Georges BERNANOS (1888-1948). Autograph manuscript signed, O - Lot 8

Georges BERNANOS (1888-1948). Autograph manuscript signed, Organisons la Peur; 6pages large in-4. From this article, which appeared in Le Figaro on April 16, 1932 (and was collected in Le Crépuscule des Vieux), Bernanos reused the central pages in 1939 to form the conclusion of Grands Cimetières sous la Lune. Bernanos confesses to having long cherished the idea of "having Briand inaugurate the statue of General Mangin. A great political thought. And like all great political thoughts, religious. [...] France redeemed from the sin of victory - what a sight! From the sin of victory for which we still owe satisfaction to beautiful souls, to inconsolable souls. Retraction, penance and satisfaction that the true fathers of modern Pacifism, the great academics of the 15th century, the men of the University of Paris, the dreadful priests who long before the piss-froid League of Nations dreamed of enslaving the world to a kind of spiritual bureaucracy, once obtained from Joan of Arc. Then they burned her. And already they thought they were burning with her, destroying forever, the marvelous flower whose seed seems to have been cast by the Angels, this genius of honor that our race has so supernaturalized that it almost made it for a moment like a fourth theological virtue"... "There is only one decisive, radical way to exterminate the memory of hideous sacrifices, to tear out the roots of the warrior spirit, and that is - after the general amnesty granted to heroes - the solemn rehabilitation of the Coward. [...] The only force capable of killing war is Fear. [...] Every man of government, in Paris as in Moscow, in London as in Berlin or Rome, can henceforth have only one thought, only one policy, only one goal: to organize Fear"... Former Daniel Sickles collection (Littérature du XXe siècle, 13-15 juin 1983, n°40).