Nineteenth-century debates over realism were particularly intense in France, where they were part of a struggle against the dominance of classical idealism. These debates, and the major realist literary works of the period, largely focused on metropolitan areas, often Paris itself. From Balzac onwards, however, several strands of French realism sought to embed storytelling in dense description whose signification, branching out through metonymy, often included connections with the French colonies. So-called realist writers, meanwhile, often also wrote ‘exotic’ texts in which they sought to problematize the nature of realism itself or apply a realist gaze to the wider world. Realism’s later variant, naturalism, portrays characters whose behavior is largely determined by materialist, predominantly biological factors. While it generally focuses on specific metropolitan milieux, naturalism was a source of inspiration for colonial literature from the 1880s onwards. Realist observation can serve as a tool for political writing of many kinds and remains a resource drawn on by later writers, including postcolonial Francophone authors.