Combats littéraires is the title of a 2006 collection of 187 articles and prefaces written by the French writer Octave Mirbeau, between 1876 and 1916, on literature, journalism, and publishing over the course of his long career as an influential journalist.
Although Mirbeau collaborated with numerous daily newspapers, he was never officially assigned the work of literary reviewer.
Even if certain articles by the author of Les affaires sont les affaires (Business is business) bestow praise on Émile Zola, toward whom Mirbeau was not otherwise so kindly disposed, and on Edmond de Goncourt, they evidence an aesthetic that is overtly hostile to naturalism, considered by Mirbeau to be one of the century's gravest errors in matters of art.
However, Mirbeau was well aware that, in a conformist bourgeois society, and under a capitalist economy whose sole object was profit, journalism and publishing were becoming increasingly contaminated, serving only as an instrument for besotting the masses.
Good literature, Mirbeau believed, was incompatible with the prevailing trend toward mercantilism and publicity, and so its impact could only be limited.