Between 1886 and 1891, Maurras published 169 articles in La Réforme Sociale and as many in a Catholic daily called L’Observateur Français.3 Penon marveled at his fecundity. But he would just as certainly have frowned upon the un-Catholic company the young man began to keep. That Maurras kept any company at all was the result of an impromptu visit from three young poets whose work he had praised. Undeterred by his protestations of deafness, they introduced him to the profane neighborhood of cafés at his doorstep. Before long, he became fluent in Latin Quarter argot and seasoned his prose with it. He cultivated an unkempt appearance and bad manners. He read Émile Zola’s novels and people’s palms. He described this world as la brousse—the bush—and its feminine fauna as a “veritable nation” of the unhappily married, the separated, and the divorced. In short, he spent several seasons visiting a place walled off from him since adolescence by deafness, philosophy, and religion. The bush was “delicious,” he wrote. But it was uninhabitable. Its offerings were a mixed blessing, depriving him of weight even as it liberated him from gravity.
Maurras turned twenty on April 20, 1888. He would always remember the year, not so much for that reason as for his encounter with the twenty-five-year-old Maurice Barrès, in whom he immediately recognized a more sympathetic confidant than Jean-Baptiste Penon. Sous l’Oeil des Barbares, which he reviewed in L’Observateur Français, was the link. His political idiom may not have been Barrès’s, nor were their barbarians identical, but the narrative of a struggle between the Self and non-Self rang loud and clear. “At the time,” he later recalled, “I was dwelling almost obsessively on an idea of the English historian Macaulay, who thought that our civilization would perish, not at the hands of invaders from without, like the Roman, but of internal barbarians, ‘barbarians from below,’ as he put it: our Communards, our Socialists, our plebs.” Their first exchange of letters struck a more personal note. “I must admit that Sous l’Oeil des Barbares enthralled me,” Maurras wrote on November 4, 1888. “I have lived fragments of that life. And where our sensibilities differ, the analysis is so painfully close to the bone that one can imagine oneself suffering in your place. It is an overflowing of egoistic sympathy.”
The sentence in Sous l’Oeil des Barbares that resonated with Maurras more than any other was the hero’s ultimate supplication: “Oh master, you alone [can point the way], if you exist somewhere—whether you be an axiom, a religion, or a prince of men.” Despite their differences, he and Barrès recognized in each other the believer manqué yearning for salvation. Unable to feel “whole,” authentic, or centered without a transcendent guide, they made gospel of Hippolyte Taine’s materialist formula: race, milieu, moment. Individualism was their common bane. Selfhood resided not in one’s unique history but in a sameness Taine likened to that of the leaves of a tree. It was ordained by one’s race, one’s cultural milieu, one’s moment in time. It was “organic.” And the organic self postulated the existence of an alien “other” bent on invading and uprooting.
A year after the two met, Barrès decided that Georges Boulanger was a “prince of men” and ran for political office under the general’s banner. Maurras, on the other hand, had yet to raise the flag of white lilies. He concerned himself now with literature more than politics or philosophy, letting his ties with Catholic publications go slack. Even so, the literary program to which he subscribed as a founding member of the école romane (the Roman school) and an enthusiast of Provençal poetry foreshadowed his politics. The term “Roman” encapsulated the idea that France’s genius belonged to the Mediterranean or Greco-Latin tradition, which had been perverted by Romanticism and its decadent offspring. Barrès praised the new school in Le Figaro of July 4, 1892, for reviving French literature of the past rather than following the crowd to authors whom the Roman school collectively dubbed “Nordic” (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen); in the article, “The Quarrel of Nationalists and Cosmopolites,” he applied those polarities to literature before they became the obsessive dialectic of his political thinking. Maurras, for his part, published a pamphlet entitled Barbarians and Romans.
