THE ATTACK on the Republic made by Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras was not a concerted one, and there were many differences in their respective approaches. However, not only was there a great deal of overlapping in their attitudes toward political and social problems, as the ensuing chapters attempt to show, but there was also a certain interplay among the three in their political and literary life.
Between Barrès and Maurras there was a close but not intimate link. They worked on parallel lines, but were not bound in political alliance. Maurras often acknowledged his debt to the slightly older Barrès. "Without Barrès," he said, "what would I have become? Without his warning, where would I not have gone astray?"1 Maurras wrote one of the first appreciative reviews of Sous l'oeil des barbares, Barrès' first novel, and was amazed to find his hero only six years his senior. He dedicated one of the stories in Le Chemin de paradis to Barrès, and collaborated with him on the journal La Cocarde. Together, they became the chief intellectual spokesmen of anti-Dreyfusism and nationalism, Barrès publishing 13 articles in the Revue d'action française between 1899 and 1903. Indeed, it was to Barrès, as the possible leader of the movement, that the original statement of the four fundamental principles of the Action Française were addressed on November 15, 1899. Maurras acknowledged also the role of Barrès in the attempt to save French culture. "If impressionism, naturalism, and all other forms of degenerate romanticism have been defeated in French intellectual life between 1885 and 1895, it is to Barrès and to Barrès alone that the chief honor of the triumph is due," he wrote.2 On the death of Barrès, Maurras wrote that one of the columns of France had fallen, and a great support of morals and intelligence had departed.3
Barrès in return had great respect for Maurras and thought that "in the literary field, it was Maurras who had begun the campaign against romanticism, that dazzling literary blaze which was so foreign to French tradition and so fleeting,"4 while in the political field, he had high praise for Enquête sur la monarchie. He paid him a great compliment by using the visit that Taine had paid to Maurras as a basis for a description in Les Déracinés of the visit paid by Taine to Roemerspecher. But on the question of monarchy, the Action Française movement, the degree of rigidity of doctrine, and the nature of individualism, their views were incompatible. "Ah, it is my shame . . . Barrès is not a monarchist," lamented Maurras,5 but Barrès' complaint of the "durs petits esprits" that Maurras was creating as disciples was amply justified. He contrasted the influence of Maurras and himself. Whereas the former was concerned with training disciples, he was interested, not in making people think like him, but in leading them to their highest point of perfection.6
The link between Sorel and Maurras was ephemeral and peripheral. In 1908, explaining to Georges Valois why he was not a monarchist, Sorel argued that one event dominated everything—the event of 1871, when a Royalist assembly caused the massacre in Paris of over 30,000 men, a massacre which determined the whole history of the Third Republic.7 But Sorel became aware in 1909 of the similarities between himself and Maurras in some of their political attitudes. In a letter to Croce8 on June 27, 1909, he wrote, "Maurras and his friends are well educated, and people are becoming disgusted with the mediocre crowd which monopolizes the best academic positions." He appreciated Maurras' friends, who "form an audacious avant-garde fighting against the scum who have corrupted everything they have touched," and praised the Action Française for its will to restore France morally by reacting against democracy.9
After his disillusionment with syndicalism, Sorel between 1910 and 1912 turned in the direction of the monarchist and Nationalist groups. In 1910 Maurras sent to Sorel the second edition of Enquête sur la monarchie, and the latter expressed his admiration in a four-page letter. In his article, "Quelques prétentions juives," Sorel held that Maurras was directing the defense of French culture. Talking to Variot, he expressed a belief that Maurras was as important to monarchy as Marx was to socialism.10 In a shrewd assessment, Sorel had granted, "If Maurras succeeds in persuading the literate young that the democratic idea is losing its force, he will deserve to be classed among the 'maîtres de l'heure,' since his doctrine will have provoked a change in the orientation of present thought."11
Sorel and Maurras attempted to change this orientation by association in different projects. Through Georges Valois, Sorel attempted to found a journal, La Cité française, in which both the syndicalist and monarchist groups would collaborate. The project never got beyond its preliminary statement of intentions which argued against the democratic organization of society. But a similar program became the basis of Jean Variot's Nationalist review, L'Indépendance, the title of which Sorel himself had chosen and on whose editorial board Barrès had a seat. Sorel among others, including close friends of both Maurras and Barrès, had signed the manifesto of the new review, a bitterly antidemocratic statement which declared that "tradition, far from being a fetter, is the necessary springboard for the most daring advances."12
Sorel and Maurras also attempted to collaborate in the Cerele Proudhon, in the belief that syndicalists and Royalists could unite both in admiration of the "rustre heroïque des Marches de Bourgogne," as Maurras called Proudhon, and in common hatred of Democracy. Maurras presided at the first meeting in December 1911, but it was a short-lived experiment. The group issued a journal, Cahiers du cercle Proudhon, which appeared only twice, in March-April and in MayAugust 1912, and which had a total of 200 subscribers and only 100 other sales in Paris. The attempt to embroider the lys de France and the Sacré Coeur on the syndicalist banner had failed.
