Is the unclassifiable Charles Péguy, finally, a philosopher? This is the thesis defended by Camille Riquier, who brings together in the work and existence (inseparably linked) of the writer the elements of a philosophy of action, on the margins of systems.
Since the centenary of Charles Péguy’s death in 2014, there has been a proliferation of works that allow us to approach his work from all literary, political and religious angles. The essay that C. Riquier devotes to Péguy’s philosophy is a notable milestone. The author is not the first to explore this path since, without mentioning Emmanuel Mounier in the 1930s, Philippe Grossos and François Fédier have recently addressed the issue, but this new perspective is notable for its breadth of vision and the desire to grasp the whole of a thought that is so difficult to grasp in simple terms.
The missing book by Charles Péguy?
The first ambition of this work is great: to clearly expose the coherence of a philosophy. C. Riquier succeeds in this. Those who have read little of Péguy will find in it enough to enter a profuse and complex work. His seasoned readers will see, in the midst of well-known elements, perspectives that may have seemed obscure or hidden to them. C. Riquier thus mobilizes an intimate knowledge of Péguy’s texts to the benefit of a great depth of analysis, served by a clear and vigorous style. This proximity to his subject sometimes leads the author to adopt an apologetic tone, but this is a common bias among Péguyists.
C. Riquier’s second ambition, more original, raises questions. Péguy, the poet, the pamphleteer, the journalist, the politician, the writer, anarchist, socialist, Dreyfusist, patriot, Christian, would be above all a philosopher but who never delivered the philosophical work that one could have hoped for from him. No reference treatise, no completed thesis, but a philosophy that finds a place in the whole body of his work, in small touches, with great discretion. However, by proposing to restore coherence to a fragmented whole, C. Riquier wants to try – in his words – to compose the book of philosophy that Péguy did not write. The ambition is dizzying. It has the merit of being assumed since C. Riquier concludes his text thus: “we sought (…) that this book be by him even more than about him and like the work hoped for” (p. 546). Let us admit that our almost total adherence to this work stopped at this threshold. For if Péguy did not offer us this unified work, it is not by chance. His conception of philosophical action based on insertion into life prevented him from doing so.
Exposing Péguy’s philosophy is no easy task. One could have imagined isolating concepts. That would be nonsense: Péguy’s thought is a tapestry whose threads intertwine to form a unit. An isolated thread has no interest. One could also have thought of a reflection on Péguy’s place in a philosophical tradition, from a more historical angle. The approach would have been too didactic and would have missed the Péguyist singularity. C. Riquier preferred to construct his demonstration by following the chronology of the texts. This is the only way to grasp the flow of a thought that, more than evolving, experiences a deepening and broadening, at the rhythm of a life. The three parts of the work illustrate this journey: innocence; the fall; salvation. Innocence is that of adolescent socialism, which sees in the Dreyfus Affair the chosen event that will allow the socialist city to be founded. The fall is that of a Dreyfusism that becomes corrupted and of a mysticism that ends in this policy of which Jaurès is the hated figure. It is also the domination of money in a modern world that debases. Salvation, finally, is the Christian hope rediscovered in the face of personal despair and the certainty that war is coming inexorably.
Fighting universal evil
Péguy’s philosophy is above all in action. It has a moral and political scope. Moral because it responds to an internal, personal need. Political because it proposes a City to be built on this moral foundation.
The initial movement is marked by a refusal: that of evil. It can take the form of economic misery, against which the young socialist revolts. It has the face of injustice that the early Dreyfusist will fight. It is domination, excess of power, lies, violence, pogroms, colonization… And it is also damnation for the Christian that he was in the second part of his brief existence.
A disembodied denunciation cannot suffice. Péguy separates himself here from the Kantianism to which he is nevertheless close, this Kantianism of which he wrote in a famous formula of Victor-Marie, Count Hugoin 1910, that he ” has clean hands but (…) has no hands”. This fight can only be waged on two conditions: lucidity and truth. One must always say what one sees, but even more so see what one sees. The price to pay is high: to remain in the “axis of distress”, as he writes, that is to say, to remain in worry or, to use a term attached to Pessoa’s work, in disquiet. From this moral requirement, which is the foundation of Péguy’s thought and life, is born a permanent tension to which he will subject himself at the cost of great inner suffering.
The common thread of Péguy’s philosophy is the fight against evil, the evil one. If C. Riquier subtitles his book, “Memoirs of an Imbecile”, it is in reference to the very words of Péguy who assumes this part of naivety, innocence or simply truth in the face of the evil ones who always seek to deceive. Péguy shares this imbecility with the people who often find themselves disarmed in the face of demagogy and its temptations. And yet, the revolution he hopes for is that of conscience, conversion and justice, because, as he wrote in 1905 in Parallel supplicants : “The triumph of demagogy is fleeting, but the ruins are eternal.”
