Though almost every book he has written is satirical in intent, or at least in incident, five volumes are satire pure and simple; as I have no space to analyse all his works, these five representatives must expound him. They are Penguin Island and the four volumes of Contemporary History (The Elm Tree on the Mall, The Wickerwork Woman, L’Anneau d’Améthyste, Monsieur Bergeret à Paris). They overlap a little, but the spirit which informs them is different. Penguin Island is broad, applicable to the whole history of man, while the other four volumes cover rather the modern irregularities of the French State. For this reason, Penguin Island is a bigger and a finer thing; indeed it is probably the biggest thing Anatole France has done, because, dealing as it does with the earliest superstitions of man, his faith in gods and in God, with the rise of feudalism, the roots of democracy, war, the birth of art, the action and reaction of parties, it has a sweep so large that it envelops even ages now in the womb of time. It is a terrible book, not so much because it is the thinly veiled history of the French people—that is to say, the story of follies, miseries and crimes (the story of any other imperial people)—but because at the end Anatole France reaches forth into the future. And what he sees is a development of capitalism by the side of which modern capitalism is as a puling child; he summarises in a phrase a period of greater New York: “the houses were never high enough.” He sees the masses rising, revolution, the break-up of the social system, the return of pastoralism, man once more nomadic ... towns forming ... another aristocracy ... Parliaments ... industry and capitalism fastening upon the world, and again the houses never high enough.... That is a vision of horror, of a world unchanging, unchangeable, of man as a dog ever returning to his own vomit. I should like to pursue the dream further, to the death of the sun, when the earth shall grow cold and a terrible term be brought to the stupidity of man; he shall once more be a fearful brute hiding in a cave, until at last, upon his cold and dying globe, among settling mists, he shall yield up the last spark of a misused life....
Anatole France is certainly wrong, for no barbarism which the world has ever known ever was so barbarous as the barbarism that went before. If the life of man describes a curve, this is not a circle; he does not interminably return to the same point; rather the curve is a cycloid, ever bending back upon itself and yet slowly moving onwards towards the unknown goal. Anatole France does not, I think, quite deny that, but he is not over-fond of what he calls idle speculation: where his knowledge stops he is inclined to say: “After all, what does it matter to Sirius?”
The island where the penguins lived was evangelised by St Mael, who quite naïvely relates how he navigated to its shores in a stone trough. God served him as rudder and sail. It would have been all right if the saint had not been short-sighted, but he took the penguins for men and baptized them, which gave rise to great trouble in heaven and a wonderful ecclesiastical debate. For St Patrick said that baptism could not avail birds; St Damasius said it could, for Mael was competent; St Guenolé said it could not, because penguins were not conceived in sin; St Augustine thought it could if given in proper form. This caused much ill feeling in Paradise; Tertullian grew quite vicious and said he was sorry that the penguins had no soul, as thus they could not go to hell. The intervention of the Almighty was hailed with unanimous cheers, which St Augustine backed up by begging Him not to give the penguins a soul because, as they could not keep the law, they would burn in hell “in virtue of God’s adorable decrees.” Upon this the disturbance turned to scandal, and to end it the penguins were turned into men.
Then the troubles of the once happy birds began. They were clad and modesty was born. Property arose, and murder. The Catholic Devil had a hand in this and remarked that the murderers were creating rights, constituting property, laying the bases of civilisation, of society and the State. He added that the source of property is force. Later a state formed and the poor only were taxed because they could not resist, and because there were more of them. A freebooter arose: he became a king. His armies went to war and were beloved, for they won. Art appeared; Margaritone foresaw the decadence of ecclesiastical art and, in a horrid dream, something like post-impressionism. The priest, Marbode, visited Virgil in hell; the Latin poet remarked that Dante was rather a bore and that Christ was the god of barbarism. Then history unrolls. There is a revolution (obviously 1789); Trinco (Napoleon) appears and a loyal penguin states that glory cannot cost too much. Modern times give Anatole France a yet greater chance, for he takes us to New Atlantis (America), where commercial wars are executed on contract, because a business people must have a policy of conquest; the European War of 1914, if one dives deep under the crust of patriotism, sounds very like the war of New Atlantis against Third Zealand “where they killed two-thirds of the inhabitants to compel the remaining third to buy from New Atlantis umbrellas and braces.” Plutocracy. Socialism. Royalist agitations, supported by the leaders of the army, the wineshops, the newsboys, the police and the courtesans. All through this section runs the Pyrot case. A traitor (Dreyfus) sold ninety thousand bundles of hay to the foreigner—that is to say, he did not sell them, for they did not exist. Yet General Panther says: “Evidently Pyrot stole them, so all we have to do is to prove it.” To which another General replies: “Arrest Pyrot. Find some evidence; the law demands it.”
Then the agitation, difficult because the people like to believe in guilt and are too stupid to doubt. Still no evidence, and evidence manufactured. Here Anatole France puts into the General’s mouth beautiful phrases: “Don’t have evidence; it makes the case less clear”; and: “It may be better to have no evidence, but still if you must have some, trumped-up evidence is better than the truth, for it is made to order.” And so on through popular agitations, Royalist manœuvres, Boulangism, the renaissance of Catholicism (supported by Jewish money), political adultery, the rule of gold, until we come to the time when houses are never high enough....
