Liberty: The Last Essays

Liberty: The Last Essays, prepared shortly before Georges Bernanos’s death, is a final reckoning with the modern world. Written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, these five essays confront the central problems facing the world, Europe, France, each man and woman: the advent of the atomic age, the devolution of democracy, the threat of totalitarianism, the loss of true liberty, and the drastic despiritualization of society. Yet, notwithstanding the blind complacency and grave evils of his time, Bernanos holds aloft the still-intact thread of hope: the possibility of sanctity springing eternal because “it is always the era of the saints.” Ringing with the same passion and prophetic vigor which animates Bernanos’s novels, intermixed with acerbic asides and ironic critiques, the truths of Liberty: The Last Essays are as disquieting and demanding today as they were to their author’s contemporaries.