Anatole France

Anatole France
Anatole France, drawn by Théophile Steinlen
Born	Anatole François Thibault 16 April 1844 Paris, France
Died	12 October 1924 (aged 80) Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, near Tours, France
Occupation	Writer, poet, critic
Nationality	French
Period	1867–1922
Notable works	The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard Thaïs Penguin Island The Gods Are Athirst
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature (1921)
Spouse	Valérie Guérin de Sauville (1877–1893) Emma Laprévotte (1920–1924)
Children	Suzanne (1881–1918)
Signature

Anatole France (French: [anatɔl fʁɑ̃s]; born Anatole François Thibault; 16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924) was a French writer. He wrote novels, short stories, poems and essays. He was also a famous critic.

France was born in Paris. His father sold old books. The son grew up in the bookshop and loved books all his life. He began as a poet. Later he became famous for his novels. Many people of his time said he was the greatest living French writer.

France liked to doubt. He did not accept big ideas without asking questions. But he also had a warm heart. He liked to repeat two words as a rule of life: "irony and pity". Irony means saying things with a hidden smile. Pity means feeling the pain of others.

In 1896 he was elected to the Académie française, a body of forty members. Election to it is one of the highest honours in French literature. In 1898 he took a big risk. He defended Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer who was punished for a crime he did not commit. After that, France fought for socialist ideas and for peace. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

France died in 1924. The state gave him a very grand funeral. Soon after, his fame went down. Younger writers attacked his memory. His works are still studied today, though he is less widely read than in his lifetime.

His name

The writer's legal name, in the civil records of the French state, was Anatole François Thibault. He was baptised on 9 June 1844, in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The parish register of the baptism still exists; it gives the names in another order, "François-Anatole". Older books often print a third form, "Jacques Anatole François". Neither original document contains the name Jacques. The godfather at the baptism was called Jacques Charavay. He came from a family of famous dealers in old letters and autographs. His son Étienne became the boy's best school friend.

"France" was not his real family name. It came from his father. The father was called François Thibault. He came from Anjou, a region in the west of France. There, people used "France" as a short, friendly form of "François". The father had carried this name since his own childhood.

The father used "France" as his shop name. He was known as "Noël France" or "le père France" (Father France). The son signed his school work "Anatole France" from an early age. Later, the whole world knew him by this pen name. A pen name is a name a writer uses instead of his real name.

Early life

His parents

Anatole France was born on 16 April 1844 at 19 Quai Malaquais in Paris. The house stands on the left bank of the river Seine, opposite the Louvre palace. His parents lived in the same building as their bookshop. A few months after his birth, the family and the shop moved a short distance along the same street, to number 15.

His father, François Noël Thibault, was born on 25 December 1805 in Luigné, a village in Anjou. Because he was born on Christmas Day, people called him Noël, the French word for Christmas. His exact date of birth is known from his army papers, which Girard found and published.

His family was very poor. His father, who was Anatole France's grandfather, made shoes in a village. As a boy, Noël began work as a farm worker. When he was a young man, he became a soldier. He joined the army freely in 1826, when he was twenty years old. He served in the royal guard of King Charles X. His friends thought that the shape of his face even looked a little like that of the king whom he admired.

In August 1830, he stood in the yard of the castle at Maintenon with the soldiers to whom the fallen king said goodbye. According to a family story, he could not even read when he joined the army. He later taught himself to read.

After 1830, Noël had to leave the army. He became a clerk for Téchener, an old bookseller in Paris. By 1838, he was managing a bookshop for an older bookseller. In January 1839, he became the owner of the shop.

The shop was unusual. It sold books, papers, and pictures about the French Revolution. This was largely because of its best customer and protector, the comte de La Bédoyère. He was a rich nobleman who collected everything connected with the Revolution. Noël became an expert on the subject. He prepared a large catalogue of documents about the Revolution, and historians used his work.

The bookshop itself became famous. The poet Gérard de Nerval mentioned it in one of his stories. A collector searching for rare books says that he must visit the learned booksellers: "there is France, there is Merlin, there is Téchener".

Anatole's father was a serious man. He was a strong Catholic and a royalist. A royalist is a person who wants the country to be ruled by a king. His son later supported very different ideas. Some writers think that the endless discussions in the bookshop made the boy want to disagree with other people. His grandmother also felt close to the France that had existed before the Revolution.

His mother, Antoinette Gallas, was born in Chartres on 1 November 1811. No father was named in the official record of her birth. She was already a widow when she married Noël France. Her first husband, a pharmacist, had died young. The wedding took place on 29 February 1840, a date that exists only during a leap year. Antoinette was quick and lively, while her husband was slow and calm.

She loved her only son very deeply. France later said that he had received his gift for telling stories from her. He also said, partly as a joke, that she watched him too closely, even after he had become an adult.

A childhood among books

In 1853, the family moved a short distance to the Quai Voltaire. Their new bookshop was at number 9. Both the Quai Malaquais and the Quai Voltaire run beside the Seine. They contain many shops that sell old books, old pictures, and old works of art.

These streets became the boy's first school. He walked beside the river and looked into every shop window. He also carried messages and objects for his father. On the way, he stopped to read books placed in open boxes outside the shops. He kept this habit throughout his life.

Inside his father's shop, he listened to old collectors talking about the French Revolution. Their conversations stayed in his memory. Sixty years later, they helped him write his great novel about the Revolution, The Gods Are Athirst.

When he was seven years old, the religious little boy wrote a book called "Christian Thoughts". On its first page, he wrote that the author was too young to have the book printed and would wait until he was twenty.

France later wrote about his childhood in several books. The best known are Le Livre de mon ami (My Friend's Book, 1885) and Pierre Nozière (1899). In these works, he changed some of the facts. For example, he turned his bookseller father into a doctor named Nozière. France said that the feelings in the books were true, even when the details were not.

School

Anatole was first sent for a short time to a small boarding school in Versailles. From 1853, he attended a small Catholic school called the Institution Sainte-Marie in the rue Bonaparte. He went there during the day and returned home in the evening. In 1855, he entered the Collège Stanislas, a well-known Catholic school in Paris. He arrived in October, when he was eleven and a half years old.

He was not a good pupil in most subjects, and his marks were poor. One teacher described him as careless and lazy. The teacher's notes still exist in a cheap little notebook with a green cover. Anatole sometimes missed his lessons and spent the time in the Louvre, dreaming in front of the Greek sculptures.

However, he could do very well when he wrote essays in French. The school gave prizes to several of his compositions. One of them was La Légende de sainte Radegonde (1859), the story of a holy queen. It became his first "book".

The manuscript is dated 20 November 1859. A few weeks later, the boy wrote another religious story, this time about a holy woman who had been shut inside a small room. His uncle Jean-Pierre Dufour copied the text in neat, rounded handwriting. His father's shop then produced a small number of copies. The booklet had a printed cover and was dedicated "to a beloved father and a beloved mother". The fifteen-year-old writer signed it "your devoted son". Today, this small booklet is one of the rarest objects collected by people interested in French books.

In 1861, another school essay brought him one of his first successes. It was a meditation on the ruins of Palmyra, an ancient city in the desert. His school years remained in his memory in an unusual way. He later gave the names of some of his teachers and classmates to characters in his books.

Many years later, when France entered the Académie française, the school director Octave Gréard made a gentle joke about his years as a pupil. He said that France had been one of those pupils who did not work hard at the tasks they were given but followed a path of their own.

France left the school at the end of July 1862, after completing the class of rhetoric and failing the final examination. Nobody knows exactly why he did not return.

He finally passed the examination called the baccalauréat on 5 November 1864, when he was twenty years old. He had failed at least once before, and a family story says that he had failed several times. He took the examination beside his best friend from school, Étienne Charavay, the son of his godfather, and wrote joking verses about the experience.

The young writer (1862–1876)

Hard years

For about twelve years, France had no regular job. He lived on small pieces of literary work. He wrote notes about books, articles for magazines, and entries for dictionaries. He signed some of these short texts with the name "Vicomte d'Elotana". This strange name is simply "Anatole" written backwards.

In 1862, France and his father worked together on a large project. The comte de La Bédoyère, a great collector and an old protector of the family bookshop, had died. In his will, he ordered "France the bookseller" to prepare a catalogue of his enormous library about the French Revolution. France's father knew the books, while the son wrote the introduction and many of the notes. While working among this great mass of old papers, the young man came very close to the world of the French Revolution. Fifty years later, that world became the subject of his novel The Gods Are Athirst.

The young man's political ideas were already very different from those of his royalist father. During the Second Empire of Napoleon III, he quietly supported the republican opposition. Between 1867 and 1870, he wrote for small magazines for people who loved books. In them, he praised the Revolution and made fun of the Empire. Sometimes he hid his attacks inside poems about tyrants from the ancient world.

