Georges Bernanos Biography Quotes 17 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation
Georges Bernanos was born in 1888 in Paris and spent part of his childhood in the north of France, in the countryside of Artois. The contrast between the capital and the villages of fields, hedgerows, and stone churches gave him a lasting sense of France as both a spiritual landscape and a moral battleground. Raised in a fervent Catholic milieu, he discovered early companions in books: Barbey d Aurevilly and Leon Bloy nourished his taste for the dramatic language of sin, grace, and redemption. As a young man he gravitated for a time to the nationalist, monarchist circle of Action Francaise around Charles Maurras and Leon Daudet. He admired their rigor and intransigence, but the seeds of a later break were already present in his religious conscience, which mistrusted any politics that subordinated spiritual truth to strategy.

War and Moral Awakening
When the First World War broke out, Bernanos enlisted and saw front-line service. He experienced the mud, fear, and dissolution of illusions that the trenches inflicted on his generation. The war left him wounded and profoundly sobered, and it sharpened his sense that evil is not an abstraction but a force that invades ordinary lives. After the armistice he married Jeanne Talbert d Arc, a descendant of the family of Joan of Arc. Their marriage, a partnership marked by endurance and faith, anchored a household of several children. To support them he worked in modest jobs, including stints as an insurance inspector and journalist, while writing at night and on trains.

Novelist of Grace and Evil
Bernanos burst onto the literary scene with Sous le soleil de Satan (1926), a novel about the priest Abbe Donissan, whose struggles with temptation and holiness unfold in a stark rural world. L Imposture followed, and La Joie won the Prix Femina in 1929, confirming that his fiction spoke beyond narrowly confessional circles. Journal d un cure de campagne (1936), the intimate account of a sickly young parish priest, became his best-known work and received the Grand Prix du roman of the Academie francaise. Though his protagonists are often clergy, Bernanos was not writing pious edification; he pursued the mystery of freedom, the presence of grace in weakness, and the lies that camouflage despair. He rejected the tidy psychology of the novel of manners and sought a naked confrontation with the demonic and the divine.

Spain, Conscience, and Breaks
In the mid-1930s Bernanos lived for a time in Majorca. At first he harbored illusions about the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War. What he saw on the island shattered them. Les Grands Cimetieres sous la lune (1938) is his furious testimony against the executions and terror committed in the name of order. The book publicly ruptured his past ties with Action Francaise and incurred the hostility of Charles Maurras and his followers. Bernanos insisted that fidelity to the Gospel, not party loyalty, must be the standard. He also published Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette (1937), another tale of innocence crushed by a pitiless world, deepening his meditation on suffering and responsibility.

Exile in Brazil and Wartime Voice
As Europe slid into another war, Bernanos left France with his family and settled for years in Brazil. From this distance he denounced the capitulation of 1940 and the illusions of Vichy. His Lettre aux Anglais addressed to British readers defended the honor of a Free France and praised the stubborn courage of civilians under bombardment. He openly supported Charles de Gaulle and urged the French to recover a moral center that could outlast victory or defeat. During these years he completed Monsieur Ouine, a disturbing, enigmatic novel about a community poisoned by spiritual emptiness, and he wrote the prophetic essay La France contre les robots (1947), a warning against the dehumanizing drift of technocracy and mass civilization. Younger Catholic personalists, including Emmanuel Mounier, recognized in him an uncompromising ally of conscience, even when they differed about politics or tone.

Return, Final Works, and Death
After the Liberation he returned to France, a figure both admired and feared for his plain speech. He lectured, wrote journalism, and worked on Dialogues des Carmelites, drawing on the story of the martyred Carmelites of the French Revolution to examine fear, courage, and grace. The text was published after his death and later inspired Francis Poulenc s opera, which brought Bernanos s vision to a broad audience. Bernanos died in 1948 near Paris, leaving behind a body of work that united the novelist s art with the pamphleteer s urgency.

Themes, Relations, and Legacy
Bernanos s friendships and adversaries mattered to his formation. Jeanne Talbert d Arc anchored his domestic life; the early tutelage of Charles Maurras gave way to a decisive break when political realism collided with Christian conscience; the friendship of younger thinkers such as Emmanuel Mounier encouraged his postwar interventions; and the wartime leadership of Charles de Gaulle gave him a public figure he could support without reservation. His influence quickly crossed borders. Robert Bresson adapted Journal d un cure de campagne to the screen, giving austere cinematic form to Bernanos s interior drama, and readers such as Graham Greene found in him a model of how religious experience could be rendered without sentimentality. The enduring power of Sous le soleil de Satan, Journal d un cure de campagne, Monsieur Ouine, Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette, and Dialogues des Carmelites lies in their refusal to flatter either the world or the believer. Bernanos wrote as though every sentence had to be paid for. His pages present a France of dirt roads and altars, of gossip-ridden parishes and invisible battles, where salvation, if it comes at all, arrives in humility and hiddenness. In a century that celebrated systems and power, he stood with the small, the humiliated, and the stubbornly free.

Our collection contains 17 quotes who is written by Georges, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Mother - Hope.

Other people realated to Georges: Robert Bresson (Director), Shusaku Endo (Author)

• 1938 The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon (Essay)
• 1936 The Diary of a Country Priest (Novel)
• 1926 Under the Sun of Satan (Novel)