Anatole France (pronounced: [anatɔl fʁɑ̃s]; born - TopicsExpress

Anatole France (pronounced: [anatɔl fʁɑ̃s]; born François-Anatole Thibault,[1] [frɑ̃swa anatɔl tibo]; 16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie française, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements. France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcels literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time. *** The son of a bookseller, France spent most of his life around books. France was a bibliophile.[3] His fathers bookstore, called the Librairie France, specialized in books and papers on the French Revolution and was frequented by many notable writers and scholars of the day. Anatole France studied at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school, and after graduation he helped his father by working in his bookstore. After several years he secured the position of cataloguer at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre. In 1876 he was appointed librarian for the French Senate. Anatole France began his career as a poet and a journalist. In 1869, Le Parnasse Contemporain published one of his poems, La Part de Madeleine. In 1875, he sat on the committee which was in charge of the third Parnasse Contemporain compilation. As a journalist, from 1867, he wrote many articles and notices. He became famous with the novel Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). Its protagonist, skeptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard, embodied Frances own personality. The novel was praised for its elegant prose and won him a prize from the Académie française. In La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893) Anatole France ridiculed belief in the occult; and in Les Opinions de Jerome Coignard (1893), France captured the atmosphere of the fin de siècle. France was elected to the Académie française in 1896. France took an important part in the Dreyfus Affair. He signed Émile Zolas manifesto supporting Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who had been falsely convicted of espionage. France wrote about the affair in his 1901 novel Monsieur Bergeret. Frances later works include LÎle des Pingouins (1908) which satirizes human nature by depicting the transformation of penguins into humans – after the animals have been baptized by mistake by the nearsighted Abbot Mael. Les dieux ont soif (1912) is a novel, set in Paris during the French Revolution, about a true-believing follower of Robespierre and his contribution to the bloody events of the Reign of Terror of 1793–94. It is a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism and explores various other philosophical approaches to the events of the time. La Revolte des Anges (1914) is often considered Frances most profound novel. It tells the story of Arcade, the guardian angel of Maurice dEsparvieu. Arcade falls in love, joins the revolutionary movement of angels, and towards the end realizes that the overthrow of God is meaningless unless in ourselves and in ourselves alone we attack and destroy Ialdabaoth. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. He died in 1924 and is buried in the Neuilly-sur-Seine community cemetery near Paris. On 31 May 1922, Frances entire works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Prohibited Books Index) of the Roman Catholic Church.[4] He regarded this as a distinction. This Index was abolished in 1966. In 1877, Anatole France married Valérie Guérin de Sauville, a granddaughter of Jean-Urbain Guérin a miniaturist who painted Louis XVI,[6] with whom he had a daughter, Suzanne, in 1881 (dec. 1918). Frances relations with women were always turbulent, and in 1888 he began a relationship with Madame Arman de Caillavet, who conducted a celebrated literary salon of the Third Republic; the affair lasted until shortly before her death in 1910. After his divorce in 1893, he had many liaisons, notably with Mme. Gagey, who committed suicide in 1911. France married again in 1920, Emma Laprévotte. After his death in 1924 France was the object of written attacks, including a particularly venomous one from the Nazi collaborator, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and detractors decided he was a vulgar and derivative writer. An admirer, the English writer George Orwell, defended him however and declared that he remained very readable, and that it is unquestionable that he was attacked partly from political motives. The clerics and reactionaries hated him in just the same way as they hated Zola. [France] had lost no opportunity of poking fun at the Church. He was everything that the clerics and revanchists, the people who afterwards sucked the blacking off Hitlers boots, most detested.