Three
The Nation as Artwork: Charles Maurras and the Classical Origins of French Literary Fascism
Our France is a work of art. It is a political work of art born of the collaboration of an obliging nature and the thought of our kings.
Charles Maurras, "La Maison de France"
(1901)
Plato asserts in The Republic that one cannot tamper with the rules of music (that is, of poetry and taste) without disturbing the fundamental laws of government.
Charles Maurras, "Le Centenaire de Victor
Hugo" (Gazette de France, February 20, 1902)
Maurras, who has practically failed in his career in France, succeeded in Italy and is the father of fascism.
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Genève ou Moscou
(1928)
We could find nothing that represented better the youth of nationalism than the Action Française, a kind of "pre-fascism" already in the air, the union of a strong social doctrine and national intelligence, . . . and the clarification of the fascist or National Socialist idea has been our grand quest ever since.
Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre (1941)
On February 7, 1941, when the extremist weekly Je suis partout began to be published again under German supervision after an interruption of eight months due to the war and defeat, the subtitle of the newspaper was changed from "Grand hebdomadaire de la vie mondiale" to "Grand hebdomadaire politique et littéraire." To change the focus of the weekly from "world life" to "politics and literature" was not, as it might first seem, to indicate that the newspaper had become narrower in scope—no longer directly concerned with the world as a whole—and certainly not that it intended to be in any way less political. On the contrary, the new subtitle was a sign of a renewed, even more militant commitment to extremist nationalist politics, fascism, and anti-Semitism, and even of a desire to collaborate directly with the Nazi occupiers to construct a new European Order in which, the principal voices at the journal hoped, a fascist France would play an important role. Giving literature equal billing with politics in the subtitle was a way of emphasizing the fact that the fascism espoused by the newspaper was rooted in the intimate relation between the political and the literary-aesthetic, that fascism was as much a "spiritual," literary-cultural phenomenon as a strictly historical-political one.
The pairing of politics and literature in its title, similar to the titles of numerous other extremist newspapers and weeklies of the period, indicated above all that Je suis partout saw itself as continuing a long tradition of the extreme nationalist right, one in which literature was recognized as being the principal model for and support of politics, the sign that politics was being taken seriously and considered a fundamental, essential problem. Politics was thus treated not just in terms of the programs, policies, and actions of political groups and parties to achieve specific goals, or the conflicts in the world theater among different nations and ideologies, but also as the area in which fundamental questions concerning the ideal form and fundamental nature of the national community and the people were raised. Nothing less than the truth of the political was at stake in the linkage between politics and literature. Thus, at the very moment that Je suis partout was increasing its distance from the Action Française by the specific politics it championed and by collaborating with the Germans and continuing to publish in Paris, it was at the same time indirectly acknowledging the great debt it owed to the extremist nationalist literary tradition in France and especially to Charles Maurras and his thinking, particularly to the way Maurras had articulated the fundamental relation between the literary and the political, which a number of his disciples would exploit in the name of fascism.1
Maurras, however, was not at all happy with the reappearance of Je suis partout, for after supporting and constantly defending the weekly throughout the 1930s as it became increasingly and more militantly fascist—while, it is true, remaining (at least officially) anti-German—he denounced the decision to begin publishing again in occupied Paris. This marked the definitive break between the father of "Integral Nationalism" and younger followers such as Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet, between a radical form of royalist nationalism and a French form of nationalist socialism or fascism. As Maurras put it when he was asked to approve of the project to continue publishing the newspaper in Paris: "How can a national journal think about reappearing in Paris and asking for an authorization from the Germans, under German censorship? It's completely impossible."2 Maurras chose to move L'Action Française to Lyon and to energetically support Pétain and Vichy from within "Free France." Thus he accepted censorship, but only because it was at least nominally "French." He participated in collaboration, but in a way that was supposedly not dictated by the Germans but developed by Pétain in the name of the "National Revolution" and to defend "La Seule France" [Only France].3
What interests me especially in the relation between Maurras and the French literary fascism, which is best represented by a newspaper like Je suis partout, are the aspects of Maurras's work that provide a foundation for the very literary fascism he ended up condemning when it took a too explicitly pro-German, pro-Nazi collaborationist form. The problem of how the nation can be conceived as a work of art and where the limits, if any, are to be placed on the aestheticizing of politics turn out to be key issues in determining both the relation and differences between Maurras and his fascist heirs.4 For whatever innovations French literary fascists proposed for France, no matter how "revolutionary" and "socialist" their fascism was claimed to be, most also claimed that fascism was at the same time the most profound expression of the spiritual essence of France, not just modern France but also "eternal France." Maurras provided many of the arguments and strategies to back up such claims, even if the political consequences of the claims in a fascist context were quite different from and often at times opposed to Maurras's own. Maurras made a traditional but at the same time radical concept of the nation the regulating principle of both literature and politics, using terms and arguments that were easily adapted to fascism, in spite of the monarchist, traditionalist ends they were made to serve in his work. But even the question of the monarch for Maurras was more complex than it might at first seem, and Maurras himself clearly indicated the openings in his own very particular form of royalism through which literary fascists would move and provided many of the aesthetic and political principles on which literary fascism in France would be founded.
The chief political and spiritual problem for France, as Maurras and many others on both the left and the right at the end of the century repeatedly claimed, was that France had been living through a long period of decadence and had become dangerously weak, or, as Maurras put it, effeminate: "Everything, from the spirit to love, has become effeminate. Everything has grown weak" ("Le Chemin de Paradis" [1894], in Pages littéraires choisies [Paris: Honoré Champion, 1922], 8). Maurras's general project could be defined as an attempt to revitalize the French spirit, make it once again sharp, strong, and energetic—and, in his terms, masculine. This was at the same time both a political and a poetic project, for he saw the weakening of literature as always accompanying a weakening of the political, not because literature is determined by politics in any simple, causal sense, but because both are, or should be, expressions of the national spirit and thus share the same origin and nature. To recover the true (masculine) poetic language of France and to restore the hereditary monarchy—the institution of the original and "true father"—were thus for Maurras one and the same project.5
Maurras felt that France had undergone a long and profound identity crisis since the Revolution, experiencing only limited moments of what he called rationality, lucidity, and sanity in which the disintegration of the nation was countered and the only "real" resolution to the long crisis repeatedly indicated. Even more than in the actual restoration of the king, these antirevolutionary values were most fully realized in the work of those rare thinkers and writers who kept alive traditional rationality and classical poetic values. Given that the spiritual crisis was profound, it could not be confined to one area alone but had to be by definition evident in all manifestations of spirituality, especially in what Maurras considered its most important and determining manifestations: literature, politics, and religion. The decadence and impotence of one of these areas were for him always indications of the decadence and impotence of the others, and without masculine "force and energy" both politics and poetry had become nothing more than empty, sterile forms. The general law that links literature to politics—Maurras's reference to Plato in one of the epigraphs to this chapter indicates that for him it was a universal law—has special significance in the modern period, however, for it linked romanticism to the Revolution and thus dictated that "Integral Nationalism" had to be both antirevolutionary and a militant antirepublicanism, and a vehement and polemical antiromanticism as well.
In the "Préface de l'Edition Définitive" to Romantisme et Révolution (Versailles: Bibliothèque des Oeuvres Politiques, 1928), Maurras assigns to revolutionary politics and romantic poetics the same identity: "Both the friends and adversaries of Romanticism are in agreement as to its profound identity with the Revolution. . . . Romanticism and the Revolution resemble stems which are distinct in appearance but which come out of the same root" (2). The sources of the Revolution and romanticism were of course all "foreign" and included Rousseau, Luther, German thought in general, and all manifestations of the "Jewish spirit," all of which he, like Barrès, considered "barbarian":
The fathers of the Revolution are in Geneva, in Wittenberg, and formerly in Jerusalem. They all derive from the Jewish spirit and from varieties of independent Christianity which rage in Oriental deserts or in Germanic forests, that is to say, at the different crossroads of barbarism. (4)
Barbarism was thus defined as Jewish, Protestant, and German—in short, "Oriental"; in its essence, everything that was opposed to and destructive of "Western civilization," that is, the classical world and its only legitimate modern heir: Catholic, royalist France.
Even though he is only one name among others on this list, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom Maurras most often referred as "le misérable Rousseau" (5), in fact has a special place. As both a writer of literature and a political theorist, as a Swiss who wrote in French but was influenced by and represented the interests of "Germanic barbarism," as well as someone "nourished on Hebraic revolt" (6), his work and his person embodied all of the diversified evils being denounced. Rousseau's work was the point at which the diversified foreign threats to traditional France intersected, the point from which the dual evils of romanticism and the Revolution grew. Maurras claims that Rousseau "came from one of the parts of the world where, for two centuries, different mixtures of decomposition had been swirling" (5), and thus he was not just a product of decomposition but its culmination, the fusion of all its destructive forces. Rousseau preached and embodied all of the essential traits of what was threatening France and, by extension, threatening the civilized world in general, since Maurras, like Barrès and Péguy, saw France as the unique authentic inheritor of the classical world. "Le misérable Rousseau" was thus the ultimate figure of anti-France.
Having identified Rousseau as the key figure in the dual, literary-political decomposition of modern France, Maurras spares him no insult: "One finds in him almost equal doses of criminal man or savage man and simple madman. . . . This savage, this half-man, this sort of wild animal drenched in its native mire pleased by means of the paradoxical and impossible nature of his primitive apparatus. . . . Savage nations, savage natures therefore followed Rousseau, adopting him as a fellow countryman" (6-7). Rousseau thus occupies the place described as the intersection of what could be called three different manifestations of the spiritual: "the triple literary, religious, and political coincidence" of a number of important "facts" all having to do with the interruption of tradition and the destruction of the authority and hierarchy of its institutions and truths.
In Rousseau, certain habits of the spirit, certain policies of taste, certain customs and traditions of the State are interrupted: his Héloïse, his Confessions, and the attitude and conduct of his life bring us back (it is a real return) to the reign of "nature," whose affectation Romantic sensibility will take up; his "Profession of Faith" reduces religious life to an interior god of Protestant logic without cult or priest; his politics will subjugate France to the doctrine which destroys the monarchy and dreams of the republic. (7)
Because the "coincidence is triple"—that is, touching all important aspects of the spiritual—the remedy, if it is to do more than mask the symptoms, must have a triple effect as well.
In terms of each of these converging elements, Maurras defended the restoration of the tradition that had been interrupted. He advocated a return to a classical aesthetics and order of taste in order to restore beauty; a return to the Catholic Church and its institutions and ceremonies in order to restore truth; and a return to the monarchy in order to restore political continuity, harmony, and national unity and grandeur. Maurras's literary and political activism, therefore, was one that combated modernity itself and attempted to restore to literature and politics the forms and truths supposedly established and guaranteed by tradition.
Since literature itself, for Maurras, had become romantic and "effeminate," without force, energy, or truth, it was not a simple matter of turning to literature for a countermodel for the political. In fact, in the modern period, when literature could be considered to have played a determining role in politics, the results for Maurras had been disastrous: "When royal authority disappeared, it did not give way, as has been said, to the sovereignty of the people: the successor to the Bourbons is the man of letters" ("L'Avenir de l'Intelligence," in Romantisme et Révolution, 46). Thus, for Maurras, the revolutionary period was "the highest point of literary dictatorship. . . . No government was ever more literary" (47). Obviously not just any aestheticizing of politics or fusion of the literary and the political would do. The dictatorship of a certain modern form of literature rooted in individualism and what Maurras called negative freedoms constituted the very sign of political and literary decadence, of the loss of beauty, truth, and creative energy.
Maurras's most interesting examples of the dangers of such a dictatorship had to do with Napoleon, who, he claimed, "represents the crowned man of letters" (48). Napoleon, the poet-politician, was able at times to create the semblance of order by "drawing from his unreliable daydreams the strong appearance of consistent realities." But this was precisely the problem: a false, fictional order was being presented and taken for a real one, just as a false, fictional "legal France" was still obscuring and being taken for "the real France."
Assuredly, all our misfortunes ensue from these deceptive appearances: they have never stopped thwarting the profound necessities of the real order. However, our phases of fleeting tranquility had no other cause than the very real agreement of the administrative fictions with the literary fictions that agitated everyone's mind and led all astray. From this meeting of these two fictions and of these two literatures, one official the other private, was born the precarious but real feeling of a harmony or relative affinity. (48)
Maurras felt that Napoleon's fusion of literary and political fictions did create harmony and order, then, but he also claimed that unlike the "real" order and harmony exemplified by the monarchy, these encouraged only a feeling of harmony without producing real harmony. What could be called "the dictatorship of literature" was thus especially dangerous because it induced tranquility, when in fact through its dual fictions it was actually covering over the disorder raging beneath and between the literary and the political. For Maurras, then, a romantic aestheticizing of politics represented the most dangerous opponent to a legitimate, classical aesthetics, the negative form of both aesthetics and politics.
But Napoleon was not just the heir of Rousseau and the Revolution, the creator and administrator of misleading political fictions. He was also the great general, the military genius who inspired and unified an entire people, the true nationalist poet and assembler of the French people:
Nothing is more opposed to this bad political and diplomatic literature than Napoleon commander of the army: nothing is more positive; nothing is more national. Like the generals of 1792, he revives, he stimulates the warrior core of the nation; he brings in all the elements making up the French, assembles them, and hurls their mass against the foreigner. In this way he puts them to the test, unites them, fuses them together. New resources of patriotic sentiment are revealed, are concentrated together, and served by the superior authority of the master; they oppose the ideology of letters with an unexpected system of violent forces. (48-49)
Napoleon thus embodied at the same time the most positive and the most negative elements of the early nineteenth century: its literary-political decadence and its military successes, its internationalist fictions and its nationalist "realities," its weak, sterile ideology of letters and its creative, activist military exploits. Under Napoleon, the violence of the authentic, unified forces of the nation was directed not only against the foreigner outside but against the foreigner inside, against the very "ideology of letters" he had instituted. Napoleon was presented as both the product of the Revolution and romanticism and a violent antidote to them.
