The myth of the abbé Pierre has at its disposal a precious asset: the physiognomy of the abbé himself. It is a fine physiognomy, which clearly displays all the signs of apostleship: a Franciscan haircut, a missionary’s beard, all this made complete by the sheepskin coat of the worker-priest and the staff of the pilgrim.  Thus are united the marks of legend and those of modernity.

The haircut, for example, half shorn, devoid of affectation and above all of definite shape, is without doubt trying to achieve a style completely outside the bounds of art and even of technique.  One has to have one’s hair cut, of course; but, at least, let this necessary operation imply no particular mode of existence. Let it exist, but don’t let it be anything in particular.  The abbé Pierre’s haircut, obviously devised so as to reach a neutral equilibrium between short hair (in indispensable convention, if one wants to go unnoticed) and unkempt hair (a state suitable to express contempt for other conventions), thus becomes the capillary archetype of saintliness.

But at this point things get more complicated—unknown to the abbé, one hopes—because here as everywhere else, neutrality ends up functioning as the sign of neutrality, and if you really wished to go unnoticed, you would be simply back where you started.  This “zero” haircut, then, is simply the label of Franciscanism; first conceived negatively so as not to contradict the appearance of sainthood, it quickly becomes a superlative mode of signification: it dresses up the abbé as St. Francis. Hence the tremendous iconographic popularity of this haircut in illustrated magazines.

The beard goes through the same mythological routine. True, it can simply be the attribute of a free man, detached from the daily conventions of our world and who shrinks from wasting time in shaving.  Fascination with charity may well be expected to result in this attitude, but we are forced to notice that ecclesiastical beards also have a little mythology of their own.  Among priests, it is not up to chance whether one wears a beard or is clean shaven; beards are chiefly the attributes of missionaries or Capucin monks. They signify apostleship and poverty. Shaven priests are supposed to be more temporal, bearded ones more evangelical; [in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame], the wicked Frolo is beardless, the good père de Foucauld, bearded.  Behind a beard, one belongs a little less to one’s bishop, to the hierarchy, to the Church as a political force; one looks freer, a bit independent, more primitive in short.  By benefiting from the prestige of the first hermits, enjoying the blunt candour of the founders of monastic life, the wearer of a beard explores the slums in the same spirit as the land of the early Britons or Nyasaland.

The problem is not to know how this forest of signs has been able to grow on the abbé Pierre….I am only wondering about the enormous consumption of such signs by the public.  I see it reassured by the identity of morphology [the abbé’s appearance] and vocation [priest-hood] in spectacular form.  The public has no doubts about the latter because it knows the former, and no longer has access to the real experience of apostleship except through the bric-à-brac associated with it.  The public gets used to acquiring a clear conscience by merely looking at the shop window of saintliness; and I get worried about a society which consumes so avidly the display of charity that it forgets to ask itself questions about charity’s consequences, uses, and limits.  And I then start to wonder whether the fine and touching physiognomy of the abbé Pierre is not the alibi which a sizeable part of the nation uses in order, once more, to substitute with impunity the signs of charity for the reality of justice.