Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on November 30, 2021

Which Bernanos do you cherish the most? The author of Under the Sun of Satan and The Diary of a Country Priest, an obstinate surveyor of the rugged sides of the human soul? The inveterate activist, burning Catholic, defender of a high idea of goodness and honor, who will make him commit to free France and deny, after the Shoah, his genetic anti-Semitism he who was nevertheless a admirer of douard Drumont? The visionary haunted by fear of machines, who saw in them the beginnings of an Apocalypse? Or the monk-soldier fleeing social life, father of a large and Dostoevskian family, unrepentant traveler, eternally uprooted, perpetually broke, but never on the fringes of a world for which he always hopes for light?

These thousand faces of Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) are brought together in a voluminous biography signed by the journalist and producer at France Culture Franois Angelier, who from his preface recalls that Bernanos, the humble, the honest, made a point of honor not to spread out in journals and correspondence, not to cultivate archives, to take only random care of his manuscripts and his writings, sowing them to match, preferring to dive into himself every day to extract from it a literature of intimacy and darkness rather than worrying about the good figure of its literary posterity or its laurel wreaths.

If the Bernanosian archives are thin, Georges Bernanos La Anger et la Grace is nourished above all by the authors own literature, whose commentary offers us a very sharp dive into the mind, intelligence, light and shadow of Bernanos. Author of several biographies, including the essential Paul Claudel: paths of eternity (Pygmalion, 2001) and Bloy or the fury of the just (Points, 2015) Franois Angelier dissects the work to capture man.

Visionary

Since Under the Sun of Satan (1926), which he began to write in 1920, when, he confided after the publication of the book, the lesson of war was going to be lost in an immense gaudriole, to La France contre the robots (1944), who expresses his anguish of a world populated by men accustomed, from their childhood, to wanting only what machines can give, through the Great Cemeteries under the moon (1936), text through which he breaks with the right, which supports Francoism, in the name of his spiritual ideal, the writings of Georges Bernanos enlighten and order his chaotic, inevitably confusing life course. Franois Angelier, deeply inhabited by the work of his subject, interprets the biography of Georges Bernanos with remarkable finesse through his writings.

Embellished with abundant documentation, mixing letters and articles, interviews and historical reminders, his analyzes are served by a beautiful writing, singular, generous, which gives body and flesh to the life that we read like a novel, which unfolds under this pen with cinematographic power and grabs us from the first pages, moves us, does not let go of us any more than it crushes us, despite its volume more than 600 pages. In his literary quest for Georges Bernanos, Franois Angelier unearthed forgotten texts, unknown to the general public, which further amplify the light that this biography throws on this masterful life made up of shadows and hopes, outbursts and work.

Read the original:

Texts by Georges Bernanos that you have never read The National Discourse - The National Discourse

Category: Shoah
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