ALL THREE WRITERS had spoken of the necessity of up-holding traditions, but what traditions were to be upheld? Sorel denied being a traditionalist of the kind that the Action Française was producing if, as he wrote in a letter to Edouard Dolléans on October 13, 1912, "one means by traditionalist the supporters of monarchical and Catholic institutions."1 He agreed he was a traditionalist in the sense that he attached major importance to historical evidence in cultural matters, but not in the sense of being an ally of Maurras. Sorel criticized the choice of intellectual parentage the Nationalists had made. They had passed over Chateaubriand because he was a romantic and had overpraised Fustel de Coulanges. The Nationalists refused to recognize that modern ideas of tradition came from Savigny, a German, while Bonald, even if he had given the idea of the general will to God, had borrowed the concept from Rousseau.2
Sorel was not even sure that tradition was of primary importance. He had stated that a time had arrived when the complaints of the oppressed individual seemed more sacred than traditions, the necessities of order, and the principles on which society rested. But he was sufficiently a traditionalist to argue, in an article in L'Indépendance in November, 1912, that, "A people belonging to the category of great races must make continual efforts to create the novel by depending on the legacy of the past."3
All the writers dealt with the Church, the army, the importance of rural values, and a series of accepted values, which in the case of Maurras, amounted to a political science.
The three writers were basically nonreligious. Though some have claimed Barrès as a spiritual Catholic, the substance of his work does not bear this out. Maurras was put on the Index specifically for the nonreligious nature of his work. Sorel, both by temperament and by training, was agnostic. But all were interested in the political and social role that the Church played, though Sorel was somewhat contradictory on the matter.
Sometimes Sorel stressed the heroic morality of the persecuted Christians in ancient times; at other times he praised the legal system of the Romans and denounced Christians as destroyers of society. In one book, La Ruine du monde antique, he argued that Christianity had accelerated the fall of Rome, while in others he denied its responsibility. For Sorel, there was no true social morality in Christianity, for it could not teach what it was necessary to do in modern civil society.4 The Church attached itself to the military class partly because it sought to find support for a course of external politics conforming to Catholic interests.5 When he was still an ardent Dreyfusard, Sorel believed that the Church had committed no greater fault in modern times than having taken part against the revision of the Dreyfus trial. Indeed, the Church was a greater danger than the army, for while the priest was in daily contact with the citizen, the military oligarchy exercised only an intermittent tyranny. But Sorel praised Christianity both for the value of its myths and for the heroic energy which had been exercised in its behalf in previous generations.
Barres was not a defender of the Catholic Church and religion because of any spiritual or theological impulse. "We reject revealed religions because of what they include, in which we cannot believe."6 In a letter of April, 1902, he stated that although he did not want Catholicism to be degraded, at the same time he did not intend to go to confession, or to associate himself with the campaigns of the vestries against free thinkers. Barrès did occasionally talk of "the mystery at the bottom of all reality," the great states of religious emotion, and the need for the divine. But in his political trilogy, Les Déracinés, L'Appel au soldat, and Leurs Figures, there was little place for religion. Of his seven young men from Lorraine, only Saint-Phlin was religious in any meaningful way.
Catholicism, however, was valuable in a double sense. Barrés ranged himself among its defenders, "not as a faithful believer, but because I am patriotic, in the name of the national interest."7 He believed that French nationality was tied strictly to Catholicism, that it was formed and developed in a Catholic atmosphere, and that, in trying to destroy and tear Catholicism away from the nation, no one could foresee what would be demolished. Politically it was valuable because it was a force, a treasure to protect. Between Catholicism and French civilization no distinction could be made. In a picturesque metaphor, Barrès said, "The Church planted in the village square makes the soil healthy. Around it the human plant develops in an atmosphere of civilization."8 The Church was still what men had found strongest and most valuable in maintaining order. Even when he confessed that "nationalism lacks the infinite," and that he felt himself "sliding from nationalism to Catholicism,"9 Barres still found it necessary "for Maurras as for me, that the gods of France become the gods of civilization."
