 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) | |
|
French novelist and essayist, whose masterpiece is JOURNAL D'UN CURÉ DE CAMPAGNE (1936, The Diary of a Country Priest). Bernanos was not a priest but he is considered one of the most original Roman Catholic writers of his time. Unlike many contemporary French writers, Bernanos was an active supporter of the rightist Action Française movement and an ardent supporter of the French monarchy. "Je me disais donc que le monde est dévoré par l'ennui. Naturellement, il faut un peu réflechir pour se rendre compte, ça ne se saisit pas tout de suite. C'est une espéce de poussière. Vous allez et venez sans la voir, vous la respirez, vous la mangez, vous la buvez, et elle est si fine, si ténue qu'elle ne craque même pas sous la dent. Mais que vous vous arrêtiez une seconde, la voilà qui recouvre votre visage, vos mains. Vous devez vous agiter sans cesse pour secouer cette pluie de cendres. Alors, le monde ságite beaucoup." (from Journal d'un curé de campagne) Georges Bernanos was born in Paris as the son of an interior decorator. He studied at the Collège des Jésuits, Collège Notre-Dame-des-Champs (1901-1903), Collège Saint-Célestin, Bourges (1903-04), and Collège Sainte-Marie, Aire-sur-la-Lys. Bernanos's school years were not happy. He gave up the idea of becoming a priest, and in 1906 he entered Sorbonne, receiving in 1909 a license in law and literature. From 1909 to 1910 he was in the military service. In 1913-14 Bernanos edited L'Avant-Garde de Normandie, a roaylist weekly. For his fanatic monarchist views, he spent some time in prison. During World War I Bernanos served in the army, witnessed the battles of Somme and Verdun, and was wounded several times. Léon Bloy, a prominent figure of French Catholicism, whose works Bernanos read in the trenches. Writing was for Bloy a divine calling and his thoughts influenced deeply Bernanos. In 1917 Bernanos married Jeanne Talbert d'Arc; they had three sons and three daughters. Talbert was a direct descendant of Saint Joan of Arc through her brother. After the war, Bernanos worked as an inspector for an insurance company until 1927. Most of his major fiction Bernanos wrote in a period of barely twelve years, between 1926 and 1937. Like a number of French writers, from Joris-Karl Huysmans to François Mauriac and Julien Green, Bernanos wrestled with Catholicism in his novels. His first novel, SOUS LE SOLEIL DE SATAN (1926), appeared when he was 38 years old. It was followed by L'IMPOSTURE (1927), about the spiritual crisis of a prominent member of the Parisian clergy, and its sequel, LA JOIE (1929). From 1930 to 1932 Bernanos was a columnist for Le Figaro. Bernanos' fervent Catholism entered into conflict with his royalist beliefs when Action Française, for which he started to write as a student, was condemned by the Vatican in 1926. In 1932 he broke off all contacts with the movement and Charles Maurras, its leader. The move marked one of Bernanos' most bitter crises. When Maurras was elected to the French Academy in 1938, Bernanos denounced him in SCANDALE DE LA VÉRITÉ (1939). In 1931 Bernanos attacked the French middle class in LA GRANDE PEUR DES BIEN-PENSANTS and denounced Franco's rebellion against the Spanish republic in LES GRANDS CIMITIÈRES SOUS LA LUNE (1938). Most of the last twelve years of his life Bernanos devoted to writing polemical essays and articles. He pleaded for a new spiritual and moral integrity, but although he was well known figure, his writings did not bring the family financial security. In 1933 Bernanos became disabled in a traffic accident. Because of debts, he was evicted from his family home. He moved to Palma de Mallorca, living there between the years 1934 and 1937. Living in Mallorca was also cheaper than in France. In the 1930s Bernanos wrote NOUVELLE HISTOIRE DE MOUCHETTE (1937), which was adapted for screen in 1966. By the end of 1936 he had completed all but the final chapter of his last novel, MONSIEUR QUINE (1943). Robert Bresson's film adaptation of Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951, Diary of a Country Priest ) won at the twelfth annual Venice International Film Festival the the Golden Lion. The story is set in an ugly and indifferent parish in northern France. The central character is an enthusiastic but an inexperienced priest (Claude Laydu), whose attempts to introduce extreme versions of Christianity lead to tragic consequences. The character was partly inspired by Thérèse de Lisieux, a Carmelite nun, who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. "His innocence wins out over all before he dies peacefully of cancer," Bernanos explained in a letter. Bresson recounts, through the pages of a diary, the daily life of a young priest, his self-doubts and the problems of his small parish at Ambricourt in the province of the Pas-de-Calais. He is upset that no one comes to Mass. The villagers wrongly suspect that he is greedy and an alcoholic. However, in his own despair he is able to bring spiritual peace to a dying countess, who has long rejected God. He ultimately dies alone, painfully of stomach cancer, murmuring '"All is Grace". Thérèse de Lisieux's final words were "Grace is everywhere." "Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest is a meditation which forces us to reevaluate experience. It refuses convectional