Anatole France was a French poet , journalist , and novelist . He was born in Paris , and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire . He was a successful novelist , with several best-sellers . Ironic and skeptical , he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters . He was a member of the Académie française , and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements . France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel 's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust 's In Search of Lost Time . The son of a bookseller , France spent most of his life around books . France was a bibliophile . His father 's bookstore , called the Librairie France , specialized in books and papers on the French Revolution and was frequented by many notable writers and scholars of the day . Anatole France studied at the Collège Stanislas , a private Catholic school , and after graduation he helped his father by working in his bookstore . After several years he secured the position of cataloguer at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre . In 1876 he was appointed librarian for the French Senate . Anatole France began his career as a poet and a journalist . In 1869 , Le Parnasse Contemporain published one of his poems , La Part de Madeleine . In 1875 , he sat on the committee which was in charge of the third Parnasse Contemporain compilation . As a journalist , from 1867 , he wrote many articles and notices . He became famous with the novel Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard -LRB- 1881 -RRB- . Its protagonist , skeptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard , embodied France 's own personality . The novel was praised for its elegant prose and won him a prize from the Académie française . In La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque -LRB- 1893 -RRB- Anatole France ridiculed belief in the occult ; and in Les Opinions de Jerome Coignard -LRB- 1893 -RRB- , France captured the atmosphere of the fin de siècle . France was elected to the Académie française in 1896 . France took an important part in the Dreyfus Affair . He signed Emile Zola 's manifesto supporting Alfred Dreyfus , a Jewish army officer who had been falsely convicted of espionage . France wrote about the affair in his 1901 novel Monsieur Bergeret . France 's later works include L'Île des Pingouins -LRB- 1908 -RRB- which satirizes human nature by depicting the transformation of penguins into humans -- after the animals have been baptized by mistake by the nearsighted Abbot Mael . Les dieux ont soif -LRB- 1912 -RRB- is a novel , set in Paris during the French Revolution , about a true-believing follower of Robespierre and his contribution to the bloody events of the Reign of Terror of 1793-94 . It is a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism and explores various other philosophical approaches to the events of the time . La Revolte des Anges -LRB- 1914 -RRB- is often considered France 's most profound novel . It tells the story of Arcade , the guardian angel of Maurice d'Esparvieu . Arcade falls in love , joins the revolutionary movement of angels , and towards the end realizes that the overthrow of God is meaningless unless `` in ourselves and in ourselves alone we attack and destroy Ialdabaoth '' . He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 . He died in 1924 and is buried in the Neuilly-sur-Seine community cemetery near Paris . On 31 May 1922 , France 's entire works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum -LRB- Prohibited Books Index -RRB- of the Roman Catholic Church . He regarded this as a `` distinction '' . This Index was abolished in 1966 . In 1877 , Anatole France married Valérie Guérin de Sauville , a granddaughter of the miniaturist of Louis XVI , with whom he had a daughter , Suzanne , in 1881 -LRB- dec. 1918 -RRB- . France 's relations with women were always turbulent , and in 1888 he began a relationship with Madame Arman de Caillavet , who conducted a celebrated literary salon of the Third Republic ; the affair lasted until her death in 1910 . After his divorce in 1893 , he had many liaisons , notably with Mme. Gagey , who committed suicide in 1911 . France married again in 1920 , Emma Laprévotte . After his death in 1924 France was the object of attacks - '' a particularly venomous one was written by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle , afterwards to become a collaborator of the Nazis '' and detractors decided he was a vulgar and derivative writer . An admirer , the English writer George Orwell , defended him however and declared that he remained very readable , and that `` it is unquestionable that he was attacked partly from political motives . The clerics and reactionaries hated him in just the same way as they hated Zola . France had lost no opportunity of poking fun at the Church . He was everything that the clerics and revanchists , the people who afterwards sucked the blacking off Hitler 's boots , most detested '' .