Charles Maurras
Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras was a French author, politician, poet and critic. He was an organiser and principal philosopher of Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist, medievalist, conservative, corporatist, integralist, nationalist, traditionalist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras also held anti-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-liberal, anti-Masonic, anti-Nazi, anti-Protestant and antisemitic views. His ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and integral nationalism, and led to the political doctrine of Maurrassisme.
While raised Roman Catholic, Maurras went deaf and became an agnostic in his youth, but remained anti-secularist and politically supportive of the Catholic Church. An Orléanist, he began his career by writing literary criticism and became politically active as a leading anti-Dreyfusard. In 1926, Pope Pius XI issued a papal condemnation of Action Française. In 1927, several of Maurras's works were put in the Index of Forbidden Books, Action Française became the first newspaper to ever be placed on the Catholic Church's list of banned books, and AF members were forbidden from receiving the sacraments.
In 1936, after voicing death threats against the socialist politician Léon Blum, Maurras was sentenced to eight months in La Santé. Maurras was elected to the Académie Française in 1938 and later expelled in 1945. During the Second World War Maurras opposed Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but supported Vichy France, believing that Free France was a puppet state of the Soviet Union. He explained his support for Vichy, writing: "As a royalist I never lost sight of the necessity of monarchy. But to enthrone the royal heir, the heritage had to be saved." After Vichy's collapse he was arrested and accused of complicity with the enemy. Following a political trial he was convicted of incitement to murder, and received Indignité nationale and a life sentence. In 1951, after falling ill, he was transferred to a hospital and subsequently received a medical pardon. In his final days he reverted to Catholicism and received the last rites shortly before his death.
As a political theorist and major right-wing intellectual of 20th-century Europe, Maurras significantly influenced right-wing and far-right ideologies, anticipating some of the ideas of fascism. He has been described as the most important French conservative intellectual, and has directly influenced a large number of politicians, theorists, and writers on both the left and right. Maurras' legacy has remained controversial to this day. Critics have derided him as a "fascist icon", while supporters, including Georges Pompidou, have praised him as a prophet. Others, including Macron, have taken a nuanced approach, with Macron stating: "I fight all the antisemitic ideas of Maurras, but I find it absurd to say that Maurras must no longer exist."
Biography
Before the First World War
Maurras was born into a Provençal family, brought up by his mother and grandmother in a Catholic and monarchist environment. In his early teens, he became deaf. Like many other French politicians, he was affected greatly by France's defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. After the 1871 Commune of Paris and the 1879 defeat of Patrice de MacMahon's Moral Order government, French society slowly found a consensus for the French Third Republic, symbolised by the rallying of the monarchist Orleanists to the Republic. Maurras published his first article at the age of 17 years in the review Annales de philosophie chrétienne. He then collaborated on various reviews, including L'Événement, La Revue bleue, La Gazette de France and La Revue encyclopédique, in which he praised Classicism and attacked Romanticism.At some point during his youth Maurras lost his Catholic faith and became an agnostic. In 1887, at the age of seventeen, he came to Paris and began writing literary criticism in the Catholic and Orleanist Observateur. At this time Maurras was influenced by Orleanism, as well as German philosophy reviewed by Catholic thinker Léon Ollé-Laprune, an influence of Henri Bergson, and by the philosopher Maurice Blondel, one of the inspirations of Christian "modernists", who would later become his greatest opponents. He became acquainted with the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral in 1888 and shared the federalist thesis of Mistral's Félibrige movement. The same year he met the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès.
In 1890 Maurras approved Cardinal Lavigerie's call for the rallying of Catholics to the Republic, thus making his opposition not to the Republic in itself, but to "sectarian Republicanism".
Beside this Orleanist affiliation, Maurras shared some traits with Bonapartism. In December 1887 he demonstrated to the cry of "Down with the robbers!" during the military decorations trafficking scandal, which had involved Daniel Wilson, the son-in-law of President Jules Grévy. Despite this, he initially opposed the nationalist-populist Boulangist philosophy. But in 1889, after a visit to Maurice Barrès, Barrès voted for the Boulangist candidate; despite his "anti-Semitism of the heart", he decided to vote for a Jew.
During 1894–1895, Maurras briefly worked for Barrès' newspaper La Cocarde, although he sometimes opposed Barrès' opinions concerning the French Revolution. La Cocarde supported General Georges Ernest Boulanger, who had become a threat to the parliamentary Republic in the late 1880s.
During a trip to Athens for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, Maurras came to criticise the Greek democratic system of the polis, which he considered doomed because of its internal divisions and its openness towards métèques.
