Georges Bernanos (1888-1948)

"All is grace": the most quoted last line of the French Catholic novel

Journal d'un curé de campagne recounts, in the form of an intimate diary, the last months of a young country priest, the curé of Ambricourt, consumed by illness, despised or misunderstood by his parish, yet inhabited by a hidden holiness. The novel opens with an observation that has remained famous:

"My parish is bored stiff, that is the word. Like so many other parishes! Boredom devours them before our eyes and we can do nothing about it." Georges Bernanos, Journal d'un curé de campagne, Plon, 1936, incipit^[5]

It ends, after the curé's death, with the words reported by his friend Dufréty, witness to his agony:

"He then pronounced distinctly, though extremely slowly, these words which I am sure I am reporting quite exactly: 'What does it matter? All is grace.' I believe he died almost immediately." Georges Bernanos, Journal d'un curé de campagne, Plon, 1936, final lines^[6]

Bernanos never claimed to have invented this formula: annoyed to hear preachers attribute it to him as a personal discovery, he reportedly retorted: "You fools, it is not mine: it is Thérèse's!"^[7], the phrase actually coming from the last writings of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. This detail, far from diminishing the novel's scope, reveals its true stake: Bernanos does not seek literary originality, but the faithful transmission of a spiritual truth greater than himself, that of mercy covering all, even the dereliction and apparent failure of a despised priest's life.

A Christian who refused all lukewarmness

Another line from the same novel, taken from the scene of the conversation between the young curé and the bereaved countess, expresses with the same density Bernanos's central intuition about sin:

"Hell, Madame, is to love no longer." Georges Bernanos, Journal d'un curé de campagne, Plon, 1936, scene of the conversation with the countess^[8]

This formula, more than ten years earlier than Jean-Paul Sartre's famous "Hell is other people", sums up Bernanos's novelistic theology: evil is not first an exterior transgression, but a cooling of the heart, a withdrawal into oneself that cuts the soul off from charity. It is this conviction, that holiness is decided in the interior combat against boredom, pride and indifference, not in social respectability, which runs through his entire oeuvre and explains why the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar devoted a whole study to him, Le Chrétien Bernanos (1956), counting him among the great literary witnesses to the glory of God in the modern world^[9].

A childhood in Artois, at the source of his novelistic landscapes

Georges Bernanos is born in Paris but spends most of his childhood and adolescent holidays at Fressin, a small village in the Pas-de-Calais, in his father's Artois country^[10]. It is this landscape of Picardy plains, isolated presbyteries and dreary villages that will nourish, thirty years later, the settings of his most famous novels: the Ambricourt parish of the Journal d'un curé de campagne and the village of Monsieur Ouine both bear the imprint of that northern countryside, under a grey light and a low sky that become in his work almost theological figures of boredom and spiritual mediocrity^[11]. His mother, Hermance Moreau, came from a peasant family of Pellevoisin, in the Indre, the village where Bernanos will choose, without all his precise reasons being known, to be buried in 1948^[12].

His education is classically Catholic and bourgeois: the Jesuit college on the rue de Vaugirard in Paris (1897-1900), the Notre-Dame-des-Champs boarding school, then the Sainte-Marie college at Aire-sur-la-Lys, in Artois, where he earns his baccalauréat in 1906^[13]. He then studies literature and law at the Institut catholique de Paris^[14]. It is during those student years that he joins, like so many young Catholics of his generation, the royalist movement of Action française: he becomes a camelot du roi, a militant street vendor of the newspaper L'Action française, sometimes at the cost of scuffles, and for a time edits the royalist paper L'Avant-garde de Normandie^[15]. That youthful commitment, as we shall see, will structure him and then turn against him: Bernanos will spend his whole life disengaging himself, not from the Catholic faith, but from the political dead ends into which that faith had once, for a time, led him astray.

The Great War and marriage to a descendant of Joan of Arc's family

Drafted into the 6th Dragoon Regiment in October 1910 then discharged a month later, Bernanos volunteers as soon as the First World War breaks out, first in aviation (Issy-les-Moulineaux), then again in the cavalry of the 6th Dragoon Regiment^[16]. He is wounded several times at the front and mentioned in army dispatches: the Croix de guerre 1914-1918, with a citation bearing the number 286, dated 15 June 1918^[17]. That experience of gunfire, mud and mass death, as for so many writers of his generation, will leave a lasting imprint on his writing, marked by an acute sense of human fragility and of the constant proximity of evil.

