Charles Péguy

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