Charles Péguy on The People

Short translation from L' Argent (1913) by Péguy

Charles Pierre Péguy (1873 – 1914) was a prominent French essayist and poet. He played a major role in criticizing modernity, exploring mysticism, and in promoting a forgotten view on patriotism. Some of his major works are: Basic Verities. Prose and Poetry, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, and The Mystery of the Holy Innocents.

Charles Péguy wrote on different subjects, below a short translation from L'Argent (1913) :

Today, when we say ‘the people’, we write literature, and even one of the lowest, electoral, political, parliamentary literature. There are no more people since everyone is bourgeois. Since everyone reads their newspaper. The little that remained of the old, or more precisely the old aristocracies, has become a lower bourgeoisie. The old aristocracy became like the others, a bourgeoisie of money. The old bourgeoisie has become a lower bourgeoisie, a money bourgeoisie. As for the workers, they have only one idea left, and that is to become bourgeois; it is even what they call becoming socialists. Only the peasants have remained profoundly peasants.

(…)

Would you believe it, we were nurtured within joyful people. In those days, a construction site was a place on earth where men were happy. Today, a construction site is a place on earth where men recriminate, blame each other, fight; kill themselves. In my time everyone was singing (except me, but I was already unworthy of being of that time). In most professions, people sang. Today, we grumble. In those days, we earned practically nothing. The salaries were so low, we had no idea, and yet, everyone was eating. There was in the humblest house a kind of wealth and comfort of which we have lost the memory. We did not count, and we did not have to count. And we could raise children, and we raised them. There was not that kind of dreadful economic suffocation which now year after year gives us another turn. We earned nothing; nothing was spent; and everyone lived.

There was not this economic suffocation of today; this scientific strangulation, which is cold, rectangular, regular, clean, neat, without a burr, unappeasable, wise, common, constant, convenient like a virtue, where there is nothing to say, and where the one who is strangled is wrong.

We will never know how far the decency and justness of the soul of these people went. Such finesse, such deep culture will not be found again. Nor such subtlety and care when speaking. Those people would have blushed at our best tone today, which is the bourgeois tone. And today, everyone is bourgeois.

This text is from ‘Cahiers de la quinzaine, 6e cahier de la 14e série’, February 16, 1913.