Anatole France

French novelist

• Born: April 16, 1844
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: October 12, 1924
• Place of death: La Béchellerie, near Tours, Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, France

France’s reclusive devotion to books turned to militancy in the wake of the late nineteenth century Dreyfus affair, and he used his satirical skills thereafter to campaign against intolerance and social injustice. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921.

Early Life

Born Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault, Anatole France was the son of François Noël Thibault, a devoutly Roman Catholic and politically conservative bookseller. Anatole grew to adolescence surrounded by the cultural heritage of France and quickly acquired a keen appreciation of its worth. To begin with, he took aboard his father’s religious and political beliefs in a meekly obedient fashion, with the result that his childhood was untroubled by conflict.

France remembered his childhood as a comfortable and happy time that he revisited nostalgically throughout his writing life, evoking aspects of it in Le Livre de mon ami (1885; My Friend’s Book , 1913), Pierre Nozière (1899; English translation, 1916), Le Petit Pierre (1919; Little Pierre , 1920), and his final novel, Le Vie en fleur (1922; The Bloom of Life , 1923). A portrait painted when he was six shows him with a serious expression, a Cupid’s-bow mouth and a narrow chin (which he was to conceal throughout adult life with a luxuriant beard and mustache).

The young Anatole became a devoted scholar, although he left the Collège Stanislas in 1862 without qualifications for reasons that his biographers have been unable to clarify. He refused to take over his father’s business—which the elder Thibault then liquidated—and set out to make a living from his pen using the pseudonym Anatole France. He began to frequent the salon of the Parnassian poet Charles Leconte de Lisle in 1867 but supported himself in the field of academic journalism, which was unusually lucrative in nineteenth century France by virtue of the rapid postrevolutionary establishment of universal literacy and an attendant hunger for education.

France’s subjects ranged from such writers of ancient Greece and Rome as Lucius Apuleius and Terence to such contemporaries as Paul Bourget and Émile Zola. The classical philosophy of Epicurus and the social upheavals of revolutionary France became particularly fascinating for Anatole. The Catholic faith and monarchist sympathies that Anatole had inherited from his father were ameliorated by polite Epicurean skepticism and an idealistic commitment to liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Early manhood proved to be a more troubling period of his life. A passionate infatuation with Élise Devoyod in 1865-1866 was unreciprocated. He married Marie-Valérie Guérin de Sauville in 1877, but the marriage was disrupted by a hectic love affair with a married woman, Léontine Arman de Caillavet, that turned his gradual retreat from moral orthodoxy into a headlong rush during the late 1880’s. His marriage was dissolved in 1893, shortly before his involvement with the celebrated case of Alfred Dreyfus —a Jewish army officer wrongly convicted of selling military secrets—presented his newfound radicalism a cause that he could pursue in the public arena.

Life’s Work

France’s first full-length work, issued in 1868, was a study of the poet Alfred de Vigny. He published a poetry collection of his own in 1873 and a poetic drama, Les Noces corinthiennes , in 1876, but the latter was not performed until he had become famous; it was first produced at the Odéon in 1902. His first book of prose, Jocasta et le chat maigre (1879; Jocasta and the Famished Cat , 1912), consisted of two novellas, but his breakthrough to popular success was Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881; The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard , 1890), a novel about an unworldly book lover’s struggle to cope with the vicissitudes of everyday life. This was followed in 1883 by the long, moralistic fairy tale “L’Abeille,” variously known in English as “Honey-Bee,” “Bee,” and “The Kingdom of the Dwarfs,” which became the longest item in the story collection Balthasar (1889; English translation, 1909).

France wrote two novels dramatizing his feelings for Léontine Arman de Caillavet. The first, written while he was still married, was Thaïs (1890; English translation, 1891), based on a legend that he had already recapitulated in a poem written in 1867. Paphnuce, a hermit living in the same locale as Saint Anthony (whose oft-illustrated temptations had been vividly described in an extravagant novel by Gustave Flaubert), persuades a famous Alexandrian courtesan to repent her wicked ways and become a nun but is then driven mad by the erotic feelings she has awakened in him. The second novel, set in the city of Florence, which he and Madame Arman de Caillavet visited while touring Italy in the wake of his divorce, was the infinitely more relaxed and sentimental love story Le Lys rouge (1894; The Red Lily , 1898).

The resentment against Christian asceticism embodied in Thaïs was further extended in the stories in L’Étui de nacre (1892; Tales from a Mother of Pearl Casket , 1896), which opens with the notorious “Le procurateur de Judea” (“The Procurator of Judea”), in which an aged Pontius Pilate, reminiscing about old times, reveals that he has no memory whatsoever of his brief encounter with Christ, although he remembers Mary Magdalene well. The collection also includes further ironic pastiches of the legends of the saints in the same vein as Thaïs. The trend continued in Le Puits de Sainte-Claire (1895; The Well of Santa Clara , 1909), which included a fine tale of a satyr saint that summarized France’s arguments about the tragedy of the Church’s rejection of the pagan heritage and the novella “L’humaine tragédie” (“The Human Tragedy”), in which a medieval holy man discovers that the Church has become the enemy of true Christian ideals and that the rebellious spirit of its traditional enemy—Satan—better embraces the traditional ideals of hope and charity.

