OMO-0247 — The White Flag and the Sovereign Nation (Part 3 of 3)
Politics, the State, and Public Life
The White Flag and the Sovereign Nation (Part 3 of 3)
France, from the Counter-Revolution to the National Right
Duration: 30:29 · Reading with an AI-generated voice. Audio in Spanish.
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The pattern repeats itself: Barrès loved the roots without the light; Maurras admired the cathedral without kneeling; Vichy spoke the words without the order; the FN sought votes without doctrine; the RN defends the nation without asking about its end; and the identitarian right claims Christian civilization without Christ.
XVII. After the Empire: Fragments and a Crisis in the Church
The year 1962 left many who had lived for French Algeria without a cause. A scattered constellation remained: anti-Gaullists, revolutionary nationalists, Maurrasian remnants, traditional Catholics, activists from various organizations, and a generation of young people formed after the war.
Another upheaval compounded that dispersal. The Second Vatican Council, between 1962 and 1965, and the liturgical and pastoral changes that followed it provoked a particularly strong traditional Catholic resistance in France, whose symbol would be Archbishop Lefebvre. But what was doctrinally decisive for our history was the controversy opened by the declaration Dignitatis humanae on religious freedom. The document affirmed a civil right to immunity from coercion in religious matters, including public practice within certain limits, while also declaring that it left intact the traditional doctrine concerning the duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion.[1] Archbishop Lefebvre and later authors such as Jean-Michel Gleize maintained that the difficulty lay precisely in reconciling that right, recognized independently of the truth of the religion professed, with the earlier magisterium, which distinguished between the right of the true religion and the prudent toleration of error.[2] Within the circle of Verbo, Miguel Ayuso has examined the same question in studying the Christian constitution of states.[3] In the Church's postconciliar orientation, the Catholic confessional constitution and the social kingship of Christ ceased to be proposed with the centrality they had held in the previous magisterium, still taught with complete clarity in Quas primas. And when that kingship ceased to occupy the center, the defense of Christian France was often left to those who understood it as an identity rather than a duty. Many traditional Catholics and many nationalists found one another again, because both rejected much of the modern world.
But sociological proximity is not doctrinal identity, and the questions of 1926 reappear. Is the Church defended because it forms part of France's heritage, or is France judged from a truth that does not depend upon it? Is the Christian order a mark of identity, or an objective ordering of society toward goods that no national will can alter?
As long as there is a common enemy, the difference goes unnoticed. When the time comes to govern, it decides everything.
XVIII. 1972: A Front for the Ballot Box
The name said it all: Front National, National Front. The intention was not to found a school of thought, but to bring people together.
The party was born in October 1972, driven by a radical nationalist group, Ordre Nouveau, which sought a figure capable of giving scattered currents an electoral face.[4] That figure was Jean-Marie Le Pen. For a decade its results were minimal. But the FN made a decision that would eventually transform it: it accepted the long patience of electoral politics.
There is a lesson here for all politics: means educate those who use them. The old Action française wanted to change the regime. An electoral party needs to win voters within the regime. This is not merely a difference in tactics. A movement that lives by majorities ends up changing its language, choosing issues that gain votes, abandoning those that lose them, turning doctrines into slogans, and accepting as its horizon what it formerly wanted to replace.
It is like a ship that decides to navigate a river. It may carry whatever cargo it wishes, but the river decides its route, and over the years the ship takes the shape of the channel. By making the ballot box its path, the FN implicitly accepted numbers as the final judge of political life, and whoever accepts the judge ends up accepting his law.
XIX. Jean-Marie Le Pen: The Tribune
Jean-Marie Le Pen, born in Brittany in 1928 and deceased in January 2025, belonged by biography to the world of colonial wars and Poujadism. He was an enormously talented orator, provocative, capable of filling public squares and causing scandal with statements that led to judicial convictions, especially concerning the Second World War. In the 1980s the FN took off thanks to an issue that would become its hallmark: immigration. In 2002 Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election, and all of France mobilized against him.[5]
The party he built could no longer live as Action française had. The doctrinal newspaper trained militants in a comprehensive vision of the political community. The modern party gathers votes around programs. And that changes the function of ideas: great systems break apart into issues, such as immigration, security, Europe, identity, taxes, memory, and public order.
The old words survive, but their content changes. Nation does not mean the same thing in Barrès, in Maurras, and in an electoral program of the 1990s. Sovereignty survives although the monarchy has disappeared. Identity takes the place formerly occupied by tradition. People replaces nation in speeches. And Catholicism, central in the older circles, becomes a cultural, civilizational, and sometimes purely heritage reference.
