Ecological Personalism: The Bordeaux School of Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul[1]
by Christian Roy
The purpose of this paper is to impress upon students of Jacques Ellul’s thought the importance of two vital aspects of its context that have until recently been overlooked and that are still often insufficiently stressed in most English-language literature, at the risk of falling out of step with Ellul’s French reception. Firstly, it should be realized that Jacques Ellul is the visible face of a tandem of thinkers of comparable importance, overshadowing the still obscure figure of Bernard Charbonneau as his intellectual mentor (for social thought at least).[2] Secondly, even though Ellul scholarship mostly treats him as a thinker who appeared out of the blue around mid-century with some important books, the historical fact is that the main outlines of Ellul’s thought and style of political action took shape in the 1930s, in the context of Ellul’s and Charbonneau’s involvement in the French Personalist movement, and that much of their distinctive approach to politics can be read as a critical reflection on that bittersweet initial experience of commitment and counter-cultural activism.
In 1930s France, Personalism as a non-conformist critical position offered a stimulating point of reference and a privileged meeting ground for young people who were genuinely looking for thoughtful, humane ways to achieve the spiritual reorientation and material reorganization that a beleaguered Western civilization seemed to require.[3] However, there was a certain mutual distaste between followers of the two Paris-based organs of Personalism—Esprit and L’Ordre Nouveau, separated by temper even more than by doctrine. A unique regional exception to this pattern was to be found in Southwestern France. The local cells of both wings of the movement operated there in symbiotic relationship, less under Parisian impulses than from initiatives issuing autonomously from two school friends whose intense discussions thus came to find an outlet on this larger stage: Bernard Charbonneau (1910–1996) and Jacques Ellul (1912–1994).
From the 1950s onward, Ellul would, through his many books, transmit to the whole world the fruits of a reflection begun around 1930 in Bordeaux at Charbonneau’s instigation, on the meaning that humanist values could still have in the context of a far-reaching transformation of society under the impact of modern technology. It had been with the aim of translating some of their conclusions into action that they had joined the movement around Emmanuel Mounier’s review Esprit shortly after its launch in October 1932, though they remained in contact with Ordre Nouveau, feeling closer in many respects to this lesser known but earlier Personalist group that had its own review from 1933 to 1938. For one thing, they shared the latter’s federalist hostility to all forms of centralization; Charbonneau and Ellul were unabashedly thinking and acting from the provinces over against the powerful drain of Paris on French life.
However, Charbonneau and Ellul went further than Ordre Nouveau (with its plans for mastering technological progress to humane ends like guaranteed basic income, which they took over) in their questioning of industrial society. They were also inspired to put into practice the communitarian aspirations of Esprit within the framework of the review’s local groups of Friends of Esprit. Their hands-on approach was exemplified by the reflection retreats they organized in the guise of camping trips in the rough natural settings of the Pyrenees or the Landes. There, Charbonneau figured the resistance of concrete reality could offer a foothold to personal freedom in the face of the smoothly abstract conditionings of mass society. According to Charbonneau’s 1937 manifesto on “Feeling for Nature as a Revolutionary Force,” this “must be to Personalism what class consciousness has been to socialism”—as it would later be to political ecology, once it became the only credible opposition to techno-capitalist hegemony.
Cheaply printed in an issue of a regional newsletter of Personalists in Southwestern France with a circulation of eighty, “Le sentiment de la Nature, force révolutionnaire”[4] has a claim to be the founding document of political ecology as an autonomous revolutionary position beyond Right and Left. If France was long much less open to its theme than Germany or the United States, it is not to these countries, with their strong traditions of reverence for Nature, but to this small regional offshoot of the French Personalist tradition, that the origins of the Green movement must be traced. We may see as an ecological Personalism Charbonneau and Ellul’s conscious forays in this direction in the 1930s; as such, their original position constitutes a third branch of French Personalism, beside Ordre Nouveau’s federalist Personalism and Esprit’s communitarian Personalism.[5]
For Charbonneau and Ellul, Personalism implied a striving to discern the larger underpinnings of seemingly unimportant facts of daily life in a changing world, in the conviction that “societies are formed by people’s mentalities, not by their ideals.”[6] Bernard Charbonneau even insisted that “there is no revolutionary ideal,” only ends “derived for us from Christian history: the primacy of the person, the existence of eternal spiritual truths outside of man, the commandment to love one’s neighbor, etc.,” “tending at every instant to their realization, and arousing in this way in the person a constant mistrust of appearances, a taste for very down-to-earth results.” Hence a radical distance from “the great quarrels between fascisms, liberalisms, communisms,” which were all nothing but “spectacular reformisms,”[7] based on a common philosophical ideology: that of quantifiable Progress, which any genuine revolt had to start by negating. At the end of a “Manifesto in 83 points” entitled “Origine de notre révolte,”[8] Ellul and Charbonneau spell out that they are struggling “so that every man may find in a voluntary city what is necessary for him to live. Be it a life minimum for all, only that this life minimum be balanced, be at once material and spiritual. Man is dying of an exacerbated desire for material enjoyment, and for some of not having this enjoyment.” Drafted in 1935, this call to “Revolution for an ascetic civilization, against poverty and against wealth” may be among the first Western appeals for deliberate restraints on economic growth for the sake of quality of life.
