OMO-0246 — The White Flag and the Sovereign Nation (Part 2 of 3)
Politics, the State, and Public Life
The White Flag and the Sovereign Nation (Part 2 of 3)
France, from the Counter-Revolution to the National Right
Duration: 25:43 · Reading with an AI-generated voice. Audio in Spanish.
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The Church teaches, sanctifies, and safeguards the faith, but it is not in itself the instrument that secures political order. There is a Christian politics, animated by the same spirit as the Church’s action but distinct in nature, with its own forms and institutions that God’s law and social nature require us to respect
IX. Dreyfus: The Nation Split in Two
In 1894, a captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian, was convicted of treason, accused of passing military secrets to Germany. He was innocent. The real culprit was another officer, Esterhazy, and over the years it became known that the case against Dreyfus included forged documents.[1]
For twelve years, France split in two. The Dreyfusards demanded a review of the proceedings in the name of justice and truth. The anti-Dreyfusards maintained that reopening the trial humiliated the army, weakened France against Germany, and served its enemies. Families stopped dining together. The issue was no longer a captain, but what France is and what matters more: the justice owed to a man or the prestige of the national institution.
Barrès sided with the anti-Dreyfusards. Here the question of what makes a decision just receives, in practice, a terrible answer: national utility. No national interest can make it just to condemn an innocent man. Classical tradition had always said so: reason of State is not above justice, because the State exists for justice. Added to this, in part of that camp, was a prejudice against the accused man’s origins that made him a figure of the enemy within.
It was in this climate that Action française was born in 1899.[2] At first it was a league of republican patriots. A young Provençal writer convinced it that the only way to save France was monarchy. That young man was Charles Maurras.
It is worth noting the order, because everything lies in it. Legitimism had reached the defense of France through monarchy. Maurras reached monarchy through France.
X. Maurras: The Architect
No figure in this history requires as much care as Maurras, and none teaches as much.
He was born in 1868 in Martigues, in Provence. Early deafness shut him away among books. He lost his faith in adolescence and lived apart from it for decades. In his final days, already gravely ill, he received the last sacraments.[3] He was a poet, a formidable polemicist, and a tireless organizer. His newspaper, L’Action française, appeared daily from 1908 and carried a motto in its masthead: Organ of Integral Nationalism. His young activists, the Camelots du roi, sold the paper in the streets and fought their opponents.
Maurras saw things that very few people saw. He saw that the individual vote does not represent a real society, made up of families, trades, municipalities, and provinces. He saw that party democracy lives by dividing the country into permanent camps, and that a nation needs continuity, so that a hereditary king, who does not owe his position to a campaign, can think in the long term. He defended decentralization and provincial liberties against Jacobin centralism. He defended the Church against the Republic’s secularism, which in 1905 broke with it and seized its churches.[4] In his 1900 Inquiry into Monarchy, he constructed a brilliant argument: if one reasons dispassionately about what France needs, one arrives at the king.[5]
Many Catholics were attracted to him, and with apparent reason. Maurras seemed to say what they thought, and he said it better than anyone.
But we must examine how he reached his conclusions, because that is where the key lies.
Maurras called his method organizing empiricism: observe history, see which institutions had worked to preserve France, and adopt them. His watchword was politique d’abord, ‘politics first.’[6] And every good he defended, he defended for its usefulness to the nation: monarchy, because it serves France; decentralization, because it strengthens the real France; tradition, because it preserves France’s accumulated experience; the Church, because it formed France and keeps it united.
It was like admiring a cathedral without kneeling in it. Maurras loved the cathedral, its stone, its history, its beauty, and the order it had given generations. But he did not believe in Him for whom it had been built. To him, the cathedral was France’s highest monument, not the house of God.
The word integral is often understood as though this nationalism embraced all the goods of a society. It is more accurate to read it the other way around: all goods are integrated within the nation, which is the principle that orders them. The nation is not one good among others, but the measure of the rest.
If religion is defended because it is necessary for France, France has become the criterion of religion. If France must submit to religious truth because that truth is true, the relationship is reversed. The two positions can fight together for decades, in the same trenches and against the same enemies, but they are not the same, and when the moment of decision comes, they part.
Saint Thomas had taught in On Kingship that political life has its own dignity, but that well-ordered temporal life is not man’s ultimate end.[7] Politics is noble, but it is not everything. A nation can possess a true good, but it cannot be the absolute measure of good.
There is also a problem of method. Saint Thomas’s realism is not empiricism. It does not say ‘this is good because it worked,’ but that things have natures, reason discovers ends in them, and prudence chooses the means. Experience is indispensable, but it does not establish the norm, and for Thomism effectiveness is never enough. A centuries-old institution can be unjust, an overwhelming majority can be mistaken, and a unanimous nation can desire evil. A legitimate king can govern as a tyrant, and a republic can enact a just law.
With this in hand, Castellano’s thesis acquires its full meaning. If the Nation occupies the place of that which has no rule above it, the Revolution continues even with a king on the throne. Maurras wanted a king, but he wanted him as the Nation’s best servant.
What he saw. Almost everything that was diseased in the Republic: individualism, centralism, the tyranny of parties, religious persecution, and the lack of continuity.
What he lacked. The order of ends. He fought 1789 with one of the creatures of 1789. Hence his intellectual greatness, and hence his limit.
XI. Rome Says No: ‘The Spiritual First’
In 1925, Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Quas primas, which established the feast of Christ the King. It taught that Christ reigns not only over souls but also over societies, and that States must acknowledge Him publicly.[8] It was the exact answer to secularism.
A year later, in December 1926, the same Pius XI condemned Action française. Several of Maurras’s books and the newspaper were placed on the Index, and Catholics were obliged to withdraw from the movement. The wound was enormous. Some of the faithful were denied the sacraments, families were broken, and Catholics could not understand how Rome could strike those who most defended the Church against the Republic. In 1939, under Pius XII, the prohibition on the newspaper was lifted after its leadership’s submission.[9]
The dispute was not solely doctrinal. The condemnation also formed part of a Vatican policy that, since the ralliement, had sought to detach Catholics from monarchist causes; for this reason, the Verbo school, which brought together former disciples of Maurras such as Ousset, has received his legacy ‘with benefit of inventory.’[10] But we need not resolve the entire dispute here to see what it revealed. Pius XI’s two decisions together form a single lesson. Christ must reign over society, but reigning does not mean serving as cement for the nation. The Church does not exist to give France spiritual unity; France must acknowledge Christ’s kingship because it is true.
The true answer to Maurras was Pius XI’s own: against politique d’abord, the kingship of Christ. This is worth noting, because history usually gives that role to Jacques Maritain, who had been close to Maurras and in 1927 published The Primacy of the Spiritual.[11] But Maritain corrected one error by opening the door to its opposite. In developing his thought in Integral Humanism, he ended up granting the temporal order an autonomy that separated it from the social kingship of Christ, and his path led to the ‘healthy secularism’ of Christian democracy. Maurras had made the Church an instrument of the nation; Maritain ended by separating it from the polity. Both, by opposite paths, left Christ outside government.[12]
There is a permanent temptation in all conservative politics: to value religion for its effects. The State favors it because it creates obedient citizens; the conservative, because it maintains customs; the nationalist, because it unites the people. None of those reasons yet touches what is essential. The usefulness of a truth is not the reason for its truth. And when politics protects the Church for its usefulness, it ends up protecting it on condition that it domesticate it.
The opposite error also exists. The Church teaches, sanctifies, and safeguards the faith, but it is not in itself the instrument that secures political order. There is a Christian politics, animated by the same spirit as the Church’s action but distinct in nature, with its own forms and institutions that God’s law and social nature require us to respect.[13] Maurras wanted to use the Church as cement for the nation; clericalism would have the Church perform the work of government. Tradition rejects both.
The question left open by the condemnation would accompany the French right throughout the twentieth century: how much of its Catholicism was faith, and how much was French identity dressed in religious clothing?
