Charles Maurras

4 Key excerpts on "Charles Maurras"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Right Wing in France

  From 1815 to de Gaulle

  • Rene Remond, René Rémond, James M. Laux(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  That one politician, among others, declared that he held Christianity to be the immense multiplier of individual whimsy, would not have led to a pontifical warning. But Maurras was more than a politi-cian. He cut a figure as a thinker, he assumed almost the position of a spiritual father. In this area he naturally roused the traditional suspicion of the Church. But it happened that the system of this agnostic, be-come the intellectual leader of a large part of the Catho-lic public, rested on a denial of any metaphysical abso-lute and on the postulate of a positivistic methodology. His political conclusions agreed with those of Christian thinkers, so what did it matter if they arrived there by different routes? Maurras was closer to the skepticism of Renan or the empiricism of Taine than to the inspiration of the author of On the Pope} To be sure, he proposed 8 Joseph de Maistre. T r . ACTION F R A N Ç A I S E : A SYNTHESIS OF TRADITIONS? 249 only a political system which set aside all questions of theology. But was it so easy, was it even possible for his readers to discriminate between his political declarations and his estheticism, between his system and his philoso-phy? The slogan politics first, still so often misinter-preted and improperly used against its author, sounded like a defiance of the spiritual authority, an unacceptable assertion of Machiavelism. H o w could the Church accept what seemed to be a refusal to subordinate the choice of political means to the consideration of moral ends? In any case, if only by default, the national interest took the place left empty by the absence of another absolute and tended to set itself up as the highest end. It was perfectly clear that universal Catholicism could no longer accom-modate itself to this nationalism. Some reasons of fact suddenly appeared which gave such considerations of principle an overriding urgency: the apparent coincidence or identification of French Catholicism with neo-royalism.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Ideas into Politics

  Aspects of European History 1880- 1950

  • R. J. Bullen, H. Pogge von Strandmann, A.B. Polonsky(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  pays légal, were not his creations, but he made them household words on the French Right. Obsessive anti-Germanism was not his invention, but he gave it a dimension in historical and cultural terms which few could rival. Where he was original was in his monarchism, which does not concern us here, and in his positivism, on which this essay is centred. There are many 20th century Nationalists who look back to Herder, Fichte, Hugo, Byron, Walter Scott, Mazzini and Mickiewicz, but very few who claim descent from the classical writers and still fewer who start with Auguste Comte. Charles Maurras was both a classicist and a Comtean.

  In over fifty years of political writing he claimed an unswerving consistency of ideas, and in every book and newspaper article he claimed to argue from the concrete facts of the situation and not from abstract principles. These facts were not economic and rarely social, except in its most cultural sense: they were political, literary and intellectual, with politics always at the forefront. People who traded in economic arguments were dismissed either as Marxists or crude laissez-faire capitalists, both seen as Anglo-German products of the 19th century and of total irrelevance to the True France. Indeed almost the whole of the 19th century was seen by Maurras as a foreign import, and his aim was to link the 20th to the 18th in the way that someone might welcome back and restore a perfect machine which had been stolen and abused by intruders. The problem was to recover it, and Maurras was at his weakest when it came to the issue of how he proposed to rescue his True France from the Third Republic. His movement was frequently dubbed ‘in-action française’ mostly by young disciples who moved away in the 1930s to more fascist alternatives. It was not seen as so ineffective by opponents, who held it responsible for the attempted coup of 6 February 1934, the assassination attempt on Leon Blum, the politics of Vichy, and incalculable damage to the Resistance. When he was tried and convicted early in 1945 for collaboration with the enemy, he saw it as one more malevolent act by the forces of Anti-France, and the irony of the most noted anti-Germanist of his generation being tried for assisting the German invader has been standard comment ever since.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The French Writers' War, 1940-1953

  • Gisèle Sapiro, Vanessa Doriott Anderson, Dorrit Cohn, Vanessa Doriott Anderson, Dorrit Cohn(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Maurras blamed a certain literature of the interwar period for having re-jected material “of purity and grandeur” for “base and vile” material, “purity and grandeur” referring to the “national feeling” numbed by “a long century of 128 chapter 2 revolutionary denial and Romantic folly.” But the writer’s material was his soul, Maurras explained. The “puny and poor natures, the feeble ones whose vices submerge virtue” could not attain the “mental and moral sublime [that] is the native element of superior souls.” By elaborating his aesthetic theory from the assumption that grounded his social philosophy, namely the existence of “natu-ral hierarchies,” Maurras could then do without a transcendent morality. He established a distinction between the “elite” of writers, represented by people like Péguy and Barrès, and the average, and particularly the below-average whom he claimed recruited “more and more, with a growing facility [ . . . ] the army of intellectual crime.” 181 Far more than Catholics like Bordeaux and Massis, Maurras was always care-ful to distance himself from moralizing discourse. His social philosophy avoided the moral question. For him, “if we want to avoid an individualism that only suits Protestants, the moral question becomes a social question again : no morals without institutions. The problem of morals must be brought back under the dependence of the other problem, and that last one, all political, rees-tablishes itself in the foreground of reflection of the best.” 182 In this aesthetic debate, he substituted “private interest,” namely “the good of persons,” and “public interest,” namely “the good of society and of the State,” for morals. From this standpoint, he joined Massis and Bordeaux; for them, the question of content—“material”—raised the question of its social effects. In the tradition of Paul Bourget, they considered that it was the writer’s duty to do the work of a social clinical practitioner.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  A History of Western Political Thought

  • J. S. McClelland, Dr J S Mcclelland(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Maurras never seems to have considered what position an event like this would put him in. The Vichy regime, while not exactly royalist, had had in its leader, Marshal Pétain, a deeply Catholic anti- democratic reactionary trailing clouds of military heroism from Verdun. This was only second-best to restored monarchy, but it was a very good second-best. Better still, the Marshal was one of Maurras’s admirers, and Vichy organised itself into more than a parody of some of the social and political ideals which Maurras had long held. Perhaps Vichy France never intended to be a client state of Germany, but that is what it turned out to be. Hence the final irony of Maurras’s long career as an ideologue. He was punished for collaboration with Germany when anti-Germanism was a connecting thread of all his political thought. Thinking meticulously as ever Maurras does not seem to have realised that Frenchmen in their enthusiasm for purging the Vichyites were unlikely to pay much Conservatism 737 attention to the distinction between anti-anti-Nazism and pro-Germanism. Perhaps Maurras deserved better from a France which has always placed too high a value on political intelligence. If there is a Maurrasian legacy then it shows more clearly in France’s democratic politics than in the perennial right-wing lunatic fringe (though only time will tell whether a party like the National Front can ever be more than just a protest party). Gaullism and eventually Mitterrandism both based themselves on an analysis of the weakness of a French republican politics which in its way is profoundly Maurrasian. Democratic politics is more than a matter of universal suffrage and rival political parties. What successful democratic politics needs above everything else is majorities. Only majorities can produce strong political leadership, and only strong political leadership can make the institutions of state function in a way that makes the solution of great national problems possible.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book