By 1914, Péguy had developed an almost physical revulsion from parliamentary politics – another aspect of his writing that left traces on de Gaulle. So too did Péguy’s cult of Joan of Arc about whom he wrote two long plays. There was no moment of France’s history which his eucumenical nationalism did not embrace: ‘Valmy and Jemappes [two famous battles of the Revolution] are’, he wrote, ‘in the direct line of Patay [one of Joan of Arc’s victories against the English]! … They are of the same race, the same spiritual family.’53 What links the early socialist and republican Péguy and the later
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