Le Grand d’Espagne

This book is a collection of seven short essays on politics and morality: the “Grand d’Espagne” is Georges Bernanos, the guiding spirit of the Hussards, the literary group to which Roger Nimier belonged: “the faults I recommend to you are frivolity, discretion, modesty, debauchery and a touch of old age, without excess… One must know how to despair to the very end. One more step and we shall be masters…”
Read him, read the audacious Roger Nimier, urges Juan Asensio: if Georges Bernanos’s “royal sign” is “Intelligence,” which Nimier carefully distinguishes from genius, that “all too convenient notion” which “allows the meanest pedant to dominate great men,” it is because he knew, better than anyone, how to speak “the necessary truths” and break “the windows,” a “new air com[ing] to insult the impure,” doubtless those “forty million Frenchmen” who, “having blindly followed the Marshal, found themselves having passionately resisted.” It is also because, against the man who had once been his own master, Charles Maurras, he managed to stand “on equal footing with the century and with mankind.” Whereas “Maurras’s universe, deprived of God, nonetheless requires a transcendence of ideas to preserve the form of things,” Bernanos, “with God,” knows that “true transcendence lies much higher, and if it wishes to overturn History, it need only change hearts.” Changing hearts! An admirable naivety, both Nimier’s and Bernanos’s, and that of every writer who does not write merely to amuse, as our contemporaries do, but who writes, like the Grand d’Espagne, to breathe new vigor into “those somewhat faded words: sainthood, genius,” honor and courage too, and, once again against Maurras, to affirm the evident truth that “men are the whole quality and secret of History” (in Le Grand d’Espagne de Roger Nimier, 2016, online).