Anatole France
(1844 - 1924)
Born in Paris in 1844, Anatole Thibault France, known as Anatole France, was a great humanist and progressive, writer, poet and novelist, a righteous man and a witness of truth for the Armenians and a Nobel Prize winner.
His first intervention on the Armenian question dates back to 1897, in the aftermath of the massacres perpetrated by the sultan Abdul Hamid II against Ottoman subjects of Christian Armenian origin.
With Emile Zola he fought for the acquittal of the Frenchman Alfred Dreyfus, the officer of Jewish origin sentenced for spying and high treason by an anti-Semitic court martial and later found to be innocent.
In 1901 he founded the newspaper Pro Armenia, convinced that fighting for the cause of a nation means fighting for humanity as a whole. He famously held political rallies, in 1901 in Paris and in 1903 in Rome, in which he remembered the 300,000 Armenian victims of the massacres ordered by sultan Abdul Hamid and the contribution to civilization given by this small Middle Eastern nation.
In 1916, remembering the extermination of the Armenians at the hands of the Young Turks, he vigorously reminded the allies of their “great duties still to be fulfilled …to restore life to martyred peoples ….and to guarantee Armenia’s security and independence”.
He died in Paris. His funeral, on October 18 1924, was attended by a crowd of two hundred thousand people.
(1844 - 1924)
Born in Paris in 1844, Anatole Thibault France, known as Anatole France, was a great humanist and progressive, writer, poet and novelist, a righteous man and a witness of truth for the Armenians and a Nobel Prize winner.
His first intervention on the Armenian question dates back to 1897, in the aftermath of the massacres perpetrated by the sultan Abdul Hamid II against Ottoman subjects of Christian Armenian origin.
With Emile Zola he fought for the acquittal of the Frenchman Alfred Dreyfus, the officer of Jewish origin sentenced for spying and high treason by an anti-Semitic court martial and later found to be innocent.
In 1901 he founded the newspaper Pro Armenia, convinced that fighting for the cause of a nation means fighting for humanity as a whole. He famously held political rallies, in 1901 in Paris and in 1903 in Rome, in which he remembered the 300,000 Armenian victims of the massacres ordered by sultan Abdul Hamid and the contribution to civilization given by this small Middle Eastern nation.
In 1916, remembering the extermination of the Armenians at the hands of the Young Turks, he vigorously reminded the allies of their “great duties still to be fulfilled …to restore life to martyred peoples ….and to guarantee Armenia’s security and independence”.
He died in Paris. His funeral, on October 18 1924, was attended by a crowd of two hundred thousand people.