The Gods Are Athirst

Introduction

The novel

A young painter enters a church whose saints have been replaced by republican heroes. He signs a petition against political opponents, speaks with a carpenter who fears that the patriots would lose if everyone attended the assembly, and visits a sick man arranging recruitment, weapons and relief. Before the first chapter ends, Anatole France has brought together the two claims that will trouble the whole novel: the Revolution can organise coercion in the name of virtue, and obscure people can serve it with courage and generosity.

Les Dieux ont soif follows Évariste Gamelin through revolutionary Paris in 1793–94. His artistic ambitions, his attachment to his mother, his love for Élodie Blaise and his public responsibilities occupy the same small urban world. Shops, staircases, attics, streets, gardens and courtrooms connect the characters long before political categories divide them. An accusation can travel through those ordinary connections and return as a verdict.

The following account offers a reading of the novel. The outline at the back gives the events of every chapter and reveals the ending. Readers who prefer to discover the plot as they read can leave it until later. The historical notes distinguish people and institutions documented outside the novel from the actions and words France gives his fictional characters.

A painter and a juror

Gamelin is a pupil of David. His artistic allegiance matters because the ancient figures offered as examples of public virtue are also models for feeling and action. He admires the severe gesture, the act that places the common good above personal attachment. The challenge is to recognise how readily an image of moral greatness can become a way of arranging other people’s lives. The paintings are part of the novel’s machinery of judgement.

France first shows Gamelin’s limitations in his work. His feeling for elevated subjects does not reliably give him the power to paint them. Poverty makes him dependent on the small commissions and marketable objects he disdains. His designs belong in a trade of prints and images whose customers have desires of their own. Élodie and her father understand that trade more readily than he does. Artistic aspiration consequently meets a practical world of money, taste and appetite from the beginning.

His later place on the Revolutionary Tribunal gives his desire for significance a public instrument. A juror must decide what to believe about another person. The novel attends to the mixture of evidence, expectation, loyalty, fear and personal feeling that enters such decisions. Gamelin’s confidence can grow as his knowledge becomes less secure. He increasingly takes political explanation to supply what an actual inquiry would have had to discover.

This development is visible in the language. Words such as virtue, patriot, traitor and public safety offer an apparent clarity that the circumstances of particular lives resist. France lets those words circulate between official speech, private conversation and inward thought. Their repetition is part of the action: a label makes one response seem necessary and another disloyal. The translation preserves their recurrence instead of replacing them with a succession of English synonyms.

Other ways to live

Brotteaux’s small manufacture of puppets places him at another point in the same economy of images. Having lost the security of his earlier social position, he makes fragile figures for a living. The little bodies can be moved by someone else’s hand. The comparison with political life is available to the reader, but Brotteaux’s work also remains a real occupation performed by a man who needs food and shelter. France repeatedly allows a suggestive object to keep its ordinary use.

The Lucretius Brotteaux carries supplies a vocabulary for his scepticism and for an imagination of human beings within nature. His conversation offers pleasure, friendship and the limits of knowledge as alternatives to the ambition to order everyone’s life. His scepticism does not give him unlimited foresight or immunity from danger. It changes what he thinks he may demand of another person.

The religious Longuemare and the unbelieving Brotteaux disagree about fundamental matters, yet their proximity brings convictions into contact with acts of kindness and need. Their arguments should be heard as arguments by particular people in particular circumstances. The narrator supplies reasons to admire conduct across the boundary between belief and unbelief. The novel’s account of fanaticism therefore requires attention to how people live with convictions, as well as to the convictions themselves.

Trubert offers another difficulty for any reading that would turn the book into a simple inventory of good sceptics and bad believers. His body is failing, but he keeps working for people who must be armed and for families who must be supported. The first chapter closes with admiration for his participation in a common effort. The phrase impossible and certain gives that effort its paradoxical horizon. A reader has to carry the admiration forward alongside the carpenter’s admission about the minority of patriots.

Private feeling and public language

Élodie’s print shop belongs to the world through which Gamelin moves as an artist and a lover. Her gestures, wishes and recollections have a force that exceeds the political meanings he may assign to them. The movement between her perspective and his is essential. A scene can change when the narration makes available a thought one character has concealed, misunderstood or never considered.