Both Sorel and Maurras moved apart and quickly expressed their changed attitudes toward each other. Sorel wrote to Berth, September 11, 1914, "Maurras never had any serious idea of what social forces were necessary under a monarchy,"13 and eventually dismissed him as a "café philosopher." The nationalist politicians, said Sorel, were pagans, dilettantes, and fanatical supporters of despotism. Moreover, Maurras was himself tainted with the democratic spirit, and the authors he admired—Stendhal, Balzac, Sainte Beuve—had little aristocratic distinction about them.14 Maurras, for his part, was "appalled" (horripilé) by the obscurity and eccentricity of Sorel's ideas.15
Sorel never had the same respect for Barrès as he had had temporarily for Maurras. He was often caustic about Barrès' deficiencies. He criticized him for not being a thinker, for being inaccessible to tragic sentiments, for not knowing enough of the ancient traditions—and considered him a man who could well be an imbecile. Barrès, the educator of nationalism, the bourgeois incapable of understanding ancient greatness, completely lacked those qualities of heart necessary to be a great writer.16 Presenting himself as the representative of the ancestral soul was pretentious on Barrès' part, for he was too shallow to fill this role. For only a short time were they associated, when they were among the members of the directoral committee of L'Indépendance. The meeting between Barrès and Sorel that had been arranged by Jean Variot was a disastrous failure.
All three writers were alike in displaying a vigor for polemics, a tendency to overstate the case, a contempt for opponents, often a vituperation which bordered on the libelous and, with Maurras and Sorel, often went beyond it, and a lack of generosity tempered only occasionally by kindness. Dimnet commented of Sorel, "I cannot remember that he ever praises or admires anybody, but a few men escape his censure."17 All three aroused intense enthusiasm and bitter distaste and the degree of these passions is the measure of the influence of the writers on their time.
They each attempted to Influence political action, were successful in some degree, and had schools or disciplines associated with them. For none of them was thought divorced from action, as Baudelaire had implied in the line that Barre was fond of quoting: "D'un monde ouùFl'ction n'est pas la soeur du rev̂v. . . ."
The three writers made remarkably prophetic predictions of national socialism. The first long article that Sorel wrote for the Cahiers de la quinzaine of Péguy was National Socialisms, in which he argued that each nation had a socialism of its own, according to its particular needs.18 Barrès had first entered the chamber in 1889 on a program of which nationalism and socialism were the chief ingredients; in his 1898 electoral program he had elaborated these ideas, proposing homes for the old retired workers, the recognition of workers' syndicats and their independence, and contending that socialism was a word in which France had put its hope. In 1890 he wrote, "Boulangism is a Socialist program, a general movement against the omnipotence of capital, in favor of national reconciliation and love of the disinherited.19 Like Sorel, Barrès confessed the influence that Proudhon had had on him in his youth. The socialism of Proudhon, because it combined French national sensibility and Hegelianism, satisfied or profoundly interested Frenchmen who would never turn to German collectivism or Russian terrorism, because these two conceptions were derived from foreign races.20 Socialism would produce both the vigorous development of national strength and the necessary effort to decentralize and federalize the government.
Maurras had argued that a Socialist, liberated from the democratic and cosmopolitan environment, could fit into nationalism like a well-made glove onto a beautiful hand. The counter-revolution in fact meant the combination of nationalism and socialism, for at the bottom of socialism there was a spirit of reaction, of conformity with the idea of traditional France against the bourgeoisie. Maurras found it natural for nationalism and socialism to combine against the revolutionary bloc, for the Socialist resolution of the problem of the working class posed by the birth of large industry meant reacting against the individualism of the Jacobins and the ideas of the Revolution.21
Antidemocratic, skeptical of the value of piecemeal change, attempting to influence political and social movements, appealing simultaneously to an elite and to the masses, the three writers are essential to an understanding of French political life at the beginning of the 20th century and of European political history since that time.
