Charles Péguy

Charles Péguy (born Jan. 7, 1873, Orléans, Fr.—died Sept. 5, 1914, near Villeroy) was a French poet and philosopher who combined Christianity, socialism, and patriotism into a deeply personal faith that he carried into action.

(Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)

Péguy was born to poverty. His mother, widowed when he was an infant, mended chairs for a living. He attended the lycée at Orléans on a scholarship and in 1894 entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, intending to teach philosophy. In 1895 he turned to socialism, convinced it was the sole means by which poverty and destitution in the modern world could be overcome. He also abandoned the conventional practice of Roman Catholicism, though he retained to the end of his life a fervent religious faith. At this time he wrote his first version of Jeanne d’Arc (1897), a dramatic trilogy that formed a declaration and affirmation of his religious and socialist principles. Péguy was then caught up in the Dreyfus affair; he threw himself unreservedly into the battle to establish Dreyfus’ innocence and helped to bring many of his fellow socialists onto the same side.

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Besides running a bookstore that was a centre of pro-Dreyfus agitation, Péguy in 1900 began publishing the influential journal Cahiers de la Quinzaine (“Fortnightly Notebooks”), which, though never reaching a wide public, exercised a profound influence on French intellectual life for the next 15 years. Many leading French writers, including Anatole France, Henri Bergson, Jean Jaurès, and Romain Rolland, contributed work to it.

Péguy published several collections of his essays in the years before World War I, but the most important works of his maturity are his poems. Chief among them is Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910), a mystical meditation that enlarges upon some of the scenes in the Jeanne d’Arc of 1897; Mystère des Saints Innocents (1912); and the culmination of the meditative and devotional outpouring of his final years, Ève (1913), a statuesque poem of 4,000 alexandrines in which Péguy views the human condition in the perspective of the Christian revelation.

When World War I broke out, he went to the front as a lieutenant, dying in the first Battle of the Marne.