IT HAS BEEN THE AIM of this work to examine the similarities in criticism that the extreme Left and Right made of liberal democracy in general and of the ideology and institutions of the Third Republic in particular. There was, among Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras, a natural if not inevitable link through Proudhon, with his views on democracy, the value of tradition and the family, and through Le Play, with his views on decentralization and on social authorities. When the close collaborator of Maurras, Jacques Bainville dedicated his Bismarck and France to Proudhon, it caused no surprise. Among them, the three writers were representative of the contemporary opposition to the Third Republic, and also were significant forerunners of an opposition that would prove more fatal in the future not only to France, but to other European nations. They aptly illustrated the dictum of Julien Benda that the modern age was typified by the intellectual organization of political hatreds.
Sorel, Maurras, and Barrès were writing in a country with a proud cultural heritage but one which was facing new, complex, and difficult internal and external problems that seemed insoluble. Born into a nation that had experienced a humiliating defeat either during their youth or early manhood, they were intensely concerned with the strength of their country. For Maurras, this strength could be renewed by a complete counter-revolution and a return to past rulers. For Barrès it would be through the energetic hero or the leader acting in and through the noblest traditions of the country. For Sorel, it was to be by a renewal of moral spirit. The work of these writers illustrates the modern French dilemma. In an epoch when strong executive leadership became indispensable, the country was compelled through the impetus of its own revolutionary traditions to frown on such leadership. At the same time, strong executive leaders had always been, if popular, undemocratic, in the sense of lacking in responsibility and accountability.
In the context of a humiliated country, the rise of mass movements and the beginning of extensive education, the emotional, intellectual, and institutional divisions in France gave rise to views dangerous for the future. The attack on the intellectuals began to mount, and with it the idea that political problems could be solved in ways other than by conscious application of reason. The true treason of the intellectuals was to attack the process of intellectualization. When to this was added the feeling of heightened nationalism, with its strong stress on militarism and defense against foreigners, the setting was laid not simply for antidemocratic but also for totalitarian movements. It was perhaps in this sense that Louis Aragon suggested that Barrès' books were the first examples in French of the modern political novel.1
It is interesting that the three writers were forerunners in the use of political terminology which becomes as confusing as helpful. We have agreed that a division between Left and Right can be drawn, but it is by no means easy to do so, especially in the discussion of extremists, since the attack on the moderate democratic position, though made for opposing reasons, is likely to embrace similar theses. The three writers illustrated the difficulty of such a division: the neo-Marxist attacked rationalism and liberal humanism, the disciple of Comte challenged the economic implications of the master's thought, the supporter of exuberant individualism upheld tradition. It is by their very complexity that these writers are interesting, not only for the understanding of French political life and thought, but for that of the western world as a whole.
The three writers all protested against the conception of the isolated man that they regarded as an integral part of democratic theory, either because to posit such an isolation was a mere intellectual exercise, the product of a cold, unrealistic, rationalistic process, or because it meant controverting the fact that societies were superior to and more important than the individual. The writers protested against the abstract nature of the underlying premises of a democratic system—its conceptions of natural rights, its assumption that government through a process of discussion can reach desirable solutions—and against the educational system that would be fostered.
The three writers were all opposed to the existing political institutions, used myths, consciously or otherwise, to justify this opposition, and were prepared to use violence to overthrow these institutions; the violence would come from a small group, an elite, either by direct action or by a coup. It was poetic justice that Clemenceau, Prime Minister in 1906, on the outbreak of a number of strikes in Paris, should arrest the leaders of the syndicalist, Nationalist, and monarchist groups for which Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras were the intellectual spokesmen, as responsible for a plot against the Republic. In fact, for a number of years in the first decade of the century, the Action Française flirted with the C.G.T. in the hope of overthrowing the Republic. Yet up to 1914 the political effect of the three writers was limited: Maurras' group at the Action Française was essentially one of literary figures; Barrès, after his Boulangist experience, isolated himself politically and in the Chamber; Sorel was unwilling or incapable of working with any organized political or social movement for long.
The differences among the writers were also significant. The essential and underlying difference between Maurras and Barrès on one side and Sorel on the other was their respective attitudes to politics and to the state, typical of the Right and the Left. The Right always stresses the importance of politics, and in fact for Maurras and Barrès it was important to change the political institutions and replace them by others, to decentralize in order to make the state as a whole stronger, more efficient, and freer. Sorel was hardly interested in the mechanics of politics, and indeed only a small part of his total output of articles and books was concerned with political problems as such. For Sorel, the state was an oppressive institution. Whereas force for Maurras and Barrès meant the capture of the state, violence for Sorel meant its destruction and the breaking up of authority.
