Tours, October 13, (00:50).
Anatole France died last night at 11:30.

The happy life of Anatole France has just ended, and one hesitates to use grand words to measure such a great misfortune. Mourning of French letters, diminishing of universal consciousness, the death of Anatole France restores to these crude clichés all their relief; but if, during his lifetime, Jules Lemaître himself could not speak of him without feeling embarrassed by an indefinable disorder, how shy should we not be before his coffin and how silent we should be?

His pseudonym of France, he held it from his father, to whom was already given the familiar appellation of "father France". France, bookseller, quai Voltaire, carried a thin nine-page booklet published in 1859 under the title La Légende de Sainte Radegonde, reine de France; Anatole France was then fifteen years old. These were his very first beginnings, which revealed a vocation as a hagiographer to which he was to remain faithful. He followed it up only nine years later with a study on Alfred de Vigny, in the Collection du Bibliophile français (at Bachelin-Deflorenne, quai Malaquais).

The youth of Anatole France calls for two rather curious remarks: he was almost self-taught and in any case his intellectual training was less at the Collège Stanislas than along the quays and in his father's shop. Add to this that none of the fine qualities of a writer for which we admire him marked his first writings. His talent was hardly precocious, and besides the work as annotator to which he devoted himself between 1868 and 1875 was not of a nature to cause a sensation. But it was during this period of his life that he nourished himself with the pure marrow of classical antiquity, transforming it, literally, into his own substance.

Les Poèmes dorés are from 1873, Les Noces corinthiennes from 1876. He had lived, at Lemerre's, in the atmosphere of the Parnasse and had not been able to resist the temptation to rhyme. These crystal verses were not very popular. It was doubtless found that they lacked brilliance. they who were only limpid. Finally, after Jocaste et le chat maigre (1879) appeared Le crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, crowned by the Académie française. This book, in which one must see, if not the masterpiece of Anatole France about such a writer, the word masterpiece has no meaning at least the most charming creation of his genius, reached, hold on to your hats, two editions. France was thirty-seven years old. However justified the reproach of philistine often addressed to our era may be, how can we not give it preference over the disgraced times, stupefied by naturalism, when the author of Sylvestre Bonnard, alone against the indifference and hostility of all, maintained the purity of language and the finesse of thought?

With Sylvestre Bonnard, he had acquired the esteem of scholars. Notoriety only came to him later, after Les Désirs de Jean Servien (1882), Abeille (1883), Le Livre de mon ami (1887). In 1888, he joined Le Temps. In 1890, he published Thais. This time, his fame took a leap, it grew suddenly and, from then on, never stopped rising and spreading. We know how it grew from the good reputation of M. Bergeret until it equaled the world celebrity of Zola. The head of the naturalist school and the last representative of classical humanism met and were reconciled in glory.

Anatole France has no other history than that of his works. If I felt it necessary to insist on the wise slowness of his beginnings, it is because it contains a lesson for the young people who are jostling at the gates of success; it is also because it clearly shows his character as a man of study, an enemy of vain agitations from outside, ignorant of intrigue and who tasted his greatest joys, his only joys perhaps, in the trade of the Ancients. He had little curiosity for modern literature. The works that admirers sent him every day from the four corners of the world, he piled up in his bathtub; and, when the bathtub was full, the bookseller was called. However, one should not imagine Anatole France as a dusty hermit, all the dustier the more learned he was. His house in the Villa Saïd was wide open to visitors eager to hear his amiable and learned remarks. Nor did he disdain to appear in salons, for he appreciated all the pleasures of life as an Epicurean. He loved the society of women and all those who approached him were touched by the extreme refinement of courtesy. He embodied in his person, as he summed up in his philosophy and his art, that secular civilization and that universal conscience that I named earlier and which he nevertheless one day doubted, when he wrote in Penguin Island, the harshest and most desperate of his satires: "Since wealth and civilization contain as many causes of war as poverty and barbarism, since the madness and wickedness of men are incurable, there remains a good action to accomplish. The wise man will amass enough dynamite to blow up this planet. When it rolls piece by piece through space, an imperceptible improvement will be accomplished in the universe and satisfaction will be given to the universal conscience which, moreover, does not exist." A dizzying pessimism against which he usually defended himself better. A penetrating counsel of benevolence and human solidarity emerges from all his work, and this counsel is repeated in so many forms, with so much insistence. and, on the other hand, Anatole France took such a clear position against the idea of ​​social conservation, he called so loudly for the Revolution, that one is obliged to give up considering him as the perfect type of the skeptic and that one must agree with those who prefer to see in him, as in Montaigne. an agnostic and a positivist convinced of the need for an incessant struggle against all religions, including that of individual property: My son, said Abbé Coignard, I have always observed that the ills of men come from their prejudices, as spiders and scorpions come out of the shadows of cellars and the dampness of courtyards. It is good to wander blindly through all these dark corners with a wolf's head and a broom. It is even good to give a few small blows of the pickaxe here and there to the walls of the cellar and the garden. This scares off the vermin and prepares the necessary ruins. "

