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THE REVENGE OF MAURRAS

by
Nathan Pinkoski
November 2019

L’avenir de l’intelligence et autres textes

BY CHARLES MAURRAS

EDITED BY MARTIN MOTTE

BOUQUINS, 1,280 PAGES, €32,00

E very year, France’s Ministry of Culture publishes an o cial volume to commemorate major
anniversaries in French history, covering past events as well as the lives of prominent personalities.

Assembled by a team of historians and approved by the Ministry, the list mixes victories and failures, the

honored and the notorious—judging events and personalities strictly on the basis of their historical
signi cance. In 2018, the judges placed Charles Maurras on the list, noting the 150th anniversary of his

birth. Protests ensued. The judges insisted that commemoration is not the same as celebration, to no avail.

Bowing to pressure, the Minister of Culture recalled and reedited the volume. Maurras’s name was e aced

from the o cial history.

The same year saw the release of a new anthology of Maurras, the rst edition of his works to be arranged
and published since 2002. It, too, caused a scandal. Reviewers deplored “the return of a fascist icon.”

Publishing an anthology of Maurras is an o ense against the postwar consensus and the “o cial history” of
the twentieth century. Yet the case for studying Maurras is hard to deny. He was historically signi cant. As

a political journalist, essayist, and poet, writing for more than six decades, he reached a wide audience and
maintained enormous in uence. Charles Péguy, Marcel Proust, and André Malraux all praised his talent.
Those who acknowledged their intellectual debt to Maurras include philosophers Louis Althusser, Pierre

Boutang, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Maritain, and Gustave Thibon, and novelists Georges Bernanos, Michel
Déon, Jacques Laurent, and Roger Nimier. French president Georges Pompidou, the pragmatic
conservative of the 1970s, praised Maurras as a prophet of the modern world. T. S. Eliot, who read Maurras
for years, said that Maurras had helped him toward Christianity. Maurras was, for Eliot, “a sort of Virgil
who led us to the gates of the temple.”

The “o cial history” of the twentieth century is highly selective in its designations of the thinkers who
count as scandalous. It does not hesitate to highlight Marx’s insights or to praise the political movements he

spawned, and it quietly ignores the unsavory aspects of the thinker and his followers. The resulting
distortion of our understanding of the twentieth century is a serious problem because—as the preface of
the new anthology contends—readers today are likely to nd “a troubling familiarity” in the situation

Maurras addressed.

The editor of L’avenir de l’intelligence et autres textes, military historian Martin Motte, demonstrates that

Maurras was not a fascist. Like many interwar intellectuals, Maurras had a fondness for Mussolini. Yet he
rejected the fascist theory that Mussolini advocated, of the state’s controlling the totality of the social
realm. In the 1930s, Maurras denounced Hitler’s “bizarre philosophy of Blood and Race.” Opposing Nazism,

Maurras taught that racial con ict was “neither the nerve nor the key of history.” He repeatedly advocated
French rearmament in the face of the German threat. Fascists opposed him. They mocked Action française,

the movement Maurras led, for its refusal of revolutionary violence—calling it “l’Inaction française.”

Maurras was an icon and in uence for many political movements, but fascism was not one of them.

Deaf from an early age and cut o from most social life, Maurras turned his energies to reading and writing.

He reached adulthood when France seemed to have reached the “end of history”; republicanism had
triumphed over all its opponents. The Third Republic, which had consolidated in the 1870s following the

Prussian invasion and the collapse of the Second Empire, claimed to obviate all the ideological battles of

the past and to unite the French in a common consensus. It dominated the political, juridical, and cultural
institutions of France. Maurras devoted his life to showing that this “end of history” mentality was a false

republican conceit. The republican victory was extensive, making it “legal France.” But it was not “real

France.” On behalf of “real France,” Maurras argued that the republican ideology and regime were
weakening the nation and dividing the French against one another. Moreover, the Republic was steadily

surrendering national independence to the control of foreign powers. Maurras argued that there was an

alternative to republicanism, which would guarantee France’s independence: integral nationalism.

Articulating its postulates would become the project of Action française.

The volume’s selections, the detailed preface by Jean-Christophe Buisson, and Martin Motte’s superb
editorial essays make no attempt to idealize the political thought of Maurras. His most egregious failures are

openly discussed. Anti-Semitism became a formidable political force in the nineteenth century, appearing
in the writings of many prominent intellectuals. “We discern in Judaism . . . a universal anti-social element.

