On Charles Maurras
Maurras and his Action française in perspective, by Jules Monnerot (Inquisitions, 1974).
[Jules Monnerot (1909-1995) is a forgotten but cutting edge figure of French social sciences. A former surrealist and marxist coming from the Martinique, a contributor to his friend Georges Bataille’s nietzschean magazine Acéphale, a founding member, with him too, of the Collège de sociologie, a very vivid institution of the late 1930s that greatly influenced the whole postwar French intellectual landscape, he wrote an influential, silenced and outrageously pillaged1 Sociology of Communism in 1949. This made him a persona non grata among intellectuals, but earned him the respect of political figures such as Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, both of whom he worked with as an advisor. After having been a Gaullist, he opposed the General’s positions on the settlement of the Algerian war and drifted rightwards, writing in Maurras’ disciple Pierre Boutang’s La Nation Française, getting involved in the New Right from the late 1960s on, and ended up in the scientifical commitee of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in the late 1980s. He however soon parted ways with them, due to the Party’s support to Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War. The following texts come from an anthology of articles published in 1974, Inquisitions2. According to the notes, of the three texts contained here, the second was published in homage to Maurras not long after his death, in the Gaullist journal Liberté de l’Esprit, in December 1954; the third one was published in La France Intellectuelle in 1970.]
Universal suffrage and political thought
There is, or more exactly there can be, from 1815 to 1850, a connexion, a continuity between political thought and politics, leading to the effective possibility of being at the same time a political thinker and a political actor. Not to mention the “theocrats” such as Mr de Bonald, peer of France whose action on events seems to be inexistent, and Joseph de Maistre, Piemontese subject, Royer Collard is a kind of parliementary oracle under two regimes. Guizot, another doctrinaire, and an unfortunate “political sociologist”, is Prime Minister. But suddenly, something happens. Alexis de Tocqueville (you should salute him; you will never see him again) is in 1849 the last French minister “who thinks”. (It is true that there will be Thiers too, who authored a monumental “History of the Consulate and of the Empire” still read to this day, whose political advisor was Barthélémy Saint-Hilaire, a translator of Aristotle’s Politics — although an abysmal one.)
What happened then? This: universal suffrage, at its advent, operates a radical and definitive dissociation of political ideas from politics, an effect partly covered by the double system of plebiscitary referendum and official candidature3 under the Second Empire. Until the liberal Empire4, universal suffrage is canalized. The Emperor is under intellectual influences (Saint-Simonian ones, and also that of Michel Chevalier and of liberals). But as soon as we got rid of its Napoleonian tutors, universal suffrage, under the 3rd Republic, changes the real conditions of the accession to power: the issue includes a completely new data. The censitory electors of the Monarchie de Juillet5 were in fact, with some exceptions, the most instructed persons in the whole country. Creative people and drivers of political ideas were also the milieu that voted, or at least, it contained them. Explaining a political system, a sequence of complex and organized notions could pay, electorally speaking, as long as the vote stayed censitory. With universal suffrage, the issue was specifically different. To be elected was the necessary but insufficient condition to the accession to power. Taken statistically, electors on which the thing depended have no access to these systems of complex — be they good or bad — but linked-together ideas that at least partly guided the choices of censitory electors, back in the days. These electors pronounced discourses in Latin, learnt by heart thousands of Greek, French and Latin verses in Collège. One has to trace back the era from which political ideas are struck with impotence to the advent of universal suffrage. In such a domain, what is not useful is detrimental: now, this will all be about extracting idea-forces from both conservative and the “other” thought, about extracting intellectually digest and affectively motivating themes that can determine uncultured (compared to the electors of previous regimes) individuals, polarized by elementary appetites or repugnances. One must tell them that everything will be okay. But one cannot even explain to them how will everything be okay without risking annoying and misleading them. From this, power game can put aside all properly political ideas. They are disused in favor of mythical themes (taking only the elements affectively assimilable to the “masses”; and it is precisely when the word “masses” starts to be spread). From now on there are rules, that we could codify with as much rigor as tennis or rugby. One has to know about the best themes for every kind of audience, and when to use them. The apprentice political actor has to render himself master of an elementary psychagogy, coming directly (but in fact way “rougher”) from the Ancient rhetorics. Which results in what Albert Thibaudet named a “Republic of lawyers”, a “Republic of professors”. After all, what is a jury? An electoral sample. What is a high-school classroom? An audience to persuade. To train to convince one or the other of these “audiences” is to train for the profession of elected official.
