Notre Jeunesse

"I think out of all the books I’ve chosen, Péguy is probably the least well known to an English audience. But the first reason I chose him was that on many occasions de Gaulle said it was the book that most influenced him as a young man and Charles Péguy the author that most influenced him. Péguy is a very strange figure in the French literary landscape, because he has a curious, repetitive, poetic, incantatory prose, very difficult to translate. Some people cannot stand it in French. But his story is exemplary of a particular generation. He came from a very modest background, his mother barely literate. But he was a success story of the republican system. He was extraordinarily able as a schoolboy, went to Paris, became a literary figure and so on, and then threw himself into the defense of Dreyfus. He founded a journal to defend Dreyfus. He was a passionate republican, a passionate socialist of a kind — not a Marxist, but with an extraordinary reverence for the ordinary people of France — and passionately against anti-Semitism. But like many of that generation he has a kind of conversion. He moves from socialism, republicanism, being a Dreyfusard, to rediscovering the nation and religion. Notre Jeunesse tells that story. And the story is one of disillusion with the way the Dreyfus affair has been hijacked by politicians for their own ends, and how all that was beautiful in the Dreyfus affair, all that was noble, has been harnessed to mean-spirited anti-clericalism, and also by socialist internationalism and anti-militarism. So Péguy rediscovers the army, the nation, and the church. But the key thing is the most famous phrase of that book, “everything begins as mystique, and everything ends as politique”. And that’s what he thinks happened with the Dreyfus affair. It began as a noble cause and was derailed by opportunistic, self-seeking, mean-spirited politicians. The values of universal human justice. He thought that in fighting the Dreyfus affair, you were defending the cause of humanity. For him, the values of the Drefusards were the defense of everything that was noblest in the French republican tradition — justice, humanity, universal values, and so on. But the key thing about him and where the link to de Gaulle comes, is that he doesn’t say ‘I’m no longer republican and socialist now that I am Catholic and patriotic.’ He says, ‘I’m all these things now’, and what he’s aiming at is an extraordinary sort of syncretic, holistic view of France, in which he wants to bring all traditions of France together. He wanted to link Joan of Arc to the revolution. They represent some eternal spirit of France. And so he is about binding together what you might call the two Frances. The Dreyfus affair supposedly divided France into two, and what Péguy is offering is a reconciliation. He has a famous phrase “the Republic is our kingdom of France”. In other words, the kingdom of France and the Republic are all part of France. De Gaulle has a phrase in his war memoirs on the first page where he talks about how for him “France is like a princess in a fairy story, Madonna in a fresco”. That could come straight out of Péguy. Péguy is offering this extraordinary, overarching synthesis of the unity of France, that French history is a continuum and a whole. De Gaulle is obsessed with transcending the fracture of 1789 and finding a way of re-stitching together the French story."