FRANCE, Anatole

   Working name of Anatole-François Thibault (1844-1924), French writer active from the early 1860s until his death. His essayistic "pagan" SATIRES seem perhaps less relevant now than formerly, their amusedrationality failing to bite with sufficient savagery into targets like official religion and sexual prudery. Of sf interest are Sur la pierre blanche (1905; trans Charles E. Roche as The White Stone 1910), in which a group of intellectuals prognosticates a White Peril (the Yellow races being at risk) and the rise of Socialism; and L'ile des pingouins (1908; trans A.W. Evans as Penguin Island 1909 UK), in which humanity's evolutionary course is allegorized satirically through the transformation into humans - after they have been baptised in error - of a race of penguins, who repeat human history. In La revolte des anges (1914; trans Mrs Wilfrid Jackson as The Revolt of the Angels 1914 UK), a fantasy andAF's finest novel, an angel - corrupted by the world of books - realizes that his fallen brethren were in the right. AF won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921.

   JC

   Other works: Thais (1890; trans, almost certainly by Charles Carrington, 1901 France); L'Etui de Nacre (coll 1892; trans Henry Pene du Bois as Tales from a Mother-of-Pearl Casket 1896 US; vtMother of Pearl 1908 UK); Le Puits de Sainte Clare (coll 1895; trans, almost certainly by Charles Carrington, as The Well of St Clare 1903 France); Honey-Bee (trans Mrs John Lane 1911 UK), a tale first publishedwith other fantasies in Balthazar (coll 1889; trans Mrs John Lane 1909 UK); Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleu, et autres contes merveilleux (coll1909; trans Mrs D.B. Stewart as The Seven Wives of Bluebeard, and Other Marvellous Tales 1920 UK).

   See also: ECONOMICS; FRANCE; UTOPIAS.