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after seventeen years, utter defeat was to fulfill. What! less than four
years after the armistice, those incorrigible masses were voting 'Left!'
Once again the people were eluding the elites!"
And on the middle classes: "It felt against the proletariat, so eager
for social reform, the same resentment as a merchant might feel toward
an employee who elects to ask for a raise on the day when a large note
falls due. Even more, our middle class was annoyed at the proletariat
for its budding sympathy with Russia, the bankruptcy of which had just
cleaned out many an old stocking. . . . The collapse of the Russian
loans, coincident with communist propaganda, was a fact of consider–
able effect among us. It dug between the petty bourgeoisie
~nd
the
working class a deep rift; it pushed the petty bourgeoisie into the arms
of the upper middle class."
What is interesting in Bernanos' attitude is the constant distinction
he establishes between real society and the intellectual, institutional and
traditional structures which claim to represent society. This also is not
new in the milieu of the French Right. There was Maurras' famous op–
position, which could not stand close examination, between the "real
country" and the "legal country." There was also a certain exploitation
of Proudhon's anarchism by people who were forced to round up as many
arguments as they could to show that the existing State was an artificial
creation unsuited to the true nature of the French. Their actual concern
being all the time with State, Power and Greatness, not to speak of
militarism, the dialectical game of those people was up very soon. The
path Bernanos treads is a different one. He is following very closely,
even if he does not realize it, the idea which inspires all of Michelet's
history-writing, that the only real history is the history of the people
themselves, or rather the history of how the people are manhandled,
sacrificed, repressed, their aspirations betrayed or ignored by despotic
abstractions. Bernanos' interpretation of the French defeat, the opposi–
tion he establishes between a people that sincerely wanted liberty, justice
and peace, meaning by that very concrete, common, everyday achieve–
ments, and a ruling class which, in the best case, feared everything that
was real in those words and was busy keeping them in the state of
electoral slogans, what is this if not going back to Michelet, to the ele–
mentary postulates of French republicanism?
One does not know how much Bernanos himself would mind such
a conclusion. But it is very probable that the conversion from Catholic
absolutism to something which is anyway far more flexible was accom–
plished, in Bernanos, through his admiration for Charles Peguy. French
right-wing intellectuals were only too glad to capture Peguy, because
Peguy had spoken of Christian Honor, Joan of Arc and of France as
the standard bearer of militant Christianity. The trouble was that Peguy
himself never for a moment ceased to be a socialist, a "dreyfusard" and
a passionate republican; as far as Catholicism was concerned, he used
