What the Swedes Read: Anatole France

• LAUREATE: Anatole France (France, 1921)
• BOOK READ: The Gods Will Have Blood, translated by Frederick Davies

It is with some embarrassment that your humble columnist must admit that he was a bit confused about the 1921 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. OK, OK: I thought he was a fictional character. I think I had him confused with Anthony Adverse. On reading the name “Anatole France,” I pictured a guy in a peasant blouse, half fop and half swashbuckler. If you’d told me that Anatole France was played by Errol Flynn in some breathtaking Technicolor production, not only would I have believed you, but I would have thought I’d seen the thing. “Unhand her, you lout! Unhand her in the name of Anatole France!”

Anatole France turns out—and I’m sure everyone knew this but me—to be a French poet and writer, whose best-known work is Les dieux ont soif, a novel the title of which has been translated variously as The Gods Are Thirsty, The Gods Are Athirst, and The Gods Will Have Blood, which cumulatively sounded to me, as I chose what to read, like the studio, live, and remixed versions of some death-metal album.

This preconception, it turns out, puts me closer to the mark. The Gods Will Have Blood—that’s how the Penguin Classics likes it called—is set in the bloody, thrashy aftermath of the French Revolution, although both the translator and the Nobel Committee are keen to remind us that the book, published in 1912, is also prescient in predicting the bloody European troubles that were on the horizon. “How events have fulfilled his predictions!” said fellow Nobel winner Erik Karlfeldt in his presentation speech. “What beautiful arenas have been prepared now for the games of salamanders! The smoke of battles still hangs over the earth. And out of the fog surge gnomes, sinister spirits of the earth.”

The novel has no gnomes, but the smoke of battles is everywhere, and our hero, Gamelin, a young, idealistic artist, finds himself in a sudden position of power when the smoke clears. The foundation of the republic has led a group of brash youngsters to appoint Gamelin as magistrate, which might sound petty-bureaucratic until you remember that the magistrates were basically in charge of the guillotine. It’s a job requiring sober and careful judgment, so that justice might be exacting but not destructive—a post for a zealot, maybe, but not for a fanatic. Well, let’s listen in to what Gamelin tells his mother when she remarks that people are suffering in the streets:

Mother, the scarcity we’re suffering from is caused by the monopolists...