Hell of good feelings

Hell of good feelings

The gods are thirsty (Paperback)

Customer Review

Anatole France wanted to write a book on the Inquisition, so as to show how a simple idea to start could be made an ideological monster that consumes everything in its path. But the Inquisition did not seem strong enough, and then the Third Republic was sufficiently "eater caps" (that remained in the following republics!). So the French Revolution, which provided a framework, specifically the period of the Terror in Paris.

Through the character of Evariste Gamelin, painter means working piecemeal, with little political or personal conscience, Anatole France shows how the path of evil and horror is hidden behind the good feelings carried by an innovative vocabulary. The words of the French Revolution (tyrants, enemies, emigrants, starving, ...) were the new language that has least attracted the young Gamelin. The French Revolution was a revolution of language, that although Aaron Upinsky also shows in his book "the severed head: the secret of power." Gamelin cradles of words which prevent to have empathy for the victims of the Revolutionary Court. He went also into account the training effect, but too late to save his own head.

For this book, France made the denunciation of ideology and is known since the work of François Furet, how the French Revolution was an important template for revolutionaries of all kinds in the world, and how hyphenation with reality to refuge in abstraction brought unhappiness among people who are promised tomorrows.

Anatole France traces some portraits successful in this short book Gamelin course, but also Ms. Rochemaure, Brotteaux and longuemarre father, the young Elodie and Athenais, the young prostitute. All these figures bring the history of France throughout the day and shows, in contrast to the revolutionary orthodoxy, it's not just the little people who carried the Revolution. Although socialist at heart, does France remains lucid about human nature and this critical novel of the Revolution was greeted instead by the freshly French Left of the time (1912)

The style is dated but holds the road (Academician and Nobel Prize for Literature, forgive less!). France fell into disuse because of the style but it deserves to be reread for his lucid and distanced analysis as well as its thirst for social justice.

Note that the text is difficult to read in paperback because of the font size and line spacing insufficient. How to present also affects the quality perception by the reader.

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