The brain of Action Française, the royalist theorist who denied the republic itself in the name of integral nationalism
'It is the revenge of Dreyfus!', on hearing his life sentence in the court at Lyon, 27 January 1945
A poet and polemicist from Martigues in Provence, deaf from his youth, who led Action Française for half a century after the movement formed out of the Dreyfus affair. His 'integral nationalism' called for the restoration of the monarchy and the abolition of the parliamentary republic, and named Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and foreigners as the 'four confederate states' eating France from within. The movement survived the Vatican's condemnation of 1926, and in 1938 he was elected to the Académie Française. Through January 1934 his paper named 'the thieves' day after day, and on the morning of 6 February it called on its readers to come to the Chamber that evening. He welcomed Pétain's accession in 1940 as a 'divine surprise', backed Vichy, and denounced resisters and Jews in print throughout the occupation. In January 1945 he was sentenced to life imprisonment and national degradation for collusion with the enemy.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1868–1890Born at Martigues; loses his hearing; begins writing in Paris
- 1899–1908Joins Action Française out of the Dreyfus affair; the daily is founded in 1908
- 1908–1939Theorist of integral nationalism, shaping the whole of the French far right
- 1926The Vatican condemns Action Française
- 1934.01–02Press offensive over the Stavisky affair; calls for the demonstration of 6 February
- 1938Elected to the Académie Française
- 1940–1944Backs Vichy; denounces resisters and Jews in print
- 1945.01Sentenced to life and national degradation for collusion with the enemy
- 1952Released in ill health and dies at Tours the same year
Related historical events
- 1934.01–07The Fascist Riot of 6 February 1934Theorist of Action FrançaiseHe stood at the centre of the press offensive that translated the Stavisky affair into a story of foreigners and Jews eating away at the republic, and on the morning of 6 February his paper called its readers to the Chamber that evening.
- 1940–1944The Fall of France and the Vichy RegimeVichy supporterHe welcomed Pétain's accession in 1940 and backed Vichy throughout the occupation.
Theorising 'state antisemitism'
'State antisemitism' was the concept Maurras set out in the columns of L'Action française in 1911, claiming that it was political rather than racial. Its goal was to drive Jews out of civic life, concretely by withdrawing their French nationality and restoring them to the pre-Revolutionary status of perpetual foreigner. By 1913 the doctrine had been formulated as a demand to bar Jews from posts in administration, management and teaching. He depicted German antisemitism as a 'tradition of brutality' rooted in the biological notion of race, and denied that his 'French antisemitism' had any 'racist character' because it lacked biological foundations. The historian Laurent Joly treats that distinction as an a posteriori reconstruction, even a euphemism that does not withstand analysis: Maurras too judged the Jew 'inassimilable', and state antisemitism was no more moderate than antisemitism 'of the skin' but simply inferred that the state, once restored, would settle the Jewish question from above, so that the rhetoric of 1911-1913 foreshadowed what was applied in 1940. Maurras indeed endorsed Vichy's Statute of the Jews as nothing less than prudent, arguing there was nothing offensive to human rights in excluding Jews from directing a theatre, a publication or a university. Joly notes that two thirds of the 800 articles Maurras wrote between 1908 and 1914 contained antisemitic attacks.