Wikimedia Commons: La Sainte Chapelle, Paris 10 September 2014
“Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics”, said the French poet Charles Péguy (1873-1914); this was my thought exactly when confronted with the golden idols of abortion along the Seine this year on 26 July, incidentally the Feast Day of St Anne, the patron saint of mothers and women who want to be pregnant.
Among the ten secular saints (all women) canonised that evening at the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony in Paris were Simone Veil (1927-2017) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). Veil, the French Health Minister from 1974 to 1979, gave her name to the Veil Act that legalised abortion in 1975, while de Beauvoir authored the infamous 1971 manifesto in which 343 women claimed to have had an illegal abortion, which gave further impetus to the Veil Act.
There was something cheap and nasty about these plastic statues rising awkwardly from their pedestals along the Seine, and this was representative of the entire ceremony, a cross between Eurovision and a Roman orgy. The parody of The Last Supper – disciples in drag and Jesus Christ supplanted by the plus-sized Venus of Willendorf – angered Christians and Muslims alike, and even some atheists.
“This is France!” President Macron pronounced on X/Twitter that evening, which saw the old saints replaced by a political pro-abortion elect whose piety, like Macron’s, is ostensibly beyond reproach; not the saints of Péguy’s France: Genevieve (patron saint of Paris), Thérèse of Lisieux and Joan of Arc.
Still, the 26 July ceremony was as much an expression of religious conviction as any medieval mystery play performed outside a cathedral. “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious”, St Paul the Apostle told a crowd on the Areopagus in the first century AD, and how true that is of Macron’s France.
***
In 2024, the nation once dubbed the “eldest daughter of the Church” lauded the patron saints of abortion, those activists and politicians who think it more righteous to sacrifice others so that they may live, happily and without inconvenience – a radical upturning of the revolutionary claim of Christianity: that the last shall be first, and the first last.
What we saw on 26 July was a sad regression back to the pagan notion that might is right, that power, not love, rules over the weak simply because it can; certainly, there’s no greater power indifference than that between an unborn child and an adult person who has the means to kill it: there were 232,000 abortions in France in 2022, 16,000 more than in 2021. Founded on power, abortion is a corrupting influence that, not surprisingly, leads to more abortion.
This preoccupation with power, as portended by Foucault and modern French philosophy, consumed the feminist movement and left-wing “progressivism”, which now speak of abortion as an article of faith to be imposed from above, as Macron did on International Women’s Day when the French Parliament voted to make abortion a constitutional right.
“Today is not the end of the story but the start of a fight”, said Macron. “We’re going to lead this fight in our continent, in our Europe, where reactionary forces are attacking women’s rights… I want to enshrine that guaranteed freedom to abortion in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.”
Poland and Malta, the European Union’s last pro-life holdouts, might spoil Macron’s ambition, and Malta is used to sieges. Nonetheless, the intensity of his rhetoric makes it clear that resistance to abortion is now considered a challenge his presidential authority but also to the global hegemony to which we must all pay homage as incorporated members of a new Christendom, the chief sacrament of which is abortion.
***
Macron’s will to shape Europe from the refined comfort of Élysée Palace is nothing new. France has invariably shaped European politics and culture, sometimes at the point of spear or bayonet, or through soft power – that vulgar modern phrase that has never seemed more appropriate to the times we live in.
The Olympic Opening Ceremony was a clear case in point, the French elite’s response to the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which, according to their teleological view of history, ought never to have happened.
There’s more to it than that, of course, for the idolisation of abortion that evening epitomised the confused state of Western culture. As Péguy warned over a hundred years ago, there was a danger even the greatest of mysticisms might “be devoured by the politics to which it gave birth”. That was the “interest, the question” that France had to address during the Dreyfus Affair; a Dreyfusard, Péguy lamented how the cause, once motivated by a mystical devotion to truth, irrespective of personal politics, turned partisan and vengeful.
But Péguy’s famous aphorism, you may have noticed, has an even broader meaning, especially today in a West divested of its belief in the supernatural yet still clinging to the Christian ethic – the radical teachings of Jesus who elevated the Galilean poor over the rich and powerful, the oppressed over the oppressor. This standard still applies today, though it, too, has been devoured by politics.
