Anatole France

Anatole France: The Skeptic Who Outlived His Fame

On 31 May 1922 the Catholic Church placed the complete works of France's most decorated living writer on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. He had taken the Nobel Prize in Literature seven months earlier and had sat in the Académie française since 1896. He said he considered the condemnation a distinction. That reply - courteous, amused, and entirely unrepentant - is the whole of Anatole France in nine words, and it explains both why his contemporaries thought him the finest prose stylist in Europe and why the generation after him found him unbearable.

A Childhood Among Books

He was born François-Anatole Thibault in Paris on 16 April 1844, the son of a bookseller whose shop specialised in material on the French Revolution and drew writers and scholars through its door. It is difficult to imagine a more exact apprenticeship for the writer he became: a boy raised among first-hand documents of the Terror, listening to literary men argue over the counter. His pen name was a contraction of his father's trade name.

He was educated at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school whose religious instruction he spent the rest of his life politely dismantling, then worked in the bookshop and as a cataloguer.

The Librarian Poet

His first published verse appeared in *Le Parnasse contemporain* in 1869, placing him among the Parnassians, whose cult of formal polish and emotional restraint shaped his sentences permanently even after he abandoned poetry. In 1876 he was appointed assistant librarian to the French Senate, a post he held until 1890 - fourteen years of steady salary, unlimited books and enough leisure to write, an arrangement that suited a man of his temperament perfectly. From 1888 to 1892 he was literary critic of *Le Temps*, where he practised the discursive, personal criticism that treated reviewing as the adventure of a soul among masterpieces.

Sylvestre Bonnard and the Making of a Style

*Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard*, published in 1881, made him famous. Its hero is an elderly scholar whose only crime is an act of kindness performed against the letter of the law, and the Académie française gave it a prize specifically for the elegance of its prose. That phrase followed him for the next forty years. His method was set: an eighteenth-century clarity of sentence carrying a thoroughly modern scepticism, irony used not as an attack but as a solvent, and a refusal ever to raise his voice.

The Salon and the Novels

He married Valérie Guérin de Sauville in 1877 and their daughter Suzanne was born in 1881. From 1888 until her death in 1910 he was involved with Madame Arman de Caillavet, whose salon supplied him with an audience, a discipline and a subject; his 1894 novel *Le Lys rouge* draws on that world. He married Emma Laprévotte in 1920.

The novels of these decades are among the strangest in French literature because they look so conventional and are not. *Thaïs* (1890) sets a desert ascetic against an Alexandrian courtesan and arranges matters so that the saint is damned by his own virtue. *La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque* (1893) is an eighteenth-century picaresque that makes systematic fun of occult belief. *L'Île des Pingouins* (1908) rewrites the entire history of France as the history of a nation of penguins baptised by mistake, and is the purest demonstration of his central conviction that human institutions are accidents which afterwards claim to be destiny. *Les Dieux ont soif* (1912) sets a decent young painter inside the Revolutionary Tribunal and watches idealism turn into machinery for killing - the most durable of his books, and the one written closest to the documents in his father's shop. *La Révolte des anges* (1914), in which the rebel angels win and immediately begin to behave like the tyranny they replaced, has often been judged his most profound.

Dreyfus

When the Dreyfus affair split France, the ironist chose a side without irony. He supported Émile Zola publicly and campaigned for the falsely convicted officer, and he wrote the affair into *Monsieur Bergeret* in 1901, turning the mild provincial academic who narrates several of his books into an instrument for examining how a whole society lies to itself. It cost him friends and much of his standing in polite conservative Paris, and it converted his scepticism from a literary manner into a political position.

The Late Radical

After 1900 the social concerns grew heavier and the comedy thinner. The First World War produced the pessimism of *Le Petit Pierre* (1918). He held socialist convictions, welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and gave his support to the French Communist Party - an old man of letters, decorated by every institution in the Republic, publicly aligning himself with the people who intended to abolish them. The Nobel followed in 1921, awarded "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament." The Vatican answered the following May.

Why Anatole Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is a specific and rather rare one: the capacity to make a devastating argument in a pleasant voice. The Nobel citation names it exactly - nobility of style joined to profound human sympathy - and the joining is the point. France's satire is corrosive but never cruel, because he did not exempt himself from it. In *L'Île des Pingouins* he demolishes the founding myths of his own country; in *Les Dieux ont soif* he shows a good man becoming a killer through nothing worse than conviction; in *Thaïs* he damns a saint. Each is a structural idea of real philosophical force, executed in prose so transparent that readers reached the conclusion before noticing they had been argued into it. He was also, unusually, a writer whose scepticism did not paralyse him: when the Dreyfus affair demanded a plain public stand, the professional ironist took one.

The counter-case is that the reputation collapsed and has never fully recovered, and that the collapse was not only political. To the modernists coming up behind him he was the incarnation of an exhausted classicism - polished, urbane, endlessly readable and, they charged, without risk, a man who had perfected an eighteenth-century instrument in the century of Proust and Joyce. Marcel Proust used him as a partial model for the novelist Bergotte in *In Search of Lost Time*, an act of homage that also fixed him in the past. His late alignment with the Communist Party gave later critics an additional reason to discard him. George Orwell thought the neglect dishonest and defended his continuing readability against what he called political motives for the attacks - a fair judgement, and the one most likely to hold. France was not a formal innovator and did not intend to be. What he had was a mind of unusual clarity operating on the largest subjects at his disposal, and a style capable of carrying it to ordinary readers without dilution.

Legacy

He died on 12 October 1924 at Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, aged eighty. The Third Republic buried one of its most persistent critics with full honours, an irony he would have enjoyed. His works remained on the Index he had accepted as a compliment. A century on, *Les Dieux ont soif* is read wherever revolutions are studied, *L'Île des Pingouins* is quoted whenever a nation invents its own past, and the sentences still do exactly what they were built to do: go down easily and stay.