The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  2Garibaldi was a military hero of the Italian Risorgimento and a mortal enemy of the pope, against whose armies he had led bands of volunteers. After Napoleon III’s abdication, he declared his support for the Government of National Defense and even commanded a volunteer army against the Germans in the Vosges Mountains.

  3Three million copies of Le Tour de la France were sold within the first ten years of publication and six million by the end of the century. There were many more readers than that, as children often used copies purchased by their school. The Catholic Encyclopedia states, “It was at the age of thirteen-and-a-half, in the summer of 1425, that Joan first became conscious of that manifestation, whose supernatural character it would now be rash to question, which she afterwards came to call her ‘voices’ or her ‘counsel.’ ”

  4Pierre Cauchon, a French bishop and strong partisan of English interests in France at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, was instrumental in convincing the Burgundians, who had captured Joan, to surrender her to the English. He then presided over her trial.

  5It was to the commander of a military bastion at Vaucouleurs, Robert de Baudricourt, that Joan spoke of her message and presented a demand for troops to raise the siege of Orléans.

  6No such concern banished military pomp in a celebration of Joan’s venerableness at the Church of St. Vincent de Paul on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. “The presence of soldiery in full uniform gave a quasi-military character to the ceremonies,” reported the New York Times on November 26, 1894. “Detachments from the Bataillon Français, the Grenadiers Rochambeau, and the Garde Lafayette were stationed in the centre aisle. The parishioners walked through a lane of glistening bayonets to their pews.… At times, above the chanting of the mass, would ring out the sharp orders of the commanding officers, followed by the rattle of the rifles upon the stone floor.”

  7Among Condorcet’s most distinguished alumni was Marcel Proust.

  8The thrashing took place in an amphitheater of the Sorbonne, where Thalamas was lecturing. Camelots du Roi also staged campaigns against Jewish lecturers and the dean of the faculty. Anti-Semitism was written into the oath taken by inductees: “I pledge myself to fight against every republican regime. The republican spirit disorganises national defense and favors religious influences directly hostile to traditional Catholicism. A regime that is French must be restored to France. Our only future lies, therefore in the Monarch, as it is personified in the heir of the forty kings who, for a thousand years, made France. Only the Monarchy ensures public safety and, in its responsibility for order, prevents the public evils that anti-Semitism and nationalism denounce.”

  9The “taxis de la Marne” became the stuff of legend. France suffered 250,000 casualties in the first battle of the Marne, and Germany almost as many.

  10When President Loubet visited King Victor Emmanuel III very early in the century, Benedict XV’s reactionary predecessor, Pius X, chose not to meet him. Relations deteriorated. The law of separation between church and state in 1905 was denounced by Pius and led to a break in diplomatic relations. They were resumed in May 1921.

  11The bishop portrayed her as “a model for Christian youth, a model of the virtues that characterize the good citizen and true patriot, a model of resignation to the sacrifices everyone is called upon to make in life.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Royalism’s Deaf Troubadour

  L’Action Française has acquired broad influence in French thought. You are a patriarch, already. One can see in outline the historical chapter written and filled by our generation.

  —BARRÈS to Maurras, December 1920

  Civilization is an effort to reduce violence to an ultima ratio. Direct action reverses the order and makes violence the first option or, rather, the only one.

  —ORTEGA Y GASSET

  As president of the Ligue des Patriotes, Maurice Barrès often had occasion to join forces with Charles Maurras, leader of the royalist movement L’Action Française, who contributed in no small measure to the brutalization of French political life between the world wars. Barrésien and maurrassien both denoted programmatic xenophobia. Unlike Barrès, Maurras lived long enough to see several of his prominent young followers gravitate toward Fascism, to hail the Vichy regime, to be convicted after World War II of “complicity with the enemy,” and to spend his last years in prison.

  The cult of a virgin savior—indeed, the Neo-Romantic penchant in conservative circles for all things medieval—reflected a fortress-France nationalism whose mission was not only to protect the fatherland from external hordes but to defend the cohesive social organism against subversive change. What went by the name of progress loomed ahead even more menacingly than Germany. “[This worldview] oriented itself toward the interior, toward the past,” wrote the historian Michel Winock.

  It directed its antagonism first and foremost against the democratic and liberal regime, the “Jewish, Masonic Republic,” but discernible beneath the political agenda was a spiritual reaction against decadence by people who understood the defense of French interests to be that of a completed civilization at war with the new mobility of things and beings.

  “Completed civilization” is a key phrase. It calls to mind the opprobrium heaped on Impressionist pictures for spurning the historical and biblical themes favored by juries at the annual Salon. Art that lacked “fini” (high finish) was not art but the defiling of consecrated space by alien eyes. Napoleon III arranged to have paintings deemed unworthy of state recognition—most famously Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe—displayed, like freaks in a side show, at an alternate exhibition indelicately called Le Salon des Refusés. The name had great symbolic resonance. Nationalists of the kind Winock describes would have welcomed a Salon des Refusés for every manifestation of the modern intellect and sensibility, from a government inclined to place time itself in quarantine and enforce principles as retrograde as Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. No one illustrated this disposition more obstinately than Charles Maurras.

