Hmmm. This is a really fascinating question, and I feel bad because at best I can provide a mere sliver of an answer. (Don't be fooled by the length.)

In The Aquariums of Pyongyang, which is an account of Kang Chol-Hwan's time in North Korea's Yodok concentration camp between 1977 and 1987, there are a few references and links to classic French literature.

Modern French journalistic links: The Aquariums of Pyongyang was first published in French. Pierre Rigoulot, a French writer and historian, was the first foreigner to interview Kang extensively on his experiences, and their translator was a South Korean academic who specializes in French literature (unfortunately, she is not named in the book).

Interestingly, the book got an English translation before it was published in Korean, which may be an unfortunate reflection of South Korea's policies and the public mood with respect to North Korea in the early 2000s. However, this is past the /r/AskHistorians cutoff for content post-1996, so we'll leave that bit alone.

Alphonse Daudet and a story that speaks to Korean history: The short story "La Dernière Class" (The Last Class) from Alphonse Daudet's 1873 collection Contes du Lundi (The Monday Stories) is alluded to in relation to Korea's colonization by Japan between 1910 and 1945. Neither the story nor the book is widely taught in English, but it was translated into Korean, is a common text in South Korean schools, and would be familiar to much of Kang's audience in both South Korea and France. I do not have a copy myself and have never read it, but an Aquariums footnote states: "The story tells of a painful falling out between a class of Alsatian students and their French teacher, whom the students abruptly abandon in favor of a newly arrived German Lehrer (teacher)."

So why does the story resonate with Koreans? Again, not having read it and not being Korean, this is a guess at best, but I hope it's a decent one. Alsace is a region in northeastern France bordering Germany. Glossing this as quickly and somewhat irresponsibly as possible, it's been smacked like a volleyball between proto-French and proto-German (and later unified French and unified German) states for almost two thousand years, with the most recent scuffles seeing Alsace formally deeded to France in the Treaty of Versailles, Germany yanking it back during World War II, and then losing it again afterwards. Notably, Contes du Lundi was published in 1873, two years after Bismarck annexed Alsace in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Daudet deliberately set the story in a region that had divided loyalties to, and hosted political antagonism between, two governments and two peoples.

The Japanese colonial period is an incredibly divisive subject in South Korea, so my guess is that the story very effectively captures Korean society's ambivalence on the period and is popular for that reason. For example, one of the reasons that Kim il-Sung in North Korea could plausibly lay claim to the moral high ground over his South Korean counterparts is that he fought against the Japanese occupation rather than "collaborating" with it. (Although the awkward truth is that both the North and South Korean post-WWII governments made extensive use of government infrastructure, bureaucrats, and systems put in place by the Japanese.) But again, it's just a guess.

My personal favorite: The Count of Monte Cristo transposed to a North Korean concentration camp: Kang knew an older man in Yodok named Kim Song-chi who was a prisoner between 1974 and 1989. He never knew for sure how Kim ended up in the camp. However, as Kim was a Japanese-Korean like Kang himself (there were a lot of Japanese-Koreans in Yodok in this period), it's possible that he was also a victim of Han Duk-su's rise to power in the Chongryon/Chosen Soren, which is the association of ethnic Koreans in Japan who supported NK over SK. (Incredibly enough, it still exists). One of the more compelling reasons as to the sheer number of Japanese-Koreans who ended up in the camps in the 1970s and 1980s is that Han took revenge on anyone who hadn't supported his candidacy for the top job in the Chongryon, but no one really knows for sure.

Getting back to our buddy Kim here, this is Kang's little story about him:

" ... when I finally got out of the camp, all I wanted was to throw out my memories like a dirty shirt. That was just me, though. There were people whose hatred never abated -- people like Kim Song-chi. The only thing that sustained him through his imprisonment was his desire for revenge. In the old days, he had been a Party cadre in Japan. He was a big, beautiful man, with a deadpan sense of humor and sex appeal that had caused numerous scandals over the years. He had entered the camp in 1974 at age fifty-five and survived fifteen years there -- a rare achievement for someone without a family. Always discreet, he was meticulous about not bothering others and had a rule about never asking anything thing of anyone. He had an exceptional ability to master his hunger, and I never once saw him wolf down a meal. He was still at the camp when I got out, but a little later I heard that he had been released. On rejoining the outside world, he discovered that his wife had divorced him and found a new husband, and that his children had forsaken him as an enemy of the people. This only redoubled his desire for revenge. At the camp, he was nicknamed the Count of Monte Cristo, and he now demonstrated just how worthy he was of that title. He tracked down and assassinated the security agents who had arrested him and then, the rumor went, killed himself."

A few things:

• Dantès goes road-tripping: It blows my mind that The Count of Monte Cristo is literally so famous that a hundred years past its date of publication, a language removed, and half a world away, the starving and unfairly-imprisoned occupants of a North Korean concentration camp see its main character as a sort of mascot for their own fantasies of vengeance. Dumas would be terribly proud.
• The bizarre Get Out Of Jail Free card of NK: The popular conception of North Korean justice is that prisoners were sent to the camps and their entire family was dragged alongside them, but the system had a few wrinkles. Blood relatives -- grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, children -- were, yes, often sent to the camps as well. Kim il-Sung reasoned that a counterrevolutionary was an unhealthy plant whose roots and leaves had to be reformed or destroyed to keep it from infecting the rest of society. However, it was normal for the spouses of offenders not to be imprisoned with them (the regime's rationale was that they were not blood relatives of the offender) and for the state to force them to divorce the prisoner. The same fate befell Kang's mother, who was actually not even permitted to seek imprisonment with the rest of her family. Her husband (imprisoned in Yodok with their children, Kang and his sister Mi-ho) died without ever seeing his wife again.
• Hunger: Kang is paying Kim a big compliment here with respect to the latter's "ability to master his hunger." A significant portion of The Aquariums of Pyongyang is devoted to the prisoners' struggles with hunger and malnutrition, and how it turned people into animals who'd steal from their own family just to eat.
• Kim's death: Given the book's timeline, Kim had to have exacted his revenge and then died at some point between his release in 1989 and Kang's escape from North Korea in 1992. Cold as it sounds, this may well have been an easier fate than having to live through North Korea's 1994-1998 famine.

Anyway, I know this is an imperfect answer at best and deals more with ordinary people than academics, but I've always thought it was pretty cool that Korea -- an isolated peninsula in a wildly different set of geopolitical circumstances than France, a former colonial power -- sees its own reflection in at least two French literary classics.