“De l’esprit classique,” note 1 to “Trois idées politiques,” Romantisme et Révolution (Paris: Nouvelle Libraire Nationale, 1922), pp. 269–70. My translation. A short, lapidary exposition of Maurras’ conception of the classicism–romanticism dichotomy. His analysis owes much to Pierre Lasserre. Here Maurras represents the more straightforwardly political side of the classicist current within conservative-revolutionary thought, Lasserre and T. E. Hulme representing the middle term, and T. S. Eliot giving probably the most influential and most straightforwardly aesthetic formulation.
PDF: https://www.academia.edu/45025240/Charles_Maurras_On_the_Classical_Spirit_1922_
A deplorable error, due
perhaps to the prejudices of the professor or the former student, led our
master Taine to designate as classical the spirit that prepared the way for Revolution.
On reflection, classical Antiquity played but a minute part in it. As far as
classical books are concerned, the Revolutionary bibliography includes hardly
more than Plato’s Republic and
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives; nor would
these be present had not the Father and Doctor of revolutionary ideas, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, borrowed from them more language than substance.