The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Just as he had laid the blame for the entire Dreyfus Affair at the doorstep of a bickering National Assembly, so Maurras attributed France’s surrender of Middle Congo to the absence of a coherent foreign policy, with ministers rotating through the Quai d’Orsay like horses on a carousel. Thenceforth, in L’Action Française and in lectures, Maurras concerned himself almost exclusively with the redemption of national honor. No one was more prolific of articles lamenting the unpreparedness of the army, denouncing Republican governments as pawns controlled by the same treasonous forces that had set Dreyfus free, calling attention to the omnipresence of spies, or generally beating the drums for war.

  The drumbeat grew louder in 1913 during the weeks of parliamentary debate over a proposal to lengthen compulsory military service.11 Maurras hailed the three-year law as progress, but he credited royalty for its passage. “The lugubrious fact of the matter is,” he wrote on July 21, “that neither our voices nor the sticks of the Camelots du Roi … would have sufficed to rouse the Republic of Dreyfus from its inertia.” Agadir did it. The “republican world” would never have scrambled to its feet if not for the initiative taken by Emperor Wilhelm II— a Hohenzollern rather than a Capetian, but royalty all the same. In subsequent issues of L’Action Française, Maurras devoted his column to the generals who pressed the need for more troops at the National Assembly, applauding them at the expense of limp-wristed parliamentarians. Moved by the testimony of General Auguste Mercier, he asserted that there was nothing more eloquent in any language than the military order to charge: “I don’t hesitate to express my admiration for a sick, crippled Garibaldi huddled inside a carriage but still managing to issue the command ‘Advance, gentlemen!’ to his band. Even more sublime was the injured Marshal de Saxe, carried to the front line on a litter, urging his troops forward not with words but with a simple gesture at the battle of Fontenoy [in 1745].”12 General Paul Pau was made of the same stuff. He, too, exemplified the man of action whose plain language bespoke his virility. “General Pau’s speech,” Maurras wrote, “had the power of an act, a political act capable of changing views, feelings, and resolutions.… Parliamentarians are above all delicate old ladies sensitive to draughts. The masculine voice of General Pau stiffened their spine for several hours or weeks.”13 Nothing is more beautiful, he went on, than some much debated idea stripped of everything but its necessary garments. The ancients knew it. Men of action enjoyed pride of place in the Athenian Pnyx and the Roman Forum.

  A few days after shooting Jean Jaurès, Raoul Villain wrote to his brother, “So I have brought down the flag-bearer, the great traitor of the Three-Year Law, the furnace-mouth that swallowed all appeals from Alsace-Lorraine. I punished him, and my act was the symbol of a new day.” Rumor had it that Villain was a Camelot du Roi or otherwise employed by L’Action Française, in whose rogues’ gallery Jaurès figured prominently. Maurras, unlike Barrès’s maître à penser Jules Soury and the anti-Semitic Comtesse de Martel de Janville (who wrote under the pen name “Gyp”), did not gloat over the assassination. But his memoir was a casuistic argument eulogizing the victim while condemning his thought, honoring a man who died in the service of “his faith” while execrating the faith. For some years, he wrote, the prospect of peace had been an illusion fostered by Jaurès, who believed that European nations were evolving toward unity. The opposite was true. If not for the chimera of a united Europe, France would have been better prepared for the imminent war. Soldiers would fall in the thousands because Jaurès had disarmed the nation with his oratory.14

  Even so, dying for one’s country was an enviable fate in Maurras’s moral scheme of things. He said so on August 1 in an article entitled “National Duty.” War, he declared, is a burden shared by all but borne for the most part by the happy few. “Fortunate are those whose hearts and arms enjoy the privilege of combat, of putting themselves in harm’s way and smiting the enemy!” To be pitied were those left behind, “good Frenchmen born to shoulder arms but disqualified by some physical or mental condition.” Mindful of all that they owe the air and soil of the fatherland, “they will wonder what price they can pay equivalent to the blood that their friends and brothers are going to shed. As for myself, I can hardly bear the thought of old colleagues departing for the supreme battle.”

  One sacrifice Maurras vowed to make on the home front was postponing his campaign for a monarchy. When France’s salvation was at stake, he wrote, men were honor-bound to defend the Republic. He and his fellow royalists bent their energies to that patriotic end with a zeal fueled by their dedication to Dreyfus’s guilt. Between 1914 and 1918, republicanism went largely undisputed in L’Action Française. But during those four years, the editors—above all Léon Daudet, Alphonse’s elder son—waged war against defeatists and spies, collectively denounced as the “hidden foe.”

