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INTRODUCTION

Born into a provincial family of modest means, Charles Péguy became an internationally famous intellectual in the years before the Great War; he was killed in that war at the age of forty-one. As a poet, journalist, and philosopher, for generations his writing prompted fascination, awe, fury, scorn, searching criticism, laughter, wonder, little imitation, and no indifference.

Among Péguy’s most abiding enquiries was the question of what it means to be modern. We are often modern, thought Péguy, in two different ways. One way advances an inexorable becoming; another opposes it.

Credentialed, procedural, and managerial in affect, the advocates of a new, entirely immanent becoming, thought Péguy, work to transform institutions patiently from within rather than seeking their overthrow. Sustained in ways great and small by the ultimate assumptions and insatiable expansion of global markets—with the market and its technological artifices as the ubiquitous and paradigmatic form for all human relations with others and with the world—this process brings the imperatives of negotiated, contractual exchange and profitable consumption to all our experiences, guided by the ongoing labor of sciences natural and social. Human being is increasingly encompassed by an ever more uncompromising immanence, from which the transcendent appears only through cracks in locked doors of long disuse, the unceasing glare within obscuring prospects without.

These advocates sense by no means an unreserved concord of discrete practices or ultimate purpose, but rather, a profound and ongoing alignment between their aspirations and the general direction of a society propelled forward by a technological market. Hence they express a deep if occasionally irritable confidence that their triumph is assured. While they work within free republics, they are not always or even often sympathetic to notions of individual free will, or sovereignty of the people; they wish supremely to see their shared idea of the future vindicated, which, they assume, will require the persistent and expansive guidance of accredited specialists in diverse fields of enquiry and policy.

The adherents of this way are generally sympathetic to determinism, in either material or social forms. As long as there is history, science and technology will always allow human beings to remake our world continuously (often in ever more complete accord with science itself). They assume the ultimate reality of an experimental becoming against the illusions of a persistent (or worse, eternal) being. They tend toward agnosticism or atheism, to the desirability of practical arrangements among persons and societies governed by continuous negotiations about contingent “values” that often “cash out” to some increasingly self-concious, increasingly pervasive validation of material and social interests, even if a diminution in communal meaning and purpose is the object of abstract speculation.

For most of their advocates, these assumptions should generally not be positively defended. Rhetorics of indirection, irony, and above all, applications of putatively dispassionate method are much to be preferred to making direct claims about the ultimate nature of reality that inevitably elicit pointless and tedious but—annoyingly—not refuted counterargument. Direct disagreement with the supereminent assumptions underwriting their historical advance is hence embarrassing. Set directly before a person or persons who insist on such disagreement, it is generally best not to engage with them at all but to continue one’s work with the like-minded, secure that one’s own positions are and will be sustained by a deeper and inexorable logic working through political economy, culture, scholarship, technology, and institutions.

The specifically scholarly advocates of this immanence often complement the progress of technology and of the social sciences with a highly developed if selective historical consciousness. A methodical and comprehensive “contextualization” regularly falls with force upon philosophies of life and the world different from their own; the injustices that might or ought to be attributed to these views receive close attention, and the injustices that might or ought to be attributed to the scholar’s views are passed over in silence. It is assumed—and thus unsurprisingly concluded—that alternative meanings and accounts of the whole ultimately owe their existence to atavism, and with it more intellectually limited, cruel, fearful, credulous, and scarcity-addled pasts, decisively produced by transitory and often unhappy circumstances, upon which the meticulous scholar can now perform distinctively modern disciplinary operations.

Whatever their walks of life, the advocates of this immanent, expansive becoming are at home in universities. Their sense of self is entwined with them, and the order of merit and prestige attending them. Befitting their professional status, an appropriate zeal for their own advancement and that of their allies is suitable, even praiseworthy. To pay dearly in order to live honestly in a flawed world is regrettably still necessary elsewhere; but through the expansion of perpetually negotiable becoming to which they have contributed as scholars and students, there is no longer a tension between being honored by one’s contemporaries and telling the truth without reserve. To claim otherwise is to open the way for archaic economies of sacrifice, in which the desire to sacrifice for truth often produces the oppositions that themselves create the need for and legitimacy of sacrifice. It is thought better to examine that dangerous economy from a secure scholarly distance, or to avoid it entirely.

Among these judgments often rests the assumption that most of the longstanding particular forms of human conviction, belief, and allegiance that mediate between individual persons and universal humanity—in particular, notions of communal continuity, of peoples, and perhaps above all of religious faith—should be allowed to dissolve inexorably, consumed by the irresistible velocity of media and scholarship, and the general liquefaction of identities in the flux of increasingly self-conscious becoming.

It is likely, and desirable—a kind of immanent justice—that these older forms of being human will be altogether absorbed in that continuous, perpetually contemporary negotiation and exchange, issuing in a cumulative equanimity of perspective set loose from all particular fictions, all arbitrarily inherited and given commitments. For the daring, this will ultimately include the great given of being human. Human being may only be a transitional moment in becoming’s perpetual advance. Perhaps most important, a straightforwardly two-dimensional linear time, moving neatly from past to present to future, will vindicate this immanent and ultimately universal becoming.

Such was the intellectual world Péguy saw coming to be in early twentieth-century Paris.

Alongside it a faction comes to be, this one self-consciously particularist, populated by the avowed enemies of expanding becoming. Furthermore, in a truly universal humanity, universal rights, universal hopes, and perhaps above all the work of universal justice, these enemies see only the triumph of the expansive immanence they oppose. To block its triumph is their foremost purpose and end.

For the advocates of this particularist order, both immanent becoming and the universally human are alleged to be the instrument of an inexorable exsanguination, set against vital and positive action, that cuts itself off from the chthonic power inhering in the limiting forms of particular peoples, a particular traditional culture, in traditional forms of order and prejudice that, in their account, themselves give ultimate limiting coherence, purpose, and above all strength to being human. They have an idolatrous awe for this strength, often serving as self-appointed champions of some portion of the culture identified as its true and ultimate origin, its putative “heartland.” This heartland is set in contrast to modern urban life, and perhaps especially the universities beloved by their adversaries; for self-conscious and resentful particularists, the world of learning is simply a base for an opposing ideology.

