La République des animaux

A major work in George Orwell’s oeuvre alongside 1984, Animal Farm is a dystopia offering a satire of the Russian Revolution and a critique of the Soviet regime, particularly Stalinism. It was written between late 1943 and early 1944, at a time when the alliance with the Soviet Union was at its height and Stalin enjoyed the highest esteem in Britain, both among the general public and the intelligentsia.

The novel is divided into ten chapters, describing a farm on which the animals rebel against their master, seize power, drive out the humans and live in self-sufficiency. The first edition was published in 1945 in England, though not without considerable difficulty: Orwell was turned down by four publishers who objected to the offensive nature of the text, which likened Communist leaders to pigs. The publisher Frederic Warburg, despite pressure from those around him and from agents of the Ministry of Information, published it nonetheless in August 1945.

“Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job” (George Orwell, letter to Dwight Macdonald, 5 December 1946).

A fine copy.