L’Action Française has acquired broad influence in French thought. You are a patriarch, already. One can see in outline the historical chapter written and filled by our generation.
—BARRÈS to Maurras, December 1920
Civilization is an effort to reduce violence to an ultima ratio. Direct action reverses the order and makes violence the first option or, rather, the only one.
—ORTEGA Y GASSET
As president of the Ligue des Patriotes, Maurice Barrès often had occasion to join forces with Charles Maurras, leader of the royalist movement L’Action Française, who contributed in no small measure to the brutalization of French political life between the world wars. Barrésien and maurrassien both denoted programmatic xenophobia. Unlike Barrès, Maurras lived long enough to see several of his prominent young followers gravitate toward Fascism, to hail the Vichy regime, to be convicted after World War II of “complicity with the enemy,” and to spend his last years in prison.
The cult of a virgin savior—indeed, the Neo-Romantic penchant in conservative circles for all things medieval—reflected a fortress-France nationalism whose mission was not only to protect the fatherland from external hordes but to defend the cohesive social organism against subversive change. What went by the name of progress loomed ahead even more menacingly than Germany. “[This worldview] oriented itself toward the interior, toward the past,” wrote the historian Michel Winock.
It directed its antagonism first and foremost against the democratic and liberal regime, the “Jewish, Masonic Republic,” but discernible beneath the political agenda was a spiritual reaction against decadence by people who understood the defense of French interests to be that of a completed civilization at war with the new mobility of things and beings.
“Completed civilization” is a key phrase. It calls to mind the opprobrium heaped on Impressionist pictures for spurning the historical and biblical themes favored by juries at the annual Salon. Art that lacked “fini” (high finish) was not art but the defiling of consecrated space by alien eyes. Napoleon III arranged to have paintings deemed unworthy of state recognition—most famously Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe—displayed, like freaks in a side show, at an alternate exhibition indelicately called Le Salon des Refusés. The name had great symbolic resonance. Nationalists of the kind Winock describes would have welcomed a Salon des Refusés for every manifestation of the modern intellect and sensibility, from a government inclined to place time itself in quarantine and enforce principles as retrograde as Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. No one illustrated this disposition more obstinately than Charles Maurras.
In 1923, André Gide observed of the fifty-five-year-old Maurras, who had begun to lose his hearing at age fourteen, that he was “a deaf man as England is an island nation—whence his strength.” Goethe’s aphorism “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” suited him just as well.
Intensely proud of his ability to store “auditory memories,” Maurras could still, in old age, hear his first teacher reciting Casimir Delavigne’s passionately patriotic poem “La Mort de Jeanne d’Arc.” Elementary school was the École du Sacré-Coeur in Martigues, a town situated on the canal linking a large brackish lake, the Étang de Berre, to the Mediterranean. Natives earned their living from the sea, spoke Provençal more fluently than French, and, unlike boisterous Marseillais, twenty miles away, looked askance at the Third Republic taking its first, uncertain steps after the Franco-Prussian War. Maurras’s mother, Marie, who came from a seafaring family with relatives planted on distant shores, was Provençal born and bred, although apt to treat Provençal as a vulgar patois unwelcome in the household. Her father had commanded a frigate in the fleet that repulsed Ottoman line-of-battle ships at Navarino during the Bourbon Restoration and had fought under Louis-Philippe’s third son, the Prince de Joinville (famous for bringing Napoleon’s ashes back from Saint Helena). In retirement he served as mayor of Martigues. Not so venturesome was the Maurras clan. Its generations had been collecting taxes in the lower Rhône valley since the early eighteenth century. Jean Maurras, the last of his name to do so, married late and fathered Charles at fifty-seven, in 1868. What little is known about him suggests that he was rather more fun-loving than his young wife. But fun didn’t run free in the Maurras household, as Marie, who supervised her family’s spiritual welfare, left nothing to chance. Except La Fontaine’s fables, only Bible stories passed for entertainment. By the time Charles entered the École du Sacré-Coeur, where history meant histoire sainte, his mother had thoroughly schooled him in both Testaments.
Still, there were excursions to the coast and to the lush valley of the Huveaune River, which flowed seaward from the Provençal hills. Maurras remembered Martigues’s island suburb sitting on the canal like a white gull, long days threaded with gold, church bells ringing the Angelus, lapping waves, a warmhearted nanny from the Dauphiné, and himself a pampered child—pampered the more for having entered the world after the death of a two-year-old brother. Another brother, Joseph, arrived in 1872.
At five, Maurras, the future royalist who dreamed of restoring the ancien régime, was shaken by a domestic upheaval that ended the unbroken succession of golden days, creating a “before” and an “after.” In 1874, his father died.
