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....