The partisans of this order often claim to love the past, but most reliably express not a love or gratitude for its givenness; rather, they give vent to an inexhaustible anger over its present alteration, whether or not those alterations are just. Their rhetoric abounds in invective. To strip their opponents of respect is a task to which they warm with alacrity—even as they express a longing for the forms of mutuality, respect, and dignity that the new order of perpetual negotiation sweeps away. For all that, they often present the past they claim to love only in evocative outline; at intervals it appears as the necessary MacGuffin for the expression of antagonisms, hastening the way to an allegedly clarifying agon.

These wrathful particularists often intimate a loyalty to older notions of transcendence—including religious faith and its avowal of abiding truths—but they conceive of that which transcends time only as an arrested immanence. They often present an amalgamated past as a unity, the final and definitive form for flourishing for themselves and their community, in which a comprehensive fulfillment was possible, and which now must be reinserted mechanically into the present, without creativity or surprise. Within their arrested immanence, they express contempt for their learned adversaries but also hope—once more the captives of their opponents—that “science” will confirm their particularism and its prejudices.

The champions of willful particularism show themselves ready and often eager for collective sacrifice—often for others in their self-identified community—in relation to enemies. Yet they stand in unmistakable disaccord with many of the exalted truths they profess to defend and proclaim worthy of sacrifice. In its most conceptually assertive and self-aware forms, the sacrifice particularists are most eager to make is a sacrifice of truth. They assert that faith should be upheld, though they do not believe it true,¹ that long-standing prejudices and brutal forms of scapegoating should be affirmed regardless of the facts of the case, that illusions are more compatible with human and historical drama and collective power than truth.

Péguy opposed both an immanent becoming and the particularist, arrested immanence that accompanied it in the early twentieth century. The partisans of each group were not the same, and they required different forms of opposition. For the partisans of “the intellectual party”—whatever their politics—that opposition took the form of written argument.

To oppose the most enraged and violent anti-universalists, however, would require direct defensive action in the streets as well as words, as in the defense of Alfred Dreyfus—a Jewish officer in the French Army falsely accused of treason—during the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s and early 1900s, in which Dreyfus and other French Jews were subject to an increasingly vicious and pervasive anti-Semitism.

It was an integral part of Péguy’s work to see both ways of being modern as they were; to see, at various speeds and levels and in different ways, the profound and consuming inhumanity that subsisted in both immanent, inexorable becoming and reactionary particularism.

Reactionaries tended to cohere enthusiastically around immediate threats to both the dignity and the physical safety of other human beings, especially those belonging to small and vulnerable groups, and to find a malicious glee in their suffering and degradation.

The other side was solicitous of the physical safety of persons but, in Péguy’s account, sought no less to put an eventual end to human dignity, and with it to the notion of human being as something distinct from material mechanisms, or units of social function, or the comprehensive products of impersonal historical processes. This end would be directed not only at accounts of the soul—religious or secular, aesthetic or moral—but also often to the very possibility of human freedom as something other than an increasingly complete repudiation of the past and of all not subject to becoming. (The advocates of immanent becoming were decidedly chary about arguments advancing free will or the possibility of substantive human creativity.) They pursued their own project with a sweaty partisan zeal that made its way under an amusingly ill-fitting carapace of judicious calm and meticulous neutrality of method.

Péguy would insist upon another way—related differently to the past, present, and future alike—in which the particular and the universal, being and becoming, were equally indispensable to human flourishing. He insisted further that the political obsessions of both continuously becoming immanence and arrested immanence were most important as a visible sign that life-giving dimensions of human experience were suffering from neglect and an intentionally cultivated ignorance, often produced by a severe misunderstanding of time.

For Péguy, neither of these forms of culture and politics could serve to substitute for a free, continuous, and living relation of diverse pasts with the present and diverse futures, and ultimately to the transcendence of linear time in eternity, prompted by love and sustained by lucid hope. For him, those truths that move at once within and beyond time participate imperfectly in the fullness of any historical moment, because eternity cannot be encompassed by any moment. The moral improvement of human affairs in time was a real (if neither an automatic nor final) possibility, but this required metaphysical freedom and the free expression of abiding convictions. The freedom and integrative creativity opened by an encounter with different dimensions of time could in turn open the way to a renaissance of republican freedom and of Christianity, to a positive encounter between Judaism and Christianity, and to a renewed understanding of our embodied lives. Surrounded by moderns and antimoderns, Péguy set out upon a path that could be called amodern.²

It is unwise to ignore the unique historical specificity of Péguy’s situation. Yet it is also unwise to ignore the contemporary resonances of Péguy’s observations and arguments. As the events of the early twenty-first century have shown with piercing clarity, Péguy’s animating questions and insights have not “ended” historically, in the manner of arguments for the claims of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. Péguy writes repeatedly about certain dilemmas in late modern culture, some of which have recently reemerged with great and disquieting force throughout the West. To claim that one does not see these resonances, or does not take them into account—while in fact arranging one’s sources very assertively to vindicate certain conclusions, leading the reader with words like “nostalgia” and “anxiety”—is tedious and dishonest. This is all the more true if one affects the self-consciously flat, stagily sober rhetorical style weighing upon so much contemporary scholarship. Genuine sobriety is far more interesting and insightful than its counterfeit. It is the unsober person, trying to win the approval of wary authorities, who assumes a sonorous monotone.

Yet why else should you read a book about Charles Péguy? If Péguy—particularly in the Anglophone world—is now a figure often overshadowed by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries like Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others, this occlusion was nowhere in evidence through the greater portion of the last century. For generations, Péguy inspired thinking and action across all manner of political, religious, academic, and national boundaries.

