Birth of Anatole France (April 16, 1844)

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.

Death of Henri Troyat (March 2, 2007)

Prolific and popular French novelist and biographer Henri Troyat, a member of the French Academy for almost half a century, was also of Armenian origin, even though he had little connection to Armenian life.

He was born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov on November 1, 1911, in Moscow. His last name was the Russianized form of Torosian, and his maternal grandfather was of Armenian-Georgian mixed descent. His father was a wealthy Armenian draper who had made a fortune through investment in railways and banking. His privileged environment included a Swiss governess who taught him French. When the Soviet Revolution broke in 1917, the family retreated to their estate in the Caucasus, but the failure of the counter-revolutionary movement forced them to catch the last émigré boat from Crimea to Constantinople in 1920. From Constantinople, they traveled with passports of the Republic of Armenia to France and joined the exiled Russian community in Paris. They settled in the prosperous suburb of Neuilly, where young Lev attended the Lycée Pasteur. The family found exile life difficult and was forced to move to the city, where Lev Tarasov studied law at the Sorbonne. He would once say: “Success means nothing. I know what I'm talking about: at the very beginning of my life, I saw my parents lose everything in a reversal of fortune, and I kept that lesson in mind.”

He would never return to Russia, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, claiming that he wanted to keep alive the imaginary country he had created out of childhood memories and dreams. He acquired French citizenship in 1933, and departed to Metz to complete his mandatory military service. He was still under arms when he published his first novel, False Light, in 1935, which obtained the Prix du Roman Populiste, under the pseudonym Henri Troyat.

After returning from military service, the writer was appointed as a civil servant in the prefecture of the Seine. He continued his literary career, publishing a series of short psychological novels. In 1938 his fifth novel, The Web, earned him both the Prix Max Barthou of the French Academy and the very prestigious Prix Goncourt. He was mobilized with the outbreak of World War II and returned to Paris in 1940.



At this point Troyat’s career took a major shift. He continued with his short psychological fiction--his novel Snow in Mourning (1952) was filmed with Spencer Tracy in 1956 as The Mountain —but his subsequent work was dominated by two major innovations: the long novel cycle and biography. In 1942 he left his civil service job to devote himself entirely to literature. He married twice; he had a son from his marriage, which ended in divorce, and later married a widow, the love of his life, with a young daughter whom he raised as his own.

He initiated a whole series of biographies of Russian writers (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Leon Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, and Anton Chekhov) and tsars (Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander I, and Ivan the Terrible). These works brought an introduction to Russian literary and political culture to the French public. The historical research became the grounds for a series of historical novels, mostly based in Russia. Troyat devoted the trilogy While the Earth Endures (1947-1950) to prerevolutionary Russia, the revolution, the civil war, and the exile, and then explored France from the same perspective in the tetralogy The Seed and the Fruit (1953-1958), which became a popular French television series in 2001. These cycles of novels were followed by other multivolume novels from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. He would have more than a hundred literary works in his count, including novels, short stories, biographies, and plays.

Troyat became one the first French best-sellers, combining critical recognition with commercial success. In 1952 he won the Grand Prix Littéraire du Prince Pierre de Monaco. Seven years later, on May 21, 1959, at the age of forty-seven, he was inducted into the French Academy. Intriguingly, he sat on seat number 28, which had previously belonged to Claude Farrere, a novelist well-known for his pro-Turkish stances. He became the most long-standing member of the group of forty “immortals” who safeguard the French language. He would later earn a series of state decorations, including the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest ranking in France.

Henri Troyat published his last novel, The Hunt, in 2006, at the age of ninety-five. He passed away on March 2, 2007.