What Maurras wrote about politics at that moment foreshadowed the nationalist sentiments with which he championed France’s military establishment during the Dreyfus Affair. As important to him as classical fixity in the chaos of “isms” born of Romantic license was the virtue of one voice in the fractiousness of the Republic. To rise from its slough, France would have to end parliamentary squabbling. “Action” and “energy” were what she wanted. The word “action” became a shibboleth whose political insinuations were destined to inform French consciousness in the twentieth century. Thus, Maurras could despise the Revolution of 1789 yet sympathize with the Terror of 1793, for among Jacobins, the pale cast of thought never sicklied over the native hue of resolution. “Passion, willfulness, desire led to immediate gratification. Words were acts. The memory of those times casts a jaundiced light on our own; nowadays, thoughts have great trouble merely becoming spoken or written words, and actions get so tangled in verbiage that any well-bred mind disdains them, and abandons them to the mediocre.”
Political debate became more relevant several years later, when parliamentary proceedings of the pale, sickly sort gave way to ideological warfare, allowing no middle ground for doubt or decorum. By 1890, Maurras was already hailing Édouard Drumont, the author of the recently published book La France Juive. “In Drumont’s work there are pages, paragraphs, notes whose haughty impertinence reminds one of Saint Simon,” he wrote in L’Observateur Français. “But that is not where his glory lies. His glory lies in having opened a career for men of action, for the audacious.” In 1894, a remark by Barrès about Jews being well established in the Midi provoked a sharp response: “You persist in confusing one or two confined districts of the Gard region with the whole Midi. That is an error for which Alphonse Daudet is responsible.” Maurras went on to say that the city of Nîmes did indeed swarm with Jews, Protestants, and Oriental hucksters, but that Nîmes was a “race” apart—dull-witted, “thick blooded,” loudmouthed, and given to much gesticulation. “Moreover, it is sly and perfidious.… Nîmes is a story of shame. Bear in mind, however, that the entire Midi scorns these people. You won’t find anyone like them elsewhere in our region, except perhaps in Cahors, which is a former ghetto.” Maurras habitually described foreigners resident in France—all Jews included—as “métèques,” giving a pejorative twist to a word of Greek origin.4
When they had set matters straight, Barrès invited Maurras to write for La Cocarde, whose editorial direction he assumed with a tip of the hat to Édouard Drumont. Drumont, in turn, had launched his own newspaper, La Libre Parole, at the height of the Panama Scandal, with revelations of knavery in Parliament and his ears pricked for scandals to come. In 1894, readers were informed that a court-martial held behind closed doors had tried an unnamed officer accused of passing military secrets to Germany.
It was in the nature of things that the traitor should be Jewish. Cast in a stock role waiting to be filled by opportune candidates, Dreyfus was treasonous long before treason was committed. His court-martial had not yet taken place when Maurras declared that Jews were “the scourge of nations,” subversion being their “natural métier.”5 Loyal only to their own kind, they could not understand that the integrity of the social organism must prevail over the guilt or innocence of an individual, that judicial rectitude must always defer to “la raison d’état.”
Like most people, Maurras saw no reason to question the rightness of Dreyfus’s conviction until evidence came to light that fraudulent documents had been placed in his dossier and Émile Zola published an indictment of the general staff on the front page of L’Aurore in January 1898. Only then did Maurras join the fray, vehemently contending that the affair would never have become an affair if an ignorant populace hadn’t been harangued by partisan tongues. Where pandemonium reigned, one voice, in the person of a king, could have settled accounts. “There was no one to say to deputies toeing a
party line, ‘I am neither this administration nor that one, I am neither Jewry, nor the Protestant Consistory, nor the Catholic Church. I embody the race that made France French. In the name of that race and that fatherland, all this muck must be carted away,’ ” he wrote. The French, he claimed, dreamed not so much of justice as of “public salvation,” which compelled them to reorganize political life around a supreme arbiter. Judeo-Protestant individualism was the villain.
