Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · Bilingual Edition
The Gods Are Athirst
Les Dieux ont soif · Complete French–English bilingual edition
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English Introduction · Branch 5 of 120
Introduction · Part 3
English
The footnotes are placed beneath the English and begin again at one on each printed page. They identify historical references, explain consequential lexical choices and distinguish textual difficulties from interpretation. The glossary and editorial note collect matters that recur. The bilingual ebook and Markdown file pair passages in reading order; the English-only ebook retains the English text and its notes without the parallel French.
Anatole France and publication
Anatole France was the pen name of Jacques-Anatole Thibault, born in Paris in 1844, who died in 1924. He worked in publishing and in the Senate library, was elected to the Académie française in 1896, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921. These dates situate a writer whose learning and public standing had been acquired long after the revolutionary world reconstructed here.
Les Dieux ont soif appeared in serial form in 1911–12 and in volume from Calmann-Lévy in 1912. The present title retains the established English form The Gods Are Athirst. The French title and the new English text remain visible together because a translation is also a sequence of choices that the reader may wish to inspect. The source record and the precise limits of the textual checks are set out in the editorial note.
Socrates
Reading The Gods Are Athirst · Introduction · Introduction · Part 3
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst follows the painter Évariste Gamelin as revolutionary conviction draws him into the work of the Revolutionary Tribunal. This complete French–English edition preserves the novel’s twenty-nine chapters, paired by source paragraph, with an introduction, historical orientation, glossary, and chapter notes.
Historical Text and Translation
The novel appeared in volume in 1912. The complete French reading text follows Project Gutenberg eBook 36477, whose underlying impression is undated and carries a later Brodard & Taupin colophon. Chapter I was also checked against a separate 1912 printing; that limited collation is distinguished from the source used for the whole novel.
About Diotimos Editions
The new English translation and editorial matter were generated and revised with AI for Diotimos Editions. The reader preserves the supplied paragraph pairing, songs, quoted letters, and 431 chapter notes, together with the source register and the edition’s statement of editorial responsibility.
Rights
Anatole France’s French source work is in the public domain. The new 2026 English translation and Diotimos editorial matter are credited as supplied in this bilingual edition.