In 1868, with the poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard, he even announced a great Encyclopedia of the Revolution in twelve volumes. Famous republican writers promised to write parts of it, but only the short paper announcing the plan was ever printed.

During these years, France also had his first unhappy love. One evening in 1861, his parents took him to the theatre as a reward for good school work. At the Comédie-Française, he saw the actress Élise Devoyod on the stage and fell in love with her.

For years, he loved her from a distance. Once, he even watched her while she prayed in the church of Saint-Roch. In July 1865, he finally found the courage to write to her. The love had no hope of success, and he placed his pain into poems that were never published.

The memory returned much later in his novel Les Désirs de Jean Servien, in which a poor young man loves a famous actress from a distance. The figure of the distant actress remained in France's work. She appears again in the first poem about Thaïs in 1867, in Histoire comique, and even in The Gods Are Athirst.

In August 1864, France played a famous trick. He published ten lines of verse in a small learned magazine called L'Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux. The lines appeared on 10 August 1864.

He said that they were lost lines by the poet André Chénier. In fact, France had written them himself. Even Chénier's own nephew believed the story and included the false lines in an edition of his uncle's poems. Becq de Fouquières, the greatest expert on Chénier at that time, was also fooled. The young writer was already able to copy the style of older masters very well.

For a time, he also earned some money as a teacher. He taught at a private school in Ivry, just south of Paris, called the Institution Sigisbert Pompée. He did not speak much about this work later. However, he remembered the place. In 1869, he signed some articles with the name "Camille d'Ivry".

For years, France's father waited for his son to take control of the bookshop. Anatole refused because he wanted to write books, not sell them. In June 1866, his father was ill and finally gave up the idea. He sold the business.

In 1868, France published his first true book. It was a short study of the poet Alfred de Vigny.

With the Parnassian poets

France as a poet, in a collection printed by Lemerre in 1888

Around 1867, the poet Catulle Mendès introduced France to a group of young poets called the Parnassians. These poets loved ancient Greece and Rome. They wanted poetry to be calm, perfect, and carefully made, like a marble statue. They were against the strong and open emotions of the older Romantic poets.

France joined this group. He went to the private meetings held by its leader, the poet Leconte de Lisle. A salon is a group of people who meet often in a private home to talk about art and ideas.

At the beginning of 1867, France had also joined a very small magazine for young poets called La Gazette rimée. It never had more than thirty-eight readers who paid for it. Paul Verlaine was one of the other writers in the magazine.

In 1867, France published a poem called La Légende de sainte Thaïs. More than twenty years later, this early subject became his famous novel Thaïs.

The publisher of the Parnassian poets was Alphonse Lemerre. From 1869, France worked for Lemerre as a reader of manuscripts. He earned about 150 francs each month. He also prepared editions of older French writers for Lemerre. In 1874, he wrote a long study of Racine. This slow and careful work as an editor became his true school of writing style.

His own poems appeared in the Parnassian collection Le Parnasse contemporain. One of them, "La Part de Madeleine", was read aloud in public by the actress Agar and had great success. A friend later remembered that, in those days, such a public reading could make a young man accepted as a real poet.

In July 1870, war began between France and Prussia. The young writer remained in Paris. In October, during the siege of the city, he was called into the National Guard, the army made up of ordinary citizens. In January 1871, an army group decided that he did not have to continue serving.

In the spring came the Commune, a violent workers' revolt that took control of Paris. France did not join it. On 5 May 1871, he left the city with false papers and hid with friends in the countryside until the fighting ended. The violence and killing frightened him. For many years afterwards, his political ideas remained careful and moderate.

Two books of poems

In 1873, Lemerre published France's first collection of poems, Les Poèmes dorés (Golden Poems). The poems describe nature, animals, and scenes from the ancient world in a calm and carefully polished style.

One scholar has shown that behind these poems about animals was a young man's dream that all forms of life were joined together. This idea was influenced by the natural science of his time. During these years, France also met the novelist Gustave Flaubert.

In 1875, the Parnassian poets prepared their third and final collection. France was a member of the small group that chose which poems would be included. The older poets Théodore de Banville and François Coppée were also members.

The group rejected poems by Paul Verlaine and Charles Cros. It also rejected a long poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, "L'Après-midi d'un faune". France is said to have written one short sentence about Mallarmé's poem: "they would laugh at us".

Later history judged the judges badly. The poets who had been rejected became some of the greatest names in French poetry, and Mallarmé's Faune became one of the most famous French poems. France himself later made peace with this part of his past. In 1893, he publicly praised Mallarmé in the newspaper Le Temps.

In 1876, France published a second book of poetry, Les Noces corinthiennes (The Bride of Corinth). It is a play in verse set in ancient Greece, at the time when Christianity was new.

A young woman is promised to God by her Christian mother. This promise destroys the girl's love and finally her life. The poem already shows one of the main ideas that remained in France's work throughout his life: religion can be beautiful, but it can also destroy human happiness.

One important writer stood behind the work: Ernest Renan, the historian of religion whom France had read for many years. France's poem about Mary Magdalene, written in 1869, had already been strongly influenced by Renan.

The old writer George Sand, near the end of her own life, wrote a letter to the young poet. She said that his work was beautiful and fresh like ancient art, and that it had made her cry.

The work was first performed for the public only in 1902. Before that, it had been performed once at a private evening in 1884.

After this book, France almost stopped writing poetry. Prose became his true form of writing. Leconte de Lisle had already understood this. Around 1874, the older poet had said that this student of poetry would become a good writer of prose.

A job at the Senate library

On 3 August 1876, France received a small job in the library of the French Senate, in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. He was paid 2,200 francs a year. He had first asked for a job there ten years earlier, in 1866. His father had even written a letter to support his request, but it had failed.

The job gave him enough money to live, but he did not like it. He was only a junior assistant. The head librarian was the writer Charles-Edmond. He was a Polish count who had become a French writer and was one of the founders of the newspaper Le Temps.

When France had first asked for a job in 1866, Charles-Edmond had answered with one unkind word: "Néant", meaning nothing. Ten years later, Charles-Edmond himself proposed that France should receive the job. He also allowed the young writer to publish in Le Temps, where France's first articles appeared in 1875. The poet Leconte de Lisle, who already worked in the library, had also strongly supported his young friend.

The work was not difficult. France only had to spend a few hours each week preparing records of books. Even so, he often arrived late, left early, and did as little work as possible.

His final years at the library were unhappy. In 1888, a better job there became free. France hoped to receive it, but it was given to a younger man. France protested, but nothing changed. His relations with Charles-Edmond became worse and worse.

Someone once asked Charles-Edmond to write a report about the work France had done during six years. The old librarian again answered with one word: nothing.

France left the job on 1 February 1890. By that time, he no longer needed the salary. One amusing detail remains: he wrote the first version of his novel Thaïs on official paper from the Senate library.

Marriage and family

On 28 April 1877, France married Valérie Guérin de Sauville. They had a civil wedding at the town hall of the sixth district of Paris and a religious wedding at the church of Saint-Sulpice. Valérie was twenty years old, while France was almost thirty-three. Charles-Edmond and the publisher Lemerre were witnesses at the wedding.

Valérie's family was proud of its name. Several generations of the family had been painters. One of them, Jean Guérin, had painted fine small portraits of Queen Marie Antoinette. Valérie's father was an important clerk at the Ministry of Finance.

The couple lived in Neuilly, which was then a quiet suburb of Paris that still seemed almost like the countryside. At first, they seem to have lived there in the house of Valérie's father.

Their only child, a daughter named Suzanne, was born on 1 March 1881. France loved her deeply and wrote gentle pages about small children. With Valérie's dowry, the money that a bride brought into a marriage, the family bought a small house in the Rue Chalgrin.

The marriage was not happy. France and Valérie had very different characters. In June 1892, France left the family home. Their divorce became official on 2 August 1893, and the court said that France was responsible for the failure of the marriage. Valérie kept the house and continued to care for Suzanne. France had to pay her money every month.

First novels

Jocaste and The Skinny Cat

France began writing fiction in prose when he was in his thirties. In 1878, his first novel, Jocaste, appeared as a serial in the newspaper Le Temps. A serial is a story published in parts over several days or weeks. The newspaper printed the story without giving the author's name.

In 1879, Jocaste was published as a book together with a second short novel, Le Chat maigre (The Skinny Cat). France dedicated Le Chat maigre to Charles-Edmond as a small sign of thanks and affection.

