Two
The Beautiful Community: The Fascist Legacy of Charles Péguy
That awful democratic system,. . . the only one that will remain in the modern world, the least popular, the least profoundly people that has ever been or that we have ever seen in the world, and above all, the least republican, reigns uncontested in history.
Charles Péguy, "Clio: Dialogue de l'Histoire et de l'âme païenne"
(1912-1914)
The work of few literary figures has been more at the center of controversy in recent times than that of the poet and essayist, Charles Péguy. The battle over Péguy and his legacy has been primarily about whether his work rightfully belongs in the extremist French nationalist and racist traditions, which in the 1930s and 1940s provided a support for fascism, anti-Semitism, and eventually collaboration with Nazi Germany, or whether it is, on the contrary, diametrically opposed to these traditions. The conflict, in other words, has been over whether Péguy's writing (and because he is often taken to be representative of important tendencies of modern French literature and thought, modern French history and culture in general) should be considered either fundamentally democratic or protofascist; either a privileged example of a profoundly humanistic cultural pluralism and a model for all opposition to totalitarian ideologies and racism; or, on the contrary, representative of dogmatic, totalitarian ideological thinking and a model for nationalist extremism, racism, and anti-Semitism.1
What is particularly interesting about Péguy is that he was on the opposite side of the conflict in each of two of the most divisive events in modern French history. Given the ideological use to which his work was put during the Occupation by French fascists and collaborators, it could be considered to have provided an important foundation for French fascism. And yet, while he was alive, Péguy remained a militant and unrepentant Dreyfusard, a severe critic of anti-Semitism, and a staunch defender of a mystical ideal of the Republic, clearly on the opposite side of the battle for the political and cultural destiny of France from anti-Dreyfusard nationalists and other "fathers" of French fascism such as Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras. The controversy surrounding Péguy (and French culture in general) that continues today has to do with which Péguy and which France emerged victorious in those two most crucial and divisive political and cultural battles for France—the Dreyfus affair and the collaboration of French intellectuals with Nazi Germany.
Writers obviously cannot be held totally responsible for the fate of their works after their death—or even, for that matter, during their lives, although at least while they are still alive they can protest and disclaim uses they find misleading or incorrect, or whose implications they simply oppose. No one controls the legacy of any work, not even the author, for if there is one thing even the "master thinkers" have no mastery over, it is what others will do to and with their work. To take an extreme case, the fact that Nietzsche was used by the Nazis does not make him only or primarily a proto-Nazi thinker. And yet the uses that texts are put to cannot be ignored, no matter how opposite those uses might be to the explicit intentions of their author or the overall and dominant effects of the texts themselves. The uses and abuses of texts become part of their history and thus must be taken seriously, especially if the texts have as a part of their legacy an important totalitarian or racist phase.
It may not be wrong, but it is certainly not enough, to say that certain uses are abuses—that they are partial or distorted readings—in order to save the texts they simplify or distort. It is also necessary to analyze with care and precision how texts are used and which figures, arguments, concepts, and strategies are borrowed and mobilized for contexts, causes, or ends far different from those advocated or suggested by the texts themselves.2 No matter how partial, dishonest, absurd, or grotesque their references to and uses of the name of Nietzsche were, Nazi ideologues were able to find and exploit within Nietzsche's texts elements essential to Nazi ideology—even if Nietzsche's satire and critique of German nationalism and his attacks on anti-Semitism, among many other things, had to be ignored or censored. And this means that the arguments and strategies in Nietzsche's work that should have made it difficult or impossible for the Nazis to proclaim a German National Socialism in his name must be analyzed in terms of the National Socialism his texts were called on to support. One could find examples of other work—although none more dramatic than Nietzsche's—to illustrate the difficulties involved in analyzing and understanding the historical-political responsibility of texts for the uses to which they are put, even (or especially) when they are mobilized in the name of totalitarian ideologies and principles to which they implicitly or explicitly are opposed or whose presuppositions they put into question before the fact.
Any reader of Charles Péguy's political writings is faced with a problem similar (though not identical) to the one facing the reader of Nietzsche. On the surface, no one seemed a less likely candidate than Péguy for the "honor" of having been considered by French fascists one of the "founding fathers of fascism."3 Socialist, republican, Dreyfusard, severe critic of anti-Semitism, Catholic mystic, Péguy, right up until his death in the Battle of the Marne in August 1914, was, at least on the surface, opposed to almost all of the essential elements that would constitute the different versions of fascism in France. The question remains, however, as to how he could have been seen as a precursor and founding father by so many. What exactly did fascist writers see in his work that attracted them to it and made them see it as protofascist? Were the fascist writers and thinkers who refer to him simply wrong, incompetent readers, narrow ideologues ready to make any text they liked, any writer they admired—and especially a militant nationalist writer—conform to fascist ideology? Some undoubtedly were, and the problem would be certainly easier to resolve, but much less interesting, if this were in fact the case for all of them. But in all cases, the questions remain: Why did French fascists admire Péguy in the first place? What did they find in his work, rather than in some other author's work, to praise?
In Colère de Péguy (Paris: Hachette, 1987), Jean-Michel Rey tries to disassociate Péguy completely from his fascist legacy and all forms of extremist nationalism. Rey condemns all attempts to "classify" a writer such as Péguy, for he claims that to treat a true writer in terms of ideological or religious concerns always constitutes a strategy for not reading him and moreover justifies why "we," today, should not read him. Rey's militant defense of Péguy is thus also a defense of reading and writing as profoundly anti-ideological practices, which means that Péguy's writing as writing, no matter what it says and what political effects it actually had, can have nothing to do with the various ideological contexts in which it was placed.
Rey especially emphasizes the way Péguy's writing—always turning back on itself, unfinished, disordered—was open to heterogeneity and what Rey calls the "truly historical":
Writing as the collection of antecedents, the treatment of the heterogeneous and the diverse, as a discipline without a method . . . the unprecedented opening of the present, even as expenditure, as the negotiation with real forces, seized in their profundity, as what is original in history. (39-40)
Such writing, for Rey (assuming that his description is accurate), in its very form and regardless or in spite of its content, is by nature undog-matic, critical of ideological constructs, and thus truly historical: in other words, anything but vulgar, extremist-nationalist, or protofascist. Thus, Rey argues that it is only by ignoring Péguy's writing as such that his work can be considered to have anything to do with the contexts in which it was used. For Rey, writing as such is the antithesis of vulgar nationalism and fascism; in fact, of all ideology. Its heterogeneity and diversity, its lack of method, are always opposed to and undermine the homogeneous, monolithic characteristics of ideology in general. To save Péguy, Rey must thus sacrifice important components of the very writing he claims must be read and not censored; he must ignore its various and contradictory ideological effects in order to claim it has nothing at all to do with any ideology whatsoever.
Rey thus attacks and dismisses the political readings and uses made of Péguy during the war and Occupation as grotesque falsifications of Péguy's writing and thought. He argues that when a text by Péguy was published in the first issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, edited by Drieu La Rochelle during the Occupation, this constituted a serious betrayal of Péguy's writing and a serious and highly motivated ideological distortion of his work:
What did they try to make the work of Péguy say, after the disappearance of the author? It was used for political causes that were fundamentally foreign to it. (Just as was done for Nietzsche.) During the Occupation, they notably looked to make of Péguy an apostle of the most vulgar nationalism. His text was cut up and editings performed on it: well-known operations that attest at the same time perhaps, through a definite bias, to the importance of this work and to its disconcerting character. (102)
Rey is of course not wrong to insist on the way in which Péguy's texts had to be edited in order to reappear in the specific context of the Occupation, when all publications were closely controlled and censored, and when only a certain form of French nationalism—one that did not overtly challenge the Nazi project for a "New Europe"—was permitted. Not only did all anti-German references have to be censored, but all positive references in his work to Jews and Jewish mysticism of course had to be eliminated as well. Péguy's work definitely had to be mutilated to fit into this context, which is to say that Rey is certainly right to claim that Péguy was not "an apostle of vulgar nationalism," if vulgar nationalism is defined as militantly collaborationist, explicitly fascist, anti-Semitic, or National-Socialist in the Nazi sense of the term.