The History of political ideas nevertheless goes on, and the fruitfulness of the European society in this field did not dry up from the instauration of universal suffrage. But this History so to speak goes on in a vacuum. Take for example the list of political writers from 1850 on. They do not directly influence deputies, ministers, who for the vast majority (in France, but not in England) did not read them, and who would have taken such reads as a pure waste of time. Never did political ideas act so little on actual politics than at the time of universal suffrage. Socialist masses, when the time of intellectuals comes, will be seduced by the promises of better living conditions, not by the accuracy of the economical analysis of “The Capital”. Who in the ministerial personnel of the 3rd Republic did read (even partly) Marx, Sorel, Lenin, Trotski (not to mention Pareto or Mosca)? In all likelihood Mr de Monzie, Mr de Jouvenel, Mr Henri Lémery, Tardieu. Maybe another or two, and Jaurès, who according to the testimony of Daniel Halévy “read everything”. Maybe Mr Léon Blum? (His writings give no proof of that.) Let us set aside the case of the “Action française”, which we will be treating later. From now on, the agressive return of political ideas in the West can only be done with a bomb; everytime a war, an economic plight, or their consequences will stamp down the political system based on electoralism.
Charles Maurras and “The Future of the Intelligence”.
When in the political and literary order reflex finally superseded judgement, evoking certain names is enough. They ring like the leper’s bell. To utter them, neither grinding your teeth nor cursing with a grin is violating some law there. Freedom of spirit manifests itself naturally through such infractions. It seems to us evident that one cannot dispose of truths and values in terms of the Hemicycle, either left or right.
It is in 1905 that Charles Maurras publishes these pages. From 1899 to the eve of the War of 1914, a truly creator period takes place in terms of political ideas. Lenin publishes What is to be done?, Georges Sorel the Introduction to modern Economy and the studies later gathered under the title Reflexions on Violence. Pareto tries and sets the conceptions he will express all through his monumental Sociology. Professor Gaëtano Mosca teaches in Padua the elements of political science on which he would work his whole life during. Robert Michels spreads among the socialist elite the ideas he’ll express in his Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. A European from Napoli, philosopher Benedetto Croce, who’d die at the same as Maurras, had rediscovered Hegel, criticized Marx, went from the aesthetics to the political, and vice and versa. In Germany, Max Weber published his famous essay on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Spengler, meditating on Goethe on Nature, conceives the great themes of The Decline of the West. In France, people feel a passion for Nietzsche, as translated by the socialist hellenist Bracke, and for Dostoyesky. Intellectual generosity was still natural a thing. A student could get active in the Socialist Movement, swear only by Barrès, study in Bergson’s classes and have a great interest in The Future of the Intelligence. Intellectual terrorism, the intimidation of the spirit by the conspiracy of silence or the advertizers’ agression did not yet reign supreme. We could not yet accept, in France, the divorce between Intelligence and Politics that Paul Valéry would soon implicitly treat as a fact.
These constellations, these conjunctions, these oppositions between stars determined for at least half a century the political thought of Europe. Alone among all these thinkers, Maurras is a great writer.
The Future of the Intelligence6 is not a pamphlet. This piece of writing falls under a literary genre that hasn’t many representatives, but these few are regal: the literature of judgement, opposed on all points to that of feeling. These are short treatises that enlighten their object for a long time: the Essays of Bacon, the Discourse on the Method, Benjamin Constant (On the Spirit of Conquest), the best Untimely Meditations from Nietzsche, the Antichrist from the same, and maybe the Elements of Human Greatness from Rudolf Kassner. This high literature describes dramatic situations, but their hero is never a man. It is a society, a culture, a nation, a truth, a value — or it is the human spirit. Its particular rules — each of these geniuses discovered them for themselves — are those of intellectual narration. All cultures have legends; many have epics. Rares are those who have intellectual narrations. These writings, meeting an assured indifference — one could even say an organized ones — from the great number, enable us to locate the highness of Western culture.