. . . What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. . . . As soon as
society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew

becomes impossible.” These quotations are from Marx, not Maurras, but Maurras wrote in a similar vein.
Like nationalism, political anti-Semitism was born on the left but became bipartisan in time. Whereas left-

wing anti-Semitism imagined the Jew as the truest capitalist, right-wing anti-Semitism imagined the Jew as

unpatriotic, exercising undue political in uence at the service of foreign powers.

T he right saw the Dreyfus a air as the realization of its worst fear. Here was a Jewish o cer of the

French army, convicted of spying for the Germans. The left used Dreyfus’s case not to clear his
name but to humiliate the army. It was on that basis that Maurras wrote: “If Dreyfus is innocent, he should

be made a Marshal of France, and his top ten defenders should be shot.” Of course, as later events showed,

Dreyfus was innocent. The question of his innocence or guilt was the only question that should have
mattered. Yet instead of prioritizing that question, Maurras used Dreyfus’s case to launch opportunistic

attacks against the Republic and its Jewish supporters. Maurras’s anti-Semitic aim was to limit Jewish

political in uence. This was the typical French anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century. It was very far
from the anti-Semitism of racial warfare and puri cation that Hitler embodied. Yet after the Shoah, these

demarcations are of little consequence. Maurras cannot be excused.

Nor should Maurras be excused for his support of Vichy. Maurras never wavered from arguing that the

Third Republic was a awed regime, doomed to collapse in the face of German menace. His prophecy came

true in 1940, when he was an elderly man. After France’s surrender, he and most of the French people,
including the political class of the left and right, trusted the hero of Verdun, Marshal Pétain, to lead a new

regime. Maurras was one of many to imagine that Pétain would rebuild the country and avenge the defeat

of 1940. But Maurras, deafer than ever, was living in his imagination. In supporting Vichy, he condemned
himself by his own standard: He supported a regime that surrendered national independence to a foreign

power. In rejecting Vichy, General de Gaulle was more Maurrassian than Maurras.

Maurras was an agnostic for most of his life. This fact had consequences. He was fascinated by Auguste

Comte’s positivist political project, which envisioned a central place for le culte, albeit in the form of a new

religion of humanity. Maurras saw no reason for a new cult; the old, properly guided, would do. Thus, he

did not adopt the anti-Christian prejudices common to secularist movements. He was not directly anti-

clerical or anti-religious in the manner of the left. Yet his movement lacked, as Bernanos observed, an
“interior life.” At his worst he did something more insidious, instrumentalizing Catholicism to political

ends. This trend in Maurras’s thought, combined with the in uence he exerted over French youth,
prompted Pope Pius XI to denounce him and Action française in 1926. In an extraordinary and controversial

use of papal disciplinary powers, Maurras’s major writings and the journal Action française were forbidden

to Catholics under pain of excommunication. As an agnostic, Maurras appeared untroubled by

excommunication. Yet his Catholic supporters could not be indi erent. Prominent Catholics drifted away,
Bernanos and Maritain among them. By the time the ban was lifted in July 1939, Catholics had moved on.

Maurras’s thought revolved around a series of binaries. The rst was for counter-revolution, and against

revolution. Maurras was sympathetic enough to the Orléaniste tradition to appreciate civic equality and the

end of special privileges for the aristocracy. Yet the real essence of the French Revolution was the

sacralization of social and political change, based on the ideal of individualism. Individualism had
produced the great nineteenth-century ideologies that emerged from the Revolution: socialism and

liberalism. Both were individualist, in that they challenged the organic conception of society favored by the

right of the nineteenth century. In its socialist form, Maurras argued, individualism attacks all social

hierarchies. In its liberal form, it excuses the elite from acknowledging their social obligations toward the

people. Both ideologies look to transform social relations and institutions in order to achieve freedom; but

in seeking to free the individual from social roles, individualism mutilates freedom.

F or Maurras, genuine counterrevolution did not require violent social and political change. It

required a way of thinking that would dissipate revolutionary passion. Thus, Maurras arrived at

another binary: for classicism, and against romanticism. In his time, the right admired the romantics of the

nineteenth century, who were often conservatives yearning for the lost unity of the old regime. But

Maurras thought that the right had set up the wrong champions. Romanticism was a movement of
individualism and historical determinism, which believed that the post-revolutionary present doomed

France to mediocrity. Only a few noble souls could look beyond the present catastrophe. By regarding the

past nostalgically, romanticism could not assess what from the past was transmissible, fertile, and eternal. It

delighted in despair. To counter romanticism, Maurras proposed a rediscovery of classicism. Classicism

sought to discover the rational order existing in nature and reality, including in politics. As a way of

thinking, classicism disciplined the mind; classicism in politics disciplined the statesman to achieve right
order and abandon hubristic, unrealizable dreams. As its name suggests, classicism sought to apply the best

of Greece and Rome into the modern context. Classicism’s greatest achievement was the Grand Siècle of the

seventeenth century, because the Grand Siècle synthesized the best of Greece and Rome into modern