Within the Esprit movement, the position of Charbonneau, Ellul, and their friends was strident, distinctive, and localized enough for them to be dubbed the “Gascon group” at its first annual congress in a Paris suburb in 1936. (At the time, that position was sometimes referred to as “charbonniste” within broader Personalist circles.) Indeed, they left the Esprit fold to go their independent way after the second congress in 1937, since they could not impart to it the revolutionary orientations and specific commitments that they deemed indispensable to avoid remaining some kind of liberal debating club. The Bordeaux School and its Protestant friends from Ordre Nouveau were keenly aware of the sociological aspect of the reception of Personalism in France. For it is largely as a way for Catholics to trade in their traditionalist assumptions for “progressive” ones that Personalism, thanks to Mounier’s Esprit, has played a role in history, e.g., as the ideology of many of the technocrats who engineered the post-war modernization of France (as Charbonneau often pointed out, starting with his first book devoted to a self-styled “Personalist” thinker then in vogue and still a patron saint to transhumanists: Teilhard de Chardin, prophète d’un âge totalitaire. Paris: Denoël, 1963). But for Charbonneau and Ellul, this was a betrayal of Personalism’s critical charge, aimed by them at the conformism of compulsory change at the exponential rate dictated by Technique, taking over from that of forced immobility within the immutable cycles of Nature.
Charbonneau maintained that, since mankind has triumphed over Nature by dint of social organization, human beings must now lean on Nature to find spaces of real freedom amidst the oppression of modern society’s rampant conditionings. This is the main thread running through the 1100-page, single-spaced, so-called “theological summa” that he rewrote from wartime drafts over the first half of the 1950s under the general title Par la force des choses. If Ellul could later say that all his books were like chapters of a single work conceived in outline during the war before he wrote any of them, this holds true of Charbonneau as well, for many of his later books are drawn from chapters of that typescript.[9] The significance of this fact to Ellul studies can hardly be overstated, as many of Ellul’s sociological insights could probably be traced back to this massive manuscript by his friend Charbonneau as a summation of their common reflection up to the war, with fascinating differences of emphasis.
For one thing, Bernard Charbonneau never missed an opportunity to tell this writer that his growing focus on Science differed from Ellul’s consistent emphasis on Technique.[10] When Ellul’s book on Technique came out in 1954, Charbonneau seems to have promptly developed reservations about its relative neglect of Science itself as a driving force of what he still called “technical progress” in the Summa he was then compiling with the help of Ellul’s student Jean-Louis Seurin. Science was intimately tied to the central spiritual issue of freedom by the late 1950s in a 300-page abridgment entitled La liberté, which not only sketched his book Je fus, essai sur la liberté, self-published in 1980, but also contained the kernels of his books on a range of topics, many also addressed by Ellul. Among these are two Latin-titled works dealing with Science written later in the following decade: Finis Terrae[11] and especially Ultima Ratio,[12] not to mention large chunks of Le Système et le chaos, a “critique of exponential development” written between 1950 and 1967 and first published in 1973, when Charbonneau and Ellul got to work side by side again as activists in the context of the fledgling French ecological movement.
Nature had not initially been much of an issue for Ellul, whereas it had always been central to Charbonneau, who devoted another hefty wartime manuscript to the topic, entitled Pan se meurt. Reworked for publication in 1969 as Le Jardin de Babylone, it showed how “Nature is an invention of modern times.”[13]
Nature is vanquished, which is why we are becoming aware of it. We have freed ourselves from it; there remains for us to go further, not only beyond nature, but beyond progress. There remains for our strength to choose the boundaries that had previously been imposed by our weakness.[14]
This has special bearing on political ecology, for “the active awareness of nature is a question of morals or better yet of ethics: of an awakening of the spirit. The protection of nature is rooted less in matter than in freedom.”[15] This insistence gave the Bordeaux School its distinctive Personalist profile over against the various combinations of scientism and pantheism to be found within the environmental movement. But while a Personalist-inspired discourse was often used by progressive Christians to justify the sacrifice of France’s countryside to industrial monoculture and mass tourism, the lonely fight against this cultural genocide and natural catastrophe would be Charbonneau’s great cause. An early member of Nature et Progrès, founded in 1964 as the first French association for organic agriculture, in the 1970s he also spearheaded, with Ellul’s help, one of France’s first grassroots environmental campaigns, to resist the misguided State-sponsored development of the Aquitaine coast. Charbonneau devoted books, articles, and lectures to such issues on the fledgling Green scene, even though it promptly lost its way in politics and PR, as he showed in 1980 in his essay The Green Light, A Self-Critique of the Ecological Movement drawing on half a century of preaching in the desert.
Charbonneau would soon develop as a separate book his critique of what he called Mediatized Society, revisiting the “exegesis of commonplaces” devised with Ellul (on the explicit model of maverick Catholic novelist Léon Bloy’s 1902 book Exégèse des lieux communs) as a key Personalist revolutionary method in the 1930s, with local press clubs as grassroots media detox. This would surely warrant Charbonneau’s inclusion in the canon of the discipline of Media Ecology, alongside Ellul who is considered one of its fathers with Marshall McLuhan; the Bordeaux School would then join the Toronto School of Communication as a distinctive approach to the critical understanding of media and all technologies as “extensions of man” (McLuhan).[16]
Ellul’s own breakthrough as a prophet outside his own country had come in 1964 (the same year as McLuhan’s with Understanding Media), when Alfred E. Knopf published the English translation of a book written between 1948 and 1950: The Technological Society. It was due to the discovery of the original French book, La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954), by Aldous Huxley, who promoted it in the United States, as it proved what he had tried to say in Brave New World in 1932. Little did he know that his famous novel’s French translation had then confirmed Charbonneau in his original intuition of the role of Technique, which he nevertheless asked Ellul to develop. Charbonneau preferred to tackle himself the obsession with politics as State capture that he thought hid from his contemporaries the larger issue of unchecked organization under all modern regimes, be they liberal democracies or dictatorships of any stripe. In the context of a new round of Personalist reflection camps, the State and Technique appeared as two sides of the same coin, to be simultaneously described in book form for a larger audience. Ellul even dedicated the Charbonneaus’ copy of La Technique as follows: “To Bernard and Henriette, this book that is their work as much as mine.” The same could have been said by Charbonneau about Ellul’s contribution to his own magnum opus of the same period, L’État, for which he drew extensively on his friend’s historical erudition, in a breathtaking survey of the State’s development into a vortex of centralized power on a par and in tandem with Technique. The book finally came out in 1987, followed since by other original or reissued works.
