Large Cemeteries under the Moon

The Grands Cemeteries under the moon is a Pamphlet of the French writer Georges Bernanos, published in 1938, in which this one denounces pro-Franco repressions violently of the Guerre of Spain.

“Testimony of a free man” , the Large Cemeteries under the moon is the second work of Bernanos as a lampoonist, after the Great fear of the right-thinking people (1931).

Work

Bernanos had left to Palma de Majorque in October 1934 “because the price of ox and potatoes is still accessible there” . In July 1936, Bernanos has initially much admiration for pro-Franco rising. His/her Yves son engages in the Phalange. But little by little, in front of the sequence of cruelty which seizes pro-Franco and republican, nauseated Benoite attitude of the Spanish clergy and intellectualizing reactions come from France, Bernanos is shocked. In January 1937, it evokes the arrest by the pro-Franco ones of “poor guy simply suspect of little enthusiasm for the movement the other trucks brought the cattle. The unhappy ones went down having on their right-hand side the expiatory wall sifted from blood, and on their left the blazing corpses. The wretched bishop of Majorque lets do all that. ”

He writes then the Large Cemeteries under the moon by affirming itself to have begun this quasi-expiatory work while seeing passing in trucks of condemned to dead which knew only that they were going to die: “I was struck by this impossibility that have the poor people to include/understand the dreadful play where them life is committed. And then, I could not say which admiration inspired courage to me, the dignity with which I saw these unhappy dying”. Whereas he was educated in the horror of the French events of 1792, Bernanos does not include/understand the attitude accessory to those which give each other appearance to be good people.

Denouncing the absolute power of the initially “imbeciles” and “right-thinking people” , the “resignation” middle-class man, the idolatry of the established order and “the wretched prestige of the money” (p. 37), the nonsense of political and ideological divisions, the “patriotism denied” Déroulède and of Claudel, Bernanos calls of them with the Honneur men.

Armed with an infinite clearness and words whose arid beauty betrays the impotence of the writer vis-a-vis the horror, he sadly denounces this spiral of the war which locks up the individuals in collective reactions of which they are not any more the Masters. And those which speak about holy war, he answers: “It is not with Hoche or Kléber, it is with Fouquier-Tinville and Marat that you clinked glasses. ” the book made scandal in France at its exit at Plon.

Random links: