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'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.

Contents

Before World War I

From World War I to the Liberation

Arrest and death

Maurras' political thought

In Popular Culture

References

Works

Before World War I

Maurras was issued from an old Provençal family, and brought up by his mother and grand-mother in a Catholic and monarchist environment. In his early teens he became profoundly deaf. Biographical notice on Maurras on the ''Académie française's website . As many other French politicians, he was heavily affected by the defeat during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War . After the 1871 Commune and the 1879 defeat of Marshall Mac-Mahon's ''Moral Order'' government, French society slowly found a consensus for the Republic, symbolized by the rallying of the Orleanists to the Republic. In his youth, Maurras was a disciple of the poet Frédéric Mistral and shared the federalist thesis of the Provençal Félibrige movement . He published his first article, at 17 years-old, in the ''Annales de philosophie chrétienne'' review . He then collaborated to various reviews, including ''L’Événement'', ''La Revue bleue'', ''La Gazette de France'' or ''La Revue encyclopédique'', where he praised Classicism and attacked Romantism .
However, some time in his youth, Maurras lost his faith and became an agnostic over time. At the age of seventeen he came to Paris and started literary criticism in 1887 in the Catholic and Orleanist ''Observateur'' Alain-Gérard Slama, "Maurras (1858 (sic)-1952): ou le mythe d'une droite révolutionnaire", article first published in ''L'Histoire'' in 2002 . At this time, Maurras was influenced by Orleanism, as well as German philosophy reviewed by Léon Ollé-Laprune, an influence of Bergson, or by the philosopher Maurice Blondel, one of the inspirations of Christian "modernists" who would later become his most bitter opponents . He came to know the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral in 1888 and shared the federalist thesis of Mistral's Félibrige movement . The same year he met the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès Biographical notice on Maurras on the ''Action française's website .
In 1890, Maurras approved Cardinal Lavigerie's call for the Rallying of Catholics to the Republic, marking his opposition not to the Republic in itself but to "sectarian Republicanism."
Beside this Orleanist filiation, Maurras also shared some traits with Bonapartism. In December 1887, he demonstrated to the cries of "Down with the robbers!" during the decorations scandal which had involved Daniel Wilson, the son-in-law of the President Jules Grévy . Despite this, he opposed at first the Boulangist movement . But in 1889, after a visit to Maurice Barrès, Barrès voted for the Boulangist candidate ; despite his "anti-semitism of the heart" ("''anti-sémitisme de coeur''"), he accepted to vote for a Jew .
In 1894-95 he briefly worked in Barrès' ''La Cocarde'' (The Cockade)'s newspaper, although he sometimes opposed Barrès on his views on the French Revolution . ''La Cocarde'' supported General Boulanger who almost toppled the Republic in the late 1880s.
During a trip to Athens for the First Olympic Games in 1896, he came to criticize the Greek democratic system of the ''polis'', which he considered doomed because of its internal divisions and its openness towards ''métèques'' (foreigners) .
He became involved in politics at the time of the Dreyfus affair, appearing at the forefront of the ''Anti-Dreyfusard'' side. He supported Colonel Henry's forgery blaming Dreyfus, as he considered that to defend Dreyfus, the Republic had to accept to weaken the Army and Justice. According to Maurras, Dreyfus was to be sacrificed on the altar of national interest . But when the Republican nationalist thinker Barrès accused Dreyfus of being guilty because of his Jewishness, Maurras went a step forward, vilifying the "Jewish Republic" . While Barrès' anti-Semitism found its roots both in the pseudo-scientific racist contemporary theories and on Biblical exegesis, Maurras decried "scientific racism" in favor of a more radical "state anti-Semitism." .
In 1899 he founded the ''Action Française'' (AF) review, an off-shoot of the newspaper created 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''. The AF mixed ethnic nationalism with reactionary themes, shifting the nationalist ideology, beforehand supported by left-wing Republicans, to the right-side of the political field ^[1]. It found a wide readership during the implementation of the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. In 1899 he wrote a short notice in favour of monarchy, ''Dictateur et roi'' ("Dictator and King"), and then in 1900 his ''Enquête sur la monarchie'' ("Investigations on Monarchy), published in the Legitimist mouthpiece ''La Gazette de France'', which made him famous. Maurras also published thirteen articles in ''Le Figaro'' between 1901 and 1902, as well as six articles between November 1902 and January 1903 in Edouard Drumont's anti-Semitic newspaper, ''La Libre Parole'' .
Between 1905 and 1908, when the ''Camelots du Roy'' monarchist league was founded, Maurras introduced the concep of political activism through extra-parliamentary leagues, theorizing the possibility of a coup d'état . Maurras also founded the Ligue d'Action française in 1905, whose mission was to recruit members for the Action française, with the aim of establishing the duc de Guise on the throne.

