ONE OF THE DILEMMAS of any constitutional government is that laws make clear what one cannot do, but not what one should do. Since there is no single end for society to pursue, and since a democratic system by its essence involves the conditional and tentative, such a system means avoidance of commitment beyond that of the preservation of freedom. Maurras saw the dilemma of liberalism inherent in this fact: the one thing it could not tolerate was the repudiation of liberty itself. It did not therefore know what to do either about religious bodies or about economic questions which might interfere with that liberty.
All three writers were concerned about the lack of vitality of principle and of inspiration behind the Republic and the lack of orientation in the country. Barrs argued that the country did not want a king or an emperor or a parliamentary republic or socialism. "What did it want? It did not know."1 In a situation of this kind, where agreement on policy was lacking and where the leaders of the country were incompetent, there could be no firm attachment to the regime. The lack of policy was largely the result of the fact that, for anyone who had a real desire to succeed, it was essential to become a moderate. The politicians were afraid to open their mail, the newspapers of their arrondissement, and the letters of their political committees. They were afraid of alienating a single person in the corridors or differentiating themselves from one another by taking a position at the tribune. Barre' fictional M. Bouteiller himself confessed, "The regime lasts only because of the fear of war.". 2 Energetic young men were disgusted at the stupid ends to which their activity was supposed to be directed.3 he effect of this lack of purpose on the country was, as Barres in Les Deracines showed in his portrayal of the seven youths from Lorraine, that all were in the process of becoming anarchists and of advocating disorder. Out of the inchoate revolt against these conditions, against the lack of government in a country which wanted to feel itself governed, a movement like Boulangism was born.
For Maurras, since democracy was unreal and visionary, it could not have any coherent policy. This was the result of deficiencies both in the governmental and parliamentary institutions. Logically, the Republic could only be negative in operation because by definition it meant the exclusion of a hereditary leader, and it had no other chief. With the government divided and segmented, France lacked a tradition and a leader, the former nourished by the wisdom of the past and the latter thinking of the future of the country. The Republic could therefore have no doctrine of its own. The choice France had to make was clear: liberty or a leader, equality or order.4
The writers agreed that a common doctrine was lacking, but were not altogether in accordance either on the prognosis or on the cure. They agreed that the country was over-centralized and needed decentralizating (though their analyses and remedies were somewhat vague), that the educational system was deficient (though again, the proposals for change varied), but they differed widely on the need for unity.
The problem of how to obtain a stable, coherent system unified by general acceptance is one that has constantly troubled political thinkers from Plato on. It is a problem that has become even more important in an industrial society with a mobile population. Though Mr. Friedrich has argued5 that agreement on fundamentals is not a necessary condition of either representative government or democratic or constitutional government, it is difficult to see how any political system can operate successfully where irreconcilable ideological differences are present. It was the presence of these irreconcilable differences, religious, political, and social, in the Third Republic that made its history so difficult, so perplexing, and so interesting.
The attitude of the right to differences which exist is always to attempt to remove them. It will stress unity rather than diversity, the national factor rather than individual interests, and will issue an appeal to all men of good will to rally together. It will criticize those features of the political and social system which encourage division, in particular, the party system. It will oppose the idea of class struggle, and will talk instead of cooperation or collaboration among classes. It refuses to allow that legitimate differences of opinion may present problems difficult to solve or that there might be more than one point of view. It emphasizes conformity, unity, and authority, the subordination of the individual to the whole society. It tends to emphasize the concrete rather than the abstract, the enduring rather than the changeable, the organic social unit rather than agglomerations.6
Barrs and Maurras were the chief exponents of these rightist doctrines in France, although the problem was made more complex there by the fact that since August 1792, official religion had also been associated with that point of view, as a guardian of order against the people.
The profound evil, said Barrs, lay in the absence of the needed conformity in society. This was due partly to the fact that France was divided and troubled by a thousand particular wills, by a thousand individual imaginations. Partly it was due to "the lack of a common knowledge of our end, our resources, our central core."7 The Dreyfus Affair had added to the division of the country and to the troubling of the national mentality. Barreè approved the formula of Deéouleèe, "There is only probability that Dreyfus is innocent, but it is absolutely certain that France is innocent."8 He therefore ranged himself against Dreyfus, agreeing with the opinion of the men whom he believed society had designated to be competent, and disagreeing with those he regarded as incompetent, the intellectuals, the "stage anarchists," the metaphysicians of sociology—the Affair was an orgy of metaphysicians—a band of fools who treated French generals as idiots, French social institutions as absurd, and French traditions as unhealthy.
Barrès looked for the sentiment or the common interests that would unite the country he found so "divided and headless," and found them in the idea of a unified group and a strong leader. He stressed the myth of national concentration that would many times in the future become the basis of appeal to the country both in France and elsewhere, as the only method of solution to political problems. The desire for unity, what he called the universal dream, not only satisfied the moral needs and the desires of the thoughtful, but also was satisfactory for the health and well-being of France. Barrès made use of all opportunities and people to stress this necessity for unity. In his call to all parts of the nation to be inspired by eternal France, Barrès saw, as in a similar fashion he was to see the Union Sacrée of 1914, the fete of Joan of Arc as one where Frenchmen of all parties could unite in a great fraternal gathering around the heroine of the country.
