- It was on this day 100 years ago , one of the doyens , not only of French , but also of the world literature died, bequeathing a heritage of classical literary works, some of which once read a hundred years since his death, still capable of awakening and enthralling the imagination of the readers, notwithstanding all the attempts of the literary establishments to ignore him , if not to send him to oblivion altogether. I read him for the first time only after nearly two decades since I finished my formal education when I accidentally found his "Penguin Island" in a "second-hand " bookshop ( in Sri Lanka we always find the most important books of bygone eras in "second hand" bookshops) and I was so fascinated even before reading it completely my decision to translate into my mother tongue, SINHALA, came involuntarily. And I did it in 1987 and notwithstanding the lukewarm publicity it was accorded by the media and critics it went to its third printing in 2024, to mark the 100th death anniversary of Anatole France. Since I read him for the first time, I was so lucky enough to buy almost all the English translations of his books, which was and is nearly impossible in Sri Lanka. The inevitable result was my translation of "The revolt of Angels'' which is another gem among his literary works, in 2021. In addition to these two translations , I thought of the easiest way to make many readers as possible not only of Sri Lanka but also of of the whole world aware of his his most thoughtful, provocative fascinating and hilarious sayings. My Blog - "PANTHISATANA" was my solution. I have already entered some of his sayings and it will continue in the coming months.
- Anatole France was not just a literary figure. Although no a philosopher in the academic sense, he is a philosopher in his own way that in almost all the literary works contain whole gamut of philosophical reflections that philosophers grapple to solve, especially regarding religions and religious bigotry. In fact he was one of the most consistent atheist non-religious among the literary figures , so much so he was giving insights even when he seemed to defending religious views or figures. Following the great anti-religious tradition of Voltaire and Diderot and even surpassing them he satirized the world-creation myth and All-Mighty God myth in two whole books - "Penguin Island" and "Revolt of the Angels." in such an imaginative way that even the other types of religious bigots can apply to their own religious myths. If not for the fact that French people were undergoing massive anti- religious upheaval at the time Anatole France could have been brought before an Inquisition and condemned to Eternal Damnation. Instead in 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Such was the time!
- As for his philosophical credentials suffice it to say that Will Durant who has written that amazing monumental 11-volume book , "The Story Of Civilization ", in addition to other historical and philosophical books, thought it fit to refer to Anatole France more than 30 times in his " The Pleasures of Philosophy."
- Anatole France was not just a arm-chair social critic. He along with Emil Zola spearheaded the struggle against the most despicable anti-Jewish conspiracy hatched by the Army, Church and the bourgeois gutter press and helped in their own way to defend democracy and freedom in France.
- I publish below two articles written by Maxim Gorky and Edmund Wilson for the benefit of those who want to know more about Anatole France but unable to find them.
Maxim Gorky on Anatole France
If I were asked what distinguishes the spirit of France from the spirit of other most characteristically and favourably, I would answer: the fact that fanaticism is an alien to the thinking of a Frenchman as pessimism. To my mind, French skeptics are the pupils not of Protogoras and Pyrrho, but of Socrates.
Socrates, as everyone knows, set a limit to the Sophists' infatuation with the terrible might of the intellect by bringing into the anarchic rampancy of thought, destructive to text-book truths, the basics of ethics and by establishing that objective truth is attainable by the will of man, provided that his thinking is completely free and aimed at cognition oh his own self and the world.,
It is quite likely , of course, that my knowledge of the history of France's spiritual development is scant and my judgements are erroneous. But the little that I know paints for me the genius of a Frenchman happily lacking in fanatical and cold self-confidence, and happily lacking in a despotic desire to establish for all time this or that dogma,, to drive thought into the narrow channel of this or that system, and with the captious cruelty of the Inquisitor to guard the inviolability of the dogmas and systems. I believe that the Procrustean bed - that beloved piece of furniture of the pedants constraining the freedom of cognition - has never enjoyed particular popularity in France. And I find it most natural that it was a Frenchman who said: " I think, therefore I am."
Beginning with Rabelais and Montaigne, who across the centuries held a hand out to Voltaire, the skepticism of the French, in accord with Socrates, asserted the need for enlightenment, Rabelais, speaking as the "oracle of the bottle", advised people to study nature, making its force serve the interests of man, and Montaigne said that a philosophy which "hid itself from people" was just charlatanry.....