But because Péguy was an apostle—and the word is chosen advisedly—of what I would call a militant spiritualistic or aestheticist form of nationalism, it seems to me (at best) misleading for Rey to claim that the political causes for which Péguy's work was used by fascists and collaborationists "were fundamentally foreign to it," or that, as Rey goes on to argue, his work "had nothing to do" with the contexts in which it was republished during the war (103, my emphases). Not just during the war but for at least twenty years before, Péguy's work was much cited in extremist nationalist contexts, which, no matter how extreme and dangerous, cannot be dismissed as being simply "vulgar." Too many important writers and intellectuals contributed to the construction and defense of this extreme form of nationalism to dismiss it so easily. In other words, Péguy's contributions to forms of French nationalism that before and during the Second World War were fascist and then collaborationist are much greater than Rey admits. And even though Péguy's texts had to be edited to fit the specific propaganda purposes of some French collaborators and the German censors, they did not have to be edited or cut to have an important influence on most French literary fascists.4
Péguy's socialist mysticism or spiritualism was frequently evoked by fascists and translated into a more directly political context; that is, it was freed of its references to Christianity, and then transformed into one of the principal elements of a highly aestheticized or literary form of fascism proposed by numerous writers and intellectuals. When these translations and transformations are performed, Péguy's work does not remain exactly the same, but it certainly cannot be claimed to be fundamentally foreign to the extremist nationalist and fascist contexts in which it was used. The question that especially interests me is what roles both Péguy's writing and his concept of writing played in his fascist legacy, what his notions of art and literature had to do with both his politics and the fascist politics his texts were later called upon to serve.5
If we read Péguy's texts in terms of the various literary, cultural, and ideological concerns but resist the temptation to reduce everything in his texts to a single principle or idea—either an ideological or an anti-ideological principle—the problem of the cultural and political implications of his work is quite complex. Péguy was a republican who admired ancient France and hated modernity, parliamentary politics, and all political parties. He was a committed socialist, but he broke with the Socialist party and thereafter made it and the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès the privileged objects of his attacks. He was a militant Dreyfusard, but he felt that the politics of those on his side were even more "criminal" than the politics of the anti-Dreyfusards. He was a mystical Catholic who constantly criticized the Catholic Church, a severe critic of anti-Semitism who abhorred what he called "Jewish politics," an intellectual and poet who took every chance he could to attack the "intellectual party" (especially historians and sociologists) and denounce their responsibility for the evils of modernity, political corruption, and the loss of the true (spiritual) sense of the Republic. He was also a radical political theorist who hated politics and theory. Péguy's work on this general level seems to have no unique source or to determine no specific legacy; it opens, rather, at least in principle, onto diverse and contradictory aesthetic, cultural, and political possibilities.
In the name of the absolute ideals of Christianity and the Republic, which he claimed were profoundly intertwined, Péguy constantly called for a revolutionary return to the true spirituality of the French people, the transcendence of democratic, parliamentary, and religious institutions, the unification of the disparate elements of the nation, and thus the end of class divisions and the misery of the poor. Such a spiritual revolution made against modernity would, he felt, bring about the destruction of anti-Semitism as a political position as well. In almost all of his writings, Péguy saw the Jews as the victims, not the masters or beneficiaries, of capitalism and modernity in general. French fascists who referred to his work made similar arguments, obviously not in the name of the Republic or in favor of the Jews, but in violent opposition to both. What they were especially attracted to was the theoretical model for the spiritual transcendence of the politics of modernity that Péguy's work seemed to offer.
Robert Brasillach, for example, constantly referred to Péguy in his work and considered him one of the models for his own commitment to fascism. In an article on Georges Bernanos, Brasillach praised Bernanos by comparing him to Péguy, who, Brasillach claimed, had long before warned against the dangers of "intellectual parties and the materialist civilization, against the power of money and against every weakening of France," and reminded the modern world of "the ancient virtue of poverty, . . . the virtues of heroism and saintliness" ("Georges Bernanos," L'Action Française [March 5, 1931]). In an essay written during the Occupation, after reading Marcel Péguy's book, Le Destin de Charles Péguy, Brasillach situated Péguy's work even closer to the fascist politics that he, like Péguy's son, supported:
[Marcel Péguy's] thesis is that Péguy . . . is also a very great sociologist, worthy of being considered the inspirer of the new France, in brief, a French National Socialist. The thesis deserves to be known, and in spite of several important reservations (Péguy, unfortunately, wasn't racist, at least in theory), the thesis is correct. . . . We are here in the presence of a series of sacred texts, a sort of French breviary. ("Péguy ou l'inconnu," Je suis partout, no. 547 [January 24, 1942])
Brasillach regrets that Péguy was not a racist, but he is clearly willing to overlook this "weakness," given the importance of Péguy's particular form of spiritualistic "national socialism" and the importance he gives to the nation—the homeland, its people, and its traditions—as the foundation of all spirituality.
What seems most foreign in Péguy's work to the contexts in which fascists put it, then, are his republicanism, his militant Dreyfusism, and his respect for and defense of the Jews. French fascist writers like Brasillach usually passed over Péguy's Dreyfusism and his scorn for anti-Semitism as quickly as they could and tried to explain them away, to treat them as insignificant, or simply to ignore them. Péguy's son, Marcel, for example, had no trouble separating his father's defense of Dreyfus from any defense of the Jews in general: "Dreyfus was Jewish. There were men like my father who took a stand for Dreyfus even though he was Jewish" (Le Destin de Charles Péguy, 137). Without claiming in any way that Péguy's texts led exclusively or inevitably to fascism, I shall argue that the fascist version of Péguy, no matter how dogmatic and partial, is not in its general lines in contradiction with the major arguments advanced by Péguy's political texts. In any case, neither his Dreyfusism nor his attacks on anti-Semitism were considered by literary fascists to be serious problems, given the overriding attraction of his general spiritualistic approach to politics, which they claimed laid the foundation for a specifically French form of fascism or national socialism.
In order to better understand the spiritual, aestheticized ideal of the Republic that dominates Péguy's work, it is necessary to analyze some of his early essays from the period in which he still considered himself a socialist; that is, when he still thought spiritual ends could be achieved by political means. In "Marcel, Premier dialogue de la cité harmonieuse" (1898),6 Péguy drew a detailed picture of the ideal socialist city. As the title of the essay indicates, harmony is its most prominent characteristic. Harmony regulates all relations within the city and in this way could be said to be the goal itself of socialism—what distinguished socialism from all other political ideologies. The real harmony in which people would live, which socialism would supposedly provide, is given a specific form and function in Péguy's ideal imaginary community. On the first level, the socialist harmonious city is profoundly nonexclusive, open to all, regardless of national or geographic origin, profession, class, religion, or ethnic or racial background:
The harmonious city has as its citizens all living beings who are souls . . . because it is not harmonious, not proper that there are souls who are foreigners. . . . Thus all men of all families, all men of all lands, of lands that are far and lands that are near, all men of all professions, . . . all men of all countries, poor countries and rich countries, . . . all men of all races, . . . all men of all languages,... all men of all cultures,... all men of all beliefs, of all religions, of all philosophies, of all lives, all men of all states, all men of all nations, all men of all countries, have become citizens of the harmonious city, because it is not proper that there are men who are foreigners, (v. 1, 55-56)
Perhaps the universalist socialist ideal has never been stated more directly or more powerfully than here; certainly never has it been more inclusive. Nothing is foreign to the city or outside it, given its potential to incorporate everyone into itself. And because everyone is included within it, the socialist city is in the strongest sense of the terms universal, absolute, total, an enormous machinery of the incorporation of differences into a functioning, harmonious totality.
