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acknowledge their limitations.²⁴

      What ultimately rests behind these commitments? While a given historian can deny that his or her models have morals, the choosing of ordering argumentative principles, or of criteria for the selection of evidence, or of emphases in argument, imply notions of what is true, about what is and what should be, or at least about what is “good in the way of belief” or “a desirable state of affairs.”

      This reality is generally—if rather discreetly—acknowledged by historians. Peter Gordon, for example, claims that while an “ethic of neutrality partially occludes” the presence of “strong normative frameworks” in the writing of history, an account of what should be enters into the formulation and development of historical arguments: “The discerning reader can usually grasp without difficulty what political or moral judgment may have animated the historian in her work and guided her toward certain conclusions.”²⁵

      One moral of the standard model of late modern Europe tends to assume the following, applying its truth of immanent becoming to the origins of the twentieth century’s catastrophes: the notion of a rigorously ethical, integral, strong, persistent, and sacrificial self is not a source of resistance to fascism but rather and ultimately is a precondition and enabler of fascism. Following Foucault and others, advocates of the standard model have implied and asserted that resistance to fascism, and more generally to modern tyrannies of either a bluntly political or a more subtle kind, can be attributed to a refusal or repression of discontinuous identities, desires, and forms of expression.²⁶

      Given this account of fascism’s ultimate inner hold upon us via our very notions of self and self-command, it is rather awkward that resistance to fascism in the twentieth century was often carried out by those with a robust attachment to some considerable portion of the aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical commitments that many contemporary scholars consider to be, as it were, incipiently fascist in their internal logic. They include integral selves making deliberate moral decisions at great personal cost, founded in what is often a mixture of quite traditional and quite modern notions of virtue and civic good associated with solidarity, courage, equality, integrity, independence, duty, socialism, Christianity, Judaism, humanism, and so on.

      An open encounter with Péguy’s thinking meets another obstacle in a different prevailing model, this one more closely associated with intellectual history. It is less political than the standard model and operates at a higher level of abstraction. It tends to emphasize how ideas in history often work within an immediately contextual matrix, one that allows for apparent differences to be set within conceptual, social, and linguistic structures of which participants were generally unaware, or only dimly aware, and from which they cannot escape. This is often accompanied by a conscious effort by historical agents to “negotiate” contemporary institutional and intellectual expectations in order to secure intellectual credibility and status. For this model’s advocates, to focus upon thinking by a given person without assigning priority to these structures and negotiations veers dangerously close to humanist nostalgia. Often the very attempt by a given thinker to move beyond various social, conceptual, and professional constrictions is treated ironically, though it may well be a tragic or melancholy irony that intimates an unspoken wish for an impossible escape from what contextually bound both the thinker and the thought.

      Whatever the rhetorical hue of the argument, this ready-made form of historical understanding allows the scholar to devote him- or herself to structures of assumption and inquiry, to what “shows up” as “knowledge,” or the immediate, inescapable contextual boundaries of intellectual work.

      For example, in Sarah Hammerschlag’s The Figural Jew, Péguy is a thinker who tries to subvert cultural assumptions, especially anti-Semitic preoccupations with Jews’ putative “rootlessness” and “disloyalty” to affirm an ongoing prophetic vocation. Yet in her account, he failed; his writing does not really escape the anti-Semitic discursive historical matrix from which it is said to emerge. Péguy’s Judaism remains racial—if not racist—in nature, it is “dehistoricized” and reduces Jews to being the exemplary suffering servants of Christians, or as edifying examples in a Christian typology.

      For Hammerschlag, Péguy’s very praise of his friend Bernard-Lazare is not, as it was for George Steiner, the best account of friendship since Montaigne;²⁷ rather, it is itself veering close to anti-Semitism, since it also claims that Jews were not Dreyfusards as Bernard-Lazare himself was, and thus that most Jews were disloyal to, put baldly, one of their own, in part because of a besetting anxiety. Even when Péguy sought justice for Dreyfus, he did so for the honor of the nation, not for “some universal law.”²⁸ A more promising remedy for the exclusions of modern identity politics must await the theoretical transposition of simultaneously figurative and defigurizing language from literature, via the ministrations of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, which finds especially promising expression within the French student movement of 1968.

      Hammerschlag’s reading does not always condescend to read with care. For example, it is not true that Péguy finds in “most of the Jews”²⁹ a refusal to support Dreyfus that suggests their alleged distinctive “failings” as a people. First, Péguy observed at the time that most Jews indeed defended Dreyfus’s innocence.³⁰ He also repeatedly refers to a limited and initial reluctance to get involved in the campaign to vindicate Dreyfus as a natural human tendency, applying to human beings in general. Many people do not wish to get involved in costly and difficult campaigns that do not immediately affect them. When it did occur, this was manifestly a universal human trait for Péguy, not a “Jewish” one; here, as Péguy repeatedly puts it, the Jewish people are “like all peoples” (and Jewish voters are like other voters).³¹

      “Anxiety” is for Péguy a human experience, uniquely inflected in Judaism but not uniquely a Jewish one: “Man” as such is a “puits d’inquiétude” (a well of anxiety), as he puts it in one of his most famous lines of verse,³² and Jewish anxiety is “grafted” into Christianity by Jesus himself.³³ Hammerschlag’s explicit antihumanism³⁴ leaves her unmoved by these repeated references to cross-religious affinities and universal human situations, but that does not relieve an author of a need to acknowledge what is clearly and repeatedly in an author’s work.

      It is also not true that Péguy sees Jews serving only as a typological example for Christians. He expresses his conviction directly that in the Dreyfus affair, Jewish, Christian, and French mysticisms were engaged in “coming together”³⁵ and “mutually tested,” one another³⁶ in which all three distinctive mysticisms brought out what was best in one another and made it possible for them to work toward the common end of justice.

      Furthermore, these identities were in no way mutually exclusive: for Péguy, Bernard-Lazare is not simply or only Jewish—he is also and simultaneously French, and Parisian, and secular in his sensibilities.³⁷ If there is “essentializing” in Péguy, it is relational and multidimensional, both within individual persons and among different religious, national, and extranational groups.

      Similarly, the “dehistoricizing” to which Hammerschlag refers can only be made plausible if it is meant to mark Péguy’s failure to be a doctrinaire contemporary historicist. For Péguy, the forms, even the beliefs, in which those elected to fulfill the best (mystical) imperatives embodied by a given historical group can be starkly different according to very diverse historical circumstances, while enjoying an unforeseeable but profound continuity. Péguy, the impoverished anticlerical Parisian writer of 1900, expresses French chivalry in ways very different from Jeanne d’Arc or Louis IX’s chronicler Jean de Joinville. As Hammerschlag herself observes, Bernard-Lazare is an atheist³⁸ (and an advocate of universal justice—things to which Péguy gives unmistakable emphasis).³⁹ Within the poststructuralist canon, Hammerschlag might have consulted Deleuze’s account of repetition in Péguy to avoid a misreading of this kind. Péguy assumes, however, that regardless of historical period, participation in and fidelity to a mysticism generally entails poverty, weakness, and a distance from established institutions, whether those institutions are French, Jewish, Christian, or some mixture thereof.⁴⁰

      For Péguy, Jewish, Christian and French (or

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