‘Anatole France’ by A.V. Lunacharsky from The Daily Worker Saturday Supplement. Vol. 3 No. 264. November 20, 1926.

The newspapers brought the sad news of the death of Anatole France, one of the most significant writers of our time.

Anatole France is such a unique figure in modern European culture that to judge and evaluate him is a very difficult thing and one which can be done from the most diverse points of view. I shall attempt to give a short sketch of his development and a few touches of his social-cultural growth.

Anatole France was born in 1845; his life may be divided into three parts: From his first work written in 1875–to the Dreyfus Affair; from the latter to the World War; and the last period–from the war up to the present. Anatole France began as a Parnassien. The Parnasse was an extraordinary refined school of bourgeois culture. Up to the time of the Commune, the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie were permeated with a certain bitter pessimism. The rule of the regime of the big bourgeoisie called forth a certain nausea in the best part of the French intelligentsia. The intellectuals tried to separate themselves from the spirit of the merchants and the inhumanity which found an especially raw expression under the regime of Napoleon III and of the bourse. At the same time, this intelligentsia had not the slightest intention of organizing any kind of effective, political protest. Among the gifted poets and writers, there were only very few who had an inclination towards politics. The politics of the government seemed impure, the revolutionary politics–fantastic; all that lay between–petty and useless. Hence the striving of the artists after formal content, hence their philosophic reflections on the imperfections of life and their heightened pessimism. These were the features with which the leaders of those days, the leaders of the Parnassus, were endowed: Lecomte de l’Isle, the romanticist akin to him, Alfred de Vigny, such masters as Heredia, Gautier and others. The same spirit also dominated the great romanticist Flaubert.

The young Anatole France did not exactly incline towards pessimism, but he likewise felt himself to be a pure esthete, far from the hideous chaos of life, filled with the plastic wisdom common to the chosen strata of the refined bourgeois intelligentsia. Skepticism predominated in Anatole France already then. In his eyes, all truths were uncertain and vacillating. Towards Christianity he maintained a mocking attitude; he liked to oppose to it epicurean, heathen moods. In the eyes of Anatole France, the world had nothing serious to exhibit, and even this world seemed to him the product of chance. If life were worth living, then solely for the sake of the esthetic enjoyment, the esthetic working-up of experiences, and still more–its esthetic reproduction.

Already then, Anatole France stood out as a prominent stylist. At the bottom, that which constituted Anatole France’s unique charm, was the union of his eclectic style, of his immense knowledge of all epochs from which he chose his themes, with his fine skeptical smile, which shone forth from all of his pictures and characters (as if he were smiling a little at his own marionettes, as if he wanted to say that he no less than anything else belonged to this marionette world).

With his “Abbe Coignard”–a wise toper and skeptic whom he had set in the milieu of the middle ages–Anatole France had brought himself fame not only in France, but thruout the whole world. At the same time he also stepped to the foreground as a critic. It is very characteristic that Anatole France, in this his last quality, adhered exclusively at the time to the formal artistic performance. Zola, who at that time began to draw the serious furrow of his deep-reaching naturalism, inspired him with horror, and France wrote an article on him at that time, which is more like an exasperated pamphlet than a critical essay. Kurdin, the not unknown Russian publicist of social-revolutionary tendency, dedicated an article to Anatole France and Jules Lemaitre, a similar gourmet in the field of esthetic culture, in which he does not differentiate the one from the other at all.

Anatole France, from all appearances a representative of the skeptical literature of decadence of the seventies and eighties, differed nevertheless very essentially from Jules Lemaitre, which was sufficiently demonstrated by the Dreyfus affair. skeptic, Jules Lemaitre, as a true bourgeois, was seized by the monarchic-catholic reaction. How was this possible? Why could Jules Lemaitre and other personalities akin to him, as for example Barres, believe the gross fraud of the general staff and sink down to the most naive religiosity, to the most reactionary repudiation of all freedom? Could this all really be due to the Jewish captain and his involved trial?

No, the matter is otherwise.

To a certain extent, the French bourgeoisie drew Its writers near to itself, those writers who up till then had occupied themselves with cultivating hothouse flowers. The French bourgeoisie was preparing itself for a new struggle. Socialism was maturing, a whole cloud of proletarian organizations, apparently peaceful for the time being, collected over Paris. In the sky of international politics there gathered storm clouds too. The French bourgeoisie decided to create a military police state. The democratic compromise of the radical republic seemed dangerous to it. This reactionary current flashing thru the entire body of capitalism, even caused the skeptics, shortly before so polished, to perform the most extraordinary antics. But Anatole France, just because of the fineness of his culture, proved himself proof against these aberrations. His trained healthy mind could not stand that unbearable nonsense with its hypocritic savour which sounded from the right. His skepticism turned against the black expanding reaction.

