Charles Péguy (1873-1914)

The poet of recovered faith

Péguy holds a place apart among the great converts of the turn of the century. Beside Paul Claudel, struck down behind a pillar of Notre-Dame de Paris on Christmas Day 1886, or Jacques Maritain, led to the faith by Léon Bloy, Péguy is the exception: in him, no lightning bolt, no rupture.^[6] He even refused the word "conversion", preferring "deepening": he had not turned back; he had at last found what had always grounded his thirst for justice and truth.^[7][8]

This refusal was not a literary pose. It says something central: Péguy's faith was not an added piece in his life, but the root that explained everything else — his socialism, his Dreyfusard commitment, his revolt against money, his love of the people. "Everything begins in mystique", he would say, and his own path proves it.^[9]

The singer of hope

Had Péguy written only one book, it would already have been enough to place him in the history of Christian spirituality: The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue (1911). The "second virtue", between faith and charity, is hope — the one theology often places in a minor position, and which Péguy raised to the first rank.^[10][11]

His stroke of genius is to make God himself speak, with disconcerting simplicity, and to say that what amazes him is not that men believe (the evidence of creation commands it), nor that they love (the misery of their neighbor calls for it), but that they hope in spite of everything:

"The faith I love best, says God, is hope. [...] But hope, says God, that is what astonishes me. Myself. That is astonishing." — Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue^[12]

This poetic theology of hope nourished twentieth-century Catholic spirituality.^[13] Ignispedia sees in it one of the summits of French spiritual literature: a lesson in childhood and trust offered to a century tempted by despair.

Biographical landmarks

Péguy's life spans forty-one years, from a poor suburb of Orléans to the wheat fields of the Marne. It is made of one single thrust: that of a man who never separated thought from existence, and who finally died for what he wrote.^[14][15]

A poor childhood in Orléans

Péguy was born into real poverty, and he kept from it an unfailing pride and tenderness for the world of workers. His father, a carpenter, died when he was one year old. His mother and grandmother earned their living by reseating chairs — a humble trade he would always evoke with respect.^[20][21] From this childhood came his conviction that the world of artisans, formed by good work and the honor of the craft, was worth more than the moneyed bourgeoisie.

This Orléans childhood also marked him decisively: Orléans is the city of Joan of Arc. The figure of the city's liberator, peasant and saint, warrior and pure, accompanied Péguy throughout his life; she is the subject of his very first work and of one of his last.

Normalien, socialist and Dreyfusard

As a scholarship student, Péguy went up to Paris and entered the École normale supérieure, where he followed in particular the teaching of Henri Bergson, whose influence on his thought about time and duration would remain lasting.^[22] He then joined socialism, but socialism in his own way: less an economic doctrine than a mysticism of justice, an almost religious demand for fraternity and truth.^[23]

The Dreyfus Affair is the founding event of his youth. Péguy threw himself into it passionately, on the Dreyfusard side, in the name of the justice owed to an innocent man. He would keep from it the idea that France had, for a moment, risen to a mystical height — before politicians recovered and degraded that impulse. This memory, twelve years later, nourished Notre jeunesse.^[24]

The Cahiers de la Quinzaine

In 1900, Péguy founded his review, the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which he directed until his death from his shop on the quai des Grands-Augustins.^[25][26] It was an undertaking without equivalent: an absolutely free review, refusing advertising and compromise, poor and proud, in which Péguy published his own works and those of authors he admired (Romain Rolland published his Jean-Christophe there).

The Cahiers are the laboratory of his whole work. There he forges a unique prose, made of repetitions, repetitions again, insistences and scruples, like an artisan turning his work over. They are also the place of his great ruptures: with parliamentary socialism, with Jean Jaurès whom he ended by judging a traitor to the nation, with a political world he accused of betraying every mystique.^[27][28]

I have recovered the faith, I am Catholic

The only dated landmark we possess for Péguy's spiritual itinerary is a confidence made in September 1908 to his friend Joseph Lotte, professor and companion. Ill, Péguy then avowed what he had long carried within: he had recovered the faith, he was Catholic.^[29][30]

Lotte, overwhelmed, would report that "it was sudden, like a great emotion of love", and that his own heart "melted": Péguy's confidence became the starting point of his own return to the Church.^[31] The avowal of 1908 therefore does not mark the beginning, but the public emergence of a faith that had been maturing underground for years.