Sorel is a perplexing figure in French thought, inheriting directly from Proudhon at least one great trend of thought—an intense dislike of political forms and a desire to escape decadence by vigorous moral action—while contributing to other trends enthusiastically, if temporarily. If he is not, as Wyndham Lewis argued,22 the key to all contemporary political thought, he provides a highly complex, partly reactionary and partly revolutionary, attack on political republicanism.
Surprisingly little is known of his life or inner motives, why the engineer should in 1892 suddenly resign his job, never claim his pension rights, and begin, at the age of 45, the prolific output of articles in technical, obscure, or esoteric journals, most of which had extremely limited circulations; why the moralist, who constantly praised the value of the family never formally married his wife or had children; or why the agnostic should stress the importance of religious fervor and wear the religious medal of his wife around his neck after her death. The product of a middle-class Norman Catholic family, a rentier leading a tranquil life in a cottage in Boulogne-sur-Seine (interrupted only by a Thursday train ride to Paris to attend the lectures of Bergson and the coteries of the magazines for which he wrote), Sorel became the theoretician of violence, but always wore in his lapel the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.
His style of writing was as curious as the pattern of his life. Proceeding by long, uninterrupted, judicious quotation, his own meaning often obscure or vague, his writing was a mixture of striking insights and unusual aperçus, as well as of fantastic misconceptions. His language was as ascetic and as astringent as his code of morality. His ideas were not only expressed dryly and obscurely but showed a bewildering rapidity of change. He was in turn a traditionalist in 1889, a Marxist in 1894, a Bergsonian in the same year, a Vician in 1896, a Socialist critical of Marxism in that year, a reformist syndicalist in 1898, a Dreyfusard in 1899, a revolutionary syndicalist in 1904 to 1905, a disillusioned ex-Dreyfusard in 1909, an ally of the Nationalists and monarchists in 1910, and at the time of World War I, a philosopher of morals.
He made a virtue out of his very lack of system. On April 28, 1903, he wrote, "I have never asked myself if I am consistent in my writings. I write from day to day, following the need of the moment."23 Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but at least it makes for comprehensibility. No one who keeps adding, as did Sorel, "Et puis, il y a autre chose," to a polemical discussion, can be a maker of systems. It is not every book on economic problems that ends as did Sorel's Introduction à, l'économie moderne, with a disquisition on suffering. All his writings were rough drafts for a book he never wrote.
His reading was surprisingly wide—from 1884 to 1891, his borrowings from the library at Perpignan, where he was stationed as an engineer, included many works on architecture and archeology—but it was also limited. As Perrin wrote, "Often he was content with materials at second hand,"24 taking his knowledge of ancient history from Renan or Ferrero, his knowledge of modern history from Tocqueville or Taine, and his knowledge of literature from Brunetière. Yet his reading provided the stimulant for writing on subjects as diverse as music, economics, art, and Greek philosophy.
It is ironical that the man whom his translator, T. E. Hulme, called "the most remarkable socialist since Marx" should have largely discovered socialism through his wife, who came of proletarian origins. It is even more ironical that this most erudite of French socialists, as Le Bon called him, who absorbed so readily works on social science and on philosophy both ancient and modern (including Nietzsche, Bergson, Hartmann, and William James), and who believed that the mission of the philosopher was to see and to understand the movements which seemed to him important without being obliged to take sides with the makers of the movement, should have been an advocate of direct action. And the crowning irony is that most of the valuable writing on this fierce opponent of the universities and official academies is in the form of doctoral theses.
