Contre taine et renan Charles Péguy and the metaphysics of modern history

Abstract

Israel Zangwill, l’homme et l’oeuvre. On October 25th, 1904, Charles Péguy, editor of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, published a short story entitled Chad Gadya! written by a certain Israel Zangwill and translated from the original English by one of the Cahiers’ collaborators. As neither the text nor its author were particularly well-known to the French reading public of the day—"il m’était totalement inconnu" Péguy admits—the gérant of the Cahiers felt it necessary to include a short preface introducing the man and his work to his subscribers. Before any biographical information is imparted, however, Péguy offers us his vision of the unique hermeneutic situation in which readers (here, Péguy himself) find themselves when confronted with an unknown author; a situation to which the "modern" response, Péguy tells us, is one that is "toute contemporaine, toute récente" in the history of French letters: Quand nous ne connaissons pas le nom d’un auteur, nous commençons par nous méfier; et par nous affoler; nous nous inquiétons; nous courons aux renseignements; nous nous trouvons ignorants; nous sommes inquiets; nous demandons à droite et à gauche; nous perdons notre temps; nous courons au dictionnaires, aux manuels, ou à ces hommes qui sont eux-mêmes des dictionnaires et des manuels, ambulants; et nous ne retrouvons la paix de l’âme qu’après que nous avons établi de l’auteur, dans le plus grand détail, une bonne biographie cataloguée analytique sommaire. Thus, one of the first of Péguy’s important longer Cahiers, the text that will come to be known simply as "Zangwill" in subsequent editions of his work, begins modestly with an attempt to establish a modern, scientific biography of an obscure English author. Show more