“Maurrassisme et
gaullisme,” Le Figaro (17 December
1964). Draft translation, 2020. A brief, journalistic piece; but interesting,
certainly to those concerned with de Gaulle, and perhaps to those concerned
with Aron, too.
French original:
PDF of this version:
Condemned in 1945 by one
of the Liberation’s tribunals, Charles Maurras cried: “This is Dreyfus’
revenge!” Perhaps the “old republicans” ask themselves today if Gaullism
doesn’t represent a kind of posthumous revenge of the leader of the Action Française.
The present Constitution resembles what Marshal Pétain wished to confer on
France in 1944; and our country hasn’t known more monarchical a regime than the
Fifth Republic since the First Empire.
It goes without saying
that the Maurassians, which I would call those who were disciples of Maurras,
or who those who claim him explicitly, are in the majority passionately hostile
to de Gaulle. They detest the perpetrator of the purge, “the great deception,”
he who, returning to power on the occasion of the events in Algiers, saw
through to its conclusion, mercilessly, the very enterprise he’d accused Mr.
Pfimlin of planning. Faithful to Marshal Pétain and defenders of French
Algeria, the Maurassians have also been anti-Gaullists.
These facts are not open
to doubt; but that’s not the historical problem to which François Mauriac
himself alluded in his book on the head of State, and which was the subject of
a debate organised by the magazine France
Forum. According to all his biographers, General de Gaulle was, in his
youth, influenced by Maurras. Whether or not this influence was effective, the
kinship of the critique of parliamentarism that the Action Française made every
day for years, and the Gaullist critique of the “exclusive rule of parties,” is
evident. Certain ideas belong equally to the thought of both men: the primacy
of politics and, in particular, of foreign policy; the traditional vision of
States and their unending struggle; the indifference to ideologies, which pass
while nations remain; the passion for France alone, accepting the danger that
France might be alone.
One might object, and
quite rightly, that the Fifth Republic borrowed more from Jacobinism (Mr.
Michel Debré) and Bonapartism (referendum-plebiscite) than from the old France.
Maurras wanted to be counterrevolutionary; and he detested Jacobinism and
Bonapartism. The regime of the Fifth Republic certainly doesn’t stand in the
counterrevolutionary current, neither in fact nor in word; but it responds to
certain necessities that affirm the doctrine of the Action Française: a strong
State; the exaltation of national independence as the supreme good; the myth of
the real country, or of the people rallied against the partisan divisions “to
which the French are only too inclined”; the power, conferred upon one alone,
to take decisions that concern the destiny of all. If the Senate were to be
transformed next year into an Assembly of organised interests, that is, more or
less corporative, then another loan would have been issued from the Maurassian
fund. The National Assembly remains, and will remain in any event; but, at
least in the present situation, it exercises no influence upon the conduct of
diplomacy. Even in the matter of legislation it plays only a limited role. In
other words, Charles de Gaulle will have accomplished, within the republican
framework, a number of transformations that Charles Maurras made the error of
believing impossible without the Restauration.
I don’t believe that this
alignment should irritate either the last of the faithful to Maurras or the
faithful, clearly more numerous, of the head of State. Style of diplomacy,
particularities of Constitution adapted from the needs and from the
particularity of France: on these points the thought of the ideologue of the
Action Française and that of the President of the Republic belong to the same
school; but this school incudes plenty of other teachers: the critique of
democracy is as old as democracy. And above all, the oppositions between
Maurrassism and Gaullism—and not only between Maurras and de Gaulle—are no less
striking than the similarities.
These oppositions pertain
primarily to circumstances and personalities. Maurras denounced the Republic
but also, and above all, minorities, Jews, Freemasons, Protestants, whom he
described as strangers within France, invisible and powerful. The country’s
unity was, for him, the supreme objective; no less, all his life and till his
dying day, did he nourish the hatred that the French reserve for the other French.
He didn’t even accept France’s past in its entirety. Those periods, works,
ideas that didn’t correspond to his own political system—even to his aesthetic
tastes—he condemned without hesitation: the eternal France was a France
dispossessed of a part of herself. The enemy of the Action Française, living or
dead, always risked being declared non-French by a tribunal without right of
appeal, and happily without power.
The destiny of General de
Gaulle was, on two occasions, to symbolise at once the discords of the French
and the dream of their unity. Already, in London in 1940, surrounded by others,
he believed in his destiny, and saw in advance a France united in Resistance
and for victory. Throughout his twelve years “crossing the desert,” he also
used and abused polemic—and this is incompatible with equity. At least he set
himself more against the “system” than men, which is all the easier for him,
given that France, to his eyes, transcends the French, their mediocrities and
their miseries. He retains the past of the national community in its entirety:
monarchies and republics, Louis XIV, Napolen, Barrès and Jaurès. Gaullist
France isn’t fixed once and for all upon Roman, monarchical or classical order:
she remains herself, but on the condition that she “wed her century” (épouser son siècle).
That is probably the
essential difference, at least of a philosophical order, between the thought of
Maurras and that of de Gaulle. The first almost ignored the original aspects of
modern societies because he saw the future more as a menace to order than a
creative movement. The second, even if he maintains a nostalgia for order, is
conscious of the chances and necessities of our epoch: from tank divisions to
decolonisation, he wanted to adopt as his motto: We command nature only in
obeying her (On ne commande à la nature
qu’en lui obéissant). While the majority of Maurassians imprison themselves
within a gradually ossifying system, General de Gaulle is inclined towards a
kind of superior pragmatism. History is not, to his eyes, a fatality to which
one must submit; no more is it a beneficent divinity: it’s an environment,
favourable and hostile by turns, that the man of State has a duty to comprehend
in order to master it. In the second half of the twentieth century,
colonisation, such as was yesterday or the day before, is, to his eyes, like
the oil-lamp or sailing-ship. The spirit of an epoch is no less compulsory than
modes of production or instruments of war.
Two questions arise in
one movement; and the answer that the future is to give will determine the
ultimate meaning of Gaullism: Is the absolute of national sovereignty contemporary
with atomic weapons? Is the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, or is it not,
despite its historical sources, the model of democracy in the industrial age?
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