Maurras saw "literature" in the nineteenth century as the principal impediment to the implementation of a system of forces, violent as they might be, that would effectively destroy the false fictions of the nation and guarantee the unity and superiority of the true, integral nation: ''''Everything useful and necessary undertaken by the Force of things, was misdirected or methodically contested by literary Intelligence" (50-51). If, for Maurras, Napoleon was both the great nationalist military poet and the failed literary-political poet, nineteenth-century France was a country in which the creative, nationalist forces were always being countered by weak literary-political fictions.
The principal literary-political conclusion to be drawn from such an analysis is that France, in order to realize itself fully, had to activate in the aesthetic-political realms the same violent forces that Napoleon successfully inspired and mastered in the military realm. Maurras obviously saw his own role as a poet, critic, and political theorist to be the advocate of such a program. What could be called the royalist, classical-aestheticist dictatorship of the nation had to replace the dictatorship of romantic/revolutionary literature in order to restore creative force to literature and politics and in order to make them truly national. Only then could the fusion of the literary, the political, and the religious be ensured in a way that no single field—and certainly not the literary field as such—could dominate the others and so that nationalism would be "integral"; that is, actively, militantly spiritual. Politics would then become the genuine expression of the work of the nation and would also in turn (re)produce the nation as an artwork.
The weak fictions of the Revolution and romanticism were, for Maurras, predominately the fictions associated with the concept of the individual, and he considered none to be more dangerous in its capacity to misdirect and contest the true forces of the nation than the "fiction" of individual freedom. "The same body of false ideas which are as inhospitable to the human spirit as they are pernicious and deadly to the human species" (11), ideas which are linked to the fiction of individual freedom, could be discovered, he claimed, in both literature and politics. The fact that romantic politics and literature were both rooted in the "fiction of individual freedom" meant that the two realms could never be separated, so that to attack the literary movement was at the same time always to attack the political ideology:
The two vocabularies of criticism and politics were fused together and completed each other: the divine freedom of the Word, the sovereign freedom of the Citizen, the equality of verbal themes or of social elements, a vague fraternity creating the "right" of everyone and their "right" to everything. These formulas flowing one into the other, exchanged their metaphors with each other. . . . The great political error was finally recognized as illustrating the aesthetic error, which, having become glaring, served to allow the former to be seen more clearly. (11-12)
Because romanticism and the Revolution grew out of the same foreign roots and were inextricably intertwined through not just the concepts but also the metaphors they shared and exchanged with each other, because they were rooted in a common error, the failure of individual freedom in art and literature could be used to attack the principle of individual freedom in the political realm and show, from a perspective that was outside of politics per se, its political shortcomings.
The inflated place that romanticism gave to the individual self was thus the sign that tradition and the "true" community of readers were being devalued. It was also, as Maurras's essay "Le Romantisme féminin" clearly indicates, a sign of the weakness of the movement, an indication of its fundamental "femininity."
The idea, the precise feeling, the abstract image of the self do not offer themselves to virile intelligence with as much frequency and precision as in a feminine mind. To say I is practically a part of the character of women. The self gushes forth in their discourse at the slightest pretext, not in an auxiliary capacity, not for the convenience of language, but with a rush of blatant, personal impressions that signify quite exactly: I who am speaking, I and no one else (191).
The "feminine," romantic "I" brings everything back to itself, makes itself the norm in terms of which all other norms, subjects, forms, orders, and traditions are presented, judged, and understood. The relation of this "I" to any collectivity, even one consisting of other such "Ps," can only be conflictual, given that each "I" will be restricted by the demands and interests of all the others. Such an "I" is thus always considered to be a carrier of disorder.
For these reasons, the weak, destructive, romantic self represented a serious threat to "virile," classical French poetics, but it also could be considered in its "femininity" ultimately to be not really "French" at all, regardless of the importance of French romanticism as a literary movement. Only the masculine ideal of the nation was truly French. The dominance of the (feminine) self in romanticism was a foreign aberration, a serious challenge to paternal authority and hierarchy, a disintegrating force undermining the unity of the authentic national community.6 Maurras constantly attacked Rousseau and Mme de Staël for having attempted to destroy the French language and its literary traditions by introducing foreign elements into both. He approved wholeheartedly of a critic who called them "undisciplined aliens [métèques—a word he used to describe all of those he determined to be non-French, especially Jews]," and he said of romanticism in general that "as a foreigner, it loves the foreign" (182-83).
The "foreign" origins of the leading precursors or exponents of romantic ideology and poetics were ultimately less important, however, than what he considered the internal foreign elements in the work of French romantics from Chateaubriand through Hugo and even to Mailarme, whom he characterized as the last and most extreme inheritor of romantic poetics.7 He argues in Mallarmé's case that romanticism results not in the "gushing forth" of sentimental, lyrical expressions of the "feminine self," but in what seems to be at the other extreme of poetic form and content, the mechanical manipulation of language governed by no rules whatsoever. The most serious dangers of the freedoms taken by the romantic self are not just solipsism and emotionalism, then, but also a formal, mechanistic poetics and politics that destroy all meaning and value.
In fact, to Maurras, the most foreign aspect of romanticism, especially as it is exemplified at its extreme by Mallarmé, is the way in which words are considered entities in themselves. "The foreign" in poetry in this instance is recognized by the fact that individual words are treated primarily as vocables, which gives them an "absolute sovereignty, unlimited authority" and in terms of which "meaning itself loses its rights of direction and composition" ("Le Romantisme féminin," in Romantisme et Révolution, 150). What is not "French," then, is the devaluation of meaning and syntax, the domination of sound over sense. What is French, on the contrary, is to "order ideas so that they themselves arrange the syllables of words in the reason and order of song" (De la politique naturelle au nationalisme intégral [Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1976], 53). Threatened in the priority given to the vocable is the French language itself as a system of form and meaning:
From being an element subordinated to syntax, the word has become with Romanticism the principal element. With Mallarmé, words are arranged on the paper according to their mutual attraction and reciprocal exclusions: purely mechanical affinities, calls, contrasts that demand absolutely no operation of the mind [esprit] of the poet, neither his choice nor his judgment. . . . The aesthetic theories of Mallarmé would have been unreservedly fitting for a kind of animal lacking the superior faculties of the intelligence. (Romantisme et Révolution, 186)
For Maurras, the primary spiritual function of the intelligence is to create order and form. Mallarmé's poetry and poetics fail to measure up to this requirement, and Maurras thus considers what we would now call "the play of the signifier" in Mallarmé's poetry to be not only un-French and feminine but even barbaric and inhuman.
If Mallarmé's poems can be considered to be "arranged" and thus to have a certain exterior, mechanical form, they nonetheless lack the fundamental unity and beauty (and thus form) of true poetry, because they ignore and even challenge the unity of syntax, what Maurras considered the dynamic unifying principle of the French language as such. He who thus challenges and subverts the traditional concept of the French Ianguage must be treated not just as an inferior poet but also as an enemy of civilization and the nation—a sous-homme, "a kind of animal lacking the superior faculties of the intelligence." Maurras viewed all enemies of the French nation as inferior men—as animals, women, barbarians, or Jews—all those who threatened the masculine identity of French culture and politics. This means, among other things, that Maurras felt no limits should be imposed on the "holy war" that had to be waged against them, a war for the very existence of "civilized man," that is, French man.
