Penguin Island by Anatole France

Satire in the tradition of Voltaire

The French writer Anatole France (1884–1924) won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature. His novel Penguin Island, published in 1909, is probably his best-remembered work, at least in the minds of English-language readers. In this comedic and critical novel, France establishes himself as the inheritor of Voltaire’s role as the great satirist of French literature.

Some time in the Middle Ages, a Breton monk named Maël (later Saint Maël) decides it is his mission to sail forth to unknown lands and spread the gospel of Christ to the savages. His boat drifts way off course, and he ends up in the Southern Hemisphere, where he lands on an island full of penguins. At 99 years of age, with failing sight and hearing, Maël thinks the penguins are an Indigenous race of people, so he baptizes them into the Catholic Church. The only witnesses to this sacrament are God and His angels in Heaven, who debate how to rectify Maël’s erroneous baptism of animals. God solves the problem by turning all the penguins into humans, albeit naked uncivilized humans. Maël then tows the Penguins back to Europe, where they establish a new nation in the area of what we know as France.

Spanning centuries in the history of the Penguins, the book is divided into eight related stories taking place in eight different time periods. The early chapters of the book, in which the newly humanized penguins are learning the ways of civilization, are the most funny and entertaining. France seems to be lampooning some of the Edenic noble-savage pipe dreams of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Voltaire’s Candide, however, Penguin Island doesn’t aim its mocking barbs at just one target but rather scatters its shots to make different satirical points in every chapter. In this book everything is game for absurdity and worthy of tongue-in-cheek scorn.

After a while, the fact that these people started out as animals becomes irrelevant. The Penguins of Penguinia are simply another nation of humans, often a surrogate for the French. Some targets for spoofing include religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, capitalism, feudalism, gender roles and sexual inequality, various factions in the modern French political landscape, and even Dante’s Divine Comedy. The most extensive parody is directed at the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s, in which a character named Pyrot is a substitute for Dreyfus and Columban for Emile Zola. To a French reader, the characters and events being satirized in this book would be readily decipherable, but it’s not always easy for an American reader to recognize all the players of every political plot. That doesn’t become too much of an obstacle, however, because enough of the humor and derision is universal to human nature and society, not French-specific.

The early formative years of the Penguins are laugh-out-loud silly at times, but the latter, more modern episodes of their history take the form of more wryly stated indictments of hypocrisy. There is also a science fiction element to the book as the final chapters take place in the future. After all the satire and cynicism, France ends the book on a surprisingly inspirational note of hope. Penguin Island is a work of great insight and much wisdom, but perhaps presented too cleverly for the non-French reader to grasp all in the first read. I think I’ll give it a second look, eventually, because it seems worthy of further scrutiny.