  In 1923, André Gide observed of the fifty-five-year-old Maurras, who had begun to lose his hearing at age fourteen, that he was “a deaf man as England is an island nation—whence his strength.” Goethe’s aphorism “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” suited him just as well.

  Intensely proud of his ability to store “auditory memories,” Maurras could still, in old age, hear his first teacher reciting Casimir Delavigne’s passionately patriotic poem “La Mort de Jeanne d’Arc.” Elementary school was the École du Sacré-Coeur in Martigues, a town situated on the canal linking a large brackish lake, the Étang de Berre, to the Mediterranean. Natives earned their living from the sea, spoke Provençal more fluently than French, and, unlike boisterous Marseillais, twenty miles away, looked askance at the Third Republic taking its first, uncertain steps after the Franco-Prussian War. Maurras’s mother, Marie, who came from a seafaring family with relatives planted on distant shores, was Provençal born and bred, although apt to treat Provençal as a vulgar patois unwelcome in the household. Her father had commanded a frigate in the fleet that repulsed Ottoman line-of-battle ships at Navarino during the Bourbon Restoration and had fought under Louis-Philippe’s third son, the Prince de Joinville (famous for bringing Napoleon’s ashes back from Saint Helena). In retirement he served as mayor of Martigues. Not so venturesome was the Maurras clan. Its generations had been collecting taxes in the lower Rhône valley since the early eighteenth century. Jean Maurras, the last of his name to do so, married late and fathered Charles at fifty-seven, in 1868. What little is known about him suggests that he was rather more fun-loving than his young wife. But fun didn’t run free in the Maurras household, as Marie, who supervised her family’s spiritual welfare, left nothing to chance. Except La Fontaine’s fables, only Bible stories passed for entertainment. By the time Charles entered the École du Sacré-Coeur, where history meant histoire sainte, his mother had thoroughly schooled him in both Testaments.

  Still, there were excursions to the coast and t
o the lush valley of the Huveaune River, which flowed seaward from the Provençal hills. Maurras remembered Martigues’s island suburb sitting on the canal like a white gull, long days threaded with gold, church bells ringing the Angelus, lapping waves, a warmhearted nanny from the Dauphiné, and himself a pampered child—pampered the more for having entered the world after the death of a two-year-old brother. Another brother, Joseph, arrived in 1872.

  At five, Maurras, the future royalist who dreamed of restoring the ancien régime, was shaken by a domestic upheaval that ended the unbroken succession of golden days, creating a “before” and an “after.” In 1874, his father died.

  Two years later, Marie Maurras, ambitious for Charles, moved her small family from Martigues to Aix-en-Provence and enrolled him in the cathedral school. If her hope was that Greek and Latin would purge him of everything primitive or provincial, she did not reckon with the need, in a fatherless boy, to find anchors wherever he could. Marie spurned Provençal as peasant jargon, but when Charles discovered Frédéric Mistral’s poetry, he embraced the movement to restore classical Occitan, and eventually became a powerful advocate. Its restoration agreed with his idea of France as it had been before eighteenth-century Jacobins cast a net of bureaucratic uniformity over la France profonde—the organic hinterland and its regional cultures.

  Marie Maurras found Charles’s scholarship worth the scrimping. Every year he brought home prizes for excellence in Latin, French, and religious instruction. It was an unusual child who fell in love with Racine at age twelve, and priests noted the phenomenon. Fortunately for all concerned, the decision of an aggressively secularizing minister of education to close schools run by “unauthorized” religious orders did not affect the Collège Catholique, a diocesan establishment. Maurras would always remember the day in June 1880 when three thousand soldiers descended upon Aix to maintain order, or to restore it should the expulsion of Jesuits excite resistance, in this town whose traditionally conservative population had swollen since 1871 with the arrival of refugees from the surrendered provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Charles’s first teacher at the Collège Catholique, and his neighbors, were all Lorrainers.

  Charles had hardly begun to heal from one catastrophic loss than tragedy struck again. In 1882, at the age of fourteen, he went deaf. The deafness was not complete; nor would it ever be. But a malady baffling every doctor consulted—and there were many—drove home the feeling that nature had wronged him, that he stood outside the human species in an occluded head. What future could he have among men? Attending naval college and following his heroic grandfather to sea were unthinkable. What present could he enjoy among barely audible schoolmates and teachers? “The most cherished voices were henceforth heard only as a murmur devoid of meaning,” he later wrote. “No one can portray this state who has not experienced it. You’d think that a tragic silence envelops the sufferer, but nothing is falser. On the contrary one is assailed within oneself by a storm of cries, of hummings and of moans, which overmaster one.”

  An incident that took place during the summer of that fatal year at the Maurras house outside Martigues, which Marie never sold, bears upon his response to these tormenting questions. Five ancient cypresses separated the house from an orchard whose owner regarded them as an abomination depriving his fruit trees of light and sending their roots into his soil. Charles argued that they should be cut down. He argued the case so well, in fact, that his mother, who was desperately short of funds, conceded. “What evil demon made me plead for the enemy and produce sophistries that ultimately, to my eternal shame, met with success.… I can still see the pink flesh of their sap-wood bleeding between the foliage.… No sooner had the last trunk fallen than I felt pangs of conscience, and a desire to repair the irreparable.” Later on, he may have come to believe that his forceful brief was dictated by anger at the irreparable in himself. He had assaulted five patriarchal shoots of nature before turning his rage against his own defective being. It was then, in 1882 or not long afterward, that he tried to hang himself with a cloth tied to the hasp of a window.

