Recommendations
Books Like Le Lys rouge
Best books to read after Le Lys rouge by Anatole France
Readers who respond to Le Lys rouge's ironic portrait of the Parisian intellectual and social world, France's sympathetic but amused detachment, and the love affair set against the Florence art world will find the wider tradition of French ironic fiction.
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Thaïs
by Anatole France
Thaïs (1890) is the essential predecessor of Le Lys rouge in France's ironic philosophical method: where Thaïs uses a historical-religious setting (fourth-century Alexandria) to dramatize the irony of suppressed desire, Le Lys rouge uses a contemporary social setting (Paris and Florence, 1890s) for the same analysis — the method is identical, the setting is different.
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La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque
by Anatole France
The Rôtisserie (1892) is the companion philosophical novel to Le Lys rouge: where Le Lys rouge is a society novel with philosophical irony, the Rôtisserie is a philosophical novel with social comedy — reading both shows the range of France's ironic method from the contemporary to the historical.
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L'Histoire contemporaine
by Anatole France
France's four-volume political novel (L'Orme du mail, 1897; Le Mannequin d'osier, 1897; L'Anneau d'améthyste, 1899; Monsieur Bergeret à Paris, 1901) is the direct political successor to Le Lys rouge: the same ironic intelligence applied now to the Dreyfus Affair and its social and political implications — the most important extension of France's method in the direction of political satire.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's 1881 novel about an American woman in Florence is the most important Anglo-American parallel to Le Lys rouge: both novels use the Florence art world as the setting for a story about consciousness, love, and the constraining conventions of social life, and both are ironic analyses of the relationship between aesthetic sensibility and social reality.
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Penguin Island
by Anatole France
L'Île des pingouins (1908) is France's most sustained political satire and the most direct development of the ironic political intelligence that underlies Le Lys rouge's treatment of the Panama scandal: the history of 'Penguinia' is a thinly veiled history of France from the Middle Ages to the Dreyfus Affair, and reading both novels shows the full arc of France's political intelligence.
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Les Déracinés
by Maurice Barrès
Barrès's 1897 nationalist novel is the most important contemporary with which to read Le Lys rouge as a document of Third Republic intellectual life: where France represents the skeptical, anti-clerical, Dreyfusard tradition, Barrès represents the nationalist, regionalist, anti-Dreyfusard tradition — the two novels together constitute the two poles of the fin-de-siècle French intellectual debate.
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Le Disciple
by Paul Bourget
Bourget's 1889 novel about the consequences of a philosopher's scientific materialism when adopted by a disciple is the most important conservative Catholic counter-argument to the ironic skepticism that France embodies in Le Lys rouge: reading both novels together shows the full range of the philosophical and moral debate that the French fin-de-siècle intellectual novel was conducting.
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The Ambassadors
by Henry James
James's 1903 novel about a New Englander who comes to Paris and is gradually converted by French culture and its values is the most important Anglo-American parallel to Le Lys rouge's portrait of the Parisian social world: both novels are ironic studies of the relationship between personal freedom and social convention, conducted through the consciousness of a protagonist who is both inside and outside the world he is observing.
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