IV HISTORIAN AND POLITICIAN

Though deeply interested in the past, Anatole France has written singularly little pure history. His vision being universal, most of his critical work is informed with historic feeling, but in spite of his love of ancient chronicles, in spite of knowledge which might shame the College of Heralds and the Record Office put together, he has preferred to use history as raw material for romance. He has been right, in a way, for most historians have used romance as the raw material of history and made of it, with a few exceptions, such as Green, Gibbon, Michelet, Mommsen, an unreadable, unfinished product. Anatole France knows that, and possibly he has hesitated to write history because he had not the details he needed to write it as he wished; those details were the history of the people, the real history, the ploughman’s menu, and what the merchant said to his wife about Mr Pitt before they fell asleep; battles and dates make him smile. He expresses this very well in the preface to The Life of Joan of Arc. “To discern the future one must consider not the enterprises of the great but the confused movements of the labouring masses.”

Once only has he written an actual historic work, and that is his monumental study of Joan of Arc. It has made him more unpopular than all his works put together, from which it is easy to conclude that it is a work of worth and nobility. It is an enormous, encyclopædic study showing that he has consulted every possible source of information: archives, chronicles, diaries, private letters and reports of the merest tittle tattle; he knows almost too much about the Maid of Orleans, and this makes it difficult to read the work. But the one who perseveres will be richly rewarded, for Anatole France sheds some new light upon the chevalière. It is the preface and the addendum have made him hated by the clericals, for he impugns the chronicles as mostly having been written by chroniclers paid by the knights; pitilessly he shows up their discrepancies, their omissions, he depicts Joan of Arc as a hallucinated, hysterical girl, subject to visions which in those days afflicted many a girl on the threshold of womanhood. For him her sight, smell, hearing, sense of contact, all were decayed, and he inclines to think that she was influenced by priests favourable to the cause of Charles VII. Those priests were politicians and, knowing her simplicity, led her and used her. They had no difficulty in this, for the people were ignorant and believed because they wanted to believe. As he himself says: “Belief in her sanctity was as hypnotic as would be to-day a belief in aeroplanes.” It is not wonderful that, assuming an attitude such as this towards one whom M. Bergeret called a military mascot, Anatole France should have been violently attacked by the reactionaries; that was a little unfair, for all through the book Anatole France recognises the simplicity, the purity, the courage and the true enthusiasm of Joan, but he will not grant her divine inspiration. That is unpardonable in the eyes of the reactionaries, who forget that it took the popes over four hundred and fifty years to canonise her; they want to use Joan of Arc in the cause of the Church and the King, and it does not do at all to have that touching conviction disturbed: it was not the Kaiser invented the alliance of Meinself (und Gott).

Animosity has not disturbed Anatole France, for “one conquers the earth only by ploughing it.” He has told the story simply, without heroics, painted a poetic picture of Joan growing up “on bitter soil among rough and sober folk, fed on rosy wine and brown bread, hardened by a hard life”; she had knowledge of tree-worship, and hung garlands on the boughs as does to-day Russian youth on the birch-tree; she was a pagan and grew up among private wars, fire, blood and murder. It is all extraordinarily living, for Anatole France speaks familiarly, using the names of local tradesmen, peasants and lawyers. And so the story goes on on the well-known lines, continually critical, for Joan reveals the clerical influence by using terms known only to ecclesiastics5; she uses sometimes peasant language, sometimes rhetoric, as if she had a double personality; she is fierce, obstinate, firm, as if hypnotised; she impresses the crowd by refusing Charles the name of King until she herself has led him to Reims. Anatole France is fair even to the English, who were cruel only because they were afraid of her as “a superhuman, terrible, frightful creature, a demon from hell before whom the bravest quailed.” Anatole France criticises Joan also as a strategist, in which rôle, it seems, she was most incompetent; but faith may inflame where strategy fails. Her strength came evidently from her inflated view of her mission, so common in lunatic asylums, for she went so far as to dream of a crusade against the Turks and the Hussites....

5Miracle?

All this is implied, not stated; Anatole France advances few opinions, digresses not often; he tells the story simply and allows us to draw our own conclusions. Apart from the historical references, the book is as simple as Renan’s Life of Jesus, and as damaging. Anatole France is happiest when painting pictures of the enthusiastic mobs, swearing the oaths of men-at-arms and singing songs with the ribald women, painting pictures of the towns in the wars of the Middle Ages. At times, however, he cannot restrain himself, must discuss a side issue that interests him, such as the worship of virtue and of virgins. Then his charm grows Virgilian: “In this land of Gaul the white priestesses of the forests had left some memory of their holy beauty; and sometimes one saw, fleeting in the Isle of Sein, along the misty shores of the sea, the pale shadow of the nine sisters who, in bygone days, at will laid or awoke the storm.”

It is not a disrespectful, but a critical book, and I suppose it is true enough that the inspiration of Joan merely served to bring luck to the French troops, was indeed a military mascot. To claim more is to claim a little too much, for did not, during the European War, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, Germans all invoke the Almighty and make quite sure that He was on their side? Yet everybody cannot win; the Christian God is no Janus.

Far more interesting for ordinary reading is his pseudo-novel, The Gods are Athirst. In that book he tells the story of a Jacobin, Gamelin, living through the Revolution of 1789, active terrorist, ready to sacrifice sister, mother, sweetheart, upon the altar of liberty, hard, narrow in the forehead, obsessed. Anatole France leads us through sumptuous scenes, the murder of Marat, the death of Robespierre, while Gamelin every day grows more bloodthirsty, more pitiless. The creature is marvellously living, for in his madness and his blood-lust he responds to all the affectations of revolutionary days, the personal oppositions between the red hands and the white hands, to the ridiculous imitation of Roman citizenship which led to men calling themselves Brutus or Cicero. Yet the ridiculous is not without its nobility, for Gamelin falls at last a victim to the guillotine, and then says, splendidly: “I die justly. It is well that we should bear those insults levelled at the republic against which we should have protected it. We were weak, we have been guilty of indulgence. We have betrayed the republic.... Robespierre himself, pure and saintly, sinned by gentleness, by pity ... I have spared blood, let my blood flow.” That is not so extraordinary as it seems, for Gamelin, the executioner, believes in virtue, in a high ideal and, as everybody should know, there is no creature in the world so brutal and so venomous as one who is working for the good of mankind.

The virtue of the book is not in the history, but in Anatole France’s acute consciousness of the things that happen while history is being made. There are picnics, talks about art; there is a sentimental amourette between Brotteaux, the old aristocrat, and a sweet courtesan; there is an old priest who does not mind having his head cut off, but does object in court to being called a Capuchin when he really is a Barnabite. It is all deeply human, and one scene at least is unforgettable, a love scene. (Of course ... those are mostly unforgettable.) It is not the recurrent scene between Gamelin and his mistress who, by the way, and it is a charming irony, invites his rival to her bedroom on the day of Gamelin’s execution in exactly the words she used to Gamelin himself; it is a scene on the day when Charlotte Corday murdered Marat. There is a great crowd and Gamelin, in the press, meets his friend Desmahis. He tries to detain him to talk about Marat, but Desmahis is almost in tears; he curses the crowd, he was following a fair-haired girl, a shopgirl, a divine girl, and the crowd has parted them. “But Marat ...” says Gamelin. “Marat, Marat!” growls Desmahis. “That’s all very well, but I’ve lost my fair-haired girl.”

It is hard to realise that men follow shopgirls while empires fall, but it is most likely, and I suspect that Anatole France thinks it more important.

As it is the fate of Anatole France to be unpopular whatever he does, it is not surprising that The Gods are Athirst should have annoyed the advanced people as much as The Life of Joan of Arc did the reactionaries. That is because he loves truth and is one of the few people in the world who realise that truth is neither blue nor buff. He has been charged with having fouled the noblest work of man; that is untrue, only he is determined not to be taken in and will not see the Red Virgin as spotless. Great things can be done by little men, done clumsily, cruelly, and yet somehow done. That is more or less what Anatole France shows in this book; the verdict of the people is not for him the voice of God, but this does not imply that the voice of the aristocrat is any more divine. He cannot help seeing that the democracy is ignorant, prejudiced, greedy, coarse-minded, and yet at the same time he finds in it the seeds of generosity and of that justice so much more costly than the mercy now and then vouchsafed with a fine gesture by those who dominate man. Irony and pity, pity and hope, it is always the same gospel.

