ALAN RAITT was one of the most distinguished British scholars of 19th-century French literature, and one of the few British critics whose work the French themselves consider indispensable. He contributed not only to the reputation of French culture abroad, but also to the extension and deepening of the French literary canon.

It is no exaggeration to say that his work on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam restored to serious critical attention one of the most extraordinary and uncategorisable figures in the 19th century. Among his other notable publications were Life and Letters in France; the Nineteenth Century (1966), Prosper Mérimée (1970), and a further book on Villiers, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, exorciste du réel, published by Corti in 1987.

As well as seminal books and monographs, Raitt produced editions that have become what the French call ouvrages de référence: his edition of Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (Imprimerie Nationale, 1979) and the magisterial two- volume Oeuvres complètes of Villiers for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1986, which he produced with the late Pierre-Georges Castex. He was general editor of French Studies from 1987 to 1997.

In the Oxford faculty’s handbook, the list of staff and their specialisms was a detailed affair: individual authors or movements, often strictly delimited by period or genre. Beside Alan Raitt’s name it simply read “The 19th century”. It was true. In an academic world increasingly driven towards specialism, there was something bracing about the vastness of Raitt’s range of reference, but he never allowed it to intimidate. He knew the period from all angles, and was as comfortable supervising research on Chateaubriand as on avant-garde theatre, as capable of guiding a student through a doctorate on Stendhal and Italy as through a thesis on the occult in the fin de siècle.

Alan William Raitt was born in Morpeth, Northumberland in 1930 and educated at the King Edward VI Grammar School there, before going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1948, where he studied modern languages. While an undergraduate he won the Heath Harrison prize, the university’s most prestigious for languages, in both French and German in consecutive years. After graduating with a first in 1951, he began a DPhil under the supervision of Austin Gill. His thesis, completed five years later, became his first book, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam et le mouvement symboliste (Corti, 1965).

In 1952 he won the Zaharoff Travelling Scholarship, and he was a Fellow of Magdalen from 1953 to 1955, after which he moved to Exeter College as Fellow and Lecturer in French. He remained there for 11 years, and was the college’s sub-rector between 1956 and 1959, a position which provided him with a fund of stories in later years. In 1966 he succeeded Gill as Fellow in French at Magdalen; he was made Reader in 1979 and given a personal chair in 1992.

Raitt’s air of restrained learning as a college tutor filled the room far more than any showy erudition could have done, and students were keen to impress him. Even those who were not especially gifted or diligent found reserves of intellectual pride. His lecture courses were unusual for their range and ambition, often focusing on themes and ideas rather than just authors.

Thus one lecture series examined the bourgeois in French literature; another was on the dandy. These were the kinds of lectures in which new graduate research topics were born. From 1987 to 1989 Raitt was an associate professor at the Sorbonne, where his lectures were exceptionally popular.

Raitt’s expertise never stopped him encouraging postgraduate students from finding their own subjects, and he was always tactful about suggesting new avenues of thought, especially when they might pose an unwelcome challenge to a hard-won conclusion. He was an enormously supportive supervisor, and generations of French scholars all over Britain and the US have cause to remember him gratefully. In 1998 the Clarendon Press published a book of essays in his honour, The Process of Art, with essays by students and friends, among them Julian Barnes, a former student with whom Raitt shared his fascination with Flaubert.

Many of his graduates arriving at their first conference in France, where the academic pecking order is more rigid than in Britain, would find themselves with unprecedented access to the top echelons as soon as it was heard that “le Professeur Raitt” was their supervisor. But there was never anything grand or imperious about Raitt himself. He was always scrupulous, correct and kind, and treated everyone in the same way. For all his distinction, he was a strict meritocrat and an egalitarian. Only his shyness, and, in later years, the discomforts caused by illness, which he bore with strength and patience, could be mistaken for curtness.

Though he reached positions of seniority early on in life, there was something subversive about his literary interests: Villiers was a character of excess, with more than a whiff of the occult about him; Flaubert was a merciless tracker of bêtise and idées reçues. There was a side to Raitt that quickly detected misplaced authority, stupidity and received wisdom, and knew they were as likely to be found inside as outside university life.

When he retired from Magdalen in 1997 he continued to write and take an active part in intellectual life. In fact, Raitt’s retirement was as productive as any mid-career scholar’s peak. He was founding editor of the academic series Romanticism and After in French Literature, which continues to do 19th-century French studies an important service in an age which has not been kind to scholarly publication in modern languages.

Three of his own books appeared in this series: The Originality of Madame Bovary (2002); Flaubert and the Theatre (2004), the first study of the great novelist’s dealings with the theatre; and Gustavus Flaubertus Bourgeoisophobus (2005). His last book, on French prose style, was being prepared for publication when he died.

Raitt held a season ticket to Oxford United, and went most weeks to home matches. He took his football seriously: put in charge of entertaining a visiting Soviet academician and his inevitable KGB minder, he took them to an OUFC home game. He was a discriminating football analyst, and knew not just about the teams but about the squads, international and club alike. His critical appraisals extended, sometimes bluntly, to the referees too. A loyalty to Oxford United was undimmed by a recent interest in the performance of Chelsea FC, on the ground that the team’s manager, the showmanlike José Mourinho, shared his nationality with Raitt’s wife Lia, a Portuguese scholar whom he married in 1974.

He was also a connoisseur of detective fiction, with a preference for the harder-boiled end of the genre. When one of his students expressed an interest in Ezra Pound, Raitt directed him to Elmore Leonard’s Pronto, in which a minor Mafia money launderer, on the run from his bosses, returns to Italy on the trail of Pound, whose prison cage he had once guarded in a Pisan war camp.

Raitt was full of such unexpected connections, which made learning pleasurable and brought what could easily have remained recondite knowledge a little closer to us.

Friendships played a large part in his life, and he and his wife had a talent for nurturing them. Both his mentors, Gill and Castex, became friends, and their closeness with Castex and his wife Marie-Madeleine was a source of great happiness.

There is a story about Raitt as a young student, arriving in the South of France, typewriter under his arm, to visit the Leclercq family, owners of important Villiers manuscripts. He was met at the station by Henri Leclercq, and a lifelong friendship began, with Raitt visiting them every Easter thereafter until his illness made travel difficult. Just as Raitt’s mentors became his friends, so those to whom he himself was a mentor enjoyed his friendship and support long after they left university.

After retirement, and despite an active commitment both to literary study and to the pleasures of digital sports channels, Raitt remained in close touch with former students and ex-colleagues. He was a fine cook, and he and his wife regularly welcomed friends at their North Oxford home. He was immensely proud of his daughters by his first marriage to Janet Taylor, Suzanne, a literary critic, and Claire, a lawyer.

Raitt was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1971 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992. In 1987 he was awarded the Grand Prix du Rayonnement de la langue française from the Académie Française and made Officier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, in which he was promoted Commandeur in 1995.

Professor Alan Raitt, French scholar, was born on September 21, 1930. He died on September 2, 2006, aged 75.