No matter how limited and dogmatic Maurras's reading of Mallarmé might seem to us today, it clearly reveals the political stakes for Maurras of literature and art and why he so violently attacked any writer associated with romanticism. The political risks represented by Mallarmé were just as great as those presented by increased immigration into France or the growth of German nationalism, because in romantic poetry "language is dishonored, rhythm tortured." Romanticism, along with its political ally, revolution, therefore could be claimed to be leading the spirit, leading rational man, to its/his death:
The decadence of all the humanities shows that the future, the future of French intelligence and of Occidental spirit as a whole, is still foundering. It should not be dissimulated that one runs the risk of seeing man himself die out in this way, political and rational man, man the artist and man the singer. Anyone who prolongs the double romantic and revolutionary deviation provides the Spirit with the sweeping freedom to die. (24 bis).
In the name of giving renewed life to art and literature, and in this way to the Spirit in general, Maurras proposed a return to or a restoration of the traditional, classical unity of the literary work and the nation. He constantly returned to the concept of "the integral work" as the principal question for the spiritual life of the nation, and thus for both its aesthetics and its politics. Spiritual life, for him, was guaranteed by the unity of the work; nothing less than the death of the spirit resulted from the disintegration or the absence of the work. Such dogmatic support for classical aesthetics made Maurras undeniably the most conservative of the various "fathers" of French literary fascism, at least as concerns his tastes in literature.
Even though he was a militant royalist, Maurras claimed that he was not opposed to the notion of freedom in general, but only to "anarchistic," romantic/revolutionary freedom, which he argued always destroyed the work and the "true freedom" that constituted the work and that was equivalent to art itself:
Felicitous freedom . . . is the art of life, it is art itself. The freedoms to be discouraged are those that are enemies of the work, either because they keep it from being accomplished or because they tear it apart as soon as it is formed. If the work in question were allowed to speak and give its opinion,... it would undoubtedly say, conforming to the reactions of its vital instinct: "I love everything that makes me live, and I hate everything that would kill me." The interests of the work are the only ones to consult. . . . A positive freedom is given [to the poet], a negative freedom is denied according to the same principles. Freedom to create. Prohibition to tear apart. These are the last works of thought and tradition in the matter of Poetics. Freedom has value by its usage and by its fruits. It is indebted only to good; evil is without rights. Why? Because one makes and the other undoes the Poem. (17)
In Maurras's poetics, then, the work, the poem, is everything. It is the ultimate, determining, unique criterion in terms of which to judge whether freedom is positive or negative, creative or destructive, aesthetic or nonaesthetic. In such an argument, the poem ceases to be an object and becomes a subject. Speaking on its own as a living being, it demands that its own integrity and vitality be protected, that all freedom have as a unique goal the construction of a poetic work. Once it has been established—through a classical poetics—what makes the work/poem integral and vital, then everything else follows logically and dogmatically from this absolute aesthetic (and political) principle.
In speaking of the work in this way, Maurras uses terminology and critical criteria that seem at first glance to be rooted in romantic organicist aesthetic theory—which is largely German and English in origin—in order to denounce French romanticism for not being truly French (for being German) and for its destruction of the vital character of the work. His "organicism," however, is explicitly more classical than romantic, for the "freedom" and vital unity of the work is for him always controlled and determined by rules and tradition, and it is in this sense preromantic or antiromantic. Given that he treats the work as a living unity and the integrity of "the Poem" as a fusion or incorporation of different and even conflicting elements and forces, his antiromanticism and antirepublican-ismnevertheless retain a decidedly postromantic tone. The self-declared and ferocious enemy of romanticism thus reveals himself as a romantic of sorts after all, for the notion of the organic nature of the work is one point where neoclassical, romantic, and postromantic aesthetic theories—and perhaps revolutionary and antirevolutionary political theories—overlap and "exchange metaphors" and concepts in important ways.8
In fact, Maurras's militant classical poetics constitutes a struggle to take organicism back from the romantics (and the Germans and English) by emphasizing its classical and French neoclassical prehistory over its romantic manifestations, a struggle that was at the same time meant to take the state back from republican institutions and return to an earlier version of the "organic nation," united not in terms of the supposedly "fictive" will of the people but in terms of the one "real" institution that Maurras claimed authentically founded and guaranteed unity: the monarchy. Maurras's Integral Nationalism is an uncompromising, dogmatic application of a classical organicist model to poetics and politics, with the nation in the political realm corresponding to the Poem in the poetic realm—the nation as the original community and fundamental political artwork, the artwork of all artworks.9
In Maurras's view, the nation is a work (artwork) whose unifying principles were determined in history and thus supported by tradition in the same way that classical aesthetic criteria determine the laws governing the unity and life of the poem. For before there was the French nation, before there was French poetry, Greece already existed and supplied the models and rules for determining what an aesthetic-political work really was or what it should be. France could only be itself by imitating not Greece per se but the aesthetics of Greece, by safeguarding within itself the essence of Greece and Rome, what Maurras saw as the true origin of France, the essence of its identity. France is what it is, France can become what it should be, only because it is first and foremost the only legitimate heir to the ancient world.
Because of this lineage, the French embodied for Maurras in their history and in themselves nothing less than the genre humain.
The development of our nationality in the 16th, 17th, and even 18th century [was] so complete, so brilliant, of a humanity so perfect that France became the legitimate heir of the Greek and Roman world. Through France measure, reason, and taste reigned over our Occident: in spite of barbaric civilizations, the true Civilization survived right up to the threshold of the contemporary period. In spite of the Revolution, . . . in spite of Romanticism, . . . one can still argue that civilization displays in this country of France some quite beautiful traces. Our tradition is only interrupted, our capital subsists. It depends on us to make it flourish and bear fruit again. . . . A few of our rivals suspect this. . . . Germans are barbarians, and yet the best of them know this. I won't even speak of the Moscovites or the Tartars. France is the human species, not just for us but for the human species. (Mes idées politiques [Paris: Editions Albatros, 1986], 146—originally published in 1937)
In addition to the typically inflated and xenophobic chauvinism of this passage, the other and perhaps more significant point Maurras makes has to do with the form of the aesthetic-political struggle he envisages to bring the French nation back to its glory, to make France more than "the museum" of the beautiful traces of past civilization. If France is to be the living embodiment of "the true civilization," once again bearing the fruit of the aesthetic capital Western civilization has bequeathed to it, it must both model itself after the ancients and make use of the aesthetic tradition originating in Greece, and at the same time it must combat vigorously all other claims—primarily German—to such an inheritance.
