PÉGUY, CHARLES. - Writer, b. at Orléans on 7 January 1873, d. in combat at Villeroy on 5 September 1914. In 1894, a first-year student at the École Normale in Paris, he joined the Socialist Party. His idealism, of a Proudhonian rather than Marxist stamp (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 therefore undertaken a revision of the concept and methodology of history then prevailing in French university chairs, under the sign of Taine and Renan, he was not long in realizing how that sterile and narrow determinism, common both 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 determination to devote himself to the publishing venture that "would have to triumph thanks to the sole revolutionary force of truth" and thus remake the French public. On 5 January 1900 the first of the Cahiers de la quinzaine issued from a makeshift editorial office; they would continue, with the same unassuming and evocative nonchalance, until P.'s death. J. Lotte, H. Ghion, R. Rolland, L. Gillet, C. Sorel, J. Benda and the Tharaud brothers collaborated on them; but the animator and fundamental author is always P., who makes of them almost a moving personal correspondence with his readers. In his instinctive fidelity to the real, he is not long in discovering 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 spurred him to dialectical deepening; but in that very process misery and freedom were revealed to him as the inheritance of the Fall and as a mysterious filiation from God himself to men.
What for the philosopher remained pure intellectual passion now becomes for P. an anguished dilemma. The city is not saved by human forces alone, he confesses in 1902 (Jean Coste); the infirmity of sin damns it. This uneasiness torments him, until in September 1908, during an illness, he falls suddenly into the certainty of Grace. From that date P. entrusts his own fate and that of the Cahiers to the Virgin; Clio (1909), L'Argent (1913) and the grandiose 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 that the lack of the Sacraments be supplied by the heroic exercise of charity.
The fidelity of his pages to the great and recurring breath of prayer uproots spirits 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, of 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 sustain the vast armature, represent the obstinate and happy effort of a poet who has attempted, through the very monotony of his lyrical discourse, to gain entry into a timeless duration, and to lead his listener there with him.