Le Pen's FN organized its program around insecurity, immigration, the loss of powers to Brussels, and the distance between the elites and the ordinary French person. What the reader must ask is whether that denunciation reached the cause or stopped at the symptoms. From the questions of Saint Thomas, the disease lay not merely in immigration or Europe, but in the claim that a will, national or European, should be the ultimate principle of law. Changing the sovereign does not cure sovereignty.
XX. From Front National to Rassemblement National
In 2011, Marine Le Pen succeeded her father and undertook what France called dédiabolisation: removing the party's diabolical image. In 2015 she expelled her own father. In 2018 the Front became Rassemblement National, National Rally. Since 2022 its president has been Jordan Bardella, a young man from a working-class background who never knew either Algeria or Vichy.[6] After the 2024 legislative elections, the RN became the largest individual group in the National Assembly, currently numbering 118 members and associates.[7]
Normalization was not merely a matter of image. To measure it, one need only set some documented positions against the categories the reader already knows.
Marine Le Pen defends republican secularism, that is, the strict separation between religion and public life that the Republic imposed against the Church in 1905. Quas primas had taught the opposite: societies, not only individuals, must publicly recognize the kingship of Christ.
On March 4, 2024, the French Congress voted to enshrine abortion in the Constitution. Of the 88 RN deputies, 46 voted in favor, 11 against, 20 abstained, and 11 did not vote. Marine Le Pen was among those voting in favor.[8] The party was divided, but its leadership sided with the reform. Against the tradition teaching that no human law can turn the destruction of an innocent person into a right, the fact speaks for itself.
The RN also accepts the Republic, its institutions, and its language. Viewed from the history we have traced, its course recalls the ralliement: an adherence to the regime initially conceived as tactical, which ends up becoming strategic. What it defends as French identity is largely republican and secular France, which its discourse presents as threatened by immigration and Islam.
This requires precision. It would be false to call a party that defends secularism and whose leadership voted to constitutionalize abortion “traditionalist” or “counter-revolutionary.” Compared with the classical categories, the RN appears not as a radicalized Counter-Revolution, but as a republican national right that accepts the score of 1789 and disputes who should conduct it. It maintains that public authority must be able to regulate entry, residence, and naturalization. That policy may be judged according to justice and the common good, not a sovereign national will; but the question the party leaves open is what the nation it seeks to preserve exists for.
XXI. Today's Right-Wing Movements: Identity without Faith
Around the RN and beyond it, other phenomena have emerged. Éric Zemmour, essayist and journalist, founded the party Reconquête in 2021, with a discourse centered on the threat of a demographic and cultural replacement of the French.[9] He claims Christian France as a civilization, through a cultural affirmation of that heritage rather than a profession of the Catholic faith. Identitarian movements speak of European heritage, sometimes invoking pre-Christian references. On social media there circulates a nebulous array of young people who reject dominant progressivism and seek belonging.
There is something significant in this search. The traditional Chartres pilgrimage brought together nearly twenty thousand pilgrims in May 2026 and, according to an internal survey by the organizers, more than half were under twenty-five.[10] It is a visible sign that among part of French youth there is once again a hunger for transmission, liturgy, and roots.
But the reader now knows how to distinguish. Defending Christianity as a civilization without believing in Christ is Maurras's formula, and it leads to the same place. The cross turned into an identitarian banner against Islam ceases to be a cross and becomes a tribal emblem. A Christianity defended because it is ours is, at bottom, indistinguishable from any other ethnic inheritance. And an identity without truth is merely an armed custom.
The pattern repeats itself: Barrès loved the roots without the light; Maurras admired the cathedral without kneeling; Vichy spoke the words without the order; the FN sought votes without doctrine; the RN defends the nation without asking about its end; and the identitarian right claims Christian civilization without Christ.
XXII. The Problem of the Name
Let us return to the label with which newspapers enclose this whole history: far right.
It has some usefulness. It allows parties to be placed on a map and alliances, votes, and militants to be studied. But it does not serve as a category of thought, for three reasons.
First, because it is relative: extreme means something only in relation to a center, and the center moves. What was moderate in 1950 is called extreme today, and vice versa.
Second, because right arose by chance. In the Assembly of 1789, supporters of the king's veto sat to the president's right, and their opponents to his left. It is a geography of seats, not a philosophy.
Third, because it puts in the same box people who differ precisely on what matters most: what man is, what society exists for, where authority comes from, and what makes a law just.