Other works elaborating France’s new spirit of dissent included the Rabelaisian satire La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque , 1912) and Les Opinions de M. Jérome Coignard (1893; The Opinions of Jerome Coignard , 1913), but his work changed direction markedly in 1897 when he began a four-volume series of novels set in contemporary France. This consisted of L’Orme du mail (1897; The Elm Tree on the Mall , 1910), Le Mannequin d’osier (1897; The Wicker Work Woman , 1910), L’Anneau d’améthyste (1899; The Amethyst Ring , 1919), and the semiautobiographical Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris , 1922).

The last book features a hero whose decision to remain aloof from politics is overturned by outrage at the refusal of the French military authorities to admit that Captain Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted and at the consequent continuation of Dreyfus’s imprisonment on Devil’s Island. France’s own sense of outrage broadened to include other social injustices, some of which were scathingly chronicled in the sarcastic tales collected in Crainquebille, Putois, Riquet et plusieurs autres récits profitables (1904; Crainquebille, Putois, Riquet and Other Profitable Tales , 1915). The Dreyfus affair formed the basis for the final sequence of his hugely successful satire L’Île des pingouins (1908; Penguin Island , 1914), in which a population of accidentally baptized penguins reproduces all the errors and follies of human social evolution.

France offered more earnest accounts of his philosophical development in his reconstruction of debates in Le Jardin d’Épicure (1894; The Garden of Epicurus , 1908) and a novel examining the difficulties of predicting the future, Sur le pierre blanche (1905; The White Stone , 1909), whose attempted description of a future Marxist utopia reflected France’s increasing attachment to socialism. He eventually joined the Communist Party, but only briefly; he found its narrow faith as stultifying as the one he had deserted in adolescence.

France always preferred to develop his ideas satirically and relatively lightheartedly, as in Contes de Jacques Tournebroche (1908; The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche , 1910), which contained stories in the same slightly bawdy mock-medieval vein as Honoré de Balzac’s Droll Tales, and Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue et autres contes merveilleux (1909; The Seven Wives of Bluebeard and Other Marvellous Tales , 1920), a collection of ironic fairy tales that concludes with a long exercise in moral symbolism in which emissaries of an unhappy king search in vain for the shirt of a happy man with which to redeem the king’s melancholy spirit. France had been much troubled himself by the controversial remarriage of his divorced daughter Suzanne in 1908; he refused to speak to her thereafter, and the estrangement continued until her death during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.

The ultimate satirical product of France’s conversion to radicalism was his literary masterpiece, La Révolte des anges (1914; The Revolt of the Angels , 1914), written on the eve of World War I. The story tells how a guardian angel is converted to free thought by De rerum natura (Lucretius’s summary of Epicurean philosophy) and sends out a new call to arms to the fallen angels, most of whom have become teachers and artists. He offers the commanding role to Satan, who is working as a humble gardener and who politely declines on the grounds that liberation from divine tyranny must be won within the hearts and minds of men, not on the field of battle.

The carefully considered rejection of violent means was carried forward from Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The Gods Are Athirst , 1913), his heartfelt historical novel analyzing the French Revolution of 1789 and the consequent Reign of Terror. He had turned to that subject in the wake of the death, in 1910, of his longtime companion Madame Arman de Caillavet. He did marry again in 1920, and in 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of seventy-six. He was still working despite his age, and his last few published works, although slight, showed that he had lost none of his clarity of mind.

Significance

Despite the fact that Anatole France won a Nobel Prize, his international reputation has always suffered somewhat from the fact that he does not fit into either of the literary categories currently regarded as the most prestigious. His early adventures in poetry were undistinguished, and the bare handful of realistic novels that he produced are obviously novels of ideas rather than novels of character.

France’s best work is in the tradition of Voltairean contes philosophiques, which never won much acclaim outside France and petered out even within their native land. He remains, however, one of the finest contributors to the later days of that tradition (and a significant influence on James Branch Cabell, the one writer who tried hard to import it into the United States). France’s greatest virtues—his painstaking erudition and the dispassionate coolness of his intelligence and wit—are sometimes held against him by critics who prefer more intimate narratives and more intricate plots, but they are rare virtues that ought to be accounted more precious than they often are. The Revolt of the Angels remains the classic work of the tradition of “literary Satanism” that sprang from William Blake’s observation that the author of Paradise Lost, John Milton, had been “of the devil’s party without knowing it.” Such literature raises the important question of whether the commandments of a jealous God are really the best basis for human morality.

Bibliography

George, W. L. Anatole France. London: Nisbet, 1915. This was the first study of France in English. Written shortly after publication of The Revolt of the Angels, it deftly summarizes his career from that viewpoint.

Jefferson, A. C. Anatole France: The Politics of Skepticism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1965. A careful analysis of France’s philosophical progress, his involvement in contemporary issues, and the position he eventually adopted.

Levy, D. W. Techniques of Irony in Anatole France: Essay on “Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. A minute dissection of a key exemplar of France’s satirical method.

Sachs, M. France: The Short Stories. London: Arnold, 1974. A comprehensive survey of France’s short fiction, offering a useful account of work that is sometimes neglected in more conventional studies that tend to place the novels in the foreground.

Virtanen, R. Anatole France. New York: Twayne, 1968. A useful general survey of the author’s life and work.