On 11 May 1917, at Vincennes, he marries Jeanne Talbert d'Arc (1893-1960), a collateral descendant of Joan of Arc's family through her brother^[18][19], a symbolic filiation which Bernanos, a great admirer of the Lorraine saint, never failed to mention with pride. The couple will have six children: Chantal (1918-1980), Yves (1919-1958), Claude (1921-2009), Michel (1923-1964, himself a writer), Dominique (1928-2015) and Jean-Loup (1933-2003)^[20].

The insurance years and the birth of a writer

After the war, Bernanos must support a large family: he becomes an insurance inspector, travelling through provincial France for a company, while writing at night, in hotel rooms or cafés, the novel that will become Sous le Soleil de Satan^[21]. That life of toil and precariousness, the most celebrated Catholic writer of his generation will continue, all his life, to live in chronic financial difficulty, gives his oeuvre a rare authenticity: Bernanos writes from inside ordinary existence, not from the comfort of a literary salon.

Bernanos's novels form a coherent whole, obsessed by a single question: how can evil, under the features of Satan, boredom, social lies or mediocrity, be conquered by grace, most often through the hidden and despised holiness of a country priest?

Sous le Soleil de Satan (1926): a resounding entry into literature

Published by Plon in 1926, Sous le Soleil de Satan tells the destiny of Abbé Donissan, a tormented priest who literally confronts the demon on a country road, and of Mouchette, a lost young girl whom the holy man tries to save. The novel, praised notably by the critic Léon Daudet in L'Action française, meets with immediate success and establishes Bernanos as a literary revelation^[22]. The book asserts from the outset what will remain Bernanos's trademark: the reality of the supernatural, of the demon as of grace, taken seriously in a literary France largely won over to naturalism and scepticism.

L'Imposture and La Joie: the priest without faith and the murdered saint

L'Imposture (1927) and La Joie (1929) form, with Sous le Soleil de Satan, a kind of unsystematic trilogy around the figure of Abbé Cénabre, a brilliant priest inwardly emptied of all faith, whose spiritual imposture contrasts with the luminous holiness of Chantal de Clergerie, the heroine of La Joie^[23]. This second novel earns Bernanos the Prix Femina in December 1929^[24], a recognition confirming his place among the great Catholic novelists of the interwar period, alongside François Mauriac, with whom he will maintain all his life relations as admiring as they are tense, each sometimes reproaching the other for his relationship to the Church and to power^[25].

Journal d'un curé de campagne (1936): the masterpiece

Bernanos's most famous novel, Journal d'un curé de campagne, wins the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1936^[26] and becomes a best-seller reaching far beyond the Catholic public. Written as an intimate diary, it recounts the last months of the young curé of Ambricourt, misunderstood by his parish, consumed by a stomach cancer he long mistakes for alcoholic intemperance, who discovers, through his absolute destitution, a holiness that nothing exterior signals. The novel will be brought to the screen by Robert Bresson in 1951, in one of the most acclaimed films in the history of Catholic cinema.

Monsieur Ouine: the night of the village

Begun in the 1930s and completed in Brazil, Monsieur Ouine, published first in Brazil in 1943 then in Paris by Plon in 1946, is regarded by part of the critics, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, as Bernanos's darkest and most radical novel^[27]. It depicts a village entirely gangrened by lies and spiritual indifference, with no character embodying, as in the previous novels, a luminous counter-figure of holiness: evil is shown there almost in its pure state, as a slow dissolution of all interior life.

Here, in summary, are Bernanos's principal novels and the spiritual stake of each:

La Grande Peur des bien-pensants (1931): a pamphlet on Édouard Drumont

In 1931, Bernanos publishes with Grasset La Grande Peur des bien-pensants, subtitled Édouard Drumont, author of "La France juive"^[28]. The book, which reuses texts published between 1929 and 1931, some of them in L'Action française, presents itself as a panegyric of Drumont (1844-1917), the author of the founding antisemitic pamphlet La France juive (1886) and founder of the newspaper La Libre Parole. The work contains genuinely antisemitic content, which encyclopaedic honesty requires us not to conceal^[29]: to denounce modern capitalism and the "bourgeoisie" he has execrated since his youth, Bernanos reuses there a rhetoric in which money is associated with a figure of the Jew conceived as an economic bogeyman, a form, according to the historians who have studied it, of economic and anti-capitalist antisemitism rather than of Nazi-style biological racial antisemitism, but a real antisemitism publicly assumed at the time^[30].

