Book review: Charles Péguy, the Amodernist
Like so many intellectuals, journalists, and activists of belle époque France, Péguy was also formed by his involvement in the Dreyfus affair. This infamous travesty of justice set off a pitched culture war between those who opposed and those who supported the conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who had been falsely accused of spying for the enemy during the Franco-Prussian War. It was the Dreyfus case that inspired Péguy, in 1898, to open a small socialist bookstore in the Latin Quarter. ..
Matthew Maguire, an
associate professor of history and Catholic studies at DePaul University, makes
a very large claim for Péguy (1873–1914): namely, that this fiercely
independent man of letters and founder of the influential fortnightly
journal Cahiers de la quinzaine stood brilliantly athwart the
defining cultural antinomies of his time by challenging the two main ways of
being modern, the progressive and the reactionary. While the progressive front
identified itself with “inexorable becoming” and the reactionary bloc sought to
resurrect the past, Péguy believed that both tendencies succumbed to similar
varieties of “immanentism.” That is, each tried in its own way to bring about
the final or perfected order—the end of history—in this world and this time.
Matthew W. Maguire - Carnal Spirit: The Revolutions of Charles Péguy
Reviewed by Jay Tolson
To be sure,
enlightened progressives were committed to science, positivism, and liberal democratic
values—all of which the reactionaries rejected in favor of hierarchy and a
highly traditionalist, and exclusively Catholic nationalism. It would seem to
be a clear-cut struggle between the modernists and the antimodernists, but not
as as Péguy saw it. He found the progressive faith in a scientifically driven
and ever-improving future no more immanentizing, and no more modernist in its
deepest aspirations, than the reactionaries’ vision. “These wrathful
particularists,” Maguire explains, “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…which now must
be reinserted mechanically into the present, without creativity or surprise.”
More ironically, some of the faux antimodernists (including the right-wing
Action Française founder Charles Maurras, an admirer of the positivist Auguste
Comte) also believed that “‘science’ would “confirm their particularism and
prejudices.” Péguy’s critical stance toward both broad coalitions made him
neither a modernist nor an antimodernist, Maguire argues, but something quite
distinctive and instructive: an amodernist....