It seems legitimate to query the basis of the harmony of the harmonious city, given the great diversity of the national, economic, religious, cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds of its people. What exactly was shared in common to make this city harmonious rather than heterogeneous and conflictual? Péguy's answer was a spiritual commonness, a common soul. The spirituality and perfection of the soul were, for Péguy, the fundamental issues in the construction of the city, and individual beauty constituted the essence of the harmony of each soul.
In the harmonious city, each soul realizes to the fullest its own personal beauty, each soul realizes to the fullest its degree of beauty, . . . each soul becomes to the fullest what it is. In the society that was not yet harmonious, souls did not realize their own personal beauty, . . . they did not become what they were; they did not accomplish their form and lived deformed. (77-78)
The individual beauty of the particular souls—and the possibility the city gives them to realize fully this beauty—is the proof of what would be called today the "cultural diversity" of the city and the basis of the harmony of its collective soul. The soul of the city is thus conceived by Péguy as the collective beauty of the individual souls, each living in harmony in itself and at the same time in a state of immanence or collective harmony with all of the others. Diversity thus leads to and supports the singularity of the collectivity—of the collective soul whose beauty and harmony determine the form and truth of the diverse individual souls.
"The foreign," which in the form of differences of national origin, race, and religion is claimed to be totally incorporated into the harmony (beauty) of the city (and in this way transcended by being included), reappears on the level of the will, where it is this time not incorporated into the totality but radically excluded: "All foreign elements are banished from wills in the harmonious city; the wills of harmonious souls are pure of foreign elements" (86). The price one pays for beauty and harmony is thus the homogenization of will. The foreign and the heterogeneous that can be incorporated into the harmonious form of the city cannot be incorporated into the deepest interiority of the will, for the exteriority they represent, were it to enter the pure interiority of will, would by this entry alone already have interrupted the pure relation with itself that the will is claimed to have. Even if subsequently excluded, it would be too late: the interiority of will would be divided from itself, open to an other; it would be impure, not itself. It is therefore necessary that the exclusion of foreign wills be original and absolute; the foreign must not even be known: "Thus the citizens of the harmonious city do not know foreign wills, nonliving wills" (87). The foreign is equivalent to the nonliving because it is not part of the interior life of the will, its only real life. What is outside the will is not.
Péguy's mystical, aesthetic socialism thus has a complex, contradictory relation to the foreign. In terms of the place of "exterior" geographical, national, religious, cultural, and racial factors, it is totally inclusive, incorporating what could initially be considered foreign into the collectivity by making all foreign elements harmonious and functioning parts of the city, with the particular harmony of each being a sign of the harmony of the collectivity. This massive incorporation may be a problem in itself, but at least initially it seems to indicate a definite openness to the foreign and the diverse. But on another and more profound level, that of the pure interior life of the will, the foreign has to be radically excluded as the greatest imaginable menace to will. For a will that does not will itself, a will that is in any way determined or even influenced by factors outside itself, cannot really be considered a living, natural will at all. On this level, the alterity that was seemingly admitted in the first place can now be seen to have from the start been radically excluded.
The radically all-inclusive, internationalist aspects of Péguy's socialism can thus be seen to be rooted in a radically exclusivist voluntarism, one that could potentially be called on, as it was by Péguy himself on the eve of World War I, to support a militant, xenophobic nationalism, or even, as was later the case with French fascists, to support a national socialism that was explicitly anti-Semitic. The mechanisms of exclusion are in place on a very profound level to justify the most radical forms of control or the elimination of whatever is deemed to be foreign to the will of the city, to its harmony (beauty) and that of the "natural" collectivities that constitute it: that is, "the familial wills," "the friendship wills," and the "national wills." "Nothing exterior to the collective souls commands the wills of these souls in the harmonious city. No one has command over the wills of the collective souls in the harmonious city" (89). The collective wills command themselves, and nothing is allowed to interfere with the overall interior harmony of the city's collective will to itself or the harmony of the particular wills constituting it. Socialism's task consisted of creating the city as a beautiful, organic, willed entity and then ensuring that no interference with or disruption to its harmony or beauty would occur.
The most obvious political consequence—for Péguy was also concerned with the practical, political effects of his Utopian musings—of the principle of immediacy attributed to the city's collective will was not just that voting was unnecessary but, more important, that it had to be prohibited because it interfered with the pure expression of the will willing itself. Elections of any sort thus constituted an artificial, exterior, foreign imposition on both the particular and the collective wills of the city. Elections always break up the collective will into competing parties and force both the particular and the collective wills to make specific decisions at specific times, to choose among competing individuals, parties, and interests.
The decisions of the harmonious individual and collective souls are not made, as we used to say in disharmonious society, by a majority of votes, but wills are willed by harmonious souls when they are ready for the souls to will them, when they are in shape for the souls to conform to them. Thus the citizen souls in the harmonious city do not know the weighing of pros and cons of voting, comparison by votes, the law of majorities, the respect of minorities, polls, because this weighing of pros and cons is based on the calculation of voting. (95)
The will does not calculate; it wills. It is not expressed in votes or in the compromises of parliamentary democracy, which in principle at least give some recognition to and protect minority positions and dissenting wills. It wills when it is ready to will and when what it wills conforms to the souls that will; that is, to the harmonious collectivity that the city constitutes. The harmonious city is in this sense, then, by its will and as a will, a self-constituting, autonomous, but profoundly anti-democratic willed form: that is, a beautiful art form that incorporates superficial differences into its harmony in order to will itself as a totality and to radically exclude what does not conform to its will.
As a political entity, the city is dependent on socialism for its existence, but its deepest truth is not really practical and political but disinterested, dependent only on the internal laws of the organic work it is destined to be. In other words, its truth is aesthetic. Even the most willful forms of work in the city are considered "independent and free of everything in the harmonious city, because it is not proper that disinterested work [travail] be commanded by anything that could deform its work [oeuvre] or effect" (96). Art is treated by Péguy as the most spiritual of the disinterested forms of work—the others being science and philosophy—and the most complete model for the harmonious city, which was on its most profound level "the city of good artists" (99). "Made only for themselves," works of art constitute the ultimate model for all works in which "all foreign elements have been banished," all works that are "pure of foreign elements" (99).
Unlike science, which provides information about the real, works of art provide only information about themselves, information "about the real as it is proposed to the knowledge of artists." The reality proposed to the knowledge of artists is the matter of art, claims Péguy, but the matter of reality in art is not material matter but matter that has undergone an aesthetic "'mise en forme without having been deformed of its form" (100). In works of art, one "learns" primarily what form is, what the work of the artist has done to matter to make it harmonious form. And because the reality of art is to be found exclusively in art, in its form, the relation of art to reality is internal rather than external.
The real "art of the political" is thus to make the political a work of art. The privilege Péguy granted to art as a model for the political is evident in his "Réponse brève à Jaurès" (July 4, 1900), in which he criticized Jaurès's politicized view of art and especially the idea that under socialism art would be socialist. On the contrary, Péguy argued, art should never serve the revolution, but rather the revolution should serve art and should make it possible: "We are preparing the socialist revolution in order for art to appear—free—to the knowledge of men. . . . The socialist revolution will give us the liberation of art. It will give us a free art but not a socialist art" (v. 1, 543-44). Statements such as these do not represent just a defense of the integrity and autonomy of art against its politicization; they are also indications of the priority given to art in Péguy's notion of the socialist revolution. The purpose of the revolution is to make art free, and the freedom guaranteed art and to be manifested in art would be both the sign and the guarantee of the freedom of society and of the "health" (harmony) of reality itself. In this sense, Péguy's early Utopian socialism must be considered a radical aestheticism, for his notion of freedom (in art and politics) is primarily the freedom of the will to will itself without exterior interference and to fulfill its destiny as a harmonious, beautiful form.