As a practical outcome of a final series of reflection camps by the sea or in the mountains in the mid-1950s, mostly attended by Ellul’s students, Charbonneau had planned to draft some theses against scientism and technocracy and spread them in the universities that abetted them, like Luther nailing his theses on a church door in Wittenberg; but at that time, Ellul’s hopes of social transformation rested with the Reformed Church. He was more open to Charbonneau’s approach twenty years later, when such an institutionalized Bordeaux School might have found a ready audience in Ellul’s worldwide readership. At the core of a larger spiritual community, it could have been some kind of college of social research devoted to the critique of scientific and industrial development, comparable to the Frankfurt School, whose earliest attempts to focus on these issues are predated by the Gascon Personalists, as are Heidegger’s. By then, Charbonneau and Ellul had to recognize they had become too old to get it off the ground, so that books remained their main channel to reach people beyond a narrow circle of local disciples. They both had a difficult time getting their writings published and talked about in France—especially Charbonneau. He had no religious affiliations and, as a geography and history teacher in a regional Normal School, had shunned a university career in order to remain close to the land (to angling brooks in particular), so he could not, like Ellul, lean on Protestant and academic institutional support. The Bordeaux School, such as it is (from direct disciples of Charbonneau and/or Ellul—like Daniel Cérézuelle, Alain Gras, and André Vitalis—to younger French thinkers inspired by them), stands out among ecological movements in that it remains firmly rooted in the very biblical tradition often blamed for the environmental crisis facing mankind.
For this freedom of man which threatens to destroy him with his earth contains its antidote. It is in the very societies where the science and individualism born of Christianity have developed furthest that feeling for nature and eventually the environmental movement were born.[17]
For the reverent agnostic Charbonneau, if paganism’s “old law is abolished it is in favour of another one that belongs to personal conscience and love: which is true just as much for nature, [...], as it is for the neighbor.”[18] The theological soundness and uncompromising honesty of this skeptic’s faith deeply impressed the convert Ellul. They both came from free-thinking backgrounds, yet each found a demanding personal faith that sharpened rather than stifled critical thought. The Bordeaux School thus continued the Aquitaine region’s local humanistic tradition—stressing concrete freedom and empirical experience, going back to Rabelais, Montaigne, and La Boétie, through Montesquieu and the French Revolution’s Gironde party, to name but some of the kindred spirits born of the same soil. It is against this regional backdrop that the works of Charbonneau and Ellul now need to be read together, a century after they joined this illustrious company.
Bernard Charbonneau (1910–1996): An Introduction to His Life and Thinking
by Daniel Cérézuelle
Born and educated in Bordeaux, under the shadow of World War I, the first truly industrialized war, Charbonneau passed his agrégation in both history and geography but chose not to follow the standard academic career. Instead, he elected employment at a small teachers’ college in order to be able to live a rural life in the Pyrenees. Charbonneau spent almost thirty years of intellectual loneliness in developing his analysis of the socio-economic and environmental costs of modern technoscientific development: what he calls “the Great Molting.”
Early on, Charbonneau became convinced that since the time of the war, humankind was experiencing an utterly new phase in its history, one that displays two basic characteristics. First, the Great War (World War I), as a total war, subordinated reality to the logic of industrial and technological imperatives, which require the mobilization of the whole population, resources (industry, agriculture, forests), and space itself. Indeed, the war achieved as well a mobilization of the inner life of the people who, on both sides, were not just affected by the war, but consented to it, thus justifying the anonymous process that would destroy them. The Great War was the first experience of what Charbonneau describes as “a total social phenomenon,” insisting that it does not have to be totalitarian in order to be total.
Second, this Great Molting is characterized by self-acceleration. Human power takes hold of the entire planet at an ever-accelerating pace. This acceleration is a quasi-autonomous process. It is not a collective project, because most of its effects have not been chosen, and there is no pilot, because it simply rushes forward independently of any direct guidance. Technoscientific and industrial development fosters ever-more rapid change throughout the world, across all aspects of life, without any respect for cultural meaning or purpose. The result is a radical disruption of society and nature, a state of permanent change.
Charbonneau was convinced that contemporary conflicting ideologies (nationalism, fascism, communism, liberalism) are superficial answers to the problems of industrial civilization; they will not change our daily life, the main reason being that “they all share the same religion of production and industrial organization.” The uncontrolled development of industry, technology, and science is the problem and not the solution. In L’État (1987), one of his major books, written during the 1940s but published much later, Charbonneau insists that the issues of technoscientific development, of totalitarianism, and of ecological disruption are interrelated. Charbonneau argues that the modern obsession with production and economic power sooner or later comes into conflict with our need for freedom, because economic and industrial progress can be obtained only by a refinement of the “armature sociale” (“societal frame”). Therefore, “the synthesis between endless progress in freedom and an endless growing comfort is a utopia.” Collective impersonal disciplines, at the cost of personal freedom and responsibility, are the price that has to be paid for economic progress. He describes how the technological and industrial dynamism of liberal society has created the conditions for a total, technocratic organization of social and individual life. In Le Jardin de Babylone (1969), he describes how the expansion of human power and of the techno-industrial order on a planetary scale deprives human beings of a harmonious relationship with nature and threatens not only ecological balance but also human freedom. As Charbonneau shows in Le système et le chaos (1990, written between 1950 and 1967), since human knowledge is limited, and our goals and behaviors are far from being reasonable—not to say rational—the growth of our technical power results in fatally disorganizing effects on both nature and society.
