Charles Maurras: The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Reawakening. Edited and translated by Alexander Jacob. London: Arktos Press, 2016.
Almost no one reads him in America. Catholic-sympathizing royalists—Maurras himself was an agnostic whose writings were anathematized by the pope in the 1920s—one who came down on the wrong side of French regime struggles from the Dreyfus ‘affair’ to the Vichy demi-government’s collaboration with France’s Nazi conquerors, tend to get little notice, here. Yet in France, the spirit of Action française, the movement whose journal Maurras edited from its inception in 1899, survives in attenuated form, and so does the organization—no longer a full-fledged political party but a sort of think-tank dedicated to teaching young ‘Right-wing’ activists. It remains staunchly monarchist and patriotic, opposing both French republicanism and federation within the bureaucratized auspices of the European Union. Maurras himself remains a perceptive cultural historian, and not without some telling political thoughts, despite his almost uniformly bad political judgment and virulent antisemitism.
Maurras admits his own imprudence near the beginning of his 1905 book, The Future of the Intelligentsia. Characteristically, he wraps his admission in hauteur: paying homage to his friend, the writer René-Marc Ferry, founder of a short-lived journal Minerva, Maurras recalls, “We imagined that the Attic olive tree and the Latin laurel united in the French fashion would definitely make the people rush to us,” but “we did not take into account a small fact,” that “the good people were dead,” that the “refined and cultivated society” of old Paris “does not exist any longer.” “We did not want to believe it,” and in encouraging the Quixotic effort Ferry proved himself “too good for your century.” “The enlightened love of letters, and much more the love of philosophy” have perished. Without the “humanist literature,” the arts and sciences become increasingly barbaric, as European politics has become. “I would like to be wrong, but, after so many years of very refined intellectual life, a French high class that does not want to read any more seems to me to be close to its downfall,” and “the bad taste of the new masters” now dominates. Although he detests what he takes to be the internationalism of French Jews, he respects their esteem for “an intelligentsia”; Jews “would not commit the pathetic errors, the omissions, the confusions in which the good faith of our friends may allow itself to get lost.”
Very well, then. Ferry’s strategy didn’t work because it no longer could work. Political and social circumstances have changed. Since “today, everybody is armed and trained,” so too must the intelligentsia be. “For a long time, we have no longer been able to walk and discuss things under the plane trees,” like the interlocutors in Plato’s Phaedrus. We intellectuals must therefore move from political philosophy to political action. “Action! And I ask for nothing better.” Move from the Phaedrus to Maurice Barrès’s Les déracinés, the novel chronicling young Frenchmen from Lorraine who lose their way, morally and spiritually, in contemporary Paris. Restoration of the life of the mind can only come from vigorous political action, now, action in defense of French monarchy and, to the extent now possible, France’s traditional way of life. Can this be done? “No mind can flatter itself that it has a really satisfactory and certain knowledge of the future. To foresee, even try to foresee, is a sickness of the heart” because “the future is either fear or hope,” and to fear and hope rightly comes only from underlying sentiments well refined. The first of these is patriotism, the opposite of deracination, love of one’s own soil and the ways of one’s own people. Thought severed from the sensibility fostered by the old regime has only led to the “mechanism of modern moeurs,” its power animating the “electric wagon that moves dividing the world into plebeians and patricians.” Modernity founds itself on the “material forces” of “blood and money”; discarding its kings and aristocrats, the French have “passed under the rod of the financial merchants who are of another flesh than ours, that is to say, of another language and another thought”; here is the locus of his animus toward Jews, Germans, and (not incidentally) the great commercial republics of England and America. “Fortunately, the conquering force is not single,” as “blood and money combat each other.” If only the intelligentsia will act, act not as a moderating arbiter between the two forces but as a force that tips the balance from money to blood, to nationality, then it will reverse intellectual deracination and vulgarization while winning an ally with the material force intelligence needs to protect itself but cannot wield directly. “The interest of the man who thinks may be to have more money, but the interest of thought is to attach itself to a free country, which only the hereditary virtue of blood will be able to maintain. In this free country thought equally reclaims order, that which blood can establish and maintain.” Maurras recognizes the need for “wise and prudent” action, even as he fails signally, and will continue to fail signally, to achieve wisdom and prudence.
