122
PARTISAN REVIEW
GENERAL FRANCO'S CEMETERIES
LES GRANDS CIMETIERES SOUS LA LUNE.
By Georges
Bernanos. Paris, Librairie Plon.
20
francs.
It has been said that the only people who have any conviction
today are the Fascists, the Communists and the Catholics. Georges
Bernanos is a Catholic who lacks the conviction. Probably he is no
longer a Catholic in the eyes of the Church which brooks neither
insubordination nor criticism on the part of its faithful. M. Bernan<l'!
is gradually breaking away from his articles of faith. The
Action
Francaise's
approval of the rape of Ethiopia alienated him from the
official French royalist party, to which he had belonged since its
foundation. Now the clergy's support of Franco has done somewhat
the same to his relations with his church. Like Joan of Arc-whom he
optimistically invokes on the last page of this book-he has his own
chapel. Architecturally, you might call it a free-standing chapel.
The chief interest of
Vast Cemeteries in the Moonlight
(to
translate the title literally) is just that it shows the capitulation to
evidence of a mind that had housed too many convictions. No matter
how much we may admire the man's courage, this is bound to
be
a
pitiful spectacle. M. Bernanos remains confused. It is much easier to
determine what he is against than what he is for. His indignation
showers itself upon the imbeciles (whom he used to call the "right·
thinking people"), the dictators, the Spanish clergy, polemicists, the
idea of progress, the philosophy of the lesser of two evils, Machiavelli
and Mammon. He champions the poor and downtrodden and the
fundamental flignity of man. Refusing to enroll himself, he points out
that parties are a prerogative of the
hourgeoisie;
the masses--despite
the plural in English-remain indivisible by any barrier between
right and left. And he deplores the evolution that has made of th<l'le
masses a proletariat-that is, "a vast reservoir of stultified worken
plus a tiny nursery-garden of future
bourgeois."
If
he had not been living in Palma de Majorca at the time the
Spanish War broke out, Georges Bemanos might never have com–
pletely waked up. With an eighteen-year-old son in Franco's Phalanx
and a pass in his pocket that identified
him
as a sympathizer of the
Rebels, he witnessed the mass executions of suspects along the cerne·
tery wall with a priest always in attendance to administer the extreme
absolution. Along with his Spanish neighbors he got his summons to
receive the sacraments and sign the register in church that would put
him on the white list. He is thus able to judge the "Holy War" for
what it is:
"I can easily understand how Fear and the desire for Revenge
(but isn't Revenge simply the final manifestation of Fear?) inspiml
the Spanish counter-revolution. But that such a state of mind should
nourish the movement as long as it has remains a problem. Let me