XII. The Leagues: United by the Enemy
In the 1930s, France was experiencing the world economic crisis, financial scandals that implicated parliament, and fear of communism. Many leagues emerged, street organizations hostile to the regime, with or without uniforms: the Jeunesses patriotes, Solidarité française, Colonel de La Rocque’s Croix-de-Feu, and Action française itself. On February 6, 1934, thousands of demonstrators marched toward the Chamber of Deputies; the police fired, and people were killed. The left saw an attempted fascist coup; the right, a legitimate protest against corruption. The debate continues.
Words become traps here: fascism, the far right, nationalism, authoritarianism, counter-revolution. Each illuminates something and conceals something else. The most attentive French historiography insists that speaking of ‘the’ far right in the singular flattens currents very different from one another.
Castellano offers the key. There is a way of doing politics that defines itself by the enemy: we are those who are against. But the enemy never supplies a community’s positive end.[14] Knowing what one fights against does not say what one governs for.
Two men can push the same door and want to enter different houses. A liberal and a Catholic can be anticommunists for opposite reasons: one defends property as the individual’s freedom; the other, as a natural order serving the family. A monarchist and a fascist can hate parliament without sharing the same idea of authority: the first wants power limited by its end; the second, an all-embracing State. The leagues rightly saw the regime’s corruption and the communist danger, but adding enemies together does not produce a doctrine. History would put that combination to the harshest possible test.
XIII. Vichy: The Right Words and Unjust Deeds
In June 1940, the French army collapsed before Germany in six weeks. Parliament granted full powers to Marshal Pétain, the hero of the First World War, and the Third Republic died. It was not overthrown from outside its institutions: its own Parliament voted, on July 10, 1940, to replace it. Larramendi had foretold this three years earlier, writing that party regimes end up granting full powers when they no longer know how to govern.[15] The Vichy regime was born, proclaiming a National Revolution and replacing the republican motto, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, with another: Work, Family, Homeland.
Catholics, conservatives, former Maurrasians, technocrats, authoritarians, and opportunists gathered around it. Maurras greeted Pétain’s arrival as a ‘divine surprise.’
The three words of the new motto name three true goods: work, family, and homeland. But none makes just every policy carried out in its name.
And Vichy committed gravely unjust acts. In October 1940, it enacted laws excluding people on grounds of origin, expelling thousands from public service, teaching, the press, and numerous professions, on its own initiative and not at Germany’s demand. It reviewed naturalizations and stripped thousands of their nationality. That same month, after meeting Hitler at Montoire, Pétain publicly announced that he was taking the path of collaboration. In 1942, French police participated in the great roundups that sent thousands of innocent people, including children, to extermination camps.[16]
To judge this, one need not know whether something is ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing.’ It is enough to ask whether it is just. It is not enough for a regime to exalt authority: we must ask which authority and toward what end. It is not enough to invoke the homeland: we must ask what is actually being done to man and the community under that name.
Vichy should suffice to destroy forever a false equation: antimodern equals traditional. A regime can reject liberalism and swell the State, celebrate the family and the guilds while subjecting them to its control, invoke the homeland and trample justice, present itself as a moral restoration and organize the legal exclusion of innocent people.
What it saw. That interwar France was morally exhausted.
What it lacked. Justice. Political tradition is not recognized by the number of traditional words in a speech, but by the order it preserves among them. Vichy had the vocabulary without the order.
XIV. 1945: The Collapse of a World
The Liberation was not a simple change of government. For the national right, it meant the fall of institutions, newspapers, networks, reputations, and legitimacies accumulated over half a century. L’Action française ceased publication in August 1944. In January 1945, Maurras was tried for collaboration and sentenced to life imprisonment. On hearing the sentence, he shouted: ‘It is Dreyfus’s revenge!’[17] The phrase shows that he understood the continuity of his own history better than anyone. He died in 1952.
But no tradition disappears with its newspapers. Men, memories, resentments, loyalties, and reading survived. Here it is worth looking at a path that political history tends to ignore, because it did not seek votes.