The publisher was Calmann Lévy. This company remained France's main publisher for the rest of his life. His decision to change publishers angered his former publisher, Lemerre. In a contract signed in 1878, France had promised to give Lemerre several works, including a short history of France. France gave him the manuscript in 1882, but Lemerre did not publish it. The two men then argued about money for many years.

Thirty years later, Lemerre suddenly decided that he wanted to publish the old book. France no longer wanted it to appear, so he went to court to stop him. France won the case in November 1911.

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

France's first great success came in April 1881 with Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard). The main character is an old scholar who lives alone among his books. His "crime" is really an act of kindness. He takes a poor young girl away from a cruel school in order to save her.

Sylvestre Bonnard is gentle, learned, and full of quiet irony. He is the first of several wise old men who appear in France's books. After him came Jérôme Coignard, Monsieur Bergeret, and Brotteaux. One English critic wrote that the kind thinker who would later defend Dreyfus was already present in this novel of 1881.

The book pleased serious critics such as Hippolyte Taine, and it was also popular with the public. In 1882, the Académie française gave it a prize. France had now become a well-known name in French literature.

In 1881, he also became the literary adviser of the Charavay publishing house. It was the family company of his godfather and of his school friend Étienne.

Smaller books of the 1880s

In 1882, Lemerre published Les Désirs de Jean Servien, a darker story about the hopeless dreams of a poor young man. In 1883 came Abeille, a fairy tale for children, published by the Charavay company.

In 1885, France published Le Livre de mon ami (My Friend's Book), a gentle book of childhood memories. A few months earlier, at the very end of 1884, the French state had made him a knight of the Legion of Honour, the country's national order.

From March 1883, France also wrote a column every two weeks for the magazine L'Univers illustré. He used the pen name "Gérôme" and continued this work until 1896. "Gérôme" was a name used by the magazine rather than by one writer alone. France and another writer used it in turn, so readers could not know which of them had written each article.

France now earned money from his books, his magazine column, and his work at the library. Because of this, he no longer had serious money problems.

In 1883, France also met the man he admired more than any other, Ernest Renan. He began to be welcomed into Renan's home. Renan was a famous scholar of religion. He had left the Catholic faith and studied the life of Jesus as a subject of history rather than as a matter of belief. France always called Renan his master.

Literary criticism

France around 1891, during the most important years of his work as a critic

In 1886, the major newspaper Le Temps gave France a weekly column about life in Paris. The first article appeared on 21 March 1886. Two months later, his mother died.

In January 1887, the column received a new title, "La Vie littéraire" (The Literary Life). From then on, France reviewed the new books published each week.

He became one of the most powerful literary critics in Paris. The best of these articles were collected in four books called La Vie littéraire, published between 1888 and 1892.

One American writer said that France's years at Le Temps made him the leader of French literature. When Renan died in 1892, France took his place as the leading writer of the country.

France had his own idea of literary criticism. He did not believe that books could be judged in a cold and scientific way. He thought that a critic could only explain what a book did to the critic's own mind.

In a famous sentence, he said that a good critic tells "the adventures of his soul among masterpieces". He added that there was no objective criticism, just as there was no objective art. Here, "objective" means judged without personal feelings.

Other critics attacked this idea. The serious professor Ferdinand Brunetière, more than anyone else, argued against France in long public debates. However, readers liked France's method. His articles were small works of art: light, learned, and full of charm.

France did not like the heavy realism of Émile Zola. In August 1887, he attacked Zola's novel La Terre in one of the strongest and most violent articles he ever wrote.

However, he could also judge the same writer fairly. He honestly praised Zola's power and the great size of his work. This fairness became important later, when the two men fought on the same side during the Dreyfus affair.

Madame de Caillavet and her salon

France with Madame Arman de Caillavet

France was first introduced to Madame Arman de Caillavet in 1883, but she was not impressed by him. In the summer of 1886, her husband invited France to Capian, the family's country home.

In 1888, their friendship became the most important relationship of France's life. He fell in love with Léontine Arman de Caillavet. She had been born Léontine Lippmann in 1844 and was the daughter of a rich banker. She was married to Albert Arman de Caillavet. They had a son named Gaston, who was born in 1869.

Madame de Caillavet held a famous literary salon in Paris. A salon was a regular meeting where writers, artists, and important people came together to talk. She received guests every Sunday and gave dinners every Wednesday. France became the most famous guest in her home.

The young Marcel Proust, who greatly admired France, was one of the visitors. In 1896, France wrote the preface to Proust's first book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours.

Madame de Caillavet did much more than welcome France into her home. She made him work. France was slow and often lazy when working on large projects. She encouraged him, watched his progress, and kept him at his desk.

She acted as his translator, adviser, and judge. She even wrote down things that he said at the dinner table so that he could use them in future books. She gave herself completely to helping his fame and career. Dargan compares her care for France with the help that Madame Récamier gave to the old Chateaubriand.

Her help went very far. She sometimes wrote complete pages that were published under France's name. These included part of a preface and several newspaper articles. Her daughter-in-law spoke openly about this many years later.

From 1893, France and Madame de Caillavet also travelled together during almost every summer. They went most often to Italy.

A younger friend, the writer Nicolas Ségur, later said that without her, Le Lys rouge would never have been written. He also believed that some of France's other novels would have stopped after only ten pages.

With her help, France published book after book during the ten years after 1888. His love for her changed both his way of thinking and his working habits. One scholar explained the change in this way: France's doubt had once protected him, but it later became a doubt that attacked.

Novels of the 1890s

Thaïs

Thaïs appeared as a serial in 1889 and as a book in October 1890. The serial ran in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the most respected review in France. A few months before the book, in May 1890, France's old father died. The story of the novel happens in Egypt in the early centuries of Christianity. Paphnuce, a proud desert monk, decides to save the soul of Thaïs, a beautiful actress of Alexandria. He succeeds: she enters a convent and dies a saint. But he fails himself. Desire and doubt destroy him, and at the end he understands that his whole faith may have been vanity.

The novel turns a pious old legend upside down, with quiet irony. It also shows France's love of the ancient world and its wisdom. The book was a great success. In 1894 the composer Jules Massenet made it into a famous opera, first played at the Paris Opera on 16 March 1894.

Balthasar and Mother of Pearl

France also wrote many short stories. Balthasar (1889) retells the story of one of the three kings of the Bible. L'Étui de nacre (Mother of Pearl, 1892) contains some of his most famous tales. One of them, "Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame", was first printed in the newspaper Le Gaulois on 10 May 1890, as a "tale for the month of May". It tells of Barnabé, a poor juggler turned monk, who honours the Virgin Mary with the only thing he can do: his juggling tricks. France had found the old miracle story in a book of 1888 on the French literature of the Middle Ages, by the scholar Gaston Paris, and he dedicated his tale to him. In 1902 the tale gave Massenet the subject of a second opera, after Thaïs. Readers have long been surprised by the warm, pious tone of this story from the great doubter. A recent study argues that such moments of religious "purity" are no accident, but a true and lasting part of his work. Another, "Le Procurateur de Judée", shows an old Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who cannot even remember Jesus.

The Reine Pédauque and Jérôme Coignard

In 1893 came La Rôtisserie de la reine Pédauque (At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque). The story had first run as a weekly serial in the newspaper L'Écho de Paris, from October to December 1892. The story is set in the Paris of the 18th century. Its hero is the abbé Jérôme Coignard, a fat, learned, drunken and lovable priest. He is full of wisdom and full of sins at the same time.

In this book France plays with the free, laughing spirit of Rabelais. A second book, Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard (1893), collects the abbé's ideas about kings, war, justice, money and academies. Under the old costume, the ideas are sharp comments on modern France.

The Red Lily and The Garden of Epicurus

Madame de Caillavet wanted France to write a modern love novel, the kind that high society read. The result was Le Lys rouge (The Red Lily, 1894). He began it in 1893 under another title, "La Terre des morts". Madame de Caillavet then organised a journey to Florence, so that the most tender pages could be set in real places. She left one Thursday in May and took France, her son and her new daughter-in-law with her. The novel follows Thérèse, a rich married woman, and her painful love for the sculptor Dechartre, in Paris and in Florence. The red lily is the flower of Florence. Many readers have seen in the book a mirror of France's own passion at that time. In 1899 it was turned into a play, acted by the stars Réjane and Lucien Guitry.

In the same year 1894 France published a very different book: Le Jardin d'Épicure (The Garden of Epicurus). It is a collection of short thoughts about life, death, science, love and books. Epicurus was an ancient Greek thinker who taught calm pleasure and freedom from fear. The book is the clearest window into France's own mind. It contains his famous appeal to irony and pity as guides through life.