Two years later, Marie Maurras, ambitious for Charles, moved her small family from Martigues to Aix-en-Provence and enrolled him in the cathedral school. If her hope was that Greek and Latin would purge him of everything primitive or provincial, she did not reckon with the need, in a fatherless boy, to find anchors wherever he could. Marie spurned Provençal as peasant jargon, but when Charles discovered Frédéric Mistral’s poetry, he embraced the movement to restore classical Occitan, and eventually became a powerful advocate. Its restoration agreed with his idea of France as it had been before eighteenth-century Jacobins cast a net of bureaucratic uniformity over la France profonde—the organic hinterland and its regional cultures.
Marie Maurras found Charles’s scholarship worth the scrimping. Every year he brought home prizes for excellence in Latin, French, and religious instruction. It was an unusual child who fell in love with Racine at age twelve, and priests noted the phenomenon. Fortunately for all concerned, the decision of an aggressively secularizing minister of education to close schools run by “unauthorized” religious orders did not affect the Collège Catholique, a diocesan establishment. Maurras would always remember the day in June 1880 when three thousand soldiers descended upon Aix to maintain order, or to restore it should the expulsion of Jesuits excite resistance, in this town whose traditionally conservative population had swollen since 1871 with the arrival of refugees from the surrendered provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Charles’s first teacher at the Collège Catholique, and his neighbors, were all Lorrainers.
Charles had hardly begun to heal from one catastrophic loss than tragedy struck again. In 1882, at the age of fourteen, he went deaf. The deafness was not complete; nor would it ever be. But a malady baffling every doctor consulted—and there were many—drove home the feeling that nature had wronged him, that he stood outside the human species in an occluded head. What future could he have among men? Attending naval college and following his heroic grandfather to sea were unthinkable. What present could he enjoy among barely audible schoolmates and teachers? “The most cherished voices were henceforth heard only as a murmur devoid of meaning,” he later wrote. “No one can portray this state who has not experienced it. You’d think that a tragic silence envelops the sufferer, but nothing is falser. On the contrary one is assailed within oneself by a storm of cries, of hummings and of moans, which overmaster one.”
An incident that took place during the summer of that fatal year at the Maurras house outside Martigues, which Marie never sold, bears upon his response to these tormenting questions. Five ancient cypresses separated the house from an orchard whose owner regarded them as an abomination depriving his fruit trees of light and sending their roots into his soil. Charles argued that they should be cut down. He argued the case so well, in fact, that his mother, who was desperately short of funds, conceded. “What evil demon made me plead for the enemy and produce sophistries that ultimately, to my eternal shame, met with success.… I can still see the pink flesh of their sap-wood bleeding between the foliage.… No sooner had the last trunk fallen than I felt pangs of conscience, and a desire to repair the irreparable.” Later on, he may have come to believe that his forceful brief was dictated by anger at the irreparable in himself. He had assaulted five patriarchal shoots of nature before turning his rage against his own defective being. It was then, in 1882 or not long afterward, that he tried to hang himself with a cloth tied to the hasp of a window.
What didn’t kill him made him stronger, though not right away and not without the support of a remarkable priest from the cathedral school. Upon learning about Charles’s disability, Abbé Jean-Baptiste Penon, who was known in the diocese as a superior classical scholar, offered to tutor the boy and to shepherd him through his troubled adolescence. This he did for three years. Charles’s salvation was his thrice-weekly lessons at home or at a local seminary with Penon. The young priest assigned him long passages of Homer, Virgil, and Horace. Together they steeped themselves in French classical theater. Penon introduced him to Sainte-Beuve. He deferred to Charles’s love of Musset and Baudelaire. They read histories of France by writers of different ideological persuasions. Most important was philosophy. For Charles, days began and ended with Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Hippolyte Taine. The self-destructive rage that had afflicted him at fourteen waxed into a fever of philosophical speculation. Penon kept faith with him even when the boy, after studying Pascal at his mentor’s behest, announced that religious belief was a lost cause. The Pensées had shaken young Maurras. As much as “the silence of infinite spaces” frightened Pascal, a silent universe answerable to a cryptic God repelled the boy. Pascal conceived of Creation as a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; the world for which Charles yearned would be as centered as the solar system. Writing to Penon during a school retreat at Le Tholonet (near one of Paul Cézanne’s favorite perches below Mont Sainte-Victoire), he quoted these lines from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol,
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the influence of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad.