  What didn’t kill him made him stronger, though not right away and not without the support of a remarkable priest from the cathedral school. Upon learning about Charles’s disability, Abbé Jean-Baptiste Penon, who was known in the diocese as a superior classical scholar, offered to tutor the boy and to shepherd him through his troubled adolescence. This he did for three years. Charles’s salvation was his thrice-weekly lessons at home or at a local seminary with Penon. The young priest assigned him long passages of Homer, Virgil, and Horace. Together they steeped themselves in French classical theater. Penon introduced him to Sainte-Beuve. He deferred to Charles’s love of Musset and Baudelaire. They read histories of France by writers of different ideological persuasions. Most important was philosophy. For Charles, days began and ended with Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Hippolyte Taine. The self-destructive rage that had afflicted him at fourteen waxed into a fever of philosophical speculation. Penon kept faith with him even when the boy, after studying Pascal at his mentor’s behest, announced that religious belief was a lost cause. The Pensées had shaken young Maurras. As much as “the silence of infinite spaces” frightened Pascal, a silent universe answerable to a cryptic God repelled the boy. Pascal conceived of Creation as a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; the world for which Charles yearned would be as centered as the solar system. Writing to Penon during a school retreat at Le Tholonet (near one of Paul Cézanne’s favorite perches below Mont Sainte-Victoire), he quoted these lines from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

  The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center

  Observe degree, priority, and place,

  Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

  Office, and custom, in all line of order

  And therefore is the glorious planet Sol,

  In noble eminence enthroned and sphered

  Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye

  Corrects the influence of planets evil,

  And posts, like the commandment of a king,

  Sans check, to good and bad.

  The words are spoken at sea by Ulysses to Agamemnon and followed by the warning that “mutiny,” “plagues,” “portents,” a “raging of waters,” and a “shaking of the earth” supervene when “planets in evil mixture to disorder wander.” He was sixteen. It was 1884. His inner life, he told Penon, felt like “a carnival of the mind, the heart, and the senses.”

  The sun shone less brightly in Paris’s Latin Quarter, where Marie Maurras arrived a year later with sons in tow, Charles having passed the baccalaureate exam and Joseph being admitted to a lycée for the intellectually gifted. Charles would pursue his studies at the Sorbonne, hoping that France’s best physicians could help him hear. Penon, who encouraged the move lest his talented student languish in the backwater of Aix-en-Provence, saw him off.

  Charles’s deafness defeated the specialists. It soon became apparent that modern medicine had no cure for his malady. This conclusion put an end to any prospect of university studies.1 He spent his days reading at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and taking solitary walks. What to do? The question might have gone unanswered if not for his loyal Provençal mentors. Furnished with recommendations from Penon and another teacher at the Collège Catholique, Charles wrote a ten-page review of a 930-page conspectus of Western philosophy for a Thomist periodical called the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne. Even longer reviews followed. Its director was so impressed that he assigned the seventeen-year-old a book column in another journal under his direction, L’Instruction Publique. France’s sluggish economy appears not to have slowed the outpouring of literature, histories, and philosophical treatises: they gave Charles enough material for seventy columns in three years. There was more. La Réforme Sociale, a fortnightly of Catholic inspiration founded by Frédéric Le Play and named after his quasi-feudal reformist movement, welcomed Charles, w
ho, undaunted by the challenge of having to write intelligibly about social economics, became a regular contributor.2 The Maurras family scraped by on what he earned and on rent from a tenant in Martigues.

  Charles remained deeply ambivalent in the matter of religion. Unable to embrace the church or to purchase security outside it, he unburdened himself to Penon: “In spite of weaknesses, I feel an inexpressible need to attach myself to something firm. I have found what appear to be principles of solidity in human science, but when I clutch them, I bloody my hands on their rough surface.” The more philosophy he read, the more phantasmagoric the world became. “Questions without answers, tangled and contradictory. One thing is certain: the question exists and one must resolve it in order to feel happy.” Penon insisted that Charles’s longing for invincible selfhood could be satisfied only one way. The heartfelt observance of religious duties was imperative: “You must perceive Jesus Christ as a live presence rather than a remote sovereign, and reserve several minutes of the day for Him, as you would for a friend. The means are very simple. Read the Gospel without commentary; especially Saint Luke or Saint John: a chapter a day.… If one passage leaves you cold and distracted, another will transport you.” What led to religious conviction, he said, was the heart, not mathematical proof—Aristotle’s “truth prior to predication.” Knowing the young man to be afflicted with feelings of “anguish” and “moral emptiness” dampened the pleasure he took in his success. He wrote, “I shall never resign myself to seeing you torn from these beliefs, these practices for which your intelligence and your heart are so well suited, and which alone give life its true meaning.”