Political involvement
Maurras became involved in politics at the time of the Dreyfus affair, becoming an anti-Dreyfusard. He endorsed Hubert-Joseph Henry's forgery, blaming Alfred Dreyfus, as he considered that defending Dreyfus weakened the Army and the justice system. According to Maurras, Dreyfus was to be sacrificed on the altar of national interest. But while the Republican nationalist thinker Barrès accused Dreyfus of being guilty because of his Jewishness, Maurras went a step further, vilifying the "Jewish Republic". While Barrès' anti-Semitism originated both in pseudo-scientific racist contemporary theories and Biblical exegesis, Maurras decried "scientific racism" in favor of a more radical "state anti-Semitism."Maurras assisted with the foundation of the nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard Ligue de la patrie française at the end of 1898, along with Maurice Barrès, the geographer Marcel Dubois, the poet François Coppée and the critic and literature professor Jules Lemaître.
In 1899, Maurras founded the review Action Française, an offshoot of the newspaper created by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois the year preceding. Maurras quickly became influential in the movement, and converted Pujo and Vaugeois to monarchism, which became the movement's principal cause. With Léon Daudet, he edited the movement's review, La Revue de l'Action Française, which during 1908 became a daily newspaper with the shorter title L'Action Française. The AF mixed integral nationalism with reactionary themes, shifting the nationalist ideology, previously supported by left-wing Republicans, to the political right. It had a wide readership during the implementation of the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. In 1899 he wrote a short notice in favour of monarchy, "Dictateur et roi", and then in 1900 his Enquête sur la monarchie, published in the Legitimist mouthpiece La Gazette de France, which made him famous. Maurras also published thirteen articles in the newspaper Le Figaro during 1901 and 1902, as well as six articles between November 1902 and January 1903 in Edouard Drumont's anti-Semitic newspaper, La Libre Parole.
Between 1905 and 1908, when the Camelots du Roi monarchist league was initiated, Maurras introduced the concept of political activism through extra-parliamentary leagues, theorising the possibility of a coup d'état.
Maurras also founded the Ligue d'Action Française in 1905, whose mission was to recruit members for the Action Française.
Members pledged to fight the republican regime and to support restoration of the monarchy under Prince Philippe, Duke of Orléans.
Many early members of the Action Française were practising Catholics, including Bernard de Vésins, the art historian Louis Dimier and the essayist Léon de Montesquiou. They helped Maurras develop the royalist league's pro-Catholic policies.
Maurras entered into a conflict with Paul Granier de Cassagnac editor of L'Autorite, and his brother Guy. The affair ended with a sword duel between Paul de Cassagnac and Charles Maurras which took place in Neuilly on 26 February 1912. Maurras was struck in the forearm, and his arm was seriously injured, which brought the combat to a close.
From the First World War to the end of the 1930s
Maurras then endorsed France's entry into the First World War against the German Empire. During the war the Jewish businessman Emile Ullman was forced to resign from the board of directors of the Comptoir d'Escompte bank after Maurras accused him of being a German agent. He then criticised the Treaty of Versailles for not being harsh enough on the Germans and condemned Aristide Briand's policy of cooperation with Germany. In 1923 Germaine Berton carried out the assassination of his fellow Action Française member Marius Plateau. Berton had planned to also assassinate Léon Daudet and Maurras but was unsuccessful.In 1925, he called for the murder of Abraham Schrameck, the Interior Minister of Paul Painlevé's Cartel des Gauches's government, who had ordered the disarming of the far-right leagues. For this death threat, he was sentenced to a fine and a year in jail.
In 1929, Pope Pius XI condemned the Action Française, which until then was supported by a large number of Catholics, clergy, and laity alike. Several of the works of the Maurras, the movement's founder, were placed into the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, alongside the movement's official newspaper. This was a devastating blow to the movement. On 8 March 1927, AF members were prohibited from receiving the sacraments. Many of its members left and it entered a period of decline.
Maurras again voiced death threats against the President of the Council Léon Blum, organiser of the Popular Front, in the Action Française of 15 May 1936, emphasising his Jewish origins. This other death threat earned him eight months in prison, from 29 October 1936 to 6 July 1937. While imprisoned, he received the support of Marie-Pauline Martin, Henry Bordeaux, Pius XI and up to 60,000 sympathetic citizens. Fearing communism, he joined the pacifists and praised the Munich Agreement of 1938, which the President of the Council Édouard Daladier had signed without any illusions. He also wrote in Action Française:
During the 1930s – especially after the 6 February 1934 crisis—many of Action Française members turned to fascism, including Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Abel Bonnard, Paul Chack and Claude Jeantet. Most of them belonged to the staff of the fascist newspaper Je suis partout.
Influencing António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo regime in Portugal, Maurras also supported Francisco Franco and, until spring 1939, Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. Opposing Adolf Hitler because he was anti-German, Maurras himself criticised the racist policies of Nazism in 1936, and requested a complete translation of Mein Kampf – some passages had been censored in the French edition.
After his failure against Charles Jonnart in 1924 to be elected to the Académie française, he succeeded in entering the ranks of the "Immortals" on 9 June 1938, replacing Henri-Robert, winning by 20 votes against 12 to Fernand Gregh. He was received into the Academy on 8 June 1939 by the Catholic writer Henry Bordeaux. In the same year, Pope Pius XII repealed his predecessor's condemnation of the Action Française.