ceived the notion of weaving selected articles from one year’s output into a novel that
would record the main events of that year in a kind of fictionalized history. It was a bold experiment, which eventually ran to four volumes and occasioned some brilliant writing
and the creation of one truly memorable character, Monsieur Bergeret, a scholar and
teacher of a wittily ironic turn of mind, who usually articulated the author’s own skeptical view of public events.
Some consider Contemporary History to be France’s finest work, but while it does make unflaggingly entertaining reading, as well as offer a valuable historical record, it may be too randomly structured and too variable in tone to be artistically satisfying for the sophisticated modern reader. It deserves respect, however, both as an interesting experiment in a new kind of fiction and as the inauguration of a new thematic vein in France’s work: the overt exploitation of public events, especially politics, in the writing of fiction.
The novels and short stories published between 1900 and 1914 are almost all in this
new political vein, sometimes seriously polemical, more often comic and satiric. The
most widely read work of that period is the amusing and clever Penguin Island, which gives a brief and jaundiced view of French history as though it were a history of a society of penguins. The masterpiece of this period, however, and probably the finest of all
France’s novels, is his reconstruction of the atmosphere of the French Revolution, called The Gods Are Athirst, published in 1912.
The Gods Are Athirst
France’s strong interest in the period of the French Revolution was undoubtedly in-
spired by his youthful browsing in his father’s bookshop, which specialized in that sub-
ject. During the 1880’s, France began work on a novel about the revolutionary period, but he abandoned it, rearranging some of the completed fragments into short stories that
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turned up, a few years later, in the collection Tales from a Mother of Pearl Casket. By 1910, when he began to work on a new novel of the Revolution, he had been through his
own personal revolution—involvement in the Dreyfus affair and public espousal of so-
cialism—only to suffer rapid disillusionment with the way human nature seems inevita-
bly to distort and betray ideals. Something of that disillusionment must have shaped The Gods Are Athirst, for it concentrates on the process by which the Reign of Terror developed out of revolutionary zeal for liberty, equality, and fraternity and, by means of the inclusion of a large and varied cast of characters, seeks to depict how daily life was affected by this process. The novel is set in Paris and covers a time span of about two years, from 1792 to 1794.
At the very heart of the novel, France places a struggling young painter, a pupil of
Jacques Louis David, whose name is Évariste Gamelin and who, in 1792, is active in the
revolutionary committees of his quarter. Gamelin is depicted as a mediocre artist but one who is serious in his devotion both to art and to the humanitarian ideals of the new Republic. His seriousness is a function of his youthful innocence, which is unrelieved by any element of gaiety or humor but which endows him with a capacity for tender feelings of af-
fection or sympathy. Those tender feelings are the noble source of his support for the
Revolution, but he gets caught up in complex and emotionally charged events that he is incapable of understanding, and, as a member of a revolutionary tribunal, he unwittingly betrays his own humanitarian principles by voting for the execution of innocent people to
satisfy the bloodthirsty mob of spectators. Gamelin thus embodies the book’s fundamen-
tal and deeply pessimistic theme, which is that even decent individuals and noble ideals will fall victim to the winds of fanaticism. At the ironic end of the novel, Gamelin the terrorist is himself condemned and executed by the Reign of Terror.
Gamelin is surrounded by an array of different types who give magnificent density to
the novel’s re-creation of the past. Most memorable, perhaps, is Maurice Brotteaux, a
neighbor of Gamelin and a former member of the nobility, now earning his living by mak-
ing puppets to sell in toy shops. Brotteaux is a skeptic and a witty ironist—unmistakably the author’s alter ego—who, though not unsympathetic to the Revolution, deplores its decline into fanaticism, consoling himself by reading his ever-present copy of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. The author’s intentional irony in this detail is that the Latin poet’s work had the original purpose of explaining nature to his contemporaries without reference to the supernatural, in order thus to liberate his compatriots from their superstitious fear of the gods. As the novel’s title suggests, Lucretius’s noble project is a futile exercise when the gods thirst for blood. Gamelin’s fiancé, the voluptuous Élodie, adds a fascinating psychological element to the novel, for as her lover Gamelin grows more and more savage in
his condemnation of his fellow citizens, she is surprised to discover that, her horror of him notwithstanding, her sensual attraction to him intensifies: The more blood there is on his hands, the more uncontrollable her passion becomes.