Maurras always claimed that his notion of tradition was anything but passive, not a stodgy retention of the past but an activist intervention of the most powerful forces of the past in the present: "Tradition means transmission. Tradition gathers together the forces of blood and soil. . . . True tradition is critical, and without these distinctions, the past no longer serves as anything, its successes ceasing to be examples, its setbacks, to be lessons. . . . Tradition is not lethargy but its contrary" (Mes idées politiques, 134). The "forces of blood and soil" may be the ultimate ground of Maurras's nationalism, but these forces have little positive effects, and in fact could have serious destructive effects if they are not gathered together, fused, and arranged and made to work together in harmony for the same end. Tradition is thus the means of bringing together and transmitting "natural forces," of providing the form these and other forces take that allows them to intervene critically in the present and restore to it what is most successful and "beautiful" in the past. The formative process that Maurras associates with tradition, then, is the aesthetic operation par excellence. It is not just the ground for politics for the Integral Nationalist, providing its model and material, but it also provides the means or operations for achieving political unity and the proper functioning of the nation as an organic artwork.
Maurras defended his own classical aesthetics of politics not just in aesthetic terms but in terms of its "realism" and its alleged roots in nature as well. If organic unity characterizes the form of the nation, the origin of the nation and its model is the patrie conceived as the primal family, the original and natural community or society. "The fatherland is a natural society, or what amounts to exactly the same thing, a historical one. Its decisive characteristic is birth. One does not choose one's fatherland—the land of one's fathers—anymore than one chooses one's father and mother" (Mes idées politiques, 278). In the same vein, Maurras argued that "the national community, the Fatherland, and the State are in no way associations born of the personal choice of their members, but works of nature and necessity" ("Dictateur et Roi," in Enquête sur la Monarchie, 455). As natural as the origin of the nation is claimed to be, however, the nation does not remain in its original or natural form but is shaped, given a direction and meaning, and transmitted over time. Tradition is natural inheritance given form. In this way, tradition raises nature to a higher level without ever losing its "naturalness." In fact, the highest form of nature becomes the aesthetic form, that form molded by culture and civilization, not brute, "spontaneous," disordered nature in itself, which is the nature of "ignorant men and backward countries"; that is, of Rousseau and the Germans.
The origins of Maurras's nationalism were thus profoundly aesthetic, for his approach to politics and the nation was dominated by the ideal of beauty, rather than by any strictly political, geographic, or racial determination. When he was criticized for having made beauty "Greek" and thus for "subjugating the science of the beautiful to the law of place and race," Maurras replied: "I do not praise the Greeks but the work of the Greeks, and I praise it not for being Greek but for being beautiful. It is not because it is Greek that we go toward beauty, but because it is beautiful that we hasten toward Greece" ("Esthétique et voyage," in Pages littéraires choisies, 191). The same argument would then have to hold for his defense of France: neither race nor place (neither blood nor soil) is the essence of the French nation, but as a work (of art) it is rather its beauty and vitality that should make one "hasten to it," defend it, judge it to be superior to all other nations, and see it as the true, modern embodiment of the classical "beautiful nation."
In the same way, Maurras claimed that his defense of the monarchy had nothing to do with the innate superiority of any individual king: "We have said that the hereditary sovereign is in the best position to govern well. We have never said that this good government was a virtue of his blood" ("Discours préliminaire," in Enquête sur la Monarchie, LXXXVI). What mattered was the king's place and function within the nation and not his individual worth or even his royal blood. The guarantees of order, unity, and grandeur that the place of the monarch had traditionally provided were for Maurras essential to the nation if it were to become an organic work. The dominance of what Maurras called the "functional" aspects of his royalism revealed that on the most basic level he was always ultimately more interested in making the nation work as a smoothly functioning organic entity, a political artwork, than in the actual restoration of the king.
Making beauty rather than geographical location the defining characteristics of the "integral nation" allowed Maurras to reject another seemingly important part of the legacy of Greece—democracy—for not conforming to the dictates of order and beauty, and for destroying rather than accumulating and safeguarding the values and works of the past.
The brief destiny of what is called democracy in antiquity makes me realize that the essence of this regime is only to consume what aristocratic periods have produced. Production, action demanded a powerful order. Consumption is less demanding: neither tumult nor routine hinders it very much. Of the goods that generations have slowly produced and accumulated, every democracy makes a huge bonfire. . . . To be a nationalist and to want democracy is to want to waste and at the same time economize the force of France, which is, I believe, impossible. (Pages littéraires choisies, 193)
Missing from democracy is order, and without order there is no genuine beauty. As a destructive, disordering, all-consuming force, democracy is at the same time and primarily an antiaesthetic force, one that lays waste to the artwork that the nation is or should be and to its "cultural capital." What Maurras claims he learned from antiquity as much as from modernity is that democracy and the political-aesthetic work do not mix, that the former is the death of the latter. If beauty draws one to Greece and its aesthetic and political works, it is also beauty that reveals that democracy is opposed to the nation-work and in its essence, even in antiquity, is unaesthetic or antiaesthetic.
The primary and determining principles of Greek aesthetics, for Maurras, are what Nietzsche called "Apollonian" and have to do primarily with the "quality and perfection" of the work, the necessity for the work to be constituted by unified, harmonious relations developed from within the work and not copied slavishly from models: "It was felt [in Greece] that it was not enough to copy forms, neither to make them bigger nor to reduce them, and that true [aesthetic] pleasure arose from a harmonious and appropriate relation" ("La Naissance de la Raison," in Pages littéraires choisies, 247). This is, of course, also the principle that is linked to the birth of reason in Athens: "Learned men stopped thinking that knowledge consisted in a mass of known facts; they looked for the order that determined them and gave them their full value" (247). True knowledge and beauty are thus always limited, arranged, determined by order. In this sense, true knowledge, like politics, especially a politics modeled after art, could also be said to have beauty as its principal value. "Politics is a science," argued Maurras, "because it is a craft or rather an art" (Enquête sur la Monarchie, CXXIII). And if modernity, in the form of democracy, had forgotten what reason and beauty were, and was dupe to the attraction of what he called the grandiose and the numerous, it was up to the art of politics to negate this divisiveness and fragmentation and transform them once again into the ordered work of the integral nation.
If Maurras emphasized the formal aspects of classical aesthetics, he also gave force an important, though secondary role in both the aesthetic and political realms:
Force in itself, . .. force which is not yet in the service of either good or evil, bare force is by itself a very precious, very great good because it is the expression of the activity of being. One would have to be an imbecile to want to ignore its benefits. . . . This does not mean it always does good or that there is no greater good. . . . As it is capable of everything, it needs as a primary safe-guard a rule and, when serving the best cause, an order. Order contributes to making it entirely and completely efficacious. (Mes idées politiques, 110).
To use a Nietzschean vocabulary of which Maurras would not have completely approved but to which he was in fact very close and which his fascist heirs did use, Maurras is arguing here for the synthesis of force and form, of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, but primarily in the name of form. He is in this way defending an Apollonian aesthetics, reversing the principal argument of Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, who, as part of what he would later call his "artist's metaphysics," had argued in similar terms for a tragic synthesis in the name of a Dionysian aesthetics of force.