  1Not that the physicians didn’t do their utmost. They resorted to catheters and tar vapor, among other formidable procedures.

  2The Catholic Encyclopedia describes as follows the principal reforms proposed by Le Play: “(a) the observance of the Decalogue; (b) public worship—on this point Le Play … expresses his fear that the concordatory regime in France will produce a Church of bureaucrats, and dreams of a liberty such as exists in America for the Church of France; (c) testamentary freedom, which according to him distinguishes peoples of vigorous expansion while the compulsory division of inheritances is the system of conquered races and inferior classes. It is only, he asserts, under the former system that familles-souches can develop, which are established on the soil and are not afraid of being prolific; (d) legislation punishing seduction and permitting the investigation of paternity; (e) institutions founded by large land owners or industrial leaders to uplift the condition of the workman. Le Play feared the intervention of the State in the labour system and considered that the State should encourage the social authorities to exercise what he calls ‘patronage,’ and should reward the heads of industry who founded philanthropic institutions; (f) liberty of instruction, i.e. freedom from State control; (g) decentralization in the State.”

  3L’Observateur Français was the official organ of the Vatican in France.

  4The Greek metoikos simply meant a foreigner in residence or someone who has changed residence—often merchants and financiers. In its pejorative sense it became one of Maurras’s principal contributions to xenophobic jargon of the twentieth century.

  5None of this, he noted, compromised his admiration for Heine and Disraeli.

  6“Bulletin” was soon changed to “Revue.”

  7The law of separation dealt many country parishes a severe blow, depriving them of state funds and rendering them incapable of maintaining their property. Another active campaigner was Maurice Barrès, who chronicled his efforts to rescue churches in La Grande Pitié des Églises de France.

  A beneficiary of the dereliction of churches and abbeys was the American sculptor George Grey Barnard, who lived in Paris and collected medieval artifacts and architectural remnants. When he returned to New York, he housed his acquisitions in a building in Washington Heights. They became the main component of the Cloisters when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought them for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  8The Syllabus was attached to his encyclical Quanta Cura, promulgated in 1864. Leo XIII, who succeeded Pius IX and preceded Pius X, was bracketed between reactionary popes.

  9Maurras died forty-one years later clutching his mother’s rosary.

  10In his early thirties Maurras fell unrequitedly in love with a married countess, Madame de Lasalle-Beaufort, the mother of two children. There were several affairs before and after, but he remained a bachelor, unlike his brother Joseph, who fathered five children. Charles adopted three of them, the youngest a boy eight years old, when Joseph, a widower, died in Saigon. Joseph Maurras practiced medicine and wrote a medical column for L’Action Française.

  11For his efforts, Maurras received a steady flow of letters of gratitude from readers. “Monsieur Char
les Maurras, he who will restore France’s place in the front rank of world armies and thus save France from a Polish-like dismemberment. Homage and gratitude” came from a group of French officers. Another group of soldiers wrote, “In homage and with gratitude for your declaration of war against the Foreigner within.” These letters and others were published on the front page of L’Action Française, February 12, 1913. The “royalist ladies and young women” of Saint-Étienne expressed their admiration for the “noble, courageous fashion in which you have defended the rights of Frenchmen against the Jewish oppressor.”

  12The Battle of Fontenoy was a major engagement in the War of the Austrian Succession; it pitted the forces of Holland, England, and Hanover against France. Saxe commanded the French army in the Netherlands.

  13A year later, the Army of Alsace, under Pau’s command, suffered a decisive defeat in the early weeks of World War I. General Joffre broke it up, assigned survivors to other corps, and sent Pau to St. Petersburg as France’s representative at Russian General Headquarters—the Stavka.

  14Many were judged at fault, not least of all Georges Picquart, the officer responsible for exposing the conspiracy against Dreyfus. Maurras accused him of lowering France’s guard when he served as minister of war between 1906 and 1909, in Clemenceau’s first cabinet.

  CHAPTER 6

  Spy Mania and Postwar Revenge

  The truth is that espionage is an essentially German pursuit. In its chivalrous candor the French character does not lend itself to such skulduggery: we find it repugnant.