A legitimist, a Bonapartist, a Maurrasian, a Pétainist, a Poujadist, a French Algeria activist, and an RN voter may belong to the same history of inheritances, ruptures, and recombinations, but they do not profess the same doctrine.
That is why each word should be used in its proper place. National right-wing movements aptly describes the current that arises after Boulanger. Counter-Revolution should be reserved for what de Maistre defined: the opposite of the Revolution, the restoration of the order it denied. Traditionalism requires care, because it can designate a doctrine, a school, or mere nostalgia. And patriotism must not be handed over to nationalism, as though the latter had a monopoly on love of country.
XXIII. Nation, Homeland, and Tradition
Luis Hernando de Larramendi offers the clearest distinction here for the beginner. Nation, he reminds us, comes from being born. It is a fact of origin, blood, language, or place, and thus, taken alone, is not yet a political reality. Nationalisms have tried to define it by race, language, territory, or natural borders, and none of those criteria withstands examination: there are nations with two languages, nations divided among several states, and political communities that encompass several nations.[11]
The homeland is something else. It is the natural and organic political society, sufficient in its own order to procure the temporal common good and the shared ends of civil life, under legitimate authority. That temporal good, without being confused with man's supernatural end, must be ordered in a manner consistent with it. It may coincide with a nation, part of one, or several at once, because what constitutes it is not biology, but common life united by a shared and lasting interest. Thus one does not choose one's nation, but one can become part of a homeland: not by a contract, but by entering its common life and assuming its duties.[12]
Larramendi illustrates this with a French example. During the Fronde, Anne of Austria, born Spanish and queen of France, and her minister Mazarin, Italian by birth, defended the French homeland against the threat of a Spanish invasion, while the Parlement of Paris lost itself in conspiracies. By nation they were not French; by homeland, they were more French than many who were.[13]
His formula sums up the entire problem: “The nation makes people alike, the revolutionary state destroys; but the homeland protects and perfects.”[14]
For France, the distinction has its own historian. Jean de Viguerie showed that since the Revolution two homelands bearing the same name have coexisted in France. The old one is the land of the fathers, loved with piety under the king's authority and within Christendom. The revolutionary one arises from the Enlightenment and the Revolution, and La Marseillaise sings its ideal: it is not properly France, but an ideological homeland for which France is merely a support and an instrument. The patriotism of the first consists of gratitude and piety; that of the second, passion and excess.[15] The second took the name of the first, and that confusion explains much of the history we have traced: many French people believed they were dying for the homeland of their fathers while serving that of the Revolution. According to Viguerie, the deception culminated in 1914, when they were told it was the war of right.
The jurist Francisco Elías de Tejada completed the distinction from another angle. Peoples are defined not by a nation understood as a sum of race, language, territory, or political will, but by their tradition. And tradition does not mean everything that happened, but the past that has passed a double test: the test of life, because it still has the strength to live, and the test of morality, because it deserves to be transmitted.[16]
The difference is fundamental. If the nation is a fixed substance, history becomes an anguished search for what is purely French, and everything foreign looks like contamination. If tradition is transmission judged morally, France can receive, lose, recover, and purify without making any era absolute. Tradition does not canonize every custom, deify every frontier, or require the preservation of every institution. But neither does it allow a generation to declare itself the absolute creator of what it received.
Between immobility and revolution there is a third path: continuity with discernment.
Rafael Gambra, drawing on Spanish experience, distinguished foralism from nationalism. One can passionately defend a region's historic liberties, its laws, language, and character without demanding a sovereign state for it. Nationalism turns the defense of a community into a question of sovereignty; the foral order protects it within a wider architecture.[17] And Vallet added that a historic nation can be a nation of nations, and that the rule “one nation, one state” is not a fact of nature, but an ideological construction continually contradicted by history.
We may add that nationalism is arbitrary in two directions: when it tears the homeland into pieces and when it seeks to make all of it resemble the piece it prefers.[18] The first is separatism. The second is Jacobin centralism and, in its own way, the temptation of every nationalism that turns an idea of the nation into a compulsory mold.
These categories cannot simply be transplanted to France, but they allow the French questions to be formulated more clearly. Was centralization a requirement of France or of the French state? Was the unity of the kingdom incompatible with the diversity of its provinces? Did the Revolution free the nation, or replace a historic and plural nation with a homogeneous political nation?
Maurras allows a paradoxical answer: both things could happen in the same man. He defended the provinces and defended integral nationalism. He wanted to restore plurality and put it at the service of a sovereign unity.
