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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
It is not often that a single work of literature can be earmarked as a watershed in its author’s intellectual development, but Les grands cimitieres sous la lune seems to offer an almost incontestable case for such an honour. Before its publication in 1938, its author, Georges Bernanos, had been widely known as conservative royalist who had had no qualms about openly supporting Charles Maurras and L'Action franqaise, even after their condemnation by the pope in 1926. Thus it was only to be expected that a book by Bernanos, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, would at least echo the staunch support that Maurras and his followers were giving General Franco. Yet Les grands cimitieres was not only bitterly critical of Franco and the Falange, but it also wasted no opportunity to launch some especially vitriolic attacks on Maurras himself, attacks which signalled a definitive break with the French conservative establishment. How could Bemanos’ outlook and central convictions have undergone such a radical transformation?
I shall argue that to pose the question in such terms can prove highly misleading. For if it is true that Les grands cimiti?res marks a watershed, it is no less true that it was primarily the scandal that the book caused among Bernanos’ French readers, rather than any fundamental change in Bernanos’ basic thinking, that caused such a watershed. Indeed, as the emphatically reluctant tone of the book attests, Bernanos himself was acutely conscious of this danger. ‘I am not a writer,’ he tells us, ‘The mere sight of a blank page fills me with anguish.”
1 Les grands cimitiéres sous la lune (Paris: Plon, 1938), iiGoogle Scholar.
2 Ibid., 153.
3 Ibid., v.
4 Ibid., 3.
5 ‘Starting with Bernanos’, writes Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘the ’imbecile' is as fundamental a concept in Christian sociology and the ‘individual’ of Kierkegaard and the ‘humiliated and offended’ of Dostoyevsky.' Bernanos: an Ecclesial Existence, trans. Leiva‐Merikakis, E. (San Francisco, Calif.: Communio‐Ignatius, 1996), 358Google Scholar. I am heavily indebted to this book and grateful to Dr K. Flanagan for recommending it to me.
6 Les grands cimitiéres, 4.
7 Ibid., 230.
8 Ibid, 5–6,336.
9 Ibid., II.
10 Les, Enfants humilés (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 179Google Scholar.
11 Ortega did not use the term ‘imbecile’ as freely as Bernanos, but he was perhaps the first to point out that to be of the ‘left’ or of the ‘right’ was one of the simplest ways to become an ‘imbecile’.
12 La France contre les robots (Paris: Laffont, 1947), 181.Google Scholar
13 Ibid.,205.
14 Les grands cimitières, 15 (my emphasis).
15 Journal d'un curé de campagne (Paris: Plon, 1936), 138Google Scholar.
16 La Liberié, pourquoi faire ? (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 269Google Scholar
17 Les grands cimitières, 267, 250. 251, 252.
18 Ibid.,255.
19 Bernanos, 345, 347‐8.
20 Les grands cimitiéres, 229‐30.
21 Ibid., pp. 180–213,214, 115.
22 A kind of ‘Kantian Jansenism’ in Balthasar's apt description. See Bernanos, 298.
23 Les grands cimitiéres, 98.
24 On this see Balthasar, Bernanos, pp. 551‐2.
25 Les grands cimitiéres, 356.
26 Nous autres Frangais (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 138Google Scholar.
27 lbid.,242.
28 Lettre aux Anglais (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 203‐6Google Scholar.
29 Le Chemin de la croix‐des‐Âmes, June, 1940. Quoted by Balthasar, Bernanos, 562.
30 ‘It is a sad thing’, Bernanos lamented, ‘having preached about the vanity of all human greatness and humbled the pride of consecrated kings, to have to cling humbly to the hand of the first available General, even if it happens to be Franco’. Les grands cimitières, 357.
31 Ibid.,351‐9.
32 When people spoke of the ‘liberal’ or ‘democratic’ tradition, he wrote, they forgot that it expressed, ‘often unconsciously, an aristocratic conception of life’. Quoted by Balthasar, Bernanos, 562.
33 From an unpublished document; quoted in Balthasar, Bernanos, 119.
34 Les grands cimitiéres, 241 (my emphasis).
35 Ibid., 298.
36 Ghéon, H., The Secret of the Curé d'Ars (London: Sheed & Ward, 1952 edn.), 241‐7Google Scholar.
37 Journal d'un curé de campagne, 74
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