| Name: |
Anatole France |
| Birth Date: |
|
| Death Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
In 1927 poet Paul Valéry delivered his discours de réception, or initial speech, to the Académie Française after being elected two years earlier to fill the seat of Anatole France, who had died in October 1924. Remembering and resenting the fact that, in 1875, as an editorial reader for the third series of the famous poetry anthologies entitled Le Parnasse contemporain, France had excluded Stéphane Mallarmé's hermetic but very beautiful L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876; translated, 1956), Valéry, while following the convention according to which the new academician pays homage to his predecessor, damned France with somewhat ambiguous, if not faint, praise, suggesting in particular that his grace, clarity, and ease of style disguised superficiality of content; moreover, while affecting to speak of him, Valéry avoided all mention of his name. In 1924, on the occasion of France's death, the surrealists--Louis Aragon, André Breton, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Paul Eluard, and others--disseminated a pamphlet against him, called "Un Cadavre" (A Corpse), in which they denounced the values he represented--skepticism, irony, French wit--and accused him, in essence, of having been a walking corpse.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 16,365 words (approx. 55 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Anatole France Access Pass.
