The generously inclusive achievement of poet, dramatist, philosopher, editor, pamphleteer, amateur medievalist, revolutionary socialist, and pious mystic Charles Péguy bespeaks an integrity that understandably remains difficult to identify in conventional political terms. A heretic among Marxists, what Simone Fraisse calls, in the introduction to his Les Critiques de notre temps et Péguy (The Critics of Our Time and Péguy, 1973), a "half-rebellious son" of the Roman Catholic Church, and an ardent patriot who kept his distance from nationalism of the kind preached by Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, he achieved in his life and writings a coherence and independence of moral action based on faith, hope, and charity, virtues that he understood to be inherently consistent with the secular ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The examples of Joan of Arc and St. Vincent de Paul helped inspire Péguy's...