BARRÈS, MAURICE (1862–1923)

BARRÈS, MAURICE (1862–1923)

Maurice Barrès, writer, politician, member of the Académie Française and Déroulède’s successor as leader of the Ligue des Patriotes (Patriot League) was a key figure in the evolution of modern French nationalism. Credited with coining the term ‘nationalist’ in a newspaper article of 1892, Barrès has been identified as the father of modern nationalism. In the context of Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, French nationalism lost its republican universalism and became increasingly associated with anti-Semitism, xenophobia and a discourse of decadence and corruption. This transition from a republican ‘open’ nationalism of the left to a ‘closed’ nationalism of the right is embodied in Barrès’ career and literary legacy.

Entries A-Z 47 Barrès was born in Lorraine in 1862, but moved to Paris at the age of 20, determined

to make his mark on the literary scene. The tension between pride in his Lorraine roots and a life spent in Paris was just one of the many contradictions within Barrès. Indeed, Barrès’s thought lacked coherence; despite the concordances between their ideas, Barrès and CHARLES MAURRAS of Action Française (French Action) were poles apart in their intellectual approaches. Whereas Maurras was a doctrinaire positivist who arrived at monarchism through reason, Barrès, who rejected monarchism, developed an aesthetic approach to nationalism. Indeed Barrès introduced the term ‘intellectual’ in a pejorative sense, owing to his belief that society was not founded on logic or reason but prior necessities.

Barrès’s first ‘Culte de Moi’ (cult of myself) novels sponsored unrestrained individualism in search of self-development and Barrès exalted action and ‘energy’. This dynamism drew him to Boulangism and a politics of anti-parliamentarian, anti-bourgeois revolt, attacking the opportunist republic in the name of the people’s tradition of 1789, 1830 and 1848. Barrès opposed the parliamentary republic in the name of a regenerated national republic and developed a syncretic nationalism, integrating the military glories of the French republic into the long history of French greatness. The same went for Napoleon, saluted as a ‘professor of energy’, at whose tomb the young Lorrainian protagonists of Les Déracinés (The Uprooted, 1897) are inspired with will, audacity and appetite. It was precisely this energy that France lacked under the parliamentary republic, which symbolized France’s decadence. A discourse of sickness and decadence was central to this new nationalism, which stressed internal sources of corruption. In the ‘national energy’ novels Barrès portrayed the Opportunist republic as in thrall to the Frankfurt-born Jewish banker Jacques de Reinach.

Anti-Semitism and xenophobia, the dominant characteristics of the nationalism of the 1890s, made Barrès an anti-Dreyfusard, joining the Ligue de la Patrie française (League of the French Fatherland). For Barrès the issue at stake was that of national greatness; the Dreyfusard intellectuals had demoralized the army, weakening the French nation, as revealed by Fashoda, where the French army was forced to withdraw before the British. Barrès’s analysis chimed with that of Maurras, concluding the Dreyfus was capable of treachery on account of his race. Barrès’s anti-Semitism however was not racially based, but an expression of his new conception of nationalism. This is best illustrated with reference to Alsace-Lorraine. Whereas JOSEPH-ERNEST RENAN, in keeping with the political voluntarist tradition of the Revolution, held that the people of Alsace-Lorraine were French because they wanted to be French, Barrès claimed that their history and traditions made them French. For Barrès Alsace-Lorraine was a Gallo-Roman and Catholic region that had consistently opposed German barbarism. Nationalism for Barrès was based on ‘la terre et les morts’, the land and the dead. To be a nationalist was to be aware of this spiritual communion and accept the role ascribed by birth. Thus the eponymous heroine of Colette Baudoche (1909) breaks off her engagement to a German on realising her French identity through her community’s commemoration of the dead of 1870.

This conception of nationalism led Barrès to stress regional identity. The Third Republic’s error was over-centralization, a centralization that led the schooling system to neglect to teach children to love their region, creating a nation of déracinés (uprooted). Moral unity was to be found through an awareness of one’s roots, an intimate connection

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to the locality and the past, symbolized above all in the graveyard. Barrès developed a cult of ancestors and provinces, involving the heroes of the national past, particularly the dead of 1870 and the very landscape. Barrès’s France exhibited a geography of patriotism, patterned by sites of national memory such as Donrémy or, for Lorrainers, Metz.

Barrès’s admiration for the fixity of the past drew him in a conservative direction, affirming the necessity of a shared religion, despite a personal lack of faith and purely aesthetic appreciation of Catholicism. Nationalism took Barrès from the socialist left to the conservative right. The young Barrès, elected as a Boulangist socialist at Nancy in 1889, tried to define a French socialism, distinct from German-Jewish materialism, as editor of the newspaper La Cocarde (The Cockade) and in his 1898 Nancy programme linked nationalism to socialism through an appeal to protectionism, restrictions on immigration and hostility to naturalized citizens. The Barrès who was elected as a deputy for Paris in 1906 (a seat held until his death) became a conservative member of the Union Sacrée (Sacred Union) of 1914 and appealed for national unity above all. Ultimately Barrès’s personal evolution was the evolution of a modern nationalist, from the cult of the self to the submergence of the self in the nation, from anti-bourgeois rhetoric to an emphasis on tradition, from left to right. Some see a more sinister development: the language of decadence and internal corruption, the exaltation of energy and action, anti- Semitism and an arational determinism make Barrès a precursor of fascism.