Not yet in English
No public-domain English edition of this book exists. The original is free to read below, and our English edition is still to come.
Read the original ↗1914 · French original
Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne
by Charles Péguy
Péguy came out of militant socialism and unbelief and returned to Catholicism around 1908, without ever quite rejoining the church's institutions. The Note sur M. Bergson, written in the last months of his life, defends Bergson against the placing of his works on the Index and is Péguy's most direct engagement with philosophy, grace and freedom. He was killed at the Marne in September 1914.
The convert behind the argument
Péguy was a scholarship boy from Orléans, a Dreyfusard and a socialist who kept a bookshop and edited the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, and an unbeliever for years. His return to Catholicism around 1908 was private and idiosyncratic — he did not have his children baptised and rarely received the sacraments — but it reshaped everything he wrote afterwards.
Summary
The Note begins in the middle of a public quarrel: the arguments of the preceding years over Bergson and Bergsonism, which Péguy says would have been much clearer if anyone had been willing to examine what is meant by intellectualism — and adds, in his characteristic aside, that clarity may not have been what anyone wanted.
His defence separates terms that the polemic had run together: reason is not wisdom, neither is logic, and none of the three is intelligence. Bergson's achievement, on his account, was not to rearrange these domains but to work a revolution inside them.
The most quoted passages are the ones on grace and freedom, where Péguy uses the image of a besieged city: grace is the relieving army, but the freedom of the besieged must make a sortie to meet it. He wrote this in 1914 and was killed at the front on 5 September of that year, the day before the battle of the Marne began in earnest.
Who was Charles Péguy?
Charles Péguy (1873–1914) was born in Orléans to a family of small means, won his way through the education system to the École Normale Supérieure, and became a socialist, a militant Dreyfusard, and the founder of the review Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which he ran from a Paris bookshop.
He returned to Catholic belief around 1908 while remaining outside the ordinary practice of the church, and wrote the long religious poems — the Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc, Ève — on which his reputation rests. He was commissioned as a lieutenant of infantry in 1914 and was killed on 5 September, on the eve of the Marne.
Common questions
- What is the Note sur M. Bergson?
- Charles Péguy's 1914 defence of the philosopher Henri Bergson, written after Bergson's works were placed on the Index, and his most direct treatment of philosophy in relation to faith, grace and human freedom.
- Is it available in English?
- Not freely. The English translations that exist are still in copyright. The French text is available as a clean transcription at Wikisource.
A note on the text. Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne is in the public domain. Its public-domain text is the Frenchoriginal — the English translations still in print are under copyright, so we can't reprint them. Our own English edition is still to be made. The original text is also available free here.