French literature has a reputation for difficulty that is partly earned and partly a function of where people start. If you begin with Proust or the nouveau roman, the reputation seems justified. If you begin almost anywhere else, you find a tradition that is more direct, more interested in ideas as lived experience, and more approachable than the reputation suggests. The French philosophical essay, in particular, is the most reader-friendly genre the tradition has produced — short, clear, and concerned with questions every thoughtful person already has.
Albert Camus is the right place to begin. His The Myth of Sisyphus is about 100 pages — a philosophical essay arguing that the right response to the absurdity of human existence is neither despair nor false hope but revolt: the refusal to let meaninglessness have the final word. Camus writes like someone who has genuinely thought through a problem, not like someone performing the act of thinking. The essay is clear, the argument is honest, and it earns its conclusions. There is no French literature on the planet more accessible than this, and the ideas in it are real ideas worth having. For anyone new to French writing, this is the entry point. It's on the philosophy shelf at byallo alongside Camus's other major works.
From Camus, the most natural progression is to the existentialist tradition he was responding to and arguing with. Jean-Paul Sartre's essay Existentialism is a Humanism — a lecture he gave in 1945 — is the most concise statement of the existentialist position in French and reads in an afternoon. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is longer and more demanding, but Part One (specifically the introduction and early chapters) is some of the most powerful analytical writing produced in the 20th century. Both are available in translation. The French tradition rewards being read in sequence because the writers were arguing with each other — Camus against Sartre, Beauvoir alongside Sartre, later writers against all of them.
For fiction, the most accessible starting point is Albert Camus again — The Stranger is a novel of about 100 pages about a man who kills someone on a beach in Algeria and is tried less for the act than for his failure to perform the expected emotions. It reads in two hours and raises questions that stay for weeks. Camus considered the novel an illustration of the Sisyphus argument in fictional form. You don't need to read the essay first, but reading them together makes each clearer. From there, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary — the foundational French novel — is more accessible than it seems. The subject is a woman trapped in a provincial marriage who has been raised on romantic novels and cannot reconcile the life she was promised with the life she has. The prose in translation (Lydia Davis's is the best current English version) is clean and ruthless.
The French have also produced some of the finest personal essays in the tradition — Michel de Montaigne invented the form in the 16th century, and his essays on everything from cannibals to friendship to the experience of riding a horse while half-conscious are as readable today as anything written since. A good selection of Montaigne is a better place to spend reading time than almost anything on a standard French literature reading list. The quality of attention is extraordinary. The byallo philosophy shelf holds the tradition that runs from Montaigne through Camus — the essay as a form of honest thinking rather than performance. That is the best of what French literature offers a new reader, and it is available in translation without significant loss.