But Catholicism was useful also for personal reasons. Catholicism, like individualism, tradition, and nationalism, was valuable in heightening his own sensibility, and at times his sensuality, to the point of voluptuousness. The Catholic religion "is the poem that most satisfies me"; it was in the churches that "my intelligence and my heart find the formulas of the highest poetry." Catholicism had made him what he was; it was the milieu which offended him least, which would best accept his divine manifestations, and which was most favorable to his natural activity. The wiping out of the Protestant bands by the Duke Antoine was a happy victory which allowed the preservation of the truths from which Barrès benefited. The truths were not to be judged but only to be seen in correspondence with the developments of his soul. Religion, in fact, was more than a simple means of maintaining public order. The virtues that Catholicism had bequeathed to the nation were both social health and the exaltation of the highest powers of the soul. Catholicism not only provided laws in accordance with the laws of health for the individual and for peoples but it also was the most favorable atmosphere for the existence of magnanimous sentiments. "It is not enough to say Catholicism is a guide, it is necessary to add that it is an immense reservoir of the pleasures of the soul." For Barrès, Catholicism did not find its proof in history, but in his soul. The Church, moreover, taught how to honor the dead, and "The dead are my sacred things. I honor them in common with the dignified among the living."10
For Maurras, Catholicism conserved and perfected all his favorite ideas: order, tradition, discipline, hierarchy, authority, continuity, unity, work, family, corporation, decentralization, autonomy, working-class organization. Religious life had become a matter of tradition more than of faith. Religion itself was not necessary for the people, religion and education were necessary only for the leaders of the people. A realistic view of politics would place less emphasis on the importance of celestial justice than on the terrestrial necessity of public welfare.
A patriot could very well not believe in Catholicism, However, it was necessary to be concerned with it as a political element of the country. Catholicism, to which were owed the organization and the conservation of the country, had not ceased to be the center of the firmest resistance to the effects of anarchy and revolution which had been disturbing France for a century.11 "Maurras accepts the Church and not the evangelist. He wants the Pope, not Christ," wrote Barrès.12
Maurras, "a cerebral Christian," as Bernanos called him, had little sympathy for religious dogma or feeling. For him the Christianity of the Evangelists was odious, a philosophy of pure and barbarous sensibility. His story, "Les Serviteurs," in his early book, he Chemin de paradts, is, in effect, a symbolic attack on the morality of Christianity, similar in content to that of Nietzsche. The virtue of the Church was that it had organized the idea of God. In a famous passage in La Démocratic religieuse,13 explaining why he was "a son of Rome," nowhere did Maurras mention any spiritual reasons. It is significant that none of the leaders of the Action Française were religious, and that the political intimates of Maurras—Vaugeois, Pujo, Moreau, Bainville—were all agnostics. In an epoch when the Church was making many converts among intellectuals, Maurras remained agnostic. It is perhaps revealing that in 1926 the Church accepted Cocteau and rejected Maurras.
In a re-edition of Le Chemin de paradis, Maurras said, "I wanted to avoid offending Catholics. My intention has never been adverse to them . . . the alliance with Catholics seems desirable to me."14 In re-editing his writings, he had cut out what might offend "the Church that I saluted as the oldest, the most venerable, or the most fecund of visible things and the noblest and most holy ideas of the Universe . . . the Church of Order."15 He omitted, among other things, the autobiographical story, "Le Conte de la bonne mort," which had described his loss of faith. This covering of his intellectual tracks, in fact, makes it difficult to discover passages like the famous one, "The Gospel written by four obscure Jews," so often quoted against him, but it did not prevent him from being made an outcast by the Church, and having his work put on the Index.
Maurras was always conscious of his debt to Comte; there were, he held, sympathies and affinities between positivism and Catholicism on questions of the family, the origin of political authorities, tradition, order, and civilization, and they had common enemies. There was no French positivist who did not believe that, if it was the Capetians who had made France, it was the bishops and the clergy who had been the first to cooperate. The Catholic Church, for 20 centuries, had been the vessel of civilized order containing most of the seeds of progress for the human species. Maurras dedicated Le Dilemme de Marc Sangnier to the Roman Church, "the Church of Order," and to Catholicism, "the most general notion of order." Inheritor of the work of the Latins and of Hellenism, the Church had stood firm against revolution and anarchy. It had been able both to formulate laws of conscience for the relations between men and society and also, as a living authority, to interpret cases arising out of these relations.
