«Fake news» from the Second Empire

In his column, former Federal Councillor Pascal Couchepin shares a piece of reading that has made an impression on him. This month, he discusses disinformation through the prism of Anatole France's novel Le Comte Morin, député.

A friend of mine, a local councillor when I started in politics in 1968, an old-fashioned socialist and a self-taught lover of culture and humanism, introduced me to Anatole France, winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was fond of quoting a phrase from one of Anatole France's novels, L'Ile aux pingouins (Penguin Island), drawing on a background of 19th-century anticlericalism: «If substance prevails over form, the priesthood is ruined.»

The context of this sentence is as follows. L'Ile aux pingouins opens with a comical scene. An old Irish monk, just a few days before his death, lies down in a stone boat that is thrown out to sea, leaving his wife and children behind.