A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle

by Julian T. Jackson

This was also a theme of the Catholic novelist and polemicist Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), who published in 1947 a book entitled France against the Robots, denouncing the way that the ‘civilization of machines’ (machinisme) was destroying the human spirit. The affinities between Bernanos and de Gaulle are worth underlining even if de Gaulle never succeeded, as he put it a bit regretfully, in ‘harnessing’ him fully to his cause. A former pupil of de Gaulle’s father at the College of the Immaculate Conception, Bernanos had started out as a fervent monarchist and supporter of Action Française. His famous novel of 1936, Journal of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne), described the anguish of a Catholic priest in a small village of northern France wracked by physical ailments and disgusted by the indifference of his parishioners to Christianity. Those who thought they knew where to situate Bernanos politically were startled when he published a violent polemic in 1938 denouncing the conduct of the Catholic Church during the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, living in self-imposed exile in Brazil, he pushed his heterodoxy a stage further by instantaneously denouncing Vichy.