One may say, in sum, that France was the complete man of letters, who tried his hand at
just about every form of writing practiced in the literary world of his time. It is nevertheless accurate to say that the writing of fiction so dominated his output, throughout his career, that it constituted his true vocation.
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Achievements
The election of Anatole France to the French Academy in 1896 and his winning of the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921 were the major public landmarks of the great success
and recognition he achieved during his career as a writer, first in his own country and then in the international arena. At the height of his fame, in the early years of the twentieth century, he was widely regarded as France’s greatest living author, celebrated for his wit, his wisdom, and his humanitarian vision. The paradoxes of that fame, however, were multiple
and heavy with irony: The fame had been an unusually long time in coming (he was nearly
fifty years old before he had his first significant success with the public), it was based largely on his association with public events rather than on his genuine but esoteric literary talent, and it lasted only briefly. Indeed, the greatest paradox of his fame was its bewilderingly rapid eclipse after his death. His reputation would not regain the luster of his glory years, around the turn of the twentieth century.
France himself lived long enough to be the saddened witness of a major erosion of his
fame in a storm of bitter controversy, which made him an object of both worship and ha-
tred but for purely nonliterary reasons. The truth is that the great fame he enjoyed, during a brief period of his life, was of the public sort, only indirectly occasioned by his writings, which, even at their most popular, appealed to a rather narrowly circumscribed audience.
One must separate his fame from his achievements as a writer—which is not to say that his achievements were minor, but only that they were literary and aesthetic, hence accessible to relatively few at any time.
As a novelist and short-story writer, France made his mark in the fiction of ideas, and as a literary critic, he established, by personal example, the validity of subjective impression-ism as a method. Those are the two major achievements of his career in letters, the accomplishments that have affected literary history. To those literary achievements, one should add a more personal achievement: the creation of a highly distinctive, instantly identifiable style of classic purity and elegance, with subtle rhythms and limpid clarity, which perfectly translated the skeptical and gently ironic view he held of the human condition.
Biography
Anatole France, born Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault in 1844, was the only child
of a well-established Parisian bookdealer and was seemingly predestined to the world of
books. His father, Noël-François Thibault, ran the sort of bookshop that was also a gathering place of the literati, who would come as not only customers but also friends. They
would sit and talk with the owner, whom they called by the familiar diminutive France, an abbreviation of François. Once the son was old enough to help in the shop and participate in the daily conversations, he was naturally called le jeune France, a custom that suggested to young Anatole the pen name he would choose when he began to write.
Shy and unassertive by nature and unprepossessing physically, France matured into an
unworldly and bookish young man, easily intimidated by the “real” world and much given
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to periods of solitude and quiet reverie. In his twenties, he did occasional research and editing chores for the publishers of dictionaries and encyclopedias, having definitely de-
cided against following in his father’s footsteps as a bookseller. Eventually, he became a reader of manuscripts for a publisher, wrote articles for ephemeral journals, and took a civil servant’s position, working in the senate library, all the while using his leisure moments to learn the craft of writing. He was thirty-three years old, and a published but thoroughly obscure and unknown author, when he overcame his timidity long enough to
marry, in 1877. The marriage produced one child, a daughter born in 1881, but was other-
wise an unhappy relationship for both sides that ended in a bitter divorce in 1893, after a prolonged separation.
France’s unhappy domestic life was the backdrop for his long personal struggle to find
his own “voice” and establish himself as a writer. By the 1880’s, he had abandoned poetry and was experimenting with different modes of prose fiction, trying both the novel and the short-story forms but attracting very little attention from the reading public. Only after he became the regular literary critic for Le Temps and had published a genuinely popular work, the novel Thaïs, did he feel securely established enough as a writer to give up his post at the senate library.
Thereafter, all through the 1890’s, France’s books sold well, and he rose rapidly in
public esteem, aided in part by a newfound interest in and involvement with politics and public affairs. In particular, the Dreyfus affair outraged his sense of justice and galvanized him into public action for the first time in his life. He was then in his fifties, and he discovered, a bit to his own surprise, a radical social thinker beneath the placid and conservative exterior he had always presented to the world. During the first years of the new century, he became outspokenly anticlerical and socialistic in his views but was soon plunged into
disillusionment when he saw that even victory, as in the Dreyfus affair, produced little real change in society, and that his own activism served only to make him controversial and the object of vicious attacks, which he found especially painful to endure. This mood of disillusionment drove him to withdraw into himself once more and to give up active involve-
ment in public affairs. His work increasingly concerned the past and took on an
unaccustomed satiric edge.