For Barrès a leader was necessary both for personal and national reasons. "Perenially in opposition, disheartened both emotionally and rationally from the task of governing," it was personally attractive to him to be a member of a mass movement dominated by a leader because he could "taste profoundly the instinctive pleasure of being in a flock."9 Politically, he would link himself with the patriots of the school of Déroulède, the regionalists, and with those, whether Catholic or positivist, who wanted a national and social discipline.
For the sake of France, it was necessary to find the strong man who would open the windows to throw out gossip and allow in fresh air, a man who would be capable of acting. In Boulanger, he found the figure around whom to rally. Instead of belonging to political parties, the people uniting in the Boulangist movement wanted to find the party of France, a party that would renounce oratorical chicanery in order to concern itself with general interests, a party, without factions, that would be concerned only with work and peace, and that would put national honor on its banner. Parties must become national ones, and collaboration must take place between all those serving the national interest. Barrs himself, unattached to any one party electorally or in the Chamber, said, "I do not want to fight for a party, I do not want to fight for parties."10 Boulangism was for him a movement of very diverse people representing very varied, even opposite, social conceptions, but united in their belief in the eéan, the psychological unity of Boulangism and in Boulanger himself, a real man.
Maurras similarly continuously stressed national unity, opposing the democratic system which meant division, struggles of class and religion inside France, and foreign intrusion into the national consciousness.
To Maurras, unity was more important than tolerance. Liberalism in politics meant civil war, in religion it meant schism. A democratic system meant both that government was divided, disunited, and bitterly opposed by other parties and groups, and that it was a factor in dividing, since it perpetuated the opposition. A government was 10 ministers, each with his own faction and party.11 The Place Beauvau (Ministry of the Interior), warred on the Quai d'Orsay (Foreign Ministry), while the Rue Oudinot (Ministry of the Colonies), was not always in agreement with the other two. In 1899, during the Dreyfus Affair, a struggle had taken place between the important Information Service, organ of French national defense, and the Surêté Générale, which was concerned with the defense of the Republic only. The democratic Republican regime, which excited and fed a hundred internal quarrels, had ruined the moral unity of the country. Maurras deplored the absence of a power strong enough to make the varied interests unite. It was because of this desire to maintain unity that he at first refused to mention the Dreyfus Affair, and even when he did, in an article in Soleil on October 23, 1897, it was only to say that it was necessary to forget Dreyfus for the welfare of the country.
Maurras was opposed, as was Barrs, to the idea of class conflict, since it was a divisive factor in the country. He argued that it was in the name of the unfortunate myth of class struggle that some dreamt of dismembering the vertical organization of nations for the profit of a horizontal and international alliance of classes. To the dialectical myth of Hegel and Marx, comments Mr. Roudiez, Maurras preferred his own, based on certain conceptions of Aquinas, that conciliation and harmony were possible between classes.12 For Maur ras, national and professional communities were more important than classes; on the one hand he denied the validity of class struggle, and on the other he asserted the possibility of industrial and social concord. It was not true that there was a venerable quarrel of the farm and the bourgeois house with the castle; the peasant and the castle owner, the castle owner and the petty bourgeois had more common than opposed interests.13 It was unfortunate that too many people had an interest, an electoral interest, in upsetting the relations of capital and labor.
Maurras would substitute for class struggle, not the fusion of classes, but the reclassification of producers to include employers as well as workers, in the interest of production and in their own interest. Workers and employers together would regulate their common interests, with the King protecting workers against possible abuses of capital. He accepted the ideas of Le Play, de Mun, and La Tour du Pin with very few modifications, and was interested in the maintenance of social peace and the reconciliation of all workers. He complimented de Mun for his campaign in favor of the establishment of mixed syndicats to which employers and employees would be admitted, and approved the desire of the Socialists to found arbitration tribunals composed of representatives of both sides.14 Believing in the desirability of class collaboration, Maurras advocated the aspiration of the workers to a kind of embourgeoisement and the ownership of some property.
