Charles Maurras, Shaper of an Age Thomas Molnar

RECONSIDERATION

THEREARE SERIOUS obstacles in our way tained “republics,” these four riders of when we try to acquaint America with the Apocalypse, penetrated France as the personality, the role, and the thought alien elements, and, with modernity com- of Charles Maurras (1868-1952). One of ing, corroded the autochthonous sub- these obstacles is that American schol- stance. They would be “republics under ars and their academic endeavors have the king,” an ideal image in need of a been mostly shaped by the Germanic great deal of political architecture. For spirit, with here and there a representa- Maurras the State (politics) cannot be tive of Latinitas, a Santayana, or a separated from the classical (aesthetic) Maritain. The French university system canons.’ is far from their accustomed mode of At this point we are at the heart of thought, and theFrench model of school- Maurrassian doctrine,at the farthest pole ing is more distant still. The works of from Anglo-Saxon premises: a Mediterra- Maurras have therefore been little trans- nean worldview in which Greeks and lated, hardly discussed (this would be Latins commune. The State is a work of today politically incorrect), let alone art (Aristotle balancing Plato in read on any academic level. The fact, neverending tension), an orderly and too, that T.S. Eliot was a great admirer of just arrangement, built for permanence, Maurras does not help, and even dimin- an ideal. It is far, unbridgeably far, from ishes the French thinker in the eyes of pragmatic politics, the duel of lobbies, American critics. voting procedures, responses to polls, There are other reasons, too, for the authorized flag-burning. The classical wide gap. Maurras is the quintessential spirit is everywhere present in antidemocraticthinker, and “pluralism” Maurrassian literature, even in his full would mean for him the coexistence of name: Charles-Marie-Photius, the last- several closed worlds, “republics” un- mentioned from the sixth-century Greek der the unifying monarchy. Or they merchantdiscoverer of Marseille, me- would be “minorities” as we would call tropolis of the Midi, not far from them: Protestants, Freemasons, Jews, Maurras’s birthplace. The Greek ideal and foreigners. These almost self-con- accompanied him to the end as the sign of perfection, peak-achievement, refer- THOMASMOWAR is aprolific author who teaches ence, and a kind of inner clock. It has in the Department of Philosophy and Religion been held by “terrible simplifiers” that at the University of Budapest. Maurras introduced fascism in France,

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and, of course, he was sentenced to life- ciple. The ideological climate for this imprisonment at age seventy-seven as a vision was the clear Mediterranean air, “collaborator of the German occupant.” the sun at high noon, the silence and This fact further explains why Maurras equilibrium celebrated by Paul Valery’s and his oeuvre are practically unknown great poem, Le cimeti2re marin-Ger- in the United States, where occasionally man darkness versus French light. The college students will sidle up to you wisdom of pre-Socratic sages was close showing some Maurrassian texts as if to this ProuengaI vision. they were dirty pictures. In 1896 Maurras was sent by his news- We shall attempt here to reestablish a paper to report on the first modern Olym- modicum of truth. There were some pic Games held in Athens. There is some youthful errors of judgment on Maurras’s discussion whether he “discovered” the part, but they were then common to the classical ideal on the Acropolis, or generation of Anatole France, Ernest whether this episode meant only the Renan, and others, all followers of final revelation of maturing ideas. That Auguste Comte’s positivism, a “scien- trip for him was the privileged moment, tific” philosophy and sociology (the lat- as other moments were decisive for ter term coined by Comte himself), a Descartes and for Pascal, and before doctrine not unlike Herbert Spencer’s in them for St. Augustine-all three Medi- England. We must explain the Comtian terranean. (Let us also bear in mind that success-story and generational influence throughout his life Maurras was stone- by the fact that the nineteenth century deaf; vision and intellect were his chief turned France upside down, a trying era channels to the apprehended world.) indeed. It began with the worldshaking His Greek-Latin forma mentis translated rule of Napoleon, followed by three revo- for him the image of classical columns to lutions which, with 1789 in the back- the political architecture of sharp con- ground, changed society’s structure; this tours and hierarchies within which the was followed by the crisis of restoring or citizen occupies his place. Expressed abolishing the monarchy, the coloniza- otherwise, there are the multiplicities of tion of North Africa and Indo-China, the civil society, but institutions and finally outlawing of religious orders by the ideo- the hereditary king are at the top. This is logically and aggressively lay republic not as rigid as Plato’s Republic, but of a (1905). Thus one half of the country’s similar inspiration. This is not fascism, intelligentsia followed Comte’s positiv- nor even Nazism, both being too turbu- ism and preparation for a scientific soci- lent for Maurras’s classic preferences, ety, the other half, Catholic and royalist. both alien on account of their socialistic We see the outline of Maurras’s impor- ingredient and enthusiastic but tempo- tant position as a unifier of the two dis- rary unity, not fixed in institutional form. courses. A unifying factor was the gen- The Maurrassian edifice is also different eral detestation of Germany, victorious from that of Carl Schmitt, the German at Sudan (1870), a Germany neverthe- critic of the modern State, who faulted less admired for her progress in all of the the Weimar constitution for its failure to sciences and technologies. For Maurras, make room for a supreme arbiter in case the Germans were the par excellence of turmoil and danger. Precisely, the aliens (Protestants, romantics, sentimen- Maurrassian State needed no appointed tal and barbarous), and facing them, arbiter, it possessed such a function in positivism that represented French the monarch, surrounded by loyal civil (Greco-Latin) rationality, lucidity, and servants of the common good. Thomas the politically best organizational prin- More would be a good illustration.