Continually vacillating in his political ideas and associated with diverse groups as he was, the closest he came to exerting practical influence was on the syndicalist movement. It is a striking commentary, however, that on being asked whether he read Sorel, Victor Griffuelhes, secretary of the C.G.T., should reply, "I read Dumas." The self-confessed "old man, who, like Proudhon, obstinately remains a disinterested servant of the proletariat,"25 was almost totally neglected by its members. A questionnaire submitted by a scholastic investigator showed that Sorel was much less widely read by the syndicalists than were Marx, Jaurès, or Tolstoy.26
Sorel was enthusiastic about his ideas, pouring them forth without any order, but he was modest about his own capabilities. To Jean Variot, who was recording his talk and attempting to play Eekermann, Sorel replied, "But I am not Goethe."27 On his part there was no inevitable commitment to the struggle of the proletariat, nor devotion to the continual rebellion against the opponents of human freedom. The writer who wanted to regenerate the moral sense of man was for his chief disciple, Edouard Berth, "uniquely an isolated intellectual worker, apart from every party, every grouping, every school."28 "Sorel, a syndicalist? He is a sectarian intoxicated with thought," declared Barrès.29 The syndicalists, the Communists, the Action Française, Mussolini—all claimed him, but Sorel belonged to none of them. He had what Professor Shils has called "the apocalyptic outsider's view of politics."30 Socialism was important to him as a symbol, as an invitation to a crusade, as a deeply emotional experience, as a fellowship to join in the fight against the system. He attempted to give to mankind what was meant for party.
Maurice Barrès, the man from Lorraine with a Provençal heritage, the déraciné who came to Paris seeking a mistress, glory, notoriety, and virtue31 and made it his base of operations for the rest of his life, while Lorraine, with which he made a mariage de convenance, remained little more than a pied-à-terre for purposes of displaying his soul, led a charmed life of his own making. "C'est un troubadour auvergnat qui s'est fait gendarme lorrain," Louis Bertrand said privately. The writer, who established his reputation by his conception of the déraciné, dreamed of Paris while he was still in school, sent his youthful articles to the Parisian Jeune France, and left for the capital as soon as he could, at the age of 20. His political career showed a similar transposition. Twice defeated at Nancy after his initial success in 1889, he adopted a constituency in Paris which he represented from 1906 until the end of his life. Barrès, contemptuous of politicians but fascinated by the game of politics, spent 21 years in the Chamber of Deputies as a bitter opponent of the political regime, ended his life with a state funeral attended by a representative of the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister, and the Minister of Education, and was laid to rest by a Marshal of France, a fellow citizen of Lorraine.
After the favorable review of his first book by Paul Bourget in Journal des débats, April 3, 1888, he became successful at 25, the Eclair paying him 400 francs for an article of 15 lines; in 1891 he was for Anatole France already "a youthful maître." The influence of this "prince of youth" on his younger contemporaries was remarkably strong, and individuals as diverse as Jacques Rivière, François Mauriac, Louis Aragon, Léon Blum, and Thomas Mann all testify to the power, seduction, or revelation of his work, while many succumbed to his personal charm. Edouard Herriot many times expressed gratitude for the help obtained from Barrès when his mother had been Barrès' domestic servant. As editor of La Cocarde, he held the allegiance of widely divergent individuals, from legitimists to syndicalists, from Jews to anti-Semites, by sheer personal charm.32 An anti-Semite himself, he always had Jewish admirers, and, until the Dreyfus Affair, maintained a connection with the Revue blanche founded by the Natanson brothers. The first article of Léon Blum in that journal on July 25, 1892 was dedicated to Barrès, and elsewhere he tells of his cruel disappointment and his break with Barrès over the latter's unwillingness to join the Dreyfusards.33 The liberal critic Thibaudet thought Barrès one of the four great men he had met in his life.
But it was the qualities of hauteur and ambition that were dominant in his character. Called "aristo" because of his aloofness in his early days of the Quartier Latin and the Ecole de Droit, and "béotien" by Jean Moréas, he might, if it had not been for his political preoccupation, have well been the personification of the fin-de-siècle dilettante. Harold Nicolson significantly chose Barrès' Le Jardin de Bérénice as a symbol for his fictional poetic poseur, Lambert Orme, in the book Some People. There is a certain coldness in his work which often becomes repellent. "I do not like Sous l'oeil des barbares," wrote Alain-Fournier. "It chills me ... I admire and remain cold."34 Thibaudet has pointed out the many images of bullfighting, slaughter, hunting, and torture to be found in his writings.35 "A brutal soul," Barrès was quick to seize on the killing of an individual as an advertising stunt for his first paper, Les Taches d'encre. In Leurs figures, his book on Panama, Baron Reinaeh became "a hog of the boulevards . . . who rushed about like a poisoned rat behind the paneling." His first joke in the Chamber was to propose that the stillliving Jules Simon be added to the list of Republicans whose bodies were to be transferred to the Panthéon.
