The Intelligent American’s Guide to the French Right II: Maurras and Mussolini

The second instalment of Mr Coulombe's 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

On the land without a Monarchy
The enemy descends four times in a hundred years;
We have saved the Fatherland,
But what has been done with the price of our blood?
The King, who, if History is to be believed
Never shed it in vain,
Would not have surrendered our victory
To the American saboteur.

—Maxime Brienne ,“La Royale,” verse 5

THE END of World War I introduced a whole new set of challenges for Europe. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empires, and the rise to power of the Communists in the last country introduced a whole new kind of instability into Central Europe; the short-lived but bloodthirsty reign of Communist governments in Hungary, Slovakia, and Bavaria hardened the determination of many that Communism was the greatest possible evil the Continent faced. There was a great deal of resentment on the part of the young men who had fought in the war against the elder who had directed it — and the fellowship of the trenches was no small thing. For all that in some ways it heightened Nationalism, in other ways it inspired an “Old Comrades” feeling even among those who had served on opposite sides at the front. Change was in the air — not least in new styles and technology. Of all the commentary about past, present, and future going about at the time, that of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi was among the most prescient: he declared in 1918 that if Europe did not unite and pull herself together on the basis of her Christian heritage, she would end up divided between the United States and the Soviet Union — which, of course, happened in 1945.

But that was sometime away when the shattered continent began to rebuild. There were many responses in each country to what had happened; but in France there were some particular issues. Despite the best attempts of the French Third Republic to purge the officer corps of its Royalist and Catholic elements before the War, not only did they fail, but the best generals — Foch, Petain, Lyautey, and so on — of the War were of Catholic Royalist background; Joffre, the pre-war republican officer poster boy, was an abject failure.

For most of the 1920s, Maurras and Action Francaise were the dominant figures of the French Right. Their doctrines were extremely influential, at home and abroad. For them, republican democracy — indeed, so-called democracy of any kind — were not merely wrong, but lies. Ideally, France would end her division — the one noted in the last article between “two Frances” — and become once more but one, Catholic and Royal. The King would reign with the support of the Church and have compete oversight of foreign and military affairs; at the same time, the pre-revolutionary provinces would be revived, with a great deal of autonomy. Rather than the ongoing conflict between labour and capital that was such an important feature of then-modern society, and had led to the rise of Communism, etc., the varying groups in society would be reorganised as “corporations.” In this “Corporatist” schematic, workers, owners, retailers, and all other members of a given trade or occupation woud be brought together in a single organisation — as with the Medieval Guilds. These in turn would be represented in the national and provincial legislatures. The importance of France in the scheme of things — “Integral Nationalism” as Maurras called it — was emphasised. French culture was represented as one stream in Latin, Roman culture, as were those of Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Romania. All of these were seen as superior to “Germanic” — Anglo-Saxon and German — culture, with which it was locked in a struggle for world dominance.

Although Action Francaise was extremely nationalist — and especially anti-German — it inspired a great many thinkers throughout Europe and the world. French Canada gave rise to Action Francaise Canadienne, which in turn was the inspiration for the diaspora periodicals le Travailleur in Worcester, Massachusetts and la Sentinelle in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Although he died in 1914, Alcée Fortier, noted historian and academic, had been the local representative in Louisiana of the movement. Walloon Belgium and Francophone Switzerland also had similar groups.

But the influence of AF was not confined to Francophonie. As might be expected, Catholic Monarchists in Spain, especially but not exclusively of the Carlist variety, were attracted to it, as were a number of thinkers in Latin America. One of the results was the foundation of the magazine and movement Acción Española. In Portugal, the Monarchist movement Integralismo Lusitano, which produced a great many writers and thinkers openly cited the inspiration of Maurras — as did Antonio Oliverio de Salazar, who took over the country in 1926. Romania saw the birth in 1924 of Actiunea Romaneasca, which — like its Belgian counterparts — wanted to see the currently reigning King take complete control, and put Romanian Orthodoxy in the place Maurras envisaged for Catholicism. Of the Latin countries, only Italy did not witness a Maurassian movement, for reasons we shall examine momentarily.