A last collection of Italian tales, Le Puits de sainte Claire (The Well of Saint Clare), followed in 1895. In August 1894 France used his new wealth to buy a private house at 5 Villa Saïd, near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. He paid 70,000 francs for it.

The Académie française

On 23 January 1896 France was elected to the Académie française. This body brings together forty writers and scholars. Election to it is one of the highest honours in French literature. He won at the first vote, with 21 votes out of 34; his main rival, the journalist Francis Charmes, received 12. He took the seat of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal.

The formal reception took place on 24 December 1896. The director Octave Gréard welcomed him with an elegant speech, joking about the new member's love story with ancient Egypt and its queens. As the custom was, a volume of selected pages from the new member's works then appeared. The scholar Gustave Lanson, who chose the pages, noted that ancient Greece had shaped France's mind even more deeply than Rome. France was fifty-two. He had reached the top of official glory. Two years later, he put all this glory at risk.

The Dreyfus affair

France speaking at the funeral of Émile Zola, 1902

The affair

In 1894 a French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was found guilty of selling secrets to Germany. He was sent to a prison island for life. Dreyfus was Jewish, and hatred of Jews played a large part in the case. In fact, he was innocent. The real spy was another officer.

For years, most French people believed the army. Only a small group asked questions. The fight over Dreyfus, called the Dreyfus affair, split families and friends. It became a fight about justice itself.

France takes a side

Doubts about the trial spread in the summer of 1897. On 23 November 1897 the newspaper L'Aurore asked France for his opinion. He answered that he could not judge Dreyfus guilty while the documents of the case stayed secret. He did not even doubt, he said, since nobody had shown him one page of the file. In careful words, this was a demand for a new trial.

Behind the careful public words, the sceptic went to work. He questioned two masters of old papers: his school friend Étienne Charavay, the autograph expert, and the head of the École des Chartes. He asked them what handwriting reports were really worth, and came back troubled. At the end of November or early in December, young defenders of Dreyfus brought a first list of names to his door. France left his bed, wrapped up against a cold, and said he would sign everything: he was revolted. That first paper gathered too few names and was never published. On 7 January 1898 the secret paper of the charges of 1894 was at last printed. France read it, and his hesitation turned into conviction.

On 13 January 1898 Émile Zola published his famous open letter J'accuse in L'Aurore. The next day the paper printed a petition asking for a new trial. Zola signed first. Anatole France signed second. Young supporters of Dreyfus had asked him for his name. Years later, two of them, Marcel Proust and the poet Fernand Gregh, each claimed the honour of having collected his signature.

France signed knowing what it might cost him. He repeated: "It must be done. Dreyfus is innocent." He was the only member of the Académie française to take a public stand for Dreyfus. Enemies mocked the signers as "the Intellectuals"; the nickname stuck.

In the storm

On 19 February 1898 France spoke for Zola at Zola's trial. Before the court, he praised Zola's admirable good faith and absolute sincerity. Outside, a crowd howled against the accused. Later that year he signed first on a protest for Colonel Picquart, the officer who had found the truth and now sat in prison himself. In July 1898 Zola was struck off the roll of the Legion of Honour; France then stopped wearing his own decoration. He became a close friend of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès. He was one of the first members of the League of the Rights of Man, a new group formed to defend justice.

The price was high. He received insults in public and in private. Old friends such as the writers Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras broke with him. Crowds sometimes gathered before his house to shout at him. The guest list of Madame de Caillavet's salon changed almost completely.

The direction of the affair changed in August 1898, when an officer admitted he had forged a key document. A new trial was held at Rennes in 1899. Absurdly, the judges again found Dreyfus guilty, but "with extenuating circumstances": facts, the court said, that made the crime look less serious. Dreyfus was pardoned, and only years later fully cleared. When Zola died suddenly in 1902, France spoke over his coffin, on 5 October, before a huge crowd. In fighting for justice, he said, Zola had been "a moment in the conscience of mankind". In July 1906, when the innocent man, restored to the army, received the Legion of Honour in a military ceremony, France was present and came to congratulate him. France himself had left the anti-Dreyfus paper L'Écho de Paris at the beginning of 1899; in July of that year he moved his weekly work to the pro-Dreyfus Le Figaro.

France also turned away from his own Academy. He was the only declared Dreyfusard among the forty members, and from 1900 he simply stopped attending its meetings. He stayed away for sixteen years.

Why did the calm sceptic enter this dangerous fight? France himself saw more than one man's fate in the case. Behind the injustice he saw the power of the army and the Church over the Republic. A South American critic wrote that the doubter simply took the side of reason and justice. For France, the affair was a test of the whole nation.

Contemporary History and Crainquebille

Title page of L'Orme du mail (1897), the first of the four Bergeret novels

The four Bergeret novels

While the affair raged, France wrote it into fiction, almost week by week. Since January 1895 he had been printing short newspaper chapters about life in a small French town. These chapters grew into a series of four novels called L'Histoire contemporaine (Contemporary History):

• L'Orme du mail (The Elm-Tree on the Mall, 1897)
• Le Mannequin d'osier (The Wicker-Work Woman, 1897)
• L'Anneau d'améthyste (The Amethyst Ring, 1899)
• Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (Monsieur Bergeret in Paris, 1901)

The hero, Monsieur Bergeret, is a gentle professor of Latin. In the first books he sits under an elm tree or in a bookshop and talks with priests, officers and officials about the small plots of the town. His wife betrays him; the world laughs at him; he thinks for himself.

Then the Dreyfus affair enters the story. In January 1898 readers of the serial met a violent, ruined officer called Raoul Marcien: a barely hidden portrait of the real traitor, Esterhazy. Bergeret becomes a Dreyfusard, like his author. From book to book, he turns into France's own double. Writing a novel from the daily news, while the news was still happening, was a bold experiment.

Crainquebille

In 1901 France published one of his most loved stories, "Crainquebille", first called "L'Affaire Crainquebille". The first edition, at the very end of 1901, was a fine illustrated book, with pictures by the artist Théophile Steinlen. Crainquebille is a poor old street seller of vegetables in Paris. A policeman wrongly accuses him of an insult. In court, nobody listens to him. He goes to prison without understanding why.

The story is the Dreyfus affair in miniature, moved to the world of the poor. It asks a simple question: can a small man get justice? France shows that Crainquebille cannot even speak the language of the judges. The critic Roberto Giusti called the tale "a masterpiece of simplicity, humour, observation and tenderness".

In 1903 France turned the story into a play. The great actor Lucien Guitry played Crainquebille.

The socialist years (1900–1914)

France in the socialist newspaper L'Humanité (1906)

Turning to socialism

The Dreyfus affair changed France's life. Through Jaurès and the long fight for Dreyfus, he moved closer to socialism. Socialism includes many different ideas, but socialists generally want workers and society to have more control over wealth and industry. France treated socialism mainly as a moral hope, not as a complete theory of history and economics. It followed the old French dreamers of the 19th century more than Karl Marx. For some years he even belonged to the united Socialist Party; as late as May 1914 he signed a public letter as "Anatole France, member of the Socialist Party".

France now spoke at workers' meetings and at the new "popular universities", free evening schools for working people. He spoke for oppressed peoples abroad, and against the alliance of the French Republic with the Tsar's Russia. On 27 November 1904 he presided over a great meeting of the socialist party at the Trocadéro palace in Paris, and made there a full public declaration of socialist faith.

When Jaurès started the socialist newspaper L'Humanité on 18 April 1904, France gave it his new book, Sur la pierre blanche (The White Stone), as a serial. This book of dialogues ends with a dream of the future: a Europe united under one socialist government. Yet even here the doubter kept his rights. The book also plays with an old Stoic idea, without any comfort in it: time turns in circles, and all things return. His speeches and articles for Dreyfus and for the workers were collected in Opinions sociales (1902) and later in Vers les temps meilleurs (Towards Better Times).

Against the power of the Church

France put much of his energy into one fight: the separation of Church and State. He actively supported the government of Émile Combes, which closed many religious schools. In 1905 he published a small fighting book, L'Église et la République (The Church and the Republic). In December 1905 the law of separation was passed: the French state and the churches became fully independent of each other.

In September 1903 France spoke at Tréguier, in Brittany, for a statue of his master Renan. The head of the government, Émile Combes, came in person, before hostile crowds. The town was so angry that troops had to protect the ceremony.

Family sorrows

These years also brought private pain. In December 1901 Suzanne had married an army captain, Henri Mollin, aide to the Minister of War. In 1904 a great scandal broke: Mollin had helped run a secret card system that spied on the opinions of army officers. He had to leave the army, and the couple divorced in 1905. In 1908 Suzanne married again. Her new husband was Michel Psichari, a grandson of Renan. France was completely against the marriage and refused to see his daughter, though he paid for her and for his little grandson Lucien.

