GREGORY CLAEYS MAURRAS, CHARLES (1868–1952)

GREGORY CLAEYS MAURRAS, CHARLES (1868–1952)

Charles Maurras was a French writer, journalist and political philosopher who, at the turn of the century, became one of the founding fathers of radical nationalism and of the French extreme right, exercising great influence on intellectuals right to the very end of the French Third Republic (1870–1940) and the Vichy regime (1940–4).

After growing up in a traditionalist milieu in the Provence he moved to Paris where he soon frequented literary circles. He started writing for various magazines in which he castigated the excesses and irrationalism of Romanticism and extolled the values of the ancient Greco-Latin world and of a pre-revolutionary, ‘classical’ France. Under the influence of the novelist MAURICE BARRÈS—often referred to as ‘father of French nationalism’—Maurras turned to nationalism, and in the 1890s he joined the anti- Dreyfusards in their campaign against the Jewish officer Dreyfus who was wrongly accused and convicted of being a German spy. Needless to say, Maurras was thoroughly Germanophobe.

Maurras became an ardent federalist and monarchist, arguing that the monarchy prior to 1789 had granted the most liberties to the provinces and communes. His stance in favour of the monarchy and the Catholic Church reflected his hate for anything and anyone considered to be contributing to the disintegration of his ‘eternal France’— Romanticism, modernism, liberals, socialists, freemasons, Protestants, Jews, foreigners. His federalism—Maurras stayed attached to his region of birth by participating in the Félibrige, the movement for the cultural renaissance of the Provence—led him to demand the thorough decentralization of France in his L’Idée de décentralisation (1898).

In 1898/9 a group formed around a periodical called L’Action Française, the movement adopting the same name and Maurras being one of its founders. The Action Française attacked individualism, parliamentarianism and abstract human rights; it stood

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for anti-Semitism and anti-German nationalism, and had links to other movements of the extreme right, such as the Ligue Antisémitique, the Ligue des Patriotes and the Ligue de la Patrie Française. Step by step, Maurras succeeded in persuading the other members of the Action Française to join his royalist platform and create a ‘neo-royalist’ movement. A wider audience was reached with the creation of a daily newspaper in 1908—also called L’Action Française . Despite ideological affinities and occasional co-operation Barrès and Maurras were never bound in a political alliance: the former did not share the enthusiasm for a monarchical regime.

The return of a hereditary monarchy based on the pillars of army and Catholic Church, as well as the rejection of parliamentary democracy, were propagated in many of Maurras’s politicalphilosophical publications, such as Enquête sur la monarchie (Inquiry into the Monarchy, 1900), L’Avenir de l’intelligence (The Future of Intelligence, 1905), La Politique religieuse (1912), L’Action Française et la religion catholique (1913), Kiel et Tanger 1895–1905, La République française devant l’Europe (1910). He was equally prolific and successful in the literary realm with works such as Le Chemin du paradis (1895), Les Amants de Venise: George Sand et Musset (1902), Anthinéa (1901), Le Mystère d’Ulysse (1923) or La Musique intérieure (1925). In recognition of his work Maurras was elected one of the ‘immortals’ of the Académie Française in the year 1938.

On the eve of the First World War the Vatican issued an—unpublished—decree that disapproved of the Action Française as well as of a few of Maurras’s books deemed ‘paganistic’: in spite of his defence of the Church as to its role in public life he himself was an agnostic. Finally, in 1926, the Pope condemned Maurras and the Action Française publicly for putting politics above religion and misrepresenting the Catholic religion. Although the Catholic hierarchy welcomed the role Maurras played in the ‘Catholic renewal’, it was nevertheless concerned about the anti-governmental aspects and the militancy of the Action and especially of its youth wing. This youth movement, called Camelots du Roi, consisted predominantly of students, commercial employees and apprentices, and it was much more radical than the elders and engaged not rarely in violent street demonstrations. In 1908, the Camelots occupied the Sorbonne in protest against a professor who had allegedly slandered Joan of Arc. Although Maurras hardly believed in Joan of Arc as a saint he saw in her a potent symbol of all the values of ‘eternal France’ he did believe in: from the year of her beatification, 1909, onwards he organized, together with Barrès, processions in her honour. Maurras’s anti-Semitism found an outer expression in presiding over the Cercle Proudhon, a movement formed in 1911, whose aim it was to take away political power from the ‘Jewish gold’ and transferring it to ‘French blood’.

In his Enquête sur la monarchie and in Kiel et Tanger Maurras attacked vehemently the idea of democracy. He accused it of furthering only particularistic interests but never the common good; he saw in it the promoter of the reign of money rather than of spirit, thus creating a country divided amongst thousands upon thousands of contradictory interests and undermining morality, family and nation. He argued that a nation was not a sum of questionable, obscure fantasies of ‘liberty’ entertained by mortal voters but the embodiment of the immortal principle of ‘blood and soil’, to which all individuals had to submit themselves. What was needed was a state that would overcome the class system and organize the society along the lines of professional representation and local empowerment: in his view only the monarchy could provide the umbrella under which

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the necessary reorganization of society could take place—if necessary, by means of action of a determined vanguard. The republic, on the other hand, was deemed unsuitable for reaching the aims of what he coined ‘integral nationalism’, since it would lead to either egotistical anarchy or a potentially stifling kind of military or Caesarean dictatorship. That his idea of monarchy was similar to such a dictatorship was not seen by him: he maintained that the marriage of authority from above was with liberties on the local level, and that his notion of ‘integral’ nationalism was the true expression of the French nation’s will.

Admittedly not all, but still many of Maurras’s ideas resemble the concoction of fascism, an assessment that is corroborated by the militant activism of the Action Française and the Camelots du Roi. Maurras did indeed admire Mussolini and support the Vichy regime after France’s defeat of 1940. Therefore he can be regarded not only as one of the fathers of radical nationalism but also of fascism.