This differing emphasis on the power of the state gave rise to another important difference of opinion, a conflicting point of view on the value of unity or scission. All three advocated the need for heroic action, but for Maurras and Barrès this would serve the interest of the nation while for Sorel it was desirable for moral regeneration. If the Nationalists concentrated on politics, Sorel concentrated on morals and economics. The Nationalists in fact had no economic doctrine as such, nor were they much concerned about it. Their suggestion for the need of corporations as opposed to syndicats was vague, but in the Rightist-Catholic tradition. Their world was closed, ordered, finite. That of Sorel had no real end, but was one of continuing development.
Maurras and Barrès would disagree on a number of important issues, including fundamental approach to problems. For Maurras, investigation was based on empiricism, rationalism, and classicism. Barrès thought that too large a place had been given to man, and in man to reason, to analysis.
Of the three writers it is Maurras who fits most easily into a recognizable pattern, Maurras was the classic 19th century, as distinct from the modern, counter-revolutionary. His desire was to return to what he thought was the peak of French civilization, the 17th century, and his view was that life ought not to have moved on from that period. Maurras, the would-be classicist, the seemingly dogmatic realist, was in fact the most romantic and the most unrealistic of the three writers. Maurras was provincial in the narrowest sense, concerned with the greatness of one civilization at one time and place.
Like Hobbes, Maurras was authoritarian but not totalitarian. He was authoritarian in his demand for an absolute political power and in his belief that there should be no opposition to this power, but at the same time he insisted that this power should not be exercised over all the affairs of the community and that the political power was not itself a religious phenomenon. Yet Catholic thinkers were right to fear the threat that Maurras represented to the Church both because the state would make use of religion for its own political advantage, and because the Church could be only a prop of the state, not an independent check to it. With Maurras everything had become political, everything was subject to political control, and the control was by a small particular group. The ultimate paradox in Maurras' argument is that political activity must of necessity be limited because of his refusal to allow dissent, and because order was to be imposed from above and was not the result of consent. For him the best guarantees of the rights of the humble were bound up with the health and good of the powerful.
Barrès and Sorel are not so easy to classify as is Maurras. Barrès, like Maurras, favored a revolution from the Right, but he differed from the latter in appealing to eternity rather than to yesterday, and in advocating return to the soul of the people. Of the three writers, Barrès anticipated most closely later antidemocratic ideas and movements, partly through his traditional nationalism on which the state was to be based, and partly through his advocacy of a leader supported by a mass counter-revolution.
Barrès, essentially bourgeois in his emphasis on clean, regular, ordered habits, in his recommendation of material Independence in order both to escape dissipation and to ensure the existence of a solid class, was representative of those who felt the Revolution had been made against the nobility as well as against the monarchy. For him the nobility was a dead thing, not capable of rendering any particular service. But Barrès was equally opposed to the working-class movements that were developing and becoming a threat to established material and cultural possessions. As Jacques Madaule has argued, Barrès was too bourgeois to be a man of the Left.2
It is significant that Barrès had no economic or social policy as such, but only related economic and social problems to nationalism. By giving the worker a share in industry, he would be induced to be more willing to defend his country. Barrès' combinations of attitudes—bourgeois behavior and morals, antiplutocratic, antiaristocratic, and antiproletarian leanings—together with his exaggerated nationalism was new in the 19th century, but common in the 20th.
Barrès' psychological determinism provided the underlying philosophy for his outlook. His emphasis on the individual's lack of freedom of thought or action, man's dependence on his dead ancestors and his native soil, his cult of French heroes, his attempt to revive historic regional organizations, his endeavor to use the Church as a social bulwark and as a means of exaltation—all had their allotted place In the strengthening of the nation.
In Barrès one finds all the themes of the modern counterrevolutionary: the stress on leadership, on action, on the call to arms, on the maintenance of a militarist spirit, the appeal to the soul of the people rather than to reason, the prescription of protection and national economic security, the attack on parties, the intolerance of dissent, and the subordination of the individual to the safety of the whole. Differing from Maurras in his reliance on mass support for political authority, Barrès would support any political movement that could restore stability and renovate French glory.