After the Liberation, Jean Ousset, who had been Charles Maurras’s secretary, founded La Cité catholique in 1946 with Jean Masson. Ousset had learned the lesson of 1926. As Estanislao Cantero has written, he gave politique d’abord a different approach: the aim was no longer to found a party, but to practice Catholic politics in every sphere of life. Maurras himself had anticipated this: when the young Ousset proposed in 1939 that a doctrinal school be created within Action française, he replied that, if he was seeking a doctrine, the Catholic one was the only true doctrine, and that he should not be half a Catholic.[18] His work did not seek to conquer power, but to form minds: small study circles reading Saint Thomas and the papal teaching on society, to restore the social reign of Christ from below, in families, trades, and municipalities. His principal book is entitled, unambiguously, That He May Reign.[19] Primacy belonged no longer to the nation, but to Christ.
From that French root, the Spanish undertaking was born. Eugenio Vegas Latapie became acquainted with Ousset’s work in the mid-1950s, and in 1961 founded Ciudad Católica and the journal Verbo with Juan Vallet de Goytisolo.[20] Years later, Ousset would be among the European and American thinkers gathered around the Asociación Felipe II, created in 1970 by Francisco Elías de Tejada.[21] In France, Jean Madiran, another former Maurrasian, founded the journal Itinéraires in 1956, which sustained a Thomistic critique of the modern world for decades.[22] From the Maurrasian trunk also grew a branch that corrected itself and returned the score to its proper place.
This fact is decisive, because it shows that the line between nationalism and Catholic tradition is not an invention of their opponents. It was drawn from within by those who knew Maurras’s greatness and his limit better than anyone.
XV. Anticommunism and Poujade: The Protest of the Small
After the war, being anticommunist could mean too many things: a liberal defense of the market, religious opposition to materialism, alignment with the United States, nationalism, or fear of the single-party system. The word united outwardly what remained divided within.
In 1953, a new phenomenon appeared. Pierre Poujade, a stationer in a southern village, organized small shopkeepers and artisans against tax pressure and Treasury inspectors. His movement spread like wildfire, and in the January 1956 elections it sent more than fifty deputies to the Assembly. Among them was the youngest member of the Chamber, a former paratrooper who had fought in Indochina and was named Jean-Marie Le Pen.[23]
Poujadism sensed something sound, almost guild-like: that the modern State crushes the small property owner, the shopkeeper, and the artisan beneath a fiscal and bureaucratic burden that nobody really voted for. But it defended interests, legitimate though particular, rather than an idea of the polity. And it revealed a profound social change. The old national right had great intellectual power and little electoral strength; the new protest had votes and little doctrine. The street, the newspaper, and the league were beginning to yield to another power: mass suffrage.
XVI. Algeria: What Is France?
Between 1954 and 1962, the Algerian War forced French nationalism to answer a question its formulas had postponed: what is France?
Algeria was not just any colony. It was divided into French departments, and nearly a million Europeans lived there, many with generations of ancestors born there. But most of the population was Muslim and did not have the same political rights. If Algeria was France, why were not all its inhabitants fully French? And if they were not, on what grounds was it France?
The war was atrocious on both sides: attacks by the National Liberation Front, torture by the French army, and massacres. In 1958, General de Gaulle returned to power at the call of precisely those who wanted to retain French Algeria, and ended by leading the country toward Algerian independence. Those who felt betrayed formed the OAS, a clandestine organization that resorted to terrorism and attempted to assassinate de Gaulle. In 1962, Algeria became independent.[24] Hundreds of thousands of Europeans fled to France, and tens of thousands of Muslims who had fought on the French side, the harkis, were abandoned; many of them were killed.
Vallet’s idea of a society of societies, which we already know, offers no retrospective solution here, but it frames the difficulty well.[25] The modern principle requires each nation to have its State and each State to be a homogeneous nation. History, however, knows plural political communities that do not fit the dilemma between total integration and sovereign independence. The Hispanic Monarchy of the viceroyalties had demonstrated this for three centuries.
But invoking a higher community does not authorize us to ignore the justice owed to its parts either. The common good is not an elegant name for reason of State. To be the common good, it must truly be common.
What it saw. The loyalty owed to those who had trusted France, and the tragedy of peoples uprooted from their land.
What it lacked. A limit on the means. When preserving the nation justifies torture or terrorism, the nation has become the absolute. Algeria showed, once again, that the national is not automatically just.