XXIV. The Common Good and the National Interest
We reach the point where history becomes philosophy, and philosophy becomes conscience.
What happens when the interest of the nation clashes with justice?
If that question can no longer be asked, we are within absolute nationalism.
Castellano has insisted that the common good is neither the project a collectivity decides to share, nor the good of the majority, nor the sum of particular advantages. If it were, good would once again depend upon the will that declares it. The political common good (bonum commune) is the good proper to the temporal community according to its nature: an order of justice, peace, and virtue that allows human beings to live well in accordance with natural law and that, without being confused with the supernatural end, must remain subordinate to it.[19]
This allows us to separate two phrases that political language constantly mixes together:
We must seek the good of France.
France is the measure of what is good.
The first is the natural duty of whoever governs France. The second is incompatible with any objective idea of justice.
A political community has a duty to preserve itself, but not a right to commit any injustice in order to preserve itself. It must defend its own, but cannot place the foreigner outside justice or natural law. It may firmly establish conditions of citizenship, residence, and entry, but cannot make what is justly owed to a human being depend on his passport. It may safeguard a tradition, but cannot declare what is false to be true because it suits that tradition. It may defend its borders, but must not confuse a border with justice.
In that distance lies the difference between patriotism and absolute nationalism.
XXV. The Homeland against Absolute Sovereignty
Traditional patriotism has something nationalism scarcely tolerates: limits.
It loves a concrete reality knowing that it is not God, and precisely for that reason can love it whole.
The homeland contains the living and the dead, saints and traitors, glories and shames. It need not turn every page of its history into a justification. It can repent without ceasing to be a homeland, receive goods from other peoples without losing itself, belong to higher communities, recognize the liberties of smaller communities, and bear the fact that some human perfections were not born within its borders.
Nationalism, by contrast, grows more fragile the more it needs the nation to be self-sufficient. If the nation is the ultimate criterion, every dependence looks like humiliation, every correction like betrayal, and every universality like a threat.
The Catholic tradition works differently. The Church's universality does not destroy the homeland, but orders it. A son does not love his mother less for knowing she is not the Virgin; he loves her better, because he loves her as she is.
Medieval Christendom allowed overlapping allegiances that the modern state found uncomfortable: a man could belong to his city, his province, his kingdom, his guild, his university, his religious order, and the universal Church, all at once and without contradiction. Modernity simplified that richness into a single sovereign allegiance. The Revolution, proclaiming the rights of the nation, had undermined the homelands.[20] Afterward, nationalisms tried to reconstruct around that single allegiance all the density that had been lost. There, perhaps, lay part of their tragedy: asking the nation to be, all by itself, family, guild, province, Church, and Empire.
The Catholic tradition does not need its adversaries' vocabulary in order to judge. It does not first ask whether a doctrine is right-wing or left-wing, moderate or extreme, national or cosmopolitan. It asks what it recognizes as true, what it understands as just, from where power receives its limit, what man is, and what good it considers common. Only afterward come the names.
And when the questions are asked in that order, the distinction appears with a simplicity that a century and a half of labels had concealed. France deserves to be loved because it is a homeland. It need not be absolute to be loved. And precisely because it is not absolute, it can be loved according to justice.
XXVI. Modernity Fighting Modernity
The most important result of this history can be stated in a few words.
Modernity does not only produce ideologies that acknowledge themselves as modern. It also produces rebellions against itself that retain its core.
It can manufacture a collectivism against individualism, a dictatorship against liberalism, a plebiscitary democracy against parliamentarianism, a nationalism against cosmopolitanism, and a conservative statism against the liberal state. In all these cases an effect of modernity is attacked without touching its principle: human will erected as the foundation of law.
Castellano sums it up precisely: negating an ideology is not enough to recover politics, because its nature must be restored.
France offers the purest case. The Revolution proclaimed the Nation sovereign. A century later, some of its most uncompromising opponents made the Nation the foundation of their struggle against the Revolution. They were not Jacobins, but calling them counter-revolutionaries is not enough to resolve the tension either.
That is why not everything to the right of the Republic should be called Counter-Revolution. The Counter-Revolution is neither the highest degree of reaction, nor heightened nostalgia, nor authoritarianism, nor distrust of foreigners, nor nationalism, nor even necessarily monarchy. If the word retains its meaning, it designates the restoration of the order the Revolution denied: a person whose dignity does not arise from will; a society prior to the state; intermediate bodies with a life of their own; a power limited by its end; a law measured by justice; a community ordered toward the common good; and a temporal order that recognizes the kingship of Christ.