The novel is masterful in its smooth handling of the welter of significant characters and 93
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details, the unobtrusive integration of known historical figures and events into an invented narrative, and the creation of both a sense of inevitable tragedy in the action and the feel of epic grandeur in the composition as a whole. It is an impressively vast canvas the author attempts to encompass here—the greatest and most complex of his career. Although there
is, of necessity, much weaving back and forth from setting to setting and from one group of characters to another, the clarity and focus of the narrative line are never blurred, and the careful structure accentuates for the reader the inexorability of the mounting dramatic tension enveloping more and more of the novel’s characters. In the manner of a classical tragedy, the novel closes with the return of uneasy calm after the catastrophe and the indication that the dead will be quickly forgotten and that life will go on as before. The final paragraph shows Élodie taking a new lover and employing the same endearments to him
as she had used at the start of her affair with Gamelin.
The Gods Are Athirst does not quite attain the majestic historical sweep that a subject such as the French Revolution might be expected to command, perhaps because the figure
at its center, Évariste Gamelin, is deliberately not cast in the heroic mold. Yet it is a fine and powerful novel, and its unforgettable images carry their intended message to issues beyond the events described, revealing something fundamentally important about human
conduct in any revolution and, indeed, in any group situation subject to the volatile incite-ments of mob psychology. This brilliant novel, written when the author was nearly sev-
enty years old, proved to be the artistic culmination of France’s long career. The novel that followed it, The Revolt of the Angels, is a merry fantasy of anticlerical bent, amusing to read but making no artistic or intellectual claims to importance. It proved, simply, that this veteran teller of tales still had the skill and magic, at seventy, to hold the attention of the reading public.
The Red Lily
As a writer of fiction, France has always eluded classification. He showed little interest in the precise observation of daily reality that was the hallmark of his naturalist contemporaries, nor did he strive to win fame with sensational plotting, flamboyant characters, or studies in spicily abnormal psychology. Though allied, at certain times, with the Parnas-sians and the Symbolists, he never submitted himself fully to their aesthetic discipline in his own art. He followed his own bent, and because he was so steeped in books and erudi-tion, so unsociable and so fond of
solitude, and so little driven by ambition, he tended to cut a strange and solitary figure in the literary world.
In both manner and matter, he was really quite unlike anyone else then writing. Proba-
bly nothing contributed more to his uniqueness as a writer than his absolute addiction to ideas. The originating inspiration for everything he wrote was neither an event nor a character nor a situation nor even a new literary trick to try out, but ever and always an idea, a concept, an abstraction that he wanted to bring to life by means of a story, a play, or a poem. Even his most conventional novel, The Red Lily, seems to be only a routine story of 94
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frustrated love and jealousy. What truly animates this novel is the daring concept of female independence, which entrenched social attitudes and the habits of male possessiveness in love relationships put out of the reach of even the most lucid and intelligent women, even in that haven of enlightened individualism, Florence.
Though not a great novel, The Red Lily penetratingly probes an idea that was very advanced for the time: the idea that a woman who conceives the ambition to be a person in
her own right, rather than an accessory to someone else’s life, faces tragically insuperable obstacles. One can identify a seminal idea of that kind at the very center of the concerns of every novel and every short story France wrote. Ideas are his trademark—not surprisingly, because his literary imagination was so completely grounded in books, rather than in life, and because his carefully maintained view of the world was a skepticism so systematic,
and so bathed in irony, that it kept reality at a distance and made the life of the mind virtually the only life he knew. Such a writer is not for everyone, but in spite of the low ebb of his reputation since his death, his audience will never entirely vanish as long as there are those who relish the pleasures of the intellect.