***
Socialism is unthinkable without Christianity; separated from it, however, socialism serves only itself, turning into a wild beast that must satisfy its insatiable appetite for equality.
The problem with France and the West is that they have made an idol of those traditionally put-upon identities (as they are perceived to be); theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and that kingdom is here and now. Not only are their rights (which are as much a theological concept as transubstantiation) primary, but there are so many that they must compete for supremacy in an Olympiad of their own.
Accordingly, a man’s right to compete as a woman outweighs a woman’s right to compete equally with other women. Meanwhile, a woman’s “right to choose” takes precedence over a woman’s right to pray silently outside an abortion clinic, that much is clear, while the right to life of an unborn child isn’t even recognised. At least the Ten Commandments don’t contradict each other; thou shalt not kill doesn’t negate the other nine directives from above. But the human rights lawyer has ultimately replaced the theologian as the interpreter of divine texts.
“The Olympic Games Paris 2024 were Olympic Games of a new era”, said International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach at the closing ceremony in the Stade de France – whether you like it or not, he might have added.
These games represented everything absurd and self-contradictory about this new “woke” era, which increasingly appears to be a parody of Christianity signed off by a self-indulgent global elite incapable of reproducing the glories of Christendom; a Notre-Dame Cathedral, for instance, or the vastly superior Sainte-Chapelle, commissioned by Louis IX to house the Crown of Thorns; at least the nobility to which this saintly king belonged was one versed in the principles of the Sermon on the Mount rather than the manifesto of de Beauvoir, which can only produce ugliness.
***
One might say that the France of Saint Louis fell long ago, if it ever existed at all, that Marianne replaced the Mary the Virgin, symbolically at least, as Marie Antoinette’s head fell from her body in 1793, that the disinterment of all those royal bones at Saint-Denis was the death blow that inaugurated the modern era. But I think that mystic France really died with Péguy, shot through the head in a field on the Marne on 5 September 1914 “For God’s sake, push ahead!” were his last words as, sword in hand, the soldier-poet led his men into the twentieth century.
The flesh is an extension of spirit, so Thomas Aquinas tells us, but the flesh is also mortal, and no man could up to the hurricane of iron that swept the field that day. Four years later, the Western Front was one vast ossuary. Verdun, perhaps the worst battle in history, was Calvary without the promise of resurrection. A nation is much like a man; when divested of its spirit, it will invariably rot.
Few people have heard of Péguy, a Catholic who was also a committed French socialist; as he marched with the ghosts of Valmy to his destiny on the Marne, he sang both republican and monarchist battle hymns. It was his mystic vision of France that made this possible. Indeed, Péguy’s Christian socialism was more a childlike insistence that he share in the privations and sufferings of his fellow men, even the damned – we don’t know if he died in a state of grace, but what we do know is that he died with his men, and I daresay that’s all that matters. It’s appropriate, then, that Péguy is buried with his men in a mass grave outside the village of Villeroy.
Péguy’s poems are profoundly Christian, and I urge you to read them; while he wasn’t a practicing Catholic, the flower of his verse was rooted firmly in the sacred soil of France, which was France to a man like Péguy whose ideals and near heretical sense of charity were watered by a deep well of spirit that few drink from today. The Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, an admirer of Péguy, referred to him only half in jest as that poet “who wants to be Catholic only if he may have hope for all”.
This sentiment was expressed in Péguy’s poem The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, in which the young Joan wishes to abandon her body to human suffering to save the souls of the damned from eternal perdition. “We are sinners, but we are Christians just the same. We are Christian people. We belong to your people of Christendom”, says Péguy’s Jeanette, how unlike woke political expression today that is so quick to damn and never forgive, let alone cast itself into the fire to save the soul of a Tommy Robinson or a Donald Trump.
***
Is there another place in the world so associated with massacre and revolution than Paris? Bethlehem comes to mind, the birthplace of a revolutionary who threatened the supremacy of a king; Péguy dedicated a poem to the male infants aged under two slain by order of Herod.
