‘Great Cemeteries Under the Moon’: Bernanos and the Spanish Civil War

Extract

It is not often that a single work of literature can be earmarked as a watershed in its author’s intellectual development, but Les grands cimitieres sous la lune seems to offer an almost incontestable case for such an honour. Before its publication in 1938, its author, Georges Bernanos, had been widely known as conservative royalist who had had no qualms about openly supporting Charles Maurras and L'Action franqaise, even after their condemnation by the pope in 1926. Thus it was only to be expected that a book by Bernanos, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, would at least echo the staunch support that Maurras and his followers were giving General Franco. Yet Les grands cimitieres was not only bitterly critical of Franco and the Falange, but it also wasted no opportunity to launch some especially vitriolic attacks on Maurras himself, attacks which signalled a definitive break with the French conservative establishment. How could Bemanos’ outlook and central convictions have undergone such a radical transformation?

I shall argue that to pose the question in such terms can prove highly misleading. For if it is true that Les grands cimiti?res marks a watershed, it is no less true that it was primarily the scandal that the book caused among Bernanos’ French readers, rather than any fundamental change in Bernanos’ basic thinking, that caused such a watershed. Indeed, as the emphatically reluctant tone of the book attests, Bernanos himself was acutely conscious of this danger. ‘I am not a writer,’ he tells us, ‘The mere sight of a blank page fills me with anguish.”