Possibly, all these comparisons which might be easily developed and extended to cover all aspects of life, will seem superfluous to the reader, but when one speaks of the genius of Anatole France one cannot ignore the spirit of the nation. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy have each in his own way shown the soul of The Russian people with a perfect comprehensiveness, and for me Anatole France represents as profoundly and comprehensively the spirit of the French. There will probably be objections to such a parallel from the Russian side, but that would simply be an argument on tastes. Besides, it is not aesthetic magnitude that I am comparing., but only the measure in which the spirit of a nation is expressed, and from this point of view Anatole France is an equal to all the greatest geniuses of the world as far as I am concerned. To this it must be added that a person with a healthy spirit appears somewhat simplified to us, which is very wrong, harmful, and proof only of a distorted taste for life.
I am not going to speak of the beauty of Anatole France's thought and, since i do not know his language, I am compelled to say nothing about the graceful strength and richness of his style, although these qualities are perfectly obvious even in the Russian translations of his books. What impresses me in Anatole France above all else in his courage and his spiritual health; indeed, he is the ideal example of "mens sana in corpore sano.'' (healthy mind in a healthy body) He lived at a time of great social catastrophes, but I do not remember if ever his acute mind made a mistaken appraisal of events, although I must say that the connection between his attitude to war and his attitude to the idea of communism was never quite clear to me. He possessed the absolutely perfect reserve of an aristocrat of the spirit, and this noble reserve never allowed him to enlarge the sorrows of the world with complaints against people or declarations of his personal sufferings, although it is undoubtable, of course, that this remarkable man suffered a great deal and not only when he was so courageously working on a a book like "Penguin Island". I...
Living in a dirty hell, so artfully, so splendidly organizes by the ruling classes of Europe, Anatole France, a man who had the look of a satyr and the great soul of an ancient philosopher, saw and felt all that was "bad" with an amazing keenness. With his large nose he smelt all the offensive malodours of hell, however subtle they might be, and like Socrates he liked to expose the bad in what popular opinion thought was good, and dis it competently. His attitude to the regrettable Dreyfus case, the letter he wrote about the persecution of Paul Marguerite, and much else convincingly enough enough that indifference to people and the world was utterly foreign to his skepticism....
For me ,Anatole France is a ruler of thought, he gave it birth, reared it, clothed it effectively in words, and with elegance and brought it out into the world; gay and lively, smiling ironically but without malice. H e governed its capricious games with the ease of a brilliant musician, the conductor of an orchestra all the members of which deem themselves outstanding talents and are subjective to the point of anarchy.
Intelligence, like everything else in this world craving peace and quiet, rather too often, too hastily and presumptuously affirms dogmas, theories and systems, thereby hampering the freedom of thought's further work on deepening and broadening our concepts. I often fancied that Anatole France saw intelligence physically embodied in a strangely shaped creature: it had the head and the wrathful face of Abddonna and the body of a winged spider that was busy entangling man in a strong web of various truths and thus enslaving his will to cognize the world. Anatole France smiled ironically when he saw this striving of a part to enslave a complex whole.
If Anatole France can be called a rationalist, then he was a rationalist who trained intelligence as if it were a lion or a snake. He loved to play with intelligence, argue with it, tease and irritate it. With a simplicity which I would call ingenious, he was constantly indicating the insecurity of the truths asserted by intelligence. The blows of his logic were especially hard when they were aimed at the thick, coarse skin of "copy-book truths". I do not remember one that was spared the great Frenchman's deservedly famed irony. ..
I seem to hear Anatole France, never for a minute losing his respect for intelligence , his partner in the game, addressing it with a Frenchman's courteousness:
" Ah, yes, you, Seigneur, are truly great, you are indisputably magnificent, but in spite of your advanced age you are still young, and absolute perfection is still a long way from you. You rebel well, but at moments it seems to me that your rebellion is incited by your anxiety to find tranquility in the cosy nest of truth, and that you are hardly capable of tranquility, much as you desire it. There is too much that you have started, and you will have to work much harder, much more boldly, preferring the creation of hypotheses to the crude hammering of dogmas".
There is no need to say that in the crown of France's glory, a country in which talent is no great wonder, the name of Anatole France will shine through the centuries.
Those who decide to inscribe on the tombstone of the wise man's last resting place just the two words
ANATOLE FRANCE
decided wisely. These words fully express the significance of this man who, having enriched our world with the treasures of his talent, left us so that it would be easier for us to really understand and appreciate his art and his charming image.
(Maxim Gorky - Collected Works - Vol.10 -pp183/86)
Edmund Wilson on Anatole France
....
