Charles Pierre Péguy (last name roughly pronounced "Peggy") (7 January 1873 — 5 September 1914) was a French poet, essayist, and editor of the magazine Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine. He was a staunch patriot and socialist who blended these aspects and the Catholic faith into his writings.
Péguy was born on 7 January 1873 in Orléans, where Bishop St. Aignan stopped Attila the Hun in the fifth century and St. Joan of Arc rallied the French forces a thousand years later. Désiré Péguy, his father, was a cabinet maker who died of combat wounds in 1874, and his widowed mother, Cécile, made a hard living making chairs. Charles was proud of his peasant origins, even proclaiming that the peasantry represented the best in France. From what little is known about his childhood, he attended a grammar school at Orléand and took catechism classes, where he apparently did very well.
Péguy attended the Lycée at Orléans on a scholarship and, in 1891, entered Paris to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure, and it appears that during these years, Péguy lost his faith and became an atheist. He entered the Lycée Lakanal but failed his entrance examinations at École Normale Supérieure. As a result of this setback, he enlisted in military service. In 1893, he was free from military obligations and entered Lycée Sainte-Barbe, one of the oldest schools in Paris and attended by John Calvin and St. Ignatius of Loyola. There, he met a couple of men who became most helpful to him in later times.
In 1894, Péguy left Sainte-Barbe and entered the École Normale, intending to teach philosophy, his old friend. However, Péguy slowly came to realize that he was not fit for a university career, perhaps conscious of his power as a writer and finding it difficult to reconcile his creative urge and his task of teaching. In 1895, he turned to socialism, convinced that it was the only means by which poverty and destitution in the modern world could be overcome, and in December of that year, he asked Georges Perrot, the director of the school, for a prolonged absence of leave to found a socialist center, to learn printing, and to work on a book in more propitious surroundings.
In November 1896, Péguy returned to "Normale", but a few months in, he asked for another leave of absence so that he could marry, insisting that he would come back next year and pass his examinations, but Perrot prophesied "You will fail". Nevertheless, Péguy left school and married Charlotte-Françoise Baudoin, sister of school-mate Marcel Baudin, in October 1897; they had one daughter and three sons, one of whom was born after Péguy's death. A month after his marriage, Péguy returned to the school, where prominent figures such as the philosopher Henri Bergson, historian Joseph Bédier, and writer Romain Rolland were teaching at the time. Their ideas were discussed feverishly, but so was the Dreyfus case (in 1894, the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of trumped-up charges of treason, and in 1897, the whole case was to be retried). Influenced by Lucien Herr, librarian of the École Normale Supérieure, Péguy became an ardent Dreyfusard and loudly clamored for Dreyfus' release. In the meantime, Péguy wrote his first version of Jeanne d’Arc (1897), a dramatic trilogy that formed a declaration and affirmation of his religious and socialist principles. He presented it to his fellow socialists, who were evidently disappointed because of the subject matter but read it anyway because Péguy was one of their own.
On 1 May 1898, when the leftist demonstrations began, Péguy opened a socialist bookstore, which became the centre of Dreyfusard agitation. Four months later, Péguy, at that time trying to complete his third year, failed his final examinations, exactly as Perrot prophesied, and abandoned all plans for a university career.
In 1901, Péguy set up a publishing firm of his own to spring out his publication called Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Although the Cahiers never reached a wide public, they profoundly influenced French intellectual life for the next 15 years. Many leading French writers, including Anatole France, Jean Jaurès, and the aforementioned Bergson and Rolland, contributed work to it. At first, it received support from the Socialist Party, but when the party, under the leadership of Emile Combes, used its victory in the Dreyfus case and the political power that came with it to establish its system of injustice, inaugurated police supervision, denunciation, and violent attacks on the Catholic Church, Péguy was deeply disillusioned.
One day in September 1908, Péguy was conversing with Joseph Lotte, a close friend of his, about his trials when he tearfully said: "I have not told you all. I have found faith again. I am a Catholic." He revealed that he returned to the Catholic faith after years of unsteady atheism, and he would remain a fervent Catholic all his life, though his practice in the faith was irregular. This is because he married into a family of staunch unbelievers back when he was an atheist. As he married outside the Church, the Church did not deem his marriage valid. In addition, his children, two boys and a girl, were unbaptized, and his wife refused to have them baptized, so for Péguy, living as a Catholic was impossible and he did not go to Mass.
Early in 1910, Péguy published a revised version of his earlier Jeanne d'Arc, known as The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc (1910), to almost total silence. Nevertheless, he kept on and followed up with his second and third Mysteries, published in 1911 and 1912.
In 1913, one of Péguy's sons fell ill with typhoid fever, and there seemed little hope of recover. Péguy prayed to Our Lady of Chartres and asked for her intercession, and the sick child recovered (Péguy's children went on to be baptized; his wife converted after Péguy died). Péguy set off to make a pilgrimage to Chartres, having promised to do so should his son recover. The pilgrimage took him three days to complete.
When World War I broke out, Péguy became a lieutenant in the 19th company of the French 276th Infantry Regiment; he was one of the soldiers who fought in the First Battle of the Marne.
On 5 September 1914, Péguy and his men were in the neighborhood of Villeroy. The men threw themselves down to shoot at the already retreating Germans, but Péguy refused to take cover, making himself an open target because of his red and blue uniform. He ordered his men to keep on shooting as he ran ahead of them to lead them on, all while his men ordered him to get down and take cover. For his trouble, Péguy was fatally shot in the head.
When the battle ended, ending with the French being victorious, a friend of his managed to identify the body of Péguy by finding a one-centime coin in his pocket. A memorial to Péguy was established near the field where he was killed.
