“Where is your soul, O France? Where is the secret strength of your land? Are yours these people who accept shame and wait to be saved by others without blushing? Rise up, France, and say that it isn’t you who denies and who abdicates your place. It is our personal conversion first and foremost which will return France her soul.”

André CHARLIER (1895-1971)
Professor, Director of L’École des Roches, then of Maslacq, Writer

“In proposing such an audacious program, Charlier knew precisely that for a number of his students and readers of the Cahiers, he was shaking up their Christianity whose mystic dimensions had been amputated and had been reduced to nothing more than what Péguy called a “moral outer skin.” For — must it be underscored? — André Charlier was never a moralist. He always defended himself against such a claim, and in fact, he explained himself in the first Letter from the Cahiers, and at the same time he defined the nature of the effort for perfection that he wished to infuse in the school. “Since adolescence,” he says, “I have always suffered at the sight of imperfection — from my own imperfection first of all, which goes without saying, then from the imperfection that I discovered around me… You see, we will remain in old age what we were at seventeen years old. When, very young, you have had the taste that I speak of, you don’t lose it very easily… I am not a moralist, and I don’t intend to give you a dissertation on morals. I simply want to make you understand that, having the responsibility of L’École de Roches, the only thing that seems to me to be indispensable and urgent is to imbue the school with a certain taste for perfection. And this desire must be put in its daily life, its intellectual life, its spiritual life, in its human relations, in its scholarly work, and even in its games. This is a strange idea, I grant it, but I find it much more important that any pedagogical method.”

André CHARLIER (1895-1971)
Professor, Director of L’École des Roches, then of Maslacq, Writer