Volume 7, Number 1 · July 28, 1966
Artist of the Impossible
By J.M. Cameron
Charles Péguy: A Study in Integrity
by Marjorie Villiers
Harper & Row, 412 pp., $6.50
When, after the second War, the Republican court found Charles Maurras guilty of collaboration with the enemy, the old man cried out as he was being taken away: This is the revenge for Dreyfus. Years later, some of the gunmen conspiring to assassinate De Gaulle were flushed out of a Versailles apartment by the French police; and the name of the lady who had offered them hospitality turned out to be du Paty de Clam. (Du Paty de Clam was the Commandant who first put Alfred Dreyfus under arrest.) Clearly, past and present are intertwined in France to a degree unusual in most countries. If De Gaulle is so detested by the French Right, this is not only because he is responsible for the loss of Algeria, not even, at bottom, because he opposed the idolized Pétain, but because he is an anomaly, in the eyes of the French Conservatives, and an anomaly whose very existence provokes a boundless irritation, rather in the way a continually repeated mistake in grammar may drive the one who hears it to thoughts of murder. He is a Catholic, an officer, a gentleman; but he is also a Republican without qualification or inner reservation, a man of 1789 who sings the Marseillaise with gusto, one who loves without sentimentality the curiously dynamic society of bourgeois, workers, peasants, and technocrats that is the France of our day. In this the French Right is more acute than the sillier sections of the Left. For these latter too, De Gaulle is anomalous; but they conclude from this that a rigorous political analysis will dissolve the anomaly and reveal a Fascist face behind the Republican mask.
Review, 2349 words
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