Georges Bernanos

Simon Kemp (University of Oxford)
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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

]…

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 19 March 2024.]

388 Georges Bernanos 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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