In a sleepy French provincial town during the Third Republic, a bishopric becomes vacant, and the vultures gather. What follows is a merciless dissection of clerical ambition, as France's finest ecclesiastical minds reveal themselves to be as scheming and self-serving as any worldly politician. Abbé Lantaigne, the seminarist director, worries about the Church's integrity while maneuvering just as ruthlessly as his rivals. The Cardinal-Archbishop pontificates from his salon. M. Guitrel, the professor with questionable associations, becomes a pawn in larger games. No one is spared Anatole France's gimlet eye: not the pious, not the powerful, not even the principles they claim to serve. France, who would win the Nobel Prize for literature, deploys his legendary wit to strip bare the gap between Christian vocation and human ambition. This is satire with teeth, anticlericalism raised to high art, and a window into a France wrestling with its own contradictions at the century's close.
