Anatole France

Anatole France was born François-Anatole Thibault in Paris in 1844, the son of a bookseller whose shop dealt in books and papers on the French Revolution and drew a steady traffic of scholars and writers. He was schooled at the Collège Stanislas, then worked among catalogues and manuscripts for publishers before becoming a librarian at the French Senate in 1876. His first literary allegiances were to the Parnassian poets, and his early verse appeared in their anthology Le Parnasse contemporain.

Recognition came with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), whose gentle, sceptical old scholar seemed a portrait of the author himself and won a prize from the Académie française, to which France was elected in 1896. His manner — limpid, allusive, quietly corrosive — served fables of erudition and desire such as Thaïs and the comic philosophy of At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque. The Dreyfus affair sharpened his irony into commitment: he signed Zola’s petition in Dreyfus’s defence and carried the controversy into his fiction. The late satires — Penguin Island, a mock-history of France; The Gods Are Athirst, a study of revolutionary fanaticism during the Terror; and The Revolt of the Angels — remain his most widely read books.

The Nobel Prize came in 1921, when France was seventy-seven. His politics had moved steadily leftward; he welcomed the Russian Revolution and lent his support to the new French Communist Party, and in 1922 the Catholic Church placed his entire work on its Index of prohibited books, a censure he chose to regard as a distinction. He died near Tours in 1924. His reputation dimmed in the decades that followed, though George Orwell defended his readability, and he is widely believed to have been a model for Bergotte, the revered novelist of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.