One of the important differences between Maurras's fascist "sons" and their classical "father" was the increased importance the former gave to force in their aesthetics of politics. But it is a question more of degree or emphasis than principle, because they too stressed the necessity for a dialectic relation between force and the aesthetic or political form in which it is manifested. It is also important to note that Maurras himself acknowledged the "great good" that force was. Had he not done so, his aesthetics and politics would have seemed much less attractive to his fascist heirs, much less provocative and violently opposed to democracy and the status quo. He would have seemed much less revolutionary and subversive had his own aesthetics of politics been a pure, mechanical formalism, which for him always constituted a neutralization of force rather than its ordered and thus full realization.
The political slogan most closely associated with Maurras, "Politique d'abord" (Politics first), means that the nation—as an organic work—has to come first. "The nation comes before all groups within the nation. The defense of the whole is imposed on the parts. In the order of realities, there are first of all nations. Nations before classes. Nations before business. . . . One joins a party, one is born of a nation" (Mes idées politiques, 282). The nation is the "natural unity" one is born into, the family of all families and the class of all classes. The national culture preexists all individuals and gives them their value and even their identity. "The individual who comes into the world in a 'civilization' finds incomparably more than he brings" (138). Maurras thus defined "man" as originally and in his essence an inheritor, indebted to his culture for his very identity; and in a manner almost identical to Barrès's definition of the Self, Maurras too rooted the individual in the land and its dead. Maurras's version of the Barrèsian "Je suis eux-mêmes" was "We are our ancestors, our masters, our elders. We are our books, our paintings, our statues" (173). When "we" are not what the nation bequeaths to us, "we" are not what we were born to be. Maurras's militant culturalist nationalism, like Barrès's, was also a call for the "we" to take form, to take the form of a prior "we" of a classical type that serves as a model for all true "we's." It was a call to overcome the divisiveness of individualism, of class conflicts, of party warfare, and become a "person"; that is, in Maurras's terms, an integral function of the whole, supporting and serving the organic unity of the nation and carrying on its authentic cultural and political traditions.10
Maurras, like his fellow anti-Dreyfusard, Barrès, was a militant anti-Semite and considered the Jews to be on a par with the Germans as the most dangerous enemies of the French nation; more dangerous, perhaps, in the sense that they were both internal as well as external enemies. And yet also like Barrès, his royalist form of nationalism was not rooted in a strictly biologically determined racism, no matter how violent and crude his frequent denunciations of the Jews. Maurras argued quite insistently throughout his work that "nationality is not a phenomenon of race" (283). His nationalism, like that of most French nationalist extremists and literary fascists, was rooted rather in a cultural, or what I would call an aestheticist, anti-Semitism. For he believed that Jews threatened the integral nation not by their blood but by their own nonlinear history and alternative tradition, by the disruption to integral form their presence within the nation provoked in the nation-work. The Jew is the ultimate figure of the non-Greek or anti-Greek (and thus the non-French or anti-French); and without a "proper heritage," he was considered a disseminating, disruptive antiaesthetic force both without and within the geographic confines of the nation, and more important, a danger to its spiritual integrity, to the very essence of the nation as an organic, classically determined artwork.
Maurras's anti-Semitism was in large part inherited from traditional Catholic anti-Semitism, which became an important political force at the time of the Dreyfus affair. It was equally and more fundamentally an essential component of his aesthetics of the nation, for national organicism can exist only if the inorganic elements of the nation are eliminated from the nation-work and the organic elements are incorporated into it. Incorporation or expulsion, this is the only alternative given by the absolute principle of the nation-work. All of the "social programs" proposed by Maurras or associated with the Action Française, whose goal was to overcome class divisions and incorporate the working class into the smooth functioning of the nation, had as their direct correlative the disenfranchisement if not expulsion of the Jews (and other "foreign elements") from the organic community. Anti-Semitism was not, then, an incidental part of Maurras's aestheticizing of politics but rather a fundamental, determining element in the construction and operation of the machinery of nationalism. Quite simply, "the work has to be" (270), and for it to be, the political-aesthetic operations of incorporation and expulsion had to be given priority. The integral-nationalist aestheticizing of politics is thus, at least in theory, always uncompromising and totalizing, if not totalitarian; its ultimate project is always a total project, one carried out at the expense of the Jew and or as the foreigner.
Maurras claimed that all political, economic, and religious crises—everything opposed to the values, truths, and aesthetics of the "Occident," as well as to the unification and harmonious, ordered operation of the nation—had an "Oriental," Jewish cause:
All of the important modern crises have an Oriental character to them: Biblical in spirit or Jewish through their personnel in the 16th century, the German Reformation, the English Reformation, and the French Reformation; then, in the 18th and 19th centuries the three French revolutions between the Terror and the Commune; and finally in the 20th century, the convulsions of Moscow, Madrid, and Barcelona display this same trait: more or less vivid, but fundamental, they express either a intellectual Hebrewism or Hebrew acts in flesh and blood. (66)
Throughout this long history, the nation alone had resisted the constant crises—reforms or revolutions—supposedly provoked by the Jews. The true integral nation before and outside the reach of the Revolution is organized in terms of and represented by the king and supported by the institution of the Catholic Church. Nation, Church, and Monarch thus form an inseparable triad; the antination, anti-Church, and antiroyalist principle of the revolution, represented by the Jew, is nothing less than evil incarnate, "Satan" himself (66).
As vehemently as Maurras polemicized against the destructive work supposedly already carried out by Jews, he was supremely confident that the body politic, the nation-work, still had within itself, no matter how bad its current spiritual health, the aesthetic and political (that is, spiritual) resources to resist the foreign and function once again, as it had in the past, as an integral, organic work. The sign of this possibility and the ultimate political counterfigure to the figure of the Jew was for Maurras, of course, the monarch—not so much the actual king or pretender as the ideal or figure (fiction) of the king. In this sense, Maurras's royalism depended less on the real king, or even on the historical institution of the monarchy, than on the place, function, and image of the king at the center and as the support of the nation-work.11
Even though Maurras was never, strictly speaking, a fascist, he did for a time praise Italian fascism for accomplishing many of the political goals he felt France also had to achieve and could achieve only through the restoration of the monarchy. At times it even seemed as if he were describing a version of his own Integral Nationalism when he spoke of fascism:
What in fact is Fascism) A socialism emancipated from democracy. A trade unionism free of the chains the class struggle had imposed on Italian labor. A methodical and successful will to bring together in a same fasces [faisceau] all the human factors of national production. . . . A determination to approach, to treat, to resolve the worker question in itself. . . and to unite the unions in corporations, to coordinate them, to incorporate the proletariat into the hereditary and traditional activities of the historical State of the Fatherland. (62-63)
As far as this quotation goes, it would seem that there is no essential difference between Maurras's royalist nationalism and Italian fascism. It reveals that Maurras clearly recognized his own influence on the development of fascism and saw it to be a (incomplete) form of Integral Nationalism.
Maurras even went so far as to call the fascist dictator a "mon-arque" (Enquête sur la Monarchie, LXXXIV). In quotations such as these, Maurras clearly indicated why he supported various movements and journals such as Je suis partout (at least until the Occupation), which were more fascist than monarchist in orientation but which owed much to his own thinking. The "faisceau" in Maurras's description is simply another name for the organicism of the nation-work, in terms of the operations that bring together the various human factors as well as in the exterior form of the organic unity achieved by their incorporation into the traditional, historical State, the Fatherland. While Maurras made the fascist dictator into the reflection of the king, his fascist followers treated the king as a precursor and model of the dictator.