He was fiercely ambitious: his first thought on seeing Hugo talking with Anatole France and Leconte de Lisle in the library of the Senate was to wish that history would include him with them as the representative of four literary ages, Gide was not unfair in stressing his desire for popularity and acclamation. Only two days after Hérédia had died on October 8, 1905, he was making a prognosis of his chances for election to the vacant seat in the French Academy,36 which he succeeded in obtaining at 45. Steadfastly and smoothly, he organized his own success. The writer, whose dark appearance led to the rumor that he was descended from Portuguese Jews, kept a portrait of Napoleon on his mantelpiece, and was pleased on being reminded of his physical resemblance to the Prince de Condé, under whose portrait he wrote in his study.
Disdainful and contemptuous, he was always "Monsieur Barrès" in a Chamber of Deputies where the rule was to tutoyer each other. Shaking hands with his constituents during his electoral campaign in the Halles, he was like a King of France touching his subjects in order to cure them of scrofula.37 Yet he was capable of generosity towards opponents, and refused to carry a grudge if conditions had changed, even with Dreyfusards.38 He welcomed the entry of Jean Jaurès to the Chamber in an article in Le Figaro on January 2, 1893, and after his assassination he wrote to Mademoiselle Jaurès "The murder of your father cemented all French hearts in union," and confessed in his journal, "Adieu, Jaurès, que j'avais voulu librement aimer." After "twenty years of frightful struggle," and two proposed duels, one of which was fought, he could still feel some friendship for Francis de Pressensé. In the hour of French need, in August 1914, he was glad to shake the hand of Joseph Reinach, Jew, Dreyfusard, and nephew of Baron Reinach, because "above all, he is French."39 Clemenceau, once "a terrible man full of pride," became for him as for all France, "an incarnation of invincible hope." The former anarchist firebrand Ilerve could also speak in 1914 of "mon cher Barrès."
Barrès, for all his writing on politics and his political career, was not really a political writer at all, in the sense of having a systematic approach to political problems. He was interested in an extraordinarily limited number of issues, and was incessantly repetitive, often ambivalent and equivocal about those things that did interest him. Maurras spoke of his "immobile mask," Anatole France of one of his books as "floating and indeterminate ... an amorphous book," and M. Domenach confessed his difficulty in choosing any of his 56 works as the Barresian work.40 "A great writer," Jules Renard concluded, "but what does he mean? One understands each phrase, but the total meaning is obscure."41 Barrès himself liked to quote the remark of Novalis, "Chaos must gleam through the regular walls of order."
There was a fundamental lack of orientation in Barrès. "Life has no sense. I even believe that each day it becomes more absurd."42 Why did he go to Paris?—for no clear or strong reason, but "with an invincible orientation like a bird." Even with what Faure-Biguet has called "his marvelous intellectual coquetry,"43 his continuing attempt to coordinate his first conception of the culte-du-moi, the delicate cultivation of his own emotions, with the nationalistic tradition of "the earth and the dead," was never a wholly credible one. Indeed, both were confused, uncertain concepts. At one point he made the culte-du-moi the result of his childhood experience playing with bad children, at another his devotion to Lorraine the result of the loss of his mother in 1901. Anatole France, not unfairly, rebuked Barrès for his subjectivism: "We must not make life an experiment, we must live it."
Apart from his theory of nationalism, his political views were equally indeterminate. First successful as a revisionist socialist for Nancy in 1889, and sitting on the extreme left of the Chamber, Barrès was never a member of a party or group, and continually changed his electoral nomenclature while deputy for the first arrondissement of Paris. In the Chamber he was singularly ineffective: he spoke only 42 times, often amid a volley of interruptions. Maurras correctly maintained that "his true political career did not unfold between the walls of the Palais-Bourbon."44
It was as a creator of a mood of nationalism of widespread appeal to the masses, together with his plea for active leadership, that he was most significant. For Barrès himself, action was not the fullest form of realization but was desirable in order to heighten his own sensibility. Politics and Parliament became favorable settings in which to enrich himself; he confessed that one of the great passions of his life, "the most constant, the most ruinous and the most bizarre," was his taste for the Chamber. The writer who entered his study with the jest, "Maintenant, je fais ma petite musique," claimed, "I have given to the work for which I was born only the moments that I have stolen from my political task."45
Barrès was in fact a romantic both in attitudes and in choice of travel. He attempted to follow his image of Disraeli, "poet, dandy, ambitious, and leader of men."46 The taste he acquired in his childhood for the novels of Sir Walter Scott fixed in his Imagination the notions of the romantic hero, the mystery of the Orient, and the "Mal d'Asie." "His mind," said Anatole France, "was restless, unhealthy, perverted, and spoiled."47 His taste in towns ran to Venice, Toledo, Sparta, Ravenna. The "amateur of souls" was hardly interested in the living; his work, as Sartre, Drieu La Rochelle, and Bordeaux have commented, was "a pathetic struggle with death."48 The sight of his heroine Bérénice, dying of fever, has an all too decadent quality about it.