To form a City
The graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, who failed the philosophy aggregation and then gave it up to get involved, thinks and acts as a philosopher, and for C. Riquier it is by approaching him as such that we perceive, more than the unity of a journey, a loyalty. A loyalty to the people from whom he comes, with whom the intellectual who has become a Parisian nourishes complex relationships. A loyalty to an ideal of justice. A loyalty to what he intends to be.
In accordance with a certain French tradition, illustrated by Montaigne, Pascal or Rousseau, which combines style and thought, Péguy rejects all systems. “Happy are the systematic,” he mocks in a text from 1905. Five years earlier, in More flu, he writes: “I am not very much in favor of immense speculations, of eternal contemplations. I do not have the time. I work in fortnights. I am attached to the present. It is worth it.” To the dead or death-dealing order of systems, he opposes the living “jumble” (p. 73), he who affirms, in Casse-cou in 1901, to have “no need to unify the world.” This philosophical vitality, he will give it substance in this project which will be his work and his life: the Notebooks of the fortnightfounded in January 1900. This is not a simple review, created to free itself from the intellectual discipline imposed within the socialist movement which is becoming unified. With the NotebooksPéguy intends to constitute a friendship, a city, a Republic composed of its authors and its readers. This is indeed a utopia, but concrete and active.
For Péguy, “the social revolution will be moral or it will not be”. This revolution must go through a personal conversion and, little by little, it will be possible to fight against evil. By offering each reader, a member of this earthly city, pieces of truth and reality, notably through raw documents, by highlighting the injustices to be fought, Péguy wants to bring about these conversions, without giving this word a religious meaning. The format of the magazine is adapted to this project. By its collective nature, it forms a community, even if over time Péguy’s personal work increasingly exclusively nourishes the Cahiers. The periodicity – fortnightly – is just as essential. It follows the course of the event which is our inner master, according to Emmanuel Mounier’s formula. This method consists of inserting oneself into current events to bring to the surface the deep structures of the world as it is. She makes of Péguy what J. Julliard, taking up Maurice Clavel, called “transcendental journalism”.
Péguy hoped that the Dreyfus Affair, the event of his life, would constitute an accelerator of the spread of socialism. The decomposition of Dreyfusism would end up convincing him that the mysticism born in the event always ends in politics. The mystic-political opposition that Péguy develops in Our Youth in 1910 was the subject of debate. By considering that no mysticism could maintain its initial integrity, does Péguy – who often evokes the idea of purity – close the door to all political action? Certainly not. C. Riquier shows this well. It is political politics, to use common terms, that Péguy refuses. For him, any compromise is compromission, which explains his violence towards Jaurès. We can see in the mystical-political opposition a call for demand. Not, to take up Max Weber’s distinction, that the ethics of conviction prevails over the ethics of responsibility. Péguy writes that “the socialist end never justifies political means”. He also intends to be responsible and to weigh on reality, but he believes that it is by maintaining a certain height in action, that of prophets, geniuses, heroes or saints, that we can change the world. This requirement is probably not tenable for more ordinary men. How to conquer and exercise power? Péguy never answers this question because he intends to situate himself on another level. From a practical point of view, it has always seemed to us that in action, Péguy should be understood as a call to show oneself faithful not only to values – in particular that of justice – but also to reason, truth and reality. This is probably today the most substantial thing we can draw from this thought at a time when lies are overwhelming public speech on networks, in the media, on platforms.
We would have liked, with C. Riquier, to address here many other points that found Péguy’s philosophy: history and memory, language, time, religion. We should also have mentioned the dialogue that Péguy established with Pascal, Descartes or Bergson. C. Riquier, a recognized specialist in the latter’s work, shows how Péguy, who was so close to him, was neither his student nor his disciple but entered into resonance with his philosophy to deploy it under other horizons (p. 373 sq.). We will refer in particular to the passages devoted to the way in which Péguy reworks Bergsonian duration to show how common history penetrates each of us, how broader durations enter into our individual duration that insert us into a temporality, a lineage and a community, by a phenomenon of incorporation or incarnation of time through memory.
It would also have been necessary to address Péguy’s ability to think about the plurality of beings and first of all his own. The use of pseudonyms allows him to establish dialogues between the facets of his personality and his thought. Here, the philosophy of plurality and literary play are mixed together, which is not without evoking Pessoa and the use of heteronyms. The very personal part that Péguy delivers in his writings, poetic or in prose, seems to us to make his work a great literary, aesthetic creation. And it is this ability of Péguy to grant his singularity to universal issues that makes him a true artist, even more than a philosopher.