Anatole France, of the generation twenty years younger than Renan and Taine, was twenty seven at the time of the Paris Commune. He had been declared unfit for services at the front, as a member of the Natinal Guard, had been reading Virgi on the fortifications. when the socialist government of paris was set up and there seemed danger of his being pressed to its defence, he got away from Paris with a false name and a Belgian passport, and took refuge in Versailles, he writes to his parents that he has had the satisfaction of seeing a group of communard prisoners: "riffraff... they were hideous, as you may suppose," The explosions of a powder magazine in the Luxembourg was clearly heard in Versaille, and the people there were very much frightened. Young Anatole France watch the fire and worried about his family in Paris. Back in home, with the Commune suppressed and the Louvre and the National Library still intact, so that he was able to feel that "the intellectual life was not yet altogether lost in Paris, he writes a friend that the "government of Madness and Crime is rotting at last in the very hour when it was beginning to put its programme into effect. Paris has run up the tricolour over the ruins,"
He was the son of a Parisian bookseller, and the family shop on the Quai Voltaire was a clearing-house for that rich culture of Paris which became richer as the country wore on. The scholars, the novelists and the poets came there. The shop was within the shadow of the Academy, and when Anatole France was fifteen, he drew one day at the end of his school themes, which had received honourable mention, a picture of Thibault bookshop and cupola and drew a line connecting one with the other. Two year later, he wrote to his father, who had just attended a meeting of the Academy: “ How shall I answer your letter now that you have actually sat within the holy precincts of the Institute, now that you have listened to the most eloquent voices and the most notably inspired poems – I who know only the greenery of the fields, the blue of the sky, the thatched roofs of the farms?”
One of his great admirations was Renan. In the Wedding at Corinth, a play in verse, he dramatized The Origins of Christianity; and part of The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, the story of a kindly, innocent and subtle-minded old scholar, is said to have been based on Renan’s adventures in Sicily. Out of the Preface to a late book of Renan’s, Philosophical Dramas, he got the phrase about approaching human life with an attitude of irony and pity which he was himself to exploit and make famous. The young Anatole France, in fact, achieved his first success by a sort of sweetened imitation of Renan in his old age. The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, which he afterwards grew to loath, was aimed , he confessed, at the Academy. And the Academy duly crowned it, By fifty-two, Anatole France had taken his seat as an Academician. He was afterwards to say that he had done everything which would have pleased his mother on the Quai Voltaire.
Yet there was something else underneath the surface of the honey-voiced early France.. Anatole France was man of superior abilities who had taken some disagreeable snubs. At the ecclesiastical school to which he had been sent, the College Stanislas, the old scale of social values was still in force. In the whole course of his attendance there, France afterwards told his secretary, Jean-Jacques Brousson, he had never received a prize. The prizes all went to the pupils with aristocratic names – it was thus the masters advertises the school. : A few second-rate honours, to be sure, were thrown to the Third Estate, the sons of doctors or notaries or lawyers- prizes for recitation, drawing or religious instruction. But favouritism played its part even there in the distribution of the crumbs that fell from the high table.” The masters told his parents he was dull and advised them to take him out: they were only wasting their money trying to educate him beyond his station. The elder France had been a shoemaker’s son, who had begun his career as a farm boy and soldier, who had educated himself and worked up gradually to the bookshop on the Quai Voltaire; and Anatole was to cherish all his life the resentment of the petty bourgeois against the big bourgeoise and the nobility. His unctuous manners are likely to break down when something happens to revive this resentment. He became furious with a vicomte of the Academy, who had promised to vote for him and then failed to do so:” You are mistaken, M de--,” he blasted him, when the Academician tried to apologize. “you voted for me! You gave your word. You are a gentleman: you don’t break your word. You’re mistaken, M de—; you did vote for me”! And when one of the priests of the College Stanislas, who had told his parents to put him to work in the shop, tried to congratulate him after his election to the Academy, France repulsed him in a harsh burst of anger. France hated the priests all the more because he believed that the Catholic education was aimed at cramping the natural instincts, that it was hostile to beauty and volupte.
All this side of Anatole France was brought out by the Dreyfus case. The condemnation of Dreyfus, which stirred up the French in 1895, when Anatole France was fifty, was not a genuine social crisis like the Commune, which called the whole structure of society in question. It was a conflict merely between, on the one hand, the liberal bourgeois, and, on the other, the army, royalists, the Church. Anatole France, by himself rather timid and lazy, had at that time a Jewish friend, Mme Caillavet, who made him work , gave him a salon in her house and generally promoted his advancement; and she probably had a good deal to do with his championship of Dreyfus, which contributed to bring about the retrial and pardon of 1899. Besides, the rightening of injustice, the baiting of the forces of reaction, had by Rabelais and Voltaire been made a part of French literary tradition, which France prided himself on representing. He made speeches, pamphleteered , turned for the moment into a satirist of the type of Bernard Shaw. The immensely amusing Contemporary History, with its smiling but deadly analysis of the upper strata of French society, is the product of the Dreyfus period.
