Georges Bernanos

Simon Kemp (University of Oxford)

Ed. by Hugo Azerad, University of Cambridge
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.06: French Writing and Culture: Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Hugo Azerad (University of Cambridge), Patrick ffrench (King's College London), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck, University of London), Nicole Kennedy (University of Newcastle), Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London), Sinan Richards (King's College London), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

Born 20 Feb 1888
Died 5 Jul 1948
Activity 1908-1948

Places

Born in France
Active in France

Activities

Primary

Essayist
Novelist

Resources

Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was a French novelist and essayist whose works combined a strong Catholic faith with highly conservative politics. His novels present a world in which divine grace and Satanic temptation are very real phenomena, and offer psychological analyses of troubled men of faith, often with a Catholic priest as protagonist. His political essays are consistently right-wing, but develop through the 1930s away from early hard-right extremism to a denunciation of fascism and anti-semitism. His best-known works are the novels Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the Sun of Satan] (1926) and Journal d’un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest] (1936), and the essay Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune [The Great Cemeteries in the Moonlight, translated as A Diary of My Times] (1938).

Bernanos’s childhood was divided between Paris and the...

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2437 words

Citation: Kemp, Simon. "Georges Bernanos". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 November 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=388, accessed 07 December 2025.]