Later satires and novels (1908–1914)

The Life of Joan of Arc

In February 1908 France published a serious work of history in two volumes: Vie de Jeanne d'Arc (The Life of Joan of Arc). He had worked on it for years. He tried to explain Joan of Arc as a real girl of her time, not as a miracle. His view had hardened slowly. The young France had sung Joan as a poetic heroine; his final attitude, cold and hostile to the Church, formed only around 1906. The book received a cool and often hostile welcome. Critics judged it one-sided.

Penguin Island

In October of the same year came a very different book: L'Île des Pingouins (Penguin Island). It had first appeared as a serial in the New York Herald. An old half-blind saint baptises a crowd of penguins by mistake. Heaven has to turn the birds into people. Their island then lives through the whole history of France: kings, wars, revolutions, and a penguin version of the Dreyfus affair.

France wrote it in years of deep discouragement. Workers and thinkers, he felt, had stopped listening to each other, and the Paris worker now cared as little about Dreyfus as about old history. While finishing the book, he wrote to a young friend that the present society filled him with horror.

The book is a laughing mirror of human history. Nothing is holy in it: nations, armies, churches, even the writing of history itself. At the end, the penguin civilisation grows rich, explodes in violence, and starts again, without learning anything.

The Seven Wives of Bluebeard

In 1909, while France was away at sea, a small book of tales appeared: Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue (The Seven Wives of Bluebeard). The title story retells the old fairy tale of Bluebeard, the killer of wives, but turns it upside down. France's Bluebeard is a good and simple man; his wives are the ones who deceive and destroy him. The tale is told by a make-believe scholar who studies documents and gravely "corrects" the old legend. Behind the joke stands a serious question: how far can we trust the people who write history?

The Gods Are Athirst

Les Dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Athirst) came out in 1912. It is set in Paris during the Terror of the French Revolution. Évariste Gamelin, a poor young painter, pure and honest, becomes a judge of the revolutionary court. Step by step, his love of virtue turns him into a killer. He sends friends and neighbours to the guillotine, sure that he is saving the nation.

Beside him stands Brotteaux, a ruined old nobleman who reads Epicurus and doubts everything. Brotteaux is kind; Gamelin, the believer, is cruel. The novel shows how absolute faith, even faith in justice, can end in killing. The scholar Jean Levaillant showed that France built the story like a classical tragedy: one city, a short span of time, and a pressure that rises scene by scene.

The Revolt of the Angels

His last major novel, La Révolte des anges (The Revolt of the Angels), appeared in 1914. Guardian angels living in Paris read modern science and lose their faith. They prepare a new war against Heaven, and ask Satan to lead them. But Satan, after a dream, refuses. He has understood that if he wins, he will simply become another God, another tyrant. The real fight, he says, is against the God of ignorance and fear inside ourselves.

The book laughs at religion, but its final idea is serious: destroying a master is useless if we keep the master in our own hearts. Readers found Satan's last words mysterious. Levaillant saw in them the last step of France's long journey of doubt: the fight goes on, but inside man himself. A few months after it appeared, the First World War began.

The Villa Saïd

France's house at 5 Villa Saïd, Paris

A British magazine drawing of France in 1909, at the height of his world fame

From 1894 France lived at 5 Villa Saïd, a quiet private street near the Bois de Boulogne. He filled the house from floor to roof with old things: Greek statues, Renaissance furniture, paintings, drawings and thousands of books. Photographs of the time show every room crowded with art, half a home, half a museum.

Every Sunday morning he opened his door. Writers, scholars, politicians, artists and simple admirers crowded his library. France, in slippers, a priest-like dressing gown and his eternal little cap, walked among them and talked. His talk was famous: stories, jokes, history, philosophy, all mixed with perfect ease. One Sunday, for example, he read aloud the proclamation that Napoleon wrote on his return from the island of Elba, and showed his guests what a piece of style it was.

From the end of 1904 to 1909, Jean-Jacques Brousson worked as his secretary. On his first visit, Brousson found the master standing at his desk, in dressing gown, felt slippers and silk skull-cap. Brousson later filled two indiscreet books with this private talk; not everything in them can be trusted. The same care is needed with all the friends who wrote his talk down from memory.

The journalist Paul Gsell wrote down these Sunday conversations for years. He published them in 1921 as Les Matinées de la villa Saïd; an English version, Anatole France and His Circle, followed in 1922. In his introduction, Gsell calls France "the prince of sceptics", but adds that indifference was the exact opposite of his nature. Late in life, France was probably the easiest great man in Europe to visit: he welcomed almost everybody. The Hungarian writer Sandor Kemeri walked with him and wrote the walks down. She remembered him talking at length about a poor gardener whose flute music, he said, cured sadness. Another friend of the late years, the writer Nicolas Ségur, also collected France's talk, and published a whole book of his conversations after his death.

A journey, and a death

From the end of April to the end of August 1909, France made his only long journey outside Europe. Invitations had come again and again from South America. He sailed to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay and gave lectures on Rabelais and on his own work. Madame de Caillavet wished to come; unfriendly voices made that impossible, and he left without her. His secretary, Jean-Jacques Brousson, went with him, and later filled a whole book with the journey. A whole theatre company travelled on the same ship.

The lectures went badly. The public expected an amusing talker and found a careful scholar; many were bored. On the ship France had begun a love affair with one of the actresses, Jeanne Brindeau. In Buenos Aires, master and secretary quarrelled, and France dismissed Brousson in the middle of the journey. Newspapers and unsigned letters carried the story of the love affair, with false details, back to Paris. When Madame de Caillavet learned of it, she fell into despair and tried to kill herself.

France returned at the end of August 1909 and ended the affair. But Madame de Caillavet's health broke. She died on 12 January 1910. France's private notebooks show his deep grief. For more than twenty years she had been his companion, his helper and his motor. He never fully replaced her.

At the end of 1910 a quiet woman came to run the empty house: Emma Laprévotte, who had been Madame de Caillavet's maid. She cared for the old writer with patience and good sense, and she stayed at his side until his death.

The First World War

La Béchellerie, his country house near Tours

1914

On 31 July 1914 a nationalist killed Jean Jaurès, France's friend and the great voice of peace. On 2 August France honoured his lost friend in L'Humanité; remarkably for those days, the article did not contain one single word in favour of the coming war. The next day, Germany declared war on France.

France's name stood on a German list of planned hostages. He was then living at Versailles, while builders enlarged the Villa Saïd. The prefect warned him that the advancing enemy might seize him. On 3 September 1914 he left for Tours; soon after, he settled at La Béchellerie, an old country house at Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, just outside the city. Emma Laprévotte travelled with him and cared for him. He bought the house in October 1916 and lived there for the rest of his life.

A young clerk from Tours, Marcel Le Goff, rang the bell of La Béchellerie on a wet December afternoon in 1914. For ten years he came back, and he wrote down the Sunday talk of the house, during the war and after it.

A pacifist in wartime

France hated war. But in wartime France, hating war was dangerous. In September 1914, after German guns damaged the cathedral of Reims, he wrote an article condemning the destruction. The article appeared on 22 September in a small left-wing paper, La Guerre sociale. He called the invaders barbarians; then he added that, after victory, the French people would take the beaten enemy back into their friendship. By a strange chance, Romain Rolland began to publish his own famous protest against the war, Above the Battle, in Geneva on the very same day.

France's sentence about friendship with the enemy brought a storm. He received insulting letters and death threats, and the police watched him. In despair, the old man wrote to the War Minister. Many good people, he said, found his pen useless in wartime; so let them make him a soldier. He was not young any more, but his health was good. A big newspaper printed the letter on 1 October 1914. He was seventy years old. At the end of October an army board declared him unfit for service.

His political friends advised him to calm the public. Half against his heart, he agreed to write some patriotic war articles, collected in Sur la voie glorieuse (1915). His private letters show that he often disapproved of what his own pen was writing. These letters grow darker and darker. In December 1915 he wrote that he hungered and thirsted only for nothingness; a few weeks later, that his reason was leaving him. Such pieces still flowed from his pen until the beginning of 1917. In 1916 he also helped a fellow pacifist, the writer Romain Rolland, to win the Nobel Prize (the delayed prize for 1915). In July 1916 he quietly returned to the meetings of the Académie française, for the first time since 1900. In January 1917 the American president Wilson called for a "peace without victory". On 2 February France sent a letter of bitter irony to a friend who wanted war to the end, Eugène Richtenberger. He pretended to be horrified by the idea of a peace without victory, and demanded a fat, rich "peace with victory". The letter ended with a terrible line: the war was costing France only ten thousand men a day. France had copies made for friends, but did not want the letter in print. A small paper, La Tranchée républicaine, published it on 19 May 1917; the censor cut off the terrible ending. A review in Geneva then printed the whole letter in June 1917. Readers have compared its cold arithmetic to the savage irony of Swift. In June 1917 he began to give articles to Les Nations, a small paper that called for a negotiated peace, and attacked the censorship itself. The censors watched him even more closely.

