C. S. Lewis’s Lost French Doctorate

Before the American Narnia films, C. S. Lewis was virtually unknown in France. Even today, his fame is nowhere near the level it has reached in the English-speaking world, be it in academia, among Christians, or in popular culture. The number of French doctoral theses or books on Lewis is extremely small. As for the French translations of his books, many of them are now out of print. However, this was not always the case. Lewis has never been as well-known in France as in Britain or America, but during his lifetime he achieved a certain fame in secular universities, in Christian intellectual circles and, to a lesser extent, among readers of science fiction and fantasy. In academia, he was respected as a specialist in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.