It is here necessary to let Maurras speak.
“We live under a government of public opinion — says the optimistic thinker he refutes. But we are the people who extract this opinion and set it to work. We pull it from the unconscious, where it sleeps and we model it in formulas full of life. The public being king namely, whoever leads the opinion of the public is de facto the king. One will say at first: it is the public speaker, it is the writer that is. Where the institutions became democratic, a capital gain was produced in favor of leaders of opinion. Before the printing press, and in mediocrely extended States, public speakers almost alone benefited from this. Since the printing press was invented and in great States, public speakers shared this privilege with the publicists. Their private opinion made the public opinion.”
Why is this not true?
Tis, says Maurras, because the Press became a dependency of Finance. A revolutionary, Mr Paul Brulat, recently spoke about the necessity of saving the independance of human thought. He therefore considered it endangered. “Financial combination killed the idea, advertisement killed the critique.” The editor becomes an “employee”.
“His role is to entertain the reader to lead him to the ads on the fourth page. One does not care about his convictions. May he bow down, or else, resign. Most of them, whose nib is the only breadwinner, resign themselves to become lackeys. Thus everywhere, blackmailing under all its forms; praise sold, silence bought… Editors transact; soon theaters will do likewise.”
Therefore intelligence does not lead what is supposed to depend on it. Why is that so?
Because “everything escapes an influence whose sincerity and seriousness are the object of a slandering doubt… But the writer is defamed by his own condition more than by any word uttered on him. Either too great or too low, he is the most downgraded of all beings…7” What was in 1905 a doubt came to be an untroubled certitude in the hight strata of the society.
What consequences did Maurras foresee, as early as 1905, from such an “état de fait”?
The prestige of Intelligence still exists within the people. But until when? And what are the conditions of this prestige? Maurras dared to say what we are accustomed to keep silent. Tis an understatement to say that the following truth is impopular: it is in fact unforgivable. “The people believe in the virtue of the Intelligence based on a running noise; those who made this opinion will not be distressed to unmake it.”
If tomorrow l’Humanité8 says that Joliot9 is a false scientist, it will immediately be approved by its audience, and Joliot-Curie will become an ignoramus even faster than Clementis or Slansky became traitors. When it comes to producing and propagating opinions, those who manage techniques of obsession do not meet any organized resistance. It is not only fair to notice that if Stalinians do it in the most rigorous, in the strictest and most systematic way, they are far from being the only ones to do it. They are not even the ones who started it.
In order to get the French to buy a hundred to a hundred and sixty thousand copies of a book, the most “drastic” methods of obsessional advertising appear to be necessary. Those interested doubtlessly consider the great drum of the prix Goncourt to be necessary for that to happen. But with an equal buzz, one could sell any other book: differences in sales would be very little. Let us take one more step fowards; what if we casted lots for it? Surely this would all be the same. Another step: what if we took the Critique of Pure Reason, changed its terminology, put names of persons instead of abstract names that are usually subject, attributes, appositions and completements. If we published that, with some more or less ingenious, picturesque and hectic cuts, modifications and additions under the “novel” section, with a title such as “Adventure in Koenigsberg”, and that the Goncourt Academicians had in mind to crown such a work — an absurd supposition to say the least —, we have no decisive reason to think that the whole thing wouldn’t “work”. In vain would the “author” declare that “he only wanted to mystify”, he would be crowned nevertheless, and would nevertheless earn a couple of millions. He would undoubtedly end up saying: “I thought I was mystifying you all; I am in fact a novelist. The millions don’t lie.” In the 19th Century, all this could have been an instrument of the freedom of Spirit. I doubt that it could be the same today.
