Books
BERNANOS AND CHRISTIAN LIBERTY
PLEA FOR LIBERTY.
By Georges Bernanos. Pantheon Books.
$3.00.
A
s
A
pamphleteer, Georges Bernanos belongs to the lineage of French
Catholic polemists of the nineteenth century, from Leon Bloy down
to the anti-Semitic crackpot and brilliant journalist Edouard Drumont.
The main contention of those people was that democracy is the reign of
money (and hence of the Jews), that it is characterized by materialistic
scepticism, incapable of a cleancut distinction between Good and Evil,
and therefore unworthy of the hieratical dignity of ruling society; that
its claim to the loyalty of the lower classes was pure demagogy,
be–
cause only Christianity and the Church really care for the people, since
only the Christian conception recognizes in the poor what is most im–
portant to human beings, "dignity"; and only the Catholic Church
"honors" the poor. This line of thought, or rather of attack, against the
modern world in the name of a peculiar reinterpretation of certain
myths, was accompanied in Leon Bloy, and is accompanied in Ber–
nanos, by a violent distaste for the official representatives of the elite:
Catholic high clergy and upper classes. These, they maintain, instead
of behaving with the uprightness which befits the chosen few, have sur–
rendered to the demon of mediocrity and are guilty of the same indif–
ference toward absolute values, and of the same laxity in practical
conduct, which should be the exclusive characteristic of materialists,
Jews, epicureans and other second-rate sinners. Thus the picture re–
mains satisfactorily black and white. It is the old grudge of the die–
hard monarchists of the Restoration against a Monarchy which had
gone bourgeois.
What is interesting in Bernanos, the pamphleteer, is that with him
the fight against the elite has progressively gained in importance. It
started with his first virulent attack against the French reactionary bour–
geoisie,
The Great Fear of the Right-Thinking People,
published in
1931, and has ended up, after the denunciation of Franco and of the
Spanish clergy in 1938 and the desperate addresses to the French people
after Munich, in this
Plea for Liberty,
which is almost entirely devoted
to a fiery indictment of the French bourgeoisie and a passionate defense
of the French common people,
les petites gens
so dear to the Left. "For
years," writes Bernanos, "the bourgeoisie has been conducting a cam–
paign of slander against my people. ... It will always be possible to
write whatever one has a mind to about our social conflicts. The day
nonetheless has come when one of the rivals therein, carried away by