Let us congratulate ourselves that Anatole France did not extend his theory of "necessary ruins" to the art of writing. In this area, on the contrary, the traditionalist reaction found in him its promoter and its leader. It is thanks to him that it triumphed; It is through him that the French language was saved from the Goncourtist and Symbolist decay; through him, through his example, through his work, through the irresistible attraction that radiates from it. He was able to witness, before he died, the renaissance of good French style. No writer since Chateaubriand, whose influence was felt in the opposite direction, had exercised such an empire. Who does not flatter themselves today that they write well? Who does not pride themselves on beautiful language? What novelist, what journalist does not have more or less present in mind the canons of rhetoric brought back into force by Anatole France? He was the master of us all, our "good master", and several generations of writers will pass without having forgotten that they were at the school of "father France". They will keep a filial tenderness for him.

André Billy.

The intimate thoughts of Anatole France

Thousands of men, every day cease to live. The thought of these daily hecatombs should armour us with indifference, but some deaths are more than the loss of a man. This one silences a song, extinguishes a light, smothers a divine spark! By striking, the grim reaper was able to say: qualis artifex perit!

After Barrès, Anatole France! Two beings who each summed up a culture, a civilisation, an ideal.,
The first held his genius from Rome, the traditional, the organiser, the imperialist.
The other was a subtle Greek, an independent Athenian, individualist, anarchic, disrespectful of the established order, discussing gods and kings, never fooled by appearances that he nevertheless adored under several names: Beauty, Art, Nature, and many others!

Whatever may have been said or believed, he was not a partisan. Even when he seemed to be drawn into the fray, he stood above it. He never judged a man by his opinions. What he admired in Zola was not so much his clear-sightedness as his civic courage, a kind of courage that seemed to him more beautiful, more difficult and more spontaneous than military courage. "For," he said, "it is not a sufficient reason to honor a man to be of his opinion." Here is an anecdote that will prove what freedom of movement he retained at the height of the political struggle:
The day after the great demonstration in front of Jaurès' house, after the armistice, he recounted with humor how he had met, at the opportune moment, with Cachin or someone else just in front of the plaque commemorating the deceased tribune. "We shook hands," he explained; "there was wild applause. So we kissed..." And he added, smiling mischievously: "Because we are a bit of a cabolin." A word that does not smack of sectarianism or mysticism. In spite of himself, he never quite believed that it had happened.

How then can we explain what has been called his conversion? To tell the truth, I am not sure that he has evolved so much: he has spoken more and more freely, that's all.
A writer always begins by being a prisoner of his education, his environment, his friends. Even after the true direction of his mind has been affirmed, he still expresses himself with reticence, he hides his boldness, he tries to disconcert the public with ornaments and fictions. At all times, priests have surrounded with symbols the truths that they did not dare reveal to the common people. But, if the writer lives a long time, death cuts around him the last ties that hindered his thought. Left alone of his generation, he then judges without consideration or scruples a world that is no longer his own.

