Reading Anatole France in the wonderful year 2011/5711 might sound ridiculous. Who needs the old style books with their images and societies impossible to imagine with the eyes of our high tech life?
For me, the very lazy lecture of the second volume of the Chronicle of Our Times - the Amethyst Ring was an endurance test. I used to read some Anatole France long time ago, but didn't find anything notable and interesting in his books. Too much dust and too much boredom and this impression didn't change since then.
The decision to spend some time in the exhibition hall of the various images of the "France profonde" was took after reading again some new books about Affaire Dreyfus. Convinced to include the book in my bibliographical list for academic reasons only I went easier beyond the stylistic emptiness of this old story.
Placed during the development of Affaire Dreyfus, the book could be read also as an account of the deep and constant anti-Jewish feelings of the middle-class French society of the time. Converted or "enlightened" the Jew is seen as a dangerous element and the good old society - as the one represented by the religious and military elites - should avoid and isolate them. In the daily representation of this society the Jew is a nuisance and, in addition, given the conflict with the Germans from the time, as a potential supporter of the German enemy. Children or adults, rich or poor, they are happily united in their hate against the Jew. A phenomenon we were used to considered familiar in the far Eastern lands of Europe, but expressed in a more sophisticated and culturally transmitted way in many Western European countries as well, in the wonderful and optimistic 19th century.
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