Georges Bernanos or the hope of saving grace, on France 2

“The Day of the Lord” concludes its summer 2022 programming in a royal way with an unpublished documentary by Marie Viloin dedicated to Georges Bernanos broadcast before the mass celebrated outdoors in Noirmoutier. Mallorca, in the Balearic Islands, Paqueta, in Guanabara Bay, Brazil, then Djerba, off the Tunisian coast: the novelist of despair and faith loved the islands madly. In Noirmoutier, he would have tasted the memory of the Vendée insurrection.

Ink and Paper Creatures

However, it is not, or very little, the political Bernanos that Father Benoît Lobet, an associate professor of philosophy and classical letters, evokes in this film. He is the novelist chosen among all the others to testify for what lasts against what pretends to last. Commenting in turn Under Satan’s Sun, The Sham, Mr Yesine, Joy and Diary of a country priestthe parish priest of the cathedral Saints-Michel-et-Gudule in Brussels has the gift of making romantic literature a branch of fundamental theology…