“How low — goes on Maurras — will what we can call the literary aristocracy go? It is all too easy to imagine. Lucre coupled with lowly ambition will bear its natural fruits. Literature will become a synonym for ignominy… From now on, the sovereign refinement of spirit, researches of the feeling, of the grave care for logics and erudition will be gone. A silly moralism will judge everything. The good Party will have its Vallès, its Mirbeau, hypnotized by ideas of good and evil conceived without nuance and applied with fanaticism. Some iconoclasts’ heads such as Tolstoy’s are being drawn on such a sinister hypothesis; they are halfway through their realisation, all around us… Places, success or glory will reward the histrion’s versatility; more than ever, to an extent unknown to the Ages of Iron, loneliness and poverty will atone the fierceness of the Hero and of the Saint: fasting, arms crossed upon a banquet, or rolling on the floor like dogs to gnaw on some bones… An immense intellectual proletariat, a whole class of lettered beggars such as what we saw during the Middle Age, will be dragging around the wretched rags of what was once our thought, our literature, our arts.”
Maurras puts the “intellectual elite” face to face with its own situation.
The author of The Future of the Intelligence seemingly believed that in politics, one can be right once and for all; that we can no longer believe. An enterprise that is not tried at the right time becomes faulty by a change in circumstances alone. A same remedy does not keep its efficiency at two different phases of an illness. It is impossible to be fixedly right on politics, which is a mobile object. Politics is a Therapeutics, and medication we may try depend above all on the state of the ill. Maurras maybe underestimated the time-factor for the sake of certitudes which could at first and in a certain way be a posteriori, but which became a priori with the passage of time. Politics depends on a correct appreciation of the time-factor, and the key notion stays that of what is possible at a given moment.
The Future of the Intelligence is one of these books that should be made again every fifty years or so, such as the Discourse on the Method or the Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. The practical conclusion drawn by Maurras from the masterful diagnosis he dared to make was to found, a couple of years later, the Action française: a daily journal, a School of thought and a political ligue. The author of The Future of the Intelligence denounced romanticism, accusing it to put literature before an alternative whose two terms appeared to him equally ruinous: cenacle literature, or revolution literature. But to denounce such alternatives was insufficient to escape them. He did not want to make any choice, but he coupled both situations his intelligence condemned in his own life. He was the artisan and animating figure of a literature both of cenacle and of revolution (at least in the most limited, purely technical sense of the word). He named the established order “disorder” and called to violence against this order. Because, to him, Order was in his doctrine; Revolution was in the government of the 3rd Republic and in the minds of those he called the “republicans”, from the communists to the moderates. He put the Action française in an dead-end as soon as the Count of Paris chose his family’s liberal tradition against the authoritarian10 doctrine of Maurras. A doctrine does not convince with its intrinsic qualities, its architectural ordination, with its style and the values it aims at being at the service of. A myth wins when the conditions for its propagation are met. Neither literary quality nor sociological truthfulness win hearts as such. If the elites were so integrally permeable to intelligence, there would no longer be in politics issues other than technical ones. The regime opposed to the ideas of the Future of the Intelligence a sufficient opacity. Maurras created around himself an environment heterogeneous to the society he lived in, just like André Breton after him; a semi-political, semi-literary environment; a climate where he could live and think. He did neither as much harm as his enemies accuse him of, nor as much good as his friends believe him to have done. He earned a striving independance and had it respected in a place and time where it was a challenge already, a tour de force. But things also went on away from him, until the final misunderstanding… He was to the end true to himself. What he gradually lost was the exchange value of words, between him and a growing number of his fellow. Today, the death of such a writer suddenly puts in light what was incorruptible in his work.
On the “Action française”
From the time when writers, scholars, men with liberal occupations constituted distinct “estates” to that when one can blend a great number of representative of these species — who more or less moved over to the same ideology — under the label “intellectuals”, there were two revolts against this “flow of history”; one of them being conscious and political, the Action française, the other implicit and aesthetic, the Nouvelle Revue française.