When we come to the period of the French Revolution, to which Anatole France devoted one of the most ambitious of his later books, we find him attacking the subject from an angle which the France of Contemporary History would never have led us to expect. The Gods Are Athirst is a story of the Terror , and Anatole France opposes in it a harsh and puritanical petty Robespierre to a charming and epicurean formerly well-to-do Farmer General- that is, the Revolution at its ugliest to the old regime at its most attractive. France had written in his youth of Louis 14th.: That grotesque and hateful being whom Michelet, with his eye of genius, has seen in all his baseness and all his misery, has no longer any right to foolish indulgence.”; yet, though he thinks better of Louis14th now, he would not even now choose an aristocrat for a hero…
Anatole France still has all his luxuries, and we feel it would be hard for him to part with them. Yet in the enjoyment of them he is not precisely happy. It has become the fashion to disparage France as a writer; but that is partly because people expect to find in him things that he cannot supply, even though he may sometimes attempt to do so- and not for the things he may sometimes attempt to do so- and not for the things that are actually there. For Anatole France does not represent merely a dimming of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as Taine and Renan do; he shows that tradition in full disintegration; and what he is telling, with all his art and wit, is the story of an intellectual world where principles are going to pieces. The moralist in Anatole France… is always in conflict with the sensualist, the great preacher of volupte as the sole solace for human futility; and the moralist becomes more and more sterile.
In his political role, Anatole France is a socialist; yet the whole purpose of two of his later books, The Gods Are Athirst and the revolt of the Angels, is to show that revolutions must eventually result in tyrannies at least as oppressive as those they were designed to displace. And when he undertakes, In Penguin Island, to write a sort of outline of history, he has modern industrial civilization blasted off the face of the earth by embittered proletarian anarchists. But no freer and more reasonable order succeeds: the rebels are wiped out with their masters, and such men are left on earth return to their original condition as tillers of the soil. We are back with the cycles of Vico again and might as well not have got rid of God. Penguin Island is presented as a satire, to be sure; but we know from France’s other work that this kind of idea haunted his mind.” Slowly, but surely,” he had written at the head of his political papers, “humanity realizes the dreams of the wise”; but he had moments when this assurance was destroyed by the nightmares of science, which was no longer for France, as I have said, the school of discipline, the source of strength, that it had been for Taine or Renan or Zola… Anatole France is a professed reformer and optimist, who is always relapsing into cynicism or gloom, and giving way to the worst suspicions of the mechanistic character of life and the total significance of humanity .
Mr. Haakon M. Chevalier has shown in his admirable study of Anatole France how both his irony and his inveterate inability to construct a book on a large scale were due to the fluctuating character of his intellect: France’s mockery work both ways because he is unable to reconcile in himself several quite different points of view and he can never hold to any system long enough to have a full-length piece of work upon it. More even than Voltaire, Anatole France comes finally to deserve the accusation of being a “chaos of clear ideas”. The books of France’s later years are more solid and more ambitious than anything he has done before; but they have the same lack of organic coherence. What do we find in them? –glowing hopes undermined by frightful sinkings , erotic imagination mixed with impulses of social protest, and – becoming more pronounced as he grows older – a nihilism black and hateful. He gets a certain intensity here, the intensity of a man actually tortured by his powerlessness to carry through any one of a number of contradictory impulses. For the first time his ridicule becomes truly ferocious. His sense of isolation deepens. He insists before Proust on that aloneness in love, that imprisoning impossibility of sharing one’s emotions with another, which Proust is to take for his central theme and which he is to harp on and elaborate so inordinately. In both The Red Lilly and A Mummer’s Taleee ( Hstoire Comique), with which the pathological early story Jocaste associates itself, the typical romantic situation of love rendered hopeless by barriers of marital duty, social convention or consanguinity has already turned into the situation of love rendered hopeless by neurotic obsession and inhibition…With France, the abysses of doubt and despair are always yawning under the tightropes and trapezes of the highly developed intelligence , and to perform on them becomes more and more ticklish.
