Charles Péguy, early victim of the Great War

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

“Charles Péguy was surely a hero. He represented all the qualities of the Republic. Born into a peasant family, with a grandmother who could neither read nor write, he made his way to the École Normale Supérieure. He was the author of many works, including a gigantic attempt to produce a Christian Iliad. He defended Dreyfus. He opposed anti-Semitism. He exalted Joan of Arc. He went into battle in August 1914 singing “ça ira” and was killed by a German bullet at the age of forty-one. If­ ever a man stood for both Revolutionary and Catholic France, and was a model of honesty and courage, it was surely Péguy.”

Thus wrote the late Douglas Johnson in the TLS in 1992, in a review of a book by the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut on the poet, dramatist, fiercely anti-bourgeois polemicist and publisher who was killed a hundred years ago, on September 5, 1914 – on the first day of the battle of the Marne. If one thinks also of (the very different) Apollinaire, wounded in combat and who died of those wounds in 1918, then it can be said that France had its war poets too.

Péguy was a committed and radical socialist who later became a fervent, mystical Catholic. Much of his work appeared in the Cahiers de la quinzaine, which he set up in 1900: the polemical works Notre Patrie (1905) and Notre Jeunesse (1910), which reflects on the effects of the Dreyfus affair – “des anciens dreyfusards, des nouveaux dreyfusards, dse dreyfusards perpétuels, des dreyfusards impénitents, des dreyfusards mystiques, . . .”gives a flavour of its rolling cadences. Joan of Arc, meanwhile, was at the heart of his poetic project – the lengthy meditation on the Passion of Christ that is the trilogy of dramatic poems Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1909), Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu (1912) and Le Mystère des saints innocents (1912), in which near-hypnotic repetition – “Elle pleurait. Elle pleurait. Elle fondait. / Elle fondait en larmes . . ." creates a strong sense of momentum. 

Joan of Arc is both a victim and the powerful conscience of the nation. Péguy’s deep patriotism and love of tradition are reflected in the lines “Reims, vous êtes la ville du sacre. Vous êtes donc la plus belle ville du royaume de France". The fact that Reims was the cathedral where the kings of France were crowned shows how far Péguy had moved from his early socialism. And it’s surely hard for an English reader to take in the following without flinching: “C’étaient des barbares, . . . infiniment plus barbares, infiniment pire que les Anglais mêmes". The English being referred to here are, of course, Joan of Arc's executioners.

Poetry was also where the married Péguy was able to allude to the deep, unconsummated love he felt over many years for a young woman, Blanche Raphaël: “Quand une fois cette parole a mordu au coeur / Le coeur infidèle et le coeur fidèle, / Nulle volupté n’effacera plus / La trace de ses dents”. Elsewhere he refers to the unhappiness brought on by the fact that he wasn't able to have his three children baptized because his wife Charlotte-Françoise was a non-believer: "Leur front bombé, tout lavé encore et tout propre du baptême, / Des eaux du baptême".

Péguy’s Oeuvres poétiques was published in Gallimard’s prestigious Pléiade series in 1941, just ten years after the imprint was founded; at least three volumes of prose works have appeared in the Pléiade since. In the TLS, George Steiner wrote a blazingly eloquent review of the third volume, in which he talked of how “the material productivity of the man has few parallels in the history of literature”. Steiner concedes that the poem Ève (1913) is “interminable”, but he goes on to say that it’s “charged with a tenacity of vision, with an investment in rebirth . . .”. The poem contains the famous, portentous lines: “Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle, / Mais pourvu que ce fût dans une juste guerre . . . . / Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans les grandes batailles, / Couchés dessus le sol à la face de Dieu . . .".  Steiner’s article, like Douglas Johnson’s, curiously also appeared in 1992. Péguy has scarcely been mentioned in the TLS since (there was a passing reference to Geoffrey Hill’s The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy in John Kerrigan’s recent essay on Hill, TLS, August 8).

Which prompts the question: has any major French writer fallen victim further to the dictates of literary taste and fashion than Charles Péguy? I sense that he’s not much read today and this notion was confirmed in the course of visits to three bookshops in London: the two French bookshops in that Gallic oasis, South Kensington, and the well-stocked European bookshop off Regent St. None of them had any books by Péguy in stock. Not one. Yet Notre Jeunesse certainly remains a powerful work, and the poetry continues to have its advocates. As if in support of this, Gallimard are bringing out a new Pléiade edition of the poems in November: “Il est temps de redécouvrir sa parole juste”, the publishers write.

 

Cover of Die Aktion with Péguy's portrait by Egon Schiele (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

According to his biographer William Carter, Proust, who was Péguy’s contemporary, “expressed his admiration for Péguy’s heroism but not for his writings”. Meanwhile, another contemporary, André Gide, wrote in his Journals, April 1941: “That Péguy is a great figure, and particularly noble and representative, goes without saying; I consider admirable his very life and many a page of his Jeanne d’Arc, as well as numerous others scattered throughout his Cahiers. But those lines from Ève which are quoted everywhere today . . . belong among the worst I have read . . .”.

The TLS published a tribute to the fallen poet in November 1914: “. . . This was Péguy’s firm conviction; no duty so important as the military duty! When the war broke out, man of forty as he was and father of a struggling family – man, too, much engrossed and overworked by his triple occupation as poet, prose-writer, and publisher – he changed from the Territorials into a regiment sent on active service to the front”.

This was written by the poet and critic Mary Duclaux (1857–1944), whose "Belgia Bar-Lass" (1914) was a TLS Poem of the Week last year.