The poet and essayist Charles Péguy, who died more than a century ago, was not only a brilliant wordsmith. He was also, and above all, an uncompromising socialist and a ferocious critic of progress and scientism. Excoriating a world corrupted by money and by men who think themselves gods, Péguy’s mystical thought resonates with our own times, with techno-prophets seeking to force on us their algorithmic approach to life and essentially redefine the very nature of what it means to be human.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in France, everyone’s a Péguyist!” It’s hard to argue with Matthieu Giroux, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Philitt and author of Charles Péguy, un enfant contre le monde moderne (Éditions Première Partie, 2018). Péguy has this particular quality – he inspires admiration from figures with diverse, even antagonistic, political backgrounds and traditions. “And they’re not fake Péguyists,” adds Giroux. “You have Alain Finkielkraut, the right-wing, Barresian Péguyist. There’s Edwy Plenel, the left-wing, socialist Péguyist. In politics, there are François Bayrou and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan… They all say they love Péguy for his freedom. Péguy is the socialist against the Socialist Party. He’s the Catholic against the Catholic institution. He’s the mystical republican against the gravediggers of the Republic.” He remains the guarantor of a certain purity, of uncompromising standards.
Late rehabilitation
For a long time, Charles Péguy suffered from a bad reputation, in particular thanks to his appropriation by the Vichy regime and Catholic nationalists. For them, Péguy was nothing more than that Christian peasant who died a patriot in the war. This man who praised the virtues of rootedness and forged a philosophy of the land and attachment. This mystical intellectual who spoke of a “French race.” But for several years now, and more precisely since the centenary of his death on the battlefield (September 5, 1914, in Villeroy, Seine-et-Marne), something seems to have changed. Péguy is back, more contemporary and respectable than ever, ready to help us understand the mysteries of our time: “It is urgent and necessary to read him for the burning relevance of his thought and the antidotes he provides to the poisons that are eating away at our society,” declares philosopher Damien Le Guay, who published Les Héritiers Péguy (Bayard) in 2014. As left-leaning journalist and historian Jacques Julliard comments, “Péguy rules the world, and increasingly so.”
Why reread Péguy today? Why discuss him here? Why is the author of Notre Patrie [Our Fatherland] (1905), Notre jeunesse [Our Youth] (1910), and L’Argent [Money] (1913) revered by his fans like a cult figure whose work had a decisive, but all too often ignored influence? To answer these questions, it is necessary to revisit the short but eventful life of this prolific author, whose “total conviction commanded respect,” in the words of André Gide.
The virtues of poverty
Charles Péguy was born in 1873 in Orléans. His mother was a chair caner, his father a carpenter. The latter died when Charles was only a few months old. Nevertheless, Péguy had a happy childhood, which he remembered fondly. He would later extoll the virtues of this simple, dignified life, the virtues of poverty in a world still untouched by capitalism, speculation and the power of money. “We earned nothing; we spent nothing; and everyone lived. There wasn’t this economic strangulation of today, this scientific, cold, rectangular, regular, clean, neat, flawless, implacable, wise, common, constant, convenient strangulation, like a virtue, where there is nothing to say, and where the one who is strangled is so obviously in the wrong,” he wrote in 1913 in L’Argent (Money). In this same text, as in the rest of his work, Péguy celebrates craftsmanship and manual labor. “Throughout my childhood,” he writes, “I saw chairs being re-caned with exactly the same spirit and the same heart, and with the same hand, with which this same people had carved their cathedrals.”
Péguy was a brilliant, if somewhat insolent, student. He certainly caught the attention of Théophile Naudy, the director of the teacher training college in Orléans, who took him under his wing. Graduating first in his class in the primary school leaving certificate exam in 1884 and earning his baccalaureate in literature in 1891, he gained admission to the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm in 1894. This was a crowning achievement and a pivotal moment. The young provincial discovered the capital and left childhood behind.
The harmonious socialist city
The École Normale Supérieure (ENS) was then a vibrant melting pot, a space of freedom and intense debate. Péguy attended lectures by Romain Rolland and Henri Bergson, and he became friends with the school librarian, Lucien Herr, a philosophy professor and early socialist. Herr was a wellspring of knowledge. He was reputed to have read everything, in every language. He would later become, incidentally, one of the founders of the League of Human Rights and the daily newspaper L’Humanité. Above all, he introduced and converted several generations of students to socialism. Like Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum before him, Péguy was captivated, and began what he called “his first conversion.” At the ENS library, he met Jaurès, 14 years his senior, and began to spend considerable time with him. He published his first articles in La Revue socialiste and in 1897 published Jeanne d’Arc, an early, more literary text, which he described as a “lyrical mystery.”
Péguy’s socialism is utopian and libertarian. As a young man he dreamed of a fraternal society, an ideal of love and equality among humankind. “He embodies a French-style socialism, such as can be found in Proudhon or Leroux. A socialism that will not be contaminated by Marxism,” explained Camille Riquier, lecturer in philosophy and author of Philosophie de Péguy, ou les mémoires d’un imbécile (PUF, 2017). “A primitive socialism,” adds Matthieu Giroux. Two texts attest to this vision at the time: De la cité socialiste (1897) and Marcel, premier dialogue de la cité harmonieuse (1898).
Péguy lays out the principles that should govern his ideal socialist city. First and foremost, the idea of an inclusive city that leaves no one behind and allows everyone to live decently. “The first social duty is to rescue the wretched from their misery. He made it a categorical imperative,” notes Camille Riquier. No one is excluded in Péguy’s socialist city: “The harmonious city has as its citizens all living beings who are souls, all animated beings, because it is not harmonious, because it is not fitting that there should be souls that are strangers, because it is not fitting that there should be animated beings who are strangers,” he writes. The young author speaks of “animated beings” and considered animals – although elsewhere described as “adolescent souls” – to be fully-fledged citizens of his city, anticipating by several decades the animal rights reflections prominent in today’s discourse. “All animals have become citizens of the harmonious city,” he explains.
Péguy can be seen as one of the forerunners of ecological thought. He demonstrates a particular attention to a form of harmony and osmosis with nature. This concern aligns with his vision of work: it is about ensuring “the physical life of the city” through gathered natural products and “the products of non-unhealthy labor” – that is, labor that does not deform either the souls or the bodies of the workers. Superfluous goods and luxury have no place in the world imagined by Péguy. It is a matter, though he does not use the term, of thinking about and building a frugal city.
Competition in the workplace, however, is rejected as the source of all evils. “Competition is bad in principle: it is bad for men to work against one another; men should work with one another; they should work to do their best at their work, and not to use their work to defeat other workers,” wrote Péguy in De la cité socialiste [On the Socialist City]. “Competition is often distorted by advertising, which tends to give an advantage to the most well-known work over the better-done work […]. Ultimately, international competition is the cause of war, armed peace, and the evils that follow, just as interpersonal competition is the cause of lawsuits, veritable private wars, most public and private hatreds, and the evils that follow.” Above all, for Péguy, work is not an end in itself but a means which allows citizens, once their physical needs are met, to devote themselves to other, more fulfilling activities, such as art or philosophy. In Péguy’s city, there is no longer any property or inheritance. Free access is the principle of everything.
Intransigence and solitude
“Péguy’s socialism is a way of restarting the French Revolution. The revolution had to be renewed every day. The socialist revolution was meant to be the culmination of the bourgeois French Revolution, which had failed because it was unprepared,” explains Camille Riquier in an interview with France Culture . The Dreyfus Affair, which shook French society at the end of the 19th Century, provided Péguy with another opportunity to affirm and deepen his commitment. For him, this affair, like socialism itself, was a moral issue, a matter of humanity. Despite failing the competitive examination for a teaching position in philosophy, Péguy was one of the first to throw himself into the fray. He decided to leave the École Normale Supérieure and, with Lucien Herr and Léon Blum, founded the Librairie Bellais bookstore in the Latin Quarter, the headquarters of the Dreyfusards.