Maurras links intelligence to spirituality, the spirituality of the Catholic Church. He is thinking of the French Catholic Church, remaining a sharp critic of spiritual internationalism along with financial internationalism. Under this noticeably ‘secularized’ Catholicism, “if one wishes to avoid an individualism that suits only Protestants, the moral question becomes once again a social question: no customs without institutions.” As in Barrès, so in Maurras: the individual can cultivate himself only as a member of immortal nation, and the nation cannot survive if it attempts to rule itself under the regime of democracy.
It is here that Maurras begins his cultural history of France, a history intended to counteract the contemporary illusion that the power and prestige of men of letters is at its zenith. After all, most intellectuals now suppose, under democracy “the most certain of facts is that we live under a government of public opinion,” and we intellectuals “are the people who extract this opinion and set it to work,” even “creat[ing] it, bring[ing] it into the world,” making us “masters of everything.” “The swords of yesterday have been beaten not into ploughshares but into printing presses,” instruments of the coming “sovereignty of the intelligentsia.” Maurras dismisses this illusion. “No conception of the future is more wrong, even though it is presented to us with equal clarity and warmth.”
The intelligentsia consists of men of letters, poets, orators, philosophers—those who wield “the power of the word”—but Maurras will center his historical account on the men of letters. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, “letters served their function as an adornment of the world,” striving to “soften polish, and amend common moeurs.” “They were the interpreters and, as it were, the voices of love, the sting of pleasure, the enchantment of long winters and long old age”; “they did not yet claim to govern.” An absolute monarch, a Louis XIV, “would not at all have tolerated” such pretensions,” and when orators, philosophers, and poets ventured to present the best regime for the state they did it ‘Platonically,” “almost always by avoiding seeking an immediate application and a serious realization.” They might invoke pagan themes but seldom if ever “deviat[ed] from the doctrines of the Gospel.” In all this, they displayed “measure and character.” The effects of letters on customs were “indirect and distant”—intentionally so.
The eighteenth century saw an entirely different approach. The Enlightenment intelligentsia aimed at reform and indeed at revolution; more, they aimed at ruling, first undermining the existing regime with satire and then reaching for control of it. This could happen because “the genius and modesty of their predecessors of the grand siècle had ensured their credibility.” Rousseau enjoyed the authority to “usurp the attributes of the prince, those of the priest and even of all the people, for,” being Swiss, “he was not even the subject of the king, nor a member of any large military state of significance in the Europe of that time.” To hold in one’s hands monarchic, priestly, and popular authority amounts to tyranny, “the general dictatorship of letters.” Moreover, in the eighteenth century “letters reigned not as virtuous or just,” not according to the natural principles of politics, “but precisely as letters,” “call[ing] itself Reason.” This so-called reason “accorded neither with the physical laws of reality or with the logical laws of thought”; its victory was therefore “absurd.” “When the royal authority disappeared, it did not at all, as is said, cede to the sovereignty of the people; the successor of the Bourbons is the man of letters.” The Bourbons unwittingly collaborated in their own demise. Thanks to the efforts of the intelligentsia, “a new order of feelings was introduced in hearts, and affected practical life, towards 1789.” They, and the French aristocracy, crucially including the military officers, by then “seriously doubted the justice of their cause and the legitimacy of this work of leadership and government that they had in public office.” Maurras remarks that the same sort of timid abdication occurred again in the revolution of 1848-1850, and not only in France. It was not a matter of lacking coglione, as Bonaparte rather unkindly asserted. “The Revolution had taken place in the depths of their mentality,” minds molded not by philosophy but “philosophism.”