To this analysis Sorel was totally opposed. "The decisive word in Sorel's vocabulary is 'scission,'" argues Mr. Meisel.15 Certainly, one of his principal preoccupations was the undesirable unity in the democratic system. As in ancient times, the great question was still that of scission, but it did not seem to him that socialism had as many resources as primitive Christianity to remain inviolate. Therefore, any individual or factor encouraging scission was desirable. Those teachers who wrote of the revolutionary tendencies of the proletariat and the evils of social peace were to be applauded as Corneillian heroes.16
In this connection a democratic system was undesirable because it always sought unity, and had perfected unitary theory. Social economists worked hard to give the workers the illusion of solidarity existing between the different social classes. This attempt to create unity was shown in the Dreyfus Affair, the chief result of which was not the separation of Church and State, or the smashing of military control over the government, but the strengthening of the philosophy of Solidarité, the political and economic expression of which was the theory of social peace,17 and which was really a philosophy of wicked hypocrisy. The bourgeoisie had taken over the devices of a bureaucratic centralization from the ancien régime, and had developed the unitary concept even further in several ways. By the system of popular universal education, the children of workers became embourgeoisé, and therefore the proletariat was deprived of future leaders. In trade unions this meant that the leadership was bought off by concessions and bribes, and the labor councils were becoming amiable cigar-smoking clubs. In politics, bureaucracy was in control of organizations, and legislation was largely inspired by ideas of pacifism and state socialism. The Socialist press itself was affected by this desire for conciliation, and sought to move bourgeois opinion by appealing to sentiments of goodness, humanity, solidarity, and bourgeois ethics; socialism was soliciting the protection of the class which was the irreconcilable enemy of the proletariat.18
This allegation of democracy that it was above class conflicts and its concern with the mixing of classes Sorel regarded as disastrous. Social peace was not a Socialist conception, but merely the order established by the governing classes and accepted by docile workers. The great social question was still that of scission. It was necessary that society be divided into two camps, and into two only, as on a battlefield.19 Bourgeoisie and proletariat must face each other with all the rigor of which they were capable. The best way in which this could be done was by the myth of the General Strike and the use of violence—violence, not force, for as in war, everything was carried on without hatred or a spirit of vengeance. Violent strikes would take the place of the ancient religious persecutions in fostering the necessary and desirable warlike state. This state was necessary because it was the best means by which the élan of the people could be stimulated, decadence averted, the taste for moderation and the desire for social peace overcome, and a new juridical system created. Asked about Bourget's play, La Barricade, which was based on the ideas of his Reflections on Violence, Sorel answered that he would be happy if it would help force the bourgeoisie to defend itself and to abandon its guilty and inglorious resignation in the face of the courageous ardor of its adversary. And in reality, the influence of Sorel did lead middle-class writers to urge the bourgeoisie to resist violently in order to safeguard its own privileges.
Sorel was right in seeing political issues as clashes of power, but there was inherent in his argument a plea for purposeless activity. As a moralist, he urged the reanimation of the spirit of the people, as a technician he urged the increase of industrial production, but the two concepts are not connected, and may even be opposed. The analogy he made in Reflections on Violence between the worker and the soldier was considerably overdrawn, while his idea of conflict inevitably producing the heroic individual was based on a curious view of human nature. It is unlikely that heroism can be a continuous manifestation of man's character. Conflict, moreover, must be a disruptive influence, and the continuity Sorel praised elsewhere was forgotten in his plea for violence.
If the three writers differed on the need for unity or scission to overcome the existing malaise, they were agreed on the need for decentralization. Michels has said, "We owe to Sorel the rediscovery of the relationships between democracy in general and absolutism, and their point of intersection in centralization,"20 but this is as true of Maurras and Barrès as of Sorel. The regionalist movement in France had many objectives, as Gooch has shown.21 It wanted to make secure liberty and vitality in the regions, to revitalize patriotism, to provide a guarantee against despotism and a barrier against revolution, to restore individual initiative, to safeguard the variety of customs and habits. Although the aims might be laudable, there was not, with Sorel, Barrs, or Maurras, any clear conception of what regionalism or decentralization or federalism might mean from the political, administrative, industrial, or intellectual point of view. Decentralization provided an effective rallying cry, it did not supply a basis for political reform. In fact, it may have produced exactly the opposite result, with the opposition of Radical-Socialists to examining the problem at least partly due to the support of regionalism by Catholics and Royalists.
Sorel saw the whole democratic movement as one which strengthened state power. The state was the expression of the domination of a group of men who had succeeded in taking over concentrated and organized force.22 All French political crises consisted in the replacement of intellectuals by other intellectuals to maintain the state or to strengthen it, since the preservation of the state was necessary for intellectuals. Sorel regarded all the revolutionary disturbances of the 19th century as having ended by strengthening the power of the state. In the contemporary regime, all politicians, Socialists as well as bourgeois, upheld the exercise of violence by the state and propagated the superstitution of authority. This led to unwarranted and inevitably unsuccessful state activity. The consequence was that industry became submerged under the increasing expansions of authority mixing in affairs formerly regarded as essentially private.
This expansion of the economic powers of the state meant not only error, waste, and embezzlement, but also the deflection of the working-class movement from its true objective. Sorel indicated the danger of the revival of the Saint-Simonian spirit among socialist intellectuals,23 and criticized the parliamentary Socialists who continued to speak of revolution while they were really concerned with social reforms, and who pretended to lead France to libertarian communism while in fact transforming all producers into officials. Excellent examples of these parliamentary figures were Millerand and Waldeck-Rousseau, whom Sorel regarded as typical representatives of that kind of state socialism which was really based on a monarchical tradition. All this meant that the working class became ardently interested in questions unrelated to its class interest, and uninterested in securing its own emancipation by itself. During the Dreyfus Affair, it needed only two years of democratic agitation for the fruits of 20 years of Socialist propaganda to be lost.
History had shown that the search by philosophers and founders of religious orders for the happiness of man was futile. When the state had to any large extent attempted to promote the happiness of man it had failed, and it hardly seemed likely that the contemporary state Socialists were any more capable in this respect than was Plato.24 The ideal of the Socratics had been the transformation of the state into a church, and though contemporary socialism did not really resemble religion, it too possessed that belief in the total power of the state that antiquity had had to an extraordinary degree. Sorel revolted from socialism because, in origin a philosophic doctrine, it had become a sect, then a political party, combining with other allied or antagonistic forces to administer business, ameliorate legislation, and direct the state. In fact, the spirit of the state had crept back into Marxism because Socialists, wanting to capture power, had organized workers into a political party.
