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The Humanism of Peguy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Rachel Bespaloff
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Extract

In Men and Saints, a second volume of selections, translated with fidelity and intelligence by Anne and Julian Green, the choice of texts offers the American reader the best opportunity to become acquainted with a mind whose true significance is just beginning to be recognized. It was an excellent idea to have first emphasized the humanism on which Péguy's significance is based, a unique humanism which is not fashioned in the quiet of a scholar's retreat, but rather in the anguish of impending destruction: “It is a dreadful anguish,” writes Péguy, “to foresee and to see collective death, whether it be that a whole people goes under in the blood of a massacre, whether it be that a whole people reels and succumbs in the retrenchments of battle.” Before anything else this humanism is a “resistance,” a supreme call-to-arms.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , January 1947 , pp. 92 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1947

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References

1 Men and Saints (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945), p. 30.Google Scholar

2 Men and Saints, p. 28.Google Scholar

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15 It is interesting to compare the attitude of Péguy and Gide toward Polyeucte; it is precisely the iconoclast that Péguy admires and Gide detests.

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