From 1789, “no government was more literary,” a judgment confirmed by the political sociologist Michael Mann, who writes that the French revolutionaries would have made “a fine ‘Department of Western Civilization.'” [1] “The governing ideas are the ideas of the ‘philosophes,'” Maurras observes, and “the system of morals and institutions that they had formerly composed in private, they imposed steadily on public life.” Since “the majority of the ideas of that time were imprecise,” general, abstracted from social and political reality, the revolutionaries’ actions “entailed a large number of mutilations and destructions even when [their method] served just ideas,”; reaching for the realization of ideals that could exist only in their minds, “our men of letters were therefore induced to spare neither things nor persons.” As for their sometime collaborator and eventual successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, “one should savor the ideologue in him”; “he represents the crowned man of letters,” the self-conscious beneficiary of Rousseau and Voltaire, the continuer of the Revolution “and with it all that the literature of the eighteenth century dreamed of,” turning it into the Napoleonic Code. This gave Napoleon’s regime coherence. But it was the coherence of “dreams without substance.” To this day, to the beginning of the twentieth century, “all our misfortunes flow from these mendacious appearances,” which “contradict the profound necessities of the real order.” In this, Napoleon may rightly be considered the heir of Enlightenment rationalism and “the greatest poet of French Romanticism.”
Despite this, he was also “the last of the nationalist statesmen” in France and a military genius. In this aspect of his soul and his actions Napoleon I “personifies the ironic and harsh response of the military men of the XIX century to the literary dreams of the XVIII.” Infected though they were by “philosophism” (Napoleon himself claimed, perhaps pretended, that “I draw up my battle plans from the dreams of my sleeping soldiers”), the harsh facts of warfare kept them at least partially grounded in reality.
This left nineteenth-century France with a knot of contradictions, never unraveled. Revolutionary literature was universal, but nineteenth century politics was nationalist. Revolutionary literature understood labor-capital relations as individualistic, man to man, worker to boss, but nineteenth century economics was industrial, impersonal, corporate. These relations were concealed, if poorly, by the “absurd, odious, and fragile core of the legal fictions” that supported them. Since “the men of letters did not understand anything of the workers movement but what it presented in a revolutionary way, instead of building with it, they contradicted it in its organizational work and stimulated it in its destructive effort,” “embitter[ing] it and lead[ing] it to violence.” “Thus everything that the force of events undertook that was useful or necessary”—the possible rapprochement between workers and capitalists—the “literary intelligentsia led astray or contested methodically.” The authority of these intelligentsia quite rightly began to decline. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Balzac, Hugo—none wielded the authority of Voltaire and Rousseau. The men of letters who did share in ruling France—the royalist prime minister after the Bourbon restoration, the Comte de Villèle, Napoleon III’s prime minister, Émile Olivier, and Third Republic prime minister Léon Gambetta—all “presented themselves as practitioners [of politics]; they would have been offended by being put in the same company as Rousseau.” “Their common ambition was to present themselves first of all as statesmen and men of action,” as indeed Maurras and his allies sought to do in the next century, with considerably less success.
Despite its decimation in the Revolution, the old aristocracy survived. Understandably, aristocrats viewed the parvenu intelligentsia with suspicion. Understandably but ill-advisedly: “It would have been wise to restrain sly smiles and to retain insults that were often paid dearly.” “The inorganic condition of society, the instability of governments, in this regard, permitted only movements of passion.” That is, contra Tocqueville’s advice, the aristocrats failed to reassume their rightful function, and “neither a directed politics nor a tradition” would be rebuilt. [2] The remnants of “old France” might invite the intelligentsia into its parlors from time to time, but never admitted such persons into their confidence, and so never exerted influence upon them. As a result, “the French intelligentsia of the XIX century continued its career of a dethroned old queen by separating itself increasingly from this other defeated queen, the French high society of the same period,” isolating itself from her or revolting against her. It appealed, Caesarlike, Napoleonlike, not to “its natural public” but to the crowd and drew much of its inspiration not from French but from German and English sources. The patriotism French letters and their readers accordingly declined.
Meanwhile, industrial capitalism and its captains of industry enriched not only themselves but spread affluence throughout the country. “The new luxury was in its principle an increase in comfort, a more intelligent adjustment of life, the means of being worth more, of acting more, the multiplication of the facilities of power.” It enables “the rich man of today…to move as he pleases,” making him more cosmopolitan, more ‘internationalist,’ than the old aristocrats, who were bound to the land and the people on and near their land. Money no longer leveled class distinctions, as it had done in the time of transition of the ruling classes from the feudal lords to the bourgeoisie. Money now “accentuated the old separations or rather dug quite new ones.” One separation that widened was that “between the French intelligentsia and the representatives of the French interest, French power, those of the past or of the present.” “Incorporeal in nature, incapable of possessing or administering the material order, the intelligentsia penetrates this new life and this new world as a visitor,” having no part in it.