A deepening, not a turning back

Péguy always refused that one should speak of "conversion" in his case, and still more of "turning back". He did not see himself as going backward, but as going deeper in the same direction:

"It is not a turning back. [...] It is a constant deepening of our heart in the same path." — Charles Péguy (as reported by those close to him)^[32]

This insistence has doctrinal significance. Péguy refuses the idea that his socialist and Dreyfusard youth was an error to be repudiated. On the contrary, he holds that his passion for justice, the people and truth was already a mystique, oriented toward God without knowing it, and that recovered faith fulfills it instead of destroying it. Where other converts break with their past, Péguy takes it up and saves it: grace, for him, does not suppress nature; it brings it to completion.^[33]

The drama of the threshold: marriage and unbaptized children

Recovered faith did not make Péguy's life simple — it made it heartbreaking. Civilly married to a woman from a freethinking family, hostile to any religious practice, he had three children who were not baptized — a fourth son will be born after his death.^[34][35] The Church of his time required, for access to the sacraments, a regularization that his wife refused.^[36][37][38]

Péguy thus found himself, according to the now famous phrase, a Christian placed "on the threshold" of the Church: believing, praying, loving the Church with his whole soul, but unable to be married religiously, unable to have his children baptized against their mother's will, and unable to receive Communion himself.^[39] He did not want to force his wife's conscience, nor impose baptism on his children by an act of authority. He preferred to carry the cross of waiting and to entrust his own to God through a long work of prayer and hope.

This canonically irregular situation must not be softened or disguised: Péguy is not a model of sacramental life. But it casts a poignant light on his whole spirituality of hope. From the threshold, empty-handed, he sang trust in mercy; as a man who could not receive Communion, he wrote on the charity of God. His work is the prayer of a man hoping for his own what he could not give them himself.

Notre-Dame de Chartres: pilgrimage and the entrusting of the children

It is in this drama that the most moving gesture of his life is rooted. In June 1912, one of his sons being gravely ill, Péguy set out on foot from the Paris region toward the cathedral of Chartres, about 140 kilometers, as a pilgrim.^[40][41] He would repeat this pilgrimage. There, at the feet of Our Lady, he entrusted his children to the Virgin — those children he could not have baptized — in a supplication of piercing humility: "My little ones are not baptized."^[42]

From this experience was born one of the greatest Marian poems in the French language, the Présentation de la Beauce à Notre-Dame de Chartres, where the plain of Beauce, an ocean of wheat, becomes itself an offering to the Star of the Sea:

"Star of the sea, behold the heavy cloth / And the deep swell and the ocean of wheat / And the moving foam and our barns filled full, / Behold your gaze upon this immense cope." — Charles Péguy, Présentation de la Beauce à Notre-Dame de Chartres (in La Tapisserie de Notre-Dame, 1913)^[43]

Péguy's pilgrimage to Chartres left a lasting trace: in memory of his gesture, the great student and family pilgrimages to Chartres developed in the twentieth century, and he remained their literary patron.^[44]

Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics

In 1910, Péguy published in the Cahiers one of his most powerful texts, Notre jeunesse, a meditation on the Dreyfus Affair and on the way great impulses always end by becoming corrupted. There we find his most famous formula:

"Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics. [...] What matters, the question, the essential thing is that in every order, in every system, the mystique not be devoured by the politics to which it gave birth." — Charles Péguy, Notre jeunesse, 1910^[45]

By mystique, Péguy means the pure, disinterested, almost religious impulse that leads men to devote themselves to a cause greater than themselves: justice, freedom, the homeland, the faith. By politics, he means the recovery of that impulse by interests, parties and careers. The Dreyfusard mystique — sacrificing oneself for an innocent man — was holy; the Dreyfusard politics — exploiting the victory for power — betrayed it.^[46][47]

This distinction, one of the most fruitful in French political thought, applies to every cause, including religious causes: faith itself can be betrayed when it allows itself to be "devoured" by calculations. Péguy calls us to keep alive the mystical source of every commitment.