The words are spoken at sea by Ulysses to Agamemnon and followed by the warning that “mutiny,” “plagues,” “portents,” a “raging of waters,” and a “shaking of the earth” supervene when “planets in evil mixture to disorder wander.” He was sixteen. It was 1884. His inner life, he told Penon, felt like “a carnival of the mind, the heart, and the senses.”
The sun shone less brightly in Paris’s Latin Quarter, where Marie Maurras arrived a year later with sons in tow, Charles having passed the baccalaureate exam and Joseph being admitted to a lycée for the intellectually gifted. Charles would pursue his studies at the Sorbonne, hoping that France’s best physicians could help him hear. Penon, who encouraged the move lest his talented student languish in the backwater of Aix-en-Provence, saw him off.
Charles’s deafness defeated the specialists. It soon became apparent that modern medicine had no cure for his malady. This conclusion put an end to any prospect of university studies.1 He spent his days reading at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and taking solitary walks. What to do? The question might have gone unanswered if not for his loyal Provençal mentors. Furnished with recommendations from Penon and another teacher at the Collège Catholique, Charles wrote a ten-page review of a 930-page conspectus of Western philosophy for a Thomist periodical called the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne. Even longer reviews followed. Its director was so impressed that he assigned the seventeen-year-old a book column in another journal under his direction, L’Instruction Publique. France’s sluggish economy appears not to have slowed the outpouring of literature, histories, and philosophical treatises: they gave Charles enough material for seventy columns in three years. There was more. La Réforme Sociale, a fortnightly of Catholic inspiration founded by Frédéric Le Play and named after his quasi-feudal reformist movement, welcomed Charles, who, undaunted by the challenge of having to write intelligibly about social economics, became a regular contributor.2 The Maurras family scraped by on what he earned and on rent from a tenant in Martigues.
Charles remained deeply ambivalent in the matter of religion. Unable to embrace the church or to purchase security outside it, he unburdened himself to Penon: “In spite of weaknesses, I feel an inexpressible need to attach myself to something firm. I have found what appear to be principles of solidity in human science, but when I clutch them, I bloody my hands on their rough surface.” The more philosophy he read, the more phantasmagoric the world became. “Questions without answers, tangled and contradictory. One thing is certain: the question exists and one must resolve it in order to feel happy.” Penon insisted that Charles’s longing for invincible selfhood could be satisfied only one way. The heartfelt observance of religious duties was imperative: “You must perceive Jesus Christ as a live presence rather than a remote sovereign, and reserve several minutes of the day for Him, as you would for a friend. The means are very simple. Read the Gospel without commentary; especially Saint Luke or Saint John: a chapter a day.… If one passage leaves you cold and distracted, another will transport you.” What led to religious conviction, he said, was the heart, not mathematical proof—Aristotle’s “truth prior to predication.” Knowing the young man to be afflicted with feelings of “anguish” and “moral emptiness” dampened the pleasure he took in his success. He wrote, “I shall never resign myself to seeing you torn from these beliefs, these practices for which your intelligence and your heart are so well suited, and which alone give life its true meaning.”
Between 1886 and 1891, Maurras published 169 articles in La Réforme Sociale and as many in a Catholic daily called L’Observateur Français.3 Penon marveled at his fecundity. But he would just as certainly have frowned upon the un-Catholic company the young man began to keep. That Maurras kept any company at all was the result of an impromptu visit from three young poets whose work he had praised. Undeterred by his protestations of deafness, they introduced him to the profane neighborhood of cafés at his doorstep. Before long, he became fluent in Latin Quarter argot and seasoned his prose with it. He cultivated an unkempt appearance and bad manners. He read Émile Zola’s novels and people’s palms. He described this world as la brousse—the bush—and its feminine fauna as a “veritable nation” of the unhappily married, the separated, and the divorced. In short, he spent several seasons visiting a place walled off from him since adolescence by deafness, philosophy, and religion. The bush was “delicious,” he wrote. But it was uninhabitable. Its offerings were a mixed blessing, depriving him of weight even as it liberated him from gravity.
Maurras turned twenty on April 20, 1888. He would always remember the year, not so much for that reason as for his encounter with the twenty-five-year-old Maurice Barrès, in whom he immediately recognized a more sympathetic confidant than Jean-Baptiste Penon. Sous l’Oeil des Barbares, which he reviewed in L’Observateur Français, was the link. His political idiom may not have been Barrès’s, nor were their barbarians identical, but the narrative of a struggle between the Self and non-Self rang loud and clear. “At the time,” he later recalled, “I was dwelling almost obsessively on an idea of the English historian Macaulay, who thought that our civilization would perish, not at the hands of invaders from without, like the Roman, but of internal barbarians, ‘barbarians from below,’ as he put it: our Communards, our Socialists, our plebs.” Their first exchange of letters struck a more personal note. “I must admit that Sous l’Oeil des Barbares enthralled me,” Maurras wrote on November 4, 1888. “I have lived fragments of that life. And where our sensibilities differ, the analysis is so painfully close to the bone that one can imagine oneself suffering in your place. It is an overflowing of egoistic sympathy.”