If one wrote the History of political ideas in Europe, there would be a long chapter on Maurras and the Action française. To speak here of the relationship both of these had with the intellectuals will only require laying some landmarks.
What Maurras is about is: a doctrinal synthesis, that was also an aesthetic success, that the doctrinarian destined to the satisfaction of aspirations that were always distinct, sometimes converging, but most of the time opposed — at least that was before Maurras. Since this is all about “integral” nationalism, let us begin with nationalism.
Genealogically, nationalism in the late 19th Century comes from the patriotism of the French revolution, which made the word “nation” enter History for a long time. This patriotism received from the “jacobine” spirit a centralizing, authoritarian, assimilative and conquering bend. This was, with the excess we all know about, the politics of the Consulate and the Empire, hence why after the fall of Napoléon, the Republican and Bonapartist opponents to the Restoration and the Monarchie de Juillet are very close to one another in their geopolitical [politique extérieure] approach: they want the abolishment of the 1815 treatises that made of the “Great Nation” a European Nation like the others. After 1870, the Republicans, very much like their old Bonapartist opponents, kept the national susceptibility ablaze, while the two rival branches of the royalist family stick to a conservative prudence.
From this fin de siècle nationalism where plebiscitarians and Republicans are indistinguishable, the Boulangist fever took its transient but symptomatic strength. It will take another form in the next twenty years. A mixture of political elements very close to what made boulangism (they are in fact partly the same) will take form due to the Panama scandal and the Dreyfus affair. Reacting to the corruption under the 3rd Republic, antiparliamentarism strenghtens and extends itself. Many men among which nationalism is the dominant passion are questioning the capacity of the 3rd Republic to resist Wilhelmian Germany. Will the agitation around captain Dreyfus not end up consummating civic corruption into military demoralisation? Yet during these three crises, nationalism revealed its strength and weaknesses, and weakness was usually prevailing since the Republican regime ended up reinforced with every passing crisis. What was this weakness consisting in? Above all — and Maurras will start from this historical data — in the inform, inarticulate and purely sentimental aspect of this nationalism, making it unable to overthrow this “plutocratic demagogy”, to maintain and transform France, due to the lack of a strategy and a tactics coming from coherent thought, ending up in action.
A Catholic and a Provençal, Maurras (1868-1952) was neither a legitimist nor an orleanist, and neither were his parents: only conservatives from the South. Coming to Paris, he discovers he is a nationalist. Early on, a paradox strikes him: thoughts and feelings linked to the nation, to a duration, to an existence anterior and superior to that of the individual; how is that so, that nationalism is an instable composite, subject to being unmade when historical temperature drops? This strength, coming out through sporadic pushes, lacks a principle of duration. Where can it be found? Considering History as a biography of the Nation, Maurras sees this continuity protruding in flesh and act in the dynastic principle.
In fact, however, there was no confusion between the dynasty and the nation. Historically, the French took consciousness of their national character against the dynasty. To Maurras, this fact is not a necessity. The founder of the Action française is rather struck by the connection between the dynastic continuity and that of the nation, and it even seems to be more proper to incarnate this national continuity than other regimes coming from the past revolutions. However, the attachment to the legitimate monarchy was not the same as faithfulness to the nation. According to the officially admitted — nuanceless — History, the emigrants preferred the dynasty and the kings accomodated easily to the humiliation of the nation as long as they took back their throne in order to bourgeoisely enjoy it. Maurras’ problem was twofold: nationalists needed to be converted to royalism, and monarchists, most importantly the pretenders to the throne, to nationalism.