Against money and the modern world

Péguy's last great combat is against what he calls the modern world — not technical progress, but a world that places money at the center of everything and has lost the sense of the sacred, of the honor of work, of dignified poverty. In L'Argent (1913), he contrasts the generation of his teachers, poor and honest schoolmasters of the Republic, with the corruption he sees rising.^[48]

"The modern world debases. [...] It debases ascent. It debases perhaps above all, singularly, woman. But it perhaps also singularly debases, it properly debases, the child." — Charles Péguy, L'Argent, 1913^[49]

This refusal has nothing of comfortable conservatism: Péguy attacks both the capitalist bourgeoisie and embourgeoised socialism. He defends an evangelical poverty, that of the laboring and believing people, against the idolatry of money — a theme in which he joins his elder Léon Bloy and announces the revolts of Georges Bernanos.

Joan of Arc, the thread of a whole life

No figure accompanied Péguy as Joan of Arc did. He devoted his first work to her, a Joan of Arc in three plays published in 1897, in the days of his socialism; he returned to her at the summit of his Christian maturity with The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc (1910), a reprise and transfiguration of the first.^[50][51]

For Péguy, Joan is the synthesis of everything he loves: saint and patriot, daughter of the people and envoy of God, she unites the earthly land and Heaven. Through her he meditates on the great scandal: evil, possible damnation, the suffering of the innocent — and the charity that would wish to save all men. The canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920, six years after Péguy's death, gave his intuition a dazzling confirmation.

The Mysteries: a theater of the soul

Péguy invents a new literary form, which he calls mystery in memory of medieval religious theater: long poem-dialogues where human and supernatural voices meditate on the drama of salvation. Three Mysteries answer one another: The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc (1910), The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue (1911) and The Mystery of the Holy Innocents (1912).^[52]

The following table summarizes the major works of Péguy's Catholic period — those which, in barely four years, made him one of the greatest Christian poets in the French language.

The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue: little hope

At the heart of the work stands The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue. Péguy unfolds there his most famous image: the three theological virtues represented as three sisters walking hand in hand. Faith and charity are two tall women; between them advances a little girl, hope, so slight that no one notices her — and that people think she is being dragged along by her elders.

But the opposite is true, says Péguy: it is the little one who leads the two great ones.

"Little hope advances between her two great sisters, and one does not even notice her. [...] And he willingly believes that it is the two great ones who drag the little one by the hand [...]. Blind people who do not see, on the contrary, that it is she in the middle who leads her great sisters." — Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue^[53]

Why hope? Because, says Péguy, believing and loving are almost easy — the evidence of God and the misery of one's neighbor press toward them — but hoping against trial, against evil, against despair which is "the great temptation", that is what is difficult, that is what "astonishes" God himself.^[54][55] This hope has the face of a child: naked trust, perpetual beginning again, the faith of tomorrow. One understands that a man "of the threshold", hoping for the salvation of his unbaptized children which he could not procure for them, would make hope the center of his poetic theology.

La Tapisserie de Notre-Dame and Eve

Péguy's last two great collections are Marian and cosmic in inspiration. La Tapisserie de sainte Geneviève et de Jeanne d'Arc, then La Tapisserie de Notre-Dame (1913), weave, like votive offerings made of thread, the praise of the holy protectresses of France and of the Virgin of Chartres.^[56] It is there that the Présentation de la Beauce and the great Marian Prayers appear.

Eve (1913), a river-poem of nearly two thousand quatrains, is the most ambitious of his works: an immense meditation on creation, Eve's fall, work, death and Redemption. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar would see in Eve a theological work of the first order, a poetic "redemption" of the whole carnal real.^[57] From this poem come the prophetic verses on the dead in combat, which Péguy wrote one year before falling himself:

"Happy are those who died for the earthly land, / But provided it was in a just war. / Happy are those who died for four corners of earth. / Happy are those who died a solemn death." — Charles Péguy, Eve, 1913^[58]

Péguy's style: litany and beginning again

One cannot speak of Péguy without speaking of his manner, unique in French literature. His sentence advances by repetitions: he says again, specifies, corrects, adds a word, begins again, like a wave returning or like a litany. This style, initially disconcerting, is deeply spiritual: it is the style of insistent prayer, of meditation circling around its object, of the conscientious worker taking up his work again.^[59]

This writing of repetition is not verbose: it is incantatory. It gives Péguy's poetry a power of shaking the reader that few authors have equaled, and it profoundly renewed the French poetic language of the twentieth century.

5 September 1914, Villeroy

When war broke out in August 1914, Péguy, first exempted then reassigned, went to the front as a lieutenant in the 276th Infantry Regiment.^[60][61] The patriot who had sung the earthly land and those "dead in a just war" left for the front with his men.