The sentence in Sous l’Oeil des Barbares that resonated with Maurras more than any other was the hero’s ultimate supplication: “Oh master, you alone [can point the way], if you exist somewhere—whether you be an axiom, a religion, or a prince of men.” Despite their differences, he and Barrès recognized in each other the believer manqué yearning for salvation. Unable to feel “whole,” authentic, or centered without a transcendent guide, they made gospel of Hippolyte Taine’s materialist formula: race, milieu, moment. Individualism was their common bane. Selfhood resided not in one’s unique history but in a sameness Taine likened to that of the leaves of a tree. It was ordained by one’s race, one’s cultural milieu, one’s moment in time. It was “organic.” And the organic self postulated the existence of an alien “other” bent on invading and uprooting.
A year after the two met, Barrès decided that Georges Boulanger was a “prince of men” and ran for political office under the general’s banner. Maurras, on the other hand, had yet to raise the flag of white lilies. He concerned himself now with literature more than politics or philosophy, letting his ties with Catholic publications go slack. Even so, the literary program to which he subscribed as a founding member of the école romane (the Roman school) and an enthusiast of Provençal poetry foreshadowed his politics. The term “Roman” encapsulated the idea that France’s genius belonged to the Mediterranean or Greco-Latin tradition, which had been perverted by Romanticism and its decadent offspring. Barrès praised the new school in Le Figaro of July 4, 1892, for reviving French literature of the past rather than following the crowd to authors whom the Roman school collectively dubbed “Nordic” (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen); in the article, “The Quarrel of Nationalists and Cosmopolites,” he applied those polarities to literature before they became the obsessive dialectic of his political thinking. Maurras, for his part, published a pamphlet entitled Barbarians and Romans.
What Maurras wrote about politics at that moment foreshadowed the nationalist sentiments with which he championed France’s military establishment during the Dreyfus Affair. As important to him as classical fixity in the chaos of “isms” born of Romantic license was the virtue of one voice in the fractiousness of the Republic. To rise from its slough, France would have to end parliamentary squabbling. “Action” and “energy” were what she wanted. The word “action” became a shibboleth whose political insinuations were destined to inform French consciousness in the twentieth century. Thus, Maurras could despise the Revolution of 1789 yet sympathize with the Terror of 1793, for among Jacobins, the pale cast of thought never sicklied over the native hue of resolution. “Passion, willfulness, desire led to immediate gratification. Words were acts. The memory of those times casts a jaundiced light on our own; nowadays, thoughts have great trouble merely becoming spoken or written words, and actions get so tangled in verbiage that any well-bred mind disdains them, and abandons them to the mediocre.”
Political debate became more relevant several years later, when parliamentary proceedings of the pale, sickly sort gave way to ideological warfare, allowing no middle ground for doubt or decorum. By 1890, Maurras was already hailing Édouard Drumont, the author of the recently published book La France Juive. “In Drumont’s work there are pages, paragraphs, notes whose haughty impertinence reminds one of Saint Simon,” he wrote in L’Observateur Français. “But that is not where his glory lies. His glory lies in having opened a career for men of action, for the audacious.” In 1894, a remark by Barrès about Jews being well established in the Midi provoked a sharp response: “You persist in confusing one or two confined districts of the Gard region with the whole Midi. That is an error for which Alphonse Daudet is responsible.” Maurras went on to say that the city of Nîmes did indeed swarm with Jews, Protestants, and Oriental hucksters, but that Nîmes was a “race” apart—dull-witted, “thick blooded,” loudmouthed, and given to much gesticulation. “Moreover, it is sly and perfidious.… Nîmes is a story of shame. Bear in mind, however, that the entire Midi scorns these people. You won’t find anyone like them elsewhere in our region, except perhaps in Cahors, which is a former ghetto.” Maurras habitually described foreigners resident in France—all Jews included—as “métèques,” giving a pejorative twist to a word of Greek origin.4
When they had set matters straight, Barrès invited Maurras to write for La Cocarde, whose editorial direction he assumed with a tip of the hat to Édouard Drumont. Drumont, in turn, had launched his own newspaper, La Libre Parole, at the height of the Panama Scandal, with revelations of knavery in Parliament and his ears pricked for scandals to come. In 1894, readers were informed that a court-martial held behind closed doors had tried an unnamed officer accused of passing military secrets to Germany.