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Is this autopian construct? Is it Plato’s indeed, when Maurras was sent to prison ideal republic, without a philosopher- and then died, France was again divided king, but a flesh-and-blood member of into two camps, and the cleavage almost the nation and its history? I tend to be- led to civil war when Charles de Gaulle lieve, rather, that the Maurrassian realm granted independence to Algeria and is an attempted answer to modern poli- liquidated the empire. The followers of tics before anarchy sets in and appeals Maurras never forgave the General-Presi- must be made to the “exceptional indi- dent.3 vidual.” In its pure form, such a political There were, however, other tragedies body will never be found, but one must which destabilized the pedestal on which keep in mind that Maurras grew up in the Maurras used to stand. In 1926, Pope first decades of the Third Republic, with Pius XI ex-communicated the Action its hypocrisy and scandals of corrup h-ancaise (movement and various jour- tion, its weak national defense, unable to nals), dealing a near death-blow to his stand up to Bismarck and the Kaiser, and followers, a majority of them Catholics, its fin-de-si2cle hedonism. Thirty years henceforth divided in their loyalty. Many before, in Spain, Donoso Cortes, in de- left Maurras, and few returned when, in spair over the lack of royal guidance, 1939, Pius XI1 lifted the interdict. Mutatis asked for a dictator to govern a slowly mutandis, this was a sort of “Lefebvre pulverized empire. Napoleon 111 was but affair.” A second episode takes us to a failed imitation of such a dictator.2 In February 1934 when the French Right Wilhelmian Germany, Max Weber diag- saw that the time had come to attack the nosed the modern political weakness, government and the regime itself for its although his solution differed from that continued corruption and communist of Donoso Cortes and of Maurras. Yet he infiltration. An enormous crowd was tried to bring a remedy to the same ills: ready to invade the building of the Na- namely, the hope that patriotic and edu- tional Assembly in order to “throw out cated civil servants would protect the the scoundrels”; a message from questionably valid democratic industrial Maurras, still and always only a pub- order. lisher of journals, but having a unique In a France still royalist at heart, prestige, would probably have sufficed Maurras had no great difficulty to find to launch the attack. In this ripe moment support for restoration. From the Dreyfus he hesitated, then desisted, in spite of case to the defeat in 1940, half-acentury, the pressure by his young disciples to Maurras was the undisputed icon of army act. They never forgave him for having officers, the clergy, fashionable ladies, remained, in those fatal hours, just a the bourgeois class, and even of some ~cribbler.~The following year a leftist leftist patriots who found “their” repub- coalition, the “Popular Front,” took over lic not militant enough. Contrary to later the government-perhaps the decisive times, large sections of the intelligentsia factor in the outbreak of World War 11, were also avid reader of Maurras’s jour- four years later. nal, Action hunpise, which embodied The unspent energies of the Right on the aspirations and the literary taste of February 6 (keep in mind that Hitler had the Right. Even today, the remnant of the just become chancellor!), were stored Right considers him as its maitre hpenser, away until the 1940 defeat and Marshal and young men are not lacking who com- PCtain’s coming to power. In a great mit themselves to his cause, an unflinch- nation’s history things often repeat them- ing patriotism. Many of my own friends selves. In the mid-eighteenth century pay tribute to his form of intelligence; France had, so to speak, two heads: Louis