On 5 September 1914, at Villeroy, in Seine-et-Marne, on the eve of the great Battle of the Marne, his company came under fire. Standing, urging his soldiers not to yield an inch of ground, Lieutenant Péguy was killed by a bullet to the forehead.^[62][63] He was buried with his men in a common grave that would become the Grande Tombe of Villeroy, where 133 soldiers rest. He was forty-one.

Happy are those who died

Péguy's death was immediately received as the fulfillment of his work. The poet who had written, one year earlier, "Happy are those who died for the earthly land [...] in a just war" seemed to have prophesied his own destiny.^[64][65] His death on the threshold of the victory of the Marne, on the soil of France he loved, only a few kilometers from Paris, fixed his image forever: that of the Christian soldier-poet, fallen for the homeland he had sung.

Deprived of the sacraments, he did not receive Communion as an adult.^[66] He died, as he had lived, on the threshold — entrusting to God's mercy what he had not been able to obtain by ordinary means. Many have seen in this, not a failure, but the mystery of a salvation entrusted wholly to the hope he had sung.

An inspiration for the Catholic revival

Few writers have marked twentieth-century Catholicism as deeply. Péguy nourished a whole generation: Georges Bernanos shares his revolt against money and his faith of childhood; the theologian Henri de Lubac and the ressourcement movement find in him a supernatural intelligence of tradition and of the communion of saints; Hans Urs von Balthasar integrates him into his great fresco of Christian beauty.^[67] His meditation on hope nourished twentieth-century Catholic theology.^[68]

His influence extends far beyond Catholic circles. Charles de Gaulle quoted him from memory and held him as a master; writers as different as Graham Greene and the English poet Geoffrey Hill paid him homage.^[69]

Appropriations and misunderstandings

This glory had its reverse: Péguy's legacy was disputed and sometimes diverted. Because he exalted the homeland, the earthly land and the France of Joan of Arc, after his death he was claimed by currents he would not have recognized, including, under the Occupation, by ideologues who betrayed everything he had defended.^[70] But Péguy was also cited by the Resistance, and his hatred of money, his love of the people, and his defense of the innocent Jew Dreyfus forbid any honest appropriation by ideologies of hatred.

The true Péguy escapes labels: socialist and believer, patriot and adversary of money, Dreyfusard and Catholic, he held together what parties separate. It is precisely this freedom that makes him a conscience and not a flag.

What Péguy teaches us today

Péguy's example still speaks powerfully to Christians today.

He first teaches the primacy of hope. In a century tempted by despair, Péguy recalls that the most difficult and most divine virtue is to continue hoping like a child — for oneself, for one's own, for the world. His little girl hope is perhaps the most beautiful poetic catechesis of Christian trust.

He then teaches that no situation excludes prayer. A man "of the threshold", kept from the sacraments, Péguy never ceased to believe, love and hope; he made his very impotence an offering. His life says that one can be a great man of prayer without being a canonical model, and that God's mercy reaches men where they are, even on the threshold.

Finally, he teaches the unity of life and thought. Péguy wrote what he believed and died for what he wrote. Against every literature of pose, he witnesses that a word has value only if it engages the whole of existence.

"One must always say what one sees. Above all one must always, which is more difficult, see what one sees." — Charles Péguy, Notre jeunesse, 1910^[71]

Péguy saw what he saw: the misery of the people, the betrayal of mystiques, the beauty of Notre-Dame, the sweetness of hope. Ignispedia reads him as a major figure of Catholicism: not for the regularity of his life, but for the greatness of his recovered faith and for that song of hope which he left to the Church and to France.

• Paul Claudel (1868-1955) — the other great convert and Catholic poet of the same generation, struck by grace at Notre-Dame de Paris; two opposite paths toward the same faith.
• Léon Bloy (1846-1917) — the poor and prophetic elder, enemy of money and the bourgeoisie, whose revolt Péguy extends in his own way.
• Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) — the converted philosopher, close to the same circles, who embodies the other side of the Catholic intellectual revival.
• Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) — the novelist heir to Péguy's anger against money and his faith of childhood.
• Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) — the theologian of ressourcement, who read and meditated on Péguy as a master of supernatural intelligence of tradition.
• Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) — the great theologian of beauty, who integrated Eve and Péguy's poetry into his reflection on Christian glory.
• Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) — the other immense Christian poet, with whom Péguy shares the ambition of a poetry that embraces the whole drama of salvation.