The Ultimate Outcry of Bernanos
With the kind permission of the Éditions de L’Homme nouveau, we publish here the introduction to the Encyclique aux Français. Le testament politique de Bernanos (Encyclical to the French. The Political Testament of Bernanos), which we highly recommend to our readership: Encyclique aux Français – L’Homme Nouveau
“What has weakened prodigiously in the Church over the last two hundred years is the virtue of Fortitude. Without the virtue of Fortitude, charity itself is degraded and debased.” The writings of Georges Bernanos published here are, strictly speaking, testamentary. They were penned in April and May 1948 in two notebooks, with the title Encyclicals. The publishers decided to entitle them Encyclical to the French. It is likely, in fact, that this text was a sequel to the equally powerful Letter to the English, written in 1940-1941, and that it heralded a third encyclical aimed at the Germans.[1]
Georges Bernanos wrote this political testament when he had just completed the dialogues for a film inspired by Gertrud von Le Fort’s The Song at the Scaffold, commissioned by Fr. Bruckberger, entitled Dialogue of the Carmelites, which truly constitutes his spiritual testament. Returning from Brazil in June 1945, he soon fell into a profound sense of loneliness and emptiness. He was deeply disappointed by France as he found it: mediocre, ravaged by falsehood and ideology, including among Catholics whose faith “is as depreciated as the Franc,” as he wrote to a friend. His last and darkest novel, The Open Mind (originally called The Dead Parish), which had been written and published in Brazil, was now published in France. His articles, always full of fury and boldness, after the manner of Léon Bloy, provoked retorts that were all the more intense given the foolish belief that, with The Great Cemeteries under the Moon, the old royalist had, in 1936, done a complete about-turn. Violent exchanges took place, notably with Stanislas Fumet’s Temps présent. He was accused of “striking haphazardly”, of disparaging a democracy saved by heroes; (How many courageous people were there in the Resistance, he wonders? A handful, and now it would seem that everyone has resisted: what a “joke”, what a “bluff”!) He gave numerous lectures in France, French-speaking countries and North Africa. In 1946, he published La France contre les robots (published in English under the title: Tradition of Freedom),a book written in Brazil in 1944, in which he railed against the mechanization and the technicians of an Americanizing world. Then, in 1947, he gave a heartrending lecture in Tunis entitled “Nos amis les saints” (“Our Friends the Saints”).
It was then that he began his Encyclical to the French, which he never completed. Under the pretext of public lectures, the Bernanos family left France and wandered through Tunisia, eventually settling in Gabès. Georges Bernanos was sixty years old. He was suffering from cancer, as yet undiagnosed, which was already eating away at his liver. It was on his sickbed that he wrote this last epistle. In May, his illness worsened and he was transported back to France, where he died on July 5, 1948, at the American Hospital in Neuilly.
As they stand, these unfinished pages might give the appearance of being a prophetic onslaught, part of whose interest would reside in stylistic excess. Yet, such is not the case. Paradoxical as it may seem, Bernanos gives a nuanced analysis of what remained of Christianity at the end of the XIXth century, at the time of the detonation of Leo XIII’s encyclical on the Ralliement, not as a sociologist or academic historian, but as a journalist, in the noble sense that the term had, in the tradition of Veuillot, Laurentie.
His entire text is devoted to the major theme of his most combative writings: the maximally disastrous nature of the instructions given by Leo XIII to French Catholics in 1892, in the encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes (In the midst of solicitudes), to adhere to the Republic born of the Revolution. He sees the consequences before his eyes, in the aftermath of the last war, when Catholics no longer have any capacity to resist a mortiferous society that empties individuals of all respiration of the soul, except for that of anguish: “In order condemn in due time this modern Society claiming to be liberal, but in which Freedom had already become the mere mask of the most abject submission to economics, a glaring prefiguration of totalitarian servitude, it is not Charity that was lacking in the Church, but Fortitude.”
The Remnants of Christianity after the Revolution
In the first and longest part of his own Encyclical, Bernanos comes to the defense, as it were… of the respectable bourgeoisie of the late XIXth century, not as such, but for what remained of its Christian sense. His historical considerations are also based on introspection: this son of an upholsterer-decorator from the Madeleine neighborhood speaks of a social world he knew well, many of whose members, like his father, read Drumont, and had witnessed their sons joining the Camelots du Roi in order to pull punches with the Republicans. What remained of Christian society at the time was “a Christendom of average Christians with its particular code of conduct, its legitimate political loyalties, its esprit de corps.” It was better than a mass of average Christians, those Christians of the “middle classes of salvation”, to evoke Joseph Malègue, because it was a body, or was capable of becoming so again. Provided that Churchmen contribute to the reshaping of French society. “This modest bourgeois Christendom certainly did not have the same worth as the great medieval communities of the same type, but it did have some honor,” structured as it was by an elite, though admittedly a rather feeble one, which consisted of a bourgeoisie that had remained Catholic, or had become so once again after 1848: “This Catholic bourgeoisie was a sort of Christendom, undoubtedly quite degenerate, quite weakened, but it was a sort of Christendom all the same.”
Half a century later, the polemicist was defending it against those who had issued forth from it and were then attacking it, namely, post-war bourgeois Catholics, Christian Democrats from the Popular Republican Movement (MRP), who were beating their fathers’ breasts rather than their own, guilty as the former were, in their view, of having shown nothing but selfishness towards the common people. In the meantime, in all truth, the idea of Christendom had been attacked by the Pope himself: the Christians of the MRP were the sons of those of the Sillon movement, who had fervently obeyed Leo XIII and who, on the other hand, like Mauriac, said of Saint Pius X: “That saint has no place in my parish!” This Christian democracy appeared to Bernanos “like the bourgeoisie of the XIXth century at the last stage of its degeneration” through the fault of its religious leaders.
Its representative was François Mauriac, who served as its whipping boy from the start to the finish of his Encyclical. Bernanos, who had just written of him in L’Intransigeant: “[M. Mauriac] rejoiced in nothing else than seeing the humiliation and dishonor of a bourgeois society that had nothing left to give him in order to appease him, because he had asked too much of it” (Bernanos, Essais et écrits de combat, II, op. cit., p. 1211). He wielded the same sarcasm against Mauriac’s attributes as an “advanced Christian” as he did against those of his ecclesiastical counterpart, the supple Christian-Democrat Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris: “From 1940 to 1945, the Cardinal proved time and again that he was not a vexatious man, but only advanced in age” (ibid, p. 1213).
After the war, Mauriac, like most of France’s bishops, went through his pro-MRP period. He defended Georges Bidault’s party against General de Gaulle’s Rally of the French People (RPF), which was siphoning off part of his electorate. At Malraux’s request, Bernanos refused to join the RPF: his own brand of Gaullism was expressed in articles in the form of Imaginary Messages from General de Gaulle, supposedly to speak to the French about France’s decomposition and debasement. In fact, while Bernanos had not always despised Mauriac, he had never really liked him either. Between them, the outstretched hand was always that of Mauriac, who in 1938 hailed him as “the only novelist capable of writing of holiness whom we possess”, and welcomed him as a fellow novelist who likewise despised the blandness of false virtue: “The gallows where he hangs his country priest stands out against a darkness full of crime.” (François Mauriac, Journal, Mémoires politiques Robert Laffont, 2008, p. 247). After the war, Mauriac proposed to Bernanos, who had returned from Brazil, to open the doors of the French Academy to him, which Bernanos refused. Mauriac was disappointed, unable to comprehend that Bernanos’ political struggle was not on the same level as his own: “Where is Péguy?” asked Mauriac in 1946. “Why are his sons silent? We were expecting Bernanos to fill this empty seat; I invited him to do just that, and he answered me with nothing but contempt” (ibid. p. 435).
