Bernanos: Católico e Antimoderno

A obra de Georges Bernanos está inserida no que se define por “romance católico”, rótulo sob o qual se estabeleceu uma tradição que reúne uma diversidade de escritores, o que não significa necessariamente que todos se inclinem em um exercício dogmático e militante, nem mesmo que suas obras possam ser consideradas a expressão de um pensamento cristão. Antes disso, o “romance católico” manifesta-se, tanto na França, quanto no Brasil, como mais uma antítese da Cidade de Deus agostiniana, pela qual se pode perscrutar uma crítica mística ao mundo contemporâneo. A modernidade, nesse sentido, é o que faz emergir uma neocristandade no início do século XX, à qual muitos escritores, distantes da igreja dogmática, mas engajados nos tópicos espirituais, debruçaram-se. Considerar a obra bernanosiana como a simples expressão de um pensamento cristão seria, nas palavras de PICON (1948), para os não cristãos, como estar “diante da porta de um jardim selado”. Tal abordagem anularia o universo que se abre a partir da superfície religiosa e que se oferece como um desdobramento das investigações do mundo moderno. É nesse sentido que Bernanos, escritor católico, é antes um intelectual que experimenta, a partir de seu deslocamento, de uma vida de degredo físico e de busca espiritual, das encruzilhadas entre a razão e a fé, uma curva católica e espiritualista, da qual não apenas sofre suas influências, mas à qual também contribui em grande parte com a sua consolidação.

Le catholique Bernanos face à la guerre civile espagnole

This paper analyses the political‑religious reflection developed by the great French novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) during his Majorcan stay in the course of the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, it was in Palma de Mallorca, where this writer stayed from 1934 to 1937 to escape the anger of his Parisian creditors, that he wrote most of his masterpiece The Diary of a Country Priest as well as A New History of Mouchette. Fundamentally Catholic and monarchist, at the very beginning of the Francoist military uprising against the Popular Front in the summer of 1936, Bernanos became enthusiastic about the “glorioso Movimiento”. This is due not only to his son Yves, who actively participated in the rebellion, but also and above all to his virulent anticommunism and his youth’s fascination for the ideas of Hello and Maurras. However, after seeing the atrocities committed against the civilian population by the partisans of Franco, as a good Catholic, Bernanos raises his voice and denounces the blessing of Francoist war crimes by part of the Spanish clergy in his famous non‑fiction book The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon (1938). Contrary to what one might believe, this explosive essay is not a leftist manifesto, since Bernanos does not justify the crimes committed by the socialists and communists who came to Spain so as to fight against Franco and his Italian and German allies, but a warning addressed to the French political elites, especially to his old friends of the conservative Action Française, against the fascist temptation. Finally, this striking work is still relevant in a Europe whose political classes sometimes tend to minimize the destructive effects of the three deadly ideologies of the past century for electoral purposes, which exacerbates memory wars and thus damages the living‑together.

A Biographical Novel of the Spanish Civil War: Lydie Salvayre's Pas pleurer (2014)

This article focuses on the biographical novel, Pas pleurer (2014) and the author Lydie Salvayre’s development of two diametrically opposed experiences of the Spanish civil war. Pas pleurer deploys the author’s parallel engagement with Montse, Salvayre’s mother, and with Georges Bernanos through a reading and commentary of the polemical essay, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune. Biographical material provides the ground for intersecting narratives: on the one hand, the Bernanos intertext with its keen analysis of the complicity of secular and religious institutions to maintain control of Spain through terrorism and violence reverberates throughout and finds its echo in the tragic story of Montse’s older brother José. Set against this is the adolescent Montse’s encounter with the dramatic social revolution underway in the Catalan city and her life-altering experience of passionate love, the memory of which remains intact and luminous despite age and disease. Examining both n arratives highlights the act of resistance at the heart of the novel and captured by its title.

La France contre les robots – At the Crossroads of Humanity, Law, and Prophetic Utterance

