Monday 1 February 2021

Charles Maurras, “On the Classical Spirit” (1922)

“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.