It was in the nature of things that the traitor should be Jewish. Cast in a stock role waiting to be filled by opportune candidates, Dreyfus was treasonous long before treason was committed. His court-martial had not yet taken place when Maurras declared that Jews were “the scourge of nations,” subversion being their “natural métier.”5 Loyal only to their own kind, they could not understand that the integrity of the social organism must prevail over the guilt or innocence of an individual, that judicial rectitude must always defer to “la raison d’état.”
Like most people, Maurras saw no reason to question the rightness of Dreyfus’s conviction until evidence came to light that fraudulent documents had been placed in his dossier and Émile Zola published an indictment of the general staff on the front page of L’Aurore in January 1898. Only then did Maurras join the fray, vehemently contending that the affair would never have become an affair if an ignorant populace hadn’t been harangued by partisan tongues. Where pandemonium reigned, one voice, in the person of a king, could have settled accounts. “There was no one to say to deputies toeing a party line, ‘I am neither this administration nor that one, I am neither Jewry, nor the Protestant Consistory, nor the Catholic Church. I embody the race that made France French. In the name of that race and that fatherland, all this muck must be carted away,’ ” he wrote. The French, he claimed, dreamed not so much of justice as of “public salvation,” which compelled them to reorganize political life around a supreme arbiter. Judeo-Protestant individualism was the villain.
Maurras’s commanding moment came after the imprisonment and suicide on August 31, 1898, of Colonel Hubert Henry, who had forged documents used to incriminate Alfred Dreyfus. With the conspiracy against Dreyfus unraveling, Maurras argued, in a series of seven articles entitled “First Blood,” that Henry’s mischief, reprehensible though it may have been by conventional standards, ought to be judged as the necessary means to a virtuous end. Far from blackening the forger, the forgeries illuminated his heroic character. Henry lied in the interest of “national salvation” and “public order.” He lied to tell the truth. And at the end he sacrificed himself for the greater good, spilling his blood magnanimously. His was patriotic gore. “Every sacred drop … still runs warm wherever the heart of the nation beats,” Maurras apostrophized.
We should have waved your bloody tunic and the sullied blades down the boulevards; marched the coffin, hoisted the mortuary banner like a black flag.… But the national sentiment will awaken to triumph and avenge you. From the country’s soil … there will soon rise monuments to expiate our cowardice.… In life as in death, you marched forward. Your unhappy forgery will be regarded as one of your best martial deeds.
Maurras’s language did not fundamentally differ from that of Joseph de Maistre, who, a hundred years earlier, had enunciated the precept that “nations have a general overriding soul or character and a true moral unity which makes them what they are.” Their happiness and power hinged on the stifling of “individual reason” and the vesting of absolute authority in “national dogmas, that is to say, useful prejudices.”
From this conflict emerged L’Action Française, a movement whose founding prejudice was that Dreyfus could never be absolved of treason and that his unabsolvable guilt served the supremely useful purpose of restoring “national sentiment.” More prominent than Maurras at the outset were Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo, two young men united in the belief that liberal republicanism was sapping France’s vital spirit. On July 10, 1899, they published the first issue of a slender bimonthly review, Le Bulletin de L’Action Française.6 In his manifesto, Vaugeois declared that “action” connoted “reaction,” and he subsequently drove the point home in speeches, as at a banquet thrown by Maurras for Barrès during the Exposition of 1900. “All of us agree, I hope, on the morality, the legitimacy of iron. We have no hypocritically puritanical objections to it, do we? It seems to us that one has the right to save one’s country despite itself. It seems to us that there have always been instances of virtuous violence in history, and that beating a sick man bloody is better than letting him rot.” This was the mind-set that glorified Colonel Henry and only eight years later, in 1908, when L’Action Française attracted enough readers to justify a daily paper of the same name, organized the cadre of street hawkers called Camelots du Roi, who doubled as a paramilitary gang patrolling the student quarter with leaded canes.
