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.

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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.

Plutarch was well aware of Semitic ideas, before being compromised despite himself; for he was born almost at the very moment that a wind from the East altered the great soul of Antiquity. As for Plato, he is, of all Greek sages, the one who imported the most and the most singular ideas from Asia; more than any of his confrères he was discussed and disfigured by Alexandrian Jewry. What we call Platonism, and what we might call Plutarchism, would, in isolation, representing the wisdom of Athens and Rome rather poorly; there are parts of these two doctrines not so much Graeco-Latin as barbarian, and already “romantic.”

But with her physicists and geometers, with her sophists, her artists, her poets and her logicians, with Phidias, with Aristotle, who accessed a new world, one might say that ancient Greece laid the foundations of positive science, philosophy and religion; with her statesmen, her historians and her moralists, ancient Rome expounded so powerful a lesson in realist politics that neither English Parliament nor Capetian Monarchy have surpassed her. Neither in the family nor in the city of the Ancients was anything left to Anarchy; the caprice of leaders and the prescriptions of laws precisely temper and balance one another. The institution of slavery relieves democracy of its greatest difficulties; and, furthermore, the sad tale of the last half-century of Athenian liberty, the repeated observations of Aristophanes, of Xenophon, even of Plato, and of every master of the Attic genius, the rapidity of the consumption, the dazzling glitter of the fall are major testimonies in favour of aristocracies and of other regimes of authority. Who learns of it will feel rather ill-disposed towards the dogma of popular government.

In the modern era, Catholic philosophy preferred to model itself upon Aristotle; Catholic politics appropriated the methods of Roman politics. Such is the character of the classical tradition. The classical spirit is precisely the essence of the doctrines of higher humanity. It is a spirit of authority and aristocracy. To call the spirit of the Revolution classical is to strip a word of its natural sense and to prepare misunderstandings.

The Revolution comes from quite another quarter: the Bible of the Reformation; the statutes of the Republic of Geneva; Calvinist theologians; the old individualist ferment of Germany, of which trilingual Switzerland served as the European vector; ultimately personal outbursts of a sensibility restrained not by hereditary moeurs, nor by strict discipline, nor by healthy reason: these are the lowly causes of the ideas that arose in the mind of Rousseau. By the magic of eloquence, they entered old French society with him; far from engendering any classical cast of mind, they moved to destroy that spirit of progress and of order. Who would deny Rousseau to have opened the romantic era?

Precisely because Taine is entitled to our respect, it is fitting to note that one cannot admit a certain detail of his vocabulary, and why one even has the duty to contest it.