The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

“The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard” (“Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard,” 1881) is Anatole France’s first novel (France, 1844–1924), which brought him literary fame (before that, he wrote novels “Iocasta” (1879) and “The Lean Cat” (1879)).

Academician Sylvestre Bonnard devotes his life to searching for ancient manuscripts. He lives in a familiar, comfortable world of thought—his own scholarly pursuits and books. But from time to time, the breath of living life bursts into this artificial world limited to his study and library: the book delivery man, Monsieur Coquoz, with his “stories”; a young unknown woman with a child whom Bonnard sends a piece of firewood for Christmas so she can celebrate in warmth; or Jeanne-Alexandre, the granddaughter of a woman once loved by Bonnard, who falls into the hands of swindlers. Trying to pull the orphan girl out of the humiliating situation she has ended up in—which, under the laws of the time, is considered a crime—Bonnard commits an act: he kidnaps the girl from the boarding school and marries her to one of his students.

In “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” France develops the principles of a new type of novel. At the center is an intellectual hero, sensitive to everything happening around him and drawing important conclusions from seemingly insignificant facts, events, and observations. The plot unfolds like a special “experiment” with the idea itself. The author, as it were, tests his hero’s starting thesis: “… Spending days with old texts is not life.” The conflict of the novel takes on a philosophical character: it’s not characters who collide, but different views on the meaning of life and a person’s purpose. By emphasizing the inadequacy and inferiority of Bonnard’s life, cut off from the world of action and focused on cultural values, France simultaneously shows the other extreme: active, yet spiritually empty, Madame Préfer and Master Musch. Shifting the novel’s center of gravity from intrigue to the development of the hero’s thought and his inner world made the two parts—“The Firewood” and “Jeanne-Alexandre”—somewhat independent. First readers and critics reproached France for the looseness of the composition. However, both parts are united by the image of the main hero and by the commonality of the problems posed. The writer considers the question of the relationship between thought and action, between the world of culture and objective reality. In the novel’s finale, he arrives at the idea of the necessity of synthesizing these two spheres.

Bonnard’s “crime,” from the author’s point of view, is not what society and the law see in it. Bonnard himself calls himself a criminal when, having given Jeanne-Alexandre his library as a wedding present, he can’t resist taking away several of the books most dear to him. Bonnard cannot achieve unity of thought and action. The world of thought and culture turns out to be more real for him than the world of action. But by making this world self-sufficient, it can kill living life—just as the fairy tales Bonnard tells his sickly and sensitive grandson finally break the boy’s fragile nature and bring him closer to death.

In “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” France’s distinctive style is clearly evident: his irony, humor, skepticism, mastery of a concise phrase and a precise word.