Two, and even threefold. Royalists at the end of the 19th Century genealogically descend from anterior traditionalists. Traditional social authorities that reclaimed intermediary corps between the king and the people — corps that would hold their power from Tradition — and the maximum of decentralisation became royalist after having been part of all Frondes against the king — the feudal, the “philosophical” and the “parliamentary” ones. In fact, these old notables were the fruit of ancestral privileges and of a long resistance to the royal centralisation. Genealogically speaking, one can find here the pretentions of the old Parliaments which Montesquieu echoed in his Spirit of Laws, but also Tocqueville and Le Play. All these ideas were affirmed at the first assembly of the 3rd Republic by the marquis de Franclieu; a character from Barrès’ The Uprooted [Les Déracinés], Henri Gallant de Saint-Phlin, is his literary replica. We know the thesis in Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution: by taming the nobility, by giving it all its privileges while taking away all its powers, the monarchy cut its own roots. A syndicate of acquired rights, an expression of the French duration, the monarchy, by throwing out its natural servants — descending from the “men of service” — to the ever growing — since such privileges were less and less justified by the services — popular execration, committed a form of suicide. However, at the end of the Century, the “social authorities”, no longer having anything of the ancient excesses to reproach to the monarchy, became royalist; or at least it blended with the other royalists. In many respects they too could reclaim the best French-speaking conservative theoricians of the 19th Century, such as Maistre and Bonald. We can easily understand that such tendencies, considered “feudalistic” by Republican historians, offended the Jacobine kind of nationalists.
However in his will to synthesise these already heterogeneous elements, Maurras did not fear adding another one, and here we are at the core of our topic. It is what he himself calls the intelligence [l’intelligence], and this trait throws a vivid light on the thought of Maurras, and on the intellectuals. Maurras, conceiving with rigour in abstracto, considered the function “thought” in the French society, and its organ. What corresponds to the organ of the function “thought” in historical reality, when Maurras speaks, is the intellectuals. But Maurras, as per his Future of the Intelligence, does not make a choice between intellectuals as they should be, men of knowledge and thought, and intellectuals as they are, as we see them in history. To him, men of thought have the same enemies as nationalism and as the dynasty, which is electoralism, speculators, broadly speaking the “plutocratic republican system” as he sees it, a system based on demagogy, on lowly rhetorics, on deception pure and simple and on corruption. The Republic, according to Maurras, is woeful to the nation in so that it cannot form a power able to be guardian on the interior side, and feared from the outside. With “Intelligence”, the maurrassian synthesis will be complete.
Maurras and his friends take up action, create and inspire magazines, even an Institute, the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, and up until the condemnation by the Vatican11, they will massively influence, at least from the outside, the “youth from the Écoles.”
The fact remains that if “Intelligence”, in the spirit of Maurras, has the same enemies as nationalism and as the dynasty, in fact, intellectuals are their enemies. Had the teachings of Maurras succeeded, it would have led to the suppression of the intellectuals. Maurras, staying on the level of ideas, according to a platonician kind of dialectics, “deduced” an intellectual aristocracy. Yet the intellectuals are not an intellectual aristocracy (putting aside the question of whether a real intellectual aristocracy would have chosen an alliance with an enlightened dynasty, with nationalism and with social authorities, as Maurras wanted it to be). The intellectuals constitute but a historical species. In fact, the intellectual aristocracy cannot be confused with the category of the intellectuals. Another imperfection of the maurrassian social vision: the persons composing in fact this intellectual elite are socially scattered. They can have every kind of political opinion prevailing in the society, or even disdain them, thinking they can or must do without. Maurras does not seem to have noticed that in the intellectual domain, just as in other fields, superiority is not a unionizable matter; people do not unionize from above. Intellectual aristocracy is ideally constituted by the choices of the observer who, from afar, looks up to the stars. Socially speaking, there are only superior functions, or even, to be even simpler, better payed functions. The very elegance of maurrassian though comes from the refusal to distinguish between the platonician archetype of realities and these realities themselves, that is to say what should match this archetype but does not.
Maurrassianism, this masterful synthesis of originally opposed factors, was politically effective only within time limits that enabled it; from the foundation of the daily L’Action française and the First World War, to the Vatican condemning the Action française.
The victory of 1918 saved the 3rd Republic by virtue of a historical constant perfectly indifferent to our subjective views, which disposes the wars won to consolidate a regime that happened to be in power at that time.