Anatole France's dilettantism was only an elegant and courteous mask that he gradually lifted. Behind it appeared his true face as a nihilist. He was not converted by the emotion of war or by sentimental considerations; he was carried away by the consequences of his thought. His social opinions are the fruit of his philosophy. He had pored over books and ruins to discover the vestiges of bygone eras, and he had found so many efforts destroyed, so many collapses and rebirths that he did not attach as much importance to our civilization as most of his contemporaries. In front of his paintings and his books, at the Béchellerie, I heard him repeat with melancholy: "Humidity eats away at them and destroys them slowly. The masterpieces of generations will perish like them; we will not be able to prolong their duration by our own efforts more than an instant. Why should our codes, our institutions have any more right to live?" He noted that our era would soon be two thousand years old, which is a great age for a human ideal. The old Western ship seemed to him to be taking on water from all sides: he sensed the more or less imminent shipwreck and was looking for which side the leveling wave would come from. It seemed to him, this time again, to be breaking from the East like the one that, starting from the shores of Judea, submerged the Roman world in a few centuries. That is why, turning away from the past, he wanted to collaborate with the future. With Nietzsche, he would have willingly hastened the decline:

O darkness, come and spread your wings,
With a sudden beat extinguish every torch,
Cool our hearts, blind our eyes
And a triumphant and more beautiful tomorrow is reborn!

For this refined one thought that there is in barbarism alone a sufficient force of rejuvenation and renewal.
Master!... I called you thus during your lifetime, not out of complacency for etiquette, but with the fervor of a disciple and the deference of a humble companion I will continue after your death, now that we can express our veneration for you without being suspected of flattery... Master, your lucid eyes will no longer watch over the front of the ship! Towards what shores will we be carried? Will we ever see the lighthouses that you foresaw emerge?
What does it matter! You have taught us a great lesson. Glorious, you have not disdained to be popular. Happy, you have worked for the happiness of others. And even on the edge of the grave you did not lose interest in life.

I only said your thought... What good is it to celebrate your heart? Everyone knew your goodness. No one, even the simplest, could be mistaken. because there was no irony in your heart.

Pierre Chaine

Anatole France and Politics

Anatole France took an active part, in the last part of his life, in political struggles: it was the Dreyfus affair that determined him to throw himself into the fray of the parties. Like Voltaire, he had been revolted by injustice and fought against lies.

He rushed to the side of Zola, whose role he characterized in a definitive formula. "Zola," he said on his tomb, "was a moment of human conscience." He spoke at meetings, at the same time as Jaurès. He was heard in the Popular Universities. He was "the citizen Anatole France"...
He aroused the enthusiasm of the crowds. His listeners knew that he had little taste for eloquence and public demonstrations: by acclaiming him, they expressed their recognition of the effort he had made on himself, at the same time as their admiration for his genius.

During this period, Anatole France had given himself entirely to action, and we find traces of his concerns in his work: in L'Orme du Mail, Le Mannequin d'osier, L'Anneau d'améthyste and Monsieur Bergeret à Paris, he was the philosophical historian of this period of civil unrest when the Republic was threatened and saved.

After the Dreyfus affair, he did not renounce his militant life. He expressly joined the Socialist Party; he supported with all his ardor the policy of the Bioc des gauches practiced by Jaurès and Combes.
He maintained the same attitude until the end of his days, despite certain appearances to the contrary. Without doubt, his admiration for the personality of Lenin and the men of the Russian Revolution, his sympathy for the boldness of thought and action incited him to approach communism, after the Tours split. But his freedom of mind and his independence soon made the tyranny of the Moscow Church unbearable for him. He was an implacable opponent of the National Bloc. The last words he spoke in public, during the tribute paid to him last summer at the Trocadéro to celebrate his eightieth birthday, were to salute the victory of the left

Anatole France served, with all his genius, the cause of peace (a Nobel Prize was awarded to him). He was a socialist and a democrat. He loved politics, as he loved ideas, and it would be a betrayal of his memory to pretend to ignore this essential aspect of his personality. His name will remain associated with that of Jaurès; the republicans will devote the same cult to them both

GEORGES GOMBAULT.