The literary critic Walter Benjamin, for example, wrote enthusiastically and at length about Péguy, finding in his work a “friendly togetherness” and continual dialogue, a sense of touch absent in Proust.³ Benjamin also claimed admiringly of Péguy’s politics and life that the phrase “enemy of the laws, indeed, but friend of the powers that be” is one that “applies least of all to Péguy.”⁴

Benjamin’s friend, the great scholar of Judaism Gershom Scholem, also wrote in highest praise of Péguy, defender of the unique and mystical character of Judaism. Near the end of his life, Scholem said that Péguy “has incisively understood the Jewish condition to an extent that has been rarely achieved, and has never been surpassed by non-Jews.”⁵

For the twentieth-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, Péguy transcended the characteristically modern tendency to assume a disjunction between the aesthetic and the ethical.⁶ The theologian Henri de Lubac wrote that Péguy “will save us from Nietzsche,”⁷ because he responded to similar questions and dilemmas in decisively different ways. Following the same path, for the philosopher Charles Taylor, Péguy is a “paradigm example of a modern who has found his own path, a new path,” to faith.⁸

In political life, Péguy long enjoyed a similarly varied and enthusiastic readership. Charles de Gaulle—the single most influential person in twentieth-century French politics—acknowledged, “No writer marked me as much” as Péguy.⁹ Yet a quite different political figure—the Senegalese intellectual and politician Léopold Senghor—also took inspiration from Péguy for the Négritude literary movement, with its emancipatory hope of bringing together traditional African cultures and modern ones.¹⁰

Immediately after World War II, Hannah Arendt clarified her disagreements with Péguy, but she counted him unhesitatingly among the champions of “freedom for the people and reason for the mind.”¹¹ In the same postwar moment, the literary critic Rachel Bespaloff wrote that Péguy transformed the language that would later be used by fascists by directing it toward entirely different ends; he “had a mind whose true significance is just beginning to be recognized.”¹² In a very different way, within the pages of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze finds in Péguy an indispensable thinker about time, who evokes the possibilities of repetition as something other than an assimilable concretion of similitudes and iterations of identity.¹³

Yet why have the depths and insights of Péguy been cast in relative shadow? In part, many scholars wish to explain the tragedies of the twentieth century from within the security afforded by the seemingly inevitable advance of immanent becoming. They simply assume—to quote Margaret Thatcher—that “there is no alternative” to continuing with the same project in saecula saeculorum. Part of their task is to preclude a vivifying encounter with lives and thoughts that cannot be assimilated into their account of the past.

Their scholarship does not always draw conclusions from close reading, or even from especially attentive reading. Hence the reading of Péguy in many recent books, including Christopher Forth’s The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood.

Forth claims that Dreyfusards, while working to free and exonerate Alfred Dreyfus, participated wholeheartedly in accepting and disseminating a hypertrophied masculinity that would ultimately prove useful to or even partially constitutive of fascism, in an effort to avoid, in his concluding words, the “feminizing pitfalls of modernity.”¹⁴ While a historical account from the mid-twentieth century would look to the Dreyfusards as harbingers of the Resistance to fascism, this dangerously naïve reading needs to acknowledge the gendering of their work, and the Dreyfusards’ deeper affinities with the forces that brought Europe not simply to the persecution of a single innocent man, but very likely to the Holocaust.¹⁵

Péguy is among those who Forth argues—to move toward traditional Marxist language—were “objectively” proto-fascist even if they were “subjectively” opposed to anti-Semitism and worked to secure Dreyfus’s exoneration. (Or to modulate the claim into an alternative hermeneutics of suspicion, an apparent antifascism and its progenitors had a latent but deep affinity with fascism, even if they were manifestly opposed to proto-fascism and fascists.) The evidence for Péguy’s participation in this fascist-tending masculinist discourse is, first, that he, “from his bookshop near the Sorbonne,” would reportedly say “fall in”¹⁶ to gather allies in order to defend Dreyfusard professors threatened by anti-Dreyfusard groups. Péguy also said that Dreyfusards “were heroes” and had “military virtues” nowhere in evidence among Dreyfus’s persecutors on the General Staff.¹⁷ Finally, as part of the “sporting enthusiasm” that contributed to fin-de-siècle masculinism, the adolescent Péguy “successfully lobbied the headmaster of his lycée to permit the older boys to play football [soccer].”¹⁸

Péguy indeed used the phrase “fall in” to exhort others to protect the victims of antirepublican and anti-Semitic aggression; but that is perhaps less an indication of nascent fascism than of the ways in which language about war and sex is a particularly fertile domain for metaphors, ones that cross the most varied domains of human experience, and have done so for a very long time.

This claim could be established with abundant references to Homer, Herodotus, and the Bible—or simply to the corridors of twenty-first century universities, in which a host of perfectly kind and good-natured contemporary academics have, in this author’s direct experience, referred to a student being given a “warning shot,” or our need to “fight” for a new course to be approved, or someone’s candidacy being “torpedoed,” or needing to fight a “battle” and form a “united front” in relation to an inconveniently obdurate dean or another department. If we are to admit this evidence, then it appears that liberal-arts academia in the twenty-first century is awash with masculinist triumphalism and subliminal fascism.

There is an important argument to make about Péguy’s changing reflections on violence and war, and it will be a significant factor in this book.¹⁹ Yet calls to fall in during the Dreyfus affair give no plausible purchase upon it. It might also be said that in an age when “calling security” was not an option for institutions of higher learning, Péguy’s clearly defensive work, as the proprietor of a bookshop, to protect intellectual freedom for university faculty and students against gangs of violent anti-Semites is rather implausibly stretched toward proto-fascism.

Péguy does refer to the Dreyfusards as “heroes” in his essay Notre Jeunesse (“Our Youth”). But his supreme example of heroism in that essay is the intellectual and anarchist Bernard-Lazare, who was an advocate not of Dreyfusard masculinist violence but of a universal justice that encompassed Dreyfus and the oppressed around the world, and who, seeing the world clearly despite his spectacles,²⁰ ill health, and considerable avoirdupois, devoted himself to exposing the lies that brought about Dreyfus’s conviction in hopes of a future and quite expressly judicial vindication. Péguy praises him for his “gentleness” (douceur), as well as his “goodness” and “even-temperedness.”²¹

Furthermore, the “martial” virtue in question for Péguy in Notre Jeunesse is courage—but courage for him was not, as it was for fascists, supremely expressed in a nihilistic and racist confrontation with death that finds its paradoxically debased Aufhebung in collectivist, industrial violence and domination. For Péguy, loving self-sacrifice, persistent devotion to carefully thought-out and established truths in the face of rejection by power, and voluntary poverty compose the true courage of the Dreyfusards (as Péguy argues throughout the essay). Moreover, Péguy’s preeminent example of heroism throughout his life’s work is not a man but a woman—Jeanne d’Arc.