A historian and a geographer by training, from very early on, Charbonneau devoted much energy to identifying and analyzing the multi-dimensional costs of progress and their chaotic results. Since we are building a world of powerful, complex, and vulnerable technologies, we are forced to anticipate everything—not only about nature, but also about human beings. Hence the development of the social sciences and the proliferation of new kinds of experts and specialists for new bureaucracies. The exploitation of nature and the artificialization of life necessitate technologies for the social control of individual and collective behavior. And since techno-economic development has worldwide consequences, only a worldwide organization, something like a world state capable of managing the whole planet, could avoid ecological and political chaos. Charbonneau warns that the disorganizing impact of technological, scientific, and industrial development on nature and on society calls for a total organization of social life that is bound to jeopardize human liberty.
Charbonneau’s criticism of industrial civilization is rooted in what we might call a philosophy of incarnation. He considers that man’s vocation does not consist in achieving pure intellectual freedom, in the philosopher’s way. The highest human achievement rather consists in expressing—or embodying—oneself as much as one can in the circumstances of daily life. It is by incarnating itself in the world and in the life of individuals that freedom reaches its highest point, and spiritual values reveal their truth when they inspire our humblest actions, when they give us the power to realize meaning in a natural or social world which does not know meaning. Therefore, the type of relationship which man establishes with the world for practical issues should not be dictated solely by the rules of technical and economical efficiency. Technology and industry should be judged by taking into account all the consequences that result for the person, body and mind, as a whole. Their impact on the sensuous quality of daily life is for Charbonneau a crucial issue that technoscientific thinking cannot take into account.
Charbonneau maintains that an excessive artificialization of the human environment will eventually result in the end of human freedom. This is why human beings need nature. Thus, precisely because they have now obtained the power of artificializing their world, human beings must consciously decide to limit their powers in order to retain a delicate balance between freedom from nature and freedom in nature.
Annotated Bibliography
by Christian Roy
Books by Bernard Charbonneau
Teilhard de Chardin, prophète d’un âge totalitaire (Teilhard de Chardin, Prophet of a Totalitarian Age). Denoël, 1963, reissued 1981. https://ia600308.us.archive.org/27/items/CharbonneauTdC/Charbonneau_TdC.pdf. A rare critical voice amidst the posthumous vogue of the Jesuit paleontologist and his technophile theodicy—making Christ the Omega Point of the emergent collective mind of evolution as Progress, Charbonneau’s deconstruction of this seductively pseudo-Christian and falsely humanistic ideology is a still potent, scathing indictment of the patron saint of today’s Transhumanist movement, that can help expose the latter’s disturbing implications.
Le paradoxe de la culture (The Paradox of Culture). Denoël, 1965. Later updated and integrated into Nuit et jour, see below.
Dimanche et lundi (Sunday and Monday). Denoël, 1966. Work and leisure as complementary modern categories into which human life is fitted to suit industrial society’s productivist imperative of total organization.
Célébration du coq (Celebration of the Rooster). Robert Morel, 1966; PDF reprint, https://www.fenixx.fr, 2019. Charbonneau gives a free rein to his mordant wit in this satire of French nationalism, and by extension, of every local variant of this universal blight of sentimentalized State-worship.
L’Hommauto (Motoman). Denoël, 1967, reissued 2003. Mass-man driven by the car, not the other way around, illustrating how the mirage of individual freedom is built into the total mobilization of society by Technique. Even world wars have not made as many victims as the automobile, nor as fundamentally redefined all aspects of life, as Charbonneau shows in this biting critique of car culture. The changes it wrought in his native Bordeaux, palpable in daily life but which no media would touch as such in his lifetime, first alerted him as a teenager to the insidious dictatorship of Change for its own sake in industrial society.
Le Jardin de Babylone (The Garden of Babylon). Gallimard, 1969; Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances, 2002; Unauthorized English translation of the Spanish translation, https://libcom.org/article/garden-babylon-nature-revolutionary-force-bernard-charbonneau. Expanding on his ground-breaking 1937 manifesto on “Feeling for Nature as a Revolutionary Force” (see below under Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous), this is Bernard Charbonneau’s definitive statement of his thesis that Nature is a discovery of the very industrial society that destroys it, usually coopting nostalgia for it to drive its own relentless expansion.
La fin du paysage (The End of the Landscape), with Maurice Bardet: foreword and chapter introductions by Charbonneau (reissued separately as Vers la banlieue totale, see below). Photos and captions by MB. Anthropos, 1972. A picture album of the French landscape in the process of degradation by “development.”
Prométhée réenchaîné (Prometheus Rebound). Mimeographed by the author, 1972; La Table ronde, “La petite Vermillon” series, 2001. An anatomy of Revolution and its repeated failures, written in the aftermath of May 1968.
Le système et le chaos. Critique du développement exponentiel (System and Chaos: A Critique of Exponential Development). Anthropos, 1973; Economica, “Classiques des Sciences sociales” series, 1990; Le sang de la Terre, “La pensée écologique” series, 2012; R&N, foreword by Renaud Garcia, 2022. The first full statement of the impossibility of infinite growth in a finite world, and the vicious cycle of totalizing system and chaotic breakdown this mirage generates on the road to global technocratic dictatorship and/or planetary environmental collapse.
