Charles Maurras

Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was a French writer, poet, critic and politician, and the chief ideologist of Action Française, a monarchist, authoritarian and counter-revolutionary movement. His thought, often summed up in the phrase “integral nationalism”, shaped right-wing politics in early twentieth-century Europe and anticipated some ideas later associated with fascism.

Raised in a Catholic and monarchist household in Provence, he became almost completely deaf in his early teens. As a young man he lost his faith and called himself an agnostic, though he continued to see the Church as a pillar of social order. At seventeen he moved to Paris, where he wrote literary criticism and contributed to periodicals such as La Cocarde. As a reporter he covered the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896. His political career began with the Dreyfus affair, in which he sided with the anti-Dreyfusards.

In 1899 he joined Action Française, founded a year earlier by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois, and persuaded them to embrace monarchism. Together with Léon Daudet he edited the movement’s review, which became a daily in 1908. His reading of French history was deeply pessimistic: he believed the nation had lost its greatness in the Revolution of 1789, a greatness built over centuries of kings, and he regarded the Republic as a kind of “anti-France”. Drawing on Comtean positivism, he prized order, hierarchy and tradition over parliamentary politics.

During the First World War he backed France’s entry into the conflict, even though this meant supporting the republican Georges Clemenceau. In 1940 he greeted Pétain’s rise to power as a “divine surprise”. After the Liberation he was convicted of collaboration; his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he lost his seat in the Académie Française. Ill in his last years, he was moved to a clinic, where he died in 1952, having returned to Catholicism.

His influence on French intellectual life was considerable. He attracted critics and writers to his review, which promoted a “modern classicism”. Jacques Maritain was close to him before the Vatican condemnation of 1926 placed some of his writings on the Index. According to Elisabeth Roudinesco, he marked a stage in the development of Jacques Lacan’s thought, and Lacan knew him personally. His name remains a subject of debate.