FRANCE, ANATOLE

French poet, novelist, critic; b. Paris, April 16, 1844;d. Saint-sur-Loire, Oct. 13, 1924. He was the son of a Parisian bookstore owner and bibliophile, and was educated at the Collège Stanislas. He began his literary career (under a pen name for Jacques Anatole François Thibault) rather inauspiciously in 1873 with the publication of Poèmes dorés, tepid imitations of Parnassian verse. Long an admirer of (Joseph) Ernest renan, France imitated him in tempering knowledge with skepticism to combat what he considered the prevailing dogmatism. Like voltaire, he argued for a kind of pragmatic humanism that barred any basic metaphysical and spiritual considerations and considered reason and justice the only redemptive factors in a universe corrupted by materialism.

His Crainquebille (1902; adapted for the theater, 1905) is a cleverly veiled treatment of the Dreyfus case. Crainquebille, like Dreyfus, appears as the innocent victim of shamefully partisan political justice. Les Dieux ont soif (1912) denounces religious and political fanaticism; France's narrow conception of humanism leads him to confuse dogma, law, and established order with constraint and repression of thought. This attitude was probably what led to all his works being put on the Index in 1922. Reacting to the scientific and positivistic currents prevalent in literature, he wrote and edited four volumes of literary criticism, La Vie littéraire (1888–92). This work, however, is more a compendium of France's own literary preferences and aversions than a balanced analysis of the literature of his time. His reputation rests mainly on the wit and wry humor that salts all his writings, however wrongheaded or superficial they may appear to the modern reader. He was elected to the French Academy and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. It is curious that he should be remembered best for some of his least objectionable stories, such as "Le Jongleur de Notre Dame," and "Pierre Nozière."

Bibliography: a. france, Anatole France par lui-même, ed. j. suffel (Paris 1954). e. p. dargan, Anatole France, 1844–1896 (New York 1937). a. france, Oeuvres complètes illustrées, ed. l. carias and g. le prat, 25 v. (Paris 1925–35).

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