Charles Maurras

Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras (; French: [ʃaʁl moʁas]; 20 April 1868 – 16 November 1952) was a French author, politician, poet and critic. He was an organiser and principal philosopher of Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist, medievalist, conservative, corporatist, integralist, nationalist, traditionalist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras also held anti-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-liberal, anti-Masonic, anti-Nazi, anti-Islam, anti-Protestant and antisemitic views. His ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and integral nationalism, and led to the political doctrine of Maurrassisme.

While raised Roman Catholic, Maurras went deaf and became an agnostic in his youth, but remained anti-secularist and supported the Catholic Church solely for political reasons. An Orléanist, he began his career by writing literary criticism and became politically active as a leading anti-Dreyfusard. In 1926, Pope Pius XI issued a papal condemnation of Action Française. In 1927, several of Maurras's works were put in the Index of Forbidden Books, Action Française became the first newspaper ever to be placed on the Catholic Church's list of banned books, and AF members were forbidden from receiving the sacraments; the ban would later be lifted by Pope Pius XII in 1939.

In 1936, after voicing death threats against the socialist politician Léon Blum, Maurras was sentenced to eight months in La Santé. Maurras was elected to the Académie Française in 1938 and later expelled in 1945. During the World War II Maurras opposed Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but supported Vichy France, believing that Free France was a puppet state of the Soviet Union. He explained his support for Vichy, writing: "As a royalist I never lost sight of the necessity of monarchy. But to enthrone the royal heir, the heritage had to be saved." After Vichy's collapse he was arrested and accused of complicity with the enemy. Following a political trial he was convicted of incitement to murder, and received Indignité nationale and a life sentence. In 1951, after falling ill, he was transferred to a hospital and subsequently received a medical pardon. In his final days he reverted to Catholicism and received the last rites shortly before his death.

As a political theorist and major right-wing intellectual of 20th-century Europe, Maurras significantly influenced right-wing and far-right ideologies, anticipating some of the ideas of fascism. He has been described as the most important French conservative intellectual, and has directly influenced a large number of politicians, theorists, and writers on both the left and right. Maurras' legacy has remained controversial to this day. Critics have derided him as a "fascist icon", while supporters, including Georges Pompidou, have praised him as a prophet. Others, including Emmanuel Macron, have taken a nuanced approach, with Macron stating: "I fight all the antisemitic ideas of Maurras, but I find it absurd to say that Maurras must no longer exist."

Maurras was born into a Provençal family, brought up by his mother and grandmother in a Catholic and monarchist environment. In his early teens, he became deaf. Like many other French politicians, he was affected greatly by France's defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. After the 1871 Commune of Paris and the 1879 defeat of Patrice de MacMahon's Moral Order government, French society slowly found a consensus for the French Third Republic, symbolised by the rallying of the monarchist Orleanists to the Republic. Maurras published his first article at the age of 17 years in the review Annales de philosophie chrétienne. He then collaborated on various reviews, including L'Événement, La Revue bleue, La Gazette de France and La Revue encyclopédique, in which he praised Classicism and attacked Romanticism.

At some point during his youth Maurras lost his Catholic faith and became an agnostic. In 1887, at the age of seventeen, he came to Paris and began writing literary criticism in the Catholic and Orleanist Observateur. At this time Maurras was influenced by Orleanism, as well as German philosophy reviewed by Catholic thinker Léon Ollé-Laprune, an influence of Henri Bergson, and by the philosopher Maurice Blondel, one of the inspirations of Christian "modernists", who would later become his greatest opponents. He became acquainted with the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral in 1888 and shared the federalist thesis of Mistral's Félibrige movement (see Maurras and Félibrige). The same year he met the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès.

In 1890 Maurras approved Cardinal Lavigerie's call for the rallying of Catholics to the Republic, thus making his opposition not to the Republic in itself, but to "sectarian Republicanism".

Beside this Orleanist affiliation, Maurras shared some traits with Bonapartism. In December 1887 he demonstrated to the cry of "Down with the robbers!" during the military decorations trafficking scandal, which had involved Daniel Wilson, the son-in-law of President Jules Grévy. Despite this, he initially opposed the nationalist-populist Boulangist philosophy. But in 1889, after a visit to Maurice Barrès, Barrès voted for the Boulangist candidate; despite his "anti-Semitism of the heart" ("anti-sémitisme de coeur"), he decided to vote for a Jew.