All other religions were the product of the foreigner and were anti-French in idea and action. Antipatriotism was linked to anti-Catholicism, intellectual and moral dissent to the Huguenots. For Maurras, the Church and the monarchy were mutually beneficial. If on the one hand God became the first gendarme of the monarchy, on the other, there was no possible security for the Catholic Church outside of monarchy. But, as Catholic critics were quick to point out, in the political alliance that Maurras envisaged, the Church occupied a secondary position, and was always an obedient auxiliary force. The very slogan of Maurras, "Politique d'abord," meant that primacy must be given to political organization over all others. When Maurras combined his political preoccupation with an intense nationalism, the Church became even more wary. To Catholics, the formula of the national interest was one under which all the Gallican and Josephite enterprises had been supported against Catholicism.16 The attitude of the Catholic to the Maurrasian version of Catholicism might well echo the old Norman proverb: "Lord, preserve me from my friends; I will preserve myself from mine enemies."
Next to the Church, the second traditional body was the army. The Nationalists were convinced that it was important to uphold the army, symbol of order and defense. This dictated their attitude in the Dreyfus Affair, which meant more than the fate of an individual. For them, besides the conscious treason of Dreyfus, the serious consequences of the Affair were the destruction of the country's faith in the army, the abolition of military jurisdiction, and the ruin of the army itself. The worst crime of Dreyfus was not that he had stolen the documents enumerated in the bordereau, but that for five years he had disturbed the army and the whole nation.
Barres was a supporter of the army for both material and ideological reasons. An army was necessary for France to remain independent and strong. He regarded General Mercier, who, during the Dreyfus Affair, had proved so deficient in character and in honesty, as "my fellow Lorrainer and my friend. He is incapable of failing in honor."17
But Barrès also admired soldiers as possessors of the virtue of energy and the means of overcoming the feebleness and emptiness of life. The army, moreover, was a school of character. Through it, young people could use and develop their various aptitudes for the good of the country and their own development. The army was the image of the nation, and that image could justifiably be upheld by the noble lie. Barrès confided that old Boulangists like himself had learned to support deceptions and to nourish themselves on chimeras.
The army, for Maurras, was necessary for both internal and external reasons: internally, in order to prevent an anarchist or socialist revolution, and externally, in order to restore France to its former glory. The army was the only permanent group escaping the fluctuations and the mutual hostilities of the parties. In the absence of the king, it was the only way to get unity. The army disliked political control, it was hostile to the parliamentary system, it detested humanitarianism, left-wing or pacific ideas. Maurras never talked in the way that de Maistre or Veuillot did of the divinity of war, for he always regarded war as harmful. But the army must be at the service of a just idea, the principle of order itself.
The proper use of the army was denied both by democratic ideology and by the Republic. Democracy was harmful to the military idea, while the Republic had led to antimilitarism, to the sabotaging of the Information Service, and the appointment of incompetent military leaders. The Republic and the party system were in contradiction to the normal life and safety of France. The Republic dishonored the old royal army, venerable institution of French unity, heroic element in the formation of France. Throughout the Dreyfus Affair, a democratic rottenness penetrated the army with the increase of civilian influence. Since then, "The liberty of insulting the 'galonnards' has been virtually inscribed in the Charter of our liberties."18
Sorel, too, upheld the integrity of the army for his own particular reasons. Contemporary experience, especially in France, taught that there was no profession which was more antipathetic to intellectuals and less intelligible for them than the profession of arms.19 The army embodied the idea of heroic action, and would always provide the model for a true movement of the workers.
"Life is a swallow and theory a snail," R. H. Tawney once wrote. While the nationalists were propounding what was essentially an aristocratic conception of the army, technology was altering the very institution about which they were talking. Easier communication and methods of transport and more capable administration meant that in the future mass armies would be based on conscription, and that from now on the political role that military leaders would like to see the army play could not be assured. The syndicalists, attempting to get the conscripts to desert their barracks, were laying the foundations for the political revolts of soldiers and workers in other countries in 1917 and 1918. Moreover the growing interconnection between economic and military problems and the enormous increase in armaments meant that planning of a considerable part of the national economy was necessary in order to produce the required equipment. The independent power of army leaders was therefore likely to be reduced because of the greater control exercised by politicians. But the military leaders were still a power with which the Republic had to reckon. If Clemenceau was right to gibe at the military competence of the army leaders during the World War, the prewar politicians were even more correct in their constant fear of political intervention by those leaders.