It is certainly true that the idealization of a chaste woman who ends her life as a sacrificial victim was part of the masculine-obsessive’s palette in early twentieth century culture, and it is equally evident that these tableaus could perceptibly constrict the lives of living women. Yet within Péguy’s rendering in both prose and poetry, Jeanne is in no way a passive, abnegating, willowy damsel in the manner of fin-de-siècle representations of “delicate” or “neurasthenic” women; nor is she an emasculating virago in the manner of some women in the work of male artistic contemporaries like Gustav Klimt or Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, nor an exalted romantic or erotic ideal (illusory or not) in the manner of Henry James’s Madame de Vionnet, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Sara de Maupers, or the variously idealized or “fallen” women that appear in the paintings of Paul Gauguin or Félicien Rops.

In his extensive writings about Jeanne, Péguy describes her body’s actions but never describes her physical appearance, nor does he dwell on her physical suffering or her death—in his most famous poem about Jeanne, her death is entirely absent, as are any scenes of battle or violence. It is a challenge to find in his Jeanne a modern male fixation on the sacrificial death of a beautiful young woman, because her death is mostly set aside, and her appearance goes entirely unmentioned.

Instead, Péguy’s Jeanne is a hero at once acutely intelligent and contemplative, and intensely ambivalent about war. She reluctantly leads men into battle as a way to create justice and peace even as she agonizes over the mistreatment of soldiers—including enemy soldiers. Her most characteristic gesture is not violence but her ongoing anguish at the thought that anyone should be in hell²²—a concern that was also Péguy’s. She is eager to help others and repeatedly argues with men to do so; she is willing to give her food to children in need (though she displays no desire to starve herself and is generally presented as healthy and readily, assertively disputatious with men and women alike). The actual poems do not offer themselves to now-standard interpretations exposing dehumanizing and instrumental accounts of women’s lives.

In short, to sustain Péguy’s appearance in Forth’s masculinist, proto-fascist discourse, we are really left with the evidence that a teenaged Péguy persuaded his headmaster to allow for broader student participation in soccer games. While this claim offers a neatly symmetrical (if ghastly) parallel to the Victorian cliché about the Battle of Waterloo and the playing fields of Eton, this “evidence” does not give the author any grounds to draw historical connections between the soccer fields of Péguy’s lycée and fascist blitzkriegs, let alone the moral abysses of Sobibor and Auschwitz.

It could be said that Forth’s purpose is to write not about Péguy, but about a masculinist discourse in which Péguy participates. Yet the argument for his inclusion in this discourse is not established by anything resembling careful, patient reading. Vladimir Nabokov’s sound if rakishly daunting injunction for interpretation that holds well beyond specifically literary reading—that it should passionately attend to details²³—is often brazenly flouted by historians seeking explanations for the cultural trajectory of late modern European history. It often binds together a wide range of sources in sheaves of very short and selective quotations in order to establish a series of “anxieties,” not in order to prepare the way for careful reading of particular sources (a perfectly legitimate task in the absence of infinite time), but as a substitute for a careful, patient reading of any sources.

In this way, the tendency of a certain strain of modern history writing to argue or imply that historical selves fail to self—that is, they are set within a matrix of linguistic and cultural practices that determines their position, or at least the historical efficacy and relevance of that position—is all too often sustained by a prior commitment by the historian not to inquire about individual differences in the first place.

This type of argument—of which Forth’s book is only one example—has become a kind of standard model for a great deal of writing about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. In it, it is claimed, or assumed, that the public, civic culture of the West in general, and Europe in particular, labored to prolong with only minor or at most gradual adjustments the presumed (as we understand, a selectively muted and amplified) culture of a premodern, traditional society with origins in the early modern or even the medieval period and its classical inheritance.

In this account, this culture artificially prolonged and intensified often rigid distinctions of gender and caste, a sense of beauty and morals and metaphysics and honor, accompanied by other aspirations, prejudices, and hierarchies from its past. It dimly perceived but refused to accept that this public, civic culture had been stretched beyond the technological, social, economic, material, and cultural imperatives that gave it its suasive power. This disjunction produced “crises” and “anxieties” about decadence and decline that led the defenders of this composite “traditional” culture to something like a mannerist caricature of the already edited, selectively reduced, or amplified castes, hierarchies, and aesthetic and moral codes it sought to uphold, and sometimes to their pseudo-scientific rationalization in medicine, psychiatry, and social science.

Working within this model, for some time many cultural and intellectual historians of Europe have shown how, at the beginning of late modernity (say, from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to 1914) a new, larval order began to fashion itself in aesthetics, politics, new notions of gender, sexuality, and social change. Not all of this is rendered in bright hues: still following Michel Foucault, the period’s more imperial forays into science and social science are often the object of criticism, explicit or implicit, on the grounds that they limited their universality by, for example, importing traditionally European, masculinist assumptions into their notion of universality, or imposing a coercive, homogenizing immanent eschaton (as in Marxism) upon the apparently spontaneous unfolding of becoming. But above all, historians trace the pathologies that sought to freely combine a steroidal enhancement of sundry limiting atavisms with the distinctive technological, ideological, and (often pseudo-) scientific possibilities of modern culture. It was this pathological response to an emerging late or postmodernity that brought Europe—or at the least, left Europe vulnerable—to the hecatombs of 1914–1945.

Like all standard models, this model encompasses a variety of emphases and qualifications, and thus, if its advocates wish, it can deny its own existence. Something similar happened in economics at the turn of our own century, where “efficient market,” fresh-water economists for many years claimed they were “just doing serious work” in different corners of economics, with various intricate models that allowed for gratifyingly piquant scholarly exchanges, until the global financial crisis disclosed a remarkable unanimity of conviction—in the face of some decidedly jarring developments—about the putatively “serious” or “sober” principles of economics.