France. That achievement could be repeated in the twentieth century; it remained possible to grasp and

achieve the right order for France. Maurras concluded that “in politics, all despair is absolute silliness.”
France needed to be put into order, Maurras reasoned, with a system of thought that countered the ideas of

“cosmopolitan anarchy.” The socialist idea of perpetual class struggle turned class against class. The

republican idea of parliamentary politics turned political party against political party, intensifying the

partisanship that had fractured national unity since the Revolution. The liberal idea turned the economic

interests of the bourgeois against everything else, causing “more woes than the bombs of the libertines.”
These ideas handed over to others the government of France, surrendering national independence. Against

cosmopolitan anarchy, Maurras o ered its opposite: integral nationalism.

For Maurras, the nationalism-cosmopolitanism binary, and the choice for nationalism, followed as a

deductive, almost mathematical argument. Individualism was false. Man has no more pressing need than to

live in society. There are a variety of social forms, but the nation is the most complete, most solid, and most
extended. Without nations, “We must fear the retreat of civilization.” Nationalism is, therefore, a rational

obligation. Maurras understood nationalism as applying the highest moments of a nation’s past to its

present, in order to secure the nation’s survival. Maurras held that the Church supports nations and

encourages charity among nations, rather than seeking to destroy nations, as socialism does. He quipped

that the Church was the only real “International.”

In the French case, Maurras argued that the nation was formed out of its history. “Ten centuries of gradual

collaboration” had drawn the French closer together, forming a bond of friendship. This friendship, in

turn, created an inheritance that was passed down from generation to generation. Emphasizing a shared

inheritance that looked to past successes for guidance, Maurras denied that the nation was “a phenomenon

of race.” The French nation, he argued, was a federation of many races and peoples, each with a cultural

and linguistic heritage that had to be preserved and respected (the young Maurras wrote in Provençal). In a
sense, Maurras held that diversity was France’s strength.

In realizing the vast nation-building exercise dreamt up by the Jacobins during the Revolution, the Third

Republic sought to destroy France’s diversity. Republicans feared the provinces as sources of reactionary

political temperament and sought to transform them in order to promote ideological conformity. Through

national education, the Republic waged war on local traditions and religious schools. Through
bureaucratic indoctrination, it purged local governments of gures skeptical of republicanism. Through

centralization, it crippled the capacity of the provinces to govern themselves.

Despite these domineering tactics, the republican state was feeble. Its parliamentary politics produced

temporary coalitions and a revolving door of ministers that made it impossible to maintain a consistent
grand strategy. Weak government turned France’s diversity into a source of division, unloosing the
centrifugal forces within France and threatening civic strife.

M aurras o ered a fundamental challenge to republicanism’s account of the power of the state and

its purpose. The Republic’s institutions failed to accomplish what they purported to do. Because

the Republic is the regime that divides the most, and because it organizes the exploitation of the country it

has divided, Maurras wrote, “Action française calls all good citizens against the Republic.”

Maurras opposed republicanism with an audaciously di erent ideal: monarchy. “Without a King, no

national strength and no guarantee for national independence.” This was not a vision of absolute

monarchy. (Absolute monarchy was, to a large extent, a republican ction; the last of the Bourbon

monarchs ailed against the powers of the local parliaments.) Instead, Maurras’s theory of the state was

federalist. The national government would be the strong executive of a hereditary monarchy. Yet the state’s
powers would be limited in kind and reach, not touching upon the rights and liberties of the regions.

Unlike in the Republic, the towns, provinces, and corporate bodies would be “completely free.” This

regime would show regard for France’s diversity while holding its centrifugal forces in check.

Maurras’s most important argument for resolving the republic-monarchy binary in favor of monarchy was

his contention that the monarchy would solve France’s geopolitical problem. Maurras’s reading of French
political history saw a close connection between foreign policy and domestic stability. Foreign policy was

the crucible in which the French either rose to greatness or fell into confusion. A strong foreign policy

united the nation’s people and increased their self-respect. A weak foreign policy pulled the nation apart,

threatening national survival and hastening civil war. Here, another of Maurras’s binaries played out: for

nationalist particularism, and against imperialist universalism. Maurras saw modern geopolitics as

inherently unstable, uctuating between the imperialism of the superpowers and the increasingly

nationalist tendencies of smaller peoples. France was vulnerable to foreign domination, whether through

invasion or through foreign powers capturing factions in the French government. It was misguided to

imagine that France could be an imperial power; it had to understand itself as a nation.