  —L’Information (LYON), November 15, 1886

  In Léon Daudet, who set out almost two years before the war to expose subversion, France’s hydra-headed foe met its Hercules. Daudet lived for brawling and enlivened L’Action Française, of which he was editor in chief, with defamatory tirades. In article after article he cast suspicion on naturalized foreigners, unnatural Frenchmen, Jews, left-wing Russian exiles, and enterprises owned wholly or in part by Germans.

  One such enterprise was Baedeker, whose roving cartographers were accused of tracking the disposition of troops on the pretext of updating French road maps. Another was Maggi, the Swiss food conglomerate known for its bouillon cubes, dehydrated soups, and milk. In January 1913, L’Action Française declared that German intelligence had been sheltering behind Maggi and colluding with high-level Parisian police officials. A torn memorandum said to have been found under a table at the brasserie Zimmer on the Place du Châtelet, where Charles Legrand, a Maggi executive, allegedly met Paul Guichard, a police commissioner supervising the city’s central market, somehow turned up at L’Action Française. It listed sums that, in Daudet’s indictment, could only refer to payments for classified information about official knowledge of German espionage in Paris. Legrand protested that the story was nonsense—that he had never met Guichard; that he was not Swiss but Norman; that he came from a family honored for its military service; that his signature on a typewritten document acquired by L’Action Française had been forged. Daudet shrugged his protests off: “Mystifications, forgeries—the usual cant of Dreyfus’s defenders naturally flows from the pen of M. Legrand. Say what you will! We stand by our affirmations! Maggi enterprises cloak a vast espionage network, and the police have been bribed to look the other way.” Two days later, under the rubric “Jewish-German Espionage: Les Maggi at Strategic Points,” the paper indicated that Maggi owned a huge warehouse at Mantes, with a private ferry to its dairy farms on an island in the Seine, which, should Germany declare war, would give prospective saboteurs easy access to a bridge connecting the main road from Paris to points west. Readers in the provinces lost no time informing Daudet of other Maggi farms and warehouses situated near other bridges whose strategic importance had been demonstrated forty-three years earlier, during the Franco-Prussian War. A precedent was thus established for the quantity of mail Daudet received after 1914 from civilian informants and soldiers suspicious of treason in the ranks. More tips reached him through an adjunct of L’Action Française, the Ligue de Guerre d’Appui, whose honorary president was that idol of unreconstructed anti-Dreyfusards General Auguste Mercier.

  Léon Daudet, Alphonse Daudet’s son and Maurras’s closest collaborator in the L’Action Française movement.

  The threat of punishment did not silence Daudet. Risking fines and even imprisonment for libel only redounded to his virtue. The campaign against traitors intensified with his vilification of Le Bonnet Rouge, an anarchist newspaper that vehemently condemned the war. Its editor, Eugène Vigo, wrote under the pen name “Miguel Almereyda.”1 His favorite targets were Maurras and Barrès. In September 1916, Daudet announced that L’Action Française had received impeccable information from a high source of Vigo’s involvement in an extensive spy ring. The source remained anonymous, which led some doubters to conclude that it was a fictive character (like “the veiled lady” conjured up by Esterhazy during the Dreyfus Affair) and others to speculate that it was someone in the know using L’Action Française as a cat’s-paw to settle accounts with a political enemy while appearing to respect the “sacred union.” Meanwhile, subscribers, whose number was to grow by leaps and bounds, enthusiastically joined Daudet’s paranoid excursions.

  Twelve years after the fact, L’Action Française published an article in which Maurras testified that the Vigo affair had begun with a visit he received on September 8, 1916, from Maurice Barrès acting as a messenger for his fellow Lorrainer President Raymond Poincaré. Barrès had previously visited Poincaré to complain about Vigo’s vicious diatribes and about reports of Le Bonnet Rouge spreading defeatist propaganda among soldiers at the front. Poincaré nursed grievances of his own against Vigo, who had spent much of the first decade of the century in jail for theft, slander, the manufacture of explosives, and attempts at sabotage. According to French intelligence, Vigo the Catalan had been in Cartagena when a U-boat landed several German agents there. What could have attracted him to that city if not a clandestine rendezvous? The government lacked sufficient evidence to press charges, but nothing prevented it from airing its suspicions through a surrogate. Maurras and Daudet volunteered the services of L’Action Française and obtained more detailed information in subsequent meetings with Poincaré himself.2

  Daudet now divided his prosecutorial efforts between Maggi and Vigo. In April 1917, when men were bleeding profusely at the Chemin des Dames or refusing to fight, Daudet blamed the slaughter and mutiny on the devil “defeatist.” Vigo proceeded to sue him for libel. Before the trial, Daudet took the offensive in the pages of L’Action Française, referring to Vigo as “the ex-convict” and to Le Bonnet Rouge as Le Torchon (the Rag).

