In 1941 Blackfriars, with a view to setting our own house in order, dealt chiefly with the internal structure of society. This must remain our principal preoccupation in the future; for the general reader will have the international situation constantly before his eyes, whereas the radical, internal diseases of our society may more easily pass unnoticed. To understand these evils and to attempt to cure them will require all our spiritual resources before the end of the war if there is to be any hope of peace in our day. There are, however, in the international sphere two points of special concern which must also be understood and be made part of the foundations of peace—indeed without such an understanding any re-Christianisation at home would be abortive. Firstly, there is the sound Christian tradition that survives the diabolic attack of the Gestapo in the German nation ; and secondly, there is also a Christian tradition in France with which, above all other alliances, we must remain closely associated in any peace-making. It is to the second of these considerations that we devote the present issue, to the first we hope to return at a later date. .

With the present alignment of forces a defeat for Hitler would mean that Britain, America and the Soviet Union would impose their terms on Europe. Two of these powers are essentially non-European, while at the same time one to a greater and the other to a far lesser extent derives its culture and civilisation from Europe. England alone of the three can lay claim to being an integral parf of Europe, and that claim is being jeopardised by the alienation of the French from the British peoples. The main artery of cultural life has passed into Britain from Palestine, Greece and Rome through France.

The more I get on in years, the more certain I am that a Christian is nothing without Christ, even from a purely human point of view; that the unimaginable gift, which we have received without having in any way deserved, has this terrible counterpart that in betraying it we fall lower than the most inferior men, becoming monsters in the etymological sense of the word. If Christians felt this fearful truth profoundly they would no longer be tempted to despise the sceptics and to divide mankind into two parts, the Good and the Bad, placing themselves, of course, among the former. They would understand that the amazing privilege which has been bestowed upon them forbids them setting themselves up too easily as judges of those to whom it has been denied. They would especially refrain from having those disinherited brothers butchered by machine-guns, on the excuse of honouring Good, and of suffering with Christ on the Cross.

The great unhappiness of this world, the great tragedy of this world is not that there are atheists, but that we are such indifferent Christians; for I am more and more convinced that it is we who are sending the world to perdition, that it is we who are attracting to it the lightning of the Wrath of God. What a folly to pretend to justify ourselves by proudly boasting that we alone are in possession of the truth, of the whole and living truth, of the kind which can liberate and save, while it remains impotent in our hands, or while we remain pitifully on the defensive behind a sort of Maginot line spiked high with prohibitions and inhibitions, as if we had nothing better to do than to guard the Law, whereas our natural and spiritual vocation is to fulfil it.

‘We, the writers, friends, readers of “Temps Nouveau” do not pretend to consider ourselves the only or the sufficient expression of the hope of France; but we are firmly convinced that our “little flock’ is one of the armies—of the vanguards—of the reconquest and the restoration of France…

My purpose, in this article, is to say something about this ‘little flock’ with whom I was privileged to work up till the capitulation, and whose activities I have tried to follow in spite of the prison walls which to-day surround their country.

On June 18th, 1940, I was driving south towards Bayonne. A little way ahead, on a hill, a small boy-scout was directing the traffic. He beckoned us on. And as we continued down the long, straight, poplar-studded roads of the Landes, I knew that that little boy would go on with his job, and that he represented the real France—youthful in its enterprise and energy and courage, mature in its perseverance and devotion. We talked then, my friends and I, of all those other young people whom we had seen or of whom we had heard, who were directing refugees, housing and feeding people, giving information, carrying luggage, delivering post, in fact, governing—that is, doing the real work of administration—a country whose official bureaucracy and civil service had collapsed. For those who knew the French youth movements this was less a cause for surprise than for admiration : it was to have been expected that France’s Catholic Action should fulfil its magnificent promise at the moment of France’s greatest tragedy.

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.

‘I was there when France fell; and I have written this book to mourn her.’ Many English-speaking people were there when France fell, and many have written books, to mourn the collapse of her army, or the dissolution of her political machine, or the capture of Paris, or the surrender of her navy. But the France mourned here, with this pall of many colours and many patterns, is not the agony of events that announced her painful death, but the reality of France, dying beneath the suffering of the last fatal illness : France as men of the French way of thinking loved and understood her. This reality is not widely, or at any rate not fully, understood in England and America; it is not understood what has died, nor what is the loss caused by that death, nor the true nature of the disease from within and the enemy from without which combined to bring about this disaster. These are the three leading strains of Mr. Bagger’s ‘Impersonal Autobiography,’ which he calls ‘an account of the End of Our Time in terms of one man’s life,’ likening himself to a scribe hurrying away from the sack of Cnossus, that most modern and urban of ancient cultural centres, to tell the Egyptians ‘to look to their fences and defences.’ For Mr. Bagger escaped with difficulty to New York, and there they said to him, what they had aid in France : ‘It cannot happen here.’

This is neither a historical treatise, nor a philosophical essay, nor humorous reminiscence, nor a traveller’s diary, nor an epicure’s observations—it is all of these things, and much more. It is much more, because all these kinds of writing are woven together in a lively and powerful narrative, which gaily carries the reader, now along one strand, now another, though it always winds in greater or lesser circles around the background of France.

Maurice Barrés, that great Frenchman whom the Church buried as a Catholic although he had not officially returned to her fold, had written of ‘The Great Pity of the churches of France.’ It was at the time of Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes’s iniquitous anti-clerical laws for which France is paying with her heart’s blood to-day.

How many Catholic hearts are now again aching for the great pity of the Church of France ! Not that, as yet, the iron heel of anti-Christ is pressed home on that Church. Hitler has had, so far, to restrain the tactics of open persecution so long followed in Catholic Germany and that have reached their unashamedly sadistic peak in Poland. But it seems as if the great Catholic renaissance operative in all ranks, those of the intelligenzia and of Labour alike, had availed nothing for the salvation of Church or country.

The illustrious Catholic philosopher has not been idle during his enforced exile in New York. He left France at Christmas, 1939, to undertake his usual lectures in the Universities of Toronto and America, and then came the fall of France. He sojourns in a free country and believes it his duty to aid his own country to rise again, and to help to bring about the triumph of the universal human ideals and values symbolised by Christian Democracy. To this end he is writing books, articles and lectures. His students are the great public of Europe and America; his studies and ideas converge upon the philosophy of modern politics. He is not enclosed within the narrow confines of any party, bur soars to the heights, untrammeled by preoccupations with slogans. In all his social writings his calm judgment, at once profound and deeply human, has always stood out. The philosopher usually follows the paths of mere speculation; Maritain takes pleasure in turning the searchlight of Catholic philosophy upon the living reality offered in the succession of great events through which we are now passing.