Today, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the mechanized character of industrial capitalism “has complicated the material life of the French higher classes,” differentiating it from the other classes, very much including the intelligentsia, which “find[s] itself rejected and excluded from a certain circle of life.” Modern life in the new regime has left the men of letters behind. Insofar as they do participate in that regime, they themselves become industrialized, so to speak. Like capitalists, they produce works appealing to the ‘mass market.’ They do make money, but not enough to join the ranks of the really rich. Their prosperity amounts only to “the false colors of glory,” not the real thing. A writer today, lacking the patronage of the old aristocrats, now find themselves subject to “the most diffuse and soft, the most fleeting and colorless of popularities.” “As a pure business, literature, is thus a bad business and men of letters are very small manufacturers,” with “mediocrity” as “the dividend of the best merchants of paper copies.”
“I am told that socialism will sort everything out.” Maurras doubts that very much, rejecting the Marxist dream of the omnicompetent ‘new man’ of communism. A writer, Maurras quite sensibly maintains, is seldom a good printer or paper merchant, the example of Benjamin Franklin notwithstanding. In expecting historical laws to transform human nature, socialists bet on a chimera, no strong horse. “Socialism cannot change very much in this natural law”: in human nature one sees not “fixed quantities that may vary with the economic and political conditions but a psychological relationship that is maintained when the quantities are altered,” ensuring that the ‘type’ of the man of letters seldom combines with the ‘type’ of the businessman. “The merchant remains a merchant and the poet a poet,” regardless of whether wealth becomes equalized across those two classes. And, of course, this will result in the constant recurrence of economic inequalities, whatever the socialist rulers may intend. Meanwhile, under the actual prevailing conditions of capitalist industrialism, writers for now can make money, although Maurras foresees the consolidation of publishing houses that will erect barriers to entry for the men of letters to come. A century later, even the Internet, which promised and delivered on its capacity to ensure every writer a means of publishing, becomes increasingly ‘policed,’ as it already is under the state-socialist regime of China. “That is the fact of all forces. It is impossible to approach them without their seeking to submit and enslave.”
Conditions of literary work under the new oligarchy will force the writer “to exchange a little of outspokenness for money,” causing him to flex “his taste, his opinions before the financial power of his newspaper, journal or bookshop.” Literary independence remains only for those who are independently wealthy (in the past, La Rochefoucauld) or those content in poverty (Diogenes, St. Francis). Having “proposed to have the world at his feet,” he “suddenly finds himself prostrated before the world.” He begins to lose “his raison d’être, the secret of his strength and his power, which consists in being determined only considerations of the intellectual order. His thought will cease to be the pure mirror of the world and will participate in these simple exchanges of action and passion that form the life of the vulgar person. Thus, the only liberty that there is will be threatened in him; in him the human mind runs a risk of being captured.” And they will be hunted, since “the moment that the intelligentsia has become a capital and it can be exploited very fruitfully, human types had to be born to hunt for it because there is the most magnificent interest in it.”
What is more, and more menacing, there is “a peril that seems more pressing when one observes” it arises: the peril of entanglement in “the market of politics.” There, intellectuals are in demand. “In fact, after our 100 years of Revolution, the masses decorated with the title of a public think that they have been clothed once again with the sovereignty of France”; “whoever directs public opinion is the actual king.” In economic terms, this produces “a surplus value…in favor of these directors of opinion,” those whose “private opinion makes public opinion.” As noted, those who make private opinion are those who pay the intelligentsia, who are merely the ones with the ability to make public opinion. Since the democrats aren’t stupid and ignorant, they tend to suspect the oligarchic mind and the commands it issues behind the intelligentsia’s hired hand. Since the oligarchs are now internationalists, they use their hired hands to shape, or rather misshape, French public opinion in forms that no longer serve the rights and interests of the French. And those oligarchs may not even be from France.