The writing of history is rather less open to immediate contradiction by events. Yet while certainly not without the capacity to adapt and integrate disparate sensibilities and interests at various levels of abstraction, the commitments of this historical standard model have been expressed with some clarity and consistency for at least a generation, sometimes among those who acknowledge their limitations.²⁴

What ultimately rests behind these commitments? While a given historian can deny that his or her models have morals, the choosing of ordering argumentative principles, or of criteria for the selection of evidence, or of emphases in argument, imply notions of what is true, about what is and what should be, or at least about what is “good in the way of belief” or “a desirable state of affairs.”

This reality is generally—if rather discreetly—acknowledged by historians. Peter Gordon, for example, claims that while an “ethic of neutrality partially occludes” the presence of “strong normative frameworks” in the writing of history, an account of what should be enters into the formulation and development of historical arguments: “The discerning reader can usually grasp without difficulty what political or moral judgment may have animated the historian in her work and guided her toward certain conclusions.”²⁵

One moral of the standard model of late modern Europe tends to assume the following, applying its truth of immanent becoming to the origins of the twentieth century’s catastrophes: the notion of a rigorously ethical, integral, strong, persistent, and sacrificial self is not a source of resistance to fascism but rather and ultimately is a precondition and enabler of fascism. Following Foucault and others, advocates of the standard model have implied and asserted that resistance to fascism, and more generally to modern tyrannies of either a bluntly political or a more subtle kind, can be attributed to a refusal or repression of discontinuous identities, desires, and forms of expression.²⁶

Given this account of fascism’s ultimate inner hold upon us via our very notions of self and self-command, it is rather awkward that resistance to fascism in the twentieth century was often carried out by those with a robust attachment to some considerable portion of the aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical commitments that many contemporary scholars consider to be, as it were, incipiently fascist in their internal logic. They include integral selves making deliberate moral decisions at great personal cost, founded in what is often a mixture of quite traditional and quite modern notions of virtue and civic good associated with solidarity, courage, equality, integrity, independence, duty, socialism, Christianity, Judaism, humanism, and so on.

An open encounter with Péguy’s thinking meets another obstacle in a different prevailing model, this one more closely associated with intellectual history. It is less political than the standard model and operates at a higher level of abstraction. It tends to emphasize how ideas in history often work within an immediately contextual matrix, one that allows for apparent differences to be set within conceptual, social, and linguistic structures of which participants were generally unaware, or only dimly aware, and from which they cannot escape. This is often accompanied by a conscious effort by historical agents to “negotiate” contemporary institutional and intellectual expectations in order to secure intellectual credibility and status. For this model’s advocates, to focus upon thinking by a given person without assigning priority to these structures and negotiations veers dangerously close to humanist nostalgia. Often the very attempt by a given thinker to move beyond various social, conceptual, and professional constrictions is treated ironically, though it may well be a tragic or melancholy irony that intimates an unspoken wish for an impossible escape from what contextually bound both the thinker and the thought.

Whatever the rhetorical hue of the argument, this ready-made form of historical understanding allows the scholar to devote him- or herself to structures of assumption and inquiry, to what “shows up” as “knowledge,” or the immediate, inescapable contextual boundaries of intellectual work.

For example, in Sarah Hammerschlag’s The Figural Jew, Péguy is a thinker who tries to subvert cultural assumptions, especially anti-Semitic preoccupations with Jews’ putative “rootlessness” and “disloyalty” to affirm an ongoing prophetic vocation. Yet in her account, he failed; his writing does not really escape the anti-Semitic discursive historical matrix from which it is said to emerge. Péguy’s Judaism remains racial—if not racist—in nature, it is “dehistoricized” and reduces Jews to being the exemplary suffering servants of Christians, or as edifying examples in a Christian typology.

For Hammerschlag, Péguy’s very praise of his friend Bernard-Lazare is not, as it was for George Steiner, the best account of friendship since Montaigne;²⁷ rather, it is itself veering close to anti-Semitism, since it also claims that Jews were not Dreyfusards as Bernard-Lazare himself was, and thus that most Jews were disloyal to, put baldly, one of their own, in part because of a besetting anxiety. Even when Péguy sought justice for Dreyfus, he did so for the honor of the nation, not for “some universal law.”²⁸ A more promising remedy for the exclusions of modern identity politics must await the theoretical transposition of simultaneously figurative and defigurizing language from literature, via the ministrations of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, which finds especially promising expression within the French student movement of 1968.

Hammerschlag’s reading does not always condescend to read with care. For example, it is not true that Péguy finds in “most of the Jews”²⁹ a refusal to support Dreyfus that suggests their alleged distinctive “failings” as a people. First, Péguy observed at the time that most Jews indeed defended Dreyfus’s innocence.³⁰ He also repeatedly refers to a limited and initial reluctance to get involved in the campaign to vindicate Dreyfus as a natural human tendency, applying to human beings in general. Many people do not wish to get involved in costly and difficult campaigns that do not immediately affect them. When it did occur, this was manifestly a universal human trait for Péguy, not a “Jewish” one; here, as Péguy repeatedly puts it, the Jewish people are “like all peoples” (and Jewish voters are like other voters).³¹

“Anxiety” is for Péguy a human experience, uniquely inflected in Judaism but not uniquely a Jewish one: “Man” as such is a “puits d’inquiétude” (a well of anxiety), as he puts it in one of his most famous lines of verse,³² and Jewish anxiety is “grafted” into Christianity by Jesus himself.³³ Hammerschlag’s explicit antihumanism³⁴ leaves her unmoved by these repeated references to cross-religious affinities and universal human situations, but that does not relieve an author of a need to acknowledge what is clearly and repeatedly in an author’s work.

It is also not true that Péguy sees Jews serving only as a typological example for Christians. He expresses his conviction directly that in the Dreyfus affair, Jewish, Christian, and French mysticisms were engaged in “coming together”³⁵ and “mutually tested,” one another³⁶ in which all three distinctive mysticisms brought out what was best in one another and made it possible for them to work toward the common end of justice.

Furthermore, these identities were in no way mutually exclusive: for Péguy, Bernard-Lazare is not simply or only Jewish—he is also and simultaneously French, and Parisian, and secular in his sensibilities.³⁷ If there is “essentializing” in Péguy, it is relational and multidimensional, both within individual persons and among different religious, national, and extranational groups.