Everything else is judged from there: the right, monarchy, nationalism, and also those who call themselves counter-revolutionaries.
France emerges from this history enlarged, not diminished. Only an idolatrous idea of the homeland needs to suppose it flawless. France gave the world Jacobinism and the Vendée, the Declaration of 1789 and Joseph de Maistre, the centralized state and an ancient diversity of provinces, fueros, and customs, militant secularism and one of modernity's most fruitful Catholic cultures; it gave Barrès and Maurras, but also Péguy, Ousset, and Madiran. Its history is not the march of a right that radicalizes or moderates itself. It is the often painful search for a principle of unity after the old one was broken.
XXVII. The Flag
Now we understand why this history began with a prince and a flag.
In 1873 it was not only a claimant who was lost: it became clear that the French question had shifted ground. Everything that followed, from Barrès to Rassemblement National, was a succession of responses to the wound then left open, and none restored the score to its proper place.
There is a history, but no immovable substance. And some of the men who most ardently wished to fight the Revolution ended up speaking in its name. That is the true paradox of the French national right: not that it was too counter-revolutionary, but that often it was not counter-revolutionary enough to escape the idea the Revolution had placed at the center of the political community.
Chambord did not reign. He died in 1883 at Frohsdorf, in Austria, far from France, without having yielded.[21] One may judge his decision imprudent, but not what he saw insignificant. They offered him a crown in exchange for admitting that he received it from the Nation, and he understood that they were asking him to change not colors, but principle.
The monarchy did not return. The Nation remained. And the white flag, folded in exile, continued to say what no French party would say again: there is an order that is not put to a vote, and a homeland is free only when it does not believe itself that order's master. ●
Notes
[1] Second Vatican Council, declaration Dignitatis humanae, December 7, 1965, nos. 1–2.
[2] Marcel Lefebvre, Ils l’ont découronné. Du libéralisme à l’apostasie. La tragédie conciliaire, Escurolles, Fideliter, 1987; Jean-Michel Gleize, Vatican II en débat. Questions disputées autour du XXIe concile œcuménique, Versailles, Courrier de Rome, 2012, with a preface by Bishop Bernard Fellay.
[3] Miguel Ayuso, La constitución cristiana de los Estados, Barcelona, Scire (De regno series, 4), 2008, pp. 32–34. An Italian edition exists: Naples, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2010.
[4] The Front National was constituted on October 5, 1972.
[5] First round of the presidential election, April 21, 2002.
[6] Marine Le Pen was elected president of the Front National at the Tours congress on January 16, 2011, and Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the party on August 20, 2015. The name change was approved on June 1, 2018, and Jordan Bardella was elected president on November 5, 2022.
[7] Assemblée nationale, composition of the political groups, consulted in October 2026.
[8] Congrès du Parlement, public vote of March 4, 2024 on the constitutional bill concerning the freedom to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy. Breakdown of the Rassemblement National group according to the official analysis of the vote.
[9] Reconquête was founded in December 2021.
[10] The 44th Paris–Chartres pilgrimage organized by Notre-Dame de Chrétienté, May 23–25, 2026. The internal survey covered 4,610 participants; see Catholic World Report, May 27, 2026.
[11] L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, pp. 57–61.
[12] L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, pp. 67–68. Larramendi defines the homeland as a society “capable of realizing all human ends”; we refine that formula here to distinguish the temporal common good from man's supernatural end.
[13] L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, pp. 63–64.
[14] L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, p. 72.
[15] Jean de Viguerie, Les deux patries. Essai historique sur l’idée de patrie en France, Bouère, Dominique Martin Morin, 1998; 2nd revised and expanded edition, 2003.
[16] Francisco Elías de Tejada, “La causa diferenciadora de las comunidades políticas (tradición, nación e imperio),” Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia, vol. IV (1942), pp. 113–136 and 342–365; idem, La monarquía tradicional, Madrid, Rialp, 1954.
[17] Rafael Gambra, “Patriotismo y nacionalismo,” Cristiandad (Barcelona), no. 160 (November 1950), pp. 507–508; idem, La monarquía social y representativa en el pensamiento tradicional, Madrid, Rialp, 1954.
[18] L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, p. 182.
[19] D. Castellano, La naturaleza de la política, cited above, chapter “La finalidad de la política.”
[20] L. Hernando de Larramendi, Cristiandad, Tradición, Realeza, cited above, p. 82.
[21] The Count of Chambord died at Frohsdorf Castle, in Lower Austria, on August 24, 1883.
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