UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ TOWARDS A REPUBLICAN ETHICS OF FRATERNITÉ: CHARLES PÉGUY’S MYSTICAL REFASHIONING OF CIVIC VIRTUE A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Matthew Steven Gervase June 2018 The Dissertation of Matthew Steven Gervase is approved: _______________________________________ Professor Tyrus Miller, Chair _______________________________________ Professor Richard Terdiman _______________________________________ Professor Dorian Bell ______________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Matthew Gervase 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Critical Introduction to Péguy’s Life and Work 1 Bibliography 185 The Duration of a People 199 iii (ABSTRACT) TOWARDS A REPUBLICAN ETHICS OF FRATERNITÉ: CHARLES PÉGUY’S MYSTICAL REFASHIONING OF CIVIC VIRTUE— MATTHEW STEVEN GERVASE Socialist and Catholic, poet and soldier, mystic and political thinker, Charles Péguy remains a figure of both critical and popular fascination in France well over a century after his death. Despite his importance in Continental thought, both he and his work remain largely unknown in American academe. This dissertation addresses the reasons for this ignorance, providing both a practical and theoretical intervention in the long and complicated history of Péguy’s reception. The practical component takes the form of a translation of Péguy’s final essay Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne, previously unavailable in English, which offers the most complete summation of Péguy’s mystico-political vision for an imperiled French identity in the lead-up to the First World War. Péguy’s highly spiritual vision of French identity, stained by the appropriation of his work by Vichy ideologues, has been rediscovered in recent decades in France. This dissertation joins and complements this vibrant conversation by arguing for Péguy’s continued relevance as a thinker of political and spiritual community in the contemporary world. Born in rural France, educated at the École Normale Supérieure, Péguy sought a way to incorporate the plebeian good sense and communal spirit of the people with a more cosmopolitan practice of literary and historical understanding made possible by education. Out of this dynamic fusion, he looked to engender a new model of civic engagement in response to the changing conditions of modern life. This model iv encouraged proximity, fraternity, and more creative forms of political praxis drawing upon the full range of members of a given community. Against the modern tendency towards hierarchy, specialization, and technological expertise, Péguy gave voice to a more egalitarian, agonistic, and communally rooted form of political self- understanding. This heterodox form of mystico-political thought has largely resisted literary and cultural forms of translation into the Anglo-American world. Yet, Péguy’s work offers us a compelling vision of political community within France’s Third Republic, one geared toward the formation of a new sense of individual and political identity capable of responding to the complexities of a global world without renouncing the commitment to a shared common good. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have many people I would like to thank. First and foremost are the members of my dissertation committee: Tyrus Miller, Richard Terdiman, and Dorian Bell. Their guidance and support allowed me to negotiate my own dialectic of freedom and necessity in the execution of this project. The dedication and attention they have shown to my work is a testament to their talents not only as great scholars but as outstanding mentors as well. I would also like to thank my pedagogical advisors, in particular Bryan Donaldson and Micah Perks. Through their thoughtful and consistent feedback, I have been able to deepen my appreciation of teaching as an empathic, transformative practice. This, more than any other factor, has given me the perspective to pursue my research with joy and creativity. I thank those specific individuals who helped me as a first-generation college student on each step of the way to earning my doctorate: Barbara Jensen, Paul “Bo” Aiello, Graham Thomas, Donald Weinstock, Aparna Nayak, and Najib Redouane. Without the love and support of my parents and family, none of this would have been possible. Their model of faith and hard work has allowed me to become the person I am today. Thank you Sarah Papazoglakis, Lennet Daigle, Tsering Wangmo, and Yuki Obayashi for being largely sane and thoroughly pleasant fellow travelers these last six years. I would also like to mention former students and now friends David Vivian and vi Payam Gregory Etemadzadeh. Their conversation and enthusiasm for learning have enriched my own experience as a teacher and learner. My final word of thanks is to my partner Ruth whose mirth and passion for life make each day a blessing. If I have been able to glean any wisdom at all, it has been through following her example. vii CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO PÉGUY’S LIFE AND WORK In beginning a critical introduction to this translation of Charles Péguy’s Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne I am acutely aware of the irony inherent in the very form of its presentation, a model that has become almost de rigueur for any new critical edition of a literary work. What could seem more natural and appropriate to both the serious and casual reader coming to this relatively little- known essay of Péguy, previously unavailable in English, than a rigorously critical and informative contextual situation of the work within the largely forgotten nexus of cultural and political events of its time? Yet, however well-intentioned and ostensibly complementary this introduction might appear to readers, one cannot escape the fact that both its form and the relationship it posits to Péguy’s original work are diametrically opposed to the overall trajectory of his oeuvre and the thought that informed it. For Péguy’s thinking and literary output was in a fundamental sense driven by a profound antipathy towards what he saw as the specialized and deadening reading practices and forms of textual analysis of university intellectuals of his time. Péguy instead conceived of an ideal reader who would approach the text as directly and intuitively as possible, intent on reanimating the unique histories, experiences, and creative impulses contained within the true work of art, which Péguy viewed as an organic, living reality rather than mere historical artifact. For such a reader, this meant above all eschewing the superfluous and potentially misleading extra-textual apparatus of critical introduction and historical contextualization, all of which pointed 1 in the direction of a scientific and critical determinism Péguy regarded as anathema to the truly dynamic, participatory, and indeed creative vision he had in mind for the act of reading. The historicist-inspired readings Péguy most despised sought instead to understand the work by means of an exhaustive resituation within its literary, historical, and political context, a scientific endeavor aimed at uncovering within the potentially limitless mass of historical data a chain of cause and event serving to engender the work in question. Péguy would ruthlessly attack this model of literary analysis as well as the historicist and positivist values operative in the methodology and practice of the scientific-minded historians, sociologists, and pedagogues driving the makeover of the French university system at this time in the name of an increasingly hegemonic faith in historical progress. This newly empowered “Republic of Professors,” in Albert Thibaudet’s phrase, would produce in the first decades of the 20th century a school of thought that would emanate across the whole of France’s Third Republic. In contradistinction to this positivist historicism and the modes of literary analysis it served to institutionalize via the educational reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Péguy offered a very different model of reading and historical understanding, which he sought to ground in a type of “creative rememoration” of one’s historical and cultural heritage through the shared processes of memory and intuition (Roe 205). As we will see, it is a model Péguy thought capable of checking the scientistic and historicist thrust of intellectual thought and 2 practice gaining ground throughout France during this time of heightened intellectual and political volatility. A chief target of Péguy’s anger and of the numerous polemical attacks he would make over the course of his lifetime was the ensemble of former Dreyfusard intellectuals alongside whom he had initially fought in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a previously unknown Jewish army captain scandalously convicted of treason in 1894. The nearly decade-long political crisis that ensued would prove enormously divisive for France, pitting defenders of French republicanism against a host of detractors on the political right clustered in support of a renewed raison d'état and an overt antisemitism. Emerging largely victorious from this conflict, the newly empowered Dreyfusard leadership would in turn become the bearers of a certain 19th-century faith in scientific and historical progress promising the ultimate perfectibility of humanity through the expansion and application of the positive and social sciences to all domains of human inquiry. It was an intellectual and political vision that would