“Salvete flores Martyrum, those children less than two / years old are the flowers of all the other martyrs, / That is to say, the flowers that produce the other / martyrs”, wrote Péguy in The Mystery of the Holy Innocents.
“And the bud does not resist at all”, he continues. “That is in fact because it is / not made for resistance, it is not commissioned to resist”, which applies especially to an unborn child who “is only made for being born… to make things last… to make itself loved”.
The culture that could conceive such lines sincerely a hundred years ago no longer exists, as the Olympics opening ceremony would seem to suggest, presenting instead the sort of Dionysian binge that Alexander the Great would have approved of in Babylon. “For it is easier, God says, to ruin than to build; / And to bring death than to bring to birth; / And to kill than to create”, Péguy writes, which applies just as much to art, society and a nation as it does to the killing of innocents, to abortion, which Macron’s France celebrates so explicitly.
That well-known G. K. Chesterton’s saying chimes even louder now: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
This is all rather depressing, isn’t it? Pope Benedict XVI’s 2004 diagnosis of a Europe “without roots”, a culture cut off from its Christian heritage, appears correct and terminal. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as he was then, observed, too, that “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives.”
That was just twenty years ago. And now, the effort to enshrine abortion rights across the European Union has been emboldened further by Macron. Is there anything left of Péguy’s France?
***
I was in France this August during the final week of the Olympics, far away from Paris in the fairytale of the Dordogne, plucking ripe plums straight from the tree – a welcome sojourn from the modern world.
Here I learned that the village where I was staying was ransacked during the Hundred Years War – by which side, I’m unsure. Christendom wasn’t always as chivalrous as the standard set by the chansons de geste; Joan of Arc was burned by her fellow Catholics, but at least the chivalric principle existed, even if was inconsistently applied.
On the final day of the Olympics, I visited the Marian shrine in Rocamadour, built into a cliff like Minas Tirith; Eleanor of Aquitaine came here, and Louis IX and Saint Dominic. Roland’s sword, or rather, a copy of a copy, is embedded in the cliff, or at least it was until it mysteriously disappeared in June, relocated to an American medievalist’s penthouse in Manhattan – not to my mantlepiece, I promise.
You’ll find the usual tourist tat in Rocamadour, of course, cheap icons and gaudy statues, and a shop selling wooden swords to young Rolands who tug at their mothers’ hand, boys eager to defend maidens from imaginary dragons. Nonetheless, in the frenzied gloom of Sanctuaire Notre-Dame, where one feels that anything might happen, I found that Marian France still exists.
I step inside awkwardly as Philip Larkin does in Church Going and wander for a while among the hushed pews and pious flames left by French men and women requesting intercession. I also feel compelled to light a candle of my own, though I wonder what on earth I might pray for. The diminutive black Madonna looks on unperturbed, as she’s done for nearly 900 years; she holds a child in her arms, and I recall what Péguy said: that all children are made to be loved.
Péguy slept under a statue of Mary in a chapel the night before his death. In 1912, he walked from Paris to Chartres, making good on his vow to go on the pilgrimage if the Virgin saved his seriously ill son Marcel; he completed the eighty-mile journey in three days. “Live in peace as we do”, he wrote to his wife before battle in the knowledge that at least Marcel lived, that something of himself would remain.
I pray for France, for its sons and daughters. I do this more in faith than in certainty, not knowing if this prayer shall be granted or if anyone is listening. Is it pathetic? But again, I think of Péguy who wrote that “the most hardened warrior has been a tender infant nourished with milk… / Without that bud which looks like nothing, which seems nothing, / the whole thing would be only dead wood.”
France is a bare tree, its leaves and branches blown away by the artillery fire at Verdun, which was just the beginning of the assault. I hope to see its leaves again, that vaulted canopy that once spread over all of Europe like the roof of a cathedral, before the age of abortion tore it down.
Well, I return to my family, the one constant that waits for me outside the sanctuary; you see, I have a son as well, he’s only an infant, and one day, perhaps, I’ll buy him a wooden sword and shield – but not yet, he’s too young.
