Anatole France's "The Gods Will Have Blood"

Artwork by Deathprophetik

I keep having to remind myself that the text doesn't take place in Russia - despite the importance of the words Citizen/Citizeness, the story takes place post French Revolution, not Russian Revolution! Élodie, the woman who represents the rational and commercial side of interpersonal relationships is not specifically and distinctly representing a paragon of individual capitalistic selfishness opposed to communal communistic goals.  Or, at least that's not all she represents. 

The fact that this story could be placed in either Revolution, or indeed century's later in Nazi occupied France shows the consistency of the failures of human nature.  The text focuses on the dangers of indiscriminate equality stripping citizens of their individuality.  Without allowing for circumstance, punishment (minimum sentencing?) is meted without consideration of  nuance or humanity. Ironically, this lesson is reversed when looking at the character of Gamelin, where we see that even (perhaps especially) the most idealistic are succeptible to the corruption of power.

This text is so dense that I think that I'm best served to just take notes:

Perspective shift between Age and Experience vs Youth and Idealism

• Passion and idealism as an aspect of the male youth, Gamelin living in the "eternal now" looking forward to an utopian future.
• Old Brotteaux's council re Gamelin's role as a Magistrate (VIII):
• "weigh the balance between love and hate . . . not truth and error"
• "submit everything to a throw of the dice. In matters of justice, that is still the surest method"
• Brotteaux: egoism inspires all men's acts of generosity and self-sacrifice by creating empathy (XII)
• Brotteaux: life is pointless' benevolence adds flavour (XII)
• Brotteaux: Acts of kindness are born of pride and superiority (XII)

Links between pain and love

• Manifested mainly in Élodie's desire for Évariste, but represents Gamelin's patriotism
• "tortured the sensually inclined" (V)
• Évariste:  "Aflame with love and anger" (III)
• Citizeness Gamelin's love for son (III)
• Élodie:  "She would have preferred him wiser in matters of love, more natural, more brutal" (V)
• Élodie, overcome by passion for Évariste as a magistrate is seduced and throws him a red carnation like a drop of blood (XI)
• "Nowadays his coming filled her with horror, he was appearing more and more to her to be something vilely mostrous; she feared him and adored him" (XIII)
• "the bloody-minded lover and the sensually mad girl made savage and silent love" (XIII)
• "she felt herself as if drwoning in a strangely mixed flood of horror and ecstatic lust" etc. (XVI)
• "If you love me, bury my name in eternal silence" (XXV)
• "At the thought of the knife cutting through her neck, her very flesh melted in an ecstacy of sexual horror" (XXV)
• Élodie eventually finds love in the repeating pattern of falling for an abusive man (XXIX). Indicates cycle of revolutions?

Inappropriate Love

• Desmahis's rape of Tronches? (XI)
• Évariste & Élodie's / Julie & Fortuné de Chassagne's unmarried marriages
• Same-sex attraction (XXI)
• Renaudin's rape of Julie.(XXI)

Dualism Tension:

• Évariste Gamelin and his duel characters:
• Évariste in the private sphere
• Gamelin in public sphere.  
• Tronches and her absorbed twin. (XI)
• Gamelin's subconscious hatred of women (XIII)
• Us vs. them issue of the French (patriots) vs. the émigrés.
• Hiding from the truth: "Shge knew in her heart of hearst what her son had bceome; she knew it, but she did not want to beleive it, she did not want to admit it to herself" (XVIII) 
• Évariste's passionate hatred of Julie's dishonourable lover / blindness to similarities with his relationship with Élodie 

Religion:

• Priest: "I, monsieur, not knowing you, love you better than myself: God demands that of me" (XII)
• "Gamelin was beginning to turn punishment into a religious and mystical ideal, to give it a virtue and a merit of its own" (XIII)"
• Crimes and infamies of atheism" (XIII)
• Brotteaux: "would repudiate any wish to attack religion, considering it necessary for people; he only desired that its ministers were philosophers instead of controversialists." (XIV)
• "Having lived to old age without practising her religion, shw was coming to feel the need of it" (XVIII)
• "Their eyes had seen God, these magistrates of the Revolutionaary Tribunal.  The Supreme Bieing, acknowledged by Robespierre, flooded them with His pure light.  They worshipped, they had faith" (XXII)

Women as the true power in the private sphere (but powerless in the public sphere):

• Élodie and her manipulation of their love affair (III)
• Mother and her management of Évariste (VII)
• Citizeness Rochemaure and Évariste's financial wellbeing (VII)

Commercial rationale behind a woman's love:

• Citizeness Rochemaure's arranging of Gamelin's role in the magistrate "securing herself a friend at 'court' against the day where she might need one" (VIII)
• Citizeness Gamelin's ongoing pursuit of money and food
• Elodie's assessment of Gamelin as a way to continue her independence (II)

Art:

• Playing cards = revolt / gamble
• Évariste's criticism of Élodie's elaborate stichwork. (II)
• Painting of Electra "least unsatisfactory of his works"
• "The Academy reflected social opinion too much in matters of art... "
• Évariste Gamelin [note use of both names marrying lover and magistrate], as an artist cold and pedantic, could see bauty only in the Antique: it inspired his admiration rather than stirred his senses (XIII)
• Nested story of Sacramouche the marionette (XIV)

Misc:

• Marat depicted as the symbolic sacrificial leader (VI)
• Rousseau, Rousseau, Rousseau! // Werther! (X) // Epicurus! (XIV) // Lucretius! (XIX) // Phedre! (XXVIII)
• Interesting shifts in tense to the present tense (XXVII)
• Gamelin's charity, sharing bread with poor mother (III) using same knife to attempt suicide (XXVII)
• Foreshadowing the holocaust:"The [innocent] condemned, their toilet completed, their hair cropped and their shirts cut away at the neck, were packed like cattle in the small room separated fromthe jailer's office by a glass partition, to await the executioner." (XXIV)
• Continuing mention of the truly oppressed's desire and focus on the small pleasures of life // love the spectacle of punishment regardless of who is being punished
• Power corrupts: Evil can be done even with the best of intentions.