This text remains, in Bernanos's biography, the most serious stain to be honestly acknowledged: neither minimized on the pretext that it would be purely "political" and not "racial", nor caricatured as if the whole rest of his oeuvre and commitment bore its mark. A later section of this article returns to Bernanos's subsequent, public and documented evolution on this question^[31].

The 1932 break with Charles Maurras

In 1932, a violent public controversy, born of a disagreement over Bernanos's collaboration with Le Figaro, a newspaper judged too moderate by the intransigents of Action française, provokes a definitive break between Bernanos and Charles Maurras^[32]. This rupture, far from a mere personal quarrel, marks the beginning of a long process by which Bernanos frees himself from all fixed partisan allegiance: he will never renounce his monarchist convictions in principle, but he will henceforth refuse to make his moral and spiritual judgement depend on any political chapel, even a Catholic one. That fierce independence, often paid for with solitude and misunderstanding, will become the hallmark of all the rest of his public life.

Disillusionment before the White Terror

After a motorcycle accident on 31 July 1933, which reopens an old war wound in his leg, Bernanos settles in 1934 in the Balearic Islands, in Majorca, for both financial and health reasons^[33]. He is there when the Spanish Civil War breaks out in July 1936. Like a large part of the French Catholic right, he at first welcomes the Nationalist uprising of General Franco, whose Spanish Phalanx his own son Yves joins for a time before deserting a few months later^[34]. But the illusion is brief, as he will himself recount:

"True, my illusions about General Franco's enterprise did not last long, two or three weeks, but while they lasted I conscientiously applied myself to overcoming the disgust inspired in me by some of his men and his methods." Georges Bernanos, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune, Plon, 1938^[35]

Bernanos witnesses on the spot the Francoist repression in Majorca: summary executions, whose number he estimates at several thousand victims on the island, often carried out with the active complicity or the silence of part of the local clergy^[36]. This spectacle, terror exercised in the very name of the order and religion he had defended all his youth, shatters him and drives him to leave Spain in March 1937^[37].

A book that shatters his political friendships

Bernanos writes in Majorca, between July 1936 and January 1937, the text that will become Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune, published in Paris by Plon in 1938^[38]. It is a pamphlet of rare violence against the Nationalist atrocities and against the complicity of part of the Spanish episcopate with the repression. Its publication provokes a considerable scandal in France: it earns Bernanos the definitive hostility of his former political family, Action française, with which the break, already begun in 1932, becomes total and irreversible^[39]. Conversely, the book wins him the esteem of Catholic writers hitherto distant, including François Mauriac, and makes him known as an independent moral conscience, beyond all partisan labels.

Nous autres Français and Lettre aux Anglais

In August 1938, Bernanos embarks with his family for Brazil, where he settles first in Rio de Janeiro then, from August 1940, on a farm in the high plateaus of Minas Gerais, at Barbacena, which he baptizes "Cruz das Almas" (the Cross of Souls)^[40]. His publications of that period, Scandale de la vérité and Nous autres Français (1939), then above all Lettre aux Anglais, published in Rio in 1942^[41], are pamphlets of extreme vigour against the Munich agreements, against the capitulation spirit of 1940 and against the Vichy regime, whose compromise with the Nazi occupier he denounces. These texts, partly broadcast by Free French radio, make Bernanos, from his South American exile, one of the most listened-to voices of nascent Gaullism, praised by General de Gaulle himself^[42].

Stefan Zweig and the evolution on the Jewish question

It is also in Brazil that Bernanos's profound evolution on the question he had so gravely mishandled in 1931 manifests itself in the clearest and most public way. As early as 1938, he writes:

"None of those who have done me the honour of reading me can believe me associated with the hideous antisemitic propaganda now raging in the so-called national press, on foreign orders." Georges Bernanos, quoted in the Bulletin de la Société des amis de Georges Bernanos, No. 47, 1962^[43]

In 1939, in Nous autres Français, he goes still further, in a formula that has remained famous:

"I would rather be whipped by the rabbi of Algiers than cause a Jewish woman or child to suffer." Georges Bernanos, Nous autres Français, Gallimard, 1939^[44]

In January 1942, in the high plateaus of Minas Gerais, Bernanos receives at his farm the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, himself a refugee in Brazil, fleeing Nazi persecution. The two men talk at length about the collapse of Europe and Hitlerian barbarism, only weeks before Zweig and his wife Lotte Altmann take their own lives on 23 February 1942^[45]. That meeting, remembered as one of the most poignant dialogues between two great European consciences in exile, marks the culminating point of a trajectory that led Bernanos, in a decade, from the panegyric of Drumont to the friendship offered to a despairing Jewish writer.

