The top 50 best-selling classics in France

From Le Figaro, The top 50 best-selling classics by Mohammed Aissaoui. 24% are British or American. Another 16% or so are from countries in Continental Europe. Among the thirty French authors, fifteen are likely to be recognized by your average American high school student (Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas) or you average college graduate (Sartre, Camus, Hugo). Interesting to see just how universal the Western canon is. The list is based on the number of copies sold between 2004 and 2012.

1 Guy de Maupassant: 3,790,000 copies
2 Molière: 3,400,000 copies
3 Emile Zola: 2,900,000 copies
4 Albert Camus: 2,810,000 copies
5 Victor Hugo: 2,710,000 copies
6 Agatha Christie: 2,650,000 copies
7 Stefan Zweig: 2,510,000 copies
8 Antoine de Saint-Exupery: 2,310,000 copies
9 Voltaire: 2,200,000 copies
10 Honore de Balzac: 2,020,000 copies
11 William Shakespeare: 1,510,000 copies
12 George Orwell: 1,350,000 copies
13 Jules Verne: 1,330,000 copies
14 Jean-Paul Sartre: 1,320,000 copies
15 Charles Baudelaire: 1,280,000 copies
16 Jean Anouilh: 1,240,000 copies
17 Boris Vian: 1,230,000 copies
17 Eugene Ionesco: 1,230,000 copies
19 JR Tolkien: 1,200,000 copies
20 Gustave Flaubert: 1,190,000 copies
21 Robert Louis Stevenson: 1,180,000 copies
22 Romain Gary: 1,140,000 copies
23 Albert Cohen: 1,120,000 copies
24 Pierre de Marivaux: 1,090,000 copies
25 Jean Racine: 1,000,000 copies
26 Georges Simenon: 990,000 copies
27 Alexandre Dumas: 980,000 copies
27 Franz Kafka: 980,000 copies
29 Jean Giono: 940,000 copies
30 Primo Levi: 930,000 copies
30 Prosper Merimee: 930,000 copies
32 Jack London 910,000 copies
33 John Steinbeck: 870,000 copies
33 Rene Barjavel: 870,000 copies
33 Isaac Asimov: 870,000 copies
36 Marguerite Duras: 850,000 copies
37 Jane Austen: 840,000 copies
38 Marcel Proust: 790,000 copies
38 Sagan: 790,000 copies
40 La Fontaine: 780,000 copies
41 Pierre Corneille: 760,000 copies
41 Denis Diderot: 760,000 copies
43 Celine: 750,000 copies
44 Alfred de Musset: 710,000 copies
45 Arthur Conan Doyle: 700,000 copies
46 Marcel Pagnol: 680,000 copies
47 Dostoevsky: 670,000 copies
48 Oscar Wilde: 630,000 copies
49 Beaumarchais: 620,000 copies
50 Stendhal: 610,000 copies