Late 1970s. Shortly after his arrival in exile in France, having fled Sovietized Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera spoke to Cioran about his passion for Anatole France. The philosopher sneered: “Never say his name out loud here, everyone will laugh at you!” Years later, in 2009, Kundera would devote a chapter of his essay to Anatole France An encounter. Why did the latter end up on the “black list” when he deserved a different posterity? “As a young man,” writes Kundera, “I was trying to orient myself in the world that was descending towards the abyss of a dictatorship whose concrete reality was not foreseen, wanted, imagined by anyone, especially not by those who had desired and cheered its arrival: the only book that was capable of telling me something lucid about this unknown world was The gods are thirsty.”
On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Anatole France, Calmann-Lévy had the good idea of republishing The gods are thirstythis neglected classic published in 1912 which paints with clairvoyance and wit the drift of the Terror. Born in Paris in 1844, elected to the Académie française in 1896, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, France was an icon during his lifetime – let us recall that he largely inspired Proust to write the character of Bergotte. But after his death in 1924, things became complicated. The surrealists published the collective pamphlet against him A dead body. Aragon saw him as an “execrable histrion of the mind”. As self-righteous as ever, André Breton argued vaguely: “With France, it is a little human servility that is going away. Let us celebrate the day when we bury cunning, traditionalism, patriotism, opportunism, skepticism, realism and heartlessness.” Three years later, replacing him in his seat under the Dome, Paul Valéry hammered home the final nail: in his acceptance speech, he managed not to mention the name of Anatole France once! Since then, the poor man has been considered the academic writer par excellence, an official extinguisher, a double of Paul Bourget – in short, the height of old-fashionedness.
Anyone who has stuck to this preconceived idea will be surprised when reading for the first time The gods are thirsty : it is a book bursting with truth, vitality and even bite. Here we must explain where Anatole France comes from. Disciple of Voltaire, friend of Zola and Jaurès, collaborator of Humanityhe studied at the Stanislas College and was raised by a father, Noël France (what a name!), who was a soldier of Charles X and then became a bookseller, specializing in the revolutionary period. Long before writing The gods are thirstythe young Anatole was therefore bottle-fed with an erudition that allowed him to avoid falling into sectarianism. This is remarkably explained by Guillaume Métayer (specialist of Anatole France and researcher at the CNRS), who signs the preface of this new edition.
Before trying to understand the fall of France, we ask him when he would place its peak (recognition, notoriety and influence). “That would require specific research,” he answers. It seems to me that an important point is his election to the Académie française in 1896, then his intervention in the Dreyfus affair, therefore around 1900, and the publication of one of his masterpieces, Contemporary history. Politics gave him a very great notoriety of which the countless streets, colleges, Anatole-France stations are the trace. His notoriety and his influence have not ceased to grow but a dissonant note began to mix with it. The worm was in the fruit because politics is always divisive. And unanimity, too, can dangerously turn against an artist, transforming him into a symbol of a bygone era. This is exactly what happened with Anatole France.”
“The generation that loathed France is also its heir”
Does Guillaume Métayer share the thesis of the “black list” mentioned above? “Yes, I sometimes had the opportunity to talk about it with Milan Kundera and I also believe that snobbery played a big role in the fall of Anatole France. I think that the surrealists behaved like terrorists: people who hit so hard that they impress part of the public and give a direction to History. Because unfortunately terrorism does not only arouse fear but often has a more or less tacit ripple effect. They set the tone and then everyone went for it with their claw, or even their donkey kick.” In this “everyone”, we find first and foremost a certain Paul Valéry, whose aggressiveness Guillaume Métayer explains to us: “He was angry with Anatole France for having refused to publish his hermetic master Mallarmé in Contemporary Parnassus – France’s personal aesthetic program was rather the return to a classical and intelligible form. But we must add to poetic rancor political hatred: Valéry’s anti-Semitic outbursts in his correspondence against the Dreyfusard Anatole France suggest this. I would add to this the ordinary rivalry of a generation towards its elders and too many similarities not to hate each other. When we look closely, the generation that loathed France is also its heir, notably through its classicism…”
At bottom, isn’t the tragedy of France that it was too subtle in a country that was grossly polarized between right and left? Guillaume Métayer supports this thesis: “Anatole France was a man of the left. He defended Dreyfus, promoted Emile Combes’ law of separation, even published a Greetings to the Soviets before dissociating himself from the first Soviet trials… Was he a right-wing writer? He was a man of great intellectual subtlety and honesty. He understood very quickly that the Enlightenment should not freeze into dogma and myth, under penalty of contradicting itself, or even, as with the Terror, of becoming the opposite of what it should have been. Driven by a very pronounced taste for the past and old France, he was never in favor of a clean slate and always sought deep continuities behind the theater of History. He also explored the possible links between the two opposing blocs, right and left, and tried to understand the thinking of his adversary instead of demonizing it. He is a model of freedom of mind associated with great humanity. Without doubt this delicacy of intelligence and heart makes him difficult to recover in periods of indoctrination.”
Among the younger generation, we only know one fan of Anatole France: the whirling François-Henri Désérable. He revealed himself in 2013 with You will show my head to the peoplea collection of short stories set during the revolutionary period. For him, it’s a no-brainer: “Of course we have to rehabilitate Anatole France! There are only three great novels about the Revolution: Ninety-three by Victor Hugo, The Eleven by Pierre Michon and The gods are thirstywhich we unfortunately no longer read, because of those damned surrealists who struck France with damnation of memorythis post-mortem condemnation to oblivion which existed in ancient Rome.” In 1924, France’s head had fallen into the basket of the six executioners behind A dead body (Aragon and Breton, but also Eluard, Delteil, Soupault and Drieu La Rochelle). A century later, in addition to this welcome reissue, Guillaume Métayer has just published Thus spoke Anatole France (Arfuyen). And on October 14 and 15, he will dedicate a conference to him at the Sorbonne. Will France finally be rediscovered? It is worth it.
The gods are thirstyby Anatole France. Calmann-Lévy, 223 p., €26.
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