The Intelligent American’s Guide to the French Right

Mr Coulombe begins a multi-part series on the French Right, based on his long acquaintance with Gary Potter, who spent his life trying to teach Americans about the French Royalist movement.

From Catholicism.org

By Charles Coulombe, STM, KCSS

French people, let us speak with courage.
Born on the soil that our Kings gathered,
We receive as inheritance,
The field less rich, and less large than before…
Yet it is the same seed,
The same earth too,
Who has pillaged the domain?
We must know, it is high time.

Chorus:
If you want your deliverance,
Think clearly and walk straight!
Kings made France!
It is falling apart without a King.
If you want your deliverance,
Think clearly and walk straight!
French people, we want a France,
But France needs a King!
—Maxime Brienne, “La Royale.”

IN MY recent obituary of Gary Potter, I wrote of his formative years in Paris that “There he reunited with some of his old Beat friends, and soon frequented various literary circles. But France was still in the throes of reaction to the Algerian defeat, and it was the circles of the French Catholic and Royalist Right whose membership attracted him. Henri Massis, Louis Salleron, Jacques Hérissay, Gilbert Tournier, Pierre Masquelier, Marshal Weygand, Marshal Alphonse Juin, Colonel Rémy, Gustave Thibon, Michel de Saint-Pierre, Gilbert Tournier, and many more such figures. He came to know men who had known Charles Maurras and became himself a man of the Right. But his conversion to the French throne began his conversion to the Catholic altar — and it was here, in Paris, that he would first dip his finger into the holy water font.” Our illustrious editor pointed out that few of our readers would recognise many of these names — or the context of the French Right that produced them, and so our Gary.

At his suggestion, I here begin a series of articles that shall explore that world that came to have such an influence on our Gary, and whose best insights he spent a career trying to bring to an American audience. I cannot think of a better tribute to the man — nor anything that he would prefer receiving as such. As he himself would say, the best way to begin such a work is to lay down its foundations — that is to say its history. As with so much else in modern France, we must start with the French Revolution.

It was that horrible and bloody upheaval that in so many ways created politics as we know them; our very notions of “Right” and “Left” come from the seating arrangements in the revolutionary legislative chamber, with the moderate republicans or “Girondins” on the right side of the speaker (their leader, Danton, was a blood relation of Hilaire Belloc, which forever affected that writer’s thinking about the issues involved), and the radical Jacobins to his left. In between were the moderates — “The Frogs of the Marsh,” as the Jacobins contemptuously nicknamed them.

Outside the entire revolutionary party system, of course, were the Counterrevolutionaries, the Chouans, in the West and South of France — most notably in Brittany and the Vendee — as well as in various émigré formations outside the country. In a real sense, this situation prefigured what has been a perennial issue not just for French opponents of revolution, but those throughout the world — can the monster be best opposed from within or without the existing political regime, itself a creature born of the overthrown of the Catholic Monarchy in 1789, and the Constitutional Monarchy in 1792. What is certain is that this conflict began the rupture so well described by Charles Maurras (of whom more later) between the “two Frances:” the pays reel, or “Real Country,” Catholic and Royalist; and the pays legal, the “Legal Country,” anti-clerical and republican. It is the first with which we have mostly to do in this article.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt combining a sort of traditional monarchy with the modern state in his “Empire of the French” lasted barely a decade, but it would have lasting consequences — not least of which was the creation of a Bonapartist Party. In 1815 it seemed that with his defeat all the King’s horses and all the King’s men had put the Kingdom of France together again. But even the triumphant Royalists were divided over how much of the regime created by the revolution and codified under Napoleon should be retained, and how much of the ancien regime could be safely revived. Louis XVIII, brother of the murdered Louis XVI and uncle of the equally murdered Louis XVII, played the role of Charles II in Restoration England — appearing to rule as though everything had been restored, but warily co-existing with the new power structure. As with Charles’ brother, James II, Louis’ brother and heir, who succeeded him as Charles X was unable to continue in that fashion. As the Restoration of the Three Kingdoms ended with the revolution of 1688, so that in France was closed with the revolution of 1830. The role of William of Orange was played in this sordid little drama by the King’s distant cousin, Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, who collaborated with the revolutionaries to have himself made “King of the French.” After 18 years in which he increasingly attempted to play the King, he too was overthrown.

