Anatole
France was a Nobel Prize winner and a member of the French Academy, but
he also was a humanist, and as such, a staunch defender of the Armenian
Cause.
He
was born François-Anatole Thibault on April 16, 1844 in Paris. He was
the son of a bookseller, who also became a bibliophile. He studied at
the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school, and after graduation
he worked at his father’s bookstore, specialized in books and papers on
the French Revolution, and frequented by many notable writers and
scholars. He later secured the position of cataloguer at various
libraries, and was appointed librarian for the French Senate in 1876.
The next year, he married Valérie Guérin de Sauville. They had a
daughter in 1881 and would get divorced in 1893. He would have various
relationships and affairs, and finally he married his governess, Emma
Laprévotte, in 1920.
He
started his literary career in 1867, writing articles and poetry with
the pseudonym Anatole France. He became famous with his novel
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
(1881)
,
which
earned him a prize from the French Academy. Other novels cemented his
fame, and he was elected as one of the “forty immortals” of the French
Academy in 1896, at the age of fifty-two.
In
1896 the country was rocked by the Dreyfus affair; Alfred Dreyfus was a
Jewish army officer who had been falsely convicted of espionage in a
case that had anti-Semitic overtones. France fought along another fellow
novelist, Émile Zola—the author of a famous piece, “J’accuse” (I
Accuse)--in defense of Dreyfus. He wrote about the affair in his 1901
novel
Monsieur Bergeret.
The scandal ended with Dreyfus being proven innocent.
In
the aftermath of the Hamidian massacres of 1895-1896, Anatole France,
always an activist for human rights and just causes joined the
pro-Armenian movement and raised his voice to condemn Sultan Abdul Hamid
II and defend the Armenian rights. In 1901 was one of the co-founders
of the periodical
Pro-Armenia,
sponsored
by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and continued his speeches
and political rallies in favor of Armenian until 1907. Anatole France
also had a close friendship with famous writer Arshag Tchobanian and
painter Edgar Chahine.
In 1908 France published his novel
Penguin Island,
which
satirizes human nature by depicting the transformation of penguins into
humans, after the animals were baptized by mistake by a nearsighted
ecclesiastic. It was actually a satirical history of France from the
Medieval time to the novelist’s own time, concluding with a dystopian
future. Another celebrated novel,
The Gods Are Thirst
(1912),
was a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism. It
depicted a true-believing follower of revolutionary Maximilien
Robespierre and his contribution to the bloody events of the Reign of
Terror of 1793-1794, following the French Revolution of 1789. He
published his most profound novel,
Revolt of the Angels
(1914),
at the age of eighty. It was loosely based on the Christian
understanding of the War in Heaven, and told the story of a guardian
angel who fell in love and joined the revolutionary movement of angels.
After
the beginning of World War I and the Armenian Genocide, Anatole France
returned to the political scene and was one of the keynote speakers at
the April 1916 “Homage to Armenia” held at the Sorbonne amphitheater
with the assistance of 3,000 people. In his speech, France included the
much-quoted passage: “Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little
blood that is left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic
generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die.”
Anatole
France was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921 in recognition
of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a
nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic
temperament.” He passed away on October 12, 1924, and his funeral was
attended by a crowd of two hundred thousand people. He is buried in the
Neuilly-sur-Seine cemetery near Paris. A few days ago, on March 30,
2018, the French International School in Armenia, founded in 2007 in
Yerevan, was renamed after him.
