Georges Bernanos

Georges Bernanos is a writer French born the February 20th 1888 in Paris, deceased the July 5th 1948 with Neuilly-sur-Seine. It is buried with the cemetery of Pellevoisin (Indre).

Course

His/her father, Emile Bernanos, are a tapestry maker decorator of Lorraine origin. His/her mother, Hermance Moreau, are of a family of peasants berrichons (Pellevoisin). It keeps of its education a faith Catholique and convictions Monarchistes. It passes its youth to Fressin in Artois. This area of North will deeply mark its childhood and its adolescence, and will constitute the decoration of the majority of its novels. Shocked by the backings of the the United Kingdom and the France culminating at the time of the Agreements of Munich, it is exiled with the Brésil, before being one of the first inspirers of Resistance. He dies by leaving the manuscript of a last book, published posthumously: France against the robots .

The first engagements

Catholic enthusiastic, Nationalist impassioned, admiror of Edouard Drumont, it militates very young person in the rows of the French Action while taking part in the activities of the Camelots of the king during his studies of letters, then with the head of the newspaper, the Avant-garde of Normandy until the Great War. Reformed, it even decides to take part in the war while going voluntary in the 6th regiment of dragons (cavalry); it will have many wounds with the field of honor.

After the war, it moves away from a militant activity, but approaches again the French Action at the time of the Roman judgment of 1926 and takes part in some of its cultural activities. In 1932, its collaboration with the Figaro of the perfumer François Coty involves a violent polemic with the AF and its rupture with Charles Maurras.

The first works

In the years 1920, he works in an insurance company, but the success of its first novel, Under the sun of Satan (1926), encourages it to enter the literary career. Having married in 1917 Jeanne Talbert d' Arc, remote downward of a brother of Jeanne d' Arc, it then carries out a difficult and unstable material life in which it involves his family of six children and his wife with fragile health. He writes in ten years the essence of his novel where its obsessions are expressed: Sinned S of humanity, power of malignant and the help of the grace.

the Newspaper of a country priest

In 1936, appears the Newspaper of a country priest , which will be crowned by the Grand Prix of the novel of the French Academy, then adapted to the cinema under the same title by Robert Bresson (1950). This book is without any doubt carrying a double spirituality: that of the priest of Ars and that of holy Therese from the Jesus Child, both related to the furnace bridges by Magpie XI in 1925. Like Jean-Marie Vianney, our young priest is devoured here by his apostolic zeal, devoted which it is with the sanctification of the herd which was entrusted to him. Of Therese, it follows the small way of spiritual childhood. The “whole is grace” final of the novel is not besides Bernanos itself, but of its prestigious elder.

The exile in the Balearic Islands, then in Brazil

Installed with the Balearic Islands, there attends the beginning of the war of Spain and takes party for, then against the Franquiste S in the Large Cemeteries under the Moon , a lampoon which devotes its public rupture with his/her former friends of the French Action, its rupture with Maurras - going back to 1927 - having remained secret up to that point. It condemns to it the exactions and the massacres perpetrated by the phalangists in the name of the Christ, but also the support brought to the Spanish nationalists by Maurras and the French Action.

It leaves Spain in March 1937 and turns over to France. July 20th, 1938 it chooses to be exiled in South America. It initially envisages to go to Paraguay. It makes stopover in Rio de Janeiro with the Brésil () in August 1938. It decides to remain there and will remain there of 1938 with 1945. In August 1940 it will settle with Barbacena, in a small house with the side of a hill called Cruz das almas, the Cross-of-hearts. It moves away then from the novel and publishes many tests and " writings of combat" in which the influence of Péguy is felt.

During the Second world war it supports the Résistance and the action of the free France in many press articles where bursts its talent of Polémiste and of Pamphlétaire.

In 1941, his/her Yves son joined the free French Forces in London. Its other wire, Michel, considered to be too young by the Committee of Free France of Rio, will leave the following year.

When it turns over to France it declares with the Brazilian ones: “Largest, deepest, the most painful desire of my heart in what looks at to me is to re-examine you all, to re-examine your country, to rest in this ground where I suffered and hoped so much so much for France, to await resurrection there, as I awaited the victory there”.

Release

It continues to continue a wandering life (Bernanos moved about thirty times in its life…) after the Release.

The general de Gaulle invites it to return to France, where he wants to place it including at the government or the Academy. Bernanos returns, but sick and not having the flexible spine, remains in margin before fixing itself in Tunisia.

Bernanos writes some time before its death a cinematographic scenario adapted of the account the Last to the scaffold of Gertrud von the Fort, itself inspired of the veracious history of Carmélite S guillotinées on the Place of the Throne, called the Carmélites of Compiegne, by adding to it the fictitious character of White Force (transliteration of G. von the Fort ).

This scenario, heading the Dialogs of the Carmelite nuns became the booklet of the opera of the same name of the type-setter Francis Poulenc, created in 1957, then was used as a basis for film of the father Bruckberger, in 1960. It was also adapted to the theater. Bernanos milked there of the question of the grace, the fear, martyrdom.