During 1894–1895, Maurras briefly worked for Barrès' newspaper La Cocarde (The Cockade), although he sometimes opposed Barrès' opinions concerning the French Revolution. La Cocarde supported General Georges Ernest Boulanger, who had become a threat to the parliamentary Republic in the late 1880s.

Maurras became involved in politics at the time of the Dreyfus affair, becoming an anti-Dreyfusard. He endorsed Hubert-Joseph Henry's forgery, blaming Alfred Dreyfus, as he considered that defending Dreyfus weakened the Army and the justice system. According to Maurras, Dreyfus was to be sacrificed on the altar of national interest. But while the Republican nationalist thinker Barrès accused Dreyfus of being guilty because of his Jewishness, Maurras went a step further, vilifying the "Jewish Republic". While Barrès' anti-Semitism originated both in pseudo-scientific racist contemporary theories and Biblical exegesis, Maurras decried "scientific racism" in favor of a more radical "state anti-Semitism."

Maurras assisted with the foundation of the nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard Ligue de la patrie française at the end of 1898, along with Maurice Barrès, the geographer Marcel Dubois, the poet François Coppée and the critic and literature professor Jules Lemaître.

In 1899, Maurras founded the review Action Française (AF), an offshoot of the newspaper created by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois the year preceding. Maurras quickly became influential in the movement, and converted Pujo and Vaugeois to monarchism, which became the movement's principal cause. With Léon Daudet, he edited the movement's review, La Revue de l'Action Française, which during 1908 became a daily newspaper with the shorter title L'Action Française. The AF mixed integral nationalism with reactionary themes, shifting the nationalist ideology, previously supported by left-wing Republicans, to the political right. It had a wide readership during the implementation of the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. In 1899 he wrote a short notice in favour of monarchy, "Dictateur et roi" ("Dictator and King"), and then in 1900 his Enquête sur la monarchie (Investigations on Monarchy), published in the Legitimist mouthpiece La Gazette de France, which made him famous. Maurras also published thirteen articles in the newspaper Le Figaro during 1901 and 1902, as well as six articles between November 1902 and January 1903 in Edouard Drumont's anti-Semitic newspaper, La Libre Parole.

Between 1905 and 1908, when the Camelots du Roi monarchist league was initiated, Maurras introduced the concept of political activism through extra-parliamentary leagues, theorising the possibility of a coup d'état.

Maurras also founded the Ligue d'Action Française in 1905, whose mission was to recruit members for the Action Française.

Maurras then endorsed France's entry into the First World War (even to the extent of supporting the thoroughly republican Georges Clemenceau) against the German Empire. During the war the Jewish businessman Emile Ullman was forced to resign from the board of directors of the Comptoir d'Escompte bank after Maurras accused him of being a German agent. He then criticised the Treaty of Versailles for not being harsh enough on the Germans and condemned Aristide Briand's policy of cooperation with Germany. In 1923 Germaine Berton carried out the assassination of his fellow Action Française member Marius Plateau. Berton had planned to also assassinate Léon Daudet and Maurras but was unsuccessful.

In 1925, he called for the murder of Abraham Schrameck, the Interior Minister of Paul Painlevé's Cartel des Gauches's (left-wing coalition) government, who had ordered the disarming of the far-right leagues. For this death threat, he was sentenced to a fine and a year in jail (suspended).

In 1929, Pope Pius XI condemned the Action Française, which until then was supported by a large number of Catholics, clergy, and laity alike. Several of the works of the Maurras, the movement's founder, were placed into the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, alongside the movement's official newspaper. This was a devastating blow to the movement. On 8 March 1927, AF members were prohibited from receiving the sacraments. Many of its members left (two Catholics who were forced to look for a different path in politics and life were the writers François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos) and it entered a period of decline.

Maurras again voiced death threats against the President of the Council (prime minister) Léon Blum, organiser of the Popular Front, in the Action Française of 15 May 1936, emphasising his Jewish origins (he once called him an "old semitic camel"). This other death threat earned him eight months in prison, from 29 October 1936 to 6 July 1937. While imprisoned, he received the support of Marie-Pauline Martin, Henry Bordeaux, Pius XI and up to 60,000 sympathetic citizens. Fearing communism, he joined the pacifists and praised the Munich Agreement of 1938, which the President of the Council Édouard Daladier had signed without any illusions. He also wrote in Action Française:

There are certain conservatives in France who fill us with disgust. Why? Because of their stupidity. What kind of stupidity? Hitlerism. These French "conservatives" crawl on their bellies before Hitler. These former nationalists cringe before him. A few zealots wallow in dirt, in their own dirt, with endless Heils. The wealthier they are, the more they own, the more important it is to make them understand that if Hitler invaded us he would skin them much more thoroughly than Blum, Thorez and Stalin combined. This "conservative" error is suicidal. We must appeal to our friends not to let themselves be befogged. We must tell them: Be on your guard! What is now at stake is not anti-democracy or anti-Semitism. France above all!