Murray Sachs
Other major works
short fiction: Nos enfants, 1886; Balthasar, 1889 (English translation, 1909); L’Étui de nacre, 1892 ( Tales from a Mother of Pearl Casket, 1896); Le Puits de Sainte-Claire, 1895 ( The Well of Saint Clare, 1909); Clio, 1900 (English translation, 1922); Crainquebille, Putois, Riquet, et plusieurs autres récits profitables, 1904 ( Crainquebille, Putois, Riquet, and Other Profitable Tales, 1915); Les Contes de Jacques Tournebroche, 1908
( The Merry Tales of Jacques Tournebroche, 1910); Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue, et autres contes merveilleux, 1909 ( The Seven Wives of Bluebeard, 1920); The Latin Genius, 1924; The Wisdom of the Ages, and Other Stories, 1925; Golden Tales, 1926.
plays: La Comédie de celui qui épousa une femme muette, pb. 1903 ( The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, 1915); Crainquebille, pb. 1903 (English translation, 1915).
nonfiction: Alfred de Vigny, 1868; La Vie littéraire, 1888-1892 (5 volumes; On Life and Letters, 1911-1914); Le Jardin d’Épicure, 1894 ( The Garden of Epicurus, 1908); Vers les temps meilleurs, 1906, 1949; La Vie de Jeanne d’Arc, 1908 ( The Life of Joan of Arc, 1908); Le Génie latin, 1913 ( The Latin Genius, 1924); Sur la voie glorieuse, 1915.
miscellaneous: The Complete Works, 1908-1928 (21 volumes); Œuvres complètes, 1925-1935 (25 volumes).
Bibliography
Auchincloss, Louis. “Anatole France.” In Writers and Personality. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Auchincloss, himself a novelist, has compiled his observations about writers in this collection. The chapter on France discusses how
France’s personality was reflected in his own fiction.
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Axelrad, Jacob. Anatole France: A Life Without Illusions. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944. In this dated but eminently readable biography, Axelrad focuses on France’s impact as a social critic and partisan of justice. While the research is carefully undertaken and generally accurate, the point of view is overly sentimental, unabashedly admiring,
and insufficiently critical and analytical.
Chevalier, Haakon M. The Ironic Temper: Anatole France and His Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 1932. Although dated, this book is insightful and engagingly
written. Its purpose is to study a character, not to evaluate the artistic achievement of its subject. It sets an excellent analysis of France’s ironic view of the world against a detailed portrait of the political climate in which he lived and wrote. Includes photo-
graphs and a bibliography.
Emery, Elizabeth. “Art as Passion in Anatole France’s Le Lys rouge.” Nineteenth Century French Studies 35, no. 3/4 (2007): 641-652. An analysis of the novel The Red Lily, describing it as a “mordant satire of [France’s] contemporaries’ aesthetic pronounce-
ments” and focusing on its detailed descriptions of fin-de-siècle aesthetic tastes and
attitudes about art.
Hamilton, James F. “Terrorizing the ‘Feminine’ in Hugo, Dickens, and France.” Sympo-
sium 48, no. 3 (Fall, 1994): 204-215. An analysis of France’s novel The Gods Are Athirst and novels about the French Revolution by Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens.
Hamilton argues that these authors repress the feminine side in their depiction of the
Reign of Terror, relying on cold mechanical reasoning that creates a self-defeating
force of violence.
Jefferson, Carter. Anatole France: The Politics of Skepticism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1965. This work emphasizes the historical and political, as
opposed to the literary, ideas of France and is especially informative with respect to the complex and shifting political positions he assumed in the last two decades of his life.
The book’s five chapters cover the conservative, anarchist, crusader, socialist, and
“bolshevik” stages of France’s thought. Contains a bibliography.