Maurras cites the examples of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Before the first war, the “liberal press” in France claimed that Prussia embodied the principles of Voltaire and Frederick the Great against the ‘reactionary’ Catholic monarchy in Vienna. This struck French observers of Bismarck as what we’d now call a bit of a stretch, but no matter—Bismarck himself had already put many among the intelligentsia on his payroll, who went to work deceiving “the benighted masses” about the Iron Chancellor’s intentions. [3] The sad fact is that “patriotism does not make itself felt equal in all the members of the same fatherland,” and it often “requires very large public ills” to remind the public of it. These came soon enough, as an unprepared France lost the 1870 war and the Bonapartist regime collapsed, replaced not by a legitimist monarchy but by the Third Republic. “The democratic journalists, who repeat with a victorious tone that one does not buy opinion, should study in Bismarck how to dupe it.”
“The illusion of French politics is to believe that good sentiments can be maintained and perpetuate themselves by themselves and, in this way sustain in a constant manner the overwhelming care of the state.” On the contrary, Maurras insists, “Good sentiments are good accidents,” unless reinforced by and within institutions, institutions which “should be defended and maintained at all costs.” What France lacked in the 1860s and still lacks now is not patriotism: “We lacked a well-constituted state,” one that “would have been able to police its press and impress on it a suitable direction.” The French state, democratic-republican in name, oligarchic in fact, “a machine to earn money and to consume it, a mechanism without morality, without a fatherland and without a heart,” readily sold itself to the Prussians, leaving itself unprepared for the war in which the victors seized Alsace and Lorraine. “A blind and fluid force, an indifferent power, equally capable of destroying the state as of serving it, the national intelligentsia,” having become like the money it chased, “could be turned against the national interest when foreign money willed it.”
Prussia then, Germany now, along with England, despite their commercial and financial heft, retain their monarchs. There, “money cannot constitute the leader of the state because it is birth and not opinion that creates” the monarch. The monarchic circle “has its own law, irreducible to the forces of money, inaccessible to the movements of opinion: the natural law of blood,” of heredity, of family. This “difference in origin is radical,” functioning “in parallel with the powers of money,” ruling and being ruled by those powers reciprocally, but still capable of “resist[ing] them.” And they can also “direct opinion and ensure the competition of the intelligentsia and reprimand it against the solicitations of money.” The natural law of public opinion, embodied by passion, flows where it will; the quasi-natural law of money flows where it finds opportunities for increase; the natural law of blood flows through the more stable channel of heredity, “a political power distinct from money and opinion.” Even religion proved susceptible to the money power, since by now the state has taken control of religion, and money control of the state. (Maurras neglects to mention that the French state, following Machiavelli, had largely taken control of the French Catholicism during the seventeenth century, which was one reason why the “philosophists” targeted both.) And as for the universities, once ordained and controlled by the Church, they now belong to the state, too, and “through its subsidies, the state controls or at least supervises our different literary or artistic bodies and associations,” as well, binding them to “its master money.” “The French state is uniform and centralized; with its bureaucracy reaching every school reading-desk in every little village, such a state finds itself perfectly armed to precent the constitution of any serious adversary, not only against itself but against the plutocracy of which it is an expression.”
What of the revolutionaries? The businessmen have ensured their complicity along with that of everyone else, funding both ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ “In this way it oversees the attacks and can direct them,” especially against any wealth that “retains something personal”—landed wealth and small business, interests more likely to retain a sense of patriotism, sentiments favoring the national rights and interests. Under these conditions, “the intelligentsia will be debased for a long time.” “A foolish moralism will judge everything,” the judges partisans “hypnotized by an idea of the good and evil conceived without any nuance and applied fanatically” in the manner of Tolstoy, that great novelist, inane religionist and vacuous political thinker. “A patrician class in the order of things but a truly democratic barbarity in thought, that is the classification of the near future.”