Bernanos accuses Mauriac and his Christian Democrat friends, who “love the people and are not loved by them”, of cursing, in a pharisaical manner, the venerable bourgeoisie from which they themselves come, for failing to fulfill their “social duty” – a duty they believe they have discovered thanks to Marc Sangnier. Yet, Catholic Socialists had existed long before the Democratic priests of the Sillon movement and the worker-priests of the post-war period: “The doctrine of the Comte de Chambord and that of the Comte de Paris,” remarks Bernanos, “were in no way reactionary; suffice it to say that the former inspired men such as M. de Mun, La Tour du Pin and the young Lyautey.” If Bernanos did not attach great importance to Rerum novarum and what had come to be called the “social doctrine of the Church”, it was not because he was opposed to what the “social” encyclical proposed – quite the contrary – but because he regretted what it omitted to state. He would have liked it to integrate his teaching in favor of the working classes into a totally anti-modern crusade, social of course, but also political: “Once again, I in no way deplore the growing importance given to the social doctrine over the last fifty years by a certain sector of Catholic opinion. I only deplore the fact that this social crusade, which should have been that of Free Christianity against the Modern World, has been waged almost exclusively against the French bourgeoisie.”
And then again, the Christian Democrats harbor a few illusions about the people they pity. Since the latter had never been led by leaders worthy of the name, they had become a tool in the hands of left-wing politicians, who were “much less interested in social justice than in the basest form of anticlericalism”. Moreover, if “M. Mauriac’s pharisaism consists in opposing, from the perspective of the past, a narrowly egotistical and formalist bourgeoisie to a class which he feigns to believe was only modestly requesting its place in Society,” he should understand that these proletarians, subjugated by Marxist leaders, actually wanted to take the reins of society, or rather allow these leaders to take them.
It is true that “the bourgeoisie of the XIXth century was not a class of masters”. He clarifies: “I mean leaders.” It had nothing in common with the Ancien Régime. In the beginning, it was a group of parvenus enriched by the acquisition of the property of the Church and of emigrants. However, it had been domesticated by the administrative asceticism imposed by Napoleon, and soon acquired “some of the virtues of a true class”. Its members were boors who had become bosses, not really masters, of a people who had become proletariat, with the former exerting on the latter “the natural harshness of the parvenu peasant”. But this bourgeoisie, or at least the petty bourgeoisie, was honest, hard-working and patriotic. Educated in religious boarding schools, it had gradually come to embrace Catholicism. It seemed down-to-earth, but its imagination had been shaped by the books of Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas. Those among them who were sons of royalists cultivated the memory of Cadoudal or Charrette, but they were also thrilled by the memory of the mustachioed grenadiers of Waterloo. Those who were sons of Bonapartists devoured tales of the Vendée War and mourned the heroic Swiss whose throats were slit in defense of the king.
These men were certainly not men of the France of olden times, but among them were “a large number of merchants and small industrialists of scrupulous honesty in the manner of César Birotteau, exemplary civil servants, magistrates, officers, teachers, proud to serve the State which they did not confound with the Republic, and in which they still naively believed they could recognize the Fatherland”. In Nous autres Français, Bernanos had written: “We ask the Church to maintain enough of the Christian spirit in the world so that Christendom may remain a possibility – possible with this impoverished material. Yet, it was precisely for these men, for a potential Christendom that had to be brought into being, that Leo XIII and his diplomatic prelates were going to do exactly the opposite, telling them that all the Syllabuses and anti-modernist encyclicals were basically just incantatory words, and that they had to loyally serve Rousseau’s democracy…
The Ralliement Detonation
The second part of the Encyclical to the French develops, or rather, begins to develop what illness prevented him from pursuing: the consequences of Au milieu des sollicitudes, which caused “millions of good people to realize that they were being duped”. Since the Revolution, Roman teaching had relentlessly condemned the modern world and the principles of democracy born of the Revolution (and would continue doing so until Vatican II). The “good people” who went to Mass on Sundays therefore constantly heard “the fiery rhetoric of Lenten pastorals and episcopal letters denouncing persecution and appealing to the martyrs”. No doubt there had already been many practical accommodations, and even more would follow Pope Pecci’s encyclical. However, the latter had promulgation value, declaring in black and white that all the condemnations of the modern world fulminated by Leo XIII’s predecessors, and even more so by himself, and with the utmost doctrinal precision (among others, the encyclical Immortale Dei on the Christian constitution of States, in 1885), were not to be taken too seriously. French Catholics understood that all this was “not much more significant than electoral professions of faith”.