In The Gods are Athirst Anatole France seemed to have receded from the pronounced socialism which colours his views. That is all on the surface, and in The Revolt of the Angels, published a year later, it was obvious that he had denied none of his views; only, and it is so difficult to make people understand this, Anatole France is a Socialist and he is also sane. He will not have it that a Socialist is necessarily a saint; that the democracy is immaculate; and it is because he finds the human being behind the tribune, while the followers of the tribune insist upon seeing him as a sort of historical hero, a county Achilles, that in their quite honest stupidity they are annoyed. If Anatole France had been born in England and entered politics there, his influence would not have been large, because, in this country, what we like is a good, stodgy, immovable view; if at the age of twenty you believed in Mr Gladstone, at the age of sixty you have to believe in Mr Asquith, and there you are. Doggedness, never say die, the bulldog breed, all that sort of stuff. The idea is that one should run one’s head against a brick wall in the hope of knocking it over: one does sometimes, if one’s head is hard enough, but that successful kind of head does not readily admit a new idea. Being a Frenchman, Anatole France has been more fortunate; he is not a bit more original than Mr. Shaw, though infinitely more sympatique, for his smile is honeyed, not vinegary; still, if Mr Shaw had been a Frenchman his countrymen would have taken him seriously. And we, too, perhaps, once he was translated.

Anatole France came into the open in the course of the Dreyfus case, and since that time he has never ceased to interest himself actively instead of philosophically in everything that was unhappy and oppressed—workers, natives, generally speaking the underdogs. His little book, The Church and the Republic, published in 1905, in which he demolishes the case for the absolute freedom of the Catholic Church, because there is not absolute freedom, but only so much as does not clash with other freedoms, had an immense success and powerfully assisted M. Combes in his campaign for Disestablishment. Anatole France, heir of Voltaire and Renan, has always seen the Church, a survival full of charm and grace, as the enemy of the people. Had it not been for the hierarchy, I do not believe he would have attacked the faith: religion would have made a pretty toy for the child that calls itself man. But religion allied with ministers and financiers, sabre-rattlers, religion à la Kaiser, he has sworn to root out. He wants to do this because he has a vision of a humanity to come when none shall suffer at the hands of the State, when one sex will not crush and the other deceive, when black faces may smile on white. He has expounded his creed in many political speeches, though he is not a good speaker; he has come before his audience with his long, whimsical, Pan-like face and his sorrowful eyes, flicking them with irony and yet touching their hearts, asking always for justice and yet for sanity. His speeches are like his writings, except that he has a Latin fondness for the rhetorical question. They are polished, literary, and he generally begins like an American by telling his audience one or two humorous stories: he believes in laughter, and he who laughs with him will soon think with him. But there is always a sting in those stories: it is not for nothing that he is so fond of telling the old fairy tale of the wrestler who could turn himself into a dragon and then, if St George appeared, into a duck: there are many of our Cabinet ministers who have been dragons at the Albert Hall and ducks in Committee Room 15, with, as Anatole France says, “a domestic animal’s mild voice.”

It is, however, his writings that matter most; though opposed to war, it is interesting to observe that he approves of the European War of 1914. At the age of seventy he demonstrated this by laying down his pen and asking the French War Office for a rifle. But in the main he hates war, though he be not Tolstoyan enough to believe in non-resistance. He hates war because it is not good business for the soul of man; I do not think he is much upset by slaughter or starvation, for humanity must die somehow, but he knows that a war makes vile those who survive. And if one reads The White Stone one easily understands him. It is an incoherent work, for the several stories it contains are quite unrelated; it is the sort of conversation four or five cultured men might hold if they were to sit up for the night with wine and cigarettes. It is rather long-winded, here and there dull, pedagogic, but it represents him fairly well from an intellectual point of view, though it contains none of the indecency, blasphemy and Falstaffian fun which pervade his writings. It is philosophical, a little rigid, rather Protestant: but then Anatole France is seldom a good Catholic, except when he is chalking up on the cathedral wall: “To hell with the Pope!” The first part is classical, and holds nothing that he has not said in other works except one concentrated phrase: “The saints are a new mythology.” He then passes on to the story of Gallio, who is perhaps, philosophically speaking, the most seductive pagan in the New Testament, a minor rival being, of course, Pontius Pilate.

Here is Gallio, administrator of a Roman province, facing the problems of Nero’s unsuitable marriage with Octavia, of the education of little boys, and of the fish trade.... It is all very Roman, a little pompous, a little dull, rather like England about 1860. Gallio is not joyous, for he has no illusions; he knows that “men will die, will kill every enemy,” that “human laws are daughters of anger and fear.” And he has official troubles, for the Jews are always indulging in religious wrangles, refusing to have images of the emperor in their temples. This gets Gallio into trouble, and he thinks it absurd, for “one should honour all religions, think them all holy.” But the wrangles of the Jews are forced on him, and he despairs of making them understand that they must manage their own silly business, that he is interested only in law and order. He personally thinks that this new God, Christ, is a mere jumble of two old ones, of Orpheus, who descended into hell, and of Adonis, who suffered and died. Gallio does not object to the new God, but he wishes he would not embarrass the Government; in Gallio’s view the new God is a bore, but he is also a nuisance, for “there are in Asia lots of these youthful gods who die and rise again, and good women take more pleasure in them than they should.” And then Gallio goes on wearily to control complex administration, while the modernised fictional version of the Acts unfolds ... and Stephen is stoned while a philosopher makes love to Ioessa....