Sorel would support all ideas diminishing the role of the state. If capitalist society had been characterized by the march toward unity in the state, the working-class movement would stress local division.25 The essence of syndicalism, he wrote in an article reviewing a book by Péguy, in the Action française on April 14, 1910, was to free itself from its Jacobin tutelage. He supported the antipatriotic doctrine of the syndicalists; it was not a question of loving or not loving one's country, but simply of the most tangible manifestation of the struggle against the state. To deny one's country would be a demonstration of a refusal to compromise with the bourgeois order. To decrease the power of the state, Sorel advocated administrative decentralization and the resurrection of communal and provincial life. But it is possible that what Sorel called "federative government" was another of his myths, for the reality of federalism, he argued, was not absolutely necessary for the realization of federalist tendencies.26 Moreover, he acknowledged that the federalist ideas of Proudhon would not be realized in his time. These ideas seemed to be popular only in the small manufacturing towns; they were not easily understood by the workers of large towns.
Barrs was as opposed as Sorel to the increasing power of the state, and to the overcentralization he saw in all fields. In the realm of politics, all power was concentrated in the Chamber of Deputies. In the field of administration, officials received their orders from Paris. The intellectual world was dominated by the universities, humanistic, Kantian, teaching in terms of abstractions, and creating deéacineé who became Parisian men of letters. This meant domination by the state and centralization of authority. There was, Barre claimed, too much state intervention (he apparently forgot he was at the same time pleading for protectionism in economic affairs) and too little liberty of association. He agreed with Taine that the domination by the state paralyzed the spontaneity of all associations, of local groups and moral groups, leading to two great evils, the lack of local life and the incapacity for spontaneous cooperation.27 The local group ought to have been a gathering of neighbors, an involuntary company, a natural and limited society.
The provinces suffered from not being allowed any activity worthy of them. The transfer of their powers, as in the case of Lorraine, to the bureaus of Paris had ruined their autonomous development. The provinces had degenerated from directors of their own affairs into clients of Paris. The situation was even more aggravated by the fact that in 1888 it was the deputies who controlled everything and made the decisions, whereas 20 years previously, when a prefect made his decisions he at least resided in the department. The intrigue in Paris meant it was there that one had to influence people in order to succeed. This in itself was more difficult, for it was necessary to convince not one or two people, but a great many deputies. Moreover, the centralist system was dominated by cosmopolitan businessmen, important Jews, and foreigners—men like Reinach and Herz, bands of vagrants.28 If Paris continued to develop in the direction of a casino, consistently preferring foreigners to Frenchmen and following ends more and more irreconcilable with the destinies of the provinces, the latter would have to be concerned with supplying the brain power that the capital would have ceased to provide.
Only decentralization could save France; it would take the form of communal and regional autonomy under national unity. The dilemma for Barrs was the unit to choose for decentralization. Since the department was an arbitrary administrative unit, and the optimum region for each economic activity varied, he returned to the old provinces. French nationality was created out of provincial nationalities; the force of the word Frenchman was doubled when to it was added Breton, Lorrainer, or Alsatian. Decentralization could restore the effective life of the provinces politically and culturally, could liberate France from the influence of foreigners, could restore Alsace and Lorraine, the provinces that had been lost by a centralist regime. It could also become a means of social transformation because the communes and the regions were sociological laboratories, and their political and economic experiments would be of benefit to all.
Thibaudet has suggested that "Barrs more than anyone created a spirit of decentralization."29In his youth, Barre had worked on the journal, Les Chroniques, which, if not a regionalist review, at least did not neglect the problem.30 lthough he abstained when his fellow workers on La Cocarde eoted to found the Ligue Repéblicaine de Decéntralisation, in October 1895, he did call a federalist and internationalist congress in Paris. Barresèhad indicated that all types of people, Catholics, moderates, liberals, and conservatives were in favor of decentralization, and even Bonapartists were not necessarily in favor of centralization. He pointed out Deréuledé as an example of a Bonapartist who, formerly opposed to decentralization, had shifted to its support. Yet the contradiction remained between the apologist of federalism and the admirer of the professor of energy, the archcentralizer, Napoleon. His idea "to put an authority at the head of the state and develop local and corporative autonomies,"31 was more illusionary than any concept that existed in the contemporary system. Moreover, while Barrs was pleading for the recognition of a distinct culture in each province, it is difficult to see what there was in common between his seven deŕacineé from Lorraine, except that they all had left their native land.
For Maurras the problem was simple—the Republic was overcentralized, and both the Republic and the overcentralization must be ended. To centralize was the fate of the Republic, to decentralize was in the interests of France. One or the other had to be destroyed.32 The Republic was in a continual dilemma. It could not decentralize for several reasons. Being weak, it had to take military precautions, and that needed the concentration of power. It needed electoral links between the elector, official, and elected, for it was by centralization that the ruling parties were chosen and rechosen; their election would be unlikely in a decentralized system, and therefore Parliament would not be likely to commit suicide by decentralizing. A republic, once established, could not become decentralized; the natural trend of an elective government was democratic state socialism. It reserved in its own hands the administration of public services, and there was no power to make the transfer to a decentralized state. State intervention had gone too far in the Republic; every day it invented some new occasion to molest the initiative of citizens.