Similarly, the “dehistoricizing” to which Hammerschlag refers can only be made plausible if it is meant to mark Péguy’s failure to be a doctrinaire contemporary historicist. For Péguy, the forms, even the beliefs, in which those elected to fulfill the best (mystical) imperatives embodied by a given historical group can be starkly different according to very diverse historical circumstances, while enjoying an unforeseeable but profound continuity. Péguy, the impoverished anticlerical Parisian writer of 1900, expresses French chivalry in ways very different from Jeanne d’Arc or Louis IX’s chronicler Jean de Joinville. As Hammerschlag herself observes, Bernard-Lazare is an atheist³⁸ (and an advocate of universal justice—things to which Péguy gives unmistakable emphasis).³⁹ Within the poststructuralist canon, Hammerschlag might have consulted Deleuze’s account of repetition in Péguy to avoid a misreading of this kind. Péguy assumes, however, that regardless of historical period, participation in and fidelity to a mysticism generally entails poverty, weakness, and a distance from established institutions, whether those institutions are French, Jewish, Christian, or some mixture thereof.⁴⁰

For Péguy, Jewish, Christian and French (or again, some combination thereof) participation in the Dreyfus affair—what he calls an “elected affair”⁴¹—is a kind of election that cannot be chosen, but can be refused. This way of thinking about election can be harsh in Péguy, but is neither racial nor dehistoricizing. For example, Péguy thought that the mystical-historical role of Dreyfus in the Dreyfus affair was to refuse his pardon and insist on his being declared innocent no matter what the cost, on behalf of all the mysticisms that sought his vindication. A judgment like this one would be a much more promising basis upon which to criticize Péguy’s thinking.

The Dreyfus affair in Péguy’s account was also not simply an affair of national honor. As Péguy wrote explicitly in Notre Jeunesse, it is precisely the universality of injustices that must be fought against, wherever they appear, and in that universal moral rigor, honor may be found. Péguy directs his readers’ attention to Bernard-Lazare’s willingness to castigate both Muslims and Christians for their anti-Semitism and persecution of other minorities whenever it appears around the world, rather than (as many did) speaking of Ottoman “tyranny” and expediently ignoring Christian anti-Semitism.⁴²

Another recent history testifies to a similar tendency to assume inescapable, tightly bounded social and linguistic fields in the past. Given the abundant citations of Péguy in a host of twentieth-century Catholic theologians, and specifically his appreciation of Judaism, one would assume that a recent historical account of changing attitudes toward Judaism among Catholics would include Péguy. This would be all the more true given the appreciative comments by Jewish thinkers about Péguy (for example, by Scholem and others). Péguy’s close friend Jules Isaac—who later wrote Jesus et Israël, in part a thorough accounting of the ways in which Christian anti-Semitism ignored and contradicted Christianity’s own Scripture⁴³—participated in many organizations and meetings for interreligious dialogue between Christians and Jews, including the Seelisburg conference of 1947. These efforts helped to open the way for the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate and other affirmative statements about Judaism in twentieth-century Catholicism. In John Connel ly’s From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, this history is swept aside.

Of course, it is both legitimate and important to research, as Connelly does, Catholic thinking about Judaism in German-speaking Europe, especially in the middle decades of the twentieth century. But Connelly hopes that this partial history of a dense, interconnected contextual network of thinkers, in a very specific and recent historical context, can serve as a complete history. Péguy is a sacrifice to this commitment.

Péguy first appears just short of the book’s halfway point, where he is mentioned very briefly as a “figure from an earlier generation who might be counted” among those who engaged in respectful, substantive dialogue with Jews and Judaism. But this was not a true and fully articulated commitment on Péguy’s part; like Hammerschlag, Connelly assumes that Péguy could not partially yet meaningfully and creatively reconfigure an ambient matrix of discourse. While he was opposed to anti-Semitism, his opposition was prompted by his “personal affection for the Jewish writer Bernard-Lazare.” It expressed itself in a statement “written in private to a friend” that Jews were not responsible for the suffering of Jesus, but rather all of human sin was so responsible.⁴⁴

In fact, Péguy wrote at length against anti-Semitism in a host of very public and widely published writings, writings that were read extensively during the interwar years and afterward. It is untrue that a single statement in a letter represents Péguy’s full authorial protest against anti-Semitism, or his protests against Jews being unjustly blamed by Christians for things they did not do. It is also not true that the notion that Christian sin as the true cause of the Passion does not appear in any formal writings by Péguy. It can be found in his posthumously published Clio, Dialogue of History with the Carnal Soul, in which, among other things, the Christian sinner Péguy is told that through the evil he has done, it is “Jesus that you crucify.”⁴⁵ Additional remarks to that effect were published by Romain Rolland—a Nobel Prize–winning author and then a figure of international renown—in his memoir of Péguy, published in 1944.⁴⁶

Similar and still more forceful objections to anti-Semitism, and of an ongoing positive relation between Christianity and Judaism, can be found in Notre Jeunesse (Péguy’s best-known prose writing) and The Mystery of Jeanne d’Arc’s Love (one of his most famous poems), among others.

Under the heading “The Troubling Origins of the New Vision,” Connelly appears to make a major argumentative concession. He acknowledges that a convert to Catholicism at the center of his history—Ottilie Schwarz—attributed the origins of her and others’ work for a change in Catholic attitudes toward Judaism to the work of “Catholic Dreyfusards” like “Jacques Maritain [and] Charles Péguy” at the turn of the century. According to Connelly, “other pioneers from the anti-Nazi struggle concurred.”⁴⁷

In this way, his own historical protagonists appear to contradict Connelly. But he adds to the names of Maritain and Péguy that of “their teacher, the antimodern apocalyptist Léon Bloy.”⁴⁸ It may well be that some of his sources conflate these authors; but Connelly endorses that conflation, joining the “Catholic Dreyfusards” with the “dark and troubling sources”⁴⁹ of their “teacher” Bloy’s profound anti-Semitism.