His lack of contact with reality and his deficiency in relevant knowledge were often demonstrated. "Who would realize on reading this citizen of Lorraine that he is describing a metallurgical country? He has seen the mirabeliiers and neglected the blast furnaces,"49 commented the perceptive critic Berl. Yet Barres did speak for science in the Chamber, and he was one of the founders of the national committee for aid to scientific research. Moreover, he was realist enough to recognize the desirability of an adequate income. "Without money," argued his hero Philippe, "how can one develop one's imagination?"
But even in literature and individuals, his taste was questionable. The Nationalist reserved his enthusiastic praise for Hérédia, Chenier, and Moréas—a Cuban and two Greeks. He dismissed Proust without reading him, and denigrated Péguy. Morès, the brutal, anti-Semitic street fighter, became for him "a heroic thinker ... a man who gave his life to the highest form of speculations." In men as in politics, up to 1914, he was invariably on the wrong side.
Maurras, the clearest, most consistent, and most doctrinaire of the three writers, presented the most sustained counter-revolutionary attack on the Third Republic. From the time he began writing political articles for Le Soleil in May 1895 (which he agreed to do after reading a passage in the Philippics of Demosthenes), his views rarely changed in the 20,000 articles that he wrote, and in the books which are largely compilations of them. There was a consistency in his work which that of Sorel and Barrès did not have, and one which was ambitious in its attempt to link together aesthetics and politics.
Educated and deeply influenced by two priests, both of whom later became bishops, he underwent at 14 the decisive experience of his life, when he lost his hearing and was forced into the solitude he once called "our greatest enemy." He was forced to renounce the naval career on which his heart had been set,50 and probably doubted forever the goodness of God. In November 1885, he left his home in Martigues in Provence for Paris, where his early years were lonely and to a large extent spent in libraries. Precocious, at 17 he was reviewing books on philosophy and economics. His affliction tended to encourage a journalistic life, sleeping in the day and working in the printing house in the evening and night. Maurras was always "un homme de cabinet,"51 and this isolation encouraged him to be uncompromising, didactic, and authoritarian.
With his relentless, lucid logic, his humorless lack of subtlety, his dogmatic views on right and wrong, Maurras was not one to make the great refusal, or spend life without infamy and without praise. "Reaction above all" was on the masthead of the newspaper of the Action Française, and from the Dreyfus Affair on, Maurras was the standard-bearer of the attack on the Republic. He was inflexible, a ruthless antagonist—a person about whom one could not be lukewarm.52 He took eighteen columns to reply to twenty lines of criticism by Gide of a book by Barrès. Even sympathizers who admired and revered him could not follow in the rigor of his conclusions.53 Former colleagues and associates like Valois, Dimier, and Bernanos, who had broken with him, were bitterly castigated. Georges Valois, who had done so much to bring Sorel and Maurras together, was attacked as a Russian agent and an agent-provocateur for the Communist party. When Pierre Lasserre, an ally from the beginning, called Moréas "petit grand poète," Maurras broke with him and put an end to Lasserre's column, "Chronique des Lettres," in the Action française. It was Barrès who spoke of his authoritarian personality, and Bernanos of his "intellectual dictatorship." He never displayed toward opponents that generosity of spirit or humanity that Vincent Auriol, President of the Republic, showed toward him in August 1951, in allowing him to be transferred from prison to the hospital of Troyes. Jaurès, for whom Barrès had warm feelings, was for Maurras "only a voice," and he refused to shake the hand of the Socialist leader when they met in a cafe.