Losses

The war struck his own family. In April 1917 his son-in-law Michel Psichari was killed at the front. On 28 October 1918, two weeks before the end of the war, his daughter Suzanne died of the Spanish flu. Father and daughter had been separated for ten years. He wrote to a friend that he could not give her a last kiss, but at least he walked with her to the cemetery.

Last years (1919–1924)

France and Emma Laprévotte on their wedding day, October 1920

Peace, and a wedding

After the war, France attacked the peace treaty of Versailles. He called it a confused peace, heavy with future wars. In 1919 he spoke to school teachers about peace, and protested against the Allied blockade of revolutionary Russia. For a time he also signed the appeals of Clarté, the international movement founded by the novelist Henri Barbusse. He supported socialist candidates but refused to become a candidate himself.

On 11 October 1920, at seventy-six, he married Emma Laprévotte. The quiet wedding took place at the town hall of Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, the village of his country house. Young socialist women came with armfuls of roses for the bride. Emma had entered the service of Madame de Caillavet as her maid in 1898, and had stayed until her death. She had cared for France faithfully for years. Society smiled at the marriage; France did not care.

In October 1921 his first wife, Valérie, died. France then took charge of their grandson Lucien. The boy grew up beside him at La Béchellerie.

The Nobel Prize

"The Crowning of Monsieur France", an American cartoon about his world fame after the Nobel Prize

On 10 November 1921 it was announced that France had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize is given for the most remarkable literary work of an idealistic kind. Idealistic here means: serving high human ideals. On 10 December he gave his speech in Stockholm. It was not a happy speech: he spoke with worry about the future of Europe. On the way home he stopped in Berlin, where he met Albert Einstein; he was back in Paris on 21 December. The American writer Will Durant reported that France gave his prize money to help the starving people of Russia. Axelrad, who later studied his affairs, tells it differently: the money went into a bank, kept for his wife and his grandson.

Between socialists and communists

In December 1920, at a congress in Tours, the French socialists split in two, and a Communist party was born. France took no membership card in either party.

His famous "joining" of the communists was, in truth, a banknote. In January 1921 his old friend Charles Rappoport asked him for fifty francs "for a good work", and France gave the money. Days later, on 11 January 1921, the communist paper L'Humanité announced on its front page that the great writer stood with the party.

In 1922 the Soviet government put its old rivals, members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, on trial in Moscow. France sent a telegram: in the name of humanity, do nothing that could look like revenge. A communist leader answered him harshly in print. Even so, the friendship lasted through 1922: on 8 November the paper still printed his "Salute to the Soviets" on the front page. France greeted the fifth anniversary of a revolution that had tried, for the first time in centuries, "a power that governs by the people, for the people".

The break came at the start of 1923. Moscow now demanded strict discipline from all party writers. France obeyed nobody. He quietly stopped writing for L'Humanité and moved to Le Quotidien, a paper of the non-communist left; he also gave texts to socialist papers such as La Dépêche de Toulouse. His two years beside the communists were over. Freedom of judgment mattered more to him than any camp.

The Index

On 31 May 1922 the Catholic Church placed the complete works of Anatole France on the Index of Forbidden Books. Faithful Catholics were now told not to read a single line of his, old or new.

Eighty years old

France with his wife Emma and his grandson Lucien in his last years

His last book, La Vie en fleur (The Bloom of Life), memories of his youth, appeared in 1922. On 11 March 1923 he gave his last public speech, in Paris, for the hundredth birthday of Renan. The meeting was itself a protest: a week before, at the official ceremony, nationalist speakers had attacked Renan's memory. In November 1923, at the Académie, he saw for the last time his old enemy of the Dreyfus years, Maurice Barrès; Barrès died a few weeks later.

In April 1924 the world celebrated his eightieth birthday. Messages came from H. G. Wells, Maurice Maeterlinck and many others. In May the left-wing parties he supported won the French elections. On 24 May a great public ceremony in his honour, organised by teachers' leagues and other republican groups, filled the Trocadéro palace in Paris. The ceremony showed that he still had many public supporters.

Death and funeral

The national funeral on the Quai Malaquais, 18 October 1924. France was born on this street eighty years before.

France took to his bed at La Béchellerie on 24 August 1924. While he lay dying, strangers wrote from far away: one told him to fear God, another offered blood for his veins. He died on 12 October 1924, at the age of eighty.

The Republic gave him a national funeral in Paris on Saturday 18 October. The farewell service was held on the Quai Malaquais, beside the statue of Voltaire, a few steps from the house where he was born. Delegations of workers stood along the bookstalls with great red flags. About 200,000 people followed the procession through the streets. Near the Pont Neuf, an old woman selling fruit gave a buyer an extra piece, "for him who loved us and who has died". One critic wrote that only the funerals of Voltaire and Victor Hugo could be compared with it.

One small group refused to mourn. Young writers of the new Surrealist movement handed out an insulting pamphlet called Un cadavre ("A Corpse"). For them, France was the symbol of everything old. More attacks of this kind came in the following years.

France was buried near his parents in the old cemetery of Neuilly. In 1925 the poet Paul Valéry was elected to his empty seat at the Académie française. His last unfinished papers were published in 1925.

His grave in the community cemetery of Neuilly-sur-Seine

His ideas

Doubt

The centre of France's thought is doubt. In philosophy this is called scepticism: the habit of questioning every belief. He learned it from Montaigne, from Voltaire and from his master Renan. Science taught him too. Around 1870 the young man discovered Darwin and made him the centre of his thought. He said later that the new doctrine had burst upon his generation like a revelation, and he walked through the natural history museum with his Darwin under his arm. His Garden of Epicurus has been described as a manual for those who cannot believe. In 1912, as president of the Friends of Montaigne, he publicly praised true doubt and the calm wisdom of Epicurus.

For France, human knowledge is small and human pride is large. In Penguin Island, a wise man is asked to tell the history of mankind in a few words. He answers: "They were born, they suffered, and they died."

But France's doubt was not cold, and it was not an excuse for doing nothing. The man who doubted everything was always ready, wrote Gsell, to go down into the street to defend an idea. His critics were amazed, and some were angry, when the lazy doubter threw himself into the Dreyfus fight. An early study of his doubt found firm ground under it: tolerance, sympathy, and hatred of fanaticism, the blind and violent form of belief. For him, doubt cleared false beliefs away; pity then showed him how to act.

Absolute doubt means a doubt that spares nothing, not even itself. France himself confessed that he had looked more than once toward absolute doubt, but had never dared to step onto that ground, "which swallows everything you place on it". A French doctoral thesis of 2001 turned this confession into a key. What comes first in France, it argues, is not doubt but desire, the wish to give a meaning to our small existence. His scepticism is only the servant of that desire.

The fullest map of this doubt was drawn in 1965 by the French scholar Jean Levaillant, in a book of more than eight hundred pages. He followed its adventures from year to year: revolt, harmony, worry, action, despair, and a final peace. His conclusion: when France says no, he never ends in emptiness. When France attacks an error, he also looks for the small part of truth inside it.

Irony and pity

France's two favourite tools were irony and pity. Irony means saying one thing while quietly meaning another. His irony came down from Renan, but it worked differently. Renan smiled in his own voice; France hid behind his characters. A priest in his books speaks with perfect seriousness, and the reader feels the author's smile behind the priest's back. Levaillant drew the line more sharply. Voltaire's irony is a weapon in a fight; Renan's is a dialogue between ideas; France's irony wants to show that truth itself has many faces. Nor is it always mockery. It runs from sharp sarcasm to a warm, loving irony, and at its highest it becomes a sublime irony, serene and almost joyful.

The pity was just as real. France said of his abbé Coignard that he despised men tenderly. That mixture, contempt for human folly and love for human beings, runs through everything he wrote. It even shaped his heroes. The richest of them are ironic portraits of their maker: Jean Servien is a France who failed, and Brotteaux a France condemned to die.

The two famous words travelled around the world. In 1926 the American novelist Ernest Hemingway could joke about them: in The Sun Also Rises, a character sings "irony and pity" to a dance tune. Haakon Chevalier, who wrote a whole book on France's irony, thought he was perhaps the first writer to join the two ideas. Where did the famous pair come from? Levaillant traced the word pity back to the historian Michelet, who had praised in Voltaire a violent pity for man. Later readings of Darwin and Schopenhauer gave the word its depth.

