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The French Right: From De Maistre To Maurras
This collection of readings is not a documentary history of the Frenh right. Nor is it an indictment of various writers on the grounds that they are fascist or protofascists... What we are concerened wth here is the intellectual history and pre-history of the radical right in France--the progenitors of fascism it one prefers,
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
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October 19, 2017
As with Lyttelton’s Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile, this is a survey of a number of rightwing writers, here, from France, post-Revolution to Post-Vichy. It’s part of Steiner’s cool ‘Roots of the Right’ series, which also includes Gobineau Selected Political Writings. They’re all deplorable, but we need to learn their ideas anyway, to wit:
de Maistre—
The original post-1793 rightwing MF, monarchism with a pope above the monarchs. FFS. FFS. It is fairly sickening that Baudelaire and Poe were adherents of this guy who found in the French Revolution only horror. His manner of argumentation is about as effective as every other rightwinger: “and in place of the quite simple solutions that naturally present themselves to the mind, all sorts of metaphysical theories have been put forward to support airy hypotheses rejected by common sense and experience” (39). It seems that de Maistre is somehow a historical immaterialist:
Irrationalist insofar as “human reason left to its own resources is completely incapable not only of creating but also of conserving any religious or political association, because it can only give rise to disputes and because, to conduct himself well, man needs beliefs” (45); “Nothing is more vital to him than prejudices” (id.), which “are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires [NB the gross conjunction]” (id.). Like any far rightest, he desires a “general or national mind sufficiently strong to repress the aberrations of the individual reason which is, of its nature, the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it gives birth only to divergent opinions” (46) OH NOS! “What is patriotism? It is the national mind of which I am speaking; it is individual abnegation” (id.). So, yeah, fuck de Maistre?
A second piece by the same author in this volume is a dialogue, regarding belligerence, wherein for the warrior, “amid the blood he spills, he is humane, just as the wife is chaste in the transports of love” (49). Eww? The warrior has “enthusiasm for carnage” (id.). He asserts, via dialogue, “this law of war, terrible in itself, is yet only a clause in the general law that hangs over the world” (50).
FFS. Just in case there’s any ambiguity: “The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death” (52). Why the Jacobins didn’t make it a special mission to track this fucker down in Savoy is beyond me. “War is thus divine in itself” (53): thank you kindly for your astute contributions. Some shades of the RSB here, however, when dialogue proclaims that “opinion is so powerful in war that it can alter the nature of the same event” (58) (‘unconquerable belief, indomitable conviction,’ &c. recall).
Hippolyte Taine—
Introduction notes that Taine assessed Rousseau and the revolution as “the idea that the state is something men choose can lead, paradoxically, only to despotism and anarchy” (61), a formulation muddled beyond measure. The only social contract for Taine, apparently, is “an agreement of their ancestors about how the polity should be run” (id.), a “democracy of the dead.” Gross. Taine himself comes across as a complete elitist: “According to the new ideology all minds are within reach of all truths” (66). He fears ochlocracy, apparently, the “crowd of dangerous maniacs” (69).
He believes that “man is an imbecile” (id.): “not only is reason crippled in man, but it is rare in humanity” (70), whatever the hell that might mean.
When he states “revolt is simply just defence” (64), we recall the echo in Ayn Rand 100 years later: first time as tragedy, second as farce, no? He proclaims that “I enjoy my property only through tolerance and at second-hand; for, according to the social contract, I have surrendered it” (79). Duh? Overall, lotsa silly carping here. Taine strikes me as fairly second rate among rightwing greasers.
Drumont—
Introduction describes this asshole