Herein lies one of the essential dimensions of Péguy’s personality: his rejection of institutions, his wholehearted commitment to the struggles of his time, his aspiration to a pure socialism. This is reflected in his way of life. “One had to live like a socialist. To live as a wretch among the wretched. I see no better example of an authentic man, an authentic socialist,” emphasizes Camille Riquier.
Gradually, he reproached his friends – Jaurès in particular – for transforming the Dreyfus Affair into a political affair, whereas he saw it as a mystical struggle. His famous axiom – “Everything begins in mysticism and everything ends in politics” —was already emerging. He committed it to paper in 1910 in his book Notre jeunesse [Our Youth], in which he extensively revisited the Dreyfusard struggle.
“For Péguy, mysticism is fidelity to the early days of commitments,” explains Matthieu Giroux. “In socialism, it means being faithful to Fourier, to Saint-Simon, to early socialism. To be mystical in the Dreyfus Affair is to remain faithful to Bernard Lazare, whom they betrayed and left for dead in a corner, but who was the first to defend Dreyfus. In Catholicism, it is being faithful to the teachings of Christ rather than to the Church of Rome.” Contrary to this logic, there is politics, understood as the game of parties, compromises and capitulations – that which would later be called, in a pejorative way, ‘politicianry’. “The republican mystique was when one died for the Republic” wrote Péguy in Notre jeunesse; “Republican politics is now when one lives off it.”.
The Bellais bookstore didn’t last long, quickly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Péguy drifted apart from his friends Lucien Herr and Léon Blum. In response to a motion passed by the Socialist Congress recommending that the various socialist factions refrain from publishing anything likely to harm the struggles for party unity, particularly those led by Jean Jaurès, he founded the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which would become his life’s work, his sacred duty. With the Cahiers, his aim was “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, to tell the stupid truth plainly, the boring truth tediously, the sad truth bleakly.” It was an extension of his Dreyfusard commitment, this fight for “the” truth and against the official version of the truth.
With this publication, which remained relatively obscure, never exceeding 1,500 subscribers, Péguy opened numerous fronts. He fought against anti-Dreyfusard nationalism, the anti-militarism of academics, the anti-clerical Combes movement (named after Émile Combes, President of the Council of Ministers from 1902 to 1905, known for his fight against the Church, which notably instituted the ban on teaching by religious orders), colonial abuses, racial persecution, and the oppression of national minorities in imperial Europe. “I am a journalist for a fortnightly publication, and I work on the miseries of the present,” he wrote. Decades before Sartre, Péguy is undoubtedly one of the first great figures of the engaged intellectual. “For him, there is a spiritual dimension to commitment,” emphasizes Edwy Plenel, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Mediapart website, “the idea that by committing oneself, one can rise above oneself.”
Péguy met many prominent figures of his time and, through his Cahiers de la Quinzaine, helped to introduce new writers, such as Romain Rolland, Julien Benda, Georges Sorel, Daniel Halévy, and André Suarès. However, his uncompromising nature and fervor led to a falling out with everyone: “In the end, the Cahiers de la Quinzaine was just Péguy on his own,” observes Alexandre de Vitry, a Doctor of Literature and author of Conspirations d’un solitaire, l’individualisme civique de Charles Péguy (Les Belles Lettres, 2015). “In Péguy’s work, there is a tension between the individual and the city,” he continues, “a tension that is concentrated in the idea of mysticism, this primal impulse that animates every beginning of civic life. The price to pay for this mysticism is solitude, and this gives Péguy’s work an individualistic dimension. He constantly creates division, and he does so in the name of harmony, of the city. It’s a kind of squaring the circle.” Péguy, in fact, succeeds in creating a void around himself.
Metaphysics versus progress
In 1908, Péguy returned to the Christian faith of his childhood. This was his “second conversion.” But once again, he rebelled against the Catholic institution, which, in his view, distorted the message of Christ. Institutions, by their very nature, seemed oppressive to him. As the conflict with Germany loomed, his longstanding friendship with Jean Jaurès was no longer relevant. Péguy criticized Jaurès for his involvement in Combes’s political maneuvering and partisan politics, and for his pacifism, and even went so far as to wish for his death. “As soon as war is declared, the first thing we will do is shoot Jaurès. We will not leave behind a traitor to stab us in the back,” he wrote, unaware that Raoul Villain, a nationalist student close to Action Française, would assassinate the socialist leader on the evening of July 31, 1914.
When war broke out, Péguy enlisted in the army and, on September 5, 1914, died, sword drawn, killed by a bullet to the forehead while urging his company to hold their position. He was 41 years old. “Péguy’s true heart lies in his legacy,” argues the philosopher Damien Le Guay. “During his lifetime, he remained on the margins. He only achieved fame after his death. Everything he thought during his lifetime, we understand today.”
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So, what do we understand from this? What is most striking, beyond his involvement in the struggles of his time, is his critique of modernity and his prescience regarding the world that awaited us. For Péguy, the modern world is the one that has taken the place of the socialist world he anticipated. A world corrupted by money, which turns its back on the past and distrusts all cultures. “This modern world is a world that wants to eliminate metaphysics in the name of progress,” explains Charles Coustille, author of Parking Péguy (Flammarion, 2019). “It’s the idea that progress and science can save us from everything. Péguy criticizes the scientist’s confidence in the accuracy of their results, whereas reality, by its very nature, is unpredictable. The scientist, for his part, always imposes units onto living things.”
Péguy’s critique of history, directed at Ernest Renan, champion of positivism in France and a prominent figure at the Sorbonne, challenges the idea of history as linear, a march forward. This undoubtedly represents a substantial part of Péguy’s relevance today. “It’s the question of progress for its own sake,” emphasizes Damien Le Guay, “and it’s a question of our time. Péguy explains that reducing everything to a matter of calculation, organization, and progress fosters a new metaphysics, that of money. So when you have something like Google, a hyper-capitalist company that aspires to correct humanity’s flaws and makes the eschatological promise of abolishing death, it seems to me that we’ve reached the end of the disenchantment Péguy spoke of.”
Péguy, the spiritual father of resistance to transhumanism? If you like, says Alexandre de Vitry: “There are elements in Péguy that resonate with this; he often criticizes his contemporaries for wanting to break free from their order, for thinking they are God. We see this today, but Péguy was not the Jacques Ellul [a pioneer of technological critique in France, author of, among other works, The Technological Society] that some would like to make him out to be.”
Edwy Plenel, for his part, primarily remembers Péguy for his (prescient) critique of capitalism and the reign of money. “Péguy was angry at his era, which is very similar to our own,” he explains in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. “An era of transition, of industrial revolution, of financial speculation, an economic, geopolitical, and social upheaval. And he is angry at the universal commodity. That is his target: the degradation caused by commodities, by money. And that is the foundation of his anger: the universal commodity, which takes everything, which prostitutes everything, which standardizes everything.” Words that directly inspired one of François Mitterrand’s most famous speeches, delivered on June 13, 1971, at the famous “founding congress” of Épinay: “The real enemy […] is Monopoly! A broad term to signify all the powers of money: money that corrupts, money that buys, money that crushes, money that kills, money that ruins, and money that rots even the conscience of men!”
The elevation of science and money to the status of new gods – that is the problem for Péguy, who denounces “the world of those who play the smart aleck,” who believe in nothing and are proud of it. “If Péguy were alive today, he would be deeply saddened,” says Matthieu Giroux, “but at least he could breathe new life into disenchantment.” Rereading Péguy for his inspiration and his extraordinary writing, his art of rhythm and language, is a reasonable imperative for many of our contemporaries.
This article originally appeared in French in issue 28 of Usbek & Rica, published in Autumn 2019. Translation by Secessio.
Secessio 