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of abiding convictions. The freedom and integrative creativity opened by an encounter with different dimensions of time could in turn open the way to a renaissance of republican freedom and of Christianity, to a positive encounter between Judaism and Christianity, and to a renewed understanding of our embodied lives. Surrounded by moderns and antimoderns, Péguy set out upon a path that could be called amodern.²

      It is unwise to ignore the unique historical specificity of Péguy’s situation. Yet it is also unwise to ignore the contemporary resonances of Péguy’s observations and arguments. As the events of the early twenty-first century have shown with piercing clarity, Péguy’s animating questions and insights have not “ended” historically, in the manner of arguments for the claims of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. Péguy writes repeatedly about certain dilemmas in late modern culture, some of which have recently reemerged with great and disquieting force throughout the West. To claim that one does not see these resonances, or does not take them into account—while in fact arranging one’s sources very assertively to vindicate certain conclusions, leading the reader with words like “nostalgia” and “anxiety”—is tedious and dishonest. This is all the more true if one affects the self-consciously flat, stagily sober rhetorical style weighing upon so much contemporary scholarship. Genuine sobriety is far more interesting and insightful than its counterfeit. It is the unsober person, trying to win the approval of wary authorities, who assumes a sonorous monotone.

      Yet why else should you read a book about Charles Péguy? If Péguy—particularly in the Anglophone world—is now a figure often overshadowed by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries like Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others, this occlusion was nowhere in evidence through the greater portion of the last century. For generations, Péguy inspired thinking and action across all manner of political, religious, academic, and national boundaries.

      The literary critic Walter Benjamin, for example, wrote enthusiastically and at length about Péguy, finding in his work a “friendly togetherness” and continual dialogue, a sense of touch absent in Proust.³ Benjamin also claimed admiringly of Péguy’s politics and life that the phrase “enemy of the laws, indeed, but friend of the powers that be” is one that “applies least of all to Péguy.”⁴

      Benjamin’s friend, the great scholar of Judaism Gershom Scholem, also wrote in highest praise of Péguy, defender of the unique and mystical character of Judaism. Near the end of his life, Scholem said that Péguy “has incisively understood the Jewish condition to an extent that has been rarely achieved, and has never been surpassed by non-Jews.”⁵

      For the twentieth-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, Péguy transcended the characteristically modern tendency to assume a disjunction between the aesthetic and the ethical.⁶ The theologian Henri de Lubac wrote that Péguy “will save us from Nietzsche,”⁷ because he responded to similar questions and dilemmas in decisively different ways. Following the same path, for the philosopher Charles Taylor, Péguy is a “paradigm example of a modern who has found his own path, a new path,” to faith.⁸

      In political life, Péguy long enjoyed a similarly varied and enthusiastic readership. Charles de Gaulle—the single most influential person in twentieth-century French politics—acknowledged, “No writer marked me as much” as Péguy.⁹ Yet a quite different political figure—the Senegalese intellectual and politician Léopold Senghor—also took inspiration from Péguy for the Négritude literary movement, with its emancipatory hope of bringing together traditional African cultures and modern ones.¹⁰

      Immediately after World War II, Hannah Arendt clarified her disagreements with Péguy, but she counted him unhesitatingly among the champions of “freedom for the people and reason for the mind.”¹¹ In the same postwar moment, the literary critic Rachel Bespaloff wrote that Péguy transformed the language that would later be used by fascists by directing it toward entirely different ends; he “had a mind whose true significance is just beginning to be recognized.”¹² In a very different way, within the pages of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze finds in Péguy an indispensable thinker about time, who evokes the possibilities of repetition as something other than an assimilable concretion of similitudes and iterations of identity.¹³

      Yet why have the depths and insights of Péguy been cast in relative shadow? In part, many scholars wish to explain the tragedies of the twentieth century from within the security afforded by the seemingly inevitable advance of immanent becoming. They simply assume—to quote Margaret Thatcher—that “there is no alternative” to continuing with the same project in saecula saeculorum. Part of their task is to preclude a vivifying encounter with lives and thoughts that cannot be assimilated into their account of the past.

      Their scholarship does not always draw conclusions from close reading, or even from especially attentive reading. Hence the reading of Péguy in many recent books, including Christopher Forth’s The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood.

      Forth claims that Dreyfusards, while working to free and exonerate Alfred Dreyfus, participated wholeheartedly in accepting and disseminating a hypertrophied masculinity that would ultimately prove useful to or even partially constitutive of fascism, in an effort to avoid, in his concluding words, the “feminizing pitfalls of modernity.”¹⁴ While a historical account from the mid-twentieth century would look to the Dreyfusards as harbingers of the Resistance to fascism, this dangerously naïve reading needs to acknowledge the gendering of their work, and the Dreyfusards’ deeper affinities with the forces that brought Europe not simply to the persecution of a single innocent man, but very likely to the Holocaust.¹⁵

      Péguy is among those who Forth argues—to move toward traditional Marxist language—were “objectively” proto-fascist even if they were “subjectively” opposed to anti-Semitism and worked to secure Dreyfus’s exoneration. (Or to modulate the claim into an alternative hermeneutics of suspicion, an apparent antifascism and its progenitors had a latent but deep affinity with fascism, even if they were manifestly opposed to proto-fascism and fascists.) The evidence for Péguy’s participation in this fascist-tending masculinist discourse is, first, that he, “from his bookshop near the Sorbonne,” would reportedly say “fall in”¹⁶ to gather allies in order to defend Dreyfusard professors threatened by anti-Dreyfusard groups. Péguy also said that Dreyfusards “were heroes” and had “military virtues” nowhere in evidence among Dreyfus’s persecutors on the General Staff.¹⁷ Finally, as part of the “sporting enthusiasm” that contributed to fin-de-siècle masculinism, the adolescent Péguy “successfully lobbied the headmaster of his lycée to permit the older boys to play football [soccer].”¹⁸

      Péguy indeed used the phrase “fall in” to exhort others to protect the victims of antirepublican and anti-Semitic aggression; but that is perhaps less an indication of nascent fascism than of the ways in which language about war and sex is a particularly fertile domain for metaphors, ones that cross the most varied domains of human experience, and have done so for a very long time.

      This claim could be established with abundant references to Homer, Herodotus, and the Bible—or simply to the corridors of twenty-first century universities, in which a host of perfectly kind and good-natured contemporary academics have, in this author’s direct experience, referred to a student being given a “warning shot,” or our need to “fight” for a new course to be approved, or someone’s candidacy being “torpedoed,” or needing to fight a “battle” and form a “united front” in relation to an inconveniently obdurate dean or another department. If we are to admit this evidence, then it appears that liberal-arts academia in the twenty-first century is awash with masculinist triumphalism and subliminal fascism.

      There is an important argument to make about Péguy’s changing reflections on violence and war, and it will be a significant factor in this book.¹⁹ Yet calls to fall in during the Dreyfus affair give no plausible purchase upon it. It might also be said that in an age when “calling security” was not an option for institutions of higher learning, Péguy’s clearly defensive work, as the proprietor of a bookshop, to protect intellectual freedom for university

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