Description

FIRST EDITION of this political pamphlet devoted to the work of Édouard Drumont.
One of 2,500 numbered copies on alfax Navarre; there is also an edition in in-4° format.
SIGNED AUTOGRAPH CONSIGNMENT the neurologist Théophile Alajouanine, a member of Action Française:

For Doctor Alajouanine,
story of the last man to speak to the French people.
(There is now only one French audience, and you can't make history with an audience.)
in affectionate gratitude
Bernanos

At the time Bernanos was writing this polemical essay, the publication of Under Satan's Sun had already made him one of the leading writers in the Maurrassian sphere. Actively involved, Bernanos wrote several articles for the newspaper L'Action Française and gave lectures to the movement's students.

Introduced as a child to the thought of Édouard Drumont - Émile Bernanos is said to have read his eight-year-old son the articles in La Libre Parole - Georges Bernanos endeavoured to rehabilitate his work, making him the figure of a lonely and misunderstood hero; evoking, like his model, the fear of the "Jewish conquest"The author emphasises the degrading nature of modernity and the decadence of a society that has renounced religion:

"[L]he Society that is gradually being created before our eyes will realise as perfectly as possible, with a kind of mathematical rigour, the ideal of a society without God. But we won't be able to live there. Our lungs will run out of air. There is no air. The world, which is watching us with growing suspicion, is astonished to see the same dark anguish in our eyes. Already some of us have stopped smiling and are measuring the obstacle with our eyes... We won't be caught... They won't take us alive! (pp. 457-458)

The theme of the alteration of religious meaning would continue to inform the author's novels. On the other hand, and despite the comparison he draws in these pages between Maurras and Drumont, Bernanos broke with Action Française only a year after the publication of The Great Fear.

Fine binding signed Honnelaître.