As for the more distant future, it may improve if the intelligentsia “tries to regain again its order, its fatherland, its natural gods” against an equally disordered, fluid democracy and oligarchy, internationalism, and the unnatural god of money now worshipped universally. To do this, “the best elements of the intelligentsia” must ally themselves with the old aristocrats,” “forc[ing] itself to respect and support our old philosophical and religious traditions.” It may then begin to perform “the true function of the intelligentsia, to see and make visible what regime would be the best, to choose it authoritatively and even to orient the other forces in this direction”—the direction of monarchy. Can the intelligentsia, by exposing public opinion “to feel the profound nullity of its powers” in the face of the oligarchs, not be persuaded to “sign the abdication” of the democracy’s “fictive sovereignty”? Admittedly, that would “demand a commonsense act from one who is deprived of common sense,” but “is it not still possible to find absurd reasons for an act that is not that at all?” In the event, both the Communists and the Nazis would find absurd reasons for absurd and vicious acts, so Maurras’s hope could have had plausibility to some of his fellow litterateurs. “Exposed to perish under a victorious quantity, intellectual quality absolutely does not risk anything in making an effort; if it loves itself, if it loves our last relics of influence and liberty, if it has some visions of the future and some ambition for France, it is fitting for it to lead the reaction of the desperate, “ally[ing] itself with those who try to do something beautiful before sinking.” “In the name of reason and nature, consonant with the ancient laws of the universe, for the welfare of order, for the duration and progress of a threatened civilization, all hopes are borne on the ship of Counter-Revolution.” The problem was that the modern tyranny of Communism and Nazism appealed to the illusion of mass empowerment, whereas Maurras aimed at disillusionment of the democrats, at admitting that they were mistaken in wanting power.
Some four decades later, writing in the middle of the Second World War, and now aligned with General Pétain’s not-so-sovereign regime in Vichy, Maurras continued to ask, “How will France awaken?” [4] In answering, he taps into the Heideggerian vein: “The actions by which France, in the course of its trials, has made an end of its forgetfulness of itself, and has regained possession of its real being its true personality and physical and moral qualities, which are part of its destiny” will stem from asking, “What do we do, what have we done, what are we used to doing and what will we do to emerge from this abyss of evils?” We must consider France’s “past rebirths.” He thus offers a political history of France complementary to the ‘cultural’ history he had written in 1904.
France consists of two strains: the Gallic type, “perfectly defined in the tribes that followed (or did not follow) Vercingetorix around 80 BC,” and the Roman type, whose representatives conquered the Gauls. “France thus had at that time all it needed to have” well before the Franks (themselves a Romanized Germanic people) invaded in 420 AD. “We are Gallo-Romans.” From the Gaul, France received the virtues of bravery and the “taste in intellectual matters and in matters of eloquence”—the “art of fighting and that of speaking well.” Generosity, enthusiasm, ardor, “the readiness to take risks, the instinct to undertake enterprises and conquests, a mystical philosophy, but learnt from at the highest speculations of the great ages of Egypt Greece and Etruria, a religion full of poetry, a poetry full of dreams, fierce and graceful, or sublime, ritual which ranged from human sacrifice to the solemn picking of the sacred mistletoe by the priestess in a white robe armed with a golden sickle, and, in nature, a serious effort at clearing a vast extent of forests, an already scientific agriculture and nascent industries that were much advanced”: such were the ethos and the actions of the Gauls. Writing only three years after the debacle of 1940, Maurras would inspirit the French, again.
He knows the Gallic vices, too, the worst of which was already observed by Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars. “His most powerful ally against the Gauls was, in Gaul itself, the discord of big children” whose “outburst of contrary opinions had betrayed commands there and paralyzed action.” Fickle and factitious, “the Gaul is like a wolf to the Gaul.” Rome gave Gallia the unity of direction and order it never had on its own. “This was naturally, and properly, the Roman contribution: order and reason.” Under Roman rule, the Gauls thrived; “hardly had Rome fallen upon them than they began to rival them in all the arts of written eloquence, rhetoric, jurisprudence, philosophy, poetry.” In designing their buildings, the Gauls learned from the Romans but soon innovated, an effort yielding first Romanesque and then Gothic architecture. In politics, the Gallic “mosaic of clans” and “the imperial statism of the centralizing Caesars” gave way to “lineaments of a new aristocratic, hierarchical, monarchical status: the feudal order.” In this new political form, as a result of it, “souls themselves were gradually transformed and here was developed in them a synthesis of emotion and intelligence, of illuminating consciousness and generous movement” defined by “the extreme vigor of a natural élan” now “orderly, enlightened, and reasonable,” and “the forces of the heart magnified by the thought that directs them.” “This definition allows us to identify our France with the eternal and universal culture that was foreseen by the ancient Hellene Anaxagoras as an expression of humanity: ‘At first all things were entangled and confused, Mind emerged to distribute them according to an order.'” The Gallo-Roman “civil state of our fatherland” combined “Gallic strength” with “Roman order.” Subsequent ethnicities, whether Greek Iberian, Moorish, Burgundian, Basque, or Scandinavian, all became integrated into the national union, a consolidation made more thoroughly and more readily because “all their distant dissimilarities were equally received into the bosom of the same uniform religion which (note well) spoke to God and men in Latin, prayed and chanted in Latin,” the language of the Roman Catholic Church.