"A true and complete philosophy of tradition is always agrarian," argued Thibaudet.20 With its more homogeneous population, its smaller number of outsiders, its relative immobility and little contact with foreigners, the rural area has a more developed nationalist and traditionalist attitude in the sense of love of country than the urban area.21 All the theorists developed this contrast between the urban and rural areas, attacked the city, symbol of decadence, responsible for the decline of tradition.
The great observation of Barrès, one critic has said, was that one thought in a truer and more fruitful manner in the countryside, for him the Lorraine countryside, than in a city library.22 One of the main reasons for so violently attacking Bouteiller, the teacher in Les Déracinés, was that he had implanted the idea of city ambition in his young students. Barrès waxed lyrical about the countryside, its ruins, the glory of its stones. "What I see in Lorraine, what I hear, is the peasant, the word of the peasant." When Lucien Herr dismissed him as "a typical product of small French towns," Barrès took this as a compliment, and added, "I have the happiness to be that."23 Barrès was fond of talking of the song of the small town, which was an eternal repetition of the ideas of religion, authority, marriage, saving, heritage. Small town people lived at a slower rate, and their aims were limited, but there was something to be revered in that monotony, that insignificance, that smallness. This concern for the small town was coupled with Barres' regard for other traditional values. It is noticeable that several of his more important speeches were on the necessity for the care and preservation of the small parish churches of the country.
Similarly Maurras, "ce fils de la mer," as René Benjamin called him, equated the true and national traditions with the countryside. When he spoke of "the people," he had the peasants and fishermen of Martigues in mind.24
In this respect as in so many others a firm disciple of Proudhon, Sorel contrasted the undesirable qualities to be found in the cities with the favorable ones to be found in the rural areas. On one side, there were skepticism and vice; on the other, faith and morality. The city was flippant and cynical; the rural area was serious and dignified. The city with its heterogeneous population, its cosmopolitan ideas, was based on trade, finance, international banking and mercantile activities, attracted strangers, and weakened traditional morality and religion. The rural area provided the opportunity for the peasant to become an artist, for work in the fields to have an aesthetic character, and for a common concern in the administration of collective things.
Again he drew parallels from history to justify his case. The trial of Socrates was, in essence, the result of the underlying conflict between the agriculturalists who respected the laws and did not want change, and the Sophists, the urban element, who mocked traditional ideas. Athenian democracy, like contemporary democracy, was an oligarchy of shopkeepers and small artisans, and the city, the home of their activity, was a marketplace ruled by self-interest.
Sorel found as features or characteristics of the town all the institutions or ideas he detested—the system of exchange, the merchant and the market, the fair, the apparatus of the state, governmental, parliamentary, and judicial institutions, politicians, intellectuals, abstract ideas, and democratic ideas. For him, modern democracies were characterized by individuals who felt no attachment to the past, had no deep love for their home, and were concerned only mildly for future generations. The true place for these individuals was the large town, where men passed like shadows and where political committees had taken the place of the old social authorities overthrown by revolutions.
Essentially an urban phenomenon, democracy had a false sense of values. It took as its ideal citizen the man of letters, the orator, the journalist. In this way the domination of the cities was established in France under the fallacious pretext that the citizens of towns, by reading newspapers and journals, were more enlightened than countrymen. This was amply illustrated by the doctrine of the bourgeois Socialists that city workers had a kind of historic-economic mission. This doctrine was in fact a reflection of the dictatorship of the cities.25 The Socialist leader, Jaures himself, had indeed only discovered the peasants in 1900, and then only for electoral purposes.
