Poet, Prophet or Scourge?

Born a Catholic, in 1873, Charles Péguy grew up in Orléans, with the image of Joan of Arc deep in his soul. At twenty he had abandoned his faith and become a dreyfusard, a socialist, a “free-thinker.” He married, founded a magazine, and for the next ten years scourged everyone, left and right, with his integrity and zeal. Then, in 1908, he announced— not his return to the Church, for he insisted he had never really left it—but his realization of its true vision. After years of polemical prose, he began to write poetry. “C’est un renaissance catholique qui se fait par moi,” he declared, but since his naive temperament seemed incompatible with the sophisticated anguish associated with religious revival among the intellectuals, his highbrow friends were only embarrassed and baffled. When he died in the battle of the Marne, he was promptly sentimentalized as a socialist saint who had given his life for la patrie, but even today, as Alexander Dru’s study Péguy (Harper, $2.50) admits, his position in France, whether as poet, prophet, or scourge, remains ambiguous.

Actually, it is very simple. Like Joan of Arc, Péguy was naive only in the sense that he could see with absolute singleness. He rejected socialism for the same reason that he had earlier rejected Catholicism: it seemed to him, by 1900, to have become all means, method, outer protocol and expedience—what Péguy called la politique, and to have lost its heart, pulse, innocence and vision —what he called la mystique.

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Robert Phelps

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Born a Catholic, in 1873, Charles Péguy grew up in Orléans, with the image of Joan of Arc deep in his soul. At twenty he had abandoned his faith and become a dreyfusard, a socialist, a “free-thinker.” He married, founded a magazine, and for the next ten years scourged everyone, left and right, with his integrity and zeal. Then, in 1908, he announced— not his return to the Church, for he insisted he had never really left it—but his realization of its true vision. After years of polemical prose, he began to write poetry. “C’est un renaissance catholique qui se fait par moi,” he declared, but since his naive temperament seemed incompatible with the sophisticated anguish associated with religious revival among the intellectuals, his highbrow friends were only embarrassed and baffled. When he died in the battle of the Marne, he was promptly sentimentalized as a socialist saint who had given his life for la patrie, but even today, as Alexander Dru’s study Péguy (Harper, $2.50) admits, his position in France, whether as poet, prophet, or scourge, remains ambiguous.

Actually, it is very simple. Like Joan of Arc, Péguy was naive only in the sense that he could see with absolute singleness. He rejected socialism for the same reason that he had earlier rejected Catholicism: it seemed to him, by 1900, to have become all means, method, outer protocol and expedience—what Péguy called la politique, and to have lost its heart, pulse, innocence and vision —what he called la mystique.