Named after the rue Anatole-France in Levallois-Perret, which honours the writer Anatole France (1844–1924).
The street was formerly the rue de Cormeille. Born François Anatole Thibault, the writer was the son of the Paris bookseller Noël France, whose shop ended up called simply France. Elected to the Académie française in 1896, he sided with Zola in the Dreyfus affair and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921.