This overcentralization produced certain difficulties. The Republic encouraged those migrations from the provinces which destroyed the professional families and enfeebled everything. The general interest was left unrepresented. Centralization encouraged idleness; the administration and bureaucracy played in relation to the people the same role that the intendants had played in relation to the dissipated youth before the Revolution.33
Maurras traced the source of the urge to centralize back to 1789 when the National Assembly abolished the old provinces of France and divided the country arbitrarily into 81 departments. Jacobinism would not admit the free existence of a variety of provinces in a unified nation, and preferred to absorb them and dismember them, but it was acting on a theory of profiting a France that was unreal.34 Local areas were being emptied of their people, their activity, their vitality, their industry, their agriculture, and their commercial importance. There was no local life—all the Girondins had been beaten; there were no small centers—communes had become impoverished; the state had become the engineer and the chaplain of the communes.
How different everything was before the Revolution! French royalty had never permitted that outrage against the soul of France, as Taine called it, which was perpetrated by the division into departments.35 In 1783 there was an infinite number of small and large autonomous organizations federated by the King of France without being enslaved by him, capable of putting at his disposal free contributions taken on collective capital rather than on an individual basis. From 1780 to 1787 all the men interested in the public good had wanted to establish provincial assemblies on the model of the bodies of Languedoc and of Provence, whose excellent administration was the admiration of France. From the year VIII, Frenchmen were not citizens, but administrés; on August 4, 1789, the franchises of towns and national provinces died.
It is interesting, but not surprising, that Tocqueville drew quite different conclusions from the good administration in some of the fays d'états, and that he should have entitled one of his chapters, "How the administrative centralization was an institution of the old regime and not, as is often thought, a creation of the Revolution or the Napoleonic period." The Maurrasian version of pre-Revolutionary history was an incredible travesty of the truth with its refusal to acknowledge that provincial independence had been abolished by the monarehy, which had sent its nominees to govern most of the country.
But to Maurras the idea of decentralization was of sentimental as well as of political interest. It was on the second floor of the town hall of Martigues, in leafing through the old registers of the municipal archives that he learned "to render justice to our past . . . and felt myself what I have always been, municipal Republican, provincial federalist, and passionate Royalist."36 In 1888 he met Mistral for the first time, and became aware of the interest in Provençal, and of the fact that Félibrige was not simply an intellectual amusement. But his appreciation of the true extent of Provencal culture was a totally unrealistic one. Reviewing a book by Mistral, Maurras wrote that while the peasants, shepherds, and poets of Provence thanked Mistral for having rescued the speech of their ancestors, there would be everywhere readers of the Tresor who would derive perpetual enlightenment on the mystery of races, languages, and blood from it. This, as Richard Aldington has aptly commented, about a book that cost 120 francs in 1900.37
Maurras was in favor of restoring the power of the provinces, of making the universities autonomous, strengthening the family by suppressing the law of equal inheritance, encouraging the tenure of land and industry, making the syndicats autonomous, and restoring the authority of the religious congregations. To secure these ends, he wanted economic and territorial decentralization in which all orders and degrees of the political, administrative, juridical, and civil hierarchy would participate. He had argued that a federalist system was not possible, since neither of the two factors normally responsible for its formation was present; there were no organized bodies like Swiss cantons or American states already in existence, nor was there a common enemy creating unity. Yet in 1892, he paid his first visit to La Tour du Pin to talk of federalism. With his friend Amouretti, Maurras decided that the Félibrige of Paris ought to be more than simply a meeting place for dinner, and with two others, René de Saint-Pons and Joseph Mange, signed a Declaration des Félibres Fédéralistes on February 22, 1892, urging immediate autonomy for the provinces and a greater independence of the communes. It is typical of the whole career of Maurras that the movement should have expelled him for this excess of enthusiasm.
The concrete suggestions he made were not strikingly dissimilar to that division of power, coordinate and separate, which is the chief feature of a federal system. The central government would retain the power of diplomacy, control of the armies of land and sea, and, to a lesser degree, general finance. Other organizations—the clergy, university, communes, arrondissements, provinces, public assistance, and judicial bodies—would be autonomous, the center reserving for itself only the supervisory, police, arbitration, and judicial powers. Caution must be exercised, however, about the professional group, for they might be without deep roots in French tradition, and thus a menace to it because of infiltration of ideas of international revolution and cosmopolitan anarchy.
Maurras' idea of territorial decentralization was equally vague. To the communes must be left the management of all affairs that were specially their own; to the provinces the questions that concerned the provinces. Thus, the supreme national organization might be relieved of all the functions that sapped its strength and might bring a greater continuity and energy of purpose to the direction of the national destinies of the country. In addition to economic and geographic decentralization, there ought also to be a decentralization of customs, so that as the number and importance of officials were diminished, citizens would lose the habit of turning incessantly to the state for aid. The role of the state would be reduced to, at most, that of a protector, a watchman.38 It would be confined to acting as guarantor of individual existence, of the independence of the country, of the free usage of the native idiom, and the maintenance of customs and national traditions. In this way, organization and life would be substituted for mechanical administration. But only a king of France could bring this about. Only he could decentralize without risk, ensure the defeat of the cosmopolitans, and restore political authority. Being neither a creature nor a courtesan of his people, he would not reduce them to servitude nor deprive them of the free exercise of their power as citizens.39
But the paradox remained of Maurras, on one hand the Félibre and Provencal, on the other the creator of unity through monarchy. The paradox was that decentralization needed a strong power and that it would be effected only through nationalism and a central hereditary power. Maurras' compromise, "Never say, 'Long live the Republic,' but at the right time, 'Long live the republics, under the King of France,'" is more difficult to understand than the simple slogan of Déroulde, "A bas les Parlementaires; vive la Republique!"
