Charles Péguy and the Spirit of France

Extract

Péguy’s life practically covers the stretch of years between the Franco-Prussian war and the war of 1914. He was killed at the Marne in September, 1914. They are years when the attitude of Frenchmen to the problems of nationalism underwent fundamental changes, which are reflected in Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine.

For two generations after the Franco-Prussian war, defeat and determinism worked their separate corrosions and Frenchmen knew such depression of spirit that perhaps in all history no country has fallen so low in faith in its power to carry on. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century German ideas had become increasingly popular, and it seemed to some people that all that was vital in recent thought came from Germany. Tracing the reactions of two generations of young Frenchmen to the music of Wagner is a very good way of tracing a change of attitude for which Barrès was largely responsible. He felt the fatal attraction of the Tristan music : ‘It is in vain that I am bound to the mast, like the wise Odysseus. I tear my bonds asunder, and ardent even to despair I plunge beneath the waves to seek the sirens.’ Elsewhere, he speaks of Wagner’s creations as exerting harmful influences, demoralising and brutalising’ men’s minds.