Religion

France grew up in a Catholic home and in Catholic schools. He lost his faith early. As a very young man he even passed through a time of open revolt against the God of the Bible. In a poem of 1864, La Fille de Caïn, he blamed God for the misery of man. The anger later cooled into calm doubt. As a thinker, he saw religions as beautiful human dreams, not as truths.

Yet he loved the world of faith as an artist. Saints, monks, miracles and legends fill his books, from Thaïs to "Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame". Already in 1909, a Catholic priest noted that under France's flowery wisdom there was a rebellious mind at war with the Church. France fought the political power of the Church, not the private faith of simple people. The Church answered in 1922 by banning all his books.

Politics and society

France's political life moved from right to left. The young man, frightened by the Commune of 1871, was a careful moderate. For a moment in 1888 he may even have smiled on General Boulanger, a popular soldier who was then a danger to the Republic. But his printed articles kept making fun of the general. The story of this short flirtation rests mostly on the memories of friends. The mature man defended Dreyfus and joined the socialists; after 1914 he belonged to no party at all. The old man greeted the Russian Revolution, then defended its victims against its new masters.

Three things stayed constant. He was for the poor and the powerless: Crainquebille speaks for all of them. He was for oppressed peoples everywhere. His first appearance at a public meeting, on 9 March 1897, was to present a lecture by the Armenian poet Archag Tchobanian on the persecuted Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. And he was for peace: he fought the arms race before 1914, and after 1918 he attacked the hard treaty of Versailles.

He was never a good party man. He doubted programmes as he doubted churches. His socialism was a hope of the heart, not a system.

Women and love

Love and the relations between men and women are important subjects in France's books. Several women also played a large part in his life: his mother, Madame de Caillavet, and Emma Laprévotte.

His heroines, such as Thaïs and Thérèse of The Red Lily, stand at the centre of his novels. Early women admirers found them drawn with unusual care and respect. In 1917 the writer Marthe Borély devoted a whole book to this side of his work. She argued that France did not simply describe desire: he truly loved woman, and understood her. She offered her study to him as an act of "feminine piety". Another woman critic, Marie Lahy-Hollebecque, went further: in France's world, she wrote, woman rules everywhere, and she is "the great teacher of man".

These were friendly voices, and later critics did not all agree. Bresky studied the openly sensual and comic side of France's writing about love. He found it learned and light, influenced by Boccaccio, and mixed with irony and ideas. Levaillant saw a darker pattern under the love stories: the lover never truly knows the loved woman; desire builds her image, and the real person stays out of reach. The critics are divided, then: some praised his understanding of women, others saw above all the play of male desire. His pages on love mix the senses and the mind. Bresky judged this mixture more learned than Zola's, and livelier than the "decadent" writers of his day, who loved sad and strange feelings.

His style

France's style is famous for its clearness. He wrote short, exact, musical sentences. He hated big empty words. The style looks simple; the simplicity hides years of work. France himself explained the trick. A good style, he wrote, is like a ray of white light: it looks simple, yet it unites seven colours. It is complex, but it does not show it.

Critics saw him as the heir of the whole French tradition. He had, said Durant, the wide laughter of Rabelais, the friendly humour of Montaigne, the fine satire of Voltaire and the soft light of Renan, each in turn. French critics called him a classic and a humanist, made to please, like Racine, the court of a great king.

His French was the living speech of Paris, polished by the old masters. Many admirers of his lifetime praised it in similar words. One admirer wrote that he had picked up on the Quai Voltaire the very language of Voltaire, "so pure, so fresh, so fine". Another critic in the same survey said that he told a tale like Voltaire and mocked as finely as Montesquieu. Even his sternest critic praised the fine literary style of his earliest stories. His English biographer, James Lewis May, praised a style of "luminous purity". The Canadian professor Herbert Stewart saw him as a reviver of ancient form, "the herald of another Renaissance". Gustave Lanson, the great historian of French prose, spoke of this prose simply as "this music", supple and waving.

Under all these French masters lay something older still: his love of ancient Greece. One modern scholar calls the Hellenism of France "a lifelong obsession". It had begun before the Greek statues of the Louvre, where the schoolboy dreamed instead of doing his homework, and it never ended. On his Mediterranean cruises between 1898 and 1908 he saw Greece itself several times. In 1919 the University of Athens made him an honorary doctor.

His larger books are built loosely. France lets his people talk, and wanders with them. Dushan Bresky, who studied his art page by page, saw both the price and the gain. The novels lose order, but the short tales are perfect; a book made of the best of them could stand beside Boccaccio. Even the wandering had its defence: if a digression gives the reader more joy than a rule, why not digress? Paul Valéry, who later took his seat at the Académie and did not love his manner, still granted that with France ease, clearness and simplicity seemed to return to earth.

France often took his subjects from old books, old legends and the news of his own time, and reshaped them through irony. He liked the image of the passer-by on the quays who always carries an idea away, as the bird flies off with a straw for its nest. He admitted the borrowing openly. A writer, he said, even a very original one, borrows more than he invents; our works grow in us, but their roots stand in the common soil. For his admirers, this borrowing was the classical way itself. For his enemies, it later became the main charge against him. Levaillant weighed the charge and rejected the conclusion: for all the imitation, he found, the work still carries an original experience.

Fame and reputation

A bust of France by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, in the museum of Tours

In his lifetime

From the 1890s to 1921, France stood at the top of world literature. In France, after Renan's death, many saw him as the first writer of the nation. Abroad, his fame was enormous. Already in 1904 a little illustrated book about him appeared in a French series on "the celebrities of today". In 1913 a professor of the Sorbonne, Gustave Michaut, gave him a whole psychological study. Michaut painted France as the "prince of the dilettantes", a mind that tastes every idea and keeps none; yet even this severe judge bowed before the courage of the Dreyfus years. His works were translated everywhere; in English alone, his publisher planned a complete edition in thirty-five volumes. By 1919 whole books about him were being written in the United States. In 1924 May wrote that no French writer since Renan had gone deeper into educated minds across the world. The Nobel Prize of 1921 crowned this world fame.

But the attacks began early. Nationalists never forgave him the Dreyfus affair. Catholic writers said his smiling doubt dissolved everything and built nothing. And even before 1914, many young French writers quietly turned away from him. They wanted faith, energy and action, not irony.

After his death

His death in October 1924 set off a strange storm. The newspapers printed a chaos of praise and blame, with little measure or tact. The Surrealists' pamphlet Un cadavre insulted the dead man in violent words. In 1925 two French scholars in America, Albert Bédé and Jean Le Bail, collected the opinions of the critics of the day. Their little book shows a reputation already under fire.

The charges were repeated for years. Young critics said his work only looked classical: it was art made from older art, not a living thing. In 1926 an American professor, Barry Cerf, went further. The title of his book states his thesis: Anatole France: The Degeneration of a Great Artist. For Cerf, the fine artist of 1890 had sunk into extreme mockery and extreme contempt for man. Later scholars were not convinced. Bresky counted only five large studies that truly condemned France, and found Cerf's the weakest of them: dogmatic, and short of proof. Even a severe judge, the critic Henri Peyre, wrote in 1962 that the hard verdict of posterity was, after all, only half unjust. Bresky turned the phrase around: then some of those judgments, he answered, must themselves be unjust and exaggerated.

For about half a century, France's fame stayed low. Schools still taught him; the literary world looked elsewhere.

Later scholarship

Later studies were generally less hostile than the criticism published soon after his death. Even in the years when fashion looked away, scholars kept working. Serious studies appeared in America in 1950, 1968 and 1978, in Belgium in 1954, in France in 1954, 1962 and 1965, in England in 1967, and in Canada in 1969. They covered his Greek culture, his years of formation, his life, his fighting journalism, the history of his thought, his art and his irony. Already in 1966 a London literary review could ask, in its title, whether the Olympian France was on his way back. Bresky himself, in 1969, closed his defence of France's art with a prediction: if readers grew tired of fashion and returned to beauty, France's star could rise again. Old readers stayed faithful too. In 1962 one French admirer, Jean Marvaud, opened his book on France with the words: "this book is the witness of a long faithfulness". Between 1984 and 1994 his novels and stories were published in four volumes of the Pléiade, a prestigious French literary collection. The editor of that edition, Marie-Claire Bancquart, also wrote a full new biography of him in 1994. French universities keep studying him as well: doctoral theses of 2001 and 2013 explored, one the place of desire in his work, the other his tales of religious purity.

