Charles Péguy

For fourteen years, Péguy edited a literary review that came out roughly every two weeks. He founded it in January 1900 from a small bookshop opposite the Sorbonne, and he kept it going until he was killed leading his infantry section at the First Battle of the Marne on 5 September 1914. Two hundred and twenty-nine cahiers, across fifteen series, every one of which he signed as gérant on the colophon.

He paid his contributors and his printer at perpetual financial loss and gathered around the journal a generation of writers — Romain Rolland, Daniel Halévy, Maxime Vuillaume, Julien Benda, Paul Milliet, René Salomé, André Suarès, Joseph Reinach, and many more. Today Péguy is remembered for a handful of his own writings: Notre jeunesse, Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc, Ève. The journal that consumed his adult life is largely forgotten.

This archive is built around that corrective: every cahier in its original form, in French and in English translation, with the editorial apparatus — Péguy's Avertissements, the colophons, the back-cover commerce notices — preserved as he printed them.

The cahiers exist on Archive.org and Gallica as JP2 image scans only. This archive provides the full text in clean, continuous, searchable form for the first time.