Bernanos, Georges

BERNANOS, GEORGES. - French writer of novels, short stories and essays, b. in Paris on 20 Feb. 1888, d. at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 5 July 1948. Coming from Catholic circles, he inspired his work with a religious conception of life, with a Catholicism deeply felt, but asserted with a force that was all too often immoderate and violent. His first novel, Sous le soleil de Satan, which may be called the novel of the interior life, published in 1926 with enormous success, springs at bottom from the tragic reaction to that facile optimism which had been produced in the first post-war period. It is the strange story of a priest, the abbé Donisson, who, though visited and persecuted by Satan, attains a holiness that superficial people have easily compared to that of the holy curé d'Ars, also because of his particular gift of reading into souls and leading them to the full confession of their most hidden faults. L'imposture (1927) follows the path marked out by this first novel, accentuating its oddities and audacities, while La joie (1929) presents us with the figure of a girl raised to an exceptional mystical state. There follow La grande peur des bien-pensants (1931), a fiery and intemperate political-social satire, Noël à la maison de France (1933), Jeanne relapse et sainte (1934), Un crime, which links up with the first novel and seeks to strike, with satirical and exaggerated portraits, at indifference before good and evil, as well as at the impossibility of following both at the same time. Le journal d'un curé de campagne of 1936 introduces us into a more accessible milieu, in which the supernatural becomes more intimate and profound; the modest country parish priest proves himself a true clinician of souls, above all of his own, and resolves its spiritual problems with delicate assurance. In 1938 B. published a volume of essays, Les grands cimetières sous la lune, very partial in its political judgments, while as early as 1927 he had published La vie de S. Dominique and in 1928 a collection of short stories, Madame d'Argent. During the German occupation he went into voluntary exile in America. From the same period are Nous autres français, and Lettre aux anglais. Endowed with an original and powerful temperament, free of erotic complications and morbid aestheticism, B. has enriched French literature with an intense spiritual orientation and a profound sense of life. Coming from the school of the Catholic novelists (J. Barbier d'Aurevilly, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, L. Bloy), he knows how to represent with equal effectiveness pure priestly souls, and certain highly questionable ones, and satanic souls (some critics have likened him to Dostoevsky), in a style that creates a special pathos and at times a hallucinatory obsession. B. lacks serenity and a sense of measure: which imposes some dutiful reservation on his title of Catholic writer.

Maria Teresa Sposato