The outbreak of World War I tempted France briefly into the public arena once more,
to proclaim his pacifist views, but when he was assailed as unpatriotic, he retreated, this time definitively, into the private world of letters. It is perhaps suggestive of the depth of his wounds from the public fray that his literary preoccupations during the final decade of his life were almost exclusively autobiographical. His career as a novelist had effectively ended with the publication of The Revolt of the Angels in 1914.
Analysis
The world of books into which Anatole France was born was surely the strongest influ-
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also determined the kind of writer he would be. Almost all the subjects he chose to write about, in his long career, were derived from or related to books in some way. He was a vo-racious reader all of his life, and the many books he wrote not only reflect that wide reading but also reveal that what he read was more immediate and more vital to him—more
nourishing to his creative imagination, indeed more real to him—than the quotidian reality in which he lived. Even when most actively involved in public events, as he was in the years immediately before the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, he tended to approach events as abstractions, dealing with them as intellectual issues, somehow detached from specific occurrences involving specific human beings. This
conscious need to convert real events into matter for books can be seen most clearly in the tetralogy that he so pointedly titled Contemporary History and in which he contrived to write about current events as though they were already in the distant past or even the stuff of legend.
Concomitant with his irreducibly bookish view of the world was his almost instinctive
<
br /> taste for storytelling. Whether as reader or as writer, nothing charmed him more than the unfolding of a narrative. Even factual writing—history and biography, for example—he
treated as an exercise in storytelling, going so far as to characterize good literary criticism as a kind of novel in which the critic “recounts the adventures of his soul among masterpieces,” as he put it in the famous preface to On Life and Letters. The art of storytelling was the art he set out to master in his long and difficult apprenticeship, and the storytelling impulse can be identified as the very heart of his vocation as a writer.
To the mind of the man of letters and the instinct of the teller of tales must be added a third characteristic: the outlook of the determined skeptic. France trained himself, from an early age, to question everything and to discern the contradictions and ironies in all forms of human behavior, including his own. He cultivated a perspective of distance and detachment from both people and events, but he learned to temper the bleakness and isolation of such a perspective with feelings of sympathetic recognition of the folly common to all humankind. A subtle blend of pity and irony came to be the hallmark of his view of the affairs of this world, expressed in the tone of gentle mockery with which his celebrated style was impregnated in the works of his maturity. Indeed, all three central characteristics of
France—the literary turn of mind, the narrative impulse, and the ironic perspective—can
be found in everything he wrote, including the youthful works of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism through which he gradually learned the writer’s trade. Those three traits can be seen fully developed for the first time in the novel that won for him his first public recognition, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, in 1881.
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
Published to the accolades of the French Academy, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
provided France with his first taste of success. The improbable hero of the book is an elderly, unworldly scholar and bibliophile who explains, in his own words, in the form of di-89
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ary entries, how he came to acquire a coveted medieval manuscript and how he rescued a
young girl from poverty and oppression. What holds the reader’s interest is not the trivial plot but the character of Sylvestre Bonnard, whose naïve narrative style, in his diary, constantly and unwittingly reveals his own bumbling incompetence in dealing with the
practical side of life.
The reader quickly recognizes as comical the dramatic earnestness with which the
simpleminded scholar narrates the only two “adventures” that have ever intruded into his serene existence. The ironic discrepancy between the excited tone of the narrator and the mundane character of the events he narrates is echoed suggestively in the title, which
promises a thriller but delivers nothing more violent than a book lover’s crime: Having
promised to sell his personal library in order to create a dowry for the damsel in distress he has rescued, Bonnard confesses, at the end of the diary, that he had “criminally” withheld from the sale several items with which he could not bear to part.
Perhaps the greatest skill the author displays in this book is that of artfully concealing the inherent sentimentality of the material. The key device of concealment is mockery:
Bonnard’s interest in old books and manuscripts is magnified, in both incidents, into a
grand and criminal passion by a transparently mock-heroic tone. This device distracts and amuses the reader, preventing inopportune reflections about the “fairy-tale” unreality of the happy ending of each incident. It is also true that the eccentric character of Bonnard is charming and that the novelty of a gentle fantasy, published at the height of the popularity of the naturalistic novel in France, must have struck many readers of the day as a welcome relief. It was for such reasons, no doubt, that the novel enjoyed mild critical acclaim and modest sales in 1881, even as its author, sternly self-critical, recognized its limitations of both form and content and set about immediately trying to do better.