The nickname “hawkers of the king” reflected the influence Charles Maurras had come to exert upon the movement. Its founders agreed that France needed saving, but they couldn’t define salvation. They had bugbears in common but no doctrine. That changed as soon as Maurras, with encouragement from colleagues who made light of his deafness, asserted himself. By 1904, activists were royalists echoing Maurras’s disavowal of the Republic and his repudiation of its philosophical commitment to the rights of man. Salvation lay on the far side of 1789, in the France of monarchs, when rationalism had yet to undermine an organic nation and “cosmopolite” to become a French noun; when Money (almost always capitalized in Maurras’s works and implicitly Jewish or Protestant) did not ventriloquize through a parliament; and when the rights of society still prevailed over the individualism propagated by eighteenth-century intellectuals. The Republic was feckless for speaking in many voices. With a multitude of centers and no circumference, it lent itself to the designs of other nations as surely as Dreyfus surrendered military secrets to Germany. “Dictateur et Roi,” an essay written during the summer of 1899, dwells on the theme of identity and alienation. “M. de Bismarck undoubtedly foresaw several of our present woes when he did everything in his power to harness us to a republican system,” wrote Maurras. The iron chancellor knew perfectly well that the strength of a state resides in its single-mindedness. “And since the Republican regime is nothing but the absence of a directing will and coherent thought at the center of power, he realized that such a regime profoundly divides the people who abandon themselves to it and condemns them to perpetual change.”
Charles Maurras in 1903, at age thirty-five.
Not unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in his essay on the origin of languages, characterizes history as entropy, with the power and stamina of speakers in ancient forums devolving into the quarrelsome babble of modern assemblies, Maurras made “unity” his mantra. National selfhood was one resonant voice. It was kingship. “French unity, which is so solid that today it ‘seems’ spontaneous and natural, bespeaks the millennial designs of the French Royal House,” he asserted. “Nature was content to make this unity possible, not necessary or ineluctable: our princes formed and fashioned it as an artist shapes his chosen material.” Where Italy owed its unity to memories of Rome and England to its insularity, art and nature had combined to make France French. The Republic violated both.
The Republic further violated France by separating church and state in 1905, after the Dreyfus convulsion. To be sure, Maurras, although he invoked the country’s basic “Catholicity,” had long since ceased to commune or confess. And among practicing Catholics who had welcomed Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum authorizing acceptance of the Republic, many found Maurras’s argument for subjecting all other considerations to political expediency immoral. A liberal Catholic review, Le Correspondant, demanded answers to three questions—whether L’Action Française’s “exclusive nationalism” and its “deep-rooted hostility to the democratic regime” could be reconciled with the “Christian doctrine of fraternity”; whether “the rigorously scientific observation of natural law” (i.e., Taine’s “race, milieu, moment”) espoused by L’Action Française did not imply the elimination of the supernatural; and what role the church would play in a restored monarchy. Several worried clerics wrote books characterizing Maurras’s thought as pervasively Nietzschean, Machiavellian, or Comtean. “His idolatry of reason has made him disdainful of belief” was the indictment of an editor at Le Correspondant.
Maurras protested that he judged belief to be as natural to man as reason, and more necessary, even though he couldn’t adjust his own mind to square with his judgment. Sympathetic clerics might have offered him the hope that Pascal’s cryptic God offers a despairing seeker: “You wouldn’t have sought Me if you hadn’t already found Me.” But better than belief, in their eyes, was his campaign to prevent the government from seizing derelict country churches and confiscating, auctioning, or destroying their contents.7 He also drew praise from orthodox quarters by publishing in L’Action Française all eighty articles of Pius IX’s memorable tirade against freedom of conscience, science, and the modern world—The Syllabus of Errors.8 “Our institute,” wrote the director of the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute in Aix, “wishing to recognize the services you have rendered the cause of truth by demonstrating that the principle of French nationality is instinct with Catholicism, and by choosing Pius IX’s Syllabus as the basis for social reconstruction, elected you an honorary member at its session of April 12, 1907.”
Blessings for Maurras as a believer in the inseparability of fatherland, religion, and society came from on high when Marie Maurras made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1911. Letters of recommendation secured her an audience with Pius X, who praised Charles for fighting the good fight. It cheered her. Pontifical favor (which would be denied Maurras the nonbeliever by Pius X’s successor) was almost as heartwarming as the conversion she never ceased to urge upon him.9
That year, three years before World War I, the good fight included debates in which L’Action Française joined battle with the Sorbonne, whose lecture halls were seen by parties of the Right as temples of republican proselytism. A witness to one such debate describes fifty Camelots du Roi armed with heavy canes forming a protective hedge at the foot of the stage. Loud applause greeted Maurras, “a young man, barely forty.” He was of medium height, thin, and sporting his lifelong Vandyke, with “an air of authority, of keenness, of eminent distinction and something slightly sad and guarded.” The witness saw “a hint of Richelieu” in him. He sat at a long table flanked by six confrères. Behind them stood two rows of friends, “like prelates behind fathers of the Church.” All eyes were fixed on Maurras. The witness described “his head with its imperious profile held high, seductive in its insolence and youth, his brow careworn, furrowed, almost too wide for the diminishing oval of his bearded jaw.” Barrès called him a “patriarch” several years later, after the war. He carefully groomed himself for the part.10
War was looming in 1911. A political crisis developed when a German gunboat docked at the Moroccan port of Agadir. This was viewed by England and France as a hostile gesture, challenging England’s maritime dominion and France’s occupation of Morocco. Germany did indeed feel that she had not received a fair share of African spoils and made her position known in negotiations that led to the Treaty of Fez. France surrendered the French Equatorial African colony of Middle Congo in exchange for Germany’s recognition of her Moroccan protectorate.