This is not the satire of Englishmen. It has not the truculence of Defoe’s A Short Way with Dissenters; nor does it state the author’s view as does any one of Mr Shaw’s plays; nor is it so veiled as Gulliver’s Travels. All this is together elusive and obvious; it aims at showing the reader what lies under history, man in the soldier’s coat, his meanness, his greed, his lust for power, and the horrible, crusted stupidity to which alone are traceable his crimes.
I should not advise any Englishman who is not conversant with French history to read Penguin Island, but I should not advise any Englishman at all to read the four volumes of Contemporary History unless he has lived in France for the last fifteen years and mixed in every kind of French society. He will find in those books droll stories, and droll incidents; he will see that the author is getting at something, but that is all. For those volumes do not deal with the big outer movements which one can watch from the columns of The Times. They are concerned with the mysteries inside French politics, paralleled here by the “Confederates,” the Marconi case, the theft of the crown jewels at Dublin, the secret history of the rebellion of the officers at the Curragh. No Frenchman would understand a book dealing with those things, so it is too much to expect an Englishman to understand Contemporary History. The circumstances that led to the writing of these books are simple enough. The Dreyfus case was used as a platform for clerical, Royalist and militarist agitation. The Government set to work to break the Church and broke it (after which the Church mended itself and became stronger than ever); the Nationalist revival took place, and since that time there has been much manœuvring, some intended to restore the Bourbons and quite ridiculous, some of it designed to gain well-paid posts for reactionaries, and that one much in earnest. The interesting parts of the four books are the commentaries of M. Bergeret, a university professor in a little town, who, I need hardly say, is (just like Sylvestre Bonnard, Coignard, Trublet, Brotteaux) Anatole France himself. The four books, published between 1897 and 1901, more or less cover that period. In The Elm Tree on the Mall unfolds, with local politics, the life of Bergeret, married to a shrew, unloved of his daughters, disliked by most people because he thinks for himself, which amounts to saying that he does not think like anybody else. Round him eddy representative characters, the Abbé Guitrel, who wants to be a bishop and is proceeding towards the episcopate half by apostolic mansuetude, half by way of Ignatius of Loyola; Worms-Clavelin, the préfet (chief of the local executive), who is a Jew, a Freemason, a Conservative Catholic, an advanced Republican, a Socialist, a Royalist and a few other things necessary to the maintenance of his post; his wife is friendly to Guitrel because the Abbé makes her feel French (she was born Noemi Coblenz) and because she “likes to protect one of those tonsured heads charged for eighteen centuries with the excommunication and extermination of the circumcised.” There is General de Chalmot, a soldier, who thinks that if you destroy belief you ruin the military spirit, because you take away the hope of another life; there is Paillot’s bookshop where Bergeret meets the county, the lawyers, the doctors, to talk of books, politics, actresses and their figures....
Nothing in particular happens. Guitrel’s bishopric is the leading string of the action; there is Madame Worms-Clavelin helping Guitrel, who finds her, at bargain prices, chasubles with which she covers her armchairs; there is a young girl, Claudine Deniseau, who, inspired by St Radegunde, becomes a prophetess, indulges in healing, predicts frost and the return of the king; there is Worms-Clavelin, trying to keep the prophetess quiet, because so ancient a person as St Radegunde ought really not to cause a row in a country town. An old lady of eighty is murdered by her boy-lover, which causes Bergeret to remark that murder is quite natural and fortunate, for without evil one could not see beauty. Worms-Clavelin kisses Madame de Gromance on the shoulder, (a local custom); a senator promotes shady companies while his wife embroiders altar-cloths; and somehow the story ends with Guitrel very much out of the running for the episcopal stakes.
What matters in the book is Bergeret, sitting under the elm-tree on the Mall, or in the bookshop, thinking, talking, smiling at the comedy. Notable are his talks with Lantaigne, another candidate for the bishopric, and the type of the intellectual priest. Anatole France may detest the Catholic attitude, but he understands it admirably, and when Lantaigne contends that one can have two opinions, one conscious and rationalistic, the other intuitive and theological, he makes a very fine case. For him, in the case of Joshua, celestial astronomy is not the astronomy of man, and in celestial mathematics, 3 + 3 may make nine, because we do not know all the properties of numbers. At other times Bergeret, who talks to anybody, tells the melancholic story of Napoleon III., who never managed to grant his foster-brother a small post in the civil service: “The Emperor was a charming fellow but, alas, he had no influence.” And so the book wanders on with the opinions of Bergeret, happy, like Æsop, in the freedom of his mind, in spite of the narrowness of his home, conscious that the State is honoured so long as it taxes the poor, and that the republic is easiest to live under because it does not govern much, that revolutions help none save the flourishing and the ambitious. It would all be profoundly pessimistic if it were not always genial. One feels sure that if Bergeret had an agreeable wife, a good cook, and a volume of Lucretius (Oh, Omar!), he would let the State do just what it liked.
The story continues in The Wickerwork Woman, with Bergeret working up his lecture in the worst room in his flat, where stands the wickerwork figure used for dress-making, symbolic of his unpleasant wife. He grumbles, and then considers the Romans. “They were not heroes, they preferred making roads, they only made war for business reasons.” He thinks of soldiers and wonders whether the sergeant has a right to tell a conscript that his mother is a sow: he decides that the sergeant has this right, for without it there can be no hierarchy or discipline. Then the cook gives notice, and Guitrel goes to Paris while Bergeret talks to a tramp who says that when he was young he lost his pride because people made fun of him....