Tristes campagnes (Vanishing Countryside). Denoël, 1973; Le pas de côté, 2013. Ironically echoing structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques that made concern over the plight of distant tribes fashionable, Charbonneau tries to get the French to pay attention to the tragedy of a disappearing traditional society on their own doorstep: that of the Béarn countryside where he chose to settle. (Wendell Berry comes to mind…)
Notre table rase (Meagre Pickings). Denoël, 1974. https://archive.org/details/CharbonneauNTR. The metaphorical tabula rasa of what passes for food in industrial society.
Les Écologistes (The Ecologists), with Pierre Samuel. Marabout, “Flash actualité” series, 1977. An introduction to the fledgling environmental movement in French politics, co-written with another member of a group led by other prominent mathematicians, that of the review Survivre et vivre, devoted to the critique of Big Science, to which Charbonneau also contributed.
Le Feu vert. Autocritique du mouvement écologique (The Green Light: A Self-Critique of the Ecological Movement). Karthala, “Poing d’interrogation” series, 1980; Parangon, “L’Après-développement” series, with a series foreword by Daniel Cérézuelle, 2009; L’échappée, foreword by Daniel Cérézuelle, 2022. English translation by Christian Roy, with a foreword by Daniel Cérézuelle and an introduction by Piers. H. G. Stephens, Bloomsbury, 2016. A critical look back at the early years of the environmental movement and its deep roots in Christian (especially Protestant) culture, with the underlying issues of the relationship of nature and freedom, and of their needful but uneasy joining against the totalizing system of technological society that threatens them both. Using this paradoxical tension as a yardstick, Charbonneau probes the ways in which concepts of Nature have developed as industrialization became second nature and jeopardized the original, taken for granted until its advent. This allows Charbonneau to explain how movements and policies claiming to deal with this issue have gone wrong.
Je fus. Essai sur la liberté (I Was: An Essay on Freedom). Self-published, 1980; Opales, foreword by Daniel Cérézuelle, 2000; R&N, 2021. Man as a being who craves for freedom and yet cannot bear it as it is, i.e., the tension-fraught unity of the spirit and the flesh in a contingent mortal existence. He will thus grasp at every conceivable justification to be relieved of the anxiety this awareness brings, as long as he can convince himself he does it freely, even to achieve freedom. Society usually provides ready-made outlets for this impulse, but individual forms of escapism are not spared either in Bernard Charbonneau’s personal call on each reader to join him in the tragic experience of conscious, embodied freedom, which he considered the summation of his life’s lonely journey against every current of modern society.
Une Seconde Nature (A Second Nature). Self-published, 1981; Le sang de la Terre, “La pensée écologique” series, foreword by Daniel Cérézuelle, 2012. Aphorisms around the theme of man’s ambiguous relation to society as his second nature, shielding him from the first one at the price of his own freedom.
L’État (The State). Self-published, 1949; Economica, “Classiques des Sciences sociales” series, 1987, 1999; R&N, 2020. Bernard Charbonneau felt the fetish of the State was such a pervasive hindrance to all critical thought and constructive action that, insisting on tackling it himself, he delegated to Ellul the task of writing the book on his own discovery of Technique. As a kind of historical and theoretical counterpart of Orwell’s 1984, written at the same time, L’État still had to wait forty years to find a proper publisher, despite Ellul’s best efforts to promote it when it first came out as one of Charbonneau’s many samizdats, only available on demand from the author.
Nuit et jour. Science et culture (Night and Day: Science and Culture). Economica, “Classiques des Sciences sociales” series, 1991. The Paradox of Culture (1965, see above) as a “creative” alibi for the “serious” business of Science as modern society’s Ultima Ratio (written by 1986), in a coupling of works that shows Culture and Science to be two sides of the same coin (not unlike Leisure and Work as paired in Dimanche et lundi).
Sauver nos régions. Écologie, régionalisme et sociétés locales (Saving Our Regions: Ecology, Regionalism and Local Societies). Le Sang de la terre, “Les dossiers de l’écologie” series, 1991. Originally titled La planète et le canton (Planet and Township), this book explores the existential connection between the local and the global that defines political ecology as a social project.
Il court, il court, le fric (Money Makes the World Go Round). Opales, 1996. Charbonneau’s 1980s take on this theme to which Ellul also devoted his 1954 book L’Homme et l’argent (Money and Power).
Un festin pour Tantale. Nourriture et société industrielle (A Feast for Tantalus: Food and Industrial Society). Le Sang de la terre, “Saveurs de la terre” series, 1997; Le sang de la Terre, “La pensée écologique” series, 2011; foreword by Michel Onfray. When tasteless, homogenized artificial nutrients become the industrial norm, healthy, varied “organic” food becomes a specialty luxury, part of the very system that makes it a scarce product.
Comment ne pas penser (How to Avoid Thinking). Written in the 1980s; Opales, 2004. Irony as the last resort of thought at the height of seriousness. “These pages were born of the failure to communicate the essence of a life devoted to the creative debate between the individual and his society.”
Bien aimer sa maman (How to Love your Mummy). Opales, 2006. A humorous look at modern society as the individual’s Mother-Goddess, with the underlying structures (the State, the Economy, Science, Culture, etc.) that give her enduring identity under the guise of constant change.
Finis Terrae (Land’s End). Written in the mid-1980s, with a 1990s afterword by the author; À plus d’un titre, “La ligne d’horizon” series, foreword by Didier Laurencin, 2010. The modern conquest of space and time increasingly fills up every corner and every moment of a finite world, depriving us of any meaningful experience of them. (A translation of the first fifty pages by David Bade and Christian Roy is available as a sample, e.g., for potential publishers.)
Le Changement (Change). Completed in 1990; Le Pas de côté, 2013. The industrial world as an endless, boundless, aimless construction site, as inhospitable to life as a war zone.
Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous. Textes pionniers de l’écologie politique (We Are Revolutionaries in Spite of Ourselves: Pioneering Texts of Political Ecology), with Jacques Ellul. Le Seuil, “Anthropocène” series, introduction by Quentin Hardy, with critical notes by Christian Roy, 2014. This is a collection of four early texts from the time of the close collaboration of Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul as leaders of a regional branch of the Personalist movement in Southwestern France, to which they gave their unique technocritical stamp, likely making it the world’s first recognizable example of political ecology as a revolutionary movement in its own right beyond Right and Left, as shown in a fine historical introduction. It starts with the only known overtly text co-authored by Charbonneau and Ellul, “Guidelines for a Personalist Manifesto” (1935, already published as “Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste” in Cahiers Jacques-Ellul no 1, “Les années personnalistes,” 2004, pp. 63-79), followed by three dazzlingly prophetic Charbonneau texts: “Progress Against Man” (“Le Progrès contre l’Homme,” 1936), “Feeling for Nature as a Revolutionary Force” (“Le sentiment de la Nature, force révolutionnaire,” 1937) and “The Year 2000” (“An deux mille,” 1945, on the implications of the A Bomb), the latter available in an English translation by Louis Cancelmi at https://www.signals-noise.com/2017/03/17/bernard-charbonneau-political-ecology/.
Lexique du verbe quotidien (Lexicon of Everyday Speech). Héros-Limite, “Feuilles d’herbe” series; foreword by Alexandre Chollier, 2016. A collection of long-form columns arranged in word entries that first appeared in the Protestant weekly Réforme in the 1950s, containing early formulations of many of the themes Bernard Charbonneau would go on to develop in his books in subsequent decades.
L’Homme en son temps et en son lieu (Man in His Time and Place). R&N, Ars Longa Vita Brevis series; foreword by Jean Bernard-Maugiron, 2017. In this brief text written in 1960, Bernard Charbonneau examines the vital role of time and place in enabling or hampering human freedom, in an era when technology fractures and shrivels them.
Quatre témoins de la liberté (Montaigne, Rousseau, Berdiaeff, Dostoïevski) (Four Witnesses to Freedom: Montaigne, Rousseau, Berdiaeff, Dostoevsky). R&N, Ars Longa Vita Brevis series, with a foreword by Daniel Cérézuelle, 2018. Bernard Charbonneau’s testament on freedom as the lodestar of his thought, revisited in his final years through the prism of four authors who helped him articulate aspects of this common theme.
Vers la banlieue totale (Towards Total Sprawl). Eterotopia, “Rhizome” series, 2018. A separate reissue of Charbonneau’s essays accompanying sections of the photo book La fin du paysage published with Maurice Bardet in 1972 (see above).
Le totalitarisme industriel (Industrial Totalitarianism). L’Échappée, “Le pas de côté” series, foreword by Pierre Thiesset, 2018. A collection of Charbonneau’s columns “Chroniques du terrain vague” (“Chronicles of the Vacant Lot”) for La Gueule ouverte between 1972 and 1977 and of articles published in Combat Nature from 1974 to his death in 1996, that made him a respected radical voice in the French ecological movement he pioneered and steadfastly championed.
La nature du combat : pour une révolution écologique (The Nature of the Struggle: For an Ecological Revolution), with Jacques Ellul. L’Échappée, “Le pas de côté” series, foreword by Frédéric Rognon, afterword by Pierre Thiesset, 2021. A collection of articles by Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul for the ecological review Combat Nature (1974-2004).
La Société médiatisée (Mediatized Society). Self-published, 1986; R&N, foreword by André Vitalis, afterword by Christian Roy. Serialized English translation nearing completion at https://www.patreon.com/christianroymedia. Charbonneau’s reflection on media owed much to the bitter experience of being ignored by Technological/Mediatized Society for dealing with its mechanisms as such rather than taking sides in dominant discourses about current affairs, under cover of which it reshapes human reality unimpeded. Such immediate and profound change does not even count as news for the media that screen out any serious discussion of it, tacitly justifying it instead of informing the public about its implications so people could form their own judgment. “The media are blind to the daily realities that come back every day. They need new stuff, instantly forgotten in favour of some other new thing.”(52–53) This is the law of the scoop that governs “information-publicity-propaganda” as a single set of phenomena, which gives its title to the second part of La Société médiatisée, fulfilling the transition “from speech to its industrial reproduction” covered in the first part. What this leads to in the third part is the “manufacturing of an antireality”, besides which Corporate or State censorship is secondary: for the censorship of a Third Power—the Media—is automatic, beyond the awareness of those who experience it or who exert it, as we now know too well as willing pawns of data algorithms. In a final part, Charbonneau explores some avenues to get beyond mediatized information and regain access to the kind of direct personal knowledge that humans thirst for as mediators of meaning.
La Propriété c’est l’envol. Essai sur la bonne et la mauvaise propriété (Property is Heft [sic]: An Essay on Good and Bad Property). Self-published, 1984; R&N, foreword by Daniel Cérézuelle. “At once means and obstacle, it would be just as unrealistic to want to eliminate property as it would be immoral to sacralize it. But this book entreats us not to let ourselves be caught in abstract alternatives. For or against property? We first need to know what property we mean, within which limits, and in what context.”
Le Plus et le Moins. De la hiérarchie (More and Less. On Hierarchy). Self-published, late 1980s. On a related topic to the previous entry, this is perhaps the last of what Charbonneau called his samizdats (privately circulated as mimeographs since no publisher would touch them in his lifetime, a spontaneous systemic censorship no less efficient than the State-sponsored one Eastern bloc dissidents devised this format to discreetly get around) to remain without a publisher. A fresh approach to the topic that surely cries out for one at a time when all options, even tech-driven neo-reactionary ones, are (back) on the table after a triumphalist liberal cosmopolis has flipped into something reminiscent of fascism (validating the provocative view of the sociological pipeline leading from one to the other, as developed by Charbonneau and Ellul in a comparable interwar historical context).