From World War I to the Liberation

Maurras then supported France's entry into the First World War (even to the extent of supporting the thoroughly republican Georges Clemenceau) against the German Empire. During the war, 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. He then criticized the Treaty of Versailles for not being harsh enough on the Germans and condemned Aristide Briand's policy of cooperation with Germany .
In 1925 he called for the murder of Abraham Schrameck, the Interior Minister of Paul Painlevé's ''Cartel des Gauches's (Left-Wing Cartel) government, who had ordered the disarming of the paramilitary wing of the AF . For this death threat, he was sentenced to a year on parole . He also threatened to death the President of the Council Léon Blum, leader of the Popular Front, in the ''Action française'' of 15 May 1936, underscoring his Jewish origins (he once called him an "old semitic camel" ). This other death threat owed him eight months of prison, from 29 October 1936 to 6 July 1937 . Fearing Communism, he joined the pacifists' camp and praised the Munich Agreement in 1938, which the President of the Council Edouard Daladier had signed without any illusions.
Influencing Salazar's ''Estado Novo'' regime in Portugal, Maurras also supported Franco and, until spring 1939, Mussolini's Fascist regime. Although he opposed Hitler because of his germanophobia, he did not disown those of his followers who acclaimed Nazism, such as Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet and most of the staff of the Collaborationist newspaper ''Je suis partout'', as well as Abel Bonnard, Paul Chack, etc. Maurras himself requested an integral translation of ''Mein Kampf'' — some of its passages had been censored in the French edition.
After his failure against Charles Jonnart in 1924 to be elected to the ''French Academy'', he succeeded in entering the ranks of the "Immortals" on 9 June 1938, replacing Henri-Robert, winning by 20 votes against 12 to Fernand Gregh. He was received in the Academy on 8 June 1939 by Henry Bordeaux.
Maurras acclaimed the fall of the Third Republic in 1940, replaced by Marshall Pétain's "French state," as a "divine surprise." Vichy's reactionary program of a ''Révolution nationale'' (National Revolution) was fully approved of by the leader of the ''Action française'', who inspired large parts of it . The monarchist newspaper acclaimed on 1st November 1940 Pétain's decision during the Montoire interview with Hitler to collaborate with Nazi Germany. But Vichy did not go far enough for Maurras: in ''La France Seule'' (1941), he criticized the 1940 Statute on Jews for being too moderate .
An admirer (before the war) of Charles de Gaulle, who himself had been influenced by Maurras' integralism, he then harshly criticized the General in exile. He later claimed he believed that Pétain was playing a "double game", working for an Allied victory in secret.

Arrest and death

Maurras was arrested in September, 1944, and sentenced to death in 1945 for collaboration with Nazi Germany by the High Court of Lyon. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, deprivation of civil liberties and automatic expulsion from the ''Académie française'' (a measure included in the 26 December 1944 ordinance ). His response to his conviction was to exclaim "''C'est la revanche de Dreyfus!''" (It's Dreyfus's revenge!) Meanwhile, the Académie française declared his seat vacant instead of expelling him, as it had done for Pétain, sparing him the fate of Abel Hermant and Abel Bonnard . They waited until his death to elect his successor, Antoine de Lévis-Mirepoix, who was himself close to the ''Action française'' and collaborated with Pierre Boutang's ''La Nation française'' monarchist review.
Imprisoned in Riom and then Clairvaux, Maurras was released in March 1952 to enter a hospital, assisted by the writer Henry Bordeaux, who repeatedly asked the President of the Council Vincent Auriol to pardon Maurras. He was transferred to a clinic in Tours, where he soon died. Although weakened, he collaborated with ''Aspects de la France'', which had replaced in 1947 the outlawed ''Action française'' review. 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. His work particularly marked the French right, including its far-right component, as he succeeded in theorizing for all of the various right-wing families an offensive political strategy, which contrasted with the Legitimists' apathy for political action . He managed to brought together the paradox of a reactionary thought which would actively change history, a form of Counter-revolution opposed to simple conservatism . According to the historian Alain-Gérard Slama, Maurras' efficiency was to bring together the various right-wing families of France (Legitimism, Orleanism and Bonapartism) and to give them a theory of political action as well as a positive ideology, Integralism, whereas the right-wings were usually characterized by their sole opposition to the left-wings . His "integral nationalism" rejected all democratic principles which he judged contrary to "natural inequality," criticizing all evolution since the 1789 French Revolution and advocated the return to a hereditary monarchy .
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, and admired classicism. 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 French Revolution, 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 xenophobic term of ''métèques''). Indeed, to him the first three were all "internal foreigners."
Antisemitism 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.
Although Maurras advocated the return of monarchy, in many ways Maurras did not fit into the French monarchist tradition at all. His support for the monarchy and for Catholicism was explicitly pragmatic, as he felt that a state religion was the only way of maintaining public order. By contrast with Maurice Barrès, theorist of a kind of Romantic nationalism based on the Ego, Maurras claimed to base his views on Reason rather than on sentiment, loyalty and faith.
Paradoxically, he admired the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte, like many of the Third Republic leaders he detested, in which he found a counter-balance to German idealism. Whereas the Legitimists monarchists declined to engage in 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 ''Camelots du Roi'' league frequently engaged in street violence with left-wing opponents). His slogan was the phrase ''La politique d'abord!'' ("Politics first!"). Others influences included Frédéric Le Play,English empiricists, whom allowed him to reconcile Cartesian rationalism with empiricism , and La Tour du Pin.
Maurras' 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" ^[2], 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.
Notwithstanding his religious unorthodoxy, Maurras gained a large following among French monarchists and Catholics, including the Assumptionists and the Orleanist pretender to the French throne, the count of Paris. 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. This papal condemnation was a great shock to many of his followers, who included a not inconsiderable number of French clergy, and caused great damage to the ''Action française''. It was lifted however 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, one of the prime thinkers of the Counter-Revolution.

