The Gods Will Have Blood

The Gods Will Have Blood is an excellent novel, but I do not recommend it for those who do not have a fairly substantial understanding of the French Revolution. Though a reader would still find themselves enjoying the book regardless of historical knowledge, one will not achieve full understanding and enjoyment if such knowledge does not take its lodging in the reader's mind. In the event that one does know a good bit about the revolution, he or she will get a lot out of this book. There are, of course, no photographs or videos we can look at from that era, so it is difficult for us to look at the event as anything more than a chapter in a textbook or an interesting lecture. The Gods Will Have Blood does an impressive job of putting the reader in the middle of the action, therefore making it a good book for students to read as a supplement to class, no matter the age. It brings to life what is otherwise simply a reason for a test. Also, the novel is fictional, but the historical figures and events are real, and the things that happen to the main characters are based on what would actually happen to people of the sort had they lived at that time.

While not the most riveting of pieces ever created, The Gods Will Have Blood does examine the events of the French Revolution from a contemporary standpoint with a certain intimacy of the subject that is difficult to find in secondary accounts. A good read for students of European history but not a NY Times Bestseller caliber choice.

A great book by a not very well known author who spares us the usual fare of passionate women suffering somewhat silently beneath the psycholgoically crushing ennui of bourgeois, male-dominated existence. Instead, we are treated to the tale of a shallow, superficial sentimentalist whose hands drip with the blood of those who fell to the first in a distressingly long line of modern, totalitarian fanaticisms. It reeks of the same kind of naked oppotunism that so many trendy leftist academics exhibit when they too loudly pronounce their oppostion to the mostly imaginary ills of American life - in which one can buy books like this, which repudiates their whole "critique", if I can honor such blather with a word both longer than one syllable and with a pompous French sufffix.

Anatole France's "The Gods Will Have Blood" (1912) is a meditation on the price of unbridled fanaticism. Several key personages and events of the French Revolution figure in the story; most notibly Maximllien Robespierre and the death of Jean-Paul Marat. But don't expect exquisite characterizations, ala Flaubert, Dostoyevski, Henry James or James Joyce. Such was not France's aim. This is a cautionary tale; one that recapitulates Robespierre, the Terror and Napoleon, and prefigures the Soviets and the Nazis. In fact, France's articulation of the maddening rationale by fanatical judges--that it is they, not their victims, who suffer as they go about the bloody work of enforcing national policies with the murder of perceived enemies--is visited through concentration camp butcher Rudolph Hoess in William Styron's "Sophie's Choice" (1976).Only the translation prevents this novel from five stars. Given the fact that French is second only to ancient Greek in terms of damage from translation, and it becomes a minor complaint. This is a novel by a master (Anatole France won the Nobel for Lit in 1921). Read this book; it's an education.

Les Dieux Ont Soif tell us how a man full of good intentions can become the tool of a killing machine system. The french revolution and the Robespierre's Comité de Salut Public was a terrible tool of repression. Evariste, the Hero, is full of hope for France. He's one of this men thinking about progress and more freedom for eatch of us. But when the system give him the possibility to judge and decide for life or death of french citizen accused for minors crimes, he become a murder machine. There was only too choice for the people accused :life or death. And remember that during the revolution, we said "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ou la mort".