But Maurras also had fans and followers in the despised “Germanic” world. In Great Britain, he had a great many fans amongst the writers and artists — not least of whom were the early Scots, Welsh, and Cornish Nationalists, and the redoubtable T.S. Eliot. In America, apart from the Franco-Americans earlier mentioned, he found interest among such as Ralph Adams Cram. The Netherlands also had its share of AF fans, such as the circle around Fr. Wouter Lutkie. Austria, which had a major exiled Catholic dynasty of its own, the Habsburgs, had its own Monarchist movement. But in Maurras’ writings, many of them saw the sort of “Social Monarchy” they hoped to install alongside restoration of either Bl. Karl I, or, after his death, his son Otto. Hans Karl Freiherr von Zeßner-Spitzenberg, who had witnessed Bl. Karl’s heroic death in Madeira — and whose account of it is standard reading to-day — went back to Austria and founded the then largest Monarchist organisation. Its ideological inspiration was obvious in its name: Österreichische Aktion. Of course, while their major opponent, Karl Renner, would collaborate with first the National Socialists and then Stalin, von Zeßner-Spitzenberg and most of his collaborators went into the Resistance — and in his case, eventual death in Dachau. One might have thought Germany, at least, immune to Maurrassian influence, but such was not the case. Most notable of his German followers was Fr. Georg Moenius, a longtime promoter of Franci-German-Polish reconciliation, and of the reorganisation of Europe on a Catholic basis. His major collaborator in this work was Henri Massi, one of Maurras’ closest colleagues, and — as we saw in last month’s obituary, one of Gary Potter’s earliest and closest friends in Paris — although that lay four decades in the future.

We have mentioned that Italy did not have a great many Maurrassian figures or movements. The reason may be summed up in one word: Mussolini. Known to-day as a sort of farcical sidekick to Hitler, he was — prior to 1938, anyway — a figure of awe and admiration in his own right to a great many, including our own Franklin Roosevelt, who patterned much of his New Deal after what il Duce did in Italy. Father of that elastic creed called Fascism, he was at once a creation of his time and its creator. The first and most important thing to realise about him was that he did not in fact have a strong ideological centre. He was a Socialist — until he wasn’t. He was a republican — until he wasn’t. He was an anticlerical — until he wasn’t. He was, however, whatever he needed to be to come to power and stay there. Added to that, sadly, was a sentimental love of Italy which, however, did not provide any sort of moral guidance. In a sense it is a deep pity that he has become so identified with Fascism, Dictatorship, and Hitler, because this destroys his real significance as the prototypical amoral modern politician, which he most surely was.

In any case, he came to power because Italy was severely divided between Communists, Socialists, and their diverse opponents: Catholics, Liberals, and Nationalists. At a parliamentary crisis in 1922 when none of the non-Marxist party leaders would accept the job, King Victor Emmanuel III offered him the Prime Ministry. After four years of postwar inaction, governmental paralysis, and increasing civil unrest, Mussolini immediately went to work restoring order and “getting things done.” The public works, the masterful speeches, the air of confidence, the snazzy black shirts, the projection of the almost indefinable Fascism as being at once a defence of Traditional values AND a wave of future progress soon sparked a wave of imitators. Soon country after country had would-be “grey-eyed men of destiny” as potential or real strongmen, and across the planet flourished a rainbow of movements of various shirt colours. One can find more than a mere hint all of this in FDR, Perón, and Chiang Kai-Shek, there were a great many more imitators, some much more obvious.

Maurras was impressed with what Mussolini doing and urged a strong French alliance with his Italy to keep Germany in check. But Mussolini and his imitators posed a real if hidden danger to Maurras and the rest of the French — and European — Traditional Catholic Right. Mussolini became a Monarchist because it was the only way he could hold and achieve power peacefully. But the various republics of Europe — to include France — had heirs to the throne who were decent, humane, and extremely reluctant to shed their putative subjects’ blood even in their own cause. Moreover, for Mussolini — at least until his very last days — the Church was only a means to an end. Thus there appeared a new threat: a basically anti-clerical, republican “Right” that had no use for Altar and Throne save as stepping stones to power, when and only as long as necessary; in reality, of course, it was a new sort of “Left” — all the more dangerous because it could appropriate for its own use any number of Sacred phrases. Many a well-meaning individual and movement would fall into this trap before the carnage of World War II began. This current would appear in France and offer a severe challenge to Maurras and his AF’s leadership of the country’s Right-wing. But first, a much more powerful opponent would emerge in 1926: Pope Pius XI. We shall look into that and other developments in the next instalment.

Pictured: Charles Maurras