Work

The romantic world

Bernanos often locates the action of its novels in the villages of sound native Artois, while emphasizing some the dark features. The figure of the catholic Prêtre is very present in its work, and is sometimes the central figure, as in the Newspaper of a country priest . Around him the notable buildings (noble lords of the manor or middle-class man) revolve, the small shopkeepers, and the peasants. Bernanos excavates the psychology of its characters and emphasizes their heart as a seat of the combat between the Good and the Evil. He does not hesitate to sometimes call upon divine and the supernatural one. Never of real Diabolisation at his place, but on the contrary, as at Mauriac, a concern of including/understanding what occurs in the human heart behind appearances.

The style lampoonist

Also insulated - in any case in France - as a Don Quichotte, it had denounced treasons as well in the authoritative and agricultural direction of the French State that the technical in what it had of liberticide. Its tests in addition translate a taste of the physical love and marital which one will re-examine then only at Jacques de Bourbon Busset.

The word Imbéciles (in the plural) often returns under the feather of Bernanos in its tests. By this fraternal insult , it expressed its “pity” for “the small dunces of the realistic new generation” (néo-maurrassiens of the years 1930), and, later, for “the dreadful prigs left Bourgeois of ” (the Communistes and Christian-Democrats), but also for all those at which the Propagande of the Médias, the lack of personal courage and handling by excessive abstractions had ended up replacing the real and concrete human experiment.

Its style cannot be qualified of “spoken”, although he often addresses himself to an imaginary reader. Full and impassioned (its pages on Brazil or Hitler cannot leave indifferent), its reading requires however a deep knowledge of the French history.

On the question of the Anti-semitism, it is essential not to be satisfied to read the writings of combat published primarily in the Années 1930, which can shock, and to also take note of the texts published right before and during the war, where it denounces the campaigns anti-semites in France, extermination of the Jews, the assassination of Georges Mandel, etc. One can also discover the article which he wrote in 1945 on this subject, in which one finds the sentence: “anti-semite: this word makes me horror more and more. Hitler dishonoured it forever”. In an interview published in 1987 for the review " Cités" news; , Elie Wiesel summarized the course of Bernanos by declaring that this one was " come little by little towards the juifs" , so much so that he regarded it itself as a " writer sémite".

Quotations

  • "Optimism is a false hope with the use of the cowards and imbeciles. The hope, is a virtue, virtus , a heroic determination of the heart. The highest form of the hope, it is despair surmonté".

  • " To be of avant-garde it is to know what died; to be of rear-guard is to like it encore".
  • " The future is not awaited as a train is awaited: one it fait".
  • " How one denied is astonished by the abrupt rise of a will contained a long time, that a dissimulation necessary, hardly conscious, with already marked cruelty, revenge unutterable of weak, eternal surprised fort, and always traps tended! " ( History of Mouchette )
  • " The simplest feelings are born and grow in one night ever penetrated, merge there or push back themselves there according to secret affinities, similar with electric clouds, and we seize on the surface of darkness only the short gleams of the storm inaccessible." ( History of Mouchette )
  • " There is the really invaluable one in the life only the rare one and the singular, the minute of waiting and the pressentiment." ( Under the sun of Satan )
  • " When a man - or people engaged his word, it must hold it, whatever that to which it has it engagée." (Foreword Newspaper of a country priest )
  • " It is that our interior joy does not belong to us more than the work which it animates, it is necessary that we give it to measurement, that we die empty, that we die like new-born babies (…) before awaking, the crossed threshold, in the soft pity of God, as in a fresh paddle and profonde." ( ibid )
  • " For me, the past does not count. Present either besides, or like a small fringe of shade, with the edge of the avenir." ( Mr Ouine )
  • " Ah! it was well there the image which I cherished so many years, a life, a young human life, any ignorance and any audacity, the really perishable share of the universe, only promise which will never be held, single wonder! (…) A true youth is as rare as the genius, or perhaps this genius even a challenge with the order of the world, with its laws, a blasphemy! " ( Mr Ouine )
  • " There is no slope in the life of a gosse" ( Mr Ouine )
  • " me, I am wary. In one way or another, Mr Ouine, I am wary of God - such is my way of the honorer." ( Mr Ouine )
  • " To suffer, believe me, that apprend." ( Mr Ouine )
  • " When I measure time that we lost to seek of the heroes in our books, I want to beat us, Guillaume. Each generation should have its heroes well with it, of the heroes well to it, the heroes according to his heart. Perhaps one did not considered to be us worthy to have the new ones, one passes by again us those which have already servi." ( Mr Ouine )
  • " If I started again my life, I would try to make my dreams even larger; because the life is infinitely more beautiful and larger than I had never believed, even in rêve."

Works

Novels

Tests

Collections of articles

  • French , if you knew… (Collection of articles written between 1945 and 1948), Paris, Gallimard, 1961.

Studies on Bernanos

Joseph Jurt, “Bernanos a prophetic word in the literary field”, Europe , n°789-790, January-February 1995, p. 75-88.

Joseph Jurt, political attitudes of Georges Bernanos until 1931, Freiburg, Editions University, 1968,359 p.

Biography

  • Albert Béguin, " Bernanos by him-même" , Paris, Threshold, 1958.
  • Jean-Wolf Bernanos, " Georges Bernanos, At the thank you of the passers by, Paris, Plon, 1986.

Iconography

  • Jean-Wolf Bernanos, " Bernanos" , Paris, Plon, 1988.

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