The Second Republic, founded in 1848, was chaotic. Looking for order, the French electorate voted in Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte; after a coup in 1852, whose results he had sanctified in a referendum, he proclaimed himself Napoleon III. Under his Second Empire, the Royalists formed the Right-wing opposition. But they were divided into Legitimists, who supported Charles X’s grandson, the Count of Chambord, de jure Henry V, and the Orleanists, supporters of Louis Philippe’s descendants. Napoleon III inherited his uncle’s dilemma — trying at once to incarnate the ideals of the revolution while acting as a legitimate Monarch and defender of the Church, whose privileges he restored at home, while defending the Pope in Italy. This led to him blowing hot and cold in the latter cause. Moreover, his actions would lead not only to his own defeat and deposition in 1871, but the creation of two new liberal monarchies who would inherit the same problems generated by the Bonapartist efforts: the German Empire and the Kingdom of Italy.

In the immediate aftermath of Napoleon III’s overthrow, it looked as though a window of opportunity had opened for the restoration of Henry V; under the banner of the Sacred Heart, there was a huge upswell of Royalist support. Rightly or wrongly, however, he decided in 1873 that he could not accept the terms under which the Crown of France was being offered. As he died childless in 1885, the vast majority of his adherents joined the Orleanist camp. A small minority — the so-called blancs d’espagne — rallied to the head of the dispossessed elder branch of the Spanish Bourbons. But they would not be an effective political force within France.

In the meantime, the Third Republic was becoming ever more entrenched — and, as it did so, ever more anti-Catholic. In an attempt to prevent a complete rupture and the voiding of Napoleon’s concordat, after Henry’s death Pope Leo XIII ordered France’s Catholics to give up the Monarchy, and “rally to the republic” in order to convert it into a Catholic State. This ralliement, however theoretically prudent, was a practical failure. It split the Catholic camp between those who could not accept what they considered Papally-ordered treason, and those who now saw it as their religious duty to accept the new regime. The result was the eventual rupture of 1905, which has lasted until to-day.

The 1880s had seen other anti-republican circles emerge, outside official Catholic associations. General Boulanger, latterly minister of war, preached an anti-German Gospel of retrieval of Alsace-Lorraine; by 1889, many liberals feared he would make himself dictator, with the help of Catholics and Royalists — a sort of French Franco before Franco, so to speak. But his movement failed ultimately, because he had no real programme other than his own charisma. In his wake were formed a number of “Patriotic Leagues.”

Much more lasting was Action Francaise, which emerged in 1898 in the wake of the Dreyfus Trial. Its intellectual chief was the Provencal thinker and (until his last year) lapsed Catholic Charles Maurras. He provided a coherent body of theory that favoured both a restored Monarchy and (despite his personal disbelief) an established Catholic Church. Most of its members were devout Catholics, and were unaware of or ignored the positivist elements of their leader’s philosophy. Through its newsboys-turned-street fighters-on-occasion, the Camelots du Roi, the organisation showed itself capable of competing with its opponents in either an intellectual debate or a fracas in a town square.

Amongst other things, Maurras warned of the rise of German power, and opposed the government’s anti-Catholicism. When at last the war came in 1914, the embattled Third Republic felt sufficiently threatened that it abandoned its political struggle against the Church, and called for a Union Sacree, a “Sacred Union,” which would unite all the French against the invader. This succeeded for the moment. But, as we shall see in your next installment, it also raised the expectations of the French Right.

Flag of the Catholic and Royal Army of 1793. Image credit (edited from original: color changed, cropped up from bottom, and fleurs-de-lis removed) : 1, GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pictured: Gary Potter