The fascist dictator, however, was not the king; his place in the nation-work might be similar or identical to that of the king, but the figure he represented, or that represented him, was not the same; nor was his function the same over time. This is undoubtedly why Maurras never actually became a fascist, even if he was especially intrigued by Italian fascism. He considered the fascist dictator first of all to be a figure and force of unification, an embodiment of the national unity he brings about through a process of incorporation that is at times violent. The dictator is even necessary at times, admitted Maurras, as the only remedy for the crises dividing and destroying the nation; but he is never sufficient. Because his actual person occupies the position of authority, the dictator can never guarantee stability or continuity over time. The unity he brings to the nation is as tenuous as his own life: "A man alone is little. The life of a man, the heart of a man, the head of a man, all that is quite exposed, quite pervious to a bullet, a knife, to sickness, to all kinds of plots" (Mes idées politiques, 294). In a certain sense, the dictator is not enough of a figure, not rooted deeply enough at the center of the "faisceau" or work the nation has become or is to become. He is too personal and therefore too exterior an authority, and he thus cannot, through his person alone, guarantee the aesthetic-political integrity and continuity of his work over time. He does not have history and tradition to support him; he does not have the assurance of his firstborn son succeeding him to guarantee the future of the nation. The dictator is thus only a temporary and artificial solution—a modern solution—to the divisions of the nation.
Only the king or the figure of the king—because his authority and function are not contingent and dependent on his life but are guaranteed by tradition and by royal succession—could guarantee the integrity and continuity of the nation-work. Because the king's actual person means nothing and his particular capacities are practically irrelevant, his death therefore is without consequence. The family and tradition are the king, the royal institution is the king, not the individual king himself. His power was thus deemed to be natural and eternal rather than artificial and contingent:
The only rational and sane form of the authority of a single person is the one that rests on the family, from first-born to first-born, following a law that excludes competition. It is a power that is so natural that, comprising that of the dictator and possessing it in a virtual way, the chief who exercises this power is no longer called dictator: he is king (let us understand the word precisely: rex, director and leader, functionary of the intelligence), and this royal magistrate, combining the two ideas of command and heredity, is such a supple thing that it never stops being itself when it changes with time.... As occurs for very great things, the institution is very much superior to the man. (294-95)
The king, then, is a director and leader (or perhaps a certain kind of "rational" Duce or Führer) who figures or embodies not just the political unity of the nation, but its historical and spiritual unity as well. Quite simply, "the King of France does not die" (Enquete sur la Monarchie, CXXVII), and his identity never really changes because his identity is not determined by his person but by his function.
The king's function has always been to create the nation as an organic work of art and to inscribe himself, his image, at the center of the work. A nation, as a single, unique work, can have only one author and one center, and that author and center are and have always been the same figure. Julius Caesar, according to Maurras, made France "possible," but the French kings, working as a single author, slowly realized the work as a whole:
Often [the kings] assimilated [territory] before conquering it. At other times, the smallest conquered domain is subjected to a patient effort of assimilation, before they take on a new conquest. Such is their art, such is the "admirable result" whose monument France is . . . . Good or bad, weak or strong, none of these princes ever lost sight of the generation of France. One would say that it is the work of a single man. It is the work of an institution, of a tradition, and of a House. (495)
The institution of the king, Maurras claims, is "consubstantial with the history of our State, our nation, and our spirit" (C). In order to be the kind of artwork that the nation is claimed to be, the consubstantiality of "artist" and work is necessary, for ideally there should be no difference between the parts of the whole, the king, and the figure of the whole, no difference between king and nation, king and people. If an aesthetic sense of unity is the supreme political goal, Maurras's Integral Nationalism can be seen to possess a powerful and convincing logic within the narrow parameters defined by such an aestheticist project. Fascism, at least the literary fascism proposed by many disciples of Maurras, could be considered the modern, revolutionary version of the same general aesthetic-political program, but a program no longer defined politically in terms of royalism or defined aesthetically strictly in terms of classicism.
Despite its traditional character, then, Integral Nationalism could be considered a fascism before-the-fact, one that claims to have realized (and to be able to realize again) the true—that is, total—project of national unification, not just in the present and for the future but in terms of and for the past as well. To give up the idea of the monarchy is for Maurras to give up nothing less than the idea of the integral nation itself. With the monarchy at its center, the nation "exists by its proper force, sua mole stat" (Mes idées politiques, 302), self-constituting, unified, and identical to itself, the supreme, sovereign subject. If in arguing against what he considered the dangerous democratic mystification of the popular will and the impersonal, collective subject, Maurras claims that "the sovereign is not subject, the subject not sovereign" (306); it is so because for him the king alone is an absolute subject, the embodiment of the nation as an organic unity. All other subjects are subject to him (it) and to the unity and authority he represents. There is and can be, therefore, only one subject in Integral Nationalism, the royal subject personifying and equivalent to the nation-subject, and in terms of whom the people become one: one people, one king, one nation.
The very aesthetic and political concepts that led many of Maurras's younger followers to fascism and active collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Occupation were, however, at the very same time at the heart of Maurras's refusal to collaborate directly with Nazi Germany after the defeat. Unlike Brasillach and Rebatet, he refused to actively support Hitler, whom he had always linked to the romantic, revolutionary German tradition he had constantly denounced:
Germany is the country of the Revolution. The Revolution comes from Germany. . . . If we stick to the essential (which so many critics forget), the filiation Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Bismark, Hitler is evident. . . . The Hitlerian movement, is it really, as so many democrats believe, a reactionary, anti-individualist, and anti-democratic movement? Is it not on the contrary one of the most dangerous forms of democratic individualism: the Cesarian dictatorship? (L'Action Française [September 26, 1933], republished in De la politique naturelle au nationalisme intégral, 123)
Throughout the war, Maurras refrained from directly supporting what he called in 1933 the "tyrannical State of Hitler," one which he claimed expressed an "abstract national will, completely metaphysical and religious" (123), and which was unlike what he argued was the "vigorous realism" of Integral Nationalism. He did not keep a distance from Pétain or Vichy, however, and thus could rightly be considered to have collaborated, even if in a different form from most of his fascist heirs, and at a distance and on what he claimed were "his own" and Pétain's terms.
