Philosophical Rogues and Antiheroes of the Intellectual. Anatole France (part 2)

Anatole France was born April 16 1844, his father was bookseller, who kept a vast collection of French classics, dealing mostly with the French Revolution and the documented idealisms that extended out from that turbulent time in European history.  From France's early poems and journalistic leanings, it is when, in the late 1800s, the changes in Europe have started to become more profound.  There is an optimistic hope described of a new political dawn.  To which France held a unique pose as a writer, that in someways is quite rare, despite his depiction of realism in his books, he was able, so cleverly, to assume a cynicism – that later became a veiled disposition to the expectations of grandeur.  He was a skeptic, with a constant dissatisfaction, entailed in his poetry and writings, the concept the assumption of governance and control to which his 1901 book Monsieur Bergeret, created a fictional observations in depicting the Dreyfus Affair. The famous political crisis that erupted over France in 1900. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, who was convicted of selling military secrets to the Germans in 1894, the case, which divided a nation, began to invigorate Anatole France's curiosity as a skeptical writer, as it was the intellectuals and journalists of the time who came to the aid of the falsely accused Dreyfus – as it continued to show the divide in French society between the old guard of Christian conservatism, which was the influence of the Church against the adherents of the new socialist vanguard. A balance point between the use of antisemitism, to which the case against Dreyfus was based on, stereotyping him as an opportunistic 'disloyal' Jew.  In the attempt of the army to reposition France and to maintain the power of the Church as a more militarized society, was in the end overthrown in court, as Dreyfus was vindicated of his innocence, with the army as late as 1995 admitting that they had fabricated the account of espionage aimed at Dreyfus. It was the beginning of the Third Republic of France, that finally separated the French society from the Church. Anatole France, was able to document this in his 1901 book Monsieur Bergeret as a reference to the weakness in doctrines that utilizes scapegoats to magnify hysteria; and in turn of the century, this event, despite its insidiousness, revealed that through investigation and study, a truth can be found.  Anatole France championed this with his writings, however, the use of what one may see as a statement of truth, often is utilized to further another motive. Anatole France, with his literal skepticism, rationalism and ideas of socialist aspired questioning.  He embraced another aspect, as discussed earlier: pessimism. That human nature maybe too fraught to truly claim knowledge as an absolute truth, when we become unhinged with a lust for power.

 “If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” 

I also feel that Anatole France in moving away slightly from the socialistic rigidity that became front and center in France, which continued to be at logger heads with traditionalists.  Anatole France found sympathy, as a rationalist and his tinges of pessimistic cynicism, in one of the greatest mythological anti-heroes ever devised in Christian theology.  Lucifer.  That in turn lead to a formulation of his embracing hedonism in his quote “Of all of the sexual aberrations, Chasity is the strangest.” And you can see in this remark of the deviations that are hidden under the auspiciousness of a Christian puritan, his writing style embraced, even though France was distinctly original, the classic secular writers of Voltaire's Enlightenment concepts of knowing what it is to be human, beyond the fear of punishment in the afterlife.  Anatole France, aware that the Church all its hypocrisy reinforces suffering onto the peasantry by decreeing that they are all sinners, who, if they do not repent, are going to hell.  Thus, there is that implemented and transfixed power base set down to restrain and control the poor through the infliction of what is deemed as a sin.  That the hedonistic writers and intellectuals of the time challenged, as what France did with satire and cynicism, the power the Church had over the people. 

As Europe marches on towards World War One. Anatole France begins to set down on of his most poignant of works. “The Revolt of Angels”.  What if we are all the fallen angels who got the wrong end of the deal?  France, who was no saint and man of contradiction; a Rake, who had many lovers.  But, also saw the suffering inflicted onto each.  The human folley of existing in the realm of hardship, loss and pain, contributing and multiplying our fears - as a unrelenting burden.  Would we not what to rebel against a so called deity who overlooks all this with a tyranny of malice.  Anatole  France offered the one thing that is sure as a weapon in this rebellion against ignorance.  Knowledge.

"Have we not seen many times indeed human beings who, poor and naked, prostrate themselves before all the phantoms of fear, and rather than follow the teaching of well-disposed demons, obey the commandments of cruel demiurges?"
Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels