Georges Bernanos

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The French novelist and essayist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was concerned with the concrete reality of evil and with the struggle to achieve saintliness in an uncomprehending, hostile modern world. His work was Catholic in inspiration.

Georges Bernanos, born in Paris on Feb. 20, 1888, spent his childhood in a small village in the north of France. Between 1906 and 1913 he studied in Paris for degrees in arts and law and worked as a journalist for the extreme right-wing newspaper Action Française. He joined the army at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and fought in the trenches. In the years after the war Bernanos suffered financial hardship, and only in his late 30s did he publish his first novel, Sous le soleil de Satan (1926; Under the Sun of Satan). This immediately successful novel deals with the struggles of a priest, Father Donissan, against the evil and temptation in the world around him and against his conviction of his own inadequacy. Further novels and polemical essays followed, the best-known being the novel Journal d'un curé de campagne (1936; The Diary of a Country Priest). In this book Bernanos treats the theme of saintliness. A young priest, living in poverty and slowly dying, remains faithful to his vocation despite his lack of success in fighting sin and evil in his parish. By complete self-sacrifice he achieves a degree of greatness of soul clearly regarded as saintly in quality.

During the 1930s Bernanos went to live on the Spanish island of Majorca, and during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 he bitterly attacked the atrocities committed by the fascist side. In 1938 he left Europe for Paraguay and later Brazil, where he spent the years of World War II helping the cause of France with further books of political essays. In 1943 he published his last important novel, M. Ouine (The Open Mind). By now Bernanos's vision had become more violent, and the novel presents a somewhat incoherent picture of the corrupting influence of the schoolteacher Ouine, who is almost a personification of evil.

Bernanos's books draw their strength from his passionate sense of commitment and his refusal to compromise with complacent bourgeois attitudes. In his contempt for conformity and traditional values, he can be seen as a revolutionary - but of a very special kind, since his aims are not political but religious. His vision of a world corrupted by sin and dominated by evil is necessarily one of somewhat narrow appeal, and the hysteria and exaggeration that sometimes break through the surface of his religious novels give them an uneven quality which offsets their intensity.

In 1945 Bernanos returned to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1948.

Further Reading

A book on Bernanos in English is Peter Hebblethwaite, Bernanos (1965). Bernanos is discussed in Donat O'Donnell (pseudonym of Conor Cruise O'Brien), Maria Cross (1952), and by Ernest Beaumont in John Cruickshank, ed., The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction, 1935-1960 (1962).

Additional Sources

Speaight, Robert, Georges Bernanos; a study of the man and the writer, New York, Liveright 1974.

Bernanos, Georges (1888-1948). With Mauriac, Bernanos is the major Catholic novelist in France in the 20th c. and an equally important polemicist. Born in Paris, he joined Action Française while a student at the Sorbonne and became one of the movement's journalists, editing L'Avant-Garde de la Normandie from Rouen before World War I. After a distinguished war career, during which he was seriously wounded, he became an inspector for an insurance company, covering the region of Northern France and Picardy, which was to be the location for his fiction. In the context of this financially insecure and semi-nomadic existence he became a novelist.

He published his first novel, Sous le soleil de Satan, in 1926. Based upon the career of the curé de Lumbres, the novel recounts the literal battle between a young country priest and the devil for the soul of a small country village, and sets the tone for the rest of Bernanos's fiction. His work is concerned with the concrete presence of evil, in apathy and corruption and violence, and with the search for privileged figures to combat it. In his next two novels, La Joie (1929) and L'Imposture (1931), the antidote to corruption is found in the innocence of the child, a theme he also explores in his later work. At the same time he turned to polemic, in the pamphleteering tradition of Drumont and Bloy, with La Grande Peur des bien-pensants (1931), in which he castigates his perennial enemy, the complacent, conventionally religious bourgeoisie.

In 1936 his struggle against poverty in France became too much, and he moved with his family to the cheaper life of Majorca. Not only was this period the most richly productive of his career, but it marked a major political turning-point. It was in Majorca that he produced his best-known novel, Journal d'un curé de campagne (1936), which elevates the childlike innocence and heroism of a young country priest in his battle against evil to the level of sainthood, and Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette (1937), which depicts the emotional martyrdom of a young girl in a barren village. It was also in Majorca that he witnessed the brutality of the Spanish fascists; he denounced this in Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1937) and became an ardent Republican. Unable to settle again in France, he moved to South America; here he emerged as a major Gaullist propagandist during World War II and wrote his last novel Monsieur Ouine (1945), perhaps his most complex analysis of evil in the community; it was not published in its definitive form until 1955. His last years after the war were spent in North Africa.

Bernanos's Catholicism must be seen in the context of the Catholic Revival of the 1900s [see Catholicism in Twentieth-Century France], as a vigorous reaction against materialist scientism and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, and as a plea for mysticism and faith. Politically, this takes the form of a particularly anachronistic form of royalism: a return to the strength and cohesion of the Middle Ages. In his novels, it leads to an exploration of those figures who can transcend the finite limits of unbelief: the child, the saint, and the hero. In his cultivation of heroism as an antidote to the modern world, Bernanos enters the mainstream of French fiction of the 1930s; hence his close affinities with Malraux and his adoption by the post-war right-wing Hussards.

[Nicholas Hewitt]

Bibliography

• A. Béguin, Bernanos par lui-même (1954)
• M. Estève, Le Sens de l'amour dans les romans de Bernanos (1959)
• C. Nettelbeck, Les Personnages de Bernanos romancier (1970)

Quotes:

"When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, you're bound to realize that if humankind have not yet finished being revenged, by sheer laughter, for being let down in their greatest hope, it is because that hope was cherished so long and lay so deep!"

"The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."

"Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it."

"And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning -- enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!"

"What does the truth matter? Haven't we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!"

"No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness."

See more famous quotes by Georges Bernanos

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