Charles Maurras
Charles Maurras was a French author, poet, and political theorist known for his role in the development of integral nationalism and the Action Française movement. He advocated for a strong, centralized state and opposed liberal democracy and individualism. Maurras' ideas had a significant impact on French politics and intellectual thought in the early 20th century.
3 Key excerpts on "Charles Maurras"
eBook - ePubIntellectuals in the Latin Space during the Era of Fascism
Crossing Borders
- Valeria Galimi, Annarita Gori, Valeria Galimi, Annarita Gori(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Likewise, the ideas of nationalisme intransigeant of Maurras had been widespread in Brazil, through the thought and writings of Antonio Sardinha and Plínio Salgado, among others. Nevertheless, it was only a ‘selective appropriation’ of certain themes, which were then combined with various other cultural references. 30 The intellectuals of the Catholic right in the ‘Latin space’ – travelling often through France and through direct contacts with the cultural world – kept their attention on Maurrassian thought. However, they often left aside elements of Maître ’s reflection that were less suited to their specific cultural contexts, preferring notions regarding the Latinité (‘Latinidad’), 31 like Hispanidad or Integralismo. The magazine Je suis partout emphasized the spread of Maurras’s thought outside France as a unique and authentic expression of French nationalism, therefore considering it ‘revolutionary’, without however being able to grasp the elements of appropriation and misunderstanding of this cultural mediation. On 7 November 1936, in an article titled ‘ Charles Maurras devant le monde nouveau ’, Maurras was presented as an indispensable political reference for all the authoritarian nationalist regimes forming in Europe: Ask Salazar, Degrelle or Franco and they answer us by saying: ‘France is Maurras. I learned to read in Maurras […] Wherever a young national movement is formed, be it in Belgium, Switzerland or Poland, it turns first to the revolutionary traditionalism of Maurras’. 32 It is a ‘partial’ look, however, in the analysis of the countries of the Latin space that the paper proposed; it is also possible to trace their political affairs and cultural environments, albeit through a sometimes stereotyped and idealized vision. 7.3 Views on the ‘Latin space’ From its foundation, the Je suis partout magazine dedicated constant attention to the Latin space...
eBook - ePub- Jonathan Judaken(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...If nothing else, this construction differs essentially from the ostensibly impersonal and political Maurrasian antisémitisme d'état, with its identification of French Jewry as one of the four solid pillars of ‘Anti-France’ (along with foreigners, Freemasons and Protestants), an antisemitism that, according to Maurras, ‘should be defined as the premier organic and positive idea, the premier counterrevolutionary and naturalist idea’. 22 As a reflection of the Action Française chief's overall mindset (the quotation dates from 1901), rather than a singular obsession with the Jews, this viewpoint opposes a reactionary positivism to what a recent study calls Maritain's ‘mystic modernism’. 23 Given the prevalence of a Christian supernaturalism in the latter's approach to the Jewish Question, one can more readily perceive the enduring imprint of Maritain's godfather, the Catholic mystic novelist Léon Bloy. Anti-modern/ultramodern The pre-eminence of Bloy's influence over that of Maurras in Maritain's framing of the Jewish Question, if not his confrontation with modernity, drew in part on chronological precedence, as the former association anticipated the latter by several years. The future philosopher had rejected his republican, libre-penseur upbringing when he and his Russian Jewish émigrée wife Raïssa sought Catholic baptism in 1906. He had been born the scion of a solidly republican and nominally Protestant family and, for a time, considered himself both an atheist and a socialist, vowing to ‘live for the Revolution’. 24 In 1901 he became the ‘disciple’ of Dreyfusard poet Charles Péguy, inhabiting the latter's bookshop and assisting with the editing of the journal Cahiers de la quinzaine while pursuing his university studies...
eBook - ePubDe Gaulle
Statesmanship, Grandeur and Modern Democracy
- Daniel Mahoney(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...To understand de Gaulle’s “political philosophy,” we must, of course, understand that most “particular” of entities, France. An understanding of the mystique of France, of France’s destiny as an elected people, provides access to de Gaulle’s understanding of the “natural order of things,” of the political nature of man. De Gaulle, without explicitly referring to Aristotle, understood the sublime task of statesmanship in a largely “Aristotelean” way: the statesman must be a partisan of the whole; he must be a partisan of the common good and not of a particular and narrow conception of justice. But as de Gaulle’s book on France illustrates, because of the forces of dispersal from her past which weigh her down, because of the bitter and ideological character of her partisan divisions, de Gaulle must speak, like Barrés and Péguy, of that “eternal France” which is above the conflict of regimes. In Chapter 6, we examine the ways in which the Fifth French Republic was self-consciously intended to transcend the fundamental ideological chasm between the Old Regime and the Revolution which blocks the formation of a politics of rassemblement, of the common good. But it is not only the legacy of the French Revolution that makes a politics which evokes the organic unity of eternal France a pressing necessity. It is also the banal, sterile, commonplace character of the “modern world” 15 or of modern mass society. The modern world oscillates between a stultifying apolitical individualism and totalitarian nationalisms and collectivisms which proffer illegitimate mystiques to the European peoples. De Gaulle instead speaks for the mystique of the nation as the true alternative to depoliticized liberal society and irrational or hyperrational totalitarian mysticisms (i.e., fascism and communism). In the first pages of his Mémoires de Guerres, de Gaulle speaks of the culture, patriotism, and piety of his mother and father...