La France contre les robots: criticizing technical civilization

Written in Brazil and published first in Rio de Janeiro in 1946 (Éditions France libre) then in Paris by Robert Laffont in 1947, La France contre les robots extends, on another terrain, the same combat against dehumanization: Bernanos denounces in advance the spiritual dangers of a civilization entirely subjected to technique and efficiency, where man risks losing the sense of his own soul for the sake of generalized mechanical functioning^[46]. This prophetic text, often quoted today in debates on technology and dehumanization, shows the deep continuity between his literary combat against spiritual evil and his political combat against the totalitarianisms of the 20th century: in both cases, it is the same thing Bernanos denounces, the loss of the soul for the sake of a system, whether ideological or technical.

Bernanos returns to France in June 1945, at General de Gaulle's invitation, who offers him a ministerial post^[47]. Faithful to his fierce independence, he refuses any official function, preferring to write a column in the newspapers La Bataille then Combat^[48]. He will refuse the Légion d'honneur three times and decline any candidacy to the Académie française^[49], a gesture consistent with a whole life spent fleeing honours and institutional compromises, including from a power he otherwise approved of.

In 1947, his health declining, he settles in Tunisia. There, in the last months of his life, he writes the scenario of the Dialogues des Carmélites^[50]. He dies on 5 July 1948 at Neuilly-sur-Seine, of liver cancer^[51][52]. In accordance with his wish, he is buried not in Paris but in the cemetery of Pellevoisin, in the Indre, his mother's native village^[53]. He receives posthumously the Médaille de la Résistance française, with rosette^[54].

From Gertrud von Le Fort to Poulenc's opera

Bernanos's final work is born of a circumstantial commission. The German writer Gertrud von Le Fort had published in 1931 a novella, La Dernière à l'échafaud, inspired by the martyrdom of the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne guillotined on 17 July 1794, in the midst of the revolutionary Terror. The filmmakers Philippe Agostini and the Dominican father Raymond-Léopold Bruckberger conceive the idea of adapting it into a film scenario and ask Bernanos, already ill, to write the dialogues^[55]. The film project does not immediately succeed, but the text, completed a few months before the writer's death, is published posthumously in 1949 under the title Dialogues des Carmélites and staged at the Théâtre Hébertot in 1952^[56].

The composer Francis Poulenc discovers the work in 1953 and immediately sets out to adapt it into an opera: composed between 1953 and 1955, orchestrated into 1956, Dialogues des Carmélites premieres at La Scala in Milan on 26 January 1957 in Italian, then in Paris on 21 June 1957 in its original French version^[57]. The work is today regarded as one of the great Catholic operas of the 20th century, carried by its shattering final scene: the Carmelites climb one by one to the scaffold singing the Salve Regina, their voices dying out one after another beneath the blade.

The martyrs of Compiègne, from fiction to canonization (2024)

Bernanos's text, centred on the fictional figure of Blanche de la Force, a young Carmelite haunted by fear, meditates on the mystery of fear transfigured into offering: Blanche, who fears death above all, ends by voluntarily joining her sisters at the scaffold, her very fear become the place of her total gift. This literary meditation on martyrdom found, long after Bernanos's death, a dazzling ecclesial confirmation: on 18 December 2024, Pope Francis signed the decree of equipollent canonization of the sixteen Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne, definitively enrolling them among the saints of the universal Church, with neither an additional miracle nor a ceremony at Saint Peter's required, according to a procedure codified by Benedict XIV in the 18th century^[58]. It is the sixteen historical Carmelites, not Blanche de la Force, a purely fictional character, who were thus enrolled among the saints of the Catholic Church, nearly eighty years after Bernanos's death.

