The Anti-Transcendent Politics of Charles Maurras

This essay is part of Public Discourse’s Who’s Who series, which introduces and critically engages with important thinkers who are often referenced in political and cultural debates, but whose ideas might not be widely known or understood. The series previously considered the life and work of Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Maritain, Michael Oakeshott, Charles De Koninck, and Allan Bloom.

Many political observers have noted the Republican Party’s—and the American conservative movement’s—perceived turn away from the bedrock religious values that once underpinned right-wing politics in the United States. What has been termed the “New Right,” with its economic populism and its reactionary cultural conservatism, has certainly marked a decisive rejection of what some have characterized as the fusionist “dead consensus” of Bush-era conservatism. But it has also brought with it a swath of policy novelties that would have raised more than a few eyebrows among the much-derided “right-liberals” of the old GOP establishment. The list of departures we are seeing in today’s Republican Party from once-untouchable right-wing orthodoxy is notable: to name a few, openness to the legal protection of abortion, at least to a degree; enthusiastic advocacy of in vitro fertilization (with some prominent Republican leaders backing the restriction of Medicaid funding from states that enact guardrails around IVF and floating the possibility of forcing health insurance providers to cover the procedure); embracing the cause of expanding marriage’s legal definition; and the adoption of a new party platform that eliminates or waters down some of the GOP’s past conservative commitments.

But that’s not to say that the New Right or the reshaped Republican Party can be fairly described as standard-bearers of cultural liberalism or as indistinguishable from the progressive movement. These are overblown and partisan caricatures, made by those erstwhile “religious conservatives” who have allied themselves with the political Left. Indeed, as the political theorist Greg Conti has noted, the shift away from “the bread-and-butter issues of the Moral Majority or the Catholic League in the Clinton years” is not so much a full-throated embrace of social progressivism as it is an ideologically loose and realist-minded brand of right-wing politics—one that champions opposition to “gender ideology” and the transgender movement’s illiberal excesses over support for traditional marriage and the nuclear family; natalism and pro-family spending policies (e.g., an expanded child tax credit and a qualified defense of some entitlement programs) over opposition to abortion and embryonic research; and placing a greater emphasis on pushing back against racial and sexual identitarianism, high levels of immigration, and multiculturalism over the more “traditional” causes of the religious Right (e.g., religious liberty, conscience rights, and limited government).

Some observers describe the birth of a non-religious or post-religious Right in the United States as something to celebrate: a right-wing movement more in touch with the realities of an increasingly secular America and, broadly, one that is far more willing to play political hardball with an eye toward victory and results over principle. As one such commentator put it, the New Right “may have an actual chance at winning.” Even for those who maintain that some form of religious conservatism still wields influence in the GOP, there is little dispute that the place of the values and concerns of the “old religious right” (which Compact’s Matthew Schmitz concedes suffered a “fatal blow” in 2016) has dramatically receded.

As the American political Right continues to undergo this slow evolution, one name that has been mentioned with increasing frequency is that of Charles Maurras—along with Action française, the interwar right-wing French political movement with which Maurras’s name is practically synonymous. But just who was Maurras—and, in light of this transformation we are seeing on the Right, might his anti-transcendent politics be able to offer any cautionary lessons for political movements today? 

The Case of Maurras

An important book for understanding politics and the Church in France before the Second World War is the intellectual historian Sarah Shorthall’s 2021 work Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics. There, Shorthall provides a comprehensive account of how Action française, led by Charles Maurras, put on the mantle of Catholicism to further right-wing causes (most notably Orleanist royalism, French nationalism, integralism, authoritarianism, and anti-Semitic conspiracies)—but how their brazen instrumentalization of religion and their desire to subordinate Catholicism to their political ends eventually led to their condemnation by the institutional Church, which preceded their continued radicalization and marginalization.

Maurras was a journalist and activist whose foray into politics began at the turn of the century around the time of the Dreyfus affair—the scandal in which a military officer of Jewish descent was accused of treason and spying for Germany. The charges were false: Dreyfus was convicted in 1894 after a sham trial driven by mass hysteria and popular anti-Semitic prejudices; he spent years imprisoned on the infamous Devil’s Island in French Guiana before his exoneration in 1906. Maurras was a prominent instigator in the French media against Dreyfus, writing newspaper articles that trafficked in anti-Jewish sentiment and arguing that Dreyfus’s conviction was necessary for the overthrow of the post-Revolution secular republican state.

Action française was founded in 1899 amid the political tumult of the Dreyfus affair; Maurras joined the young political party, quickly becoming its chief ideological force and public face. Rising to even greater prominence in the aftermath of World War I, he would be the leading intellectual force of the French Right during the interwar period. As Shorthall recounts, Maurras would realize the utility of Catholicism—particularly traditionalist Catholicism and neo-scholastic theology—in serving the political agenda of Action française. He attempted to frame Action française as the political worldview most closely aligned with strict neo-scholasticism; in one 1924 article, for instance, he defended the “doctrines of St. Thomas [Aquinas]” against “the pale substitutes of Kantianism and Hegelianism.” Philosophies of “inhuman Germanism,” he wrote, could not be defeated unless France “once again return[ed] to civilizing our Europe through the teaching of Aristotle and St. Thomas.” By championing the Catholic Church’s reestablishment as France’s state religion as part of a restored monarchy and publicly aligning himself with traditionalist strains in the Church, Maurras could craft a right-wing political alternative to the anti-clerical Third Republic with its credibility based, as the Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel wrote, on the perceived theological harmony between the “extrinsicism” (i.e., the externally-oriented political theology) of neo-scholasticism and Action française’s political goals.