In Kiel et Tanger, the text that Pompidou praised as prophetic, Maurras detailed the history of the Third

Republic’s failures in foreign a airs. The Third Republic had got the binary wrong; it favored imperialism

against nationalism. Infatuated by imperialist expansion in Africa and the Far East, the Republic allowed

other powers to control French foreign policy, so that ultimately the it failed to unify the nation against the

German threat. The Republic’s reckoning was postponed in World War I, because in 1914 and 1918 France
had in practice abandoned republicanism for the dictatorship of emergency powers. The Republic met its

fate in 1940.

Maurras contrasted the tumultuous history of modern France with the long stability of monarchical rule.

Enemies had invaded French soil in modern history—in 1792, 1793, 1814, 1815, 1870, 1914, and 1940—only
during non-monarchical regimes. To assure France’s national independence and save France from foreign

domination and invasion, Maurras argued for a recovery of the eternal statecraft of the kings of France.

Embodying the spirit of classicism in the regime, monarchy recognized nations as persistent components of

the world’s natural order. In bearing the title “King of France,” the sovereign was limited to a particular

territory and charged with the exclusive task of caring for the nation within that territory. Other nations
were subject to other rulers. Monarchy, Maurras argued, fostered restraint and respect for nations at home

and abroad. By leading coalitions of smaller nations, the kings of France checked the emergence of

universalist superpowers. It sought the balance of power among nations to preserve the freedom of nations,

not to conquer and eliminate nations.

U nder the monarchy, the major purpose of the French state was foreign policy. In turn, the purpose
of French foreign policy was to serve the French people. Foreign policy was not a means for the

French army to serve as “the soldier of the ideal,” as the republicans thought. It was a means to increase the

self-respect of the French, fostering national unity. Maurras argued that “Royalism” corresponded to all the

diverse postulates of nationalism. Monarchy was the best way of arranging the powers of the state to

protect France from its enemies, resist the superpowers, and unify the nation. It had done so for centuries

and could do so again. In a word, integral nationalism meant royalism.

Maurras’s ideas can seem fantastical to anyone formed by the “o cial history” of the twentieth century. It’s

useful, therefore, to contrast Maurrassisme with three more familiar positions across the political spectrum:

left, liberal, and conservative. Like the left, Maurras provided anti-bourgeois critiques of the Republic and

French society that revolved around questions of political economy. But Maurras disputed where economic

power actually lay. The left portrayed a struggle between the owners of capital and the workers. Maurras

argued that the left relied on and encouraged its own revolutionary capital to advance its ends. For

Maurras, “class struggle” was a misnomer. In fact, there was a struggle between two kinds of capital:

between a conservative capital and what we might now call “woke” capital. Rather than aim for the

abolition of capital, Maurras sought to lend economic support and political representation to the

exchanges of capital that promoted traditional ends and practices. For example, one could strengthen the

powers of the provinces and the traditional guilds therein. And one could weaken the powers of the
transnational enterprises that either were indi erent to the French nation or could switch their allegiance

from one regime to another.

Both integral nationalism and liberalism make the theory of international relations critical to their

apologias. (Notice the ease with which defenses of “liberalism” move to defenses of the “liberal world

order.”) But they ask di erent questions. Liberal international relations theory assumes a rigorous
demarcation between foreign policy and domestic a airs. Even neo-realism, which shares some of

Maurras’s observations about the instability of international relations, refuses to connect foreign policy

and domestic a airs. Formed on such a theory, America’s elite is accustomed to suppress questions such as

this: What consequences have the foreign policy decisions of the last two decades had on the American

regime and on the self-respect of Americans? By contrast, integral nationalism makes this a key question

for international relations.

Conservatives increasingly deplore imperialism and champion nationalism, but this binary can be obscure.

Nationalism itself can become imperialistic. Maurras clari es the binary by combining the discussion of

nationalism with the discussion of the powers of the state and the regime. Maurras contends that monarchy

bound nationalism in principle to the sovereignty of France, therein holding o the temptation to drift

toward the imperialist side of the binary. Other regimes failed to do so. For example, democracy is a

universalist ideology. It must expand. Because they were committed to this ideology, the regimes of

Napoleon I and III were expansionist. But the ideology turned against France. Napoleon I and III helped

organize the regimes that would invade France in 1814 and 1870. To avoid imperial adventures that end in

disaster, nationalism is not enough. Nations should look to their past to discover the regimes in their

histories that foster particularism rather than universalism, preventing self-destructive imperialism.