The question of Péguy's militant Dreyfusism is also more complex than it first seems. Rather than assume that his support of Dreyfus constitutes in itself the definitive proof that he was opposed to all of the principles of the extremist nationalism of his anti-Dreyfusard opponents and that literary fascists were therefore completely wrong to consider him in any way a "father" of French fascism, an investigation of the terms in which he defined his own Dreyfusism reveals important links between the underlying spiritualist assumptions of his position and those of literary fascism. The text in which Péguy undoubtedly gave his most extensive interpretation of the Dreyfus affair and the most elaborate defense of the "mysticism" of his own republicanism and Dreyfusism is "Notre Jeunesse" (1910). Because of this, it is also a key text for understanding the major components of Péguy's spiritualistic nationalism, and it is an absolutely crucial text for interpreting what could be called Péguy's "ultrarepublicanism" and for comprehending how it could take on a new life and be given a new antirepublican sense with fascism. What is clear from the start is that Péguy considered true, heroic republicanism (in his terms, republican mysticism) almost entirely a thing of the past, separated by an abyss from modernity and the politics of the present—that is, from all democratic parliamentary politics and the ideologies and parties of both the left and the right.
Péguy constantly and brutally attacked academic, positivist history, which he considered to be nothing more than a facile justification for and defense of modernity. He saw himself as a militant historian struggling against modernity to resurrect and protect what it had forgotten, denied, or destroyed: its own spiritual roots in premodern or ancient cultures. As a historian, Péguy had a cause to defend, and it was to prevent the religious and political spirituality he associated with Christian mysticism and true republican values from completely dying. He saw himself living at a crucial turning point and a moment of profound crisis in history, a moment in which spirituality itself could be definitively lost if a living link with the past were not reestablished:
We are literally the last representatives [of republicanism], and unless our children get involved in it, practically posthumous survivors. In any case, [we are] the last witnesses. . . . We are the arrière-garde, . . . an isolated and sometimes almost abandoned arrière-garde. . . . We are practically specimens. . . . We are ourselves going to be archives, archives and charts, fossils, witnesses, survivors of these historic ages. Charts that one consults. We are very badly situated. In chronology. In the succession of generations. . . . We are the last of the generations that possess republican mysticism. And our Dreyfus affair will have been the last of the operations of republican mysticism. We are the last. Practically after-the-last. (v. 3, 9-10)
But the untimeliness of such survivors and witnesses, the fact that they come after the authentic generation of republicans and before a modern generation indifferent to spiritual values, is also their critical advantage.
For to be "badly situated" is also to be "historically situated at a critical point, at a discriminating point" (11). It is to be obliged to say what no one wants to hear and to be the critical judge of the movement of history itself, to be in an ideal position to see what needs to be done so that the mysticism and spirituality of the past will not be definitively lost, so that the "entire glorious past, the entire honorable past, and what is even more important, closer to the essence, the entire racial, heroic, perhaps saintly past" (12) will not be forgotten. Péguy's view of the true (antiacademic, antipositivist) historian as witness or survivor, archive or specimen, has him holding the fate of an entire people in his hands, a people whose very being is threatened by the movement of history from the ancient to the modern.7 For without the retention of its "glorious, honorable, heroic, even saintly past," this people cannot be considered to have a history of its own, to constitute a single, homogeneous "race," a race that is spiritually and culturally defined.
Péguy introduces his account of his own participation in the Dreyfus affair and his analysis of its ultimate historical sense by describing the importance of the family archives of the Milliet family, a genuine "republican family" from the previous era. In the tradition of Michelet, he stresses that true history is popular history, not that of the "great men" but of the "troops behind them"; not that of the "premier roles, the grand masks, . . . grand theater and representation," but rather "what was behind, what was below, how this people of France was made,. . . what, in this heroic age, was the tissue itself of the people and of the republican party. What we want to construct is precisely an ethnic histology" (6). "Ethnic histology" as popular history has more to do with the tissue and texture of daily life than with important dates, objective quantifiable data, unique events, or the theatrical representation of the actions of national leaders. Péguy located spirituality not in the "dressed up history [histoire endimanchée, literally history in Sunday dress]" of the official, "professorial" historians he scorned, but in the history of the daily life of a people, the history of "a race in its reality" (7). And this is why he considered the history written by professional historians to have been doubly destructive in terms of the popular values he wanted to preserve. As a defense of technological progress and modernization, it was in the process of totally destroying the way of life "the people" once knew. As the official account of the past, it had already destroyed much of the past by focusing on documents and what could be documented and ignoring the texture of everyday life, what for him was the very tissue of the life and substance of the people.
Péguy felt that the papers of the Milliet family represented an entire past republican culture, and his critical goal was nothing less than the undoing of modern history and the restoration of what he considered authentic popular culture:
People will see there [in the papers] what it was to be a culture, how it was infinitely different (and infinitely more precious) than a science, an archaeology, a teaching, an information, a piece of erudition, and naturally, a system. People will see what it was to be a culture at a time when professors had in no way crushed it. . . . People will see what it was to be a culture when there existed a culture, how it's practically undefinable, an entire age, an entire world of which today we no longer have any idea. (8)
To polemicize and write against (professorial) history is to write for the restoration of a particular form of popular culture, because the "derepub-licanization," the "dechristianization," and the "démystification" that Péguy claims are characteristic of historicized modernity make modernity the enemy not just of French culture but of all culture: "It is in fact the first time in the history of the world that a world lives and prospers, appears to prosper, against all culture" (11). To write against modernity, science, and erudition is thus to write for the restoration of a particular image of the people as a product of (traditional) culture.
If Péguy's critique of "history from above" can be defended in terms of the way it attempts, after Michelet, to open history up to "the absent" or "the silent" of history, it should also be seen that it is rooted in very particular notions of popular culture and of the people that cannot simply be accepted without critical scrutiny. For history "from below" has to do with "how the men who were our ancestors and whom we recognize as masters lived." It presents "what the people was at the time when there was a people. . . . What a race was at the time when there was a race, at the time when there was this race and it was flourishing" (7-8). The question of the ethnic foundation of authentic history and Péguy's use of the term "race" to connote the republican essence of the French people must certainly be read in the specific context in which they appear and not be confused with "biologically" determined racist concepts. But at the very least, it also needs to be said that if race in this context is not a specifically racist term, it nevertheless points to the fact that there are restrictions or limitations inherent in spirituality, differences among peoples ("races") that determine who could be considered to belong to this "spiritual people" and its culture and who does not belong to them. The cultural and religious typology rooted in a "spiritual" notion of race is still a typology.
For even if this people is not, strictly speaking, genetically determined, its "blood" is still crucial to its spiritual survival, for when its blood no longer contains any traces of its previous Christian spirituality, as a race it is no longer what it once was, no longer itself. And the principal historical problem Péguy wants to understand in "Notre Jeunesse" and other essays devoted to historical and cultural issues is how this could have happened:
How of this people who was so profoundly Christian, who had Christianity in its blood (through an infusion, through a so-to-speak metaphysical and overall, unique physiological operation),. . . one could have succeeded in making (of it) what we see, this people we know, (having become) so profoundly un-Christian, so profoundly, so interiorly de-Christianized, . . . this modern people, . . . so de-Christian in its soul, its heart, and its marrow. So de-Christian in its blood. ("Véronique: Dialogue de l'Histoire et de l'âme charnelle" [1909, 1912], v. 3, 645-46)
The "fault of mysticism'" that had to have been committed to have produced this state—committed, when it comes to Christian spirituality, Péguy decides, in large part by the clergy—is what he calls a "mystical disaster, a disaster of mysticism" (647), having destroyed the very being of a people through the contamination of the people's spiritual blood. The ideal culture, or the ideal of culture Péguy holds onto, therefore, is a culture "purified" of all such "mystical faults" and returned to its original integrity, one in which the spiritual ideal remains intact.
