FRANCE, ANATOLE (ANATOLE-FRANÇOIS-THIBAUT). — Writer, born in Paris on 16 April 1844, died 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 several collections of poetry: Les Pohnes dorés (Paris 1873), Les Noces corinthiennes (ibid. 1876), elegant in style, but already breathing hatred for Jesus Christ and Christianity (“the specter that comes to disturb the feasts of life”), as well as the brutal sensuality of a pagan of the decadence. Abandoning poetry, he turned to prose, publishing some twenty novels; for example, Le crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (ibid. 1881), Thelle (ibid. 1830), which may be summed up in these declarations: “The raw material of sanctity 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'Epicure (ibid. 1895), which develops as its general idea the theme that there is nothing in the world worthy of love, nor even of thought; Les dieux ont soif (ibid. 1912), macabre scenes of terrorists during the Revolution of 1793; Sur la pierre blanche (ibid. 1905), in which a specially fabricated St Paul dreams of socialism and internationalism, and the Catholic religion is called the greatest impiety; L'île des piugonins (ibid. 1908), continuous sarcasm directed against everything sacred; La révolte des anges (ibid. 1914), in which the theory of the relativity of every ethical and religious notion is reaffirmed. The Dreyfus Affair pushed F. to the left, leading him to take part in every political and religious struggle and transforming him into an ardent anarchist and apostle of Jacobinism (cf. the 4 vols. of the Histoire contemporaine: L'arme du mail, 1897; La mannequin d'osier, 1897; L'anneau d'amithyste, 1896; M. Bergeret à Paris, 1901, and Opinions sociales, 2 vols., 1902).
F. must certainly be credited with a plastic, exquisite art of writing, full of subtleties, grace, learned irony, and ingenious ease; sober and enlivened by remarkable intensity—something that could impede a fair judgment of the content of his work. The clarity, in fact, of the Greek, passionate about the beautiful forms of art, is unfortunately joined to the malicious vision of the pagan, avid for pleasures, hostile to every constraint, and obstinately denying every certainty that might hamper him; he 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. “In him one finds a certain inexplicable sadism, which has led him to seek out everything that the human spirit possesses of lofty, in order to debase it; everything that can console the heart, in order to dishonor it; everything that raises the gaze above the mists, in order to display its implacable and laughable emptiness” (cf. P. Lhande, A. F., Réflexions sur une tombe, in Études, 181 [1924, iv], p. 271). Atheism and skepticism, dispensed with a lavish hand, prevented this son of Voltaire and Renan, even at the end of his life, from being reconciled with God.
All his works were condemned to the Index by decree of 31 May 1922.
BIBLI. Editions: Oeuvres complètes illustrées de A. F., 26 vols., Paris 1925–37. — Studies: For earlier publications, cf. H. Talvart and J. Place, Bibliographie des auteurs modernes de la langue française, VI, ibid. 1937, pp. 174–209. See also: V. Poucel, Les métamorphoses d'A. F., in Études, 183 [1925, ii], pp. 292 sq., 395 sqg., 466 sqg.; J. Seffel, A. F., ibid. 1945; L. Carlas, Les carnets intimes d'A. F., ibid. 1946; N. Addamiano, A. F. L'uomo e l'opera, Padua 1948. Celestino Testore