Anatole France Biography and List of Works

Writer, urbane critic, one of the major figures of French literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. France's scepticism appears already in his early works, but later the hostility toward bourgeois values led him to support French Communist Party. In the 1920 his writings were put on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Roman Catholic Church.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
(from The Red Lily, 1894)

Anatole France was born in Paris. His real name was Jacques Anatole François Thibault. France's father was a bookseller and called his shop the 'Librarie de France' - from this the future writer took his surname. France acquired at early age a love for books and reading. He studied at the Collége Stanislaus, where he learned his lifelong anti-clericalism. After failing his baccalaureate examination several times, France finally passed at the age of twenty. In the 1860s he was for a time an assistant to his father, then he was a cataloguer and publisher's assistant at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre, and he also worked as a teacher.

When his father retired, France took a series of jobs as an editorial assistant. He became member of the Parnassian group of poets, Gautier, Catulle, Mendes and others, and built himself a high reputation in the literature circles. During the Franco-Prussian War, France served briefly in the army, and was horrified of the bloodbath at the Paris Commune in 1871.

In 1875 the newspaper Le Temps commissioned France to write a series of critical articles on contemporary writers. He started his weekly column next year. These were published between 1889 and 1892 in four volumes under the title LA VIE LITTÉRAIRE. In 1876 France was appointed an assistant librarian for the French Senate, a post he held fourteen years.

As a novelist France made his breakthrough with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. Like his other works, it looked back to the 18th century as a golden age. Its protagonist, sceptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard, was the first of series of fictional characters, who embody France's own personality. The novel was praised for its elegant prose and irony and won him a prize from the French Academy.

France married Valérie Guérin de Sauville in 1877 and published in 1879 his first collection of stories. The marriage ended in divorce in 1893, several years after his liaison with Mme Arman de Caillavet (Leontine Lippmann), which inspired his Christian fantasy THAÏS (1890), closely related to Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony. LES LYS ROUGE (1894), was a roman à clef dealing with their relationship, and gained a huge success.

Between the years 1897 and 1901 France wrote four novels under the title Contemporary History, a fictional account of Belle Epoque. The first volume introduced another important France persona, monsieur Bergeret, a provisional schoolteacher. In 1893 published The Queen Pédauque introduced Jerome Coignard, whom France used as his vehicle for social criticism in The Opinions of Mr. Jerome Coignard (1893). During the 1890s and early 1900s France argued for social reforms and attacked the shortcomings of contemporary society and the church.

France resigned his library job at the Senate in 1890, and was elected to the Académie Française in 1896. He presided at the salon of Armand de Caillavet until her death in 1910. The last fifteen years of France's life were shadowed by personal difficulties, some of which he created himself. His daughter Suzanne died in 1917, his mistress Mme Arman, whom he started to deceive with other women as early as 1904, became seriously ill and died in 1910. He deceived his housekeeper, Emma Laprevotte, whom he later married, and an American woman whom he had deserted, killed herself in 1911.

"We have medicines to make women speak; we have none to make them keep silence."
(from The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, 1912)

Among France's later works are Penguin Island (1908), in which humanity's evolutionary course is allegorised satirically through the transformation of penguins into humans - after the animals have been baptised in error by the nearsighted Abbot Mael. The two-volume biography, The Life of Joan of Arc (1908), was poorly received - Catholics criticized its realistic portrayal of Joan and historians had much to say about its historical accuracy. The Gods Are Athirst (1912) was a historical novel about the French Revolution. In The Revolt of Angels (1914) an angel, corrupted by the world of books, realizes that his fallen brethren were in the right.

France died on October 12, 1924, in Tours, where he had moved ten years earlier. The highest-ranking members of the French government attended his funeral. The poet Paul Valéry succeeded to Anatole France's chair and delivered an unconventional address upon his predecessor. Instead of the usual complimentary obituary, he made an attack.

"Anatole France was essentially a rationalist: he did not deny the incongruities and incoherencies of experience, but he attempted to write about them, at least, in a simple, logical and harmonious style. Paul Valéry has set himself, on the contrary, the task of reproducing by his very language all the complexities and confusions of our interacting sensations and ideas. The phenomena with which France usually deals are the events of life as it is lived in the world; with Valéry the object of interest is the isolated or ideal human mind, brooding on its own contradictions or admiring its own flights."
(Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle, 1931)

NOTE: Anatole France participated in the Dreyfuss case (1896) with other writers, in front of them Émile Zola with his famous article J'Accuse. France discussed the affair in the fourth volume of Contemporary History, entitled Monsieur Bergeret in Paris (1901). He was the first to sign Émile Zola's manifesto, condemning the false indictment for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, which had been made to protect high army officials from the scandal of exposed corruption.

For further reading: Anatole France by J.L. May (1924); Anatole France. The Degeneration of a Great Artist by B. Cerf (1926); The Ironic Temper by H.M. Chevalier (1932); Anatole France 1844-1924 by E.P. Dargan (1937); Anatole France: A Life Without Illusions by J. Axelrad (1944); Anatole France in the United States by M.R. McEwan (1945); Anatole France and the Greek World by L.B. Walton (1950); Anatole France: The Politics of Scepticism by C. Jefferson (1965); by D. Tylden-Wright (1967); The Art of Anatole France by O. Bresky (1969); Anatole France by R. Virtanen (1969); Anatole France by M. Sachs (1974); Techniques of Irony in Anatole France by D.W. Levy (1978)

LES POÉMES DORÉS, (1873)