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__FORCETOC__ Charles Maurras (April 20, 1868 Martigues Bouches-du-Rhône France – November 16, 1952) was a French author, poet, and critic. He was a leader and principal thinker of the reactionary Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary.
Life Maurras was brought up in a Catholic and monarchist environment. (France has been steadfastly a republic since 1875.) Some time in his youth, he lost his faith. In his early teens he became profoundly deaf. At the age of seventeen he came to Paris and worked on a number of periodicals including La Cocarde (The Cockade), a republican review which supported Georges Boulanger, and the Catholic Observateur français. He reported on the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. He became involved in politics at the time of the Dreyfus affair — he was, as one can expect, extremely anti-Dreyfusard. In 1899 he joined the Action Française founded by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois the preceding year. Maurras quickly became influential in the movement, and converted Pujo and Vaugeois to monarchism, which became the movement's principal cause. With Léon Daudet he edited the movement's review La Revue de l'Action française, which in 1908 became a daily newspaper under the shorter title L'Action française. In 1904, France passed a law purporting to "separate" the French state from the Catholic Church, but that in fact placed that Church and its clergy under a number of legal handicaps that critics saw as violating religious freedom. The law also did not apply to Protestant denominations (France has significant Calvinist and Lutheran minorities) or to organized Judaism. Many orthodox Catholics utterly detested this law, which explains why Maurras's anti-democratic and reactionary Catholic message found many willing hearers. He supported France's entry into the First World War (even to the extent of supporting the thoroughly republican Georges Clemenceau) against Germany, a constitutional monarchy that formally recognized (Lutheran) Christianity. Maurras was ambivalent about the Second World War, because he believed that Jews, Freemasons, and Protestants sought to control the entire political life of France. Although passionate about his country, he hailed its invasion by Nazi Germany and Pétain's accession to power (Vichy France) as a "divine surprise." Under the occupation, he opposed both the collaborators in Paris and the "dissidents" in London. He later claimed he believed that Pétain was playing a "double game", working for an Allied (western front) victory in secret. Both Pétain and De Gaulle were influenced by his philosophy of integralism. Maurras was arrested in September, 1944, and sentenced to death for collaboration with the German occupation. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, deprivation of civil liberties and expulsion from the Académie française. His response to his conviction was to exclaim "C'est la revanche de Dreyfus!" (It's Dreyfus's revenge!) Imprisoned in Riom and then Clairvaux, he was released in 1952 to enter a hospital, where he soon died. In his last days, he returned to the Catholic faith of his childhood. Maurras political thought Central to Maurras' political ideas were an intense nationalism (what he described as "integral nationalism") and a belief in an ordered society based on a strong leadership. These were the bases of his support for both a French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. Yet he had no personal loyalty to the house of Bourbon-Orléans, and was a convinced agnostic for nearly all of his adult life. Like many people in Europe at the time, he was haunted by the idea of "decadence," partly inspired by his reading of Taine and Renan. He felt that France had lost its grandeur during the Revolution of 1789, a grandeur inherited from its origins as a province of the Roman Empire and forged by, as he put it, "forty kings who in a thousand years made France." The Revolution of 1789, he wrote in the Observateur français, was negative and destructive. He traced this decline further back, to the Enlightenment and the Reformation; he described the source of the evil as "Swiss ideas," a reference to the adopted nation of Calvin and the birth nation of Rousseau. Maurras further blamed France's decline on "Anti-France", which he defined as the "four confederate states of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons and foreigners" (his actual word for the latter being the far less polite métèques). Indeed, to him the first three were all "internal foreigners." Anti-Semitism and anti-Protestantism were common themes in his writings. He believed that the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the eventual outcome of the French Revolution had all contributed to individuals putting themselves before the nation, with consequent negative effects on the latter, and that democracy and liberalism were only making matters worse. During World War I, the Jewish businessman Emile Ullman was forced to resign from the board of directors of the Comptoir d'Escompte after Maurras accused him of being a German agent. Although the political strategies Maurras advocated were familiar to French monarchists, in many ways Maurras did not fit into the French monarchist tradition at all. His views were — at least according to him — based on Reason rather than on sentiment, loyalty and faith. Paradoxically, he admired of the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte, like many of the Third Republic leaders he detested. Whereas most French monarchists declined to engage political action, retreating into an intransigently conservative Catholicism and an indifference to a modern world they saw as irredeemably wicked and apostate, Maurras was prepared to engage in political action, both orthodox and unorthodox (the Action Française's paramilitary Camelots du Roi frequently engaged in street violence with socialists and communists). His slogan was the phrase La politique d'abord! ("Politics first!"). Maurra's religious views were likewise less than orthodox. He supported the political Catholic Church both because it was intimately bound up with French history and because its hierarchical structure and clerical elite mirrored his image of an ideal society. He considered the Church to be the mortar which held France together, and the chain linking all Frenchmen together. However, he distrusted the Gospels, written, as he put it, "by four obscure Jews" (Le Chemin du Paradis, 1894), but admired the Catholic Church for having allegedly concealed much of the Bible's "dangerous teachings." Maurras' interpretation of the Gospels, as well as his integralist teachings, were fiercely criticised by many Catholic clergy. Maurras can be seen as advocating a Catholicism without Christianity and its messianic Jesus, insofar as this was possible. In this respect, his religious views resembled those of a number of his contemporaries including Adolf Hitler. Maurras and others did not want to reject Christianity wholesale for a return to paganism entirely, but still rejected key elements of Christianity. Notwithstanding his religious unorthodoxy, Maurras gained a large following among French monarchists and Catholics, including the Assumptionists and the pretender to the French throne. Nonetheless, his agnosticism worried parts of the Catholic hierarchy and in 1926, Pope Pius XI placed some of Maurras's writings on the Index of Forbidden Books and condemned the Action Française movement as a whole; Pius XI favoured Christian Democracy instead of authoritarianism and did not support the Catholic fascism of Spain and Italy. This papal condemnation was a great shock to many of his followers, who included a not inconsiderable number of French clergy. This papal condemnation was lifted in 1938, the same year that Maurras was elected to the Académie française. Maurras was evidently a leading exponent of what Allan Bloom called (in his The Closing of the American Mind) the "conservatism of Throne and Altar," and an intellectual descendant of Joseph de Maistre. The political reality best corresponding to the Maurrasian ideal was the Spain of Francisco Franco, with a signal difference: Franquist Spain was not anti-semitic. Works Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte-Beuve d'Athènes à Florence | |||||||||||||||||
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