Henceforth, the story of Maurras was that of the Action Francaise he became its moving spirit, and most of his writings were published in the review (1899–1914) and the newspaper (1908-1944) of that name.ĭespite his insistence that politics must take precedence over everything else (Politique d’abord!), the Action Françhise was less a political than a didactic and literary movement. This was the program of integral nationalism to which he soon converted the founders of the Ligue d’Action Française, a young, pragmatic, and patriotic movement dedicated to France’s political and intellectual regeneration. True patriotism, conscious of these conditionsof national prosperity and greatness, demanded, he believed, a return to the stability and continuity which only hereditary monarchy could provide. Based upon penetrating if frequently unhistorical criticism of the republic and parliament, his critique asserted the necessity of a return to the historical sources of French intellectual and political success: the classical tradition of the seventeenth century and the monarchy. When, in the late 1890s, the scandals that periodically shook the Third Re-public culminated in the Dreyfus affair, Maurras set out to elaborate a doctrine which might spark a reaction against the existing disorder and provide the basis of a national revival. He thought France was in a state of decadence and attributed this to its abandonment of traditions identified with the old regime, campaigning against Protestants, Jews, and metics-all those alien agents of change and corruption to whom the revolution had given free rein in France. Transferred from literary to sociopolitical grounds, Maurras’s empirisme organisateur turned him against what he considered the dissolvent and anarchic qualities of liberal individualism which had triumphed inthe French Revolution. He rediscovered the classical ideals of order, hierarchy, and discipline and insistedthat they alone provide an escape from nihilism into the positive realm of “organizing empiricism”-a method of solving current problems in terms of past experience. Reacting against the dominant relativism and eclecticism of his time, Maurras set out from skeptical and agnostic premises to find some solid basis for thought, style, and action in historical realities which, he argued, having worked in the past, might be expected to work again. He entered public life supporting both Fréderic Mistral’s Felibrige and Jean Moreas, with whom he joined in 1891 in founding the Ecole Romane, a literary movement designed to defend “a common ideal of Romanity.” He became the apostle of integral nationalism, having coined the term in 1900. Charles Marie Photius Maurras (1868-1952), French man of letters, was born in Martigues, near Marseille.
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