Charles Maurras
Charles Maurras | |
|---|---|
Reactionism | |
| Institutions | Action Française |
Notable ideas | Maurrassisme |
| This article is part of Conservatism in France |
 |
Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras (
Raised Catholic, Maurras went deaf and became an agnostic in his youth, but remained anti-secularist and politically supportive of the Church. An
In 1936, after voicing death threats against the socialist politician
As a political theorist and major right-wing intellectual of 20th-century Europe, Maurras significantly influenced right-wing and far-right ideologies, anticipating some of the ideas of
| Part of a series on |
| Integralism |
|---|
 |
Biography
Before World War I
Maurras was born into a
At some point during his youth, Maurras lost his Catholic faith and became an
In 1890, Maurras approved
Beside this Orleanist affiliation, Maurras shared some traits with
During 1894–1895, Maurras briefly worked for Barrès' newspaper La Cocarde (The Cockade), although he sometimes opposed Barrès' opinions concerning the French Revolution.[11] La Cocarde supported General Boulanger, who had become a threat to the parliamentary Republic in the late 1880s.
During a trip to Athens for the
Political involvement
Maurras became involved in politics at the time of the
In 1899, Maurras founded the review
Between 1905 and 1908, when the
Many early members of the Action Française were practicing Catholics, including Bernard de Vésins, the art historian Louis Dimier and the essayist Léon de Montesquiou. They helped Maurras develop the royalist league's pro-Catholic policies.[16]
From World War I to the end of the 1930s
Maurras then endorsed France's entry into World War I (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 bank 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.[10] In 1923, Germaine Berton carried out the assassination of fellow Action Française member Marius Plateau. Berton had planned to also assassinate Léon Daudet and Maurras but was unsuccessful.[17]
In 1925, he called for the murder of
In 1929
Maurras again voiced death threats against the President of the Council Léon Blum, organizer of the Popular Front, in the Action Française of 15 May 1936, emphasizing his Jewish origins (he once called him an "old semitic camel").[12] This other death threat earned him eight months in prison, from 29 October 1936 to 6 July 1937.[12] Fearing communism, he joined the pacifists and praised the Munich Agreement of 1938, which the President of the Council Édouard Daladier had signed without any illusions. He also wrote in Action Française:
There are certain conservatives in France who fill us with disgust. Why? Because of their stupidity. What kind of stupidity?
Heils. The wealthier they are, the more they own, the more important it is to make them understand that if Hitler invaded us he would skin them much more thoroughly than Blum, Thorez and Stalin combined. This "conservative" error is suicidal. We must appeal to our friends not to let themselves be befogged. We must tell them: Be on your guard! What is now at stake is not anti-democracy or anti-Semitism. France above all![20]
During the 1930s – especially after the 6 February 1934 crisis[21]—many of Action Française members turned to fascism, including Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Abel Bonnard, Paul Chack, and Claude Jeantet. Most of them belonged to the staff of the fascist newspaper Je suis partout (I am everywhere).
Influencing
After his failure against Charles Jonnart in 1924 to be elected to the Académie française, 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 Catholic writer Henry Bordeaux. In the same year, Pope Pius XII repealed his predecessor's condemnation of the Action Française.[19]
Vichy regime, arrest and death
In June 1940 articles in Action Française signed by Maurras, Léon Daudet, and Maurice Pujo praised General Charles de Gaulle.[22] While Maurras described Marshal Philippe Pétain as a "divine surprise",[23] the statement is usually quoted without context; Maurras was referring specifically to Pétain having political talent as well as being a symbol of France, and there is no evidence of the remark until February 1941.[24]
A pre-war admirer of de Gaulle, who himself had been influenced by Maurras' integralism, Maurras 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.[citation needed]
After the liberation of France, Maurras was arrested in September 1944 together with his right-hand man Maurice Pujo, and indicted before the High Court of Lyon for "complicity with the enemy" on the basis of the articles he had published since the beginning of the war. At the end of the trial, during which there were many irregularities such as false dating or truncated quotations,[30] Maurras was sentenced to life imprisonment and deprivation of civil liberties. He was automatically dismissed from the Académie française (a measure included in the ordinance of 26 December 1944[10]). His response to his conviction was to exclaim C'est la revanche de Dreyfus! ("It's Dreyfus's revenge!")[11]
According to historian Eugen Weber, the trial against Maurras was political and was rigged against him. Weber writes that the jurors who were chosen for Maurras' case were taken from a list drawn up by his political enemies.[31]
Meanwhile, the Académie française declared his seat vacant, as it had for Pétain's, instead of expelling him as it did for Abel Hermant and Abel Bonnard.[10] (The academy waited until his death to elect his successor, and chose Antoine de Lévis-Mirepoix, who was himself influenced by Action Française and collaborated with Pierre Boutang's monarchist review La Nation Française.)
