Charles mauras
Charles Maurras (Martigues, April 20, 1868-Tours, November 16, 1952) was a French politician, poet and writer, the main reference and ideologue of Action française (French Action)., a political movement with a monarchical, anti-parliamentary and counterrevolutionary stamp. Maurras's thought, sometimes summed up in his notion of "integral nationalism," was permeated with intense anti-Semitism. A political theorist and highly influential intellectual in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, his opinions influenced various far-right ideologies; they also foreshadowed some of the ideas of fascism.
Biography
Charles Marie Photius Maurras was born on April 20, 1868 in Martigues, in the south of France, and grew up in a Catholic and monarchical environment. He became almost completely deaf at the age of 14. At the age of 17 he moved to Paris, where he worked for various periodicals, including La Cocarde , a magazine with a republican flair. He was a reporter during the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896.
His first relevant foray into political affairs occurred during the Dreyfus Affair; in 1899 he joined French Action, founded the previous year by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois. Maurras was soon influenced by the movement and managed to convert Pujo and Vaugeois to monarchism, which became the main cause to be defended by French Action. Together with Léon Daudet he edited the movement's newspaper, La Revue de l'Action française , which in 1908 became a daily newspaper under the name L & # 39; Action Francaise.
Inspired by his virulently anti-German nationalism, he supported France's entry into World War I even if it meant implicitly supporting Republican Georges Clemenceau. At the outbreak of World War II, in 1940 he described the rise to power of General Pétain as a "divine surprise." Under the occupation, however, he also expressed views contrary to both Paris collaborationists and "dissidents"; who were operating in London. He later stated that he believed that Pétain was playing a "double game", secretly working to achieve victory for the Allies. Both Pétain and de Gaulle were influenced by Maurras's pre-war philosophy. He was arrested in September 1944 and sentenced to death for being a collaborator. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, deprivation of civil liberties and expulsion from the French Academy. His response was: & # 34; C & # 39; est la revanche de Dreyfus! & # 34; ("It's Dreyfus Revenge!"). In 1952, he was transferred from prison to a clinic where he remained under surveillance. He died in that hospital on November 16, 1952. Shortly before he died, he returned to Catholicism.[citation needed ]
Political Ideas
Maurras' political ideology centered on intense nationalism (which he himself described as "integral nationalism") and a belief in an orderly and elitist society. He was the main referent and ideologue of Action Française (French Action), a political movement that was royalist, anti-Semitic, anti-parliamentarian and counter-revolutionary. Maurras also criticized the Vichy regime's 1940 Statute on Jews for being too moderate. He approved Vichy's reactionary program of a Révolution Nationale (National Revolution), which was largely inspired by his political theses.
Agnostic admirer of Comtian positivism, he nonetheless supported the Church as an authoritarian institution, without implying any interest in its doctrine. Defender of the monarchy as a system, he considered the Republic as a kind of "Anti-France" ».
His foundations for being a monarchist were given by comparing the achievements of the monarchy with those of democratic governments, which had brought misfortunes to France such as the invasion of Germany in part of its territories. He also had sympathies with the Catholic Church (most of his life he declared himself an agnostic and never had a special loyalty to the Bourbon-Orleans house).
Like many other Europeans of his day, he was enchanted by the idea of decadence, partly inspired by readings by Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine. He felt that France had lost its "greatness"; during the revolution of 1789, greatness inherited from its Roman roots and developed by "40 kings who in a thousand years created France". As Maurras wrote in the Observateur français newspaper, the revolution was nothing more than a negative revolt that destroyed all work.
His view of religion was also different. He supported the Catholic Church because it was closely linked to French history and because its hierarchical structure and clerical elite were the perfect image of his ideal society. However, he disparaged the gospels. In reality, he was a defender of Catholicism without his Christianity, assuming that was possible.
His agnosticism worried a part of the Catholic hierarchy and in 1926 Pope Pius XI placed some of his writings on the list of books prohibited by the Church. This came as a great shock to some of his followers, who included a considerable number of the French clergy. The condemnation of the newspaper French Action was lifted on July 10, 1939 under the papacy of Pius XII, a year after Maurras had been elected to the French Academy, continuing in the Index the other seven works by Maurras already condemned thirteen years ago.
Maurras was against the colonial expansion promoted by the republican governments for diverting revenge against Germany and dispersing its forces. In addition, he criticized the Jacobin and republican policy of assimilation that sought to impose French culture on peoples with their own cultures. This explained why elites from colonized peoples supported Maurras, such as the Algerian Ferhat Abbas who founded the Algerian Action or Hachemi Cherief who became Mohammed V's legal adviser and Ben Bella's lawyer. However, after the Second World War, Maurras criticized the liquidation of the French colonial empire as being detrimental to the interests of France and those of colonized peoples.
