Two Chivalrous Defenders of Saint Joan of Arc: Georges Bernanos and Hilaire Belloc

Five years before the beginning of World War I, Joan of Arc was Beatified by Pope Saint Pius X. (It was on 18 April 1909 in Paris.) A little more than a decade later, and after the devastating 1914-1918 War, she was Canonized by Pope Benedict XV. On that 16 May 1920 in Rome, it was also still a difficult and embittering time, only just a year after the vengeful Treaties of Versailles and Trianon, and but a little less than two years after the deceitfully precarious (and soon-to-be-abused) Armistice of 11 November 1918. The flower of many nations had perished in that War, and we are still trying to assimilate the full range and depth of its consequences, the dismemberment and fragmentation of so many Empires and the sad continuation of a newly begun “Thirty Years’ War” in Europe (1914-1945).

Captain Charles Péguy, the French poet, was himself killed in combat early in that War, on 5 September 1914, while leading his unit in the momentous First Battle of the Marne, and he was buried there at Villeroi, to the northeast of Paris. Five years earlier, after the Beatification of “the Maid of Orleans,” Péguy had published, also in 1909, his own incantatory verse rhythms in his extended poem (a three-act drama), entitled The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc (Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc). The 1914-1918 War was also the decisive experience in the life of Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), as many of his friends and biographers have confirmed.1 For, he had come out of it, “not changed but deepened, not cynical but disillusioned” inasmuch as “he had seen [as a decorated corporal] the worst that men could do to each other on the field of battle—and behind.”

Click here to VIEW full size, DOWNLOAD as PDF file, and/or PRINT.