L’Esprit court les rues (Words of Wisdom on the Street). Unpublished, early 1990s. The wisdom of French idioms as collected and commented by Bernard Charbonneau, being his own final word and democratic statement on the primacy of vernacular common sense over specialized expert knowledge.
Articles by Bernard Charbonneau
Bernard Charbonneau published a great many articles in several periodicals, starting with those of the Personalist movement. Aside from contributing a few important articles (e.g., on advertising and on education) to its main review Esprit, along with Ellul, he wrote much of the material of tiny-circulation internal newsletters of the movement’s regional branches in Southwestern France, where most of their key ideas were first articulated. After the war, Ellul would be instrumental in giving Charbonneau access to Protestant publications, such as the student journal Le Semeur, to which he occasionally contributed from 1945 to the 1980s, and especially the weekly Réforme from 1950 to the early 1960s, where the topics of their respective books were often first sketched—even those of one by the other in some cases! After getting a second wind as an elder statesman of the environmental movement of the 1970s, Charbonneau had a regular column in La Gueule ouverte (The Gaping Mouth), an appropriately irreverent ecological spin-off of the satirical paper Charlie-Hebdo, from 1972 to 1977, and would also contribute to the regional newspaper La République des Pyrénées from 1977 to 1983, as well as to the environmentalist review Combat Nature from 1974 to his death in 1996. In the early 1990s, at the instigation of Christian Roy, Charbonneau also contributed to special issues of the Montreal-based trilingual “transcultural magazine” Vice Versa on the themes of nature, work, and media. (See some translations in C. Roy, “Ellul and Charbonneau on Culture, Science, Nature, Freedom,” The Ellul Forum 75 (Fall 2025): 3–18.)
Secondary Literature on Bernard Charbonneau
by Christian Roy
Academia.edu: a search on this website currently yields around twenty academic papers in pdf.
Bernard-Maugiron, Jean. La Grande Mue website. https://lagrandemue.wordpress.com/. The go-to source for a steady supply of materials by and about Charbonneau. The site is named after Charbonneau’s central concept of the Grande Mue, anticipating recent acknowledgments of the Anthropocene era as that of the Great Molting of the human species, emancipated from nature’s constant pressure only to succumb to a “second nature” of its own making: totalized society.
Cérézuelle, Daniel. Bernard Charbonneau ou la critique du développement exponentiel. Le passager clandestin, “Les Précurseurs de la décroissance” series (Serge Latouche, ed.), 2018. A pocket-size survey and anthology.
Cérézuelle, Daniel. “Critique de la modernité chez Charbonneau.” In Patrick Troude-Chastenet, ed., Sur Jacques Ellul. L’Esprit du temps, 1994, pp. 61–74.
Cérézuelle, Daniel. Écologie et liberté. Bernard Charbonneau : précurseur de l’écologie politique. Parangon/Vs, “L’Après-développement” series, 2006; reissued as Nature et liberté : introduction à la pensée de Bernard Charbonneau. L’Échappée, 2022.
Chastenet, Patrick. Introduction à Bernard Charbonneau. La Découverte, 2024.
Chastenet, Patrick. Les racines libertaires de l'écologie politique. Paris: L'échappée, 2023.
Fialka, Gerry, Christian Roy, Piers Stephens, and David Bade. Zoom salon, March 7, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWjK3AnAOag.
Louis, Florence, ed. Résister au totalitarisme industriel: Actualité de la pensée de Bernard Charbonneau. R&N, 2022. Proceedings of a conference on Charbonneau held in Bordeaux in 2019.
Prades, Jacques, ed. Bernard Charbonneau. Une vie entière à dénoncer la grande imposture. Érès, “Socio-économie” series, 1997. A fairly complete list of Bernard Charbonneau’s writings, compiled by Roland de Miller, appeared at the end of the proceedings of the first conference devoted to him in Toulouse a few weeks after his death.
Rognon, Frédéric, and Jacob Marques Rollison, eds. Face aux défis écologiques et technologiques. L’éthique de Bernard Charbonneau et Jacques Ellul. R&N, 2024. Proceedings of a conference on Charbonneau and Ellul held in Strasbourg in 2021.
Roy, Christian. “Aux sources de l’écologie politique : le personnalisme gascon de Bernard Charbonneau et Jacques Ellul.” Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d’histoire 27 (April 1992): 67–100.
Roy, Christian. “Bernard Charbonneau’s Ecological Reflection on Violence and War in Society, the State and Revolution.” The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence 4, no. 2 (2020): 158–76. https://trivent-publishing.eu/img/cms/9-%20Christian%20Roy_full.pdf.
Roy, Christian, “Beyond Ellul’s Technique: Science as Ultima Ratio according to Bernard Charbonneau”, in David W. Gill & Lisa Richmond, Questioning Technology with Jacques Ellul. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2025, 123-147
Roy, Christian. “Ecological Personalism: The Bordeaux School of Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul.” Ethical Perspectives (organ of the European Ethics Network) 6, no 1 (April 1999): 33–44. Summarized as document no. 698481 in Philosopher’s Index 36 (2003), available online at https://hiw.kuleuven.be/ethical-perspectives/archived.articles/6-1.pdf.
Roy, Christian. “Technological Society as Mediatized Society: An Introduction to Bernard Charbonneau’s Media Critique in its Bordeaux School Context.” New Explorations 2, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 113–28. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj/article/view/37381/28670.