Yet Péguy was not in any way Bloy’s student. In fact, Péguy intensely disliked Bloy, took no instruction from him, formally or informally, did not know him personally, refused to answer letters from him when the anti-Semitic writer tried to establish a connection with Péguy,⁵⁰ and did not cite his work in thousands of pages of published and unpublished writing. Further, in an unmistakably dismissive reference to Bloy in conversation, Péguy told his friend Joseph Lotte in 1912 that Bloy was one of several apocalyptic “idiots.”⁵¹

For Connelly, Bloy opens up distant possibilities for Jewish-Christian reconciliation despite his own ugly anti-Semitism; but those possibilities are only given their full life, free of poisonous hatred, by the network of interconnected figures at the center of his own, later history. That Péguy had done so in less “networked” circumstances decades before has been ruled out, above all by posthumously enrolling him into a “network” to which he clearly did not belong. To call him Bloy’s “student” is a description accurate neither as a fact nor even—given Péguy’s direct and sustained rejection of Bloy and his work—as a cavernous metaphor.

One might imagine going further than Connelly or Hammerschlag, “situating” Péguy in a still more conceptually ambitious contextual matrix. One could argue that his writing is one symptom of subtly shared conceptual commitments manifest in, say, thinking about temporality, alterity, and ethics, at work in apparently diverse and opposed figures, for example, Péguy, Marcel Mauss, Paul Claudel, Henri Bergson, Henri Poincaré, and Émile Durkheim. One could traverse disciplinary boundaries to show, for example, how certain ideas associated with their different bodies of work were connected to a certain phenomenology of time, simultaneously working through different status networks (say, in universities as opposed to the world of independent writers in Paris).

It is certainly a possible if radically incomplete and partial project. Among these diverse and often opposed philosophers, scholars, and artists—as we shall see—there is a common fascination with the repetition or the singularity of events in accounts of historical time, in which an “ultimate” knowledge reveals itself by variously affirming either repetition or singularity. There is also a related ethical engagement with two apparent disruptions of modern self-fashioning, generally oriented toward acquisition and self-advancement: sacrifice and the gift.

One might offer some sort of “deft” inversion at the argument’s end: for example, Mauss’s account of the gift as entrapped by cyclical, interminably immanent repetition could be initially contrasted with Péguy’s account of the gift as a primal event, an eruption of eternity into the present, and then both could be referred to the presence of their opposite in one another, so that there is a concluding indeterminacy about the gift as eternally recurring reciprocity in time (Mauss) and the recurrent event of eternity entering time as an infinitely gratuitous gift that can never be reciprocated (Péguy). The distinction between Mauss and Péguy could then be described as one of subtle emphasis within the phenomenological architecture of early twentieth-century European culture—rather than something that requires an understanding of distinct, consequential, and mutually exclusive possibilities.

The appeal of shared conceptual preoccupations is not to be forsworn. But it is also not to be taken as self-evidently “serious” in relation to all other forms of knowledge, including consciously embodied ones—particularly in history.

Conceived somewhat differently, it is a good thing that many contemporary histories are suspicious of heroic, promethean subjectivity. But calcified into an ideological commitment to affirm its opposite, this suspicion itself becomes implausible, and can only sustain itself by tendentious and peremptory readings, ones determined not to see that distinct and consequential events of thought and action indeed happen within complex and unique historical moments. This in turn discloses a striking professional contradiction: from their graduate student days forward, historians are often evaluated supremely on the basis of their ability to do individually distinctive and original work, and yet a principle underwriting a great deal of that individually distinctive and original history-writing assumes either that individual singularity and originality do not exist, or that they are not historically significant.

Péguy is a practitioner of distinctive thinking, and hence he does not fit neatly into our historiographical models. He is not easily collapsed into the standard model of late modern history or the technocratic historicism that accompanies it. He is indeed always inflected by and in conversation with the history around him, but is not encompassed by it.

We shall have to look elsewhere to understand this history—and that is a rare and precious historical opportunity. As the philosopher of science William Wimsatt puts it, “When testing philosophical theories [or historical explanations, one might add] look for the tough cases; ones capable of producing deep and rich counterexamples we can learn from.”⁵²

In this way, instead of contemporary scholarly guides precluding a free encounter with Péguy and his singular writing, we shall remember those thinkers—Christian, Jewish, and nonbelieving, European and African, men and women alike, from Bespaloff to de Gaulle, from Deleuze to Senghor, von Balthasar, and Benjamin—who were able to read Péguy before the preeminent contemporary models for historical thinking emerged as obstacles to that encounter.

The meeting with Péguy in these pages will take life from the following commitments. First, both the partisans of an immanent becoming and a mechanical, arrested immanence are still very much with us, more than a century after their emergence. Given that reality, simply repeating the predictable, inexorably immanent “contextualizations” in ever more sweeping terms will do precisely nothing to improve our historical understanding—nor will it improve our ability to discern the needs and possibilities of our own historical moment.

Deep historical understanding is not the same as airless, rigidly contextual historicism, in which diverse, one might say, pluperfect pasts only become present as “representations” in circumambulated linguistic, discursive, social, or institutional fields. Péguy’s thought draws deeply and creatively from immediate contemporaries, the philosophy of Henri Bergson in particular, as well as the general tendency of thinking in philosophy of science and history associated with Émile Boutroux, Henri Poincaré, and others, not to mention the evanescent cultural and technological opening for intellectually ambitious philosophical journalism. But he is also indebted to, for example, a careful, sustained, and creative reading of Blaise Pascal—he is by no means always repeating the representations of Pascal’s thought among his teachers and contemporaries.

The possibility of an encounter with pluperfect pasts may seem odd, given our present intellectual commitments and their penchant for modular, linear time. Yet the possibility of noncumulative, not immediately contextual historical influence is at work well beyond political thought, metaphysical reflection, and literature; it is at work in the most rigorously cumulative and demonstrative disciplines. It is this, as it were, “spooky action at a distance” that allowed Gödel’s Platonism to deliver such an extraordinary mathematical riposte to the prevailing logicism of David Hilbert,⁵³ or that allowed the cataphatic theological commitments of the Moscow school of mathematics—drawn from long-standing prayer practices in Eastern Orthodox Christianity—to open the way to different paths in twentieth-century set theory, beyond those dreamed by French-Cartesian mathematicians.⁵⁴ In this way, the present—which is of course simultaneously connected to the recent past and more distant pasts—can also encounter a given distant past as a source of surprising renewal; what Péguy called, in his own very influential neologism, ressourcement (“going back to the sources”).⁵⁵

Péguy’s life and writing offer us a rigorous conversation between past and present, where one can test the tensile interplay of historical contact and distance, inquiring about whether our received categories are truly able to fathom the past and the present alike.