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XV and Voltaire, uncrowned prince of non-Burkean underpinnings, that democ- the “republic of letters.” There was a racy is inevitable and that it will change similar occurrence in 1940: Petain and the course of western history. Maurras. The marshal, too, was in fact a Tocqueville himself was of two minds Maurrassian, as was the majority of the about this likely future, and that is why civil servants of what was now called the he traveled in America: to understand ”French State,” a “republic” no more. the phenomenon in depth, and, as it The difference between the two situa- were, to prepare for its coming to France. tions, separated by two hundred years, At the end of his sojourn he was still was the fact of the German occupation. undecided whether to welcome democ- The legitimate question is, to what ex- racy or warn against it, but he under- tent was Maurrassian thought respon- stood that the problem transcended sible for the new laws promulgated by politics, which is largely cultural, affect- the Vichy regime, and to what extent the ing public discourse, the place of reli- orders of the occupying power? Even gion, the structure of the family. By and today the issue is undecided since half of large, European intellectuals of the post- France long before these events had been Tocquevillian century and a half re- “Maurrassian” (and was to remain so till mained similarly hesitant. At any rate, this day). Condemn an entire nation? the two extra-European “experiments,” Half of it? Was the other half free of the American and the Russian, reacted doctrinal and political errors? Obviously to the new ideology and prompted many not, even if we only consider that it was nations to embrace some form of collec- the socialist/communist government, tivism, such as communism, fascism, or heavily manipulated by Stalin, which mass democracy. This was, and still is, sabotaged the coming war. Which side, the “spirit of the time.” then, was guilty for opening France’s Maurras chose otherwise: national- strategic gates on the northeastern fron- ism, but not the war-like, aggressive kind, tier? Was it not the pacifist Left which rather an organized patriotism, unmoved enjoyed popularity abroad among its in its classical structure, severely tradi- intellectual allies, Stalin’s fellow-travel- tionalist, built according to the rhythm ers from Picasso to the “Red Dean” of of natural and local growth, yet not al- Canterb~ry?~ lowed to leave the institutional path. End-of-century historiography has still The doctrine was pragmatic enough not answered these questions, because (Maurras favored the “voluntary asso- some sturdy taboos oppose an objective ciations” which he thought he detected debate in each of the countries involved, in the United States), but only by default. including the United States. Certainly, in It could only apply to one country at a this paper by a contemporary who was time when aggressive ideologies were at the time a young man in Central Eu- imposed on multitudes of them. Dis- rope, Maurras and his political thought ciples, from Brazil to Rumania, had to are not seen as isolated elucubrations, formulate their own “Maurrasism,” but as occupying a central and influen- adapting if they could his thinking to tial position in minds from Athens to local circumstances. But this was im- Buenos Aires, from W. B. Yeats to Tho- possible. Eventually without an accepted mas Mann. Let us try to unravel this referent (patriotism was obviously pre- basically non-mysterious course of empted), people on the “other side” be- events. gan to refer to Maurrassian teaching as 1789 and its revolutionary sequels “fascism.” Clearly it was not exportable demonstrated, although perhaps with the way Soviet communism and Ameri-

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can democratic capitalism have been. to understand that there was no fracture For similar reasons, Maurras’s anti- between the two “sides”; the militant Semitism and (early) anti-Catholicism Maurras of earlier decades had combat- (inherited from Comte) have also been ted Marc Sangnier’s democrats (in La misunderstood, often on purpose, by de‘rnocratie religieuse) as menacing both unforgiving enemies. These issues inter- Church and State. ested him only insofar as they affected The Maurras phenomenon deserves France. No ideology could be manufac- to be studied seriously for an under- tured from these elements. The nation’s standing of European history in the first unity was the primary consideration, half of the twentieth century-the and all those who could not assimilate to struggle for and against democracy- it were the “foreign element” that and also because ignoring it leaves a Maurras called les rne‘tsques, the Greek vacuum for misjudgments in political term for “outside the household,”-not theory and practice. Half a century after slaves, not inferior strata, but his death, the picture is rather clear unassimilated. Such views were held by even if it has to be unearthed from under Comte, Anatole France, Tocqueville’s layers of taboo and other layers of younger friend, Gobineau, Renan; the newspeak. Like all the important politi- tragedy was that the Hitler years turned cal writers-Plato, St. Augustine, this essentially Greek view into racist Machiavelli, Hobbes, Max Weber- instruments. If Maurras was responsible Maurras reacted to what he perceived for it, so were prestigious thinkers from as a dangerous decline of sobriety in Voltaire on. politics, but he refused to become “uni- This leads to Maurras’s much more versally valid” in a century demanding complexviews of the Church, and there- global diagnoses and global remedies. fore to the relentless animosity towards His sole interest was France. In the eyes him to this day in certain Catholic circles. of his critics, he thus became a narrow What is forgotten is that Maurras’s later nationalist, but not in the eyes of those poems express a humble conversion, to aware of his enormous influence and of such an extent that a pope was to call his attempt to integrate political thought him a great champion of the Church. On with a Mediterranean overview, and thus his death-bed he asked for and received with a classical vision. In a romantic and the last sacrament. This is not to deny sentimental age, Maurras tried to reha- the earlier, “positivist” Maurras’s erro- bilitate rationality as a political interpre- neous interpretation of the Church’s tation of the real, although he was not origin and trajectory, an interpretation too sanguine about the “future of intelli- close enough to that of a heretic move- gence,” the title of one of his volumes ment, for example, of Marcion in the (L’avenir de l’intelligence, 1905). Much second century A.D. The Church has two more influential was the above men- aspects, Maurras argued: the four emot- tioned D6rnocratie religieuse (1906-19 13) ing Jewish evangelists with their senti- in which he tears to shreds the utopian mental missionary mentality, and the infiltration of Church doctrine and poli- solid superstructure modelled on Re tics. In a way, Maritain’s public writing man political virtues and Roman sense career was an answer to the thesis of of realism built on the knowledge of these volumes, and it is perhaps not human nature. He admired the Roman incorrect to opine that the second side and faulted the Semitic, middle- Vatican Council (1962-1965) itself meant eastern side as a source of danger for the to be a final liquidation of the Maurrassian body politic. Only the later Maurras was critique of a social and sentimental Ca-