The violence of his attacks on Bergson, "the Scottish Jew who is not even a thorough student of Aristotle and St. Thomas," when Bergson was campaigning for a seat in the Academy, led several waverers to vote for Bergson. "I do not read the Action française," said Gide, only half jestingly, "for fear of becoming a Republican." Maurras' violence kept him out of the Academy in 1913 and 1923, in spite of his willingness to suspend distribution of one of his books because of its "too enthusiastic preface," and it was not until 1939 that Henry Bordeaux marshaled sufficient strength for his nomination.54
But his life was a failure. A monarchist, he was disowned by both of his kings as "not our interpreter." The Comte de Paris said in 1912, "Maurras and Daudet are not true Royalists. . . . They do not serve monarchy; they use it for the satisfaction of their ambitions or their literary grudges."55 Although he was a defender of the Catholic Church, his works were put on the Index, and his relations with Rome were always uncertain and unhappy in spite of his willingness to withdraw some of his early writing in Anthinéa and Le Chemin de paradis. "A very fine brain," said the Pope, "but alas, only a brain." He made the Action Française the home of French lost causes.
The writer who so staunchly believed himself to be the champion of classicism was often appreciative of romanticism in literature. This fierce denigrator of romanticism in literature and politics, the Mediterranean voyager who declaimed Lucretius in his cabin at one in the morning was also the poet whose work was strongly influenced by Verlaine, Baudelaire, and romantic themes,56 and the man who in 1897 made a special trip to the mouth of the Arno to the spot where Byron had lit Shelley's pyre. In his sweeping indictment of the Third Republic Maurras linked politics, religion, and aesthetics, and his own life showed that he always related them. Putting his lips to the columns of Propylea became a symbolic gesture: "I am a Roman by all the positive power of my being." "The philosophic and aesthetic theories of Anthinéa form the true foundation of my politics."57
The Nationalist obsessed with xenophobia, partly caused by the table manners of an English lady on board ship, was strongly influenced by and inordinately praised Jean Moréas, the Greek poet whose real name was Papadiamentopoulos. A vigorous anti-Semite, his first work was published by Calmann-Lévy, and his first vote was cast for Naquet, a Jewish Boulangist. Convinced of the need for decentralization and of the value of Mistral and Provençal culture, he joined the Société des Felibres in Paris "to promote the love of Provence," but was expelled for too much vigor. The man whose life was spent attempting to mold the country to his pattern ended it sentenced to a prison term and "national degradation." The man who prided himself on his appreciation of reality was deluded into thinking that a few companions—Ernest Raynaud, Raymond de La Tailhede, Maurice Du Plessys—in the café Vachette opposite the Odéon theatre constituted the Ecole Romane, a significant literary group.
Though he acknowledged the influence of many, he was the pupil of none. If he accepted Bonald's idea of unity and continuity, he rejected his theory of divine right. If he shared de Maistre's belief in a "political science" and in the need for a leader, he rejected his religious emphasis. If he turned to Comte for certainty after Kant had left him a sceptic, and if he approved Comte's positivism, defense of society and stress on the social order, he rejected his ideas on spiritual power and the three laws. From Taine, Le Play, Fustel de Coulanges, Saint-Beuve, Maurras took what he needed.
His own intellectual influence was extensive. He won over a substantial part of the Ecole de Mdcine, Ecole de Droit, and a significant number of literary and scientific figures. In 1925 the undergraduates of Louvain voted him the person who had most influenced them intellectually. In 1928, T. S. Eliot confessed that "most of the concepts which might have attracted me in Fascism I seem already to have found, in the work of Charles Maurras."58His apartment in the Rue de Verneuil was a meeting place for intellectuals of the Right: Leon de Montesquiou, Bainville, Lucien Moreau, Bernard de Vessins, Louis Dimier, Robert de Boisfleury, Pugo, Lasserre, Daudet. He gave to the Right a "method and an object."59 But what Thierry Maulnier called his political aristocratism"60 did not extend beyond intellectuals to the crowd or to practical activity. In politics he was always to be the eminence grise of a coterie. The Action Frangaçse was never able to get a single deputy elected under its own name. It was through the uncompromising political intransigence of Maurras that the political thought of the extreme Right became more and more detached from the practice of politics in the Third Reublic.61
1 Henri Massis, Maurras et notre temps, Paris-Geneva, 1951, I:46.
2 Gazette de France, April 9, 1905.
3 L'Action française, December 6, 1923.
4 Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisms, Paris, 1902, p. 123.
