Tuesday 30 June 2020

Raymond Aron, “Maurrassism and Gaullism” (1964)


“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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