PÉGUY, CHARLES. – Writer, b. at Orléans on 7 Jan. 1873, d. in combat at Villeroy on 5 Sept. 1914. In 1894, as a first-year student at the École Normale in Paris, he joined the Socialist Party. His Proudhonian rather than Marxist idealism (De la cité socialiste, 1897; Marcel, premier dialogue de la cité harmonieuse, 1898) and the candour of his conduct soon isolated him from the Party politicians, especially after the Dreyfus affair, in which he had fought victoriously.
Having therefore undertaken a revision of the concept and methodology of history then prevailing in French university chairs, under the influence of Taine and Renan, he soon became aware that this sterile and narrow determinism, common both to the radicals’ capitalist individualism and to the social leaders’ class struggle, had dug a terrifying rift in the history of Christian and communitarian France.
Hence his determination to devote himself to the publishing enterprise that “shall triumph through the sole revolutionary force of truth” and thus remake the French public. On 5 Jan. 1900 the first issue of the Cahiers de la quinzaine emerged from an improvised editorial office; they continued, with the same modest and evocatively disdainful nonchalance, until P.’s death. J. Lotte, H. Ghion, R. Rolland, L. Gillet, C. Sorel, J. Benda, and the Tharaud brothers contributed to them; but the animator and fundamental author was always P., who turned them into something like a moving personal correspondence with his readers. In his instinctive fidelity to reality, he soon discovered the source of historical events in the conflict between the weight of earthly misery and man’s irrepressible yearning for freedom. Bergson’s contemporary teaching stirred him to dialectical inquiry; but in it misery and freedom were revealed to him as legacies of the Fall and as a mysterious filiation from God himself to humanity.
What for the philosopher had remained pure intellectual passion now became for P. an anguished dilemma. The city cannot be saved by human forces alone, he confessed in 1902 (Jean Coste); the infirmity of sin condemns II. This inquietude consumed him until, in Sept. 1908, during an illness, he suddenly attained certainty of Grace. From that date P. entrusted his own fate and that of the Cahiers to the Virgin; Clio (1909), L’Argent (1913), and the magnificent lyrical tapestries Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, 1910; Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu, 1912; Le mystère des Saints Innocents, 1912; La tapisserie de la Geneviève et de la Jeanne d’Arc, 1913; La tapisserie de Notre-Dame, 1913; Eve, 1913, are the most eloquent expressions of this confession of Catholic faith, which asks to compensate for the lack of the Sacraments through the heroic exercise of charity.
The fidelity of his pages to the great and recurring breath of prayer uproots spirit and things from the habitual indifference in which habit immobilizes them, inserting them into the living order of creation. Poetry itself becomes an act of love: an instrument of witness and imitation of the Creator, in which the mysterious bond between the carnal and the spiritual takes shape. His thousands of quatrains, a few motifs of which support the vast structure, represent the stubborn and joyful effort of a poet who attempted, through the very monotony of his lyrical discourse, to gain entry into a timeless duration and to lead his listener there with him.