5 Charles Maurras, Enquête sur la monarchie, Paris, 1924, p. 492.
6 Mes Cahiers, XIV:136-137.
7 Georges Sorel, "Monarchie et classe ouvrière," Revue critique des idées et des livres (May 1908), 1:149.
8 La Critica (May 1928), 26:196.
9 A. Lanzillo, Giorgio Sorel, Rome, 1910, p. 86.
10 Jean Variot, Propos de Georges Sorel, Paris, 1935, p. 123.
11 Sorel, Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, 3rd edn., Paris, 1929, p. 18.
12 Pierre Andreu, Notre Maître M. Sorel, Paris, 1953, p. 332.
13 ibid., p. 334.
14 Sorel, Matériaux, p. 18.
15 Harvard de la Montagne, L'Action française, September 8, 1922. Yet one nationalist, Pierre Villars, did make out a will which specified that his money was to be divided among Maurras, Sorel, and Jacques Maritain, and excluded Sorel only when the latter turned away from nationalism.
16 La Critica (September 1928), 26:338; (March 1929), 27:115; (July 1929), 27:295; (January 1930), 28:44.
17 Ernest Dimnet, "A French Defence of Violence," The Forum (November 1909), 42:414.
18 Sorel, "Socialismes nationaux," Cahiers de la quinzaine (April 22, 1902), 3rd Series, No. 14.
19 Barrès, "Les Enseignements d'une Année de Boulangisme," Le Figaro, February 2, 1890.
20 Scènes, pp. 483-507.
21 L'Action française, April 19, 1916; July 18, 1933.
22 Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, London, 1926, p. 132.
23 Sorel, La Critica (1927), 25:372.
24 P-L-M.J. Perrin, Les Idées sociales de Georges Sorel, Algiers, 1925, p. 39.
25 Sorel's self-portrait in the dedication of his Matériaux.
26 Max Ferré, Histoire du mouvement syndicaliste révolutionnaire chez les instituteurs, Paris, 1955, p., 316.
27 Jean Variot, Propos de Georges Sorel, p. 8.
28 Edouard Berth, Du "Capital" aux "Ré flexions sur la violence," Paris, 1932, p. 175.
29 Mes Cahiers, VIII:31.
30 E. A, Shils, preface to Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Glencoe, 1950, p. 18.
31 Mes Cahiers, I:25; II:56; IX:29.
32 Maurras, Maîtres et témoins de ma vie d'esprit, Paris, 1954, p. 26.
33 Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l'affaire, p. 87.
34 Jacques Rivière and Alain-Fournier, Correspondance, 1905-1914, 2 vols., Paris, 1926, I:208.
35 Albert Thibaudet, La Vie de Maurice Barrès, Paris, 1921, p. 38. Also: Bernard Fäy, Panorama de la littérature Française, Paris, 1925, p. 129.
36 Mes Cahiers, IV:106.
37 L. Dumont-Wilden, Le Crépuscule des maîtres, Brussels, 1947, p. 100.
38 André Maurel, Souvenirs d'un écrivain 1883-1914, Paris, 1925, pp. 89-90.
39 Mes Cahiers, I:297; VII:]34; XI:88.
40 Jean-Marie Domenach, Barrès par lui-même, Paris, 1954, p. 6.
41 Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910, 4 vols., Paris, ii:1203.
42 Maurice Barrès, Lea Amitiès françaises, Paris, 1911, p. 16.
43 J-N. Faure-Biguet, Maurice Barrès, son oeuvre, Paris, 1924, p. 65.
44 Maurras, Maurice Barrès, Paris, 1948, p. 70.
45 Scènes, I:6.
46 Barrès, L'Ennemi des Lois, Paris, 1893, pp. 167-168.
47 Anatole France, On Life and Letters, 4 vols., London, 1924, IV:217.
48 Henry Bordeaux, Portraits d'hommes, 2 vols., Paris, 1924, I:76. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 131.
49 E. Berl, Mort de la pensée bourgeoise, Paris, 1929, p. 28.
50 Maurras, Tragi-comédie de ma surdité, Aix-en-Provence, 1951.
51 Achilla Segard, Charles Maurras et les idées royalistes, Paris, 1919, p. 84.
52 It is noticeable that both the Oeuvres capitales and the Dietionnaire politique et critique are carefully edited to exclude the violence in his writings.
53 Agathon (Henri Massis and Alfred de la Tarde), Les Jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui, 2nd edn., Paris, 1919, p. 16.
54 Henry Bordeaux, Charles Maurras et l'Académie française, Paris, 1955.
55 L. Dumont-Wilden, op.cit., p. 173.