Psichari, Ernest - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. X, p. 157

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

PSICHARI, ERNEST. - French writer, b. 29 Sept. 1883 in Paris, d. in the war on 22 Aug. 1914 at Rossignol (Belgium), nephew of Ernest Renan. An essentially modern and profoundly mystical personality. Driven by the sorrow of a grave disappointment into a dissolute life, and by disgust with this into an attempt at suicide, he sought in a school of discipline the help needed to create within himself that inner order whose first principle he still did not know, and entered the army (1903).

From 1909 to 1912, in the solitude of a long military mission in the desert regions of Mauritania, he completed that spiritual journey from agnosticism to God recounted in his works: Les voix qui crient dans le désert (published posthumously in 1920) and Le voyage du centurion (published posthumously in 1916). Before these he had composed: Terres de soleil et de sommeil (1908), and L'appel des armes (1913).

BIBL.: J. Maritain, Antinoderne, Paris 1927, passim; J. Calvet, Le renouveau catholique dans la littérature contemporaine, ibid. 1931, passim; W. Beckerer, E. P. in seiner psychologischen Entwicklung, Leipzig 1933; H. Psichari, E. P. mon frère, Paris 1933; H. Massis, Notre ami P., ibid. 1936; W. Fowlie, E. P. a study in religious conversion, Toronto 1939; A.-M. Goichon, E. P. d'après des documents inédits, Paris 1946; J. Peyrade, P. maître de grandeur, ibid. 1947; R. Maritain, Les grandes amitiés, Bruges 1949, passim; Ch. Poulet, La sainteté française contemporaine. Concertis, Paris 1952, p. 113 ff. (with bibliography), Matilde Mazzolani