People with a minimum of education, anywhere, are not at leisure to know too much about their national literature, much less so about the literature of some other land¹. I have no handy information as pertains to a consideration of the question on a world wide basis but I believe to be reliable a few notions on it that I could glean as far as goes its treatment relative to the USA.

In the USA the public at large is much more likely to know about French literature through the cinematographic renderings of archetypal popular masterpieces such as Les Trois Mousquetaires and Les Misérables but also of less popular works such as Madame Bovary, the works of this latter type having a much smaller impact on that public. I think the works themselves will be famous, but not the authors whose names remain utterly obscure in comparison to such names as Twain, Hemingway, and Faulkner.
The salient masterpieces from the past are still of interest, however they can’t appeal but to an extremely restricted readership; can be counted among those the following works (réf.);

• Beauty and the Beast, Madame de Villeneuve (1740)
• The Tales of Mother Goose, Charles Perrault (1696)
• The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire (1857)
• Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais, (16th Century)
• In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (1913-1927)
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (1856)
• Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne (1864)
• The Masterpiece, Émile Zola (1886)
• Les Misérables, Victor Hugo (1862)

It seems that there is still alive in the USA a certain interest for the more philosophical type of literature France had to offer in its past, that is an interest in quintessential works such as Les essais by Montaigne, Les pensées by Pascal, Candide by Voltaire; of course, one must not look beyond the bounds of that same limited and select readership referred to above to be witness to this influence, the extent of that readership being, I think, quite understandable.

¹_{Relative to this interconnection between “minimum education” and “corresponding culture” the book of Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957) makes for enlightening reading as it captures somehow a trend peculiar not only to British society on which the analysis it puts forth is founded but as well Anglo-saxon civilisation and more generally western civilisation for which it remains essentially relevant; the insight it brings to this question of what education for what culture, in my opinion and that of others, perdures as a reality to this day and is still one of the bases for thinking in the domain of cultural studies.}

If I believe the character played by Erich von Stroheim in the Jean Renoir movie “La grande illusion”, the French literature stands on the top of the literary world.

I was not able to get the exact words put in the mouth of von Stroheim (commandant von Rauffenstein in the movie) by Renoir, but in a famous dialogue with a French captain prisoner (capitaine de Boëldieu) played by Pierre Fresnay, EVS says something like: “Bien entendu en Allemagne, nous avons des écrivains et des poètes et nous pouvons en faire une liste, avec Goethe, Schiller, puis après il faut chercher un peu, tandis que pour les français, vous avez Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Hugo, Zola et tant d’autres que la liste est presque infinie”.