Just as he had laid the blame for the entire Dreyfus Affair at the doorstep of a bickering National Assembly, so Maurras attributed France’s surrender of Middle Congo to the absence of a coherent foreign policy, with ministers rotating through the Quai d’Orsay like horses on a carousel. Thenceforth, in L’Action Française and in lectures, Maurras concerned himself almost exclusively with the redemption of national honor. No one was more prolific of articles lamenting the unpreparedness of the army, denouncing Republican governments as pawns controlled by the same treasonous forces that had set Dreyfus free, calling attention to the omnipresence of spies, or generally beating the drums for war.
The drumbeat grew louder in 1913 during the weeks of parliamentary debate over a proposal to lengthen compulsory military service.11 Maurras hailed the three-year law as progress, but he credited royalty for its passage. “The lugubrious fact of the matter is,” he wrote on July 21, “that neither our voices nor the sticks of the Camelots du Roi … would have sufficed to rouse the Republic of Dreyfus from its inertia.” Agadir did it. The “republican world” would never have scrambled to its feet if not for the initiative taken by Emperor Wilhelm II— a Hohenzollern rather than a Capetian, but royalty all the same. In subsequent issues of L’Action Française, Maurras devoted his column to the generals who pressed the need for more troops at the National Assembly, applauding them at the expense of limp-wristed parliamentarians. Moved by the testimony of General Auguste Mercier, he asserted that there was nothing more eloquent in any language than the military order to charge: “I don’t hesitate to express my admiration for a sick, crippled Garibaldi huddled inside a carriage but still managing to issue the command ‘Advance, gentlemen!’ to his band. Even more sublime was the injured Marshal de Saxe, carried to the front line on a litter, urging his troops forward not with words but with a simple gesture at the battle of Fontenoy [in 1745].”12 General Paul Pau was made of the same stuff. He, too, exemplified the man of action whose plain language bespoke his virility. “General Pau’s speech,” Maurras wrote, “had the power of an act, a political act capable of changing views, feelings, and resolutions.… Parliamentarians are above all delicate old ladies sensitive to draughts. The masculine voice of General Pau stiffened their spine for several hours or weeks.”13 Nothing is more beautiful, he went on, than some much debated idea stripped of everything but its necessary garments. The ancients knew it. Men of action enjoyed pride of place in the Athenian Pnyx and the Roman Forum.
A few days after shooting Jean Jaurès, Raoul Villain wrote to his brother, “So I have brought down the flag-bearer, the great traitor of the Three-Year Law, the furnace-mouth that swallowed all appeals from Alsace-Lorraine. I punished him, and my act was the symbol of a new day.” Rumor had it that Villain was a Camelot du Roi or otherwise employed by L’Action Française, in whose rogues’ gallery Jaurès figured prominently. Maurras, unlike Barrès’s maître à penser Jules Soury and the anti-Semitic Comtesse de Martel de Janville (who wrote under the pen name “Gyp”), did not gloat over the assassination. But his memoir was a casuistic argument eulogizing the victim while condemning his thought, honoring a man who died in the service of “his faith” while execrating the faith. For some years, he wrote, the prospect of peace had been an illusion fostered by Jaurès, who believed that European nations were evolving toward unity. The opposite was true. If not for the chimera of a united Europe, France would have been better prepared for the imminent war. Soldiers would fall in the thousands because Jaurès had disarmed the nation with his oratory.14
Even so, dying for one’s country was an enviable fate in Maurras’s moral scheme of things. He said so on August 1 in an article entitled “National Duty.” War, he declared, is a burden shared by all but borne for the most part by the happy few. “Fortunate are those whose hearts and arms enjoy the privilege of combat, of putting themselves in harm’s way and smiting the enemy!” To be pitied were those left behind, “good Frenchmen born to shoulder arms but disqualified by some physical or mental condition.” Mindful of all that they owe the air and soil of the fatherland, “they will wonder what price they can pay equivalent to the blood that their friends and brothers are going to shed. As for myself, I can hardly bear the thought of old colleagues departing for the supreme battle.”