Sorel contrasted to this unfortunate urban influence the virtues of the countryside, moral and national. The rural population, stable and homogeneous, holding its property in the form of land, had a feeling of national sentiment. Whereas the immigrant or foreigner could engage in the activities of the city, he could not infiltrate the countryside and obtain land, since the supply was limited. From the theoretical point of view, starting from the rural element was valuable. In Le Procès de Socrate, Sorel had praised Oeconomicus for his stress on rural, domestic economy, and in the Introduction à l'économie moderne, he criticized the starting point of Marxism, which believed that urban phenomena ought to be the base for economic research. To find the theory of all societies it was necessary to study the life of agricultural societies.26 In this way a rural socialism, bound to moral forces and to an organization of work where progress was easy to measure, would be practical. While industry depended above ail on mechanics and was an abstract science, agriculture, on the contrary, was "a biological industry," much more complex, much more concrete than industrial production, and therefore capable of providing a more realistic clue to the complexity of reality. From the moral point of view, the countryside was equally valuable. The worker in a trade, the urban worker in general, the man in one of the liberal professions, was not sufficiently absorbed in his work; it remained external and unintelligible to him. But the peasant, on the other hand, was absorbed by the earth that he cultivated. An agricultural enterprise had at its head a man loving the earth, and love of profession was the first element of success. It was ridiculous to talk as Marx had done in the Communist Manifesto of the idiocy of the life of the countryside. The agriculturist became the servant of the earth, preoccupied with it and its future.
In so stressing the desirability of rural values, Sorel left unresolved contradictory features of his theory. On the one hand, he argued that tension must be maintained in order for heroism to be manifested, that industrial technique must be advanced, and that the peaceful life was undesirable. On the other hand, he made a claim for rural values and for peasants, although these will normally be the most conservative elements in a political system. It is paradoxical that the group he castigated most severely, the men of liberal professions, are in fact the group most likely to carry out the cardinal necessity Sorel stressed, that of being sufficiently absorbed in their work.
The Right always claims the inevitability of certain characteristics, if a society is to exist, and chief among these are order, stability, and authority. If the Right is opposed to abstractions like justice or liberty, it is also, under the guise of realism and a concern for the concrete, just as much attached to its own abstractions. It was the aim of Maurras to erect these concepts into a system which became a political science of tradition.
Sorel thought that a science of politics could not be formulated. Since each individual was a separate person, all serious study of man had to be based on the impossibility of interpreting emotional states. Human activities could be studied only by analyzing objective processes. Since it was impossible to formulate a science of human acts, all one could hope to do was to gather "systematic data," which would be revised from time to time.27 Sorel wrote to Croce, "The philosopher must be a modest man, not proposing universal panaceas." The creator of a system worked like an artist, interpreting with extreme liberty what he observed around him. In modern economy and in a large number of social phenomena, movements were blind, unconscious, or quasi-mate rial.28 History was more of an art than a science, and no general formula could be established as a guide in historical research. Legislative acts could never resemble mathematical formulae.
Maurras agreed with Sorel that there was no general law of history which could provide the key to historical understanding. He criticized Comte for having believed that he had discovered such a "law of history"; there were, Maurras argued, laws of history, but no Law of History.29 But to the rest of Sorel's analysis he was totally opposed. Maurras believed that there was a chronological primacy about politics, and that a good political state was the necessary foundation for satisfactory conditions in every other sphere. He made a religion of politics. The intellectual problem, the ethical problem, the social problem, all led back to the political problem.
The ambition of Maurras was to build a political science, a science that was based on a combination of experience and history. His political doctrine was "not deduced, but induced from the facts, from the interconnection of facts that are called laws."30 He agreed with Montesquieu that civil and political laws were related to the nature of things, to places, times, and states. These laws were not imperative laws in the sense of order and command, but laws of constancy and sequence, induced from the field of history and the general behavior of mankind. Politics was not morals; the art and the science of the conduct of the state were not the art and science of the conduct of man. There was no direct relationship between moral perfection and the perfection of political forms, the latter being bound to factors like geographical or social conditions foreign to the morality of man. He said, "I do not believe in moralism or in idealism."31
The first principle of his political science therefore was that law was not arbitrary but the result of an appreciation of a given situation. Law was not the expression of the general will but of necessity, of the general well-being of the public interest. A parallel could be drawn from science. There was no liberty of conscience in astronomy, physiology, chemistry, or physics in the sense that principles established in these sciences by competent men would be declared absurd.32 Similarly, all societies existed according to natural necessities; it was a question of knowing exactly the essence of these necessities, not of affirming what was just or well-founded. Society had the choice only between obedience to the necessary political laws or death, and many former societies, such as the Republic of Poland or Athenian democracy, had in fact chosen death, dissolution, and ruin. This would be the fate of the democratic Republic, for it had as its base revolutionary illuminism, which was in manifest and complete disagreement with the views of positive politics or what Maurras called organicist empiricism.