The tragedy of this overstatement of the position by the three writers is that there was a genuine case to be made out against overcentralization in France. The gibe that government consisted of holding France at the end of a telegraph wire starting from Paris was shown to be not too far from the truth when in 1896 President Faure visited the Alpes Maritimes. Everyone who intended to call on the President was obliged to submit his name to the mayor of the town, who redirected it to the prefect, who telegraphed it to the Minister of the Interior. The control by the prefect over actions of the mayor and municipal council, and by the Minister of the Interior over the mayor meant that in every field of government, simple decisions had to be referred to the central authority. Bureaus in Paris decided whether a certain warden ought to be appointed in a particular gaol, whether a doctor in an asylum could prolong his leave, whether the name of a street could be changed, whether the nomination of a captain of a fire brigade ought to be authorized.
These practical difficulties helped produce French political pluralism. In this era, when the monistic theory of the state was being attacked, and the value and importance of groups in society emphasized, pluralists like Duguit and good Republicans like Charles Brun and Paul Boncour were impressed by the necessity to decentralize. It is a commentary on the extremist, uncompromising position of Maurras, Barr, and Sorel that they took little account of the useful work being done by other critics and that their own criticisms were limited to confusing abstractions. Nowhere in any of the three writers can a clear outline of what is entailed in decentralization be found. Sorel's syndicalist ideas, for example, would seem to imply little if any control by central governmental agencies and a general absence of political power. But paradoxically enough, the syndicalist movement, which for him was the prototype of a decentralized organization, was itself strengthening its central body as opposition by government and employers became stronger. The formation of the Comite d́es Forges by leading employers meant greater resistance to union activity. The government, by arresting syndicalists in 1908 and 1913, by using troops to smash several strikes between 1910 and 1912, and by threatening the C.G.T. with dissolution in 1913, attempted to stem the tide of syndicalism. The response of the C.G.T. was to create larger and more centralized bodies. The Marseilles conference of the C.G.T. in 1908 invited all craft federations to become industrial, and in general, the local Bourses du Travail were losing power to larger bodies. Part of Sorel's myth was disappearing without his awareness.
The attack oil centralization was carried over from political and social matters to the educational system, the writers attacking the uniformity or unity of the system. Maurras attacked the system because it provided the wrong kind of uniformity, egalitarian teaching that molded young brains according to the necessities and desires of the state. Sorel was concerned because he felt that the system increased the power of the State because, although modern liberalism professed to be diametrically opposed to the absolutist theory of the Church, in fact it held the same view that education ought to be as complete and as uniform as possible.40 Popular education led to absolutism and to lack of freedom because of uniform instruction. Barrs objected to the centralized system because this meant that in the provinces, university teaching was by Parisian professors, without any roots in the provinces, who taught an abstract philosophy having no relation to the necessities of national life.
The particular criticisms the three writers made about the harmful effects of the system differed widely. Barrs opposed the abstract philosophy being taught because it corrupted the young, led to the acceptance of unreal and fallacious ideas, and produced a pedagogical product who was deaf to the needs of France. Barre' continuing hatred toward his teachers, M. Burdeau, portrayed in his books as M. Bouteiller, and M. Lagneau, "ce nigaud," as he once called him, was caused by their false teachings. They corrupted the young, inspired in them contempt for their parents, introduced new gods, inspired in their best pupils dreams of domination. This official teaching of the state, inspired by Kant, transported human beings into a world apart, a world that was poetic and heroic, but a world completely unreal. Barresstated, "One of my favourite theses is to demand that education not be given to children without regard for their individuality."41 In Les Déracinés, he denounced the puerile functioning of intelligence, abstract and devoid of all reality, on which the foundations for the work of an individual could be laid. The Sorbonne, like the 18th century philosophes, was intoxicated by the belief that science could provide a complete explanation of the world, and that university had destroyed all the old moral supports. To the mediocrity of the salons and the demiculture of the graduates, Barrs preferred the creative, disinterested, spontaneous masses.42 Besides the abtract teaching of the university, its chief fault was that it preached the love of humanity before that of the national collectivity. This resulted in a rationalism foreign to French habits and local and family traditions. Barrs objected that young Frenchmen were being taught as if one day they would have to do without their country.43 The university despised or ignored tangible reality, with the result that its students hardly understood that the race of their country existed, that the earth of their country was a reality, and that, more real than earth or race, the spirit of each country was the instrument of education and of life for its sons.
Barrès made similar criticisms of the system of primary education and asked that it provide the opportunity for individuals to enjoy the heritage of the past. The hymns and the sacred songs on which a child ought to be nourished would encourage in him family, regional, historical, and corporative influences.
Barrs' own personal experience and criticism was largely an illustration of Taine's criticism of the lyceés as huge stone boxes isolated in each large town and having as their rule strict confinement in their communal life.44 This led to deficiency in social graces, unfortunate attitudes toward women, and these, combined with a desire to throw off the excessive discipline, meant that the student was tempted by low life in hygiene, money, or sex. Barre followed Taine's conclusion that some young men at twenty-four, through their education in idealism, were not ready for life, that there was a growing disparity between education and life and that there was a need for regional universities.