One sacrifice Maurras vowed to make on the home front was postponing his campaign for a monarchy. When France’s salvation was at stake, he wrote, men were honor-bound to defend the Republic. He and his fellow royalists bent their energies to that patriotic end with a zeal fueled by their dedication to Dreyfus’s guilt. Between 1914 and 1918, republicanism went largely undisputed in L’Action Française. But during those four years, the editors—above all Léon Daudet, Alphonse’s elder son—waged war against defeatists and spies, collectively denounced as the “hidden foe.”
1Not that the physicians didn’t do their utmost. They resorted to catheters and tar vapor, among other formidable procedures.
2The Catholic Encyclopedia describes as follows the principal reforms proposed by Le Play: “(a) the observance of the Decalogue; (b) public worship—on this point Le Play … expresses his fear that the concordatory regime in France will produce a Church of bureaucrats, and dreams of a liberty such as exists in America for the Church of France; (c) testamentary freedom, which according to him distinguishes peoples of vigorous expansion while the compulsory division of inheritances is the system of conquered races and inferior classes. It is only, he asserts, under the former system that familles-souches can develop, which are established on the soil and are not afraid of being prolific; (d) legislation punishing seduction and permitting the investigation of paternity; (e) institutions founded by large land owners or industrial leaders to uplift the condition of the workman. Le Play feared the intervention of the State in the labour system and considered that the State should encourage the social authorities to exercise what he calls ‘patronage,’ and should reward the heads of industry who founded philanthropic institutions; (f) liberty of instruction, i.e. freedom from State control; (g) decentralization in the State.”
3L’Observateur Français was the official organ of the Vatican in France.
4The Greek metoikos simply meant a foreigner in residence or someone who has changed residence—often merchants and financiers. In its pejorative sense it became one of Maurras’s principal contributions to xenophobic jargon of the twentieth century.
5None of this, he noted, compromised his admiration for Heine and Disraeli.
6“Bulletin” was soon changed to “Revue.”
7The law of separation dealt many country parishes a severe blow, depriving them of state funds and rendering them incapable of maintaining their property. Another active campaigner was Maurice Barrès, who chronicled his efforts to rescue churches in La Grande Pitié des Églises de France.
A beneficiary of the dereliction of churches and abbeys was the American sculptor George Grey Barnard, who lived in Paris and collected medieval artifacts and architectural remnants. When he returned to New York, he housed his acquisitions in a building in Washington Heights. They became the main component of the Cloisters when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought them for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
8The Syllabus was attached to his encyclical Quanta Cura, promulgated in 1864. Leo XIII, who succeeded Pius IX and preceded Pius X, was bracketed between reactionary popes.
9Maurras died forty-one years later clutching his mother’s rosary.
10In his early thirties Maurras fell unrequitedly in love with a married countess, Madame de Lasalle-Beaufort, the mother of two children. There were several affairs before and after, but he remained a bachelor, unlike his brother Joseph, who fathered five children. Charles adopted three of them, the youngest a boy eight years old, when Joseph, a widower, died in Saigon. Joseph Maurras practiced medicine and wrote a medical column for L’Action Française.
11For his efforts, Maurras received a steady flow of letters of gratitude from readers. “Monsieur Charles Maurras, he who will restore France’s place in the front rank of world armies and thus save France from a Polish-like dismemberment. Homage and gratitude” came from a group of French officers. Another group of soldiers wrote, “In homage and with gratitude for your declaration of war against the Foreigner within.” These letters and others were published on the front page of L’Action Française, February 12, 1913. The “royalist ladies and young women” of Saint-Étienne expressed their admiration for the “noble, courageous fashion in which you have defended the rights of Frenchmen against the Jewish oppressor.”
12The Battle of Fontenoy was a major engagement in the War of the Austrian Succession; it pitted the forces of Holland, England, and Hanover against France. Saxe commanded the French army in the Netherlands.
13A year later, the Army of Alsace, under Pau’s command, suffered a decisive defeat in the early weeks of World War I. General Joffre broke it up, assigned survivors to other corps, and sent Pau to St. Petersburg as France’s representative at Russian General Headquarters—the Stavka.
14Many were judged at fault, not least of all Georges Picquart, the officer responsible for exposing the conspiracy against Dreyfus. Maurras accused him of lowering France’s guard when he served as minister of war between 1906 and 1909, in Clemenceau’s first cabinet.