Maurras’s commanding moment came after the imprisonment and suicide on August 31, 1898, of Colonel Hubert Henry, who had forged documents used to incriminate Alfred Dreyfus. With the conspiracy against Dreyfus unraveling, Maurras argued, in a series of seven articles entitled “First Blood,” that Henry’s mischief, reprehensible though it may have been by conventional standards, ought to be judged as the necessary means to a virtuous end. Far from blackening the forger, the forgeries illuminated his heroic character. Henry lied in the interest of “national salvation” and “public order.” He lied to tell the truth. And at the end he sacrificed himself for the greater good, spilling his blood magnanimously. His was patriotic gore. “Every sacred drop … still runs warm wherever the heart of the nation beats,” Maurras apostrophized.
We should have waved your bloody tunic and the sullied blades down the boulevards; marched the coffin, hoisted the mortuary banner like a black flag.… But the national sentiment will awaken to triumph and avenge you. From the country’s soil … there will soon rise monuments to expiate our cowardice.… In life as in death, you marched forward. Your unhappy forgery will be regarded as one of your best martial deeds.
Maurras’s language did not fundamentally differ from that of Joseph de Maistre, who, a hundred years earlier, had enunciated the precept that “nations have a general overriding soul or character and a true moral unity which makes them what they are.” Their happiness and power hinged on the stifling of “individual reason” and the vesting of absolute authority in “national dogmas, that is to say, useful prejudices.”
From this conflict emerged L’Action Française, a movement whose founding prejudice was that Dreyfus could never be absolved of treason and that his unabsolvable guilt served the supremely useful purpose of restoring “national sentiment.” More prominent than Maurras at the outset were Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo, two young men united in the belief that liberal republicanism was sapping France’s vital spirit. On July 10, 1899, they published the first issue of a slender bimonthly review, Le Bulletin de L’Action Française.6 In his manifesto, Vaugeois declared that “action” connoted “reaction,” and he subsequently drove the point home in speeches, as at a banquet thrown by Maurras for Barrès during the Exposition of 1900. “All of us agree, I hope, on the morality, the legitimacy of iron. We have no hypocritically puritanical objections to it, do we? It seems to us that one has the right to save one’s country despite itself. It seems to us that there have always been instances of virtuous violence in history, and that beating a sick man bloody is better than letting him rot.” This was the mind-set that glorified Colonel Henry and only eight years later, in 1908, when L’Action Française attracted enough readers to justify a daily paper of the same name, organized the cadre of street hawkers called Camelots du Roi, who doubled as a paramilitary gang patrolling the student quarter with leaded canes.
The nickname “hawkers of the king” reflected the influence Charles Maurras had come to exert upon the movement. Its founders agreed that France needed saving, but they couldn’t define salvation. They had bugbears in common but no doctrine. That changed as soon as Maurras, with encouragement from colleagues who made light of his deafness, asserted himself. By 1904, activists were royalists echoing Maurras’s disavowal of the Republic and his repudiation of its philosophical commitment to the rights of man. Salvation lay on the far side of 1789, in the France of monarchs, when rationalism had yet to undermine an organic nation and “cosmopolite” to become a French noun; when Money (almost always capitalized in Maurras’s works and implicitly Jewish or Protestant) did not ventriloquize through a parliament; and when the rights of society still prevailed over the individualism propagated by eighteenth-century intellectuals. The Republic was feckless for speaking in many voices. With a multitude of centers and no circumference, it lent itself to the designs of other nations as surely as Dreyfus surrendered military secrets to Germany. “Dictateur et Roi,” an essay written during the summer of 1899, dwells on the theme of identity and alienation. “M. de Bismarck undoubtedly foresaw several of our present woes when he did everything in his power to harness us to a republican system,” wrote Maurras. The iron chancellor knew perfectly well that the strength of a state resides in its single-mindedness. “And since the Republican regime is nothing but the absence of a directing will and coherent thought at the center of power, he realized that such a regime profoundly divides the people who abandon themselves to it and condemns them to perpetual change.”
Charles Maurras in 1903, at age thirty-five.