Indeed, “these average bourgeois [who] seemed really average” understood that they had been made a mockery of. That is, unless they too were scandalized, in the true sense of the word, driven to duplicity and betrayal, just as the parishioners of a defrocked parish priest breathe a sigh of relief when seeing that the morality he had been preaching to them was of little import. The prelates of the Secretariat of State, and the Pope with them, had thought they had accomplished a feat of high diplomacy, a brilliant “bypass” of the anticlerical republicans by fabricating for them little brothers, at once clerical and republican, who, without changing the political system, would find a way to accommodate the anti-religious laws. But the “good people” addressed by the Roman prelates “were not so foreign to their time that they were unable to recognize in the Ralliement something of the character of those political and financial compromises already so common at the time, and as a kind of stock market crash.”
“Never have leaders more brazenly betrayed and dishonored servants guilty of nothing other than believing in the sincerity of their exhortations and maledictions. Never has the ‘politics first’ so reproached to M. Charles Maurras found a more cynical application.” The foreseeable consequences ensued. Firstly, “the young bourgeois generations, for all that, did not disown the Church, but only completed the process of losing the spirit of the Kingdom of God, and the sense of Christian honor.” In other words, the desire to rebuild the Christian City vanished from the Catholic soul. This certainly explains, says Bernanos, the extraordinary fortune of secular nationalism, replacing or annexing fidelity to Christian France, in Barrès even more than in Maurras.
Secondly – and this is where Bernanos’s development comes to a halt – the Ralliement orders were going to “detach a considerable part of French Catholic opinion from the Church, or more precisely from the clergy.” Does this mean that, after the war, Bernanos, witnessing the rise of secularization at the start of the consumerist era of the Glorious Thirty, noting the first major cracks in Catholicism less than fifteen years before the opening of Vatican II, blamed the Ralliement orders for all this? Yes, but only in part, for the most important part was the fact that “nothing emboldens the audacity of the wicked so much as the weakness of the good”, as Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort was wont to say. The betrayal of the leaders led to the betrayal of the soldiers. This was a great pity, for if “these people were not men of the France of olden times, it is simply, perhaps, that they were still in the process of becoming so”. The “perhaps” tempers an excessive degree of optimism. Nonetheless, it was the sensus of Christendom that was affected. “Before it could dry up, Christendom had to be emptied, the immense savings of spiritual goods had to be corrupted within the organism itself, to the point of becoming for it a mere material to be eliminated, a simple product of elimination.”
And now this elimination of the edifice of the Kingdom of God was welcomed as a “renovation” by the Christian Democrats. Soon there would be a more complete “renovation”, a “new Springtime of the Church”, in which the Syllabus would be disavowed not only in practice, but in principle. God gave Georges Bernanos the grace to call him to his eternal rest without his having to endure this ultimate disavowal.
Fr. Claude Barthe
[1] Perhaps the name “encyclical” also meant that the author was addressing a counter-encyclical to the one addressed to the French by Leo XIII, the consequences of which are the subject of this latest text by Bernanos. Part of this text (« These Christian Democrats love the people, but the people don’t requite this love…”) was published in Combat on March 7, 1950. Jean-Loup Bernanos subsequently published the entire text with Plon in 1975, along with six articles published in Brazil in 1942 under the title La Vocation spirituelle de la France (The Spritual Vocation of France). This Encyclical to the French is included in the Pléiade critical edition: Bernanos, Essais et écrits de combat, II, Gallimard, pp. 1247-1236.