In terms of originality it is somewhat difficult to argue against France, especially in the last 150 or so years. Yes, England probably has the deepest literary culture out of any country-Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe, Donne, Fielding and Sterne, but France has been the trailblazer in terms of literature for the last 150 years. Part of it is cultural-after all, English and American novelists were culturally very restricted in the 19th century. Tocqueville once quipped that America had no literature to speak of, though he wrote this not long before the emergence of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson and Whitman. Though none of these authors, with the possible exception of Emerson and Hawthorne, ever really achieved widespread recognition during their lives in their own country. Poe was hugely influential in France and Russia; his works were revered by Baudelaire, the Parnissian's and Mallarmé and he also influenced Dostoevskii, but he was ridiculed in American literary circles, who regarded his popularity in France as being something of an aberration.
America has produced a lot of brilliant and original writers in the 20th century-Henry James, Baldwin, Heller, Salinger, Faulkner, Auster, Roth, Kerouac, Fitzgerald. But, yet again, a lot of these writes either migrated to France or Europe (Baldwin, James) were enormously influenced by French or European literature (Heller was influenced by Hašek and Dostoevskii, Kerouac by Proust and Rimbaud and Salinger by Buddhism) or were more popular in France than in America. (Faulkner) Many of America's greatest writers seem as or more influenced by the works of foreign writers than say French or English literature.
English literature, especially during the Victorian period, was extremely limited in terms of subject matter and content, unlike say the much 'freer' moral scope of French literature. One cannot imagine a Madame Bovary or a Verlaine in Victorian literature, which is full of clichéd and artificial happy endings-a criticism which Toltsoi made in Anna Karenina and too limited by the narrow moral mores of Victorian society and as result English literature was condemned to a century of literary banality, with a few bright sparks intermittently interspersed in-between. (Austen, George Elliot, Dickens, the Bronte's.) But the roots of English literature still run deep; writers such as Scott and romanticist poets were hugely influential on the continent, especially in the establishment of 19th century Russian literature Lermentov, Pushkin etc.
French literature however, constantly tries to reinvent and revolutionize literature. Flaubert can be considered as the father of modernity, Balzac of the city-novel, Baudelaire and Rimbaud transformed the romantic-centric view of literature, Proust transformed the art of writing and the Nouveau Roman the art of writing itself. Even Joyce's revolutionary stream-of-consciousness writing owes its influence to Dujardin. (Though Gide claimed it in fact originated from English language writers such as Poe and Browning.) France also boasts of a whole host of other brilliant and original writers and poets-Victor Hugo, Verlaine, Huysmans, Genet and Queneau, if you reckon in terms of quality rather than quantity, in originality rather than sheer numbers, then French literature comes out on top. Beckett, one of most original English language writers of all time, wrote most of his best work in French. Paris was and is the mecca for all great writers.
