The Opinions of Jerome Coignard by Anatole France (1893)

This volume of fictionalised essays forms a companion piece to the author's famous novel of the same year, At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque. The novel's main characters, Abbe Coignard and Jacques Tournebroche, return in a group of pieces which retail philosophical discussions had between them and various interlocutors, usually taking place in a secondhand bookshop in their quarter. Boiled down, Abbe Coignard is the representative of Resignation in its dualist fight with Aspiration. And the reader's response to him will depend largely on their position in that philosophical slipstream. As I tend to the Aspirant side, I find him pretty irritating on the whole. There is an extra dimension lent to this by France's making him the eternal wise answer (no doubting which side he's on!) to all contretemps. The strange infallibility of Abbe Coignard! On the other hand there is no questioning the fun of the journey in terms of the liveliness of the writing - it's light and enjoyable and balanced in pace, and humorous elements are drawn out spiritedly. And the questions raised are involving and tasty. Because the philosophy given creedence by the author through his partiality is not to my taste, I wasn't feeling all that well-disposed toward this... that is, until the last few essays. These form a group of five around the topic of Justice, investigating the issues of wrong and right and how they are conceived societally, the faulty forms we use to distribute ethical power, and, most tellingly, the means we utilize to understand and deliver justice in terms of our ethical conclusions. France uses Coignard as a mouthpiece for purely Christ-ian encapsulations of morality - the attitude of universal forgiveness as it could possibly be applied in this world. I think perhaps what he misses is that Christ wasn't of this world entirely and this huge and constant forgiveness is a very difficult ask in human terms, let alone having humans build it into their worldly systems of justice. The best pieces in the book though, by far.