Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne

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 defense 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.

The French text is free at Wikisource as a clean, proofread transcription from the Œuvres complètes. The English translations that exist are under copyright; our own English edition is a machine translation with automated review, and says so on the book page and in the file.

This is a new English translation of Charles Péguy's Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne, written in 1914 and published posthumously. The French text is in the public domain. This translation and edition are copyright T.S. Baker Books.

We make no claim to be the first English translation of this work. An English version by Bruce K. Ward appeared in 2019 (Notes on Bergson and Descartes, Cascade Books), bundled with the companion Note conjointe sur M. Descartes; it remains in copyright, and we have neither consulted it nor compared our text against it. This edition contains the Bergson note alone.

How this translation was made. It is a machine translation, produced with a local open-weight language model and reviewed with automated checks, not a translation made by a human translator. Every section was checked against the French for completeness, for preserved numbers and structure, and for consistent handling of Péguy's key terms; passages the checks flagged were corrected. A reader should know that no human translator has rendered these sentences, and that the review was largely mechanical.

What we tried to preserve. Péguy writes by repetition. He restates a thought many times over, varying it by a word, circling back to it after a digression, and the restating is the argument rather than an ornament on top of one. A tidier English that collapsed those repetitions into a single tidy sentence would have deleted his reasoning. We have kept them. Where the French was merely awkward — or where the 1924 printing we worked from had been mis-scanned — we have preferred clear modern English over a word-for-word rendering.

A correction, August 2026. The paragraph above says we kept Péguy's repetitions. When we went back and read all forty sections of the French against all forty of the English, one beside the other, we found that in the most important place we had not. "Le tout fait" — the ready-made — is the term the whole essay turns on, and it had come out five different ways: the finished whole, the ready-made, the status quo, everything already done. Péguy's argument is precisely that the ready-made overcoat and the ready-made idea are the same phrase; vary the phrase and there is no argument left. His paragraph distinguishing "neuf" from "nouveau" had one English word for both, so that it read "an idea merely being new is enough to make it new" — a tautology where the distinction was. About forty-eight faults in all are corrected in this version, and the terms he repeats are now pinned in a glossary so that no future revision can vary them. We say it here because the claim in the paragraph above was, until now, not true.

The source. We translated the transcription of the Œuvres complètes (Nouvelle Revue Française, 1924, tome 9) held at French Wikisource, which is a proofread and validated text. It is linked from this book's page and is free to read.

If you find an error in the translation, we would be glad to hear of it and correct it.