To be continued.●
Notes
[1] The Cour de cassation quashed Dreyfus’s conviction without remand on July 12, 1906.
[2] Founded by Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo in 1899, Action française turned toward monarchy under Maurras’s influence in the following years.
[3] Maurras died on November 16, 1952, in Saint-Symphorien, near Tours. On his final reconciliation, cf. Estanislao Cantero, ‘Catholicism and Politics: Jean Ousset, Catholic Teacher of the Catholic Counter-Revolution,’ Verbo (Madrid), nos. 325–326 (1994), pp. 465–478, here p. 478.
[4] Law of December 9, 1905, concerning the separation of the Churches and the State.
[5] Charles Maurras, Enquête sur la monarchie, Paris, 1900; definitive edition, Paris, Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1909.
[6] For a systematic exposition of these notions, see Charles Maurras, Mes idées politiques, Paris, Fayard, 1937.
[7] Saint Thomas Aquinas, De regno ad regem Cypri, book I, chapter 15 (chapter 14 in other editions).
[8] Pius XI, encyclical Quas primas, December 11, 1925.
[9] Decree of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office of December 29, 1926. The prohibition concerning the newspaper was lifted by a Holy Office decree of July 10, 1939, in accordance with the resolution of the July 5 session, following its leaders’ declaration of submission, and was published in L’Osservatore Romano on July 16, 1939; this did not rehabilitate Maurras’s works placed on the Index. Cf. Émile Poulat, ‘Le Saint-Siège et l’Action française, retour sur une condamnation,’ Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, no. 31 (2010), pp. 141 ff.
[10] M. Ayuso, article cited, p. 902. On the condemnation, Ayuso refers to Jacques Prévotat, Les catholiques et l’Action française. Histoire d’une condamnation. 1899–1939, Paris, Fayard, 2001, and Philippe Prévost, Autopsie d’une crise politico-religieuse. La condamnation de l’Action française. 1926–1939, Paris, Librairie canadienne, 2008 (ibid., p. 887, n. 47).
[11] Jacques Maritain, Primauté du spirituel, Paris, Plon, 1927.
[12] Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral, Paris, Aubier, 1936.
[13] L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, pp. 78–80.
[14] D. Castellano, La naturaleza de la política, cited above.
[15] Constitutional Law of July 10, 1940. Cf. L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, p. 90.
[16] Law of July 22, 1940, on the review of naturalizations; law of October 3, 1940; the Montoire meeting, October 24, 1940, and Marshal Pétain’s radio address of October 30, 1940; roundups of July 16 and 17, 1942.
[17] Judgment of the Rhône Court of Justice, Lyon, January 27, 1945.
[18] M. Ayuso, article cited, p. 900, n. 82, following Raphaëlle de Neuville, Jean Ousset et la Cité catholique, Bouère, Dominique Martin Morin, 1998, p. 42.
[19] Jean Ousset, Pour qu’Il règne, 1st edition 1957; 2nd edition, Paris, La Cité Catholique, 1959 (Spanish translation: Para que Él reine, Madrid, Speiro, 1961). On the founding of the Cité catholique and the change Ousset brought to politique d’abord, cf. E. Cantero, article cited, pp. 466–469.
[20] Miguel Ayuso, ‘Brief History,’ presentation for Verbo’s fiftieth anniversary (December 8, 2011), Fundación Speiro. According to that same text, the Spanish Ciudad Católica’s first undertaking, together with the journal, was the Spanish version of Para que Él reine.
[21] Alberto Ruiz de Galarreta, ‘Preface to This Edition,’ in L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, p. XXVI.
[22] Itinéraires, the journal founded by Jean Madiran in 1956.
[23] The Union de défense des commerçants et artisans (UDCA) was established in 1953. The legislative elections took place on January 2, 1956.
[24] Évian Accords, March 18, 1962; proclamation of Algerian independence, July 5, 1962.
[25] J. Vallet de Goytisolo, ‘Organic Constitution of the Nation,’ cited above, p. 333; idem, Más sobre temas de hoy, Madrid, Speiro, 1979, pp. 208–209.
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