This touches Anatole France’s theories of government, and it is not wonderful that he should be so interested in Saint Paul, whom Gallio would have looked upon as an uneducated person. He speculates agreeably on the discomfort Paul would feel in Rome to-day, unable to understand Catholics and Protestants, and amazed because Judgement Day had not yet occurred. “The only place for him to-day would be Jerusalem.” But Anatole France does not long dwell upon this jumble of religion and government which was evidently suggested to him by the differences between the French State and the Catholic Church. He becomes more general. He believes in a future peace brought about, not by man’s goodness, but by economic necessity, which must please Mr Norman Angell. This, of course, involves a change in our attitude to coloured races, who “know us only by our crimes.” Anatole France sees that from the point of view of Asia we are the white peril, and he can find no reason why Admiral Togo should not come with twelve battleships to bombard Brest to assist the Japanese trade in France. And then he agreeably meanders; he figures the revolting French besieging the legations of China and Japan in Paris, and Marshal Oyama bringing the allied armies of the East to the Boulevard des Italiens to demand the punishment of the French Boxers, burning down Versailles in the name of a superior civilisation, and stealing the dinner-set of the Elysée. It is all very cutting if we remember what we did in 1900, and Anatole France amiably adds: “No, this has not happened. Yellow men are not civilised enough so faithfully to imitate the white.”

For Anatole France, the colonial mania is purely economic, and he considers that Japan has done a great service to the union of races by compelling the white man to respect the yellow; he does not despair even of the black, who, he points out, are evolving in South America, growing educated and much superior to the Europeans of 2000 B.C. Of course this means “no more colonies,” which he looks upon as swindles, for “France has expended men and money so that the Congo, Cochin-China, Annam, Tonkin ... may buy cotton-goods in Manchester, weapons in Birmingham and Liège, spirits in Dantzig, and claret in Hamburg.” He is right, though humanity will not realise that until the day comes for it to haul down its buntings. But he is not hopeless. He believes that even military men are growing more peaceful, that they want “a pompous, magnificent, shining peace, proud as war.” Evidently he must hold such a belief, for in the same book is his idea of Utopia. It is a queer, intellectual Utopia, very different from Mr Wells’, and probably rather distasteful to most of us. He figures men and women in the international State, dressed alike (and I wonder whether the other Anatole France has not in his mind the wicked thought of encouraging delightful surprises), work done by machines, a six-hours’ day, aeroplanes, small private dwellings, no towns, few crimes (property having gone); he suppresses the legal class, alcohol ... he even suppresses the colon by operation and then eugenics. It is the ordinary Socialist Utopia with the labour bond system, the right to live for art and science, and the wages of ability; the family, of course, goes, and the sexless increase. That is not unattractive, for I gather that Anatole France wishes to make procreation less accidental and to confine it to those who feel intimately impelled to it. He sees the cinema and the phonograph ousting the book, which is too individualistic; drama as dead, owing to a lack of comedy and tragedy in life. That is what most of us will dislike in his Utopia (that is to say, tragedy in the lives of other people and comedy in ours). Religion persists, but in a great schismatic mess, and there is even a Pope who fulfils his mission after hours, for he is a dyer in Rome. All this is fairly commonplace, but it carries a number of fine criticisms, some of them generous, such as that of capitalism, which “was a great social progress, created the proletariat, made a state inside the State, prepared the emancipation of the workers and supplied them with means to power.” That shows a true sense of the evolution of man: the need for educating him out of his nomadic state by showing him how to combine in factories, armies, republics. And Anatole France is not too ambitious, for he does not think that equality can be established “as we do not know what it is.” All he wants is to assure a living to all and to make work honourable. Likewise he does not imagine perfect liberty, because it is not possible, and, above all, he does not believe that men will be good or bad: “They will be what they will be.”

That is what he dreams as he sleeps on the white stone, the species of man evolving into another race possibly fine, possibly vile, but yet worth dreaming of because, as Mr Wells says, man is not final, and so long as a thing is not final it has the charm of a closed bud that conceals a flower the colour of which we do not know. Anatole France does not say whether the flower will burst forth gorgeous red or virginal white; it will be what it will be, and so best, for whatever its colour and its form it will be that thing which he loves in his quiet, smiling, sober way, the flower of life.