Stableford, Brian M. “Anatole France.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and
Horror, 1: Apuleius to May Sinclair, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler. New York: Scribner’s, 1985. Stableford provides a brief introduction to France’s treatment of the
Christian myth and to his fantastic fiction, discussing some of the individual works.
Virtanen, Reino. Anatole France. New York: Twayne, 1968. Intended as a general introduction to the author’s work, this insightful volume is accurate and sound in its evaluation of France’s life and career. It is also of use to general readers in its detailed analysis of France’s most significant literary works.
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JULIEN GREEN
Born: Paris, France; September 6, 1900
Died: Paris, France; August 13, 1998
Also known as: Julien Hartridge Green
Principal long fiction
Mont-Cinère, 1926 ( Avarice House, 1927)
Adrienne Mesurat, 1927 ( The Closed Garden, 1928)
Léviathan, 1929 ( The Dark Journey, 1929)
L’Autre Sommeil, 1931 ( The Other Sleep, 2001)
Épaves, 1932 ( The Strange River, 1932)
Le Visionnaire, 1934 ( The Dreamer, 1934)
Minuit, 1936 ( Midnight, 1936)
Varouna, 1940 ( Then Shall the Dust Return, 1941)
Si j’étais vous, 1947 ( If I Were You, 1949)
Moïra, 1950 ( Moira, 1951)
Le Malfaiteur, 1955 ( The Transgressor, 1957)
Chaque homme dans sa nuit, 1960 ( Each in His Darkness, 1961)
L’Autre, 1971 ( The Other One, 1973)
Le Mauvais Lieu, 1977
Les Pays lointains, 1987 ( The Distant Lands, 1990)
Les Étoiles du sud, 1989 ( The Stars of the South, 1996)
Dixie, 1995
Other literary forms
Julien Green first drew critical attention in the late 1920’s as a writer of short fiction ( Le Voyageur sur la terre, 1930; and Les Clefs de la mort, 1927) before attempting the longer narratives that became his forte. Green, however, is almost as well known for his auto
biographical works as for his novels. His Journal, begun in 1928, has appeared in eighteen volumes published between 1938 and 2006 (partial translations in Personal Record,
1928-1939, 1939, and Diary, 1928-1957, 1964); a second series, begun in 1963, is more personal and frankly confessional in tone: Partir avant le jour (1963; To Leave Before Dawn, 1967), Mille chemins ouverts (1964; The War at Sixteen, 1993), Terre lointaine (1966; Love in America, 1994), and Jeunesse (1974; Restless Youth, 1922-1929, 1996).
An additional volume, Memories of Happy Days (1942), was written and published in English during Green’s self-imposed wartime exile in the United States.
Encouraged by Louis Jouvet to try his hand at writing plays, Green achieved moderate
success as a playwright with Sud (pr., pb. 1953; South, 1955), L’Ennemi (pr., pb. 1954), and L’Ombre (pr., pb. 1956), but he soon concluded that his true skills were those of a nov-97
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elist. In any case, Green’s plays are seldom performed and are of interest mainly to readers already familiar with his novels.
Achievements
In 1971, shortly after publication of his novel The Other One, Julien Green became, at the age of seventy, the first foreigner ever elected to membership in the French Academy; his election brought sudden and considerable attention to a long, distinguished, but insufficiently appreciated literary career. Green, born in France to American parents, had been writing and publishing novels in French since the age of twenty-five, attracting more critical attention in France than in the United States, despite the availability of his work in English translation. Even in France, however, his novels have not received extensive critical notice, owing in part to his work being difficult to classify.
Encouraged by the success of his earliest writings, Green lost little time in developing a characteristic mode of expression, alternately mystical and sensual, often both at once.
Many critics, as if willfully blind to the erotic dimension of Green’s work, sought to classify him as a “Catholic” writer in the tradition of Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac.
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