Roy, Christian. “The Work of Bernard Charbonneau with Christian Roy.” Interview, November 11, 2020. https://podtail.com/podcast/hermitix/the-work-of-bernard-charbonneau-with-christian-roy/.
Troude-Chastenet, Patrick. “Bernard Charbonneau : Génie méconnu ou faux prophète?” Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée 4, no. 1 (May 1997): 189–207.
[1] This is a revised version of a paper initially given at the IJES conference “Prophet in the Technological Wilderness: A Centenary Celebration and Critical Review of Jacques Ellul (1912–1994)”, Wheaton College, July 8–10, 2012, itself a distillation of an article of the same title published in Ethical Perspectives (organ of the European Ethics Network) 6, no 1 (April 1999): 33–44 (summarized as document no. 698481 in vol. 36 of Philosopher’s Index, 2003), downloadable at https://hiw.kuleuven.be/ethical-perspectives/archived.articles/6-1.pdf.
[2] This state of affairs can be likened to the asymmetrical reception of another pair of major existential thinkers, converts to the Jewish and Protestant traditions respectively: Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock, the latter just starting to get more of the share of attention he deserves. See Wayne Cristaudo. Religion, Redemption, and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
[3] Often misunderstood and misrepresented as some kind of sophisticated “French fascism,” especially in English-language literature, “non-conformism” as used here refers to a quest beyond the conventional right and left for political alternatives to both the liberal consensus and its totalitarian rivals, among Francophone intellectuals who came of age around 1930. Its classic 1969 treatment was later updated, e.g., to take into account my research on “Gascon Personalism” as a source of political ecology: Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle (1940–2025), Les non-conformistes des années 30 : une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française. Paris: Seuil, 2001 (downloadable at https://classiques.uqam.ca/contemporains/loubet_del_bayle_jean_louis/non_conformistes_annes_30/non_conformistes_annes_30.pdf). Since then, the range of groups included in the “non-conformist” spectrum has been extended to some of Surrealist derivation, whose close ties with Gascon Personalists especially, mentioned in my earlier research, are beginning to be explored (with a collection of original documents in the offing) in a book I am currently translating into English: Thomas Keller, Anthropologien des Sakralen. Eine. Geschichte des französischen Nonkonformismus (1937–1947). Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2023. This connection is already discussed in my contribution to a Jacques Ellul journal issue edited by Jacob Rollison: C. Roy, “Mass Movements, the Sacred, and Personhood in Ellul and Bataille: Parallel Sociological Analyses of Liberalism, Fascism, and Communism,” in Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence 7, no. 2 (2023), https://trivent-publishing.eu/img/cms/5-%20PJCV%207-2-%20Christian%20Roy.pdf.
[4] Journal intérieur des groupes personnalistes du Sud-Ouest (Bayonne, Bordeaux, Pau et Toulouse), June 1937. Included in B. Charbonneau and J. Ellul, Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous. Textes pionniers de l’écologie politique (Quentin Hardy, Sébastien Morillon and Christian Roy, eds.), Paris : Seuil, “Anthropocène” series, 2014.
[5] See C. Roy, “Aux sources de l’écologie politique: Le personnalisme gascon de Bernard Charbonneau et Jacques Ellul,” Canadian Journal of History/ Annales canadiennes d’histoire 27, no. 1 (April 1992): 67–100 (Best Essay by a Graduate Student Award for 1991).
[6] B. Charbonneau, “L’esprit personnaliste,” text of an undated pre-war speech.
[7] B. Charbonneau, “Les actes nécessaires,” in Bulletin du groupe de Bordeaux des Amis d’Esprit, no. 2, around 1936.
[8] In Journal du groupe personnaliste de Bordeaux, no. 8/9. Published by Patrick Chastenet as B. Charbonneau and J. Ellul, “Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste,” Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques 9 (1999) and included in Charbonneau and Ellul, Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous (p. 80 cited here).
[9] Available among the Bernard Charbonneau Papers in the Archives of the Political Science Library of the University of Bordeaux in Pessac.
[10] See C. Roy, “Beyond Ellul’s Technique: Science as Ultima Ratio According to Bernard Charbonneau,” in David W. Gill and Lisa Richmond, Questioning Technology with Jacques Ellul. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2025, 123–147.
[11] B. Charbonneau, Finis Terrae. Paris : À plus d’un titre, “La ligne d’horizon” series, 2010.
[12] It was published jointly with the reissue of Le Paradoxe de la Culture (Paris: Denoël 1966) as the diptych Nuit et Jour - Science et Culture, Paris: Economica, “Classiques des Sciences sociales” series, 1991.
[13] B. Charbonneau, Le Jardin de Babylone. Paris: Gallimard, 1969, p. 17. This book was reissued in 2002 by Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances (the Situationist press). It was translated into Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, the latter edition serving as the basis of an unauthorized English translation downloadable at https://files.libcom.org/files/The%20Garden%20of%20Babylon%20-%20Bernard%20Charbonneau.pdf.
[14] Ibid., p. 32.
[15] B. Charbonneau, The Green Light: A Self-Critique of the Ecological Movement. Tr. Christian Roy. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, p. 86. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-green-light-9781350027077/
[16] See my translation of B. Charbonneau, La Société médiatisée (Paris : R & N, 2021), crowdfunded as Mediatized Society at https://www.patreon.com/christianroymedia, 2021–2026 (until a bricks-and-mortar publisher is found for the manuscript, nearing completion at this writing), and my upcoming paper on “The Primacy of Speech in Bernard Charbonneau’s Media Ecology” for the IJES conference “The Humiliated Word in a Time of Crisis,” at the University of Notre Dame, July 14–16, 2026.
[17] B. Charbonneau, The Green Light, p. 85.
[18] Ibid., p. 83.