In the meantime, during the period of the Dreyfus case, France sends back his Legion of Honour ribbon when the legion strikes Zola off its rolls. He stays away from the séances of the academy; but goes back to it, on entreaty, in old age. He makes speeches before working-class audiences at the time of the 1905 revolution in Russia. He supports the war of 1914, offers himself at seventy for military service; then, hearing of the rejection by the Allies of the peace proposal of the Central Powers, declines to lend his support to any more patriotic causes.” Yes”, he told Marcel LeGoff, “I have written and talked like my concierge. I am ashamed of it, but it had to be done.” He would not protest, however, even in the War’s later stages. He was frightened; his old friend Caillaux had been sent to jail by Clemenceau, his old ally of the Dreyfus case, and Clemenceau had threatened, it is said, to do the same thing to France if he opened his mouth to criticize the government. Surrounded by parasites and female admirers and a veritable museum of art objects, he would receive and talk with radicals, whom he called “comrade”. Brouson records that, on one occasion, when asked why he was “drawn towards socialism,” France had answered: “ Better be drawn than driven.” To another caller.. he said in answer to a question about the future: “ the future? Buy, my poor friend, there is no future – there is nothing. Everything will begin the same again – people will build things and tear them down and so on for ever. So long as men can’t get outside themselves or free themselves from their passions, nothing will ever change. There will be some periods which will be more peaceful and others which will be more disturbed; men will go on killing each other and then go back to their affairs again.” He sees too many people and is too polite and too malicious to all of them. Voltaire we feel, was very fortunate in having an object that required all his malice. In Anatole France’s day, after the flurry of the Dreyfus case, the Church no longer seems sufficiently formidable for the satirist to do very much more than tease it with ribald versions of sacred stories. He continues to preach the consolations of an easy-going epicureanism; but “ if you could read in my soul,” he once told Broussen, “you would be horrified,” “ He took my hands in his, feverish and trembling. He looked in my eyes, and I saw that his own were full of tears. His face was all ravaged. “ There is not, “ he sighed, “ an unhappier creature in the whole universe than I! People think I am happy. I have never been happy.- not an hour.- not a day!”.
And the nihilism , the bitter outbursts, begin to make the naivte , which had once seemed so droll and delightful, sound off-key and insincere Anatole France had an infantile side that we get to like less and less; it is bound up with an attempt to get back to the more innocent age of the language. The tendency toward archaizing which made him, in one of the Bergeret books , satirise contemporary politics in the language of Rabelais, and in the books about the Abbe Coignard, deliver criticism of contemporary institutions in the accents of the eighteenth century, which caused him to lard even his own personal utterances with obsolete locutions and phrases, represented a genuine weakness. Now, in his old age, he takes refuge from his loneliness, from the war, from the death of his only daughter, who had been estranged from him by his divorce from his wife, in returning to to a vein of childhood memories,- the vein of My Friend’s Book and Pierre Noziere – in which he had at one time been charming. But now, in spite of some fine passages such as the address to Racine, admirable exercises in that traditional French which he, like Renan, was to declare in these last years had only been debased since the eighteenth century, and to his labours over which the series of drafts of the book left unfinished at his death present such impressive testimony – in spite of this, Little Peter and Life in bloom seem self conscious and coldly contrived. How much that is harsh, smoothing out!... At last, after the flattery and rewards of a lifetime, the younger generation is to reject him. His conception of “the succession of phenomena and the relativity of things”- to which France still assigned a certain reliability – was to be carried by the Symbolists and their successors to a point where it was to become, on the one hand, unintelligible to Anatole France and, where, on the other hand, France’s interest in politics, the flickerings of his social conscience, were to cease to have meaning for them. With the Symbolists, the conviction of social isolation reached a point where they had not even the illusion of being disillusioned about society. When France died, his place at the Academy was filled by an eminent Symbolist, who used the occasion to disparage France; and that group of ultra-Symbolists, the Dadaists, together with some neo-romantic young writers, seized upon the day of his burial to bring out, under the title A Corpse, a fierce manifesto against him. “Without God, without touching love!” wrote Pierre Drieu de la Rochell. “ without insupportable despair, without magnificent anger, without definitive defeats, without conclusive triumphs!” And “ that sceptic, that amiable sceptic” protested Joseph Delteil, “leaves me cold, It is for passion that I become impassioned. It is optimism faith, ardour and blood that arouse me!” They accuse him of compromise, of cowardice, of traditionalism, of patriotism, of realism, of betraying the revolution.
(To The Finland Station –Edmund Wilson –pp.60/72)
- I publish here the two articles written by Maxim Gorky and Edmond Wilson on Anatole France for the benefit of those want to know more on Anatole France but unable to find them.
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