Les Dieux ont soif Reading Order

Les Dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Athirst, 1912) by Anatole France is his finest novel and the most balanced historical analysis of the French Revolution in French fiction — the story of the young painter Évariste Gamelin who becomes a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal and, consumed by republican virtue, sentences increasing numbers of innocent people to the guillotine as the Terror intensifies. The title comes from Danton's last words: 'the gods are athirst' — the Republic has become a god that requires endless human sacrifice to sustain its absolute virtue. France's achievement is the combination of historical precision and psychological depth: Gamelin is not a monster but an idealist whose virtue, applied through the logic of the Terror's system, produces monstrosity. The novel is a sustained meditation on the mechanism by which idealism becomes fanaticism — the comparison with the twentieth century's totalitarian movements was immediately apparent when the novel was published in 1912 and has remained compelling. The historical milieu — the Paris of 1793-1794, the political clubs, the theaters, the markets, the Revolutionary committees — is rendered with documentary precision, and France uses a range of characters (the Epicurean philosopher Brotteaux, the aristocratic émigré, the moderate Republican Desmahis) to show the range of responses to the Terror and the degree to which survival required compromise with the killing system.