This empiricist approach to a political science was based on certain premises. The first of these premises was that societies were facts of nature, of necessity, not born of contracts or wills. Society was a natural whole, not a voluntary association. It was not wished for, it was not elected by its members, for individuals did not choose their blood, their country, their language, or their tradition. The community was the first condition not only of progress but of the existence of the individual. A society could no more be broken up into the individuals that composed it than a geometric surface could be broken up into straight lines or a straight line into points. Society was the condition and the generator of justice, not the reverse. One had seen societies without justice, but no one had ever seen justice without society. Parliamentary democracy pretended to provide a government of principles. But all governments before being governments of "principles," must first be governments, and must therefore exist. The task of political science was first to defend, then to conserve societies and states.33
Together with the first premise was another that society was wiser than the individual and its preservation more important. In this way, Maurras believed that in the Dreyfus Affair, a King of France would have done what the King of Italy or the Emperor of Germany would have done: before allowing the story of the judicial error to be propagated, he would have called those interested in the propagation proven agitators. Nothing ought to stand in the way of the existing social institutions. If by chance Dreyfus were innocent, he ought to be named Marshal of France, but a dozen of his chief defenders should be shot for the harm they did to France, peace, and reason, a list which Maurras later extended to include the army, justice, order, state, country, civilization.34
A third premise was that of an unchanging human nature, viewed realistically. One could take the nature of man, alternatively with the face of a god and that of a wolf, as constant. Man needed his fellow man, but was also afraid of him. Man was an animal with reason, and it was this reason which distinguished him, without separating him from the rest of nature. But he was also limited by the laws of life. By instinct he was an accumulator, conservative, traditionalist. He had been formed by 50 centuries of civilization; if he trembled in the desert, it was from solitude.35
Another essential premise was that Maurras' view of politics and political behavior was a realistic one, while that of a democratic republic was illogical and unsound. He regarded democrats as "princes des nuées," because they believed that the edifice of civilization rested on ideas, without wondering if they were true or false, or on wills, without considering the realities behind these wills.36 They refused to face the fact that force was a natural phenomenon. But there was no place for sentimentality or for humanitarianism in politics. The existence of reasoning without force behind it could not be conceived. Power was not an idea but a fact. There would always be conquest and a conqueror, just as there would always be assassinations in the course of the game of interests.
From his political science Maurras outlined certain values, of which the most important were stability and order, authority and leadership, inequality and the hereditary principle as the basis of rule.
Stability and order.—Maurras argued that a political liberal regime was one of instability and therefore of disorder, discontinuity, and revolution. Its companion, romanticism, meant disorder, exaggeration, self-abandonment, talk of the infinity of human things. Nothing was more variable than feeling, and for about a century, sensibility had been making disquieting progress. Romantics attacked the laws and the state, public and private discipline, the fatherland, family, and property.37
But politics was a matter of continuous work, of coherence because of its invariable laws, and of science and order. Nothing was easier than revolutions . . . the beautiful, the difficult thing was to avoid clashes, to guard against subversion, to aid nature in its fight against the enemy of life. In language that would no doubt be approved by Professor Oakeshott himself, Maurras said that to navigate and to steer to port, to endure and to make endure, these were the political miracles. Those who held the contrary idea only served the interests of the forces of death.
Order was inscribed in the nature of things. For Maurras this was both an aesthetic delight and political wisdom. Order in man, thought, and the state meant discipline, composition, and conformity, the absence of anarchy, the avoidance of chaos and of formless mass. For the Greek, beauty was fused with the idea of order itself because it was composition, hierarchy, gradation.38 There was no beauty of detail, all detail changing its value as soon as its place was changed. Just as order meant beauty in the arts, it would mean happiness in the city.
Disorder and destruction were the same thing, and the disorder of the French State would result in the destruction of France itself. Liberal thought was disorganized, leading to skepticism and corruption. But human life was great and good as it resisted death; to maintain was not only to be able to create, but also to conserve for the future. All organizations, whether spiritual or temporal, had the same interest in not allowing the living accumulation of sentiments and the more humble impulses to decompose, and thus assured to the universe the immense benefits of order.39
Anything that disturbed the public order was an injustice, so that true justice meant respect for public order. Nobody could take upon himself a right of upsetting everything in order to redress a judicial error, even where the error was proved in a way that the one involved in the Dreyfus Affair was not. Laws were sacred, but the most sacred law of all was that of public safety. If Colonel Henry was wrong to resort to forgery, his error was not a crime, for he was seeking to maintain this safety. It was Maurras' two articles in Ga- zette de France, September 6th and 7th, 1898, justifying this forgery, that established him as the spokesman of the right.