Between the two wars, the “Action française” renounces — as was shown in February 1934 — the “coup de force”, which would have compelled the movement to become either “bonapartist” of “fascist” if it tried and succeeded, since it would have had to conform itself to the logics of such an act in order to win and “hold firm”; just like Lenin, like Hitler and like Mussolini, it would have had to resort to a revolutionary dictatorship, requiring excessive centralisation and that a restored monarch, if he consented to it, would become a dictator or give room to a man that would be. The success would have demanded the doctrine to be suspended. This explains the decline of the Action française in the 1930s: stuck between the Vaticanite condemnation, the disavowal of the House of France, and the attractiveness of fascisms. The first took out a big chunk of its troops and of its natural field of expansion; the second took out its chiefs and its proper justifications; the third was contrary to an exclusively French nationalism.
The formal perfection and the real inadequation of the maurrassian doctrine explains both why the “youth from the Schools” was so easily won, and why, with time passing by, most of them got out of it — no less easily. The Action française did not bind them together in the way communism, fascism or terrorism did, through irrevocable acts; everything happened as if young bourgeois succeeding to their fathers started having more moderate ideas as soon as they were in charge of a clientele. And if the Action française often “marked” students in faculties of Law or medical schools, it never even menaced the positions of intellectuals as defined above. To the three orders of education, the “superior”, the “secondary” and the “primary”, the “intellectuals” diffused the “pop philosophy of Progress”, that “announced the soon-to-be advent of Paradise on earth by the combined virtues of positive science, of the diffusion of the Enlightenment and of the ballot” — while waiting for spreading “marxist” themes.
In the end, the Action française frightened the Republican personnel just enough for it to not miss the chance of getting rid of it, but not enough for the ambitious to secretely join it, and open the doors of power to it.
Alain de Benoist, in an article given to the Figaro at the occasion of its reedition in 1978, talks about how many anticommunist figures took elements from this book to write their own without ever crediting him, among which Raymond Aron, Jean Baechler, Emmanuel Todd and Raymond Boudon. Monnerot himself also said in the late 1980s that journalist Maurice Clavel, who would later found the leftist journal Libération with Jean-Paul Sartre and who’d take under his wings the whole neocon-ish movement of the 1970s “New Philosophers” (Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and others), told him right after the publication of his Sociology of communism: “This is absolutely wonderful, but coming from you this book can have no effect. We will take all that, and then it will work. People are going to pillage you”, to what he added that retrospectively, it was not a warning but an announcement; Clavel was talking about himself and his protégés when he said that “people will pillage you” (“on va vous piller”).
The quality of which is outstanding, in both content and style. Other articles tackle Georges Sorel’s theory of Myth, the postwar tendency to weaponize the left-right distinction by applying it anachronically, why he is not a communist, the nature and evolutions of war (Monnerot taught the French military from 1951 to 1957 at the École de Guerre, having been recruited after having written a book on psychological warfare, La Guerre en Question), Television as power, the Fourth Republic, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Georges Bataille.
Candidates were chosen and proposed to the electors by the regime, reinforcing it.
The second phase of the Second Empire, from 1860 to 1870.
1830-1848.
This text was published in 1905. Maurras founded his journal L’Action française three years later. [It has been translated by Arktos Editions in 2016 as The Future of the Intelligentsia.]
This critique meets the marxist critique, but today’s “marxizing” intellectual, quite morally meek, does not apply rigorously to himself; he’d rather save that for the others. He refuses to assume his own situation (to speak in his own language). If there were no intellectuals, there would have been neither marxism nor bolshevism. We could not know these phenomenons without describing the intellectual condition and without judging it. The Maurras from 1905 judges it more clearly than any socialist at the time. It is yet for the latter ones that capitalism was evil [le mal], not to the eyes of Maurras.
Leading historical French communist journal.
Nobel in Chemistry in 1935 with his wife, who was the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie. He was a communist.
Despite decentralisation, the theory of the Republics and freedoms, a triumph of the Action française could have only led to dictatorship. Dictatorship could only last through reinforcing centralisation.
In 1926.