Carnal Spirit: The Revolutions of Charles Peguy

It is rare for a thinker of Charles Peguy’s considerable stature and influence to be so neglected in Anglophone scholarship. The neglect may be in part because so much about Peguy is contestable and paradoxical. He strongly opposed the modern historicist drive to reduce writers to their times, yet he was very much a product of philosophical currents swirling through French intellectual life at the turn of the twentieth century. He was a passionate Dreyfusard who converted to Catholicism but was a consistent anticlerical. He was a socialist and an anti-Marxist, and at once a poet, journalist, and philosopher.

Peguy (1873-1914) rose from a modest childhood in provincial France to a position of remarkable prominence in European intellectual life. Before his death in battle in World War I, he founded his own journal in order to publish what he thought most honestly, and urgently, needed to be said about politics, history, philosophy, literature, art, and religion. His writing and life were animated by such questions as: Is it possible to affirm universal human rights and individual freedom and find meaning in a national identity? How should different philosophies and religions relate to one another? What does it mean to be modern?

A voice like Peguy’s, according to Matthew Maguire, reveals the power of the individual to work creatively with the diverse possibilities of a given historical moment. Carnal Spirit expertly delineates the historical origins of Peguy’s thinking, its unique trajectory, and its unusual position in his own time, and shows the ways in which Peguy anticipated the divisions that continue to trouble us.