‘On ne comprend absolument rien à la civilisation moderne si l’on n’admet pas d’abord qu’elle est une conspiration contre toute forme de vie intérieure’, wrote French journalist and novelist Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) towards the end of the Second World War and his self-imposed exile in Brazil, in his last completed volume of essays, La France contre les robots, published in 1947. More than half a century stands between the nib of the author’s quill and the modern reader, leaving the text, its effervescent polemic and abysmal, rhetorical depths uncorroded and infinitely topical. The hermeneutics this article steps into was as complex at the time the essay was written as it is now, concerned as it is with the relationship between man and machine. Aware that mechanization has already started to (re)write history as we know it, Georges Bernanos is most concerned with the fact that ‘la civilisation des machines est celle de la quantité opposée à celle de la qualité’ in a paradigm which encourages ‘d’une manière Presque inimaginable l’esprit de cupidité’ and whose most dramatic effect ‘n’est pas dans la multiplication des machines, mais dans le nombre sans cesse croissant d’hommes habitués, dès leur enfance, à ne désirer que ce que les machines peuvent donner’. With studies of law and literature and a profound understanding of the falls and decays of the human soul, treasuring that ‘supplément d’âme’ Henri Bergson speaks about, Bernanos has constantly sought to explore the perilous trails of self-estrangement mechanization, this ‘modern era’, as it is often referred to, opens in a myriad of facets and reflexions that urged him say that ‘nous n’assistons pas à la fin naturelle d’une grande civilisation humaine, mais à la naissance d’une civilisation inhumaine qui ne saurait s’établir que grâce à une vaste, à une immense, à une universelle stérilisation des hautes valeurs de la vie’. What he tries to defend is the uniqueness and singularity of man, his complexity, and not to demonize machines and their part in reconfiguring progress, in any and all of its aspects. Danger, he warns, ‘n’est pas dans la multiplication des machines, mais dans le nombre sans cesse croissant d’hommes habitués, dès leur enfance, à ne désirer que ce que les machines peuvent donner’. The key in which we intend to approach Georges Bernanos’s La France contre les robots plays with the dichotomy of the ‘productive man’, epitome of the technical society, an offspring of the Anglo-Saxon skill and labour doctrine, more mechanical in its philosophy than the French ideological legal scheme of interest in the ‘impact of a personality in a work of the spirit/mind’1 of the ‘contemplative man’. Whilst the first is merely a reflexion of his age, estranged from his own self, though very much a master of his time, the latter becomes the depository of the writer’s hopes and symbol of creative humanity.

La révolution espagnole de 1936 dans Pas pleurer de Lydie Salvayre

[full article and abstract in French; abstract in English and Lithuan Pas pleurer de Lydie Salvayre (2014) s’inscrit dans un des sous-genre les plus proli- fiques de la littérature française contemporaine, le récit de filiation, qui se présente comme une en- quête sur un ascendant (Viart 2005 et 2009). Par le biais des souvenirs de la guerre d’Espagne que lui raconte sa mère âgée de quatre-vingt dix ans et la lecture simultanée des Grands cimetières sous la lune de Georges Bernanos (1938), Lydie Salvayre qui intervient dans le livre à la première personne, propose une réflexion complexe sur un pan de l’histoire européenne : la Révolution liber- taire espagnole de l’été 1936. Cette dernière est restituée à travers les souvenirs fragmentaires d’un témoin oublieux : la mère, et par le dialogue instauré entre cette dernière et sa fille écrivain. Aux cô- tés de l’histoire du frère assassiné, l’intertexte bernanosien contrebalance, par le témoignage des atrocités perpétrées par les Franquistes sur l’île de Majorque, la mémoire éblouie et sélective d’une femme qui a tout oublié des années qui ont suivi 1936. Nous montrerons que ce roman, manifes- tant une résistance concertée à la nostalgie, propose une réflexion sur le caractère émancipateur de la Révolution libertaire espagnole, et que le traitement littéraire de celle-ci autorise un parallèle avec Mai 1968. Ce roman a une autre portée mémorielle, celui d’inscrire l’histoire espagnole dans la mémoire nationale des Français. Summary Pas Pleurer by Lydie Salvayre (Ed. Seuil, 2014) belongs to one of the most prolific sub-genres of contemporary French literature, the narrative of filiation, which presents itself as an inquiry into an ascendant. These are remembrances of a woman who lived a horrifying event – in the sense of the French historian Pierre nora – an event that opens an unprecedented and radically new breach in present day thoughts. Through the memories of the Spanish war told to her by her ninety-year-old mother and the simultaneous reading of A Diary of My Times (Les Grands Cimetières Sous La Lune) by novelist Georg- es Bernanos (1938), Lydie Salvayre offers a com- plex reflection on one aspect of European history: the Spanish libertarian Revolution of the summer of 1936. The latter is recounted through the fragmen- tary memories of a forgetful witness: the mother, and by the dialogue established between her and her daughter-writer. Alongside the story of the murdered brother, the Bernanosian inter-text counterbalances, throughout the testimony of the atrocities perpetrat- ed by the Franquists on the island of Majorca, the dazzled and selective memory of a woman who had forgotten all the years that followed 1936. We show that this novel, which inscribes the memory of Span- ish history into the national memory of the French, proposes the praise of an emancipatory moment, by which the author seems to take indirect position in the re-evaluation of which the years 1968 are cur- rently the object