Penguin Island

When the aged, nearly blind missionary Saint Maël drifts to a northern island and mistakes a colony of tall, solemn seabirds for a congregation of little men, he does the natural thing: he preaches to them and baptises them. The mistake throws Heaven into confusion, and God resolves it by the only logical means — He turns the penguins into human beings and sets them loose upon history. From this single absurdity, Anatole France unrolls the entire life of a nation.

Told in the grave, scrupulous voice of a historian poring over his sources, Penguin Island follows the penguins as they invent clothing and shame, seize one another’s land and call it property, and stumble through a comic Dark Age of dragons, relics, and forged pedigrees into the unmistakable shape of modern France. Saints, kings, conquerors, and financiers each take their turn, and each is shown resting his grandeur on the same foundation of accident, theft, and self-flattering legend.

At the book’s burning centre is France’s own great cause, the Dreyfus Affair, replayed as the case of an innocent penguin officer convicted of stealing “eighty thousand trusses of hay” — a savage farce that is also one of the most honest accounts of the episode ever written. Beneath the laughter runs France’s darkest idea: that history is not progress but repetition, a wheel that climbs to ruin and begins again. Voltairean in its irony and Swiftian in its scope, Penguin Island is the most audacious satire by one of Europe’s great ironists, and the work that did most to win him the 1921 Nobel Prize.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation with an editor’s foreword on the book’s satire, technique, and the Dreyfus Affair behind it, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.