Peguy crusade against the modern world 
Charles Peguy is a man in the history of French literature. Poet of the incarnation, formidable polemicist, he had a fighting spirit and religion. The Dreyfus affair in the Great War, he sought to bring about a heroic conception of life. To death.
Peguy's work is itself a memorial of the Great War. By dying in battle, a bullet in the forehead, the first days of September 14, the author, who was then a lieutenant, has become like one of those soldiers whose names are engraved on memorials that mark our countries. The property of all and anyone. Vichy and some others have indeed sought to attach his name in vain. Péguy was too unclassifiable, which he announced: "I'm always on two levels. "Nationalist among Dreyfus, monarchist among Republicans, carnal among mystics. Jean Guéhenno summary of a formula without appeal: he was a Republican who did not vote and a Christian who did not communicate.
No author has been more French than he. Sedentary among sedentary, as far as can be, it would hardly traveled a single country, a few acres of land connecting Orleans to Paris and Chartres in the sky. This is the man of a triple loyalty France, the rural civilization and Christianity. Fides, faith. He was deep in the body, supported by "the little girl Hope", the second theological virtue, which he celebrated in the mystery of The Porch Under the second (1910). It will look beautiful, it is unprecedented in our literary history. The reason is simple: it proceeds from an oral tradition. This is the legatee of the peasant culture and folk religion. A child of old France, among the simple simple, which only read the missal. One of the twelve critical Christians from Christ, as the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.
It will remain as the author of a prophetic work, long curse against the modern world, under the sign of Antigone and Joan of Arc, the two great figures of the heroic disobedience. From this work emerges at once a prayer, a meditation and a sermon. Here we have records that will be of stylistic turn. The litany, dialogue, oration. All punctuated by a tongue-boned, robustness of a draft animal, a mesmerizing monotony.
life and the books are finally Péguy one and the same thing. They argue the same uninsured, that of an uncompromising character, just comfortable in denying the controversy, the melee. A writer reagent, which reacted continuously in the event and loved to be at the heart of the fray, making "personalities" as he liked to say, because the ideas are of flesh. It felt like the person need to personify, fighting against the disembodiment of the modern world, this emerging abstract art, all of which kept him away. To this man that he was opposed rooted the materiality of the world, the gravity of things, the relief of the Earth. Creation is tangible, or it is not. The spiritual did not he incarnated in the flesh? Christ did not he man?
A spokesman for the nation's real
Peguy comes from afar, from time immemorial, from the depths of the history of France. He is ageless. It is through him being French speaking community, the chorus of our depths. "A human product it took nineteen centuries of culture to bring civilization to this point," Barres said of him. He was born January 7, 1873 Orleans into a family of craftsmen, raised by a mother mending chairs in the memory of a carpenter father, died after the siege of Paris. Unable to pull the child back to these origins, who wrote: "Everything is played before we had twelve. "
He entered the century through the back door, the fellows of the republican school, only that it never closes. Until the end, these first teachers continue to show him in the light of the aurora Enchanted - "beautiful as black hussars". They will replace the dead father and re-direct on the royal road of the Third Republic: the graduation certificate to the Ecole Normale Superieure, which he resigned, however.
is that in the meantime, the young man was "converted" to socialism. With his friends, including Albert Mather, the future historian of the French Revolution, had not he called his dorm room, his "turn", the name of "Utopia"? Whole program. He wrote in La Revue Socialiste texts naïve, as quoted from the socialist utopian dream. But it was the Dreyfus Affair will throw in the arena. On this occasion, he will meet Bernard Lazare, "prophet of Israel," which he will join the cause (more than the deportee Devil's Island) and to which he devoted unforgettable pages in Our Youth (1910), the masterpiece of Dreyfus.
Peguy then his headquarters, his first bookstore Street Cujas, a "corner shop", he proclaims proudly. The basement is home to "the revolution of the synods and councils of war Dreyfusards. The manager of the bookstore requires all with his cane, his black cape and monocles. He prides himself on keeping in a drawer his gun ordinance in case. There he succumbed to the verb of Jaures, the great unrequited love of his life. The word of the socialist tribune has literally snapped. That it overwhelmed any audience, so much so that Barres, similarly subdued, saying they did not know if this flood of words came from a spring or a cistern. A tank, digs in addition, will eventually declare Peguy, who did not forgive his opportunism, nor its support for the anti-clerical policy of the "little father Combes, much less his pacifism. It is thought at first that it launch its famous "Everything begins with mysticism and ends in politics. Poor Jaurès! He dragged by the beard and hair with a kind of frenzy. This "big poussah", the "representative in France of the German imperial policy," a "traitor by nature." L'Argent (1913) and more money due (published posthumously) are all charges against the murderous socialist leader. His assassination on paper, before his assassination Real July 31, 1914.
Peguy will therefore aloof on the sidelines of official socialism. In 1900 it will install its Monographs Fortnight at 8, rue de la Sorbonne, opposite the venerable institution, its most powerful enemy, the voice of scientific rationalism and positivism. The "intellectual party." Albert Thibaudet will call this the "Republic of teachers." This is the philosophy of Bergson that will save the manager of the Journal of intellectual poison, giving him access to a higher order of reality. Duration, which, with him, becomes historical depth. Intuition as an antidote to the intellectualism of his generation. In a word, freedom. This one even offered him the Cahiers. Here, it is not subject to the constraints of publishing, nor those of journalism, is never as good as when it is not channeled, as if to give reason to Romain Rolland, who compared his work to the Loire, in turn, full, calm, majestic, untamed.