Childhood as a figure of holiness

One motif runs through Bernanos's entire oeuvre: childhood as the privileged place where holiness, or conversely the most radical distress, shows itself without the defences of adulthood. Chantal de Clergerie in La Joie, little Mouchette in Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette (1937), a figure distinct from the Mouchette of Sous le Soleil de Satan, or the young curé of Ambricourt himself, whose gaze on the world always keeps something of childlike innocence: in Bernanos, the child sees what the adult, mired in social compromises, has ceased to see. This intuition, which owes much to his own reading of the Gospel ("Let the children come to me", Mk 10:14), makes Bernanos a direct heir of Charles Péguy, whose revolt against money and fidelity to childhood faith he shares^[59], and of Léon Bloy, whose uncompromising refusal of all bourgeois mediocrity he extends^[60].

The theological reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar

The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was among the first to read Bernanos not as one Catholic novelist among others, but as a genuine theological witness to lived faith in the modern world. In Le Chrétien Bernanos (1956), he analyses the great themes of his oeuvre, the cosmos and salvation, the Church as a "vital milieu", order and penance, the Christian in time, drawing abundantly on the writer's own words^[61]. Balthasar will later integrate Bernanos, alongside other great figures of literature and holiness, into his vast theological fresco on the glory of God manifested in history, the same fresco in which he will also make room for Paul Claudel^[62]. This choice is no accident: for Balthasar, Bernanos's oeuvre is not only fine Catholic literature, but an authentic narrative theology, in which the truth of grace shows itself in the very fabric of the novel rather than in a treatise.

Encyclopaedic honesty requires us not to conceal the darkest point of Bernanos's journey: the 1931 publication of La Grande Peur des bien-pensants, a panegyric of Édouard Drumont containing genuinely antisemitic rhetoric, associating money with the figure of the Jew in a vein inherited from late 19th-century antisemitic nationalism^[63][64]. The historians who have studied this text agree in distinguishing that antisemitism, economic and anti-capitalist in nature, from a Nazi-type biological racial antisemitism which nothing in Bernanos's biography permits attributing to him^[65], but that distinction, while clarifying the nature of his words, erases neither their real gravity nor the responsibility of the writer who published and signed them.

What distinguishes Bernanos from many polemicists of his generation is that he never remained frozen in that position. As early as 1938, as seen above, he publicly protests against any association with the antisemitic propaganda of the far-right press^[66]; in 1939, he proclaims his total solidarity with persecuted Jews^[67]; in Brazil, he weaves a genuine friendship with Stefan Zweig and relentlessly denounces Nazi persecution^[68]. That trajectory, from a real and publicly assumed youthful antisemitism to an unequivocal combat against Hitlerian and Vichy antisemitism, must be neither minimized nor forgotten, but neither must it be read backwards as if it defined the whole man: it illustrates rather the possibility of a moral conversion in full adult awareness, publicly assumed, in a Christian who ended by applying to himself the demand for truth he asked of all French society.

Bernanos's oeuvre has, since his death, won a recognition that has far exceeded Catholic circles. Robert Bresson's film Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951), and the one drawn from Mouchette (1967), brought his characters into world cinema history. Poulenc's opera definitively installed the Dialogues des Carmélites in the international operatic repertoire. France issued a postage stamp with his effigy in 1978, and many streets, squares, schools and university residences bear his name across the country today^[69].

But Bernanos's deepest posterity is no doubt theological and spiritual. With Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy and Paul Claudel, he belongs to that great Catholic literary revival which gave back, between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th, an authentically supernatural voice to French literature. He shares with Bloy and Péguy the same uncompromising refusal of bourgeois mediocrity and the same attachment to the hidden holiness of the humble; he shares with Claudel, despite very different temperaments, the conviction that literature can be an authentic theological place. His reading by Hans Urs von Balthasar helped win recognition, far beyond the French-speaking world, that the novel could be a legitimate instrument of theology. And the 2024 canonization of the Carmelites of Compiègne whom he had staged a few months before his own death gives his literary testament a relevance few 20th-century writers can claim: the sixteen historical martyrs who inspired his last text are today, officially, saints of the Catholic Church.

• Léon Bloy, direct predecessor in the uncompromising refusal of bourgeois mediocrity, Léon Bloy.
• Charles Péguy, whose revolt against money and fidelity to childhood faith Bernanos shares, Charles Péguy.
• Paul Claudel, contemporary of the same Catholic literary revival, Paul Claudel.
• Hans Urs von Balthasar, the theologian who devoted to Bernanos an entire study, Le Chrétien Bernanos, Hans Urs von Balthasar.
• François Mauriac, another great Catholic novelist of the same generation, admirer and rival of Bernanos, François Mauriac.