The very nice surprise of the season and a very nice story. Flammarion this week releases a picture book. Title: Parking Peguy. Here is the story!
I knew that Clio de Péguy was somewhere in my library, but rather than trying to find it, I preferred to search the text on the internet. Half asleep, I did not realize that I was in the “Maps” section. Google then offered me the “Parking Peguy, Stains (93)”. Surprised, I started exploring the neighborhood from my computer. The parking lot, with its half-erased white lines and wild grass springing from the asphalt, looked more like a vacant lot; There were teenagers in tracksuits under a blazing sun. I made the screenshots, then I got up to go looking for the book.
A few weeks later, I asked my students in Créteil wether they had ever heard of Charles Peguy. Their response was almost unanimous: “Yes, it’s a bus stop, right next door! I knew that the one I considered one of the great French writer of the twentieth century was neglected by my contemporaries, but to be taken for a parking lot or a bus stop, was another matter.
After new investigations, I discovered various streets scattered in France, rather sad, mainly in housing estates. I archived these images, then, playfully, I confronted them with Peguy’s texts. Talking with Leo about this strange collection, it became obvious that my uniform screenshots should be replaced by photographs if I really wanted to capture the spirit of the place. To be guided by the place-names was to do a bit like Édouard Levé who, in America, had photographed small American cities with the names of metropolises (Calcutta in Ohio or Berlin in New Jersey). It was also and above all, in our case, the inspiring prospect of a trip through France.
The first difficulty was to identify all the Peguy streets, which Google does not allow. Fortunately, the “Fantoir file of the known ways and places “, intended for the distribution of the tax papers, is made available by the general direction of the Public finances. It’s a coded list of over eight million lines; deciphering it to obtain the complete inventory of the streets named after Peguy, then to position them on a map, took several weeks.
We have listed more than three hundred and fifty streets Charles Peguy, a good twenty avenues, more than thirty schools, several stadiums, a few dead ends and three parking lots. By searching on the Internet, we have seen that these various places have in common their peripheral status within the urban space (unlike Victor Hugo boulevards, located in the center of cities).
Peguy’s work, absent from textbooks, also suffers from a marginal status. It is true that it is not easy to classify, with the divisions proper to the teaching of literature, an author who has written only essays, often unfinished, like Clio, and poems so difficult to access like Eve with its 7,644 verses. For those who know him but have not read him, the author passes for a stubborn Catholic poet, sometimes for a rabid socialist. And then, it is said, his verse as his prose is difficult, often repetitive. So many reasons to never open the books of Péguy, covered with dust in the municipal libraries – long term parking.
Apart from the little peguist circles that I frequent from time to time, the writer still has a hard core of admirers: Edwy Plenel or Alain Finkielkraut claim him as a tutelary figure; he is celebrated by the rapper Youssoupha and by Fabrice Luchini in his shows; Bruno Dumont adapted his work in Jeannette and Jeanne. In recent times he has been mentioned in right, left and, perhaps most importantly, center politics. But when the name of Peguy appears in the public arena, it is most often as a moral example to follow: rather than his texts, we rely on his biography.
Peguy was a complex man, almost as contradictory as he was intransigent. It is not surprising that the story of his life was the subject of various appropriations: journalists declare themselves the heirs of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, the magazine he founded in 1900 and to which he devoted his life; Leftist editorialists retain his Dreyfusard and Socialist commitment; nostalgic of the Third Republic recall his academic success and his praise of teachers, “handsome as black hussars”; some Catholics see him as a prophet, almost a saint; small nationalist groups celebrate his patriotism and death at the front. In 2014, the centenary of Peguy’s death was an opportunity to say and to repeat that the writer was “resolutely up to date” and that he “understood our era”. But to invoke it to denounce “the reign of finance” or “the crisis of the school system” by awkwardly paraphrasing the first pages of L’Argent, is it really to do him honor?
Against a purely commemorative conception of the literary patrimony and against the reductions of the work to some quotations or slogans, this book proposes first to read Péguy. It is not an anthology, but excerpts that respond to photographs, more or less off-line, opening parallels, contrasts or suggesting simple associations. Six major routes have been taken; they make it possible to walk in France at the same time as in the work of the writer, in his essays as in his poetry; they offer the opportunity to measure the gap between Peguy’s world and ours. I also wrote a diary of our trip, constantly thinking about the life of the author, his work, his theories.
Through the streets that bear his name on the national territory, Peguy is confronted with his most immediate news. Nothing mattered more to him than this territory and the changes it underwent. To closely observe the communal schools, the churches, the small streets of the residential districts and their inhabitants, to stick to a documentary approach, is to follow his requirement of raw description of the reality, even if it is by means well different from his. In this, we have adopted the slogan of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine: “to speak the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, to say stupidly the stupid truth, boringly the boring truth, sadly the sad truth”.
Charles Coustille – Parking Peguy
Photographs by Léo Lepage
Flammarion editions