values (what counts as success in life or in cinema) and concentrates new facts and events, overdetermining then until they form a spiritual economy. The currency in this economy has many denominations (light, speech, sounds, facial expressions, simple objects, simple actions), but all are based on the same standard: the soul of the curé of Ambricourt." (Dudley Andrew in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta, 1981) Bresson wrote the scenario himself and used the literary device of first person narrative or interior dialogue. He also used non-actors, natural sound, and real locations. Claude Laydy, playing the priest, lived for a time in a monastery to accustom himself to priestly gestures. The unused script written by Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche was a standard work, which took liberties with the novel. The writers concluded the film with a minor character's cry, "When you're dead everything is dead," instead of Bernano's "What does it matter, all is grace." François Truffaut, Bresson's young protégé, criticized later in Cahiers du Cinéma ('A Certain Tendency in French Cinema') the rejected scenario of Bost and Aurenche; they couldn't write a good script because Bernanos was alive. And Bresson had said that if the writer had been alive, he would have taken more liberties. Bresson himself protested later in The New York Times the cuts made by the American distributor. In his most famous work from this highly productive period, The Diary of a Country Priest, Bernanos wrote: "The wish to pray is a prayer in itself." Bernanos turned away from fiction and devoted himself in resisting barbarism which he saw approaching. He once stated: "The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions." Bernanos went in 1938 into self-imposed exile to Brazil, where he spent seven years. He returned to France in 1945, but for his disappointment, he did not find any signs of spiritual renewal. Bernanos gave lectures in Switzerland, Belgium, and North Africa, and contributed to many journals, including Combat, which was edited for some time by Albert Camus, Carrefour, La Bataille, and L'Intransigeant. His last years Bernanos lived in Tunis and in France. He died of cancer in Paris on July 5, 1948. Shortly before his death Bernanos completed DIALOGUES DES CARMÉLITES, a film script telling the story of 16 nuns martyred during the French Revolution. As an essayist, Bernanos moved from right-wing nationalism to an undefinable political position, where both communists and the ultra-right occasionally could occasionally agree with him. He denounced Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain, appeasement in Munich, France's armistice with Germany, and the cruel aftermath of the liberation in 1944. For Bernanos writing was a divine calling, and he devoted himself to defending both Christian civilization and his mystical vision of an "ancienne France". In the essay 'Joan, Heretic and Saint' he wrote Joan of Arch: "Just when the old man raises a finger to set a thousand typist in action, just when the peace of the world is about to emerge from all this machinery, in comes a young girl, mocking and tender, who belongs to no one, and whose soft voice answers the political theologians with old sayings and proverbs, after the manner of shepherds. The democratic abbes of the illustrious University of Paris, with their dream of some sort of universal republic; the distinguished pacifist prelates, dazzled by the dollar rate and impressed by the solidity of the good Burgundian coins; the Carmelite Eustache, making up to the Communist flayers of the Butchers' Corporation; the graduates of the Rue Clos-Bruneau; the clerics of the Rouen Chapter and those of the Chapter of M. Julie Benda - all these old men, many of them under thirty, look enviously at this little France who is so fresh, so mischievous, who is awfully afraid of being burnt, but still more afraid of telling a lie." Bernanos's central works his later period include Diary of My Times (1938), and Plea for Liberty (1942). His wartime essays, written in Brazil, where he worked unsuccessfully as a farmer, gained him a reputation as "bard of the French Resistance". Bernanos' attempt to define France's supernatural destiny to lead the whole postwar world in a spiritual revolution won him audience, but his inability to fuse his ideals with political realities was a disappointment for his overoptimistic readers. For further reading: Présence de Bernanos by L. Estang (1947); Bernanos par lui-même by A. Béguin (1954); Soffrance et expiation dans la pensée de Bernanos by W. Bush (1961); Georges Bernanos by William Bush (1965); Georges Bernanos by Max Milner (1967); Bernanos by Michel Estève (1965); Bernanos: An Introduction by Peter Hebbletwaite (1965); The Poetic Imagination of Georges Bernanos by G. Blumenthal (1965); Dimensions et structures chez Bernanos by B.T. Fitch (1969); Georges Bernanos by Robert Speaight (1973); L'imagunaire et le quotidien: Essai sur les romans de Georges Bernanos by Y. Rivard (1978); Georges Bernanos: A Study of Christian Commitment by Jon E. Cooke (1981); Les Royaumes de Georges Bernanos by Jean Bénier (1994); Bernanos: His Political Thought & Prophecy by Thomas Steven Molnar (1997) - See also: Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, Jerzy Andrzejewski Selected works:
© 2003 |
