Hating the bourgeois world Anatole France endlessly returned to the idea of the French revolution of the late 18th century. How many victims! How much blood! And the result is broken hearts and lost illusions. Unhappy, disadvantaged people remained as unhappy as they were under the old regime, but new gentlemen appeared-the fat bourgeois. They differ from the former masters of France, aristocrats, perhaps, only by the fact that they are rougher and more vulgar. In the light of these judgments, one should consider the artistic fabric of the novel The Gods Will Have Blood (1912).
This novel is less philosophical than the other works of Anatole France and more picturesque, more plastic. Before us are the living creators of the revolution, we hear their voices, we see their smiles or angered faces. They hate and love, they resent and rejoice - they live. All is true in this brightly colored picture of a turbulent revolutionary Paris. Historians are unlikely to find details of time that are alien to time, eyewitnesses of events are unlikely to deny the author the recognition of the authenticity of the facts described by him. And yet the writer's story is purely biased.
This novel was published in 1912. Its action takes place in Paris in 1794, during the last months of the Jacobin dictatorship. Anatole France shows us a whole gallery of artistic images - typical characters of that era: former aristocrats, representatives of artistic bohemia and urban bottoms down to an illiterate prostitute, one of the most captivating images of the novel. All of them pass before us.
In the center of the novel is the fate of the artist Evariste Gamlen. Kind-hearted person, able to share a piece of bread and the author of talented paintings, he vegetates in poverty, not being able to adjust to the tastes of the public. The former aristocrat arranges his assessor in a revolutionary tribunal and his life changes dramatically. At the beginning of the activity, he tries to sort out the court cases, and even, it happens, his voice saves the suspect. But the further - the stronger the imperative: He is guilty. To the guillotine! And he sends dozens to execution, and then hundreds of people, including the husband of his sister, aristocrat who helped him and his former friends. He believes that this is the will of the people (does he not confuse the people with the crowd?), Such is the will of history. And if there are any doubts in it, then they leave after the speeches of the revolutionary leaders, who make everything simple out of the complicated. But feelings can not be deceived, Evarist cries at night, he is doomed to torment. He predicted these torments in his painting "Orestes tortured by furies". But if in the picture Orest helps his sister, then in life Evarist himself turns away from her. And the death of the hero at the end of the novel is inevitable. The petals of the red carnation, the flower of his beloved Elodi, the leitmotif that pass through the pages of the novel symbolize the drops of the hero's blood.
But not only does the lost hero die. Dies nobility and enlightenment in the person of the aristocrat Brissot, the selfless faith in God perishes in the person of the monk - the father of Longmar, the gratitude in the face of the courtesan Atenais dies. Remais opportunists and traitors: the scribe Henri - Alfonso, who killed his mistress, the artist Demai, who is only interested in carnal pleasures.
And France remains. The image of France Anatole France embodied in the image of the beloved of protagonist Evarist - Elodi. Ugly, but charming, loving and calculating. She throws herself into the arms of the lover-hangman, in her fear and passion merge. But also having lost it, she does not get upset for a long time: another lover comes to replace one.
Extremely convincing is the writer in the depiction of the past era, he vividly recreates Paris of the times of the revolution with the smallest details of topography, relationships among people, customs, fashion and even cooking (though, why even for the French this is sacred). Losing the feeling that this is a historical novel, it seems that the author is a contemporary of the characters he portrays.
