Charles Péguy was a French poet, essayist, editor, journalist, and philosopher who worked in the French language and whose two principal intellectual commitments were socialism and nationalism.

Péguy was born on 7 January 1873 in Orléans and pursued his education at the Lycée Lakanal, the Collège Sainte-Barbe, and the École Normale Supérieure. By 1908 at the latest he had become a believing Catholic, a development that ran alongside the political convictions he had long held. Across his career he worked simultaneously as a poet, an essayist, an editor, a journalist, and a philosopher, moving between these roles as a French citizen engaged with the intellectual life of his time.

During his lifetime Péguy received the Knight of the Legion of Honour and the Broquette-Gonin prize in poetry, recognitions that marked his standing as a writer working in verse and prose. His career brought him into sustained engagement with the major questions of French public and intellectual life, shaped by the dual commitments to socialism and nationalism that defined his thinking, alongside the Catholic faith he had embraced.

Péguy did not survive to see the later reception of his work. He was killed in action in World War I, near Villeroy in Seine-et-Marne, and died on 5 September 1914 in Le Plessis-l'Évêque. He was posthumously awarded the Croix de guerre 1914-1918.