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The Neglected (IV) Charles Péguy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
CHARLES PÉGUY IS CERTAINLY NOT FORGOTTEN. IN DEATH, as in life, he remains a controversial figure. A man of passion, he still arouses passion in others. Even today, at least in France, a book on Péguy is almost certain to give rise to polemics. The details of his political, sentimental and religious life are scrutinized in minute detail. What is most often neglected, what is not taken seriously in this stormy celebrity, is the thinker or, if you like (Péguy would have liked), the philosopher. His views on the city and the Church, on Sophocles and on the Gospels, on the modern world and what makes it move, on men and gods, are sometimes very profound and beautiful. So many writers who are greatly inferior to him now occupy a major place in the text-books of philosophy, sociology and historiography that it is only fair to deal, even if only briefly as here, with Péguy's thought. He himself would have liked to be considered from this angle: was it not the ambition (one of the ambitions) of his life to finish a thesis on the place given to history and sociology in modern times? Although unfinished, the few hundred pages which he left are rich enough to show that he was one of the most enetrating critics of the historical and sociological points of view which dominate modern consciousness.
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References
1 From the name of Emile Combes who, as President of the Council of Ministers in 1902‐1905, put through an aggressively anti‐clerical policy (closure of Church schools, organized campaign against Catholics).
2 For long librarian of the école Normale Supérieure, he converted generations of its pupils to socialism. He also exerted considerable although secret political influence, especially through his hold over Jaurés.
3 All references are taken from the prose works of Péguy, published by Gallimard (Collection La Pléiade) in two volumes, called here I and II.
4 Notre Jeunesse, II, p. 536.
5 Notre Jeunesse, II, p. 508.
6 Op. Cit., p. 509.
7 Op. cit., p. 520.
8 Op. cit., p. 17.
9 Op. cit., p. 37.
10 Op. cit., pp. 244–5, 264–5.
11 Op. cit., p. 313.
12 Op. cit., p. 314.
13 Op. cit., p. 315.
14 Op. cit., p. 417–8.
15 Op. cit., p. 1160.
16 The idea of a ‘new encyclopedia’ which would be ‘socialist’ was very much in the air at the time.
17 Op. cit., p. 324.
18 Op. cit., p. 325.
19 Op. cit., p. 680. Present author’s italics.
20 Op. cit., p. 683.
21 Op. cit., p. 683–4.
22 Op. cit., p. 686.
23 Op. cit., p. 700.
24 Op. cit., p. 729.
25 II, p. 211.
26 II, p. 218.
27 II, p. 1536.
28 II, p. 1327.
29 I, p. 191.
30 Op. cit., p. 192.
31 I, p. 775.
32 II, p. 418.
33 II, p. 482.
34 II, p. 487.
35 II, p. 1445.
36 II, pp. 357–58.
37 II, p. 346.
38 II, p. 1220.