Owing to France’s Gallo-Roman ethos, French women have taken on a far different aspect than women of other nationalities. “The English woman is a child, even as an old wife or as a grandmother; among us, the Gallic spirit, in its feminine, sensitive and generous aspect, has brought about the fact the men allow themselves to be led by the nose.” “The French woman is, in France, everywhere a queen: at the salon, the farm, the shop, the large store. There is no woman in the Académie française, but she is the great elector of it.” “This deep penetration of the French woman by the virile spirit and the French man by feminine sensitivity is not better observed anywhere else than in the religion of France,” animated as it is with a serious “rigorous orthodoxy…understood and defended in it with clarity and vigor.” In the French we see “the androgyne of Plato, the male and female being which grants the scepter alternately to the mind and to the heart when it does not confer sovereignty, as often happens, to the simultaneous synthesis of both”— a “taste of internal truths, of moral experience,” disciplined by “an iron logic, the nuances of a subtle judgment which chooses and excludes, which cuts and rejoins.” [5]
To those who might suggest that this is all a bit ‘much,’ Maurras rejoins, “Why should I be modest about my fatherland, which has been conquered?”
After the Roman retreat, France was reunited twice, first under the Franks (Clovis, Dagobert, Pepin, Charlemagne), then under French kings, beginning around 700 AD, when French aristocrats joined forces and crowned duly recognized monarchs, who proceeded to make themselves “indispensable to the population by repelling the new invasion’s and rendering increasingly more specialized police services,” eventually assuming “the role of overlords, supreme arbitrators and senior judges. It was a centralized judicial system under the monarchy, a system which combined feudal and Roman law, which did the most to keep France united, providing civil peace at work, on the streets, and in the markets. To this “benevolent authority [there] corresponded voluntarily that generous obedience wherein the real citizen finds a benefit and honor, wherein the power from above commands confidence from below”; although not fully political in Aristotle’s sense, monarchic rule enjoyed the consent of the governed. “The governed and the governing met each other halfway.”
Conversely, “every French crisis began with the head of the state,” when the lesser aristocracies and/or regents ruling on behalf of a child-king became “the scourges of the monarchy” and “the scourges of the nation.” Such rebellions did not signify tyranny but a “regression” to the Gallic spirit of faction, when “the rods of the faces began to separate and act alone,” just as their ancestors had done before the arrival of the Romans. For more than seven centuries, the monarchic regime would recover and reunite France.
It was the overthrow of the monarchy by republicans in 1789, followed by the Jacobin insurgency three years later, which plunged France into “the era of ever deeper invasions in the century-and-a-half which followed.” Decapitating the king decapitating the unifier of the factions; once freed, the factions invited foreign exploitation and conquest of the country. The Bonapartists who tried to reconstitute monarchy lacking legitimacy; it is one thing to be a leader, another to be a king. The Bourbons who briefly restored the true monarchy, and even the Orléanists who made a legitimist claim, restored unity and peace to France, but their work was ruined by “an elected democratic leader, Napoleon III,” whose “foolish foreign policy” led him to defeat and strong executive rule to discredit. This latter Napoleon produced the defeat at Sedan, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, “a tribute of five billions and, much worse than that, the establishment of the democratic republic,” since Bismarck prevented any monarchical restoration.” The Third Republic’s notorious factionalism left the state in a shambles, eventuating finally in total collapse in the face of Nazi-German assault.