In Popular Culture

In Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory Series of alternate-history novels, ''Action Française'' gains controll of France, leading Maurras to be crowned King Charles XI in the 1930's.

References

1. Winock, Michel (dir.), ''Histoire de l'extrême droite en France'' (1993)
2. ''Le Chemin du Paradis'', 1894

Works

★ 1889: Théodore Aubanel

★ 1891: Jean Moréas

★ 1894: Le Chemin du Paradis, mythes et fabliaux

★ 1896–9: Le voyage d'Athènes

★ 1898: L'idée de décentralisation

★ 1899: Trois idées politiques : Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte-Beuve

★ 1900: Enquête sur la monarchie

★ 1901: Anthinéa : d'Athènes à Florence

★ 1902: Les Amants de Venise, George Sand et Musset

★ 1905: L'Avenir de l'intelligence

★ 1906: Le Dilemme de Marc Sangnier

★ 1910: Kiel et Tanger

★ 1912: La Politique religieuse

★ 1914: L'Action française et la religion catholique

★ 1915: L'Étang de Berre

★ 1916: Quand les Français ne s'aimaient pas

★ 1916–8 : Les Conditions de la victoire, 4 volumes

★ 1921: Tombeaux

★ 1922: Inscriptions

★ 1923: Poètes

★ 1924: L'Allée des philosophes

★ 1925: La Musique intérieure

★ 1925: Barbarie et poésie

★ 1927: Lorsque Hugo eut les cent ans

★ 1928: Le prince des nuées.

★ 1928: Un débat sur le romantisme

★ 1928: Vers un art intellectuel

★ 1929: Corps glorieux ou Vertu de la perfection.

★ 1929: Promenade italienne

★ 1929: Napoléon pour ou contre la France

★ 1930: De Démos à César

★ 1930: Corse et Provence

★ 1930: Quatre nuits de Provence

★ 1931: Triptyque de Paul Bourget

★ 1931: Le Quadrilatère

★ 1931: Au signe de Flore

★ 1932: Heures immortelles

★ 1932–3: Dictionnaire politique et critique, 5 volumes

★ 1935: Prologue d'un essai sur la critique

★ 1937: Quatre poèmes d'Eurydice

★ 1937: L'amitié de Platon

★ 1937: Jacques Bainville et Paul Bourget

★ 1937: Les vergers sur la mer.

★ 1937: Jeanne d'Arc, Louis XIV, Napoléon

★ 1937: Devant l'Allemagne éternelle

★ 1937: Mes idées politiques

★ 1940: Pages africaines

★ 1941: Sous la muraille des cyprès

★ 1941: Mistral

★ 1941: La seule France

★ 1942: De la colère à la justice

★ 1943: Pour un réveil français

★ 1944: Poésie et vérité

★ 1944: Paysages mistraliens

★ 1944: Le Pain et le Vin

★ 1945: Au-devant de la nuit

★ 1945: L'Allemagne et nous

★ 1947: Les Deux Justices ou Notre J'accuse

★ 1948: L'Ordre et le Désordre

★ 1948: Maurice Barrès

★ 1948: Une promotion de Judas

★ 1948: Réponse à André Gide

★ 1949: Au Grand Juge de France

★ 1949: Le Cintre de Riom

★ 1950: Mon jardin qui s'est souvenu

★ 1951: Tragi-comédie de ma surdité

★ 1951: Vérité, justice, patrie (with Maurice Pujo)

★ 1952: À mes vieux oliviers

★ 1952: La Balance intérieure

★ 1952: Le Beau Jeu des reviviscences

★ 1952: Le Bienheureux Pie X, sauveur de la France

★ 1953: Pascal puni (published posthumously)

★ 1958: Lettres de prison (1944–1952) (published posthumously)

★ 1966: Lettres passe-murailles, correspondance échangée avec Xavier Vallat (1950–1952) (published posthumously)