The list of Péguy’s distinctive allegiances and positions is remarkable in variety and depth. To start cautiously, Péguy was a socialist, but an anti-Marxist. In France at the turn of the last century, that was not remarkable in itself,⁵⁶ but he also refused to align himself with any party, even as he insisted on his socialism and a robust critique of capitalism. To this end, in 1900 he founded his own journal, the Cahiers de la quinzaine (Fortnightly Notebooks), for which he refused all advertising in order to guarantee its complete editorial independence. The decision to strike out on his own—before he had earned a university degree, while renouncing expected sources of funding—led him to pursue a life of at times oppressive poverty, occasional if never quite total intellectual isolation, and sometimes resented marginality.

Yet for all that, Péguy was able to bring his work into the life of French and ultimately global letters. In its fourteen years of publication, the Cahiers could count among its subscribers the philosopher Henri Bergson, the politician Raymond Poincaré, and the novelists Anatole France, André Gide, Romain Rolland, and Marcel Proust, as well as Alfred Dreyfus and many famous Dreyfusards.⁵⁷ Many of them also contributed articles—notably Rolland and France—as well as Julien Benda and Georges Clemenceau. Péguy edited and produced the journal regularly until his death on the eve of the Battle of the Marne.

Within the pages of the Cahiers and elsewhere, Péguy was a critic of the emerging intellectual and institutional power of social science, and an advocate of an education dedicated to Greek and Latin, as well as the classics of France literature as they had been gathered into a canon in France over the course of the nineteenth century. Yet Péguy’s own poetry often in no way comports with the formal rules of prosody, and it owes a great debt to an incantatory encounter with a very earthy world redolent at once of French peasant culture as well as the meditative, suspensive qualities of compositions by early modernist artists like Claude Monet and Claude Debussy.

Similarly distinctive commitments can be found throughout Péguy’s life. Péguy was a great admirer of Émile Zola as a political activist, but not as a novelist. He criticized parliamentary corruption, and the modern ambitions that he believed sustained it, in intemperate language, but was convinced that the countries that had long offered freedom to their citizens were representative democracies like France, Britain, Switzerland, and the United States.⁵⁸ He admired both the pastoral serenity and the silent grandeur of the countryside and also his beloved Paris, with its ceaseless bustle and crowds. He could be a turn-of-the-last-century polemicist against modern culture and also an unwavering supporter of the French Revolution and its universalism, as well as a lifelong, very public opponent of anti-Semitism, assuring Bergson months before his own death that he alone could best defend Bergson against the anti-Semites who attacked him.⁵⁹

In those same years, Péguy exhorted his readers to ready themselves for what he wrongly believed would be its world-historical destiny to fight a short, defensive war against a German invasion, in which France would be vindicated as an agent of liberation. Yet he had for some time been skeptical about European imperialism, both in his own writings and by publishing in his journal famous critics of imperialist injustice like E. D. Morel.

Péguy’s religious convictions also confound easy preconceptions. In 1907, Péguy returned to Catholicism and became fascinated by what he called “the Christian Revolution.” Yet he remained anticlerical and volubly, caustically suspicious of ecclesiastical politics to the end of his life. Upon his death, he was in a remarkable position: he was a vigorous opponent of theological modernism who was simultaneously in danger of having his writings placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books.

Even this short list of affinities and commitments shows that Péguy does not neatly fit our received categories. That these distinctive commitments existed in the same, at times defiantly anti-institutional person—and above all in a person who was at pains to affirm the essential continuity of his thinking⁶⁰—makes him an intriguing and remarkably revealing historical case.

Finally, his writing took its shape from what was a favorite term; that is, from “revolution,” understood comprehensively and with its full range of meaning in French. In this way, Péguy’s revolutions of thought are at once an attempt to achieve radical and thoroughgoing change, an act of revolving around an orienting center that repeats a cyclical action in linear time with intimations of constancy and eternity, a return to an origin through perpetual motion, and the process of organic regeneration that allows a forest or field to regain its full depth and vitality, extending itself deep into the soil in order to grow.⁶¹ This organic, earthy fecundity leads naturally to Péguy’s affirmation of the “carnal” (charnel), and with it the blessings of a spiritually embodied and carnally spiritual life.

Above all, through Péguy’s work, it is possible to understand the cultural and intellectual life of Europe’s late modernity with fresh eyes, and to understand our own cultural and intellectual world differently.

We shall begin by surveying the range of prominent forms of assumption and inquiry into knowledge, time, truth, the self, and meaning available to him in the Belle Époque. These will be variously adopted, refashioned, and recreated in Péguy’s revolutions. Since contexts are porous and multidimensional, a wide variety of conversations are possible, in which the boundaries of different contexts can be opened for exploration.

To sound the fullness of Péguy’s thought we shall also have to be God botherers, and there are those who will find that very bothersome indeed. But for those tempted to lament a “troubling nostalgia for the Big Other,” or a “dangerous return to the metaphysics of presence,” I can offer only a friendly greeting, and be on my way.

A century after his death, Péguy’s contrarian life opens our understanding of intellectual and cultural worlds in Europe before the onset of horrifying violence. Those years must never be set aside. Yet it must not also be assumed that absolutely all historical alternatives other than immanent becoming are, after a rapid survey of sources, to be condemned as subtly or overtly responsible for those catastrophes. Still less must we conclude that only an ever more immanent becoming can serve simultaneously as prosecutor, jury, and judge for all alternatives to itself.

Through a historical reading of Péguy—through this singular test case—we can ask different questions of the past, not to enforce the answers of the currently prevailing metaphysics (whose supporters, like their forebears among Péguy’s contemporaries, claim with rather touching presumption to stand “after” or “beyond” metaphysics),⁶² nor to indulge in the vandalism and malice of their reactionary adversaries. We should free ourselves to wonder whether there are possibilities available to neither of them, an originality disclosed through origins recently obscured that await us still.⁶³