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. The idealism of Marxist stamp that he produced (*De la cité socialiste*, 1897; *Marcel, premier dialogue de la cité harmonieuse*, 1898) and the straightforwardness of his conduct soon isolated him from the Party’s politicians, especially after the Dreyfus Affair in which he had fought victoriously.
Having then undertaken a revision of the concept and methodology of history then prevalent in French universities, under the influence of Taine and Renan, he soon realized how that sterile and narrow determinism, common alike to the capitalist individualism of the radicals and to the class struggle of the socialist leaders, had dug a fearful rift in the history of Christian and communal France.
Hence his resolve to dedicate himself to the editorial enterprise that was to triumph solely through the revolutionary force of truth, and he thus refused the French public. On 5 Jan. 1900 there appeared from a makeshift editorial office the first of the *Cahiers de la quinzaine*, which continued, with the same unassuming and suggestive nonchalance, until P.’s death. Among its contributors were J. Lotte, H. Ghéon, R. Rolland, L. Gillet, C. Sorel, J. Benda, the Tharaud brothers; but the animator and principal author was always P., who made it almost 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 insuppressible yearning for freedom. The contemporary lesson of Bergson spurred him to deeper dialectical reflection; yet in it, misery and freedom revealed themselves as the heritage of the Fall and a mysterious filiation from God Himself to men.
What for the philosopher remained pure intellectual passion became for P. an anguishing dilemma. The city cannot be saved by human forces alone, he confessed in 1902 (*Jean Coste*): the infirmity of sin binds II. This unrest tormented him until, in Sept. 1908, during an illness, he was suddenly brought to the certainty of Grace. From that time P. entrusted his own fate and that of the *Cahiers* to the Virgin; *Clio* (1909), *L'Argent* (1913), and the grand lyrical tapestries *Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc* (1910), *Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu*, *Le mystère des Saints Innocents* (1912), *La tapisserie de Ste Geneviève et de Ste Jeanne d'Arc* (1913), *La tapisserie de Notre-Dame* (1913), *Ève* (1913) are the most eloquent expressions of this profession of Catholic faith, which seeks to supply the lack of the Sacraments by heroic exercise of charity.
The fidelity of these pages to the great and recurrent rhythm of prayer uproots spirit and things from the habitual indifference in which custom immobilizes them, inserting them into the living order of creation. Poetry itself becomes an act of love: a means of witness, of imitation of the Creator, where the mysterious bond between the carnal and the spiritual takes form. His thousands of quatrains, of which only a few motifs sustain the vast structure, represent the steadfast and happy effort of a poet who sought, through the very monotony of his lyrical discourse, to gain entry into a timeless duration and to lead his reader there with him.