The Death of Péguy - 110 Years Ago

“He who is designated must walk. He who is called must answer. This is the law, this is the rule, this is the level of our heroic lives, this is the level of lives of holiness.” 

This ideal of life, stated a few years before the Great War in works glorifying the saints who made France, Charles Péguy himself accomplished when he ordered fire on Saturday, September 5, 1914, near the village of Villeroy, not far from Meaux, where the German offensive had reached its climax.

As noted by Michel Laval, author of Tué à l’ennemi, la dernière guerre de Charles Péguy  [Kill the Enemy, the Last War of Charles Peguy] (Calmann-Lévy, 2013), winner of the Prix de l’Académie Française, “as early as 1905, Péguy understood that this war was inevitable, that France was threatened by what he called the ‘kaiserliche,’ the German military threat; from the outset, Péguy knew, he understood, that the German war would be a war of invasion and even annihilation, a ‘total war,’ a great inaugural lesson in inhumanity, an ‘immense flood of barbarity.’”

The writer's death occurred at a time when the French army, stunned by the lightning advance led by the German army, was trying to escape the vast envelopment movement conceived by the strategists of the Schlieffen Plan. “In less than two weeks, infantrymen, soldiers, artillerymen, engineers and cavalrymen from both sides had traveled a path that led them from the northern and northeastern borders to the banks of the Marne and the Seine.”

“An interminable march on dusty roads clogged with refugees and convoys of wounded. On the German side, victory seemed certain and already almost acquired. Countless waves of gray-green uniforms swept over France to the sound of drums and fifes, leaving in their mechanical wake a terrible procession of atrocities and exactions," wrote Michel Laval in Le Monde.

Péguy and his men, by falling on the field of honor, allowed France to hold firm and pull itself together: the day after his death, on 6 September, General Joffre, then in command, decided on a general counterattack. “At a time at the beginning of a battle on which the salvation of the country depends, it is important to remind everyone that the time has come to look back.”

“Every effort must be made to attack and drive back the enemy. A troop that will soon no longer be able to advance must, at all costs, hold the ground it has conquered and be killed on the spot rather than retreat. In the current circumstances, no failure can be tolerated,” declared the General. 

At this time in her history, France had rarely been more united, bringing together, as Augustin Thierry writes, these “20 centuries of kings, 20 centuries of peoples, of trials and holiness, of exercises, prayers, work, blood, tears” that follow one another like the “long course opened for so many centuries, where we follow our fathers, where we precede our children.”

But what about Péguy's return to the Faith of his ancestors? In 1908, he revealed to a friend that he had “rediscovered” the Faith. He did not discover the path to the sacraments: married non-religiously, he did not take Communion. “Among the Catholics of his time, he was totally marginal,” emphasizes Claire Naudin, graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and president of the Amitié Charles Péguy, quoted by La Croix.

However, grace would prevail and on August 15, 1914, after being reconciled with God, he would finally unite with Him. A first and last time: “If I do not return,” he added, “you will go to Chartres once a year for me,” he confided to the small circle of his close friends, at the time of leaving for the front. Did he imagine how many Catholics faithful to Tradition would again rise up 110 later, so as to keep this promise?

“Blessed are those who have died, for they have returned / To the first clay and the first earth. / Blessed are those who have died in a just war / Blessed are the ripe ears and the harvested wheat.” (Eve)