A Provence-born author, Maurras joined Félibrige, a literary and cultural association founded by Frédéric Mistral and other Provençal writers to defend and promote Occitan languages and literature. The name of the association was derived from félibre, a Provençal word meaning pupil or follower.

Maurras' political ideas were based on intense nationalism (what he described as "integral nationalism") and a belief in an ordered society based on strong government. These were the bases of his endorsement for both the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church.

He formulated an aggressive political strategy, which contrasted with the Legitimists' apathy for political action. He managed to combine the paradox of a reactionary thought which would actively change history, a form of Counter-revolution opposed to simple conservatism. His "integral nationalism" rejected all democratic principles which he judged contrary to "natural inequality", criticising all evolution since the 1789 French Revolution, and advocated the return to a hereditary monarchy.

Like many people in Europe at the time, he was haunted by the idea of "decadence", partly inspired by his reading of the publications of Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan, and admired classicism. He felt that France had lost its grandeur during the French Revolution in 1789, a grandeur inherited from its origins as a province of the Roman Empire and forged by, as he put it, "forty kings who in a thousand years made France." The French Revolution, he wrote in the Observateur Français, was negative and destructive.

He traced this decline further back, to the Enlightenment and the Reformation; he described the source of the evil as "Swiss ideas", a reference to the adopted nation of John Calvin and the birth nation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Maurras further blamed France's decline on "Anti-France", which he defined as the "four confederate states of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons and foreigners" (his actual word for the latter being the xenophobic term métèques). Indeed, to him the first three were all "internal foreigners."

Antisemitism and anti-Protestantism were common themes in his writings. He believed that the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the eventual outcome of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had all contributed to individuals valuing themselves more than the nation, with consequent negative effects on the latter, and that democracy, modernism and secular liberalism were only making matters worse.

Maurras was a major intellectual influence of integral nationalism, national Catholicism, Latin conservatism, and far-right movements. He and the Action Française influenced many people and movements including General Francisco Franco, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, António Sardinha, Leon Degrelle, the historian and journalist Álvaro Alcalá-Galiano y Osma and autonomist movements in Europe. The Christian Democrat Jacques Maritain was also close to Maurras before the papal condemnation of the AF in 1927, and criticised democracy in one of his early writings, Une opinion sur Charles Maurras ou le devoir des catholiques. Furthermore, Maurrassism also influenced many writings from members of the Organisation armée secrète who theorised "counter-revolutionary warfare". In Spain, the far-right Acción Española was strongly influenced by Maurras's movement both in its monarchism and name.

The influence extended to Latin America, as in Mexico where Jesús Guiza y Acevedo was nicknamed "the little Maurras", as well as the historian Carlos Pereyra or the Venezuelan author Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, who wrote a book titled Cesarismo democrático (Democratic Caesarism). Maurras' thought also influenced Catholic fundamentalist supporters of the Brazilian dictatorship (1964–85) as well as the Cursillos de la Cristiandad (Christendom Courses), similar to the Cité Catholique group, which were initiated during 1950 by the bishop of Ciudad Real, Mgr. Hervé. The Argentine militarist Juan Carlos Onganía, who overthrew Arturo Illia in a military putsch in 1966, as well as Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, who succeeded Onganía after another coup, had participated in the Cursillos de la Cristiandad, as did also the Dominican militarists Antonio Imbert Barrera and Elías Wessin y Wessin, chief of staff of the military and an opponent of the restoration of the 1963 Constitution after Rafael Trujillo was deposed. In Argentina he also influenced the nationalist writers of the 1920s and 1930s such as Rodolfo Irazusta and Juan Carulla.

In 2017, Michael Crowley wrote that Steve Bannon, then chief strategist to U.S. President Donald Trump, "has also expressed admiration for the reactionary French philosopher Charles Maurras, according to French media reports confirmed by Politico."

2016: The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Awakening, Arktos Media. ISBN 978-1910524985