  Had he not, by his own admission, gone to Saint-Sébastien—a hotbed of German espionage—in June 1916, passport number 11704—to found a “bilingual paper.” One must note here that this trip coincided with the arrival in Cartagena of the submarine U-35—the famous German predator. Vigo, known as “Almereyda,” claims that he couldn’t have traveled from Saint-Sébastien to Cartagena in three days, which remains to be seen. At any rate, he was spotted in the neighborhood of Cartagena. Besides, a German agent could have brought a package or oral instructions from Cartagena to Saint-Sébastien, and that too must be looked into. One should note that when the German agent Gaston Routier tried to found a French pro-German newspaper in Madrid, the Journal de la Paix, Vigo rushed to his defense and, after Routier had been exposed, made the first public announcement that he had given up his criminal project. Would Vigo’s paper in Saint-Sébastien have been the double of Routier’s in Madrid? Only Prince Ratibor, Germany’s ambassador to Spain, could enlighten us on the subject.

  Also suspicious was the remarkable fact that the staff of “the Rag,” all young enough to bear arms, had escaped military service. Only the influence of a higher‑up could explain this collective exemption, and Daudet pointed a finger at the Radical minister of the interior, Louis-Jean Malvy.3 Malvy, who allowed workers to demonstrate against the war with impunity, pr
esented a wide target. Why had he not jailed Alphonse Merrheim, head of the steelworkers’ union, for attending a congress of European Socialists two years earlier at Zimmerwald in Switzerland, which issued the proclamation “After one year of bloodshed, the imperialist character of the war has manifested itself more and more clearly; there is proof that it has its causes in the imperialist and colonial politics of all governments, which will remain responsible for the unleashing of this carnage”?4 And why had he not dissolved the General Confederation of Labor—the CGT—when munitions workers hampered the war effort with strikes in 1917?

  Daudet’s argument did not avail him in court. He was convicted of libel. But damages were a small price to pay for the exposés that greatly profited L’Action Française. Its circulation doubled and its editors continued their campaign against the enemy within, relying on information leaked by sympathizers in the Prefecture of Police, the Intelligence Agency, and the censorship and postal services. In May 1917, the arrest of Vigo’s associate Émile Duval at the Swiss border with a very large check, the origins and purpose of which he could not readily explain, lent credence to the accusation that Le Bonnet Rouge was a German pawn. “I do not pretend to know all the financial resources of the defeatist campaign,” Daudet wrote on July 8, “but those I cite here are certain, and will become evident.” Among others, he cited a German-American “wheeler-dealer” known for his “shady schemes” and “the banker Rosenberg,” formerly resident in Paris, who was said to have a direct line from his refuge in Zurich to the German General Staff in Berlin.

  The turning point came on July 22, when Georges Clemenceau, no friend of L’Action Française, endorsed Daudet’s campaign with a speech reviling anarchists and pacifists, Vigo and Malvy, in terms that endeared him momentarily to the right-wing press.5 “He supported the nationalist thesis par excellence with singular bravura and flare, naming names with an audacity and bluntness seldom heard on the Senate floor,” a conservative colleague wrote in Le Figaro. “Never has such vigorous speech been more necessary. Never has it been more opportune to say that at this moment treason and anarchy are twin sisters.… The former surrenders secrets to Germany, the latter seeks to make weapons drop from our hands.… They collaborate in producing pacifist propaganda.” On August 7, the police arrested Vigo and Duval. Soon afterward, Malvy announced that daily attacks by the press compelled him to resign. Early in September, Vigo was found dead at Fresnes Prison, having hanged himself (with a shoelace, according to the official report) or been silenced by co-conspirators (in the opinion of L’Action Française). Malvy, a co-conspirator and murderer? On the basis of no evidence whatever, Daudet argued the case for treason in a personal letter to President Poincaré: