Politics & Power Quote by Anatole France

Anatole France slips two blades into one sentence: one for the state, one for the sanctimony of “objectivity.” “No government ought to be without censors” reads like a sober maxim until the second clause snaps shut: “and where the press is free, no one ever will.” The trick is the inversion. France isn’t defending censorship as a policy so much as exposing it as an instinct. Power doesn’t merely enact censorship; it craves it. Even in a nominally free press, the censor reappears in civilian clothing: publishers anticipating prosecutions, editors trimming risk, readers rewarding conformity, libel laws and moral panics doing the dirty work without official badges. The subtext is modern: repression rarely needs a single villain when a culture can supply a thousand small enforcers.

Then he pivots to metaphysics: “Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.” France, a novelist with a skeptic’s smile, treats providence as a PR strategy. When events don’t add up, “chance” becomes the respectable label that lets believers keep a guiding hand in the story without producing evidence. It’s not just a jab at religion; it’s a jab at narrative itself, the human hunger to retrofit meaning onto randomness.

Put together, the line is a diagnosis of two related conveniences: censorship as the unacknowledged reflex of authority, and “chance” as the unacknowledged alibi of faith. France wrote in a France still haunted by the Church’s prestige, the Dreyfus-era fights over truth and propaganda, and a press that could be loud yet still policed by law, class, and custom. The cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a warning about how easily societies manufacture their own blindfolds.