FRANCE, Anatole (Anatole-François-Thibaut). - Writer, b. in Paris on 16 April 1844, d. at La Béchellière (Tours) on 12 October 1924. A member of the Academy from 1896, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921.
He began his literary career with some collections of poetry: Les Poèmes dorés (Paris 1873), Les Noces corinthiennes (ibid. 1876), elegant in style, but already breathing hatred for Jesus Christ and Christianity ("a specter that comes to disturb the festivities of life"), and the brutal sensuality of a pagan of the decadence. Having abandoned poetry, he turned to prose, publishing some twenty novels; for example, Le crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (ibid. 1881), Thaïs (ibid. 1890), which can be summed up in these declarations: "The raw material of holiness is concupiscence, incontinence, every impurity of the flesh and of the spirit"; Le Lys rouge (ibid. 1894), the journey of two lovers to Florence, an abject mixture of piety and dissoluteness; Le jardin d'Épicure (ibid. 1895), which develops as its general idea the theme: there is nothing in the world worthy of love or even of thought; Les dieux ont soif (ibid. 1912), macabre scenes of terrorists in the revolution of 1793; Sur la pierre blanche (ibid. 1905), where a St. Paul, fabricated for the purpose, dreams of socialism and internationalism, and the Catholic religion is called the greatest impiety; L'île des pingouins (ibid. 1908), a continuous sarcasm against everything sacred; La révolte des anges (ibid. 1914), where the theory of the relativity of every ethical and religious notion is reaffirmed. The Dreyfus affair pushed F. to the left, making him take part in all the political and religious struggles, transforming him into an ardent anarchist and apostle of Jacobinism (cf. the 4 vols. of the Histoire contemporaine: L'orme du mail, 1897; Le mannequin d'osier, 1897; L'anneau d'améthyste, 1899; M. Bergeret à Paris, 1901, and Opinions sociales, 2 vols., 1902).
F. must certainly be credited with an art of writing that is plastic, exquisite, full of refinements, of grace, of learned irony, of ingenious ease; sober and enlivened by a marvelous incisiveness; which could prevent a fair judgment on the content of his work. The limpidity, in fact, of the Greek, enamored of the beautiful forms of art, is unfortunately joined to the malicious vision of the pagan, greedy for pleasures, enemy of every constraint, obstinate denier of every certainty that gets in the way; who places his ideal of life and happiness in the voluptuousness of the present moment, laughing at and mocking every thought of tomorrow, when flesh and caresses and lusts will disappear. "There is in him a certain sadistic refinement, which made him seek out all that the human spirit has of the elevated, in order to debase it; all that can console the heart, in order to dishonor it; all that raises the gaze above the mists, in order to show its implacable and laughable vanity" (cf. P. Lhande, A. F., Réflexions sur une tombe, in Études, 181 [1924, iv], p. 271). Atheism and skepticism, dispensed with full hands, which prevented this son of Voltaire and of Renan, even at the end of his life, from reconciling himself with God.
All his works were condemned to the Index by decree of 31 May 1922.
Bibliography4 works
Celestino Testore