What France retained from The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard for future use was the tone of gentle and sympathetic irony about human foibles. In the decade that followed, he experimented with fictionalized autobiography, tales of childhood, and themes borrowed
from history or legend, seeking above all a composition that he—and his readers—could
recognize as a fully realized work of art. He reached that goal with the publication of Thaïs in 1890—his first critical and popular success.
Thaïs
The story of Thaïs, the courtesan of Alexandria, has a bookish source, as does most of
France’s fiction; he changed the legend of Thaïs, however, by giving the central role in the tale to the monk, Paphnuce, whose ambition for saintliness inspires in him the project of converting the notorious actor and prostitute to Christianity. The well-known plot, in
which the saintly monk succumbs to sin even as the notorious sinner seeks salvation in piety, is thus, in France’s version, seen almost exclusively from the point of view of the monk. The character of Thaïs is developed hardly at all, while the complex motivations of Paphnuce are analyzed and explored in detail. This imbalance in the point of view, how-90
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ever, does not affect the fundamental irony of the story. Thaïs, though superficially presented, is shown clearly to be a seeker of pagan pleasure and prosperity, who yet was influenced in early youth by piety, having been secretly baptized, and whose growing fear of
death and damnation happens to make her receptive to the preaching of Paphnuce at that
particular time of her life.
Paphnuce, on the other hand, has had a long struggle against his own sensuality in try-
ing to live as a monk, and is unaware that his sudden project of converting Thaïs is really prompted by his unconscious but still unruly sensual yearnings. When the two meet,
therefore, each is ignorant of the other’s true disposition, and Paphnuce, moreover, is ignorant of his own desires. Their encounter is thus fated to be sterile, for by that time, Thaïs is already on her way to salvation, and Paphnuce is proceeding precipitously in the opposite direction. France exploits the irony of their opposing trajectories by making the occasion of their meeting the longest and most concentrated episode in the book. The effect is structural: The book is designed as a triptych, with the shorter first and last segments employed to introduce the protagonists and then to record the ultimate fate of each, while the middle segment, equal in length to the other two combined, examines and analyzes their
encounter from every angle and demonstrates the impossibility of any fruitful contact between them, because by that time each is in an unanticipatedly different frame of mind.
The structure of the book is perhaps what critics and public admired most about Thaïs.
It has a satisfying aesthetic quality that announced that France had mastered the sense of form necessary for the achievement of a work of art. The book’s success must also, however, be attributed to the subtle complexity of the ideas the author was able to distill from what is, after all, little more than a mildly indecorous comic anecdote. Thaïs is a profound and suggestive exploration of the hidden links between religious feeling and sexual desire and, beyond that, of the intricate and unexpected interplay between pagan and Christian
ideals and thought and between worldliness and asceticism as patterns of human behavior.
In this novel, characterization and realistic description count for comparatively little, and in spite of the daring subject matter, there is not a hint of prurience. The best effects are achieved by a tasteful and harmonious blend of elegant style, well-proportioned structure, and subtle ideas, all presented with gentle irony through the eyes of an amused and skeptical observer. Thaïs remains a delight for the thoughtful and attentive read
er, one of France’s finest achievements.
At about the same time as Thaïs was being composed, France was also diligently exploring the short-story form. Employing similar material from history or legend, he was
striving to find the ideal fusion of form and content that would yield a work of art in that genre also, and in some of the stories of the volume titled L’Étui de nacre (1892; Tales from a Mother of Pearl Casket, 1896), notably the famous “Procurator of Judea” and “The Juggler of Our Lady,” he succeeded as fully as he had for the novel in Thaïs. Thereafter, having earned his artistic spurs in both the novel and the short story, France developed his career in both domains, alternating a novel and a volume of short stories with something 91
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approaching regularity over the next twenty years. What is notable in the work of those
years is the visible effort he made to avoid the facile repetition of past successes, to explore and experiment with new techniques, and to strive to develop and grow as an artist. During the 1890’s, for example, he followed the gemlike stories of Tales from a Mother of Pearl Casket with a comic fantasy of a novel called At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque, then used a trip to Florence, Italy, as inspiration for a volume of short stories, Le Puits de Sainte-Claire (1895; The Well of Saint Clare, 1909), and a surprisingly conventional love story, The Red Lily, appearing in 1894. Those publications confirmed his newly won stature as a major writer and earned for him election to the French Academy in 1896.
Contemporary History
France’s next project, Contemporary History, began as a series of weekly newspaper articles commenting on current events by means of anecdotes and illustrative tales. Soon he began interconnecting the articles by using the same set of characters in each. The articles could have formed the basis for a volume of short stories, but instead, France con-
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