42. Civilized nations are like hunting-dogs

Anatole France was a French poet and novelist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921.

All his life he was around books. First as the son of a bookseller, and later as the librarian for the France Senate. His father’s shop was frequented by many writers and scholars of those days and he also helped his father by working in his bookstore. As a result, he was well read that shaped his thoughts.

Last year I enjoyed reading him, and the dashing naturalist De Sade. 

Here are some of his lines:

“It is only the crazy and the ambitious who make revolutions. No, I don't believe that men are naturally good. What I see is that they are emerging painfully and slowly from their primitive barbarism and that with great effort they are organizing a justice that is uncertain... the time is far distant when they will be kind and gentle to one another.”

Had I been nature, he said – 

“I should have made men and women not to resemble the great apes, as they do but on the model of the insects which, after a lifetime as caterpillars change into butterflies and for the brief final term of their existence have no thought but to love and be lovely. I should have set youth at the end of the human span. Then I should have arranged that man and woman unfurling glittering wings would live awhile on dew and desire and die in a rapturous kiss.”

Anatole France stirred the world of philosophy. He was ever young. 

France had been an outspoken supporter of the 1917 Russian Revolution and when he was seventy-four, he joined the communists and gave his Nobel Prize of 40,000 Francs to Russian relief.

Not to forget his famous sentence – 

“Civilized nations are like hunting dogs” in his book The Red Lily.

Look around the globe and you will find many hunting dogs; hell bent on making a common man’s as well as their own countrymen’s life hell – hell on earth.