“Royalty supposes…a prime moral element which consists of two principles that are adhered to, alive and practiced: orders and obedience”—a “legitimist state of mind.” If and when the English, Americans, and Russians combine to liberate France, that moral element and the regime it supports must and can return. Surely we have learned the lesson republican regimes have taught us. “Why should we not govern ourselves any longer? Well, because it is a shenanigan: we govern ourselves badly, we do not even govern ourselves.” Republicanism means “the government of the worst canaille, sometimes basely cynical, sometimes so hypocritical that it sprinkles bloody holy water in both cases.” There remains one legitimate heir to the French throne: the Comte de Paris, Henri d’Orléans. And he is a real Frenchman, not a foreigner called in by necessity, as the French were forced to do more than once in their happier, monarchic centuries. Elections cause division and war, monarchs unity and peace. As a result, “the next day can no longer fail to arise when, with negligible exceptions, each Frenchman will see his personal fate hung directly on the fate of France and when the latter fate will be felt to be threatened so much that the least functionary, the least boss engaged in industrial or agricultural exploitation, the least proletarian who is father of a family will be held by the throat by a double and same necessity: to maintain for himself and his family members the condition of a French life and not to have a false idea of his condition.” “The wish for ‘Long live France’ is only the seed of another wish: ‘Long live the king.'”
It took a real statesman to right French politics, insofar as they could be righted. Instead of compromising himself by collaborating with the Nazis, Charles de Gaulle opposed them from the beginning, urging his countrymen to rearm themselves in accordance with the practices of modern, mobile warfare in the 1930s, then exiling himself first to London, then to Algeria, after fighting in the Battle of France in 1940. And although manifestly concurring with some of Maurras’s diagnosis of France’s cultural-political ills, especially its neglect of France’s Roman or Latin characteristics, as contrasted with what de Gaulle called its “Mediterranean restlessness,” he saw that if modern tyrants appealed to the democracy, and legitimist monarchists could only hope that the democracy would come to its senses, the way to defend the democracy against tyranny was to provide republican regimes with a strong executive, a monarch within a republican regime. He said to Malraux, “Our sensitive souls called me a Maurras when I re-established the republic,” but “can you see Maurras going into battle to enforce universal suffrage in the Presidential elections?” But on the other hand, “What democracy? Stalin, Gomulka, Tito, yesterday Peron? Mao? The United States had its monarch—Roosevelt—and it misses him.” De Gaulle understood that Maurras was attacking the parliamentary republic, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Republics. The Fifth Republic, the one he founded, differed from all the others because it featured an executive, a president, with the authority to defend the country. In failing to reinvigorate federalism in France, as Maurras wanted, and in delaying but failing to prevent France’s drift toward European internationalism, away from the confederal “l’Europe des patries,” which Maurras also wanted, de Gaulle identified the same enemy Maurras had deplored: “In all this lot, my only enemy, and France’s, has always been money.” [6]
Notes
- “Just like the members of a modern department, no one two centuries later would read any of their works had their authors not become world-historical terrorists.” Michael Mann: The Sources of Social Power, Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- Although Maurras evidently owes this insight to Tocqueville, he makes no mention of that, likely preferring not to encourage an alliance between the aristocratic class of “old France” with the democracy.
- Historians now suspect that Napoleon III was intimidated by Bismarck’s threats in a conference they held shortly before the war. The two hypotheses do not necessarily contradict one another.
- As Alexander Jacob observes in his useful introduction, Maurras quite characteristically supported the Vichyite Pétain but not the Vichyite Pierre Laval. Pétain represented to him the true, Roman or Latinist character of France, whereas Laval was a German sympathizer through and through. This fine but politically irrelevant distinction landed Maurras in prison after the war, convicted of treason by French republicans.
- In Plato’s Symposium, it is the comic poet Aristophanes who tells the story of the three sexes seen in human beings in their original nature: male, female, androgyne. In order to teach a due humility to humans, Zeus cuts all of them into halves: the originally round, two-headed, four-legged, four-armed humans become one-headed, two-legged and two-armed, but each of these halved humans longs for its former ‘other half,’ with the original males longing for males, the original females longing for females, the original androgynes longing for individuals of the opposite sex. In alluding to this story, Maurras invokes the comic poet, not the tragic poet Agathon or the philosopher Socrates, both of whom offer different accounts of the nature of erotic love. Maurras wants his readers to think of the true France as neither tragic nor rationalist but happy because balanced, untormented by unrealizable longings or irreconcilable ‘factions’ in its ‘soul.’
- André Malraux: Felled Oaks (Terence Kilmartin translation, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971, pp. 93, 116). Money, but without the antisemitic edge Maurras gave to his critique.
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