As I saw a month ago that the publisher has reissued Barrel & Barral, once again, The gods are thirsty, Anatole France's novel about the period of the Jacobin Terror (1793-94) in the French Revolution I pulled my personal library fund to read. I have since 1990 a much more ugly issue that just came out on this young exquisite editorial, but ultimately I realized that the new, as mine and almost all that is in the English market, uses the old translation of Luis Ruiz Contreras, a fanatical admirer of Anatole France who poured into Castilian the vast majority of his books in the first half of last century.
is paradoxical: when France published this book in 1912, was a man of the left, very radical politically, an intellectual who, from the shock that he and many others led to the Dreyfuss case, had embraced Socialism . Even in the last years of her life, she was very old, was allowed to use by the communists. And I say that it is paradoxical because the political significance of his novel is quite another.
Anatole France was not without a conservative, a longing of the Old Regime who abhor the Revolution. But he was lucid enough to understand that the times had brought, from the dynamics unleashed in 1789, new pathologies of power, that dreams of reason engenders monsters and the best intentions can be nested horrific delusions. Therefore, and seen what he wrote about the French revolutionary events, it is reasonably believed that faith in socialism that he had when he wrote this book in 1912, would not have clouded if he had lived long enough to observe what was going to turn, soon, the Revolution Russia, which he knew only in its infancy.
The parallels between the two revolutions, by the way, do not set it. Without going any further, an early French communist, Mathiez, wrote in 1920 that "Jacobinism and Bolshevism are in the same direction two dictatorships, born of the civil war and foreign war, two dictatorships in class, they resort to means of, for terror, the requisition and proposed tax and ultimately a similar goal, the transformation of society, not only of Russian society and of French society, but of universal society. " It is easy to infer, if you read The gods are thirsty, the Jacobin Terror bitter portrait of Anatole France performs, he could inspire his criticism of the Russian Revolution have lived long enough.
The gods are thirsty draws the path of Evariste Gamelin, a young artist who lives badly petty, full of revolutionary zeal, in Paris in 1793. Almost by chance (and by wrong calculation of a lady who believes the artist a useful idiot), Gamelin will become a powerful member of the revolutionary tribunals that decide the fate and lives of thousands of people at that time, judged by their disaffection with the power Jacobin. And Evariste Gamelin exercise its inquisitorial function and conviction with a thoroughness implacable.
Best of Anatole France's novel is its gentle but fierce criticism, and very well detailed account of what twentieth-century totalitarianism began to be called, thanks above all to the books of Hanna Arendt and analysis on National and communism. The novel is, in this sense, the history of the formation and development of a conscience, someone who, from intense feelings of love for humanity, is consolidating a look and a ruthless and brutal action on specific and unique human .
Gamelin is at first a clumsy young man, a bit obtuse, proud, hard, excited, full of resentment, the enemy of pleasure and a misogyny capitalized. On that basis advanced psychological involvement in the Jacobite cause. The motherland and the revolution are in danger and need to save those who want to firmly hold the pulse and are willing to sacrifice and, above all, to maintain a rigid and ruthless behavior towards those who question the power somehow, or are skeptical, or weak, or show the slightest dissent, however banal it may seem.
What is the limit of criminal insanity of these new powerful? It is variable, shifting. To summarize: the mark may at any time Robespierre and followers as Gamelin. Should be settled not match all at every moment with the core leadership position, whether it may be. Thus, there are those who are against the revolution because they yearn for the old regime and utter live the king deposed, but there are counter-revolutionaries who preach a radical atheism because it confuses the people and weaken their morale. Some are suspected of reactionary, others left over. Some of defeatist, others disbelieve, and beyond because they say or do something that the powers that be at that moment, judged unpatriotic. There comes a point at which the Jacobins have set up a mechanism as hell that they will be victims of those who, being until then their co-religionists frightened provide their own travel to the guillotine, thus pre-empt and eliminate overthrow Robespierre and his most faithful.
in Anatole France's novel is much, much more, because Gamelin is not the only character. Rather it is the center of a constellation of characters, most of which end up being victims of inexorable logic that guides the painter. The novelist is good enough to get them all to be credible, because they are so well delineated. Aristocrats Stoics and unbelievers who survive after the earthquake of 1789, in abject poverty, religious Barnabites always kind and humble, except when they are confused with members of other orders which they consider less-pedigree, men or women who play and die for love or friendship, feelings, any idea who put political demagogues and opportunists who know how to swim all changes, sensual women, attracted by force and cruelty that gives the new power, mothers with children torn between opposing paths ... All Anatole France looks carefully nuanced, with pity. There are even deep compassion and understanding in the profiles of Evariste Gamelin and Robespierre himself, as we believe in their sincerity when they explain that the killer is transient cold determination, an inevitable stage in the path to true justice will come one day, when the country has been spared, with the assistance of the guillotine, all impeding this bright and beautiful future.
Chance has made on the same day I read this novel, often peck on other grounds, in the literature Dictionary Pla, a thick book in which Valenti Puig gathered many comments and judgments of Josep Pla literature and the authors he read. Anatole France was not a writer who excite the Catalan writer. But reading the pages devoted to him, I find these lines, which I find very accurate after reading The gods have sed :
France has always seen the world and life as a tiny little animals swarm of toiling on the surface of a planet lost in the grandeur of the law of universal gravitation, but that has not stopped for a moment delivered to the pursuit of justice and the path marked by the ray of feeling. Politics, in the truest sense of the term, has made him the voice tremble with emotion, the struggle against injustice and political or economic-has humanized the literary work of jewelry.
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