What is true of Péguy's ideal of Christianity is also true of his ideal of republican mysticism, the idea of the Republic with which Péguy identified and whose last witness he claimed to be. This idea provided him with an extrapolitical position that transcended all politics, even and especially republican politics, and made of his own political position chiefly the belief in and impossible pursuit of a mystical absolute, a total spiritual politics that was always confronting and opposing political reality, but which was never, which could never be, presented in itself. The idea of the Republic had the status of the lost reality (or fiction) of a people that once was, a unified, laborious people "who in its entirety worked together, bourgeois and peasant, in joy and health, and who had a veritable cult of work, a cult, a religion of work well done" ("Notre Jeunesse," 8). This ideal embodied by the people was all the more powerful a weapon against all types of republican politics because it evoked against such politics the very ideal they were supposed to believe in and embody, that of an integral popular culture that had been lost by being despiritualized.
Because Péguy characterized modernity basically as an era of disbelief, the process of derepublicanization was for him accompanied by and equivalent to a process of de-Christianization. "It is the same, unique, profound movement of démystification . . . that this people no longer believes in the Republic and that it no longer believes in God, that it no longer wants to lead a republican life and no longer wants to lead a Christian life" (10-11). Thus, it is not just that Péguy's republicanism can be seen to be profoundly Christian in nature, but also that it functions the same way that Christianity does for him, that these two terms, one nominally political, the other religious, are inextricably bound together in such a way that every true republican must in some sense be a Christian and every true Christian a republican, at least in Péguy's spiritualist sense of the two terms. Mysticism (spirituality) thus defines and binds together the two terms, as well as the political and the religious in general. There are no partial measures when it comes to this dual absolute. One either believes in republican and Catholic mysticism, or one does not; one is either their ally or their enemy, a saint or a sinner, spiritually and politically healthy or diseased and decadent; that is, one has either pure or contaminated "spiritual blood."
The true Republic in Péguy's sense thus has nothing to do with modernity, or with democracy and modern republican politics; it has more affinity with traditional France and even with the ancien régime. The most fundamental opposition for Péguy, then, because it is spiritual rather than narrowly political, is not between royalism and republicanism: "As I have put it so many times in these notebooks, . . . the debate is not strictly speaking between the Republic and the Monarchy, between the Republic and Royalty, especially if they are considered as political forms" (11). The debate is rather between the ancient and the modern, with the Republic firmly located, along with the monarchy, in the space and time of the ancient:
For the debate is not, as is said, between the ancien régime and the Revolution. The ancien régime was a regime of old France. The Revolution is eminently an operation of old France. . . . The debate is not between an ancien régime, an old France which would end in 1789 and a new France which would begin in 1789. The debate is much more profound. It is between, on the one hand, all of old France together, . . . pagan and Christian, traditional and revolutionary, monarchist, royalist, and republican—and, on the other, facing it and opposed to it, a certain basic form of domination that was established around 1881, which is not the Republic, which says it is the Republic but which lives off the Republic, which is the most dangerous enemy of the Republic, which is strictly speaking the domination of the intellectual party. The debate is between this entire culture, all of culture, and all this barbarism, which is properly speaking barbarism itself. (22-23)
In other words, the Republic, as an ideal, continued to function, at least in part, until modern republican (intellectual) parties came to power late in the nineteenth century to act in its name and in this way to destroy it. Secularizing the state and its institutions, the modern Republic cut itself off from "all of old France together" and thus from what Péguy calls true culture. The modern is thus for him nothing other than barbarism itself.
Republican parties, for Péguy, like all other political parties, act as parasites within the Republic. But he considered some elements of monarchism to be legitimately mystical—though not the monarchist or royalist parties themselves, at least not in terms of their politics. Péguy's relations, for example, with Charles Maurras and the Action Française were more complicated and nuanced than one might at first expect. Their diametrically opposed positions on the Dreyfus affair made them of course political enemies, but since Péguy condemned all the politics of the affair, this difference was not for him the fundamental issue, since he admitted that there was a mystical side to Maurras's royalism that he claimed to admire. Though he was willing to acknowledge and listen to the mysticism he found at times expressed in the royalist newspaper, L'Action Française, he felt that Maurras and those associated with him ultimately cut themselves off from mysticism by "tirelessly comparing republican politics to royalist mysticism" and not admitting the common nature of the two mysticisms: "Our school masters concealed from us the mysticism of old France, the mysticism of the ancien régime. . . . Today our adversaries want to conceal that mysticism of the ancien régime, that mysticism of old France that republican mysticism embodied. And notably revolutionary mysticism" (22). As political parties, therefore, the republican and monarchist parties had nothing in common; but as mysticisms they were rooted in the same mysticism of "old France."
Closer in this spiritual sense to Maurras and royalist mysticism than to Dreyfus himself and Dreyfusard politics, Péguy's mystical republicanism had as many if not more potential allies in the camp of his political enemies as it did in its own political camp, a point certainly not missed by fascists decades later. Those who demanded the restoration of the monarchy and those who worked for the restoration or birth of the true, "national-socialist" community could find a common ground in the spiritualist republicanism of Péguy, which was paradoxically profoundly antidemocratic and founded in an ideal of culture best represented by "old France."
Péguy argued that royalist mysticism shared with the mysticism of the Republic a fundamental spirituality and distance from politics in general:
Different mysticisms are much less enemies of each other, than the different politics are. Because their task is not, as it is for the different politics, to divide up ceaselessly a temporal matter, a temporal world, a temporal power unremittingly limited. . . . And when they are enemies, they are so in a completely different way, at an infinitely more essential profundity, with a nobility infinitely more profound. (37).
Quite simply, republican politics were for Péguy not truly French, for they were cut off from all of the cultural values of old France, the culture and spiritual values of the ancient world that both royalist and republican mysticism kept alive. It would not be wrong even to say that monarchist mysticism was for Péguy, on the most profound spiritual level, also an ally of republican mysticism in its radical opposition to politics, for only "a mysticism can to go against all politics at the same time" (54). And for Péguy, it was absolutely essential to rise above the historical and political arena and to go against all politics at the same time.
Péguy's hatred for what he calls the "intellectual party" was rooted in his aversion for the so-called domination of the intellect in politics. Péguy's republicanism was in this way "instinctual" or emotional, not intellectual; it had to be felt, lived, and believed in, not hypothesized, deduced, or rationalized:
Thoughts, instincts, races, habits which for us were nature itself, which were given, off of which we lived, . . . which were more than legitimate, more than undisputed: nonreflective. These have become what is the worst thing in the world: theses, historical, hypotheses, I mean what is least solid, most inexistent. The undersides of theses. When an organic regime has become logical,. . . it is a regime that is prostrate. Now one proves, one demonstrates the Republic. When it was alive, one did not prove it. One lived it. (14)
No political theory, no political strategy could therefore bring about or guarantee the reestablishment of the Republic in Péguy's sense. On the contrary, political theses, hypotheses, debates, and strategies are all signs of the loss of the true sense of the Republic, of the replacement of "the organic" with "the logical." The only way to return to the true, mystical sense of the Republic was through a total transformation of life that was not primarily or originally political but rather spiritual and cultural in nature—through a reactivation of certain basic instincts the French people once manifested and that, for Péguy, still lay dormant in them.
The loss or corruption of the true sense of the Republic through republican politics illustrated for Péguy a general political law: "The degradation of mysticism into politics is it not the basic law? . . . Everything begins in mysticism and finishes in politics" (20). And therefore the essential, extra-political task was to struggle against this law to ensure "in each order, in each system, that MYSTICISM NOT BE DEVOURED BY THE POLITICS TO WHICH IT GAVE BIRTH" (20). The Dreyfus affair, of course, was itself a prime example of the general political law, for it "was an essentially mystical affair. It lived of its mysticism. It died of its politics. That's the law, that's the rule" (41). Péguy never tired of repeating this law and using it against all political parties and strategies: against republican as well as royalist parties, against nationalist as well as socialist parties, against both the nationalist, Catholic political parties of the right and what he called "Jewish politics" and the "foreign," internationalist politics of the socialist left.
For Péguy, quite simply, all politics were "stupid [sottes], . . . pretentious, . . . intrusive,. . . unproductive" (50), if not criminal, especially the politics of the Dreyfusards themselves. What he called the "Jewish politics" and the "republican politics" of the Dreyfusards were even worse than the politics of the anti-Dreyfusards, because the former betrayed the most authentic and profound sense of mysticism and exploited it for their own particular political ends:
Our politicians, our politics, were the most criminal for they were criminal to the second degree.... If they had exercised their profession as politicians, they would only have been criminal to the first degree. But they wanted at the same time to conserve all the advantages of mysticism. And this is precisely what constitutes the second degree. . . . They wanted to play two contrary games together, both the mystical game and the political game, which excludes the mystical. . . . They decided to profit from their politics and our mysticism,. . . always playing the temporal and the eternal together. (90-91)
Péguy's increasing scorn for politics in general and the very harsh criticisms he made of republican and socialist political figures in particular should be seen as leading to a transcendent or total politics, a politics above politics in the form of not another ideology contending with others but rather of an absolute spiritual movement, the total embodiment and application of the idea of a unified people, a national culture or community.8
In "Notre Jeunesse," when Péguy speaks in the past tense about the form of socialism in which he previously believed, he considers socialism less as a political process or ideology and more as a spiritual purification or decontamination—the word assainissement recurs frequently, almost obsessively in this text—and reunification of the nation. Not only did he consider purification a profoundly patriotic and nationalist endeavor, because its goal was to restore the French nation to itself, but he also felt that the process itself was in its essence "French," an indication of the principal task the French had always performed in history, of what it meant to be French:
The purification, the clarification of the world has always been the destiny, the vocation of France, the French duty itself. The purification of what is sick, the clarification of what is unclear, the giving order to what is disordered, the organization of what is crude. . . . Is it necessary to note how much this socialism based on generosity, . . . how much this pure and full generosity is in the French tradition—more than in the French tradition itself, more profoundly, in French genius? In the sap and in the race itself. In the sap and blood of the race. (108)
As Péguy insists on "purification," and as expressions such as "the sap and blood of the race" recur with increasing frequency in his work, it should not be forgotten that Péguy saw the spiritual attributes of generosity as being profoundly French, existing in the sap and blood of the race itself, thus giving the French a spiritual rather than a specifically biological or racial identity.
The French for Péguy were thus considered agents of order and models of spiritual rather than biological purity. And even though it is important not to confuse Péguy's spiritual notion of race with biological notions, it is also true that this kind of distinction mattered less and less in the context of extremist nationalisms and fascism. This is the case not because French literary fascists never evoked the same distinction—they often did—but rather because of the close alliance of spiritual and biological racism in extremist forms of nationalism and fascism, and the difficulty if not impossibility of separating conclusively the spiritual from the biological when it comes to the question of race. And can it really be argued that purification advocated in the name of a "spiritual" (cultural, religious, philosophical, or even ethical) race is really potentially less serious, less dangerous than racial purification? The grounds for such an argument seem tenuous at best and ignore how much even the most "biologically determined" racisms also owe to aesthetic, spiritual values, how much race itself is also a "spiritual" or cultural concept.9
In Péguy's terms, socialism had to undergo a total spiritual revolution in order to free itself from and rise above politics and in this way become a religion. But religion itself had to undergo in its turn another form of revolution, this time temporal, in order to be restored to itself and be made truly religious. "In the modern world," he argued, "Christianity is no longer the people, which it once was, . . . an immense people, an immense race; Christianity is no longer socially the religion of profundities, a religion of the people, the religion of an entire temporal and eternal people" (100). In order to become again the church of the people it once was, the Catholic Church had to be willing "to pay the costs of an economic revolution, of a social revolution, of an industrial revolution, to say it in a word, of a temporal revolution for eternal salvation. . . . Such is property the inscription of the eternal in the temporal" (101). Christianity and socialism, Christian mysticism and republican mysticism, thus intersect precisely at the point where the political is raised up beyond itself and becomes spiritual and where the spiritual pays the political costs of its confrontation with, and even subjection to, the temporal.
This double revolution, this total, universal revolution, would in this way constitute, for Péguy, the full realization of the nation and its people, the only way "to found [peoples and nations], to establish them finally, to give them birth, to make them, and to let them grow. It was to make them" (104). And Péguy was calling for nothing less than a new founding, a remaking of a spiritual people. This for him was France's destiny, its truth, and its spiritual-racial identity. The call of his early socialist writings to defend the "harmonious city and its beautiful souls" had become in "Notre Jeunesse" the cry for a total revolution and the founding of a renewed spiritual people or race. The synthesis of religious-cultural mysticism and social revolution advocated in the latter work could be seen as a logical outgrowth or application of the idea of the "beautiful city" in the sense that the ultimate purpose of politics was still claimed to be outside of politics, spiritual and "creative": the making of an organic "aesthetic-political work" or the making of an organic people and culture.
In a series of essays written near the end of his life, which, like "Clio" and "Véronique," were published posthumously, Péguy radically shifted the emphasis of his spiritualist national populism by defining it less in terms of republican or socialist mysticism and more in terms of an increasingly militaristic nationalism that was even more explicitly Catholic than it was in his earlier texts. The figure most representative of this militant form of nationalism was no longer the "beautiful soul" or the mystical figure of "the people" defined in Christian-socialist terms, but it was now the spiritual-temporal figure of the soldier defined in Christian-militaristic terms. The unity and joy of the people working the land was thus replaced, in Péguy's work, by the unity and joy of soldiers defending the land and the people against foreign enemies. If the spiritual had to be subjected to the temporal in order to be truly spiritual, the most profoundly spiritual "saint," the fullest embodiment of national spiritualism, was, for Péguy (once again), the soldier-saint: Jeanne d'Arc. But she was now more soldier than inspired peasant or saint.
The soldier was considered essential to the making of a spiritual people, for the soldier secured and defended the land and made it possible for there to be a national language, a culture, a people, and a race:
The soldier measures off the extent of land where a language is spoken, where customs, a spirit, a soul, a cult, a race reign. The soldier measures off the extent of land where a soul can breathe. The soldier measures off the extent of land where a people does not die. . . . It is the soldier who measures off the extent of temporal land, which is the same as spiritual land and intellectual land. ("L'Argent Suite" [1913], v. 3, 902)
The land, for Péguy, is certainly not exclusively or predominantly a material, geographic entity, for it is also a spiritual or cultural concept or ideal. But the possibility of the spiritual, and thus the very possibility of a people and a race, nevertheless rests squarely on the shoulders of the soldier who measures off and protects a material, geographic space in which a language can be spoken and a culture can take form.10 Just as the material is spiritual for Péguy, the spiritual is material, and defending the materiality of the land—especially through war—is therefore as fundamental a concern as purifying and protecting its spirituality. It is the same concern.
The soldier is crucial not just for establishing but also for carrying on the national heritage. For not just the French nation but also Western civilization as a whole owes its development to the soldier. There could have been no continuation of Greek culture, no Western tradition, and thus no France, no French people, culture, or language, without the Roman soldier who spread the spirituality of Greece throughout the world:
[The Roman soldier] measured off the land for the only two great legacies of man; for philosophy and faith, for wisdom and faith, for the ancient world and the Christian world, for Plato and the prophets. . . . Inside he carried with him the Greek world, that is to say, the first half of the ancient world. And ancient thought would not have been inserted into the world and it would not have commanded the thought of the entire world if the Roman soldier had not accomplished this temporal insertion, . . . if the Roman world had not accomplished this sort of grafting unique in the world, . . . where Rome supplies matter and the temporal and the Greeks the spiritual and even what could be called spiritual matter. (902-3)
The soldier, then, has become the primary force and actor in history, for Péguy, the figure on whose back nations are carved out and through whom cultural and spiritual values are carried on.
Given the increased importance Péguy gave to the soldier as the determining factor in the continuation of the spiritual sense of the nation (starting out with the temporal factor of where French was spoken), Péguy's militarized nation began to resemble more and more explicitly a kingdom rather than a republic, even in the mystical sense of the term. The true soldier was the soldier of the Crusades, or even more, the soldier of Jeanne d'Arc's army: "That is to say that the more a battle is beautiful, militarily beautiful, the more it is similar to the battles of Jeanne d'Arc. He who defends France still defends the kingdom of France. . . . And what Jeanne d'Arc demanded of her men were not virtues, it was a Christian life" (929). Péguy even went so far as to call the Republic "the fourth dynasty" (930), allying himself by such comments with conservative Catholics and royalists even more directly than before.
The war the French soldier had to fight was a holy war, and he had to fight it as a Christian to make it "militarily beautiful," that is, spiritual. More and more, what it meant to be French was defined openly in Christian terms, not just because Péguy associated Christian and republican mysticism, as he previously had, but because his insistence on the temporal dimension of spirituality made the geographic space where French was spoken and where French-Christian values and spirituality were inscribed the focus of his writing, the political-cultural ideal he defended at all costs. Jewish mysticism, because it was not inscribed in a temporal place, and certainly not in the land the French soldier had to defend, had increasingly less significance, except perhaps as part of the prehistory of Christianity.11
In his "Note Conjointe sur M. Descartes et la Philosophie Cartésienne," Péguy made a number of significant changes in his approach to the Republic and to the Jews. The Dreyfus affair obviously seemed a distant memory by the time this text was written, and other dangers appeared more menacing than anti-Semitism. France, which he claimed was the only "successful" civilization the world had known since Greece, was in grave danger:
Our two men [the two philosophers portrayed in the essay, the one described as Christian and pro-Bergson, the other as Jewish and anti-Bergson, and identified only once in passing as Péguy himself and Julien Benda] are melancholic. How could they not be. . . . They see the French people threatened from all sides, betrayed by all hands, betraying itself. They know that there have been only two successes in the world; and in the ancient world it was the Greek people, and in the modern world, it was the French people. . . . They know that nothing is more fragile, nothing more precarious, than such successes, (v. 3, 1288)
The two philosophers thus agree on the serious threat to France and Western civilization that the impending war presents, and they see that in such a situation it is necessary to defend at all costs the last successful civilization to avoid the fate of the Jews, "the race itself of non-success." For if the success of the French race is lost, they agree that there is "nowhere from which another success can come" (1288). But they do nevertheless have very different attitudes about how to combat the threat to French (Western) culture, and Péguy chose in this text to characterize these differences in terms of the differences between Christians and Jews in general.
Nowhere else in his work are the differences between Christians and Jews so pronounced; nowhere are their implications so significant and disturbing in terms of the typologies they produce:
An anxious tenderness, which the Jew dissimulates and to which he seems to resign himself (resigned to dispersion), which remains inexpiable and almost frenzied for the Christian, groups them together around ancient culture and French culture as if around a relic every day more and more threatened. Here the internal difference between the two cultures shines forth. Every Jew originates in a certain fatalism. Oriental. Every (actual, French) Christian originates in a certain revolt. Occidental. (1288-89)
The "Oriental fatalism" of the Jew may give him strength, but it is the "Occidental revolt" of the Christian that will save the French (and the remnants of the Greek) nation and culture. When it comes to the very survival of the Occident, it is certainly not the best of things to originate in the Orient or to be fatalistic in the face of serious threats to Western civilization.
Although it is only a very small step to develop the implications of this perspective and treat the "Oriental" origin of the Jew itself as a threat, or the principal threat, to the survival of the "Occident," Péguy did not take this step. Such "Oriental fatalism" was not for him the worst of things. The Jew has to accept the misery of his situation because that is all he has ever known, and he (and Péguy) considers misery and suffering to be good:
The Jew considers it natural to be ill. Son . . . of a race which has been suffering for centuries and centuries and which will gain for having been ill longer than the others, he says, he knows that spiritual work is paid for with a kind of inexpiable fatigue. He finds that just. He finds that things are still very fine like that. (1290-91)
The Jew in fact has made suffering his identity, and his ability to survive while conquered and without a land of his own is his principal force: "The Jew has been conquered for the last seventeen to nineteen centuries: that is his eternal force. And therein also lies his eternal victory" (1292). "His victory" is not that of France or Western culture in general, however, but that of "Oriental fatalism" itself; that is, unending uprootedness and a spirituality cut off from even the possibility of any temporal inscription. It is the victory of survival and acceptance of one's fate, not the remaking and defense of a land, a people, and a culture.
According to Péguy, what was most important for the nation, for the maintenance of French culture, and for Western civilization as a whole, given the strength of what he called the patient "Jewish uneasiness" with the world, was to incorporate this uneasiness into an "Occidental" body and give it the force of revolt. This was what Jesus accomplished and what therefore constituted the essence of Christianity:
Jesus was able to graft Jewish uneasiness onto the Christian body. That was necessary so that the all-consuming characteristics of this uneasiness, attenuated in an attenuated race,. . . could in a new race, and almost instantaneously, achieve a profundity that was finally incurable. And Jesus wasn't able (or didn't want to) graft Jewish patience onto the Christian body. (1293).
What Jesus supposedly did not want to do, Péguy did not want to do either. The French-Christian nationalist could not afford to be patient when the nation was at risk. He might even at some point have to become impatient about the Jew's patience itself in order not to become part of what Péguy calls an "attenuated race," that is, a "race" like the Jews.
As if this were not enough, there existed for Péguy what he called "an even more subtle difference of race, a split or fissure perhaps even more divisive" than that of Jewish patience as opposed to Christian revolt. It was one that touched the very nature of his vocation as a writer: the double issue of reading and writing and their relation to Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and to the identities of the ancient and modern worlds, on the other. "The Jew knows how to read," claims Péguy. "The Christian, the Catholic does not know how to read" (1296). Reading for the Jews was the sacred task: "It is reading the Book. It is the Book and the Law. To read is to read the word of God. . . . To read is the sacred operation as it is the ancient operation. All Jews are readers" (1296). Reading, then, Péguy believes, seems to be the fundamental and primary spiritual Jewish operation, what linked pre-Christian man to the ancient world and to the spiritual in general. Without reading, there seemingly would have been no spirituality at all.
Such was not the case, however, for Christianity remained the highest and most complete expression of the spiritual, the supreme model for spirituality. The Christian, unlike the Jew "who has always read," had only been reading, Péguy claimed, using the case of his own family as typical, since the people and true republican/Christian values had been lost in the world, only since modernity had begun to dominate and degrade mysticism and spirituality. Rather than being a handicap, the illiteracy of his Catholic heritage constituted for him a decided advantage over any spirituality rooted in reading: "Perhaps a more profound . . . penetration is reserved for those who do not know how to read" (1296). Freed from the mediation of the written word and the intellect, spirituality was for him situated more profoundly within a people when they had immediate access to it, when their spirituality was lived rather than being merely a function of what and how they read.
Reading was firmly on the side of wealth and political power. Illiteracy was the sign of the poor, whose family ties could not be traced in the property records of notaires, which went back for generations and generations to protect the legitimacy of economic and historical inheritance, but only in the meager baptismal records of the parishes, where the identity of the family was quickly lost because it was not necessary for, and even constituted an obstacle to, spirituality: "[The Catholic, Péguy] sees a great division of the world. On one side, the notaire (in all his forms), and on the other the miserable records of the parishes. . . . On one side, the entire historical record. On the other, the miserable records of the parishes. That is to say, the book of baptisms" (1298). Literacy, linked to personal inheritance and historical identity, was the modern evil Péguy had always fought against, especially the literacy that supported wealth and political and intellectual power, the literacy synonymous with personal ownership, money, inheritance, and historical records. Péguy's goal was always a higher, more immediate, collective (anonymous) form of spirituality than was possible in a spirituality determined by reading and interpretation.
There is no ambiguity about which side Péguy was on and which side the Jew (along with the Protestant and the rich Catholic) was on:
Being poor and French, Catholic and peasant, he has no family papers. His family papers are the parish records. . . . Nothing that left any trace in the papers of notaires. They never possessed anything. Poor and of the people, they left it to the Jews, the Protestants, and the bourgeois Catholics to have a written genealogy. (1298)
To be Catholic and French—to be truly French was to be Catholic, at least as the poor were Catholic—was to have no papers of one's own, no recorded genealogy, and even no identifiable family of one's own, after a generation or two, other than the common family of the "race." True spirituality depended on one remaining as close to this anonymous collectivity as possible.
After his grandparents, Péguy wrote, "[the Catholic] sees nothing but an immense mass and a vast race, and immediately after, immediately behind, he distinguishes nothing else. Why not say it, he plunges with pride into this anonymity. The anonymous is his patrimony. Anonymity is his immense patrimony. The more communal the land is, the more he wants to grow out of the land. . . . The more communal the race is, the more secret joy he has and, it must be said, the more pride he has to be a man of this race" (1299). The genealogy of the poor Catholic quickly merges into the anonymous, collective identity and immediacy of the people growing directly out of the land, of the communal race. The longer the family has been literate, the more difficult, the more impossible, this journey back to the collectivity constituted by the people will be. The more difficult it will be to achieve the dual goal Péguy assigned himself: to be "a citizen of the communal species, a Christian of the common species" (1299). Péguy is still defining "race" as the spirituality of a people, but the people, through their illiteracy, are more closely linked to the land they work and more clearly defined in terms of their specific religious beliefs than ever before.
But even if his ancestors did not write, Péguy did; and what he wrote about were the spiritual virtues of a particular form of illiteracy. The second in his family to write (after his mother), he wrote against writing and saw his pen at times as a "dangerous instrument," especially when his writing was not going well (1302). But even when it was going well, the purpose of his writing was to evoke, to return to, and to indicate the profundity of the silence and illiteracy of the common and the communal, of the "race" whose identity could not be captured in writing or recorded in official economic or historical documents. For him, a people was opposed to writing in the same way that the mystical was opposed to the political, the ancient to the modern, and culture to history; the same way "the book of creation," which the illiterate of previous times "read" without knowing how to read and the book in a sense they themselves were, was opposed to "the miserable journal" modern man had become (1303). To write is in this sense the antispiritual act par excellence; it is to "harden" everything, to bring it into the light, to take away its mystery. To write is to break "the silence of prayer, the silence of vows, the silence of rest and the silence even of work,. . . the silence of solitude, the silence of poverty" (1304). It is to break the silence characteristic of race and the silence of the spiritual in general.
Péguy, himself a prodigious writer, has the Catholic writer ask himself, "Why does everyone write? What is being published?" He answers such questions by insisting that there are no good reasons to write and an infinite number of reasons to stop: "The man stops talking. The man plunges into the silence of the race . . . and finds there the last prolongation that we can seize of the eternal silence of the first creation" (1305). After the fall from the original silence, writing can do no better than condemn reading and writing and praise the silence of the origin: "How close to the creation this silence and this shadow are. How noble they are. . . . Everything else is industry. Everything else is jumble. Everything else is alphabet" (1304). And yet Péguy continued to write until his death in World War I. He wrote unceasingly and obsessively against the destructive powers of writing, pausing from time to time to listen to the original silence in which he believed all true (Christian) spirituality was rooted. He acknowledged that in modernity, even the Catholic was condemned to write, but his struggle was not that of the Protestant who had been writing for much too long to understand why a struggle was necessary, and certainly not that of the Jew "who has always written" and whose spirituality was inscribed in and defined in terms of reading and writing. For the only option open to the true spiritual (Catholic) writer is a militant writing against writing, a writing that negates and transcends the written and achieves the original silence of the spiritual.
If "the letter kills," as Péguy remembers he was taught, if "the letter is an instrument of murder, and perhaps the only instrument of murder" (1305), then only the Catholic can effectively fight against this deadly instrument or at least rediscover the means of postponing the spiritual death it produces. Only the (poor) Catholic can rediscover the "original silence of the race" and thus of the nation, because only he is close enough to it still to hear it and respond to it. Only he is close enough to the land and the true sense of the nation (of the race) to defend it as it should be defended. Péguy never suggested that either Protestants or Jews should be considered enemies of the spiritual nation or excluded from it. At the same time, he certainly did not present them as allies one could depend on to defend the nation when it needed to be defended: that is, to defend it against the exterior threats of other nations and interior threats to spiritual purity; against history itself, which uses writing to inscribe, objectify, and calculate; against modernity in general as the product of despiritualized history; and finally, against writing itself and its own despiritualizing effects.
Others, though, would have no trouble taking this step, associating the writing of Jews with the evils of modernity; no hesitancy equating the people of writing and of the Book with the enemies of the nation and making anti-Semitism the principal component of their attempts to eliminate all foreign elements from the national culture. From the perspective of the extremist history in which Péguy's texts played an important role, Péguy's most nationalistic texts clearly presented arguments supportive of ideological tendencies whose specific political manifestations he explicitly opposed. It would be impossible, then, to deny that these texts supplied important elements for the foundation of the "fascist city," even though it constitutes a radical transformation and hardening of Péguy's original notion of the socialist "harmonious city." The fascist city owes much to the fundamental unifying, antidemocratic, willed spirituality of Péguy's socialist city, to its foundations in the aesthetic-spiritual cult or culture of the people. It also is indebted to the notion of a spiritual race whose collective identity comes from its intimate and immediate links with the land.
I am not claiming that fascism or National Socialism was the inevitable or unique product of Péguy's spiritualistic, aestheticist nationalism. But I have certainly emphasized how in its broad outlines, and in certain (although not all) of its details, it is not antithetical to fascism. Neither Péguy's concept of writing nor his defense of the spiritual values of a people (race) and its culture can be used to free him totally from his own troubling legacy. His arguments on behalf of the aesthetics and politics of the harmonious city, of spiritualism or mysticism as the transcendence of politics, and of the original spirituality and thus "illiteracy" of the French race were all easily assimilated into both extremist nationalisms and literary fascism. Literary fascists, especially, saw both his early socialist aesthetics of politics and his later nationalism, which was formulated in large part as an attack on parliamentary democracy and the values of modernity, to be attempts to surpass the divisive politics and literary practices of modernity in the name of a new, total spirituality. Literary fascists found in this militant Catholic writer, who wrote incessantly against writing and modernity, an important model for their own aspirations for literature and politics, an "antiliterary," "antipolitical" model for their absolute literary-political aspirations.