Maurrassisme was politics for intellectuals. It demanded mastery of vast swathes of French history, politics,

and philosophy. Maurras’s success was to shift the window of what the French could discuss and debate.

He challenged the triumphalist history of the Third Republic and exposed its most serious aws. Most

important, he gave a very modern, sociologically charged defense of the ancien régime. In his writing, these

seemingly outdated ideas and institutions suddenly appeared contemporary, even urgent. Yet perhaps

because of its highbrow appeal, his politics failed to form a uni ed political movement. As its founder aged
in the 1930s, Maurrassisme gave birth to four separate political movements.

The rst was a faction in the Vichy regime that celebrated the end of the Third Republic. Despite Maurras’s

opposition to revolutionary passion, it lent its support to Vichy’s slogan of “National Revolution.” Vichy

applied Maurras’s “anti-Semitism of state” in 1940, banning Jews from holding government positions and
restricting their public role. Initially, it went no further, yet Vichy’s policy of collaboration inevitably led
into greater and greater participation with Nazism’s genocidal aims, staining it for posterity. After the war,

the Vichy faction argued that collaboration had shielded France from the fate of Poland. A small but

formidable postwar political tradition, it tended to favor de Gaulle in the 1950s, though in the 1960s the

Vichy apologists abhorred him for ending the French Empire and French Algeria. Raymond Aron pointed

out how the pro-imperialist Vichy apologists departed from Maurrassisme: “The Kings of France would

never have had the idea of transforming Muslims into subjects of his Most Catholic Majesty!”

T he second movement, exempli ed by Jacques Maritain, called itself Christian democracy. Maritain

a rmed the Vatican’s denunciation of Action française. With Maurras, Christian democracy held

that France’s political problems had to be addressed through the recovery of the best of the pre-1789 past.

With Maurras, it held that the ideology of individualism mutilated human freedom. Yet against Maurras,

Christian democracy sought to recover the primacy of the spiritual over the political. Spiritual primacy

entailed not monarchy but the political moderation embodied in liberal democracy. The best of the pre-

1789 past was not the French monarchy, but the texts of the Angelic Doctor of Paris, which (when

reinterpreted) supported democratic politics. Rejecting Maurras’s historical interpretations and his political

conclusions, Christian democracy represents the purest rebellion against the father. Yet in France, its fate

was similar to that of Action française. Christian democracy was an intellectual rather than a political force.

The third political movement was strangely loyal to Maurras. In Catholicism and Democracy, Émile Perreau-

Saussine observed that Christian Marxism is, “if not the spiritual son, the prodigal son” of Maurras. The

worker priests of the 1940s and 1950s learned from the Action française of their youth a critique of liberalism,

the bourgeoisie, and democracy. Maurras’s “legal” France versus “real” France returned here as two

versions of democracy—the formal (and presumptively false) democracy of the silent majority versus the

authentic participatory democracy of radical movements. Maurrassian journals, such as Jeunesse de l’Église,
ipped within a decade to declare “Marxism as the immanent philosophy of the worker.” Yet Christian

Marxism departed from Maurras in its demand for the future. It embraced the revolutionary passion that

Maurras condemned.

The fourth political movement was more peculiar still. Against Maurras, General de Gaulle accepted

republicanism and democracy. But in founding the Fifth Republic, he gave the state the stamp of
Maurrassisme. His constitution strengthened the executive so that it was a kingship in all but name, and

thus diminished the importance of parliamentary politics. De Gaulle’s own statesmanship was classicist.

(He explicitly praised Maurras’s classicism.) He prioritized the political—particularly foreign policy—and

exalted national independence in a world where he thought ideologies were less important than
competition among nations. Governing for the sake of the “real France,” with the monarchical ethos of

noblesse oblige, de Gaulle exhorted the French to transcend their divisions for the sake of national unity. If
his constitutional reform of 1969 had passed, he would have left France with the more decentralized state

Maurras espoused. As it was, de Gaulle said in retirement that his greatest regret was not being able to

restore the monarchy. In a much-discussed article of the mid-1960s, Raymond Aron observed that

Gaullisme was the revenge of Maurrassisme.

All these movements—Vichy apologists, Christian democrats, Christian Marxists, Gaullists—have their
aws. The Vichy apologia depends on dubious counterfactuals. Christian democracy eventually

abandoned its spiritual basis and turned political moderation into “the fanaticism of the center.” Christian

Marxism devoured Christianity. Gaullisme was hijacked after its founder passed on. But understanding the

complexity, strengths, and weaknesses of all these political movements, to say nothing of the “troubling

familiarity” of their concerns, requires understanding their origins. It requires reading Maurras.

Nathan Pinkoski is a postdoctoral research fellow at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.