I WAS CURIOUS to see what people made of Anatole France's biography of Joan of Arc and came across this substantial volume (680 pages) from 1962.
Bancquart's book is a thorough examination of how France's essays and fictions worked as interventions in the cultural politics of the Third Republic, basically on the socialist-republican-secularist side of things.
The Joan of Arc biography gets a whole chapter, forty pages. I learned that France had written several essays and articles on Joan and her historical context in the thirty years or so before the volume was published, many of which were incorporated into the book, but which France did not always revise as carefully as he should have to achieve consistency in the portrait of Joan. Bancquart does a nice job of exposing the archaeological strata of the book, so to speak, showing how it reflects the evolution of France's idea of Joan over the years.
By the time the book was published, the climate created by the Dreyfus Affair (what Bancquart calls "la Revolution Dreyfusienne") made it seem urgent to debunk Joan's claims to being a visionary and a nationalist icon--hence France's Joan leaning a bit more towards that of Voltaire than that of Michelet.. France's tendency to see Joan as delusional and as manipulated by powerful courtiers derived mainly, Bancquart argues, from his campaign to help reason prevail over religion, science over superstition, republicanism over monarchy. Bancquart suggests that the needs of France's polemic lead him to do less than full justice to Joan, however comprehensible his motivations were.
I also had a look at her discussion of my favorite France novel, Les Dieux Ont Soif, and I thought it made a lot of sense. Politically progressive though France was, he had some misgivings about the way political enthusiasm can fall into the same pitfalls as religious fanaticism, and Bancquart does a neat job of showing how Evariste Gamelin exemplifies exactly that problem.
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