Cahiers is the work of his life (a total of 15 series and 229 numbers for a number of subscribers that oscillate between 900 and 1200). He led them to overreach, even if it is a collective enterprise. Thibaudet compared them one day in the adventure of printers Lutherans of the seventeenth century, the first editors of the Bible. But Peguy "was not a Protestant, certainly, but it was more a Protestant: he was the man who protests. He was not content also not to protest, he corrected the proofs and composed. Not just a thinker, but a typographer, who revived his way to the guild.
Peguy do not believe in the mythology of progress, the idea that "humanity is like a man who is aging." He repeated, amplified, absolutized the quarrel between ancients and moderns, to give the size of a cosmic battle. For him, original sin was delayed effect: it coincided with the advent modern times. The modern, this one falls - the easy money, destitute of soul, in the reign of quantity.
heroism against forfeiture
There was in him a background of historical pessimism, corrected by faith. "We are defeated. The world is against us. "In the beginning of chimeras, quickly followed notebooks of grievances, bearing traces of its powerful nostalgia for the old world, where man" coappartenait "at the Creation. His work is like a requiem, the last fires of the rural civilization, suburban and plebeian, in the process of disintegrating under the money. Two words punctuate this decadence: prostitution and degradation. In other words, the gentrification of the people, which Peguy given a name: the "metaphysics of savings." This is why it refuses to start. He lived
walk-in mythological time, calling it "mystical" a mythical to him, perhaps to distinguish itself from Georges Sorel, the author of Reflections on Violence, familiar with the boutique notebooks of the fortnight . Heroized if the past is that he aspired to what this world of beginnings never sets, that time is irrevocably fixed, as at the dawn of the world, in his epic and chivalrous.
All those who crossed were struck by her peasant look. There he must seek the origins of his genetic code. Rue d'Ulm, Cahiers of the Fortnight are merely stages in the rediscovery and reclaiming his roots. The French community, which sees itself as one of the elements, among others, owes a debt to it, paying them in his books, his first Jeanne Arc (1897), a man who never ceases to return to her father's house.
It is so haunted by his people that he raised the dead, like no other before him, except perhaps Michelet, one of his teachers. Thus he spoke on behalf of his people, the crowd silent and invisible. Basically, it's as if all these obscure men had to wait centuries before sending their best result at the Ecole Normale Superieure for access at last to speak. How could they be disappointed? Peguy never betrayed. That the man of loyalty block. "We never deny an atom of our past. "
His return to the faith demanded a specific language. This is poetry. We said then that he had put "holy water in his oil." Quite the contrary: it was heated with alcohol in his faith. Poetry is inseparable from her religious feelings. He was a poet he prayed and meditated. Faith has pulled dead ends or by locking his pessimism and loneliness set. There he again became a pilgrim, pilgrim for God, through the Beauce plain, with only the arrows leading from the cathedral Chartres. There, before the great Gothic nave, erected in the distance, he could exclaim, after three days of walking, "I could not feel anything, neither fatigue nor my feet. All of my impurities fell one stroke. I was another man. "
Religion, poetry, nation. It's all one. They work together in a kind of polyphonic singing. Homer responds to Clio, the muse of history, as Peguy staged in his Dialogue of history and the pagan soul. For their part, Corneille, Pascal and Hugo talk with those whom the manager called the Cahiers "Mécontemporains," among whom he counted. Jeanne him using breadcrumb. At the order to condense the French destiny. This will be the Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc (1910), his second Jeanne. And Eve (1913), poem ocean thousand nine hundred eleven quatrains in Alexandria, his Legend centuries to him, embracing the history of mankind, since the first man. Eve is a mystical cast which is ordered to build a huge cathedral of light, which has thrown everything Peguy, Rome and Jerusalem, the land of men and the kingdom of God. The fertility of the last Peguy is staggering. He is a man in flood. It overflows, while hastening to say, as if he felt his hour approached.
field of honor as destiny
So Peguy lived and worked as a monk and a soldier. Similarly, he died as he took his notebooks, standing, controlling the fire, the eve of the Battle of the Marne, September 5, 1914, leaving behind some of the most beautiful verses of the French language, including its own epitaph: "Blessed are those who died in a just war / Blessed are the ripe corn and the corn harvested. "
There is little doubt, however, it was the wrong time. His conception of war is completely anachronistic, like leaving the theater of Corneille. The child was the "debacle", the eyes always fixed on the blue line of the Vosges. As stated Maurras, revenge was now "queen of France." For the author of Our Country (1905) as well. He shared the sentiment, of his generation, who awaited a pretext to unleash. This will be the coup de Tanger "(call William II in the Moroccan port in March 1905). La Belle Epoque then ends abruptly. Europe is entering a long vigil of arms. Peguy is preparing its own way, never missing reserve period, nor the great maneuvers of 1913, a prelude to the massacre, he did not see coming.
Bernanos said that you should never speak ill of him. True enough. But to be fair, it should never fail to speak well of Jean Giono, writer farmer too, and that gives us to see another interpretation of the war, a tragic different, which has its source in the Sermon on the mountain, the great Pan was able to reclaim Manosque. Peguy slipped into the darkness of the First World War. Somehow, if Jaurès is the first death, Peguy is the second. The one thought we could have prevented the slaughter, the other for having believed it would not occur. We first killed the peace, then heroism. Both were significantly affected in the face. For that is 14-18. The end of the figurative, striking face in the tables in the forefront as hell in the trenches. By getting rid of the human face, they liquidated the question of the humanity of man, which has become a stranger to himself. Finally reduces to the anonymity of the Unknown Soldier, which honors by default every 11 November.
Francois Bousquet
This article appeared in issue 3 of the magazine.
