Georges Bernanos: a writer at war against today's guerrillas

We live so overwhelmed by the tragedy of today that we have devalued the concept of an event.

When every piece of news is decisive, every political statement thunderous and every Madrid-Barcelona, ​​the match of the century, the grain does not emerge from the chaff.

It is difficult to recognize events when they occur.

This week, for example, something important has happened that almost no one will find out about: the Rioja publishing house Pepitas de Calabaza publishes

The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon,

by Georges Bernanos.

That a tiny stamp rescues a 1937 book by a French writer that no one reads in Spain may seem so anecdotal that it would not deserve a column in the most important newspaper in Spain, but Mafalda taught us a long time ago to distinguish between the urgent and the important, and this will not be urgent but it is important.

The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon

is one of the basic books on the Spanish Civil War and one of the most influential and cited.

Due to an anomaly that I cannot explain, it had been out of print for years and could not be found in Spanish.

In France, however, it is a very well-known book.

Bernanos was a very famous novelist in the 1930s, and in 1936 he lived in Mallorca, where he was surprised by the military uprising.

A follower of the far-right Maurras, Bernanos was an unapologetic reactionary, ascribed to a wild and monarchical Catholicism that led him to be enthusiastic about the Falange (his son Yves was active there) and to celebrate the Nacionales as saviors of the faith against the red hordes.

But very soon he heard about the repression on the island, and he was frightened by the totalitarian cruelty, the terror of the walks and the dead in the ditches and on the walls of the cemetery.

With the rage of a decent man, he wrote the snatched pages of this book, which are an accusation against the curia, against the bishops and priests who blessed the massacre and called it a crusade.

The great cemeteries under the moon

is an extreme example of courage and humanism that demonstrates that moral decency is not the heritage of any ideology.

Bernanos died marked as a traitor by his former comrades, and as a hero by his political enemies.

He was neither one thing nor the other;

He alone was a free writer and a good guy who never put his pen at the service of anything he did not consider fair.

And that, which sounds like such a small thing, is so extraordinary in these times of walls and cultural guerrillas that he would deserve much more attention than he is going to receive.

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