After being imprisoned in Riom and then Clairvaux, Maurras was released in March 1952 to be hospitalized. He was supported by Henry Bordeaux, who repeatedly asked the President of the Republic, Vincent Auriol, to pardon Maurras. Although weakened, Maurras collaborated with Aspects de la France, which had replaced the outlawed review Action Française in 1947. He was transferred to a clinic in Tours, where he died soon afterwards. In his last days he readopted the Catholic faith of his childhood and received the last rites.[32]
Maurras' work
Maurras and Félibrige
A Provence-born author, Maurras joined Félibrige, a literary and cultural association founded by Frédéric Mistral and other Provençal writers to defend and promote Occitan languages and literature. The name of the association was derived from félibre, a Provençal word meaning pupil or follower.
Maurras' political thought
Maurras' political ideas were based on intense nationalism (what he described as "integral nationalism") and a belief in an ordered society based on strong government. These were the bases of his endorsement for both a French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church.
He formulated an aggressive political strategy, which contrasted with the
Like many people in Europe at the time, he was haunted by the idea of "decadence", partly inspired by his reading of the publications of Hippolyte Taine and Ernest 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
Although Maurras advocated the revival of monarchy, in many ways Maurras did not typify the French monarchist tradition. His endorsement of the monarchy and for Catholicism was explicitly pragmatic, as he alleged that a state religion was the only way of maintaining public order. By contrast with Maurice Barrès, a theorist of a kind of Romantic nationalism based on the Ego, Maurras claimed to base his opinions on reason rather than on sentiment, loyalty and faith.
Paradoxically, he admired the
Maurras' religious views were likewise less than orthodox. He supported the political Catholic Church both because it was intimately involved 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 association linking all Frenchmen together. However, he distrusted the Gospels, written, as he put it, "by four obscure Jews",[35] but admired the Catholic Church for having allegedly concealed much of the Bible's "dangerous teachings". Maurras' interpretation of the Gospels and his integralist teachings were fiercely criticised by many Catholic clergy. However, towards the end of his life Maurras eventually converted from agnosticism to Catholicism.
Notwithstanding his religious unorthodoxy, Maurras gained a large following among French monarchists and Catholics, including the
It was not just his agnosticism which worried the Catholic hierarchy but that by insisting upon politiques d'abord he questioned the primacy of the spiritual and thus the teaching authority of the Church and the authority of the Pope himself. That this was the basis of the matter is shown by Jacques Maritain's book Primauté du Spirituel. Maritain was associated with L'Action Française and knew Maurras. While his unease with the movement pre-dates the 1926 crisis, it was this which occasioned his alienation from Maurras and L'Action Française. This papal condemnation was a great surprise to many of his devotees, who included a considerable number of French clergy, and caused great damage to the movement. The papal ban was later ended by Pope Pius XII in 1939, a year after Maurras was elected to the Académie française.[36]
Legacy
Maurras was a major intellectual influence of
The influence extended to Latin America, as in Mexico where Jesús Guiza y Acevedo
In 2017, Michael Crowley wrote that Steve Bannon, then chief strategist to President Donald Trump, "has also expressed admiration for the reactionary French philosopher Charles Maurras, according to French media reports confirmed by Politico."[39]
Works
|
|
- English translations
- 2016: The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Awakening, ISBN 978-1910524985
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Miguel Rojas-Mix, "Maurras en Amérique latine", Le Monde diplomatique, November 1980 (republished in Manières de voir n°95, "Les droites au pouvoir", October–November 2007)
- ^ Stéphane Giocanti (2006). Charles Maurras : le chaos et l'ordre (in French). pp. 392–393.
- ^ Giocanti, p. 444-447
- ^ Octave Martin (alias Charles Maurras), "In the service of Hitler", Aspects of the France, 3 February 1949.
