Perhaps the most interesting because it is the most ambivalent portrayal of French Jews by Dreyfusard novelists is found in the work of Anatole France — particularly in the four novels that make up his Chronicles of our Time. These describe the political and amorous intrigues in a French provincial town at the time of the Affair. Each novel is made up of a series of witty vignettes interspersed with chapters in which France's own mouthpiece, M. Bergeret, holds forth on issues of the time.
France is a sublime cynic. In an early novel, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, the curmudgeonly bookworm Bonnard (another mouthpiece for the author) explains that his large library is "just the reason that I do not know anything; for there is not a single one of those books which does not contradict some other book; so that by the time one has read them all one does not know what to think about anything".
In France's novel Thaïs the sagacious stoic Nicias tells the Christian zealot Paphnuce: "All discussions are useless. My opinion is to have no opinion. My life is devoid of trouble because I have no preferences"; and again: "I suspect no evil, for I believe that men are equally incapable of doing evil or doing good. Good and evil exist only in the opinion of others. The wise man has only custom and usage to guide him in his acts."
Among the characters that appear in the four volumes of France's Chronicles of our Time is the Jewish prefect of the department, Worms-Clavelin, a man as cynical as France himself:
M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin was not credulous. He only thought of religion from a political point of view. He had inherited no creed from his parents, who were aliens to every superstition, as they were to every land. His soul had sucked none of the nourishment of the past from any soil.
This passage suggests that France conceded the point made by the French nationalists that Jews were not "true Frenchmen of France"; but he parodies such an attitude in an exchange between the local notables, the Duc and Duchesse de Brécé, and a Catholic priest, the Abbé Guitrel, about the Dreyfus Affair.
"I am convinced," said M. de Brécé, "as I said before, that the fuss made over this affair is, and can only be, some abominable plot instigated by the enemies of France.""And of religion," gently added Abbé Guitrel. "It is impossible to be a good Frenchman without being a good Christian. And it is clear that the scandal was started in the first place by free-thinkers and freemasons, by Protestants.""Naturally," said the Duke, "Christian France should belong to Frenchmen and Christians, not to Jews and Protestants."
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