Charles Péguy

The French poet and author Charles Pierre Péguy (1873-1914) was a fervent Roman Catholic, patriot, and social reformer. Through his writings and actions he influenced many Frenchmen who went to war in 1914.

Born into a working-class family in Orléans on Aug. 7, 1873, Charles Péguy was able, thanks to scholarships, to attend Lakanal, the celebrated lycée outside Paris, and the école Normale Supérieure in Paris, another celebrated academic institution. At the école Normale he studied under Henri Bergson, whose antirationalistic philosophy did much to confirm Péguy's mystic bent. Although Péguy wished to become a teacher, he failed the agrégation examination and then became a writer. His first work, Jeanne d'Arc, Domrémy, les Batailles, written in collaboration with Marcel Baudouin, revealed Péguy's socialist orientation and his Christian inspiration, both of which grew deeper. Jeanne d'Arc is a "drama dedicated to all who will have died fighting against universal evil, to all who will have died to found the universal socialist Republic." It appeared in 1897. Three years later Péguy founded the periodical Cahiers de la quinzaine as a means of communicating his ideas directly. He then concentrated his energies on polemical writing until, a few years before his death, he began working on the great liturgical poems for which he is now famous.

Political Writings

Péguy's ideological views are strong and stern; yet, at least when observed from a distance and en bloc, they appear more than a little contradictory. Péguy was a militant defender of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus but not an enemy of the army; he could not accept all the teachings of the Church, yet he was profoundly Christian; he was a Socialist and at the same time a severe critic of the Socialist party. Some of the contradictions, however, disappear when his thought is placed in its historical context and its fluctuations and evolution are traced. When a student at Lakanal, Péguy moved toward socialism in proportion as he moved away from the Church. Then, when a student at the école Normale, although his fervor for socialism had in no way abated, he moved closer to the Church. By a curious but not illogical itinerary, Péguy went from a defense of social causes like Dreyfusism to a defense of army and nation, whose honor he vindicated by refusing all conformism and whitewash. From the nation he moved to a defense of the Church - Joan of Arc is a double heroine. Yet not until 1908 did Péguy declare openly that he had found his faith again. And still there were reserves and recantations; his Christianity was never quite orthodox, just as his socialism was always highly individualistic. From 1900 Péguy declared his objections to the Socialist party openly. He deplored socialism's identification with materialism and atheism as well as its tacit approval of conformism and collectivism. When the Tangier incident brought home to him the danger that threatened France, socialism with its internationalism and pacifism finally had nothing more to say to Péguy. For the rest of his life he campaigned for Church and country.

A close look at Péguy's ideas in historical context and chronology reveals most clearly that in every instance his stand was dictated by a passion for truth and justice. And this passion gave his thought its basic coherence. It was in the name of truth and justice that he published his Cahiers and, in its pages, did not hesitate to attack any institution - the Church, the university, the Socialist party - that he found guilty of betraying its mission or, as he said, of sacrificing a mystique to a politique. In the name of truth and justice he invited contributions from thinkers of diverse tendencies. Although its circulation was never very large, the Cahiers de la quinzaine thus exercised a significant force in the spiritual and intellectual life of pre-World War I France.

Péguy's Poetry

Péguy's conversion in 1908 gave impetus to his creative work. He revised his Jeanne d'Arc and composed the extraordinarily long lyrical meditations that he called mystères and tapisseries. In Jeanne he had mingled prose and verse. For the mystères he used free verse with blanks and full stops, which created a very personal rhythm pattern. Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième virtu (1911) is one of the most famous. For subsequent works Péguy preferred a more orthodox line. The 8,000 verses of Eve (1913), completed a few months before his death, were written in unbroken Alexandrines. But Péguy's phrasing was still the solemn and repetitious sort associated with a litany. Each strophe repeats the preceding one with only minor variation to indicate the slow but sure progress of the poem. Their rhythm has reminded critics of a soldiers's step or of the plodding footfall of a peasant. In structure Péguy's poems constitute vast accumulations of pious rhapsody and reflexion, a verbal cathedral, as it were, raised to the glory of God. Péguy's poetry stands somewhat outside the French traditions, far removed from symbolist or modernist trends.

Charles Péguy enlisted on the first day of World War I and shortly afterward was killed leading his men in a charge in the Battle of the Marne on Sept. 5, 1914.

Further Reading

Julien Green and Ann Green published two volumes of translations of Péguy's works, Basic Verities: Prose and Poetry (1943) and Men and Saints: Prose and Poetry (1944). There are two additional volumes published by Julien Green, God Speaks: Religious Poetry (1945) and The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc (1950). Pansy Pakenham translated The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, and Other Poems (1956). Majorie Villiers, Charles Péguy: A Study in Integrity (1966), is the first full-length biography of Péguy in English. Two valuable introductions to Péguy are Alexander Dru, Péguy (1956), which provides a chronological survey of the events of his life, and Nelly Jussem-Wilson, Charles Péguy (1965), which includes useful appendixes. A critical study is Yvonne Servais, Charles Péguy: The Pursuit of Salvation (1953). Hans A. Schmitt, Charles Péguy: The Decline of an Idealist (1967), is a moral study.

Additional Sources

St. Aubyn, Frederic C. (Frederic Chase), Charles Péguy, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

Péguy, Charles (1873-1914). Socialist, and later Catholic, poet and polemicist, whose poetry and prose both make use, in different ways, of remarkable effects of powerful and repetitive rhetoric. In his gradual move towards Catholicism, and towards attitudes more usually associated with the Right of the period, some observers have seen a profound political reorientation; but there is a strong case for seeing these later attitudes as a logical and organic development of his fairly idiosyncratic socialism, which owed more to the French tradition than to international Marxism, containing strong elements of Jacobin nationalism and working-class traditionalism.