Maurras agreed with La Tour du Pin that order was not born spontaneously in society.40 Authority preceded and engendered it. Greece, Rome, and the Catholic Church had all contributed to the order of the world. France needed a strong army, respect for property, the sound establishment of public peace, the friendship of Catholicism, and enmity towards the revolutionary dogmas. From the point of view of peace, the worst government was still worth more than the best absence of government. The minimum of order in national and international relations was more favorable to the maintenance of peace than the savage struggle which was born everywhere because of the lack of a leader.
But the Maurrasian conception of order meant absence of tolerance and of diversity of opinion. "Under the pretext of organizing life," commented Guy-Grand,41 "he removed the taste of living and substituted suffocation." In his desire to perpetuate the political forms he favored, he chose, as Blum said,42 "purely arbitrary ones and pretended they were eternal." Spinoza once urged that the task of the political thinker was to show how men, even when full of passion, could still have fixed and stable laws. Maurras' solution was not to permit the passion. But to believe as he did in a rigid, stable society is both to misjudge the temper of politics and to put a high price on the conformity it necessarily entails. This kind of belief misjudges politics because instability is and has been the inevitable norm of a vital society. And the price paid for not believing this is to deny dissent and doubt, the means by which society progresses and through which freedom can survive.
Authority and leadership.—The Maurrasian concept of authority was Aristotelian. What humanity venerated most was authority, and what counted most was obedience. Political science established that authority was a necessary means of social life, and the instinct of obedience of the greatest interest to the crowds which wanted to be governed, and well governed, by firmness. "For Maurras in politics it is not a matter of knowing what pleases us, but what is good for us,"43 commented Barrès.
Authority was an absolute value like virtue or genius or beauty. It was authority not liberty, which was general, necessary, and human. If a strong superior authority was not present to impose order, the human race would be decomposed and thrown into chaos. Authority was a natural phenomenon; it was not made either from below or from above, but was born. It was a characteristic possessed by some and denied to others. The true man of authority imposed himself naturally on others. But care was still necessary, for obedience was fallible and people could be deceived in taking a Boulanger for Julius Caesar or a Bonaparte for Louis XIV.
A state without a head would lead only to disaster. A people needed a leader as man needed bread. When threatened by an enemy, people must be commanded, when disorder reigned, they must be led back to order. To maintain order and stability, organization was essential in society. This meant differentiation of organs and division of functions, because inequality was a basic characteristic of all political and social activity. Society and civilization were born of inequality, and neither society nor civilization could arise where individuals were equal.
Dictatorship was in the order of necessity of things—the single leader alone could successfully blend his interests with those of the general interest. Moreover, he alone would be clearly responsible for his actions, unlike elected representatives who escaped responsibility. The good dictator and the national dictator were necessary for a decentralized system, based on classicism and rationally oriented. But the country did not want the dictatorship of money or of electoral opinion, it did not want dictatorship against France. Maurras had nothing but contempt for the false leader. The English Monk was able to be victorious without spilling blood. But if Boulanger captured power, he would install fountains of wine, and, if he were obliged to put a dozen republicans in jail, he would send them champagne.44
Heredity.—A national authority was a necessity, but an electoral authority was an absurdity, irrational and contradictory, because it was based on competition and party division. The effect of election was to enfeeble or destroy authority, while the effect of heredity was to establish tranquillity, order, and duration. The only true authority, the only one to create unity, would be a hereditary one. All that was happy, durable, and truly strong would acquire its happiness, its duration, and its force from the power and the natural laws of blood, from the French nation and its earth.45 The aptitudes of a nation were fixed to some degree by blood, but even more by oral tradition and education. Although Maurras argued that an aristocracy was transmitted by blood, and that an aristocracy of birth was the foundation of aristocracies of intelligence, probity, and fortune, the social attributes were more important than the physical. It had been professional heredity, not the heredity of the nobility, that selected the families from which the ancien régime was able to produce such a remarkable group of officers, judges, diplomats, and artisans.