Hitler remained too much a product of democracy and of the "Orient" for Maurras to link National Socialism too closely to his own vision of France, for Hitler's mode of unifying Germany imposed on it "the most rigid, the most sectarian, and the most artificial of unitarisms—a believe OR die, a believe AND die that makes it resemble and brings it close to the measures of an Islam" (124). Unlike his younger fascist followers, Maurras thought that France had nothing to learn from this "Islamic" model, which represented one of the most dangerous threats to the integrity of France, a model that he considered an extreme product of democracy and the East rather than their opposite. What changed during the Occupation, of course, was that he could no longer write such things; he could no longer overtly attack the traditional enemy of France. Instead, Maurras devoted all his attention and energy to attacking England, which had replaced Germany in his writing as the principal foreign enemy of France, denouncing "the traitor de Gaulle," as he always called him, and defending the integrity of France, now no longer in terms of the king, the divine ruler, but rather as personified by Pétain, "the divine surprise" that resulted from the humiliating defeat.12
Maurras defended Pétain in the exact terms he used previously to defend the monarchy, making Pétain the symbolic center of the French nation: "He who wanted no other title than that of Chief of the French State personifies our historical and geographic unity. He is their brilliant sign, but also the means of organic and vital action" (De la colère à la justice: Réflexions sur un désastre [Geneva: Editions du Milieu du Monde, 1941], 74). Without being able to claim for him the legitimacy of royal lineage, and yet clearly wanting to distinguish him from dictators whose right to govern depended only on force, Maurras gave Pétain another type of "natural legitimacy," that supplied by military tradition: "We ask only for the dictatorship of the French Army and of its natural hierarchy" ("Unité française. D'abord,"in La Seule France, 18). And what is natural about the army is that, like royalty, it is equated in history with the nation as a whole: "It's out of the real country, its heart, its soul and its millenial genius that our army came, in its order and its spirit. The government of the army constitutes the brilliant image of French unity" (19). Pétain is thus presented as the worthy successor to Napoleon, the great military genius who unified France in spite of and in a sense against the Revolution, but without Napoleon's romantic aesthetic-political limitations.
Maurras ensures Pétain's legitimacy by equating him directly with France as a whole, by making him, like the king, represent the unique sovereign subject with absolute authority:
When the defeat occurred, the nation needed a defender who was devoted only to it, who represented only it, who was interested only in its essential being. . . . Instead of the parts of the nation, its Totality was taken into account, and we looked to the heights . . . where the greatest servants of the nation were—where the best, the greatest was: . . . PETAIN who depended on no one, PETA1N whose services were of a strictly national order, PETAIN who owed his authority only to himself or to his worth,... it was PETAIN who imposed himself on even the simplest gaze. (De la colère à la justice, 78-79)
In this way, "the gift of his person" that Pétain made to France was the gift of itself that France made to itself, since for all intents and purposes, Pétain was France.
The slogan associated with Maurras, "Politics First," became during this period "Unity First," which was equivalent to "France First" and then "France, France all alone" (La Seule France, 37). The survival of France, of a reactionary, traditional, hierarchical Catholic, antidemocratic France, no matter the costs, was the unique principle of Maurras's defense of Pétain:
National unity morally regained at the appropriate moment around its consecrated chief. Such is the living sense, such is the vital sense of politics first. . . . What will allow [France] to exercise its normal life function? It's first to be, to be with force, thus to retain its political and moral unity, then its territorial unity. Without this, nothing at all will be of any use to it. . . . To resist eventual misfortunes, there has to be a France. [La Seule France, 34-36).
Maurras's defense of Pétain and Vichy was characterized, as usual, by its powerful simplicity, and it was driven by the same implacable, dogmatic logic found in his defense of the monarchy. "Only France" and "France Alone" meant that if Vichy's collaboration aided the war efforts of that radical outgrowth of the Orient and democracy called Nazism and France's traditional enemy, Germany, it did not really matter, for France was the only value that had to be considered. What was good for France, and for its survival, was unambiguously good, and every act of collaboration by Vichy was defended with the same insistence: "the sovereignty of France" was the essential and only issue (286). Once Pétain was placed in the role and had the function of the king, the fiction of a free, sovereign France under German Occupation could be constructed and defended according to the same aesthetic-political principles and operations as those for Integral Nationalism.13
It was thus in the name of the survival and revival of the integral nation that Maurras enthusiastically supported Pétain's "National Revolution" and his war against "métèques" and attacked "the traitor de Gaulle" (117), who he claimed was working for the English to destroy France and bring about what he called the "Fifth Revolution" in France (La Seule France, 123).14 But such unity had its price, which Maurras was more than happy to have all "aliens," and especially the Jews, pay. In an essay entitled "La France aux Français" (in La Seule France)—a xenophobic slogan originally made popular by Edouard Drumont, author of La France Juive, and more recently used by the Le Pen's National Front—Maurras claimed that "under the condition of an atrocious national mourning, at a time of glorious resurrection, the government of Maréchal Pétain put the businesses of devastating métèques back in their proper place, and he returned to the sons of our land the ownership of their professions and restored the honor and freedom of their work" (190). In "Juifs et Franc-Maçons" (also in La Seule France), he defended Vichy's "Statute on the Jews" of October 3, 1940, 15 because he claimed it "has nothing against the religious faith of the Israelites, their blood, or their goods. It wants to save the spirit and fortune of the country, as it has the strict duty to do" (194). For Maurras, the anti-Semitism of Vichy was identical to the anti-Semitism he had always proposed—a "rational," "State anti-Semitism," rather than an "anti-Semitism of the skin," one that reestablished the true hierarchy of the country: "The first act of the government was to say: France for the French, priority to the immediate children of the land and blood, the métèques would come only after them" (272). If Vichy France went further in its anti-Semitic legislation than the Germans demanded, it was for reasons that Maurras wholeheartedly approved and for a social vision that owed much to his thought.
It is highly ironic that it is when France was politically the least independent and sovereign that Maurras praised its sovereignty and national integrity the most vigorously. The integral-nationalist fiction of the political that he had constructed in his royalist writings was powerful enough, however, to justify the most severe repressions in the name of national sovereignty and to eliminate everything that conflicted with the picture of the nation being presented. The totalizing fiction of organic nationalism that dominated Maurras's ideology from beginning to end made this militant royalist one of Pétain's strongest and most loyal supporters. At the same time, it kept him from moving to the next stage of collaboration and actively supporting the cause of Nazi Germany, as many of his disciples did. Reactionary in his aesthetic tastes and reactionary in his political tastes as well, Maurras nevertheless provided an aesthetics of the nation that was an important foundation for the revolutionary forms of nationalism that French literary fascists championed; and therefore it also provided a basis for the more direct and active forms of collaboration and support of Nazi Germany that he himself condemned.
The political position of Robert Brasillach did not differ essentially from that of Maurras in its general outlines and the overall picture of the integral, organic nation it delineated. Like Rebatet, who distanced himself even more from Vichy and Maurras, Brasillach simply drew different conclusions from such a picture. Brasillach and Rebatet quickly grew impatient with Pétain (and Maurras) and decided that active and direct collaboration with Nazi Germany was the only way to bring about a true national—that is, a National-Socialist—fascist revolution in France. As Maurras was willing to accept Pétain symbolically as king, so Brasillach and other fascists wanted a leader to emerge to replace Pétain. They had in mind a youthful, energetic fascist dictator who would have the same national legitimacy Maurras attributed to Pétain. But the aesthetic and political configuration of fascism that the literary fascists proposed was basically a logical extension and radicalization of Maurras's position, even if the step to fascism and direct collaboration with the Nazis was one Maurras himself had been unwilling to make.