The Age of Enlightenment

Anatole France (1844-1924). Enhanced reality portrait.

The period from the time of the the French Revolution to the onset of the First World War can by characterized, among countless others, by the writings of Anatole France. The son of a bookseller, Anatole France (1844-1924) spent most of his life around books. His father's bookstore was called the 'Librarie de France' and from this name Jacques Anatole François Thibault took his nom-de plume. Anatole France studied at the Collége Stanislaus and after graduation he helped his father by working at the Librarie de France bookstore. After several years he secured the position of a cataloguer at Lemerre, and in 1876 he was appointed a librarian for the French Senate. Ironic, skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was elected to the French Academy in 1896 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. Anatole France became known after the publication of Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881) where he looked back at the 18th century as a golden age. Its protagonist, skeptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard, embodies Anatole France himself. The novel was praised for its elegant prose and won him a prize from the French Academy. In La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893) Anatole France ridiculed belief in the occult. Among France's later works are L'Île des Pingouins  (1908) where France satirizes the human nature by transforming penguins into humans - after the animals have been baptized in error by the nearsighted Abbot Mael.

In Sur la pierre blanche (1905) Anatole France observes:

• Our knowledge of what the future has in store is in proportion of our acquaintance with the present and the past. Science is prophetic. The more science is accurate, the more can accurate prophesies be drawn from it.

• The Romans did not suspect that there existed in the world any other than the Roman peace. And yet, an older and vaster one there was, the Chinese peace. The Chinese, on their part, knew the white men. Their annals mention the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. But they were ignorant of the fact  that a civilization more seething and violent than their own, as well as more prolific and infinitely more expansive, was spread over one of the faces of the globe of which they covered another face. Then merchants and Christian missionaries established themselves in China, though the Chinese do not send to Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg missionaries to teach Christians and to sow disorder in European affairs. However, it is likely that Japan grown to manhood will create a strong China and to teach it to defend itself.

• One of the strangest facts of history is the conquest of the world by the god of a Syrian tribe, and the victory of Jehovah over all the gods of Rome, Greece, Asia, and Egypt. What is called the triumph of Christianity is more accurately the triumph of Judaism and their God; ferocious, ignorant, most cruel of gods. So it is that the religion of Israel became the religion of the Roman world.

• The Americanization of the world is on the march. Americans say: "We are the modern Romans." The United States of America, lacking community, traditions, and memory, madly cast into the scramble for the mighty dollar, will be swept with the colonial mania - waging war on other races but to enslave or massacre them.

• Colonial policy is a form of barbarism. The fundamental principle of the colonial wars is that the colonist is more powerful than the peoples he is fighting. He is to attack with artillery, while the attacked people are to defend themselves with arrows and clubs. It is tolerated that they should procure a few antiquated flint-locks and cartridge-pouches; this aids in rendering colonization more glorious. But in no case it it permissible that they should be armed with modern weapons.

Anatole France's most profound novel is La Revolte des Anges (1914) where Arcade, the guardian angel of Maurice d'Esparvieu, falls in love, joins the revolutionary movement of angels, and toward the end he realizes that the overthrow of God is meaningless unless

"in ourselves and in ourselves alone we attack and destroy Ialdabaoth."

In the 1920s France's writings were put on the index of Libri prohibiti.

If one book could characterize the decades following the World War II, it may be, among countless others, Watson's Double Helix.