The influence of Charles Maurras
In France
- His influence on the French intellectuals
Charles Maurras enjoyed great influence on French intellectual life; he initiated several intellectual and literary adventures. Numerous writers and politicians were inspired by his thesis, without necessarily saying so. In 1908, his followers regrouped around a newspaper called Revue Critique des idéees et des livres which was until 1914 a rival of André Gide's NRF . This journal championed the idea of a “modern classicism”, was notably open to new theories by Henri Bergson and Georges Sorel, and trained a new generation of critics and historians. During the interwar period, the experience of the Revue Critique des idées et des livres continued in several newspapers: Revue Universelle, Latinité, Réaction pour l'ordre, La revue du siècle... Before the pope's conviction, the Christian Democrat Jacques Maritain was close to Maurras. He wrote Une opinion sur Charles Maurras ou Le Devoir des Catholiques where he criticized democracy. Regarding psychoanalysis, Elisabeth Roudinesco shows that Maurras constituted a stage in the genesis of Jacques Lacan's thought. Lacan personally met Maurras and participated in meetings of l'Action française. Lacan inherited from Maurras a positivist inheritance, the idea that society is made up more of families than of individuals, the preference of long time over specific events, the uselessness of revolutionary convulsions and the paramount importance of language. In addition, Edouard Pichon, who was Françoise Dolto's teacher, made Maurras's thought the axis of his struggle to constitute a French Freudianism. In the literary field, the patriotic climate of the First World War and the prestige of Charles Maurras meant that his newspaper L'Action française was read by various intellectuals such as Henri Ghéon, Alfred Drouin, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Augustin Cochin, Auguste Rodin and Guillaume Apollinaire. The 1920s correspond to the literary heyday of Maurras, which translates into the portrait that was published by Albert Thibaudet in the series “30 years of French life” in the NRF. This document is an important source for clarifying the upper part of Maurras' thought and work, the part that escapes polemical and partisan discourse. Maurras strongly influenced the students and intellectual youth of the interwar period such as Pierre Messmer, Edgar Faure, Edmond Michelet, François Léger and Michel Déon.
- Maurras and De Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle's father read L'Action française and discussed with the Count of Paris the possibility of a restoration of kingship. Before the Second World War, it seems that Charles de Gaulle was influenced by Maurras's newspaper. Indeed, in 1924, de Gaulle dedicated his work La discorde chez l'Ennemi to Maurras testifying to his “respectful tributes”. During the spring of 1934, under the aegis of the Fustel de Coulanges circle (a showcase of French Action), de Gaulle delivered a series of lectures at the Sorbonne. De Gaulle knew that the French Action was a helpful ally; On June 1, 1934, the newspaper devoted an article chosen for de Gaulle's text, Vers l'armée de métier, which advocated the principle of a highly competent and mobile professional army. This army would overlap the conscript army. In 1940, Charles de Gaulle's nomination to the rank of general led to the retirement of Charles Maurras; Maurras stated that he had wanted to remain discreet with respect to De Gaulle so as not to compromise him. According to Paul Reynaud, who found the general's sister during his captivity in Germany, De Gaulle had Maurras present in the Munich agreements. Through these agreements, signed on September 30, 1938, the French and British handed over Czechoslovakia to Hitler to avoid a new war. Consequently, the German dictator was convinced that he could do whatever he wanted. In addition, Charles Maurras influenced Marshal Pétain. Maurras said when Pétain came to power that he is "a divine surprise." Charles de Gaulle said about Maurras that he "is a man who went mad by dint of being right." In the French liberation, de Gaulle took an interest in the fate of Maurras; he in fact intervened so that Maurras did not pass in front of the Lyon court of justice but of the High Court, known to be more lenient.
Abroad
Maurras and French Action achieved great influence worldwide on different thoughts around a counterrevolutionary nationalism. In Great Britain, Maurras was admired by several writers, philosophers, university students and newspaper directors, such as Huntley Carter, T. S. Eliot or T. E. Hulme. From the Vatican, Pius X sympathized with his ideas ("defends the principle of authority, defends order", he argued in his favor), describing him as "a good defender of the Holy See and of the Church". For his part, in 1926 Pope Pius XI classified certain of Maurras's writings in the "prohibited work" section and condemned the reading of the newspaper L'Action française. This conviction came as a great shock to Maurras's supporters; in Britain, he diverted followers of the High Church from Catholicism and T. S. Eliot converted to Anglicanism. In Mexico there were also followers of Maurras such as Jesús Guisa y Azevedo, nicknamed "little Maurras" and the historian Carlos Pereyra. Maurrasian thought was noted in Spain in authors and intellectuals such as Azorín, José María Salaverría, Eugenio D'Ors, Víctor Pradera, Antonio Goicoechea, or Álvaro Alcalá-Galiano, and, likewise, it also influenced in political movements such as Maurismo. His ideas also met detractors, such as José Ortega y Gasset, Manuel Azaña and Miguel de Unamuno and, even, a good part of Spanish Catholicism. There was also a monarchical movement inspired in large part by French Action called Acción Española, which published the magazine of the same name during the Second Republic. In Peru, the Marquis de Montealegre de Aulestia, a reactionary thinker, admired the monarchical doctrine of Maurras. In Argentina, the soldiers Juan Carlos Onganía and Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, as well as the Dominicans Antonio Imbert Barrera and Elías Wessin y Wessin were influenced by the French intellectual. In Portugal, the dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled the country from 1932 to 1968, admired Maurras. On the death of the intellectual in 1952, he expressed his condolences. In Nicaragua, the poet Luis Alberto Cabrales, who met him in France, created the Nicaraguan Vanguard Movement, together with José Coronel Urtecho.
Works
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