On the question of the humanities, Barrs and Sorel took opposite points of view from Maurras. It was in character for Sorel to complain of the fatal influence exercised over the French mind by classicism,45 an influence which developed the defects of one's nature and which led to a state of ideological dissociation in which the country had lost the sense of the reality of things. He criticized the professional schools for devoting too much time to pure culture. The great schools neglected technology for pure science; the Ecole Polytechnique hardly merited its title. The state was as incapable of taking care of education as it was of industry. Education, instead of developing a monstrous egoism which subordinated everything to the desires of the individual appetite, and which instilled a distaste for manual work, must be directed toward a practical end. This end must be achieved through a double process. Apprenticeship must be taken seriously and not treated as a game or as an intellectual exercise. At the same time, young men must be taught to love their work and to consider everything they made as carefully created works of art. It was the function of the educational process to make individuals conscientious, artists and scholars in everything relating to production.46 The anarchistic and aristocratic idea of the complete man was not suitable for a society in which education had to be oriented to scientific division of work, enlightened by a socialist philosophy and social ethics.
Barrs, differing from Sorel in his belief that there was a need to give to children an inner faculty of expansion, "a continual enchantment," agreed that the system of humanities did not render man more apt for agriculture, for commerce, or for Industry, but, on the contrary, turned him from them. The administration had prepared students only to become officials or Parisian men of letters. The university gave birth to a proletariat of bacheliers et filles, to unemployed intellectuals. The conclusion reached by Barre was amply borne out by the fact that the French publishing crisis lasting from 1890 until 1910 or 1911 did in fact leave a generation of frustrated aesthetes.47 Both in France and in other countries where similar situations existed, an important impact on extremist political movements was to be the result.
Barrs' criticism, however, was a contradictory one. He reproached the system for its Kantism, its cold moralism, and its rigorous discipline, but he also accused it of leaving everything in a turmoil, and of anarchy in lacking a doctrine or discipline. The suicide of two schoolboys had led him to condemn the whole school system in a speech on June 21, 1909. In his desire for a discipline he said in a speech in the Chamber, "I accept ... a school against the Church if that school has a positive value, fecund and living."48
Maurras agreed with Barrs that the schools taught the religion of the state, Kantism, and the defense of the Rights of Man, with the result that ethics were based on conscience rather than on will and reason. This created bewilderment in the minds of students, and was both antinational and antiscientific. But Maurras also criticized the system for having reduced the study of humanities and thus prevented the development of judgment and the formation of a critical sense. In this way the teaching of the state produced in young people either a complete lack of interest in public affairs or pure revolutionary ideas, so that French faculties of letters became seminaries of anarchism or of dilettantism. Maurras, like Barre, objected to the lack of tradition in the teaching system. There was no indoctrination of the greatness of the past. The state, said Maurras, made use of the teacher in the village as an electoral agent; the teachers, with the ardor of proselytes, were sectarians in the fight against tradition and religion. Barrescomplained that a large majority of the body of teachers was impregnated with pacifism.49 Both he and Maurras thought that education should be run by local authorities rather than by the central government, and that each region should maintain and develop its own university.
Sorel was aware that the system had a deleterious moral effect, and that it might further the degeneration in the social system because the educational system affected family relationships. Parents struggled to get an education for their children, who then despised them, but families were forced to send their children to schools to receive school doctrine. Under the existing system, Sorel dreaded mass education, and hoped the state would not succeed in suppressing consciences. He cited Proudhon's opinion that the teaching of the young, with the exception of the privileged, was a philanthropic dream. Education created an oligarchy of the erudite who, hallucinated by the idea of despotism over a poor clientele, flattered the popular masses in order best to succeed in dominating the state, and who would always be ready to sacrifice the future of the country to their vanity, their hates, and their corporate interests.50 A classical education did not help pupils make much money, but it did give them prestige over the masses. The bourgeois control of the school meant both that the proletariat was placed under the direction of an ideology foreign to it and that an attempt was made to impose unity through teaching.
Sorel feared the effect on the proletariat. Through the system of universal education, the bourgeoisie deprived the proletariat of potential leaders on the principle that it was wiser to subsidize the barbarians than to fight them. Education would not be useful to the proletariat; the primary school was empoisoned with many old ideas, and its lay and bourgeois catechism rendered the masses more easily accessible to all the nonsense uttered by politicians.51 If the popular university movement had succeeded in leading the most intelligent workers in the direction hoped for by the bourgeoisie, socialism would have fallen into the democratic rut. Sorel accepted Proudhon's idea that a good system of education must be founded on working-class associations in which apprenticeship would be based on the value of work rather than the culture of the mind.
Once habit and tradition have lost their hold on a people, the problems of obtaining agreement on fundamental basic principles and of reconciling the majority principle with minority rights will always exist in a democratic community. In a country with serious internal and external problems, and with the presence of competing ideologies, the failure to find easy solutions to these problems provokes abundant criticism.
