Charles Péguy on the Failure of a Culture

The French poet Charles Péguy in 1910 wrote a lengthy essay Notre Jeunesse (Memories of Youth) in defense of the actions of the party of Dreyfusards, those who defended Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish descent. Dreyfus was falsely accused of selling military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Later exonerated, his case deeply divided the nation along conservative and republican lines, and became a symbol not only for the issue of French antisemiticism, but also for broad political and religious questions, and effected important changes in the official status of the Roman Catholic Church in the country.

Péguy, a Catholic convert and a committed socialist, was also an ardent nationalist, and he wrote Notre Jeunesse to defend the patriotism of his convictions when many saw him as a betrayer of country and of religion. Conservative Catholics on the right were to charge him with disloyalty to the Church, while republicans often held that Catholics could not be true Frenchmen. Yet Péguy also ending up writing an essay that set out his own theory of social and political authenticity.

Péguy held that authentic action for a community arose out of a mystique, a word that can be translated as a faith, a mystery, a tradition, and an operation or action. A mystique is not held by a people consciously, at least not in a way that one debates and studies. It is a more settled way of life and set of convictions that come naturally to a community. The problem is that its mystique could over time become a politique, a political party or theory, an institution imposed from without, a set of values that are debated and proven or disproven but that no longer have a grasp on the community's heart. "Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique," he lamented.

As a Catholic and political progressive, Péguy took the radical step of arguing that "the derepublicanization of France is essentially the same movement as the de-Christianization of France. Both together are one and the same movement, a profound demystification." Both are a kind of idolatrous and yet sterile modernization that substitutes profound belief and action for cynical theorization and manipulation of an older language.

Péguy goes on to point out that mystiques treat each other in different ways that politiques even when they are in disagreement. The former are far less violent and oppressive, and when they are enemies, the distinction is "at a much deeper, more essential level, and with an infinitely nobler profundity." It is as simple as the distinction between rival virtue and rival malice. Péguy insists, then, that it is a mistake to compare the mystique of one position with the politique of another. The worst sin of all, however, is to pretend to be of a mystique while actually playing the game of the politique: "To steal from the poor is to steal twice. To deceive the simple is to deceive twice over. To steal the most precious thing of all, belief. Confidence."

A true mystique is marked by ardent loyalty, by love. Only what one is prepared to die for can reveal what one truly believes. "The only strength, the only dignity that exists, is to be loved. . . . Puns will not restore a culture." Péguy's formulation raises a profound and important question for social and political change: how do you know when a people, tradition, culture, or community is truly possessed by a faith rather than theoretical language alone that can be easily adopted without conviction? Moreover, once that mystique is lost, can it be recovered, and it political action useful unless it is?