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tholicism. The controversy is not likely The Maurrassian generations are, if to end soon.6 not dying out, losing their intellectual French intellectual history has known influence. The “hexagone” used to be many instances of thinkers and writers politically self-sufficient, but it now loses who first meet with rejection and then its moorings in the “g1obal”context.There become regarded as upholders of ortho- are new rightist groups, a new national- doxy: for example, impressionistic paint- ism directed not at Germany but at the ers, and poets like Baudelaire, Verlaine, United States, ready to fight on other Rimbaud, and Mallarme. There have than strictly political fronts. Three deci- been several post-Maurrassian “cursed sively important institutions, active until generations,” too, those who rejected 1960,have abandoned the national cause Maurras’s inadequacy to lead concretely as Maurras had conceived it and have in critical times; and those who, by now accepted a weakened condition: theArmy sine ira et studio, have returned to him was internally defeated and eviscerated and to his memory as a permanent advo- by de Gaulle when he granted indepen- cate of clear thinking and style. In fact dence to Algeria; the official Church at Maurras’s thought is very much alive Vatican I1 opted for the liberal-demo- today when France is melting herself cratic establishment and its culture; and down in a sentimental, pan-European the mental fortress, the system of educa- potpouvz. For these disciples, Germany tion (tough IycCes, a well-structured uni- remains the adversary, and even versity training, elite schools like the Franqois Mitterrand, socialist president Ecole Normale SupQieure), has been all with a Maurrassian past, tried many dip- but dismantled. The thinking and teach- lomatic tricks (another taboo subject) ing of Maurras, determining factors for to prevent German reunification in 1990 half a century, are now a rigid orthodoxy by attempting to dissuade Gorbachov of ipse dixit for powerless subgroups and from granting it. History, puce Fukuyama, an object of nostalgia for past leaders is not ending, and Maurras, popular or and ideals. In a way, it is the agony of cursed, is likely to accompany it as a France. relevant observer.

1. Maurras’s Hellenic mindset and inspiration are this rupture between words and deeds as a scan- important explanatory factors here. His Prooenpl dal, several were to yield to the “fascist tempta- background was built on the ancient Greekcommu- tion.”They becameHitlerist sympathizers and later nities which extended from Asia Minor to the Span- cooperated with the occupation forces. One, the ish coast. These communities were intensely com- great poet Robert Brazillach, was sentenced to die mercial, but otherwiseclosed to political participa- by the gpuration court and executed (February tion by foreigners and other outsiders. 2. Similar, 1945). 5. To complicate matters, let us note that real, or failed semi-military coups d’Etat were not there were pacifists also on the Right who did not infrequent in the nascent democracies of the last want to upset the European balance of power, for century and of the early twentieth, from General example, by challenging Mussolini’s invasion of Boulanger to Mussolini and Franco. 3. This seems a Ethiopia (1935). 6. The thinking of Maurras is often paradox since de Gaulle, scion of a Maurrassian summed up in the formula, “politiqued’abord,”that family,instinctively and consciously assumed regal is to say, in worldly affairs and confrontations the attitudes as president of the French republic (1960- political interest is the primary consideration. 70). In the 1960s I had opportunities to watch him at Maritain’s answer was summed up in “integral press conferences in the ElysCe Palace where the humanism,” divinely inspired human standards in monarchic, Louis XIV aspect was very much in all things. The first formulais too harsh, thesecond evidence. 4. Among the fiery young men who saw unrealistic.

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