The attack of Barrès and Maurras was typical of the Right in its condemnation of the absence of unity and of discipline, in its demand that unity be dedicated to the power of the state rather than to a Rousseauist conception of general wellbeing, and in its appeal to a higher entity than the individual. The basic fault in the plea for unity by the two nationalists was the unstated premise that there is a fixed hierarchy for individuals and groups in a rigid, stratified society. Their argument that above all else it was best not to have a pretext for civil war implied that any attempt at change would pose a threat to the well-being, traditions, and institutions of society. Sorel's attack was typical of a disciple of Proudhon, opposing unity imposed from above and advocating multiplicity, change, and conflict as a moral concept, in the belief that the production of an attitude of tension in the community was in itself desirable. The initial fault in Sorel's position was his assumption of the cowardice of government and of the middle class, with the implication that both were condemned to death. But both in fact were lively corpses, and their resistance to working class activity indicated this. Since Sorel, in another connection, himself admitted that amour propre was a force in social history that had often been more important than material interests and religious passions, it should have come as no surprise that the middle class would look after its own interests. His plea for an artificial creation of tension became as unnecessary as it was illusory. Moreover, Sorel was wrong in stating, as he did in an early work, that while the worker or peasant was interested in revolutionary traditions, the miracles of Lourdes, the devotion of the Sacré Coeur, the beatification of Joan of Arc interested the bourgeoisie. The crowd at the Gare de Lyon surrounding General Boulanger, animated, as Barrs argued, by national subconscious and obscure ancestral sentiments, could have shown Sorel that tension could be produced by the heritage of the past as well as by the promise of the future.
Their criticisms of the educational system were another manifestation of the illiberalism of the three writers. A liberal education, especially in its classical formulation by Newman, seeks to develop such attributes as freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom. Implicit are the premises that the acquisition of knowledge is a desirable end in itself, and that education is basically concerned with individual growth. Maurras, Barrs, and Sorel would not approve a liberal education defined in this way, for they believed that education should be motivated as a preparation for a certain task to be undertaken in adult life. In the case of the Nationalists, the purpose of education was to produce a passionate and devoted love of country, and in the case of Sorel, to produce a worker devoted to his work. Pertinent though the criticisms of the educational system by the three writers may have been, the Republic could hardly agree. For both Republicans and their enemies, the school was the symbol of the regime. If, as Ernest Barker said, the educational policy of the Third Republic was the work of M. Lebureau, the official would be most concerned with its lay character. To Ferry, Catholic schools were "schools of counter-revolution where one learns to detest and hate all ideas which are the honor and raison d'et̂re of modern France." To end this clerical threat he began the series of educational changes that were the administrative implementation of Gambetta's famous slogan. The proposal of Pochon in the Chamber that no Frenchman be eligible for state employment unless educated in a lay school might have been an extreme measure, but it was an indication that Republicans looked to the lay school for loyalty and that this would normally be forthcoming.
4 L'Action française, April 18, 1913.
5 Carl J. Friedrich, The New Belief in the Common Man, passim.
6 Karl Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, pp. 113-114.
7 Scènes, p. 80.
8 ibid., p. 29.
9 Mes Cahiers, 1:39; VIII:96.
14 Charles Maurras, "L'Evolution des idées sociales."
15 J. H. Meisel, The Genesis of Georges Sorel, p. 275.
16 Matériaux, p. 413.
17 La Révolution Dreyfusienne, p. 21.
18 Georges Sorel, "Le Syndicalisme révolutionnaire," Le Mouvement socialiste (November 1, 1905), 17:278.
19 Reflections on Violence, p. 144.
20 Robert Michels, Political Parties, London, 1915, p. 234.
21 R. K. Gooch, Regionalism, in France, New York, 1931, passim.
22 Introduction à, l'économie moderne, p. 230.
23 Sorel, "Quelques mots sur Proudhon," Cahiers de la quinzaine (June 1901) 2nd Series, No. 13, p. 25.
24 Sorel, "Le Socialisme en 1907," Le Mouvement socialiste (May 1907), 21:481.
25 Sorel, "Les Dissensions de la social démocratic en Allemagne," Revue politique et parlementaire (July 1900), 25:63.
26 Introduction à l'économie moderne, p. 161.
29 Albert Thibaudet, La Vie de Maurice Barrès, p. 276.
30 Leon Dubreuil, (ed.), "Lettres de Maurice Barrès a Charles le Goffic," Annates de Bretagne (1951), 58:19-88.
31 Mes Cahiers, III:37.
32 L'Action française, April 22, 1908.
33 Maurras, L'Anglais qui a connu la France, Paris, 1928, p. 37.
38 Maurras, "Une Monarchic fédérale," Le Soleil, March 9, 1898.
39 Maurras, La Ripublique de Martigues, Paris, 1929, p. 77.
40 Le Procès de Socrate, p. 188.
41 Barrès, "A Propos de la réimpression de 'l'Homme Libre,'" Revue politique et littéraire (September 10, 1904), 41:322.
42 Le Jardin de Bérénice, p. 124; Mes Cahiers, IX:19-20.
43 Les Déracinés, I:35-39.
44 Hippolyte Taine, The Modern Regime, 2 vols., New York, 1890-94, I:231-264.
45 La Ruine du monde antique, p. 84; Les Illusions du progrès, pp. 256-267; Le Procès de Socrate, p. 192. Sorel did admit, however, that the decline of classicism would be undesirable if education could not be founded on industrial practice.
46 Sorel, "La Science dans l'education," Le Devenir social (May 1896), 2:461.