- ^ )
- ^ "Charles Maurras | French writer and political theorist". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 19 July 2018.
- ^ Alain de Benoist (20 March 2007). "A Celebration of Conservative Politics in France". Kirkcenter.org.
- ^ Pinkoski, Nathan (November 2019). "The Revenge of Maurras". First Things.
- ^ "Macron criticized over comments on antisemitic figure Philippe Pétain". The Jerusalem Post. 30 December 2020.
- ^ Académie française's website (in French)
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Alain-Gérard Slama, "Maurras (1858 (sic)-1952): ou le mythe d'une droite révolutionnaire" Archived 26 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine, article first published in L'Histoire in 2002 (in French)
- ^ a b c d e f Biographical notice Archived 9 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine on Maurras on the Action Française's website (in French)
- ISBN 978-2-7082-3390-4, retrieved 7 March 2016
- ^ Winock, Michel (dir.), Histoire de l'extrême droite en France (1993)
- JSTOR 40957800
- ISBN 978-0-8229-7705-6, retrieved 27 July 2017
- ^ ""Ce n'est pas rien de tuer un homme" ou le crime politique de Germaine Berton". Radio France (in French). 29 August 2017. Retrieved 4 June 2022.
- Salt Lake Tribune. 10 January 1927. p. 1.
- ^ a b Arnal, Oscar L., Ambivalent Alliance: The Catholic Church and the Action Française, 1899-1939, pp.174-75 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).
- ^ Action Française, 25 March 1938. Quoted in Leopold Schwarzschild, World in Trance (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1943), p. 268.
- Presses de Sciences Po, 1999, p.73
- ^ François-Marin Fleutot, Des Royalistes dans la Résistance (Flammarion, 2000)
- ^ Le Petit Marseillais, 9 February 1941. Quoted by Bruno Goyet, op.cit., p. 84
- ISBN 978-0-8041-5410-9. See footnote 10.
- ^ Jean Sévillia, Historiquement correct, Tempus, 2006, p. 365
- ^ Jean Madiran, Maurras toujours là, Consep, 2004, p.71–72
- ^ In 1942, Rebatet published "Les Décombres" ("The Ruins"), a pamphlet in which he strongly opposed the "en-jewed" Action Française.
- ^ See for example Henri Amouroux, La Vie des Français sous l'Occupation. T2: Les Années noires, Livre de Poche, 1961, p. 342;
Bruno Goyet, op.cit., p. 82;
Jean Sévillia, op.cit., p. 365 - ^ Robert Paxton, La France de Vichy, Seuil, 1973, p. 246
- ^ Robert Aron, Histoire de l'épuration (second volume), Fayard, 1969, p. 365, 366, 367.
Listing these irregularities, Robert Aron describes Maurras' trial as "one of the most pathetic and most characteristic of the épuration" (p. 362). - ^ Giocanti, p. 466
- ^ Lettre de l'abbé Giraud à Charles Forot, 4 July 1958, archives départementales de Privas, dossier 24J25
- ^ See, for example, this extract from his Dictionnaire politique et critique.
- ^ McAuley, James. "Two Parisian bookstores, side by side, are waging a culture war". The Washington Post. Retrieved 14 June 2019.
- ^ Le Chemin du Paradis, 1894
- ^ Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1997, New York: HarperCollins, p. 223
- ^ Stanley G. Payne, Spain's First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931–1936, 1993, p. 171
- ^ Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas, 1999, p. 197
- ^ Michael, Crowley (March 2017). "The Man Who Wants to Unmake the West". Politico. Retrieved 6 June 2018.
Further reading
- Curtis, Michael (2010). Three Against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barrès and Maurras, Transaction Publishers.
- Kojecky, Roger (1972). "Charles Maurras and the Action Française," in T.S. Eliot's Social Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, pp. 58–69.
- Molnar, Thomas (1999). "Charles Maurras, Shaper of an Age," Modern Age 41 (4), pp. 337–342.
- Serina, Elena (2020). Nuovi elementi sul rapporto fra Action Française e Santa Sede: il ruolo di Louis Dimier nella difesa di Maurras, "Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo" (2), pp. 497–518.
External links
- Maurras.net online library : works of Charles Maurras (in French).
- Dreyfus Rehabilitated Archived 29 April 2018 at the Wayback Machine
- Newspaper clippings about Charles Maurras in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