All societies were governed on such a hereditary base. Even in contemporary France, it was such a group, the four Etats Confédérés, who brought to France whatever it possessed of stability and continuity. What was universal and eternal was not monarchy, but the hereditary government of families. In fact, the only rational form of authority of one person was that which rested in a family. The family was the means of continuing heritage and tradition. The two existing facts of hierarchy and tradition were politically united only when there was heredity. Where Bonaparte had failed, Capet had succeeded because Bonaparte had not had behind him what had supported Capet, three generations of dukes of France.46 Napoleon had ignored the value of traditions, and so could not establish a dynasty; he was only a dictator, an employer, a leader of a band, not a king.
In his presentation of the laws of politics, Maurras provided an analysis that was coherent and at the same time based on a totally unrealistic view of French political life and history. He oscillated, as Parodi said, between an empirical conception of social laws and a completely romantic conception of the national interest.47 He suggested he was stating a certain number of given empirical facts, but really was presenting a picture of society as he would have liked to have seen it.
1 Edouard Dolléans, "Le Visage de Georges Sorel," Revue d'histoire economique et socials (1940-1947), 26:107.
2 Book review of Louis Dimier, Les Maîtres de la Contre-révolution au XIX siècle, Le Mouvement socialiste (January 1907), 182:102-104.
3 As cited in Pierre Andreu, "Bergson et Sorel," Les Etudes Bergsoniennes (1952), 3:58.
7 Journal Officiel, December 21, 1906, p. 3400,
8 Journal Officiel, January 16, 1911, p. 88.
9 Mes Cahiers, VIII:80-81.
13 La Démocratic religieuse, p. 26.
14 Le Chemin de paradis, p. xxxvi.
15 La Démocratie religieuse, p. 528.
16 Etienne Lamy, "Quelques précisions," Le Correspondant (June 10, 1908), 231:986-987.
17 Journal Officiel, July 13, 1906, p. 2363.
20 Albert Thibaudet, Les Idées politiques de la France, p. 79.
21 Carl J. Friedrich, "The Agricultural Basis of Emotional Nationalism," Public Opinion Quarterly (April 1937), I:50-61.
22 Robert Kanters, "Barrès invisible et présent," La Nef (August 1947), 4:66.
23 Mes Cahiers, II:236.
24 Roudiez, "Charles Maurras: The Formative Years," p. 182.
25 Le Procès de Socrate, p. 179; Matériaux, pp. 386-390; Introduction, pp. 42, 203.
26 Georges Sorel, "Socialismes nationaux," p. 59.
27 D'Aristote à Marx, pp. 177-188.
28 Georges Sorel, Preface to E. R. A. Seligman, L'interprétation économique de l'histoire, Paris, 1911, pp. xxxviii-xxxix.
29 Le Chemin de paradis, p. xlix; L'Action française, January 7, 1927.
30 L'Action française, January 7, 1927.
31 Letter to Barrès, October 26, 1912, as cited in Mes Cahiers, IX:372.
32 L'Avenir de l'intelligence, p. 111.
33 La Démocratic religisuse, p. 97; Au Signe de Flore, p. 61.
34 An Signe de Flore, p. 55; La Contre-révolution spontanée, p. 49.
35 Prologue d'un essai, p. 50; Mes Idées politiques, p. 23.
36 Les Princes des nuées, p. 426.
37 L'Avenir de l'intelligence, p. 51.
38 Quand les français, p. 187.
39 Le Chemin de paradis, pp. LVI-LVII; La Démocratie religieuse, p. 108.
40 Eriquête sur la monarchic, p. 204.
41 Georges Guy-Grand, Le Conflit des idées dans la France d'aujourd'hui, Paris, 1921, p. 86.
42 Léon Blum, Oeuvres I, p. 227.
43 Mes Cahiers, X:27.
44 Enquête sur la monarchie, p. 488; Mes Idées politiques, pp. 40, 48-49.
45 L'Action française, September 16, 1911; March 21, 1912.
46 De Démos à César, II:197.
47 D. Parodi, "L'Action française," "Pages libres" (June 6, 1908), 15:630.