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 ecclesiastics[5]; 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....
[5]Miracle?
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.”