His supporters value him as a storyteller, as a defender of Dreyfus, and as an opponent of fanaticism. His critics have often argued that much of his art depends on earlier books and literary traditions. The different readings of The Gods Are Athirst, his study of terror done in the name of virtue, show why his reputation remains debated.

Main works

The years given are the years of first publication as books. Many works can be read in French at Wikisource.

Poetry

• Poèmes dorés (Golden Poems), 1873. French text
• Les Noces corinthiennes (The Bride of Corinth), 1876. French text

Novels and stories

• Jocaste and Le Chat maigre (Jocasta and The Famished Cat), 1879. French text · French text
• Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard), 1881. French text
• Les Désirs de Jean Servien (The Aspirations of Jean Servien), 1882. French text
• Abeille (Honey-Bee), 1883.
• Balthasar, 1889. French text
• Thaïs, 1890. French text
• L'Étui de nacre (Mother of Pearl), 1892. French text
• La Rôtisserie de la reine Pédauque (At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque), 1893. French text
• Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard (The Opinions of Jérôme Coignard), 1893. French text
• Le Lys rouge (The Red Lily), 1894. French text
• Le Jardin d'Épicure (The Garden of Epicurus), 1894 (first edition dated 1895). French text
• Le Puits de sainte Claire (The Well of Saint Clare), 1895. French text
• Clio, 1900. French text
• Crainquebille (first published as L'Affaire Crainquebille), 1901; expanded edition 1904. French text
• Histoire comique (A Mummer's Tale), 1903. French text
• Sur la pierre blanche (The White Stone), 1905. French text
• L'Île des Pingouins (Penguin Island), 1908. French text
• Les Contes de Jacques Tournebroche (The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche), 1908. French text
• Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue (The Seven Wives of Bluebeard), 1909. French text
• Les Dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Athirst), 1912. French text
• La Révolte des anges (The Revolt of the Angels), 1914. French text

Contemporary History

• L'Orme du mail (The Elm-Tree on the Mall), 1897. French text
• Le Mannequin d'osier (The Wicker-Work Woman), 1897. French text
• L'Anneau d'améthyste (The Amethyst Ring), 1899. French text
• Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), 1901. French text

Books of memories

• Le Livre de mon ami (My Friend's Book), 1885. French text
• Pierre Nozière, 1899. French text
• Le Petit Pierre (Little Pierre), 1918. French text
• La Vie en fleur (The Bloom of Life), 1922. French text

Criticism and essays

• Alfred de Vigny, 1868.
• La Vie littéraire (On Life and Letters), four volumes, 1888–1892. French text
• Le Génie latin (The Latin Genius), 1913. French text

History

• Vie de Jeanne d'Arc (The Life of Joan of Arc), two volumes, 1908. French text

Plays

• Au petit bonheur, 1898.
• Crainquebille, 1903.
• La Comédie de celui qui épousa une femme muette (The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife), 1908.

Political writings

• Opinions sociales, 1902.
• L'Église et la République (The Church and the Republic), 1905 (first edition dated 1904). French text
• Vers les temps meilleurs (Towards Better Times), 1906.
• Sur la voie glorieuse, 1915. French text

Notes and references

The notes give the author, the year of the book and the page. Full details of every book are in the next section.

Books used to write this article

• Antoniu, Annette (1929). Anatole France, critique littéraire (in French). Paris: Boivin.
• Axelrad, Jacob (1944). Anatole France: A Life Without Illusions, 1844–1924. New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Bancquart, Marie-Claire (1962). Anatole France polémiste (in French). Paris: A. G. Nizet.
• Bancquart, Marie-Claire (1994). Anatole France (in French). Paris: Julliard.
• Bédé, Albert; Le Bail, Jean (1925). Anatole France vu par la critique d'aujourd'hui. Études françaises, 5 (in French). Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
• Borély, Marthe (1917). La femme et l'amour dans l'œuvre d'Anatole France (in French). Paris: Georges Crès.
• Brandes, Georg (n.d.) [about 1908]. Anatole France. Contemporary Men of Letters. London: William Heinemann.
• Bresky, Dushan (1969). The Art of Anatole France. Studies in French Literature, 17. The Hague and Paris: Mouton.
• Brousson, Jean-Jacques (1924). Anatole France en pantoufles (in French). Paris: G. Crès.
• Brousson, Jean-Jacques (1925). Anatole France Himself: A Boswellian Record. Translated by Pollock, John. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.
• Brousson, Jean-Jacques (n.d.) [1928]. Anatole France Abroad. Translated by Pollock, John. London: Thornton Butterworth.
• Carias, Léon (1931). Anatole France (in French). Paris: Rieder.
• Cerf, Barry (1926). Anatole France: The Degeneration of a Great Artist. New York: The Dial Press.
• Chevalier, Haakon M. (1932). The Ironic Temper: Anatole France and His Time. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Cor, Raphaël (1909). M. Anatole France et la pensée contemporaine (in French). Paris: E. Pelletan.
• Dargan, Edwin Preston (1937). Anatole France, 1844–1896. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Durant, Will (n.d.) [1920s]. Anatole France: The Man and His Work. Little Blue Book No. 839. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius.
• Foucaud, Boris (2001). L'Œuvre d'Anatole France : à la recherche d'une philosophie du monde par l'écriture du Désir (Doctoral thesis) (in French). University of Angers.
• George, W. L. (n.d.) [about 1915]. Anatole France. Writers of the Day. London: Nisbet.
• Girard, Georges (1925). La Jeunesse d'Anatole France (in French). Paris: Gallimard.
• Giusti, Roberto F. (1920). Anatole France: el aspecto social de su obra (in Spanish). Buenos Aires: Ediciones Selectas América.
• Gsell, Paul (1921). Les Matinées de la villa Saïd (in French). Paris: Bernard Grasset.
• Gsell, Paul (1922). Anatole France and His Circle. Translated by Lees, Frederic. London: John Lane The Bodley Head.
• Jefferson, Alfred Carter (1965). Anatole France: The Politics of Skepticism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• Kemeri, Sandor (1926). Rambles with Anatole France. Translated by Pollock, John. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.
• Lahy-Hollebecque, Marie (n.d.) [1920s]. Anatole France et la femme (in French). Paris: Baudinière.
• Le Brun, Roger (1904). Anatole France. Les Célébrités d'aujourd'hui (in French). Paris: E. Sansot.
• Le Goff, Marcel (1926). Anatole France at Home. Translated by Gottschalk, Laura Riding. New York: Adelphi Company.
• Levaillant, Jean (1965). Les Aventures du scepticisme : essai sur l'évolution intellectuelle d'Anatole France (in French). Paris: Armand Colin.
• Levy, Diane Wolfe (1978). Techniques of Irony in Anatole France: Essay on Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.
• Marvaud, Jean (1962). Anatole France, écrivain français (in French). Paris: Henri Lefebvre.
• May, James Lewis (1924). Anatole France, the Man and His Work: An Essay in Critical Biography. London: John Lane The Bodley Head.
• Michaut, Gustave (1913). Anatole France: étude psychologique (in French). Paris: E. de Boccard.
• Pouquet, Jeanne Maurice (1927). The Last Salon: Anatole France and His Muse. Translated by Galantière, Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
• Rokukawa, Yuko (2013). Écriture de la pureté dans l'œuvre d'Anatole France (Doctoral thesis) (in French). University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail.
• Ségur, Nicolas (1926). Conversations with Anatole France. Translated by May, J. Lewis. London and New York: John Lane The Bodley Head; Dodd, Mead.
• Shanks, Lewis Piaget (1919). Anatole France. Chicago: Open Court.
• Smith, Helen B. (1925). The Skepticism of Anatole France. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Stewart, Herbert Leslie (1927). Anatole France, the Parisian. New York: Dodd, Mead.
• Suffel, Jacques (1954). Anatole France par lui-même. Écrivains de toujours (in French). Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
• Tylden-Wright, David (1967). Anatole France. New York: Walker.
• Vandegans, André (1954). Anatole France: les années de formation (in French). Paris: Librairie Nizet.
• Virtanen, Reino (1968). Anatole France. Twayne's World Authors Series. New York: Twayne.
• Walton, Loring Baker (1950). Anatole France and the Greek World. Durham: Duke University Press.

Related pages

• Dreyfus affair
• Émile Zola
• Jean Jaurès
• Académie française
• Nobel Prize in Literature

Other websites

• Works of Anatole France in French at French Wikisource
• Anatole France at the Académie française website (in French)
• Anatole France at the Nobel Prize website
• Works by Anatole France at the Internet Archive
• Anatole France, Nobel Prize Winner by Herbert S. Gorman, The New York Times, 20 November 1921