Confused by its sudden onslaught, Anatole France searched after people who would be fit to defend that highest culture of freedom, of polished scientific analysis, of luminous humanity which he considered as the sole possible atmosphere for the thriving of a culture. And then it appeared that, the same uncouth writer whom he considered a dung-beetle wallowing in the dirt–Emile Zola–suddenly became the heroic bearer of a protest of the best part of the petty bourgeois intellectuals in the struggle against the military-clerical counter-revolution. Thus was consummated the drawing-nearer of all Drefusites, of all those who struggled against France sinking into a churchly, barrack-like night. Zola, Anatole France and Jaures became friends. It is pleasant and touching when, after the abuse of the young Anatole France directed against Zola, one reads the enthusiastic essays which the older Anatole France later dedicated to him, after he had understood how much warm, upright, truthfulness, how much true love-of-man was hidden in this heavy genre-painter. Anatole France began to examine anew the latter’s artistic aspects too, and a whole series of beauties hitherto hidden to him, revealed themselves to his enthusiastic esthete-eye. From that time on, he becomes the best friend and co worker of Jaures. He participates most warmly in the Dreyfus Campaign, and remains even later a faithful ally of the socialism of the time, certainly a quite feeble and compromising socialism, but still far more noble than anything that the France of that time could present. His political labor, at times, gives one an odd, I should like to say, absolutely touching impression. I remember, for example, an enormous meeting at Trocadero, where from 4,000 to 5,000 citizens gathered in order to protest against the first assault upon China, against that notorious campaign of the European Robber-Knights which one of its leaders, William II himself, called a march of the Huns. Jaures spoke first; his voice rang out like a blare of trumpets; it rolled to the most distant corners of the immense hall. Following him, came the fine elegant old man, Anatole France, and, in a weak voice, read his venomous remarks directed against the imperialists. And the entire hall, packed full of workers, seemed to die away: the buzzing of the flies was heard; all leaned forward, almost all put their hands up to their ears in order not to lose a single word of what this noble ally, this unexpected guest from the far heights of the elegant Parnasse was saying. With a mocking smile, the speaker said: “As you know, the unexpressed international arrangement allows the Chinese to defend themselves against modern artillery, at any rate, with porcelain cannons. And now these Chinese seriously begin to defend themselves. Such an attack against civilization is simply unforgivable. The yellows manifest patriotism! They are inclined to defend their barbarous home land from the claws of our dear fatherlanders who manifest the natural lust for nourishing themselves with the flesh and blood of these low beings. This haughty people must be shown that civilization deprives it of the right of resistance.”

These words in essence Anatole France said with his soft voice, but which was loud enough to be heard by the entire civilized world; it was then that he called out the words so real now: “Hands off China!”

In this period of the Dreyfus affair up to the World War, the brilliant literary activity of Anatole France unfolded itself. The “Histoire contemparine” belongs here first of all. In his time the mighty Balzac wrote an enormous series of novels under the title of “La Comedie Humaine.” In this series of novels, the extraordinarily interesting history of a society is portrayed in which capitalism developed and intrenched itself. Balzac was the favorite author of Marx. Something similar must have been in Anatole France’s mind too, He too wanted to portray his time in a series of novels. But how great is the difference! His colors are pale and polished, all events cross the brain of a clever hermit, of a hesitating, passive, but infinitely good shepherd. In this favorite hero of the author, one recognizes anew. the striving of the best part of the French intellectuals carefully raising aloft the fringe of their snow-white garments in order to step out of the dirty valley of life and alight on a lovely, dry elevation. But from this elevation the intellectual hermit glances sadly down upon life. His eyes are sharp; at times a kindly, but often a malignant smile draws across the observer’s lips. It pains and amuses him at the same time when he lets this bourgeois carnival procession pass before him.

Anatole France has brilliantly carried out his task. His mirror is of a kind different from the hyperbolic one of Balzac or the black one of Zola. But he too contributes a unique and for him and for everyone who wants to know capitalistic France, an extraordinary reflected image.

Anatole France began at this time to feel himself a new French Voltaire. In this barbarous empire, which he felt the world surrounding him to be, he wanted to be an envoy of incorruptible thought and humane taste. Against the pathetic patriotism of the French, he opposed in voltairean manner his “Penguin Island”-a masterful, very comical and, at the very bottom, sad satire on his native country. His book on Joan of Arc is permeated with this same voltairean spirit, attempting to reconstruct the truth distorted by superstition, as is also his magnificent novel, “The Revolt of the Angels.”

His interesting novel of the first Revolution, “The Gods Athirst,” offers us a somewhat different cross- section. Here too Anatole France naturally places himself on the side of that hero who (acts wisely and indulgently.

With a certain horror, he perceives the features of fanaticism with which the activity of men is permeated. But we must not forget for a moment the astounding freshness in his portrayal of the Revolution, and the great depth of his analysis.

Then the war begins. In the first months, Anatole France is confused by the events. He loves his Paris, he loves his French confinement, he fears that the heel of the Prussian officer might stamp out everything. For a time, the stream of patriotic demonstrations carries him along with it, but it does not last long, and the sober head of the old France emancipates itself from this epidemic.

The war completely revealed to him the true essence of that brilliant formal culture which was so to character of capitalism. And in the name of this dear to him. It showed him the brutal, threatening, fine culture which decorated the portal of the capitalistic prison, Anatole France speaks out his curse against this prison. With a power a thousand times stronger than that of the Dreyfus affair, the war repels from Capital this most brilliant representative of the art created by the capitalistic epoch. And, without hesitating a moment, Anatole France attaches himself to the opposite pole. But now this pole is no longer represented by the petty bourgeois socialist and utopian, Zola, by the eclectic and people’s tribune, Jaures. In spite of the greatness of their talent, these two went only half way. This pole opposed to Capital was now represented by the Communist Party, by the Communist International; and Anatole France gave courageous and determined expression to his warm and undivided sympathies for this new world.

The Saturday Supplement, later changed to a Sunday Supplement, of the Daily Worker was a place for longer articles with debate, international focus, literature, and documents presented. The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

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