Rhétorique et style dans la prose de Charles Péguy (review)

In attempting to describe Péguy's famously idiosyncratic prose style in terms of the rigorously codified prescriptions of classical rhetoric, the author sets herself a well-nigh impossible task. To approach it she has to do some major tweaking (as did Péguy) of standard definitions of such basic terms as 'classical' and 'romantic'. Yet in the process she develops an amazingly clear and perceptive portrait of the 'manager' (gérant) of the Cahiers de la quinzaine as reflected in his prose style. In Part I her arguments are primarily deductive, showing how the structures of Latin rhetoric that Péguy memorized in secondary school and at the Lycée Lakanal reappear in certain of his homework papers, many of which are preserved at the Centre Charles Péguy in Orléans, and in some later texts. In Part II she examines Péguy's writings in the light of ancient rhetorical precepts concerning the logos (use of words and sentence structures), the ethos (the psychological and moral characteristics of the writer), and the pathos (the stylistic techniques used to persuade, to move the reader emotionally). Here, her reasoning is often inductive, starting from specific prose writings by Péguy and seeking rhetorical precepts (such as ekphrasis or hypotyposis) to describe them. Having cited Buffon's famous dictum that 'Le style, c'est l'homme' (pp. 94-95), Bruley seeks Péguy here in the multiple characteristics of his prose style. Her analyses of his use of anaphora, amplification, digressions, and repetitions are particularly fruitful. She sees Péguy as a chronicler rather than as an historian, as an explorer of the reality around him. His open-ended search finds reality, she points out, to be multiple and heterogeneous, unclassifiable in modern scientific categories, as his explorations of his changing world lead him through the numerous digressions familiar to his readers. His sometimes lengthy sentences, branching grammatically into myriads of parallel clauses, reflect this groping for truth and mirror the parallelisms Péguy finds in history (see, for example, his 'Les Suppléants parallèles'), and which, in Bruley's analysis, are for him the proof of consistent, divine forces at work in the material world. She shows Péguy seeking classical clarity and simplicity, always striving to unite form and content. She finds him in his written reactions to such notable thinkers of his era as Bernard-Lazare, Michelet, Bergson, Jaurès, and Maurras, and to the nefarious forces he defines as 'le parti intellectuel', 'le monde moderne', and 'l'esprit de système'. His style is an open-ended search for meaning in his markedly post-classical, post-rhetorical world. While Bruley's portrait of him is fragmented, developed point by point rather like a pointillist's painting across all of Part II, she constructs a coherent and original image of Péguy as, among other things, a self-selected martyr, enjoying the role of a (sometimes polemical) voice crying in the wilderness, writing plainly and directly, with great respect for the simple truth, a 'peasant' at heart, though with a classical education, penning unique chronicles of his age. Bruley demonstrates full mastery of her extensive bibliography.