Born in Orléans of peasant stock, Péguy in 1894 entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he came under the influence of Herr and Jaurès, and involved himself in socialist politics. In 1895 he returned to Orléans to start writing his first Jeanne d'Arc (published in 1897), a dramatic trilogy dedicated to all those who ‘seront morts pour tâcher de porter remède au mal universel’.

In 1896 Péguy returned to the ENS and was soon writing for the Revue socialiste. The Dreyfus Affair exploded in late 1897, and Péguy was among those young socialists who defied the conventional wisdom of Guesde and his group (that socialists should stay out of the fight); a strong Dreyfusard, in 1899 he wrote a series of important articles for the Revue blanche. Appalled by official socialist attitudes, in January 1900 he started the journal Les Cahiers de la quinzaine, in which, over the next 14 years, a gifted band of collaborators including Daniel Halévy, Israël Zangwill, Romain Rolland, the Tharaud brothers, Bernard-Lazare, and Georges Sorel were to write. Péguy's own lengthy contributions count among the greatest examples of polemic in modern France. His disillusionment with those from the Dreyfus camp who now, after their victory, were substituting politics for the ‘mystique’ of the Dreyfus cause, culminated in his polemical masterpiece Notre jeunesse (1910). Meanwhile, in Notre patrie (1905), the divisions among Frenchmen were seen to fade into insignificance beside the reality of national fervour in the face of external threats. Other polemics were concerned with more intellectual problems: an attack on the ‘scientific’ historical method used by the Sorbonne; a defence of Bergson's philosophy against his opponents; and a recurrent praise of the traditions of old France.

Around 1908 Péguy refound his faith as a Catholic Christian, and in 1910 published his Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc, a long poem in which, around the dialogues of the 1897 play, Jeanne, obsessed with the problems of suffering and damnation, meditates at length, the centre-piece being the vivid and moving description of Christ's Passion. This was followed by two further ‘mysteries’ in the same mode, Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu (1911) and Le Mystère des Saints-Innocents (1912). Other powerful religious poems, such as the Présentation de la Beauce à Notre-Dame de Chartres (1913), culminated in the long meditation of Ève (1913), in which effects of almost monotonous repetition create a monumental and overwhelming effect.

In the years 1910-14 Péguy found himself perpetually at the centre of controversy, and reacted powerfully in a variety of articles. Catholic criticism of his Jeanne d'Arc led to a violent response in Un nouveau théologien: M. Fernand Laudet (1911); bitterness at the Sorbonne ‘Cabale’ led to vicious attacks on Lavisse, Lanson, etc. But above all, his hatred for Jaurès, once so greatly admired at the time of the Affair, but attacked in Notre jeunesse as having betrayed his former companions through his cynical misuse of Dreyfusist idealism for political ends, was now exacerbated by Jaurès's espousal of international pacifism; in L'Argent and L'Argent suite (1913) Péguy vilified Jaurès as a traitor, and an agent of ‘Pangermanism’. Contemporary observers saw paranoia in Péguy's attitudes at this time. But, though there was much injustice involved, the prose articles of 1910-14 contain some of the most brilliant and effective polemics in the French language.

Within the first weeks of the war, on 5 September 1914, Péguy, a reservist, was killed fighting in the Battle of the Marne.

[Richard Griffiths]

Bibliography

• N. Jussem-Wilson, Charles Péguy (1965)
• E. Cahm, Péguy et le nationalisme français (1972)

Péguy, Charles (shärl pāgē') , 1873–1914, French poet and writer. Of a poor, working family, he won scholarships and made a brilliant record as a student. He left the École normale supérieure to devote himself to the cause of socialism. He was, however, individual in his views, and he broke with the socialist party. In 1900 he founded the Cahiers de la quinzaine, a periodical in which he published his own works and those of other young writers. Through his life he worked passionately for justice, truth, and the good of the common person and the world. He was the outstanding Roman Catholic supporter of Dreyfus in the Dreyfus Affair, and his polemics against injustice were fiery. Though formally he was often at odds with the church, he is among the foremost modern Catholic writers. He sought to infuse spirituality into every aspect of life. His great poem Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc (1910, tr. by Julian Green 1950) expresses his ideal of the spiritual in action. His repetitive chantlike verse has great power. Others of his long works are Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu (1911) and Eve (1913). He was killed at the battle of the Marne in World War I. Translations of his works appear in Basic Verities (1943) and Men and Saints (1944), both translated by Ann and Julian Green; Julian Green also translated some of Péguy's religious poetry in God Speaks (1945).

Bibliography

See studies by M. Villiers (1965), N. Jussem-Wilson (1965), H. A. Schmitt (1967), and G. Hill (1984).

Quotes:

"The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful must take himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors."

"Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love."

"We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see."

"Tyranny is always better organized than freedom."

"Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty."

"We said that a single injustice, a single crime, a single illegality, particularly if it is officially recorded, confirmed, a single wrong to humanity, a single wrong to justice and to right, particularly if it is universally, legally, nationally, commodiously accepted, that a single crime shatters and is sufficient to shatter the whole social pact, the whole social contract, that a single legal crime, a single dishonorable act will bring about the loss of ones honor, the dishonor of a whole people. It is a touch of gangrene that corrupts the entire body."

See more famous quotes by Charles Peguy