There are, to be sure, important parts of the story of Maurras and Action française that this essay will not address: how, for example, the Church’s campaign against “Modernists” in the early twentieth century and the subsequent condemnation of the views of prominent leaders of France’s emergent Christian Democracy movement helped push many traditionalist Catholics toward Action française. Jacques Maritain, who initially sympathized with Action française before Pope Pius XI condemned it in 1926, would observe that the movement’s attractiveness to many Catholics (clergy and laity alike) was derived from “the dangers that, in those days, ‘modernism’ posed to the dogmatic formulae of the faith.”

But for all his efforts to ingratiate himself with the Catholic Church, Maurras was himself an agnostic working within, as Shorthall describes, a secular worldview—one largely informed by the positivist scientism of Auguste Comte (whose positivism culminated in his famous invention of a “Religion of Humanity”) along with empiricist and rationalist influences. As a nonbeliever operating from philosophical and theological premises fundamentally irreconcilable with the Church’s doctrines, Maurras’s personal affinity for the Catholic Church was principally rooted in symbolism and other externals: he believed that the Church was inseparable from French history and tradition, that the Church’s hierarchical structure complemented his belief in a “political physics” of autocratic monarchy and social hierarchy, and that the institution of the Church could be effectively wielded as a political cudgel against what he viewed as the Jewish-controlled secular-progressive forces that governed the Third Republic. Where the political agenda of Action française came into conflict with the Church, Maurras would urge his Catholic supporters to set their faith aside and put la politique d’abord: “Politics First.”

Maurras’s Catholic defenders argued that their support for Maurras was compatible with their faith. The neo-scholastic philosopher and Jesuit priest Pedro Descoqs maintained that “considerable differences” between Maurras and the Catholic Church with respect to “dogmatic and moral speculation” did not translate to an “irreducible opposition in matters that affect the domain of political practice.” But Rome disagreed: in a series of letters and pronouncements in 1926 and 1927, Pope Pius XI condemned Action française and Catholic participation in it. In one particularly forceful letter to Cardinal-Archbishop of Bordeaux Pierre-Paulin Andrieu, the pontiff described Action française as a “pagan social organization where the State, formed by a few privileged people, is everything, and the rest of the world nothing,” while also condemning specific policy proposals, such as support within Action française for the re-establishment of slavery in the French colonial empire. Of Maurras and other leaders of Action française, Pius XI wrote that they were “Catholic by calculation and not by conviction” and that they “use the Church, or at least they hope to use it, but they do not serve it, since they reject the divine teaching that it has the mission to propagate.”

Maurras and many of his fellow partisans—including many traditionalist Catholics—rejected the condemnation by arguing that the pope had no authority to forbid Catholic participation in a political movement. Nevertheless, the Church’s rejection of Action Française precipitated a descent into further radicalization on the part of Maurras and many of his followers. After publishing a litany of attacks on the Vatican, the movement’s newspaper was placed on the Church’s index of forbidden works, its members subject to excommunication, and clergymen suspected to favor Action française gradually removed from their offices (most prominently the Jesuit Cardinal Louis Billot).

With the emergence of fascism in continental Europe in the leadup to World War II, Maurras and Action française aligned themselves with fascist movements (especially Francisco Franco’s regime in Spain), and Maurras supported the establishment of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime (despite the Vichy government’s being a rump vassal state of an invading foreign power, something that would seem incompatible with Maurras’s professed French nationalism). Maurras’s support for Vichy would be his downfall: with France’s liberation by the Allies, Maurras was tried for collaboration and given a life sentence (at his sentencing, he was said to have shouted C’est la revanche de Dreyfus!—“It’s Dreyfus’s revenge!”).

When the Right Lost Its Transcendence: Lessons from France

As Shorthall puts it, quoting the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, 

What attracted Maurras to the Catholic Church . . . was not its religious or ethical teachings, but rather its institutional form . . . [l]ike the young Carl Schmitt, he was full of admiration for the hierarchical, centralized Church, whose “religious essence, for its external admirers, corresponds to the most general notion of order.” 

Maurras’s ideology was a particular kind of right-wing instrumentalization of religion: idolizing its external trappings and its potential to be used as a politically effective tool, but all too willing to detach itself from religion—and, in Maurras’s case, contradict religion and defy its authority entirely—when its precepts came into conflict with temporal political goals.

There are important ways in which the case of Maurras ought to serve as a historical admonition for contemporary political movements. La politique d’abord is not a worldview or political framework to be admired or emulated—and to the extent inclinations toward it can be seen today on the political Right, it is something to work against. I agree that many of the causes championed by the New Right are worthy ones—and it’s true that prudence can legitimately necessitate a shift in focus to more politically salient or contemporarily relevant issues. But a prudential calculation made in good faith, and which refuses to compromise on principle, is something quite different from the enthusiastic advocacy of positions that contradict principle entirely or the embrace (no matter how innocuously experimental or “taboo-breaking” it might seem) of ideologies that are fundamentally anti-religious—pagan, to put it bluntly. To be sure, it is heartening to see that some proponents of the New Right recognize that a conservatism that wholly detaches itself from or eschews its religious roots risks treading into dangerous territory—the sinister temptations of the “anti-Christian right,” to quote Schmitz. But Ross Douthat’s 2016 warning remains prescient: “without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right promises to be tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed.”

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