Like Barrès, Sorel defies easy classification. From Rousseau on, the man of the Left has supported the growth of democratic institutions and society, the trend towards equality, the emancipation of the working class. Sorel certainly advocated the last of these, but philosophically he was opposed to optimism, economically to plutocracy and to commerce, politically to the electoral system and to state enterprise, educationally to a system of integral education. For the Left, the motive of the social movement is the pursuit of equality or justice or the conviction of historical inevitability. For Sorel it was the renewal of moral energy or the struggle to produce the autonomous man who would become free by participating in what he loved, by construction of his own world, and by action upheld by the myth. Whereas the socialist movement is an urban manifestation, Sorel was a hater of cities. Whereas the Marxist believes that revolution takes place in a period of increasing poverty, Sorel believed it would take place through strikes in a period of prosperity. Whereas Socialist movements are oriented politically toward the capture of the state power—if also implicitly to its destruction when captured—Sorel attacks all political movements and the economic solutions they proposed as founded on the omnipotence of the state. Sorel's advocacy of syndicalism and his consistent detestation of political preoccupation was a break in the historic link between socialism and democracy. Sorel cannot be classified wholly either as Left or Right, just as Proudhon to some extent is in this ambiguous position. Eclectic in his intellectual borrowings, attracted by different movements, owing political allegiance to none of them for more than a short time, with his unsystematic erudition, Sorel, part technocrat, part revolutionary, part conservative, is an outstanding example of the difficulty of drawing a distinction between Left and Right.
The criticism of the regime by the three writers was valid in many ways, especially in relation to the operation of political institutions and the educational system. But, even ignoring their neglect of economic problems, it is curious to see an attack launched on the culture and educational system of France when invention, scientific genius, and literature were at such an extraordinarily high level. Moreover, their attacks were often unfair. Maurras, for instance, urged that the Republic was incapable of centralizing power efficiently and also of decentralizing. It was incapable of making war and also incapable of avoiding it. He attacked the operation of the power of the state, but he also attacked the state whenever it refused to take action.
The irony of the case of the Nationalists is that they refused to agree that 19th century ideas on tradition sprang largely from German romanticism. Their nationalism became, not a symbol of freedom, but the doctrine of internal politics. Nationalism was not simply patriotism, but meant aggression against other countries and opposition to internal dissent. Narrowness replaced universalism. Sorel's criticism in 1894 of the Nationalist position was aptly made. At the beginning of the 19th century, he said, one called patriots those who fought for liberty and who defended collective interests against the rapacity of the privileged. Later, one meant the servile admirers of established governments. Under the fallacious pretext of patriotism, reactionaries of all kinds aspired to involve revolutionary France in a war, the clear result of which would be the triumph of capitalism.3
The Nationalists attempted and largely succeeded in gaining a monopoly on patriotism and militarism, and the moderate parties of the Republic, except in time of war, did not attempt to dispute this hold. It was forgotten that Deroulede had originally been a man of the Left. The Nationalist movement had some success in organizing an annual pilgrimage to the statue of Strasbourg, getting the anniversary of Joan of Arc accepted as a national festival, Lyautey had been virtually unchallenged in his attempt to get admittance to the Academy, and the three-year service law had been passed in 1910, against the bitter opposition of Jaurès. Yet the paradox remained, for Maurras at any rate, that while the Right appealed to patriotism, the monarchists had emigrated.
The proposed solutions of the writers were not so much inadequate as irrelevant. For instance, the interest of Barrès in social problems was largely to prevent division and class conflict and to obtain national unity, but it would be difficult to guess from his work that factories existed. The suggestions of the three writers were naïve when they were directed towards complex political and social problems. The essential defect in their argument was that in an age of increasing education, they were all concerned essentially with an elite, a ruling group that was limited, and which was not even, in Pareto's phrase, a circulating elite. Incapable of entering the real game of politics because their extremism made the formation of alliances with other groups or factions impossible, they remained politically isolated. But they also gave warning of future danger to political systems, and it is the tragedy of our times that the insights they had on the nature of political action and the lack of enthusiasm In and for the regime were not heeded.
France ignored the lesson to be learned from this period, that for democratic societies to survive happily, they need both economic prosperity and ideological enthusiasm. Culturally superior though France was and brilliant as was its administrative organization, especially the Conseil d'Etat, the country's economic strength was not sufficient to support the growing claims of the French worker. Temporarily united with the regime at the time of its greatest peril, during the two Affairs, the workers could owe no deep allegiance to a regime which refused to grant them a greater share of its wealth. Above all the ideological appeal of democracy was limited to but a small part of the country, and if the masses have gone a-whoring after strange gods, this is a measure of the deficiency of liberal democracy. France has not yet ceased to pay the price for this deficiency, and liberal democracy has not yet found the answer to its problems.
1 Louis Aragon, La Lumère de Stendhal, Paris, 1954, p. 266.
2 Jacques Madaule, Le Nationalisme de Maurice Barrès, Marseilles, 1943, passim.
3 Georges Sorel, Book review of Leo Tolstoy, L'Esprit Chrétien et le patriotisme, L'Ere Nouvelle (October 1894), 2:212.