Not unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in his essay on the origin of languages, characterizes history as entropy, with the power and stamina of speakers in ancient forums devolving into the quarrelsome babble of modern assemblies, Maurras made “unity” his mantra. National selfhood was one resonant voice. It was kingship. “French unity, which is so solid that today it ‘seems’ spontaneous and natural, bespeaks the millennial designs of the French Royal House,” he asserted. “Nature was content to make this unity possible, not necessary or ineluctable: our princes formed and fashioned it as an artist shapes his chosen material.” Where Italy owed its unity to memories of Rome and England to its insularity, art and nature had combined to make France French. The Republic violated both.
The Republic further violated France by separating church and state in 1905, after the Dreyfus convulsion. To be sure, Maurras, although he invoked the country’s basic “Catholicity,” had long since ceased to commune or confess. And among practicing Catholics who had welcomed Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum authorizing acceptance of the Republic, many found Maurras’s argument for subjecting all other considerations to political expediency immoral. A liberal Catholic review, Le Correspondant, demanded answers to three questions—whether L’Action Française’s “exclusive nationalism” and its “deep-rooted hostility to the democratic regime” could be reconciled with the “Christian doctrine of fraternity”; whether “the rigorously scientific observation of natural law” (i.e., Taine’s “race, milieu, moment”) espoused by L’Action Française did not imply the elimination of the supernatural; and what role the church would play in a restored monarchy. Several worried clerics wrote books characterizing Maurras’s thought as pervasively Nietzschean, Machiavellian, or Comtean. “His idolatry of reason has made him disdainful of belief” was the indictment of an editor at Le Correspondant.
Maurras protested that he judged belief to be as natural to man as reason, and more necessary, even though he couldn’t adjust his own mind to square with his judgment. Sympathetic clerics might have offered him the hope that Pascal’s cryptic God offers a despairing seeker: “You wouldn’t have sought Me if you hadn’t already found Me.” But better than belief, in their eyes, was his campaign to prevent the government from seizing derelict country churches and confiscating, auctioning, or destroying their contents.7 He also drew praise from orthodox quarters by publishing in L’Action Française all eighty articles of Pius IX’s memorable tirade against freedom of conscience, science, and the modern world—The Syllabus of Errors.8 “Our institute,” wrote the director of the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute in Aix, “wishing to recognize the services you have rendered the cause of truth by demonstrating that the principle of French nationality is instinct with Catholicism, and by choosing Pius IX’s Syllabus as the basis for social reconstruction, elected you an honorary member at its session of April 12, 1907.”
Blessings for Maurras as a believer in the inseparability of fatherland, religion, and society came from on high when Marie
Maurras made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1911. Letters of recommendation secured her an audience with Pius X, who praised Charles for fighting the good fight. It cheered her. Pontifical favor (which would be denied Maurras the nonbeliever by Pius X’s successor) was almost as heartwarming as the conversion she never ceased to urge upon him.9
That year, three years before World War I, the good fight included debates in which L’Action Française joined battle with the Sorbonne, whose lecture halls were seen by parties of the Right as temples of republican proselytism. A witness to one such debate describes fifty Camelots du Roi armed with heavy canes forming a protective hedge at the foot of the stage. Loud applause greeted Maurras, “a young man, barely forty.” He was of medium height, thin, and sporting his lifelong Vandyke, with “an air of authority, of keenness, of eminent distinction and something slightly sad and guarded.” The witness saw “a hint of Richelieu” in him. He sat at a long table flanked by six confrères. Behind them stood two rows of friends, “like prelates behind fathers of the Church.” All eyes were fixed on Maurras. The witness described “his head with its imperious profile held high, seductive in its insolence and youth, his brow careworn, furrowed, almost too wide for the diminishing oval of his bearded jaw.” Barrès called him a “patriarch” several years later, after the war. He carefully groomed himself for the part.10
War was looming in 1911. A political crisis developed when a German gunboat docked at the Moroccan port of Agadir. This was viewed by England and France as a hostile gesture, challenging England’s maritime dominion and France’s occupation of Morocco. Germany did indeed feel that she had not received a fair share of African spoils and made her position known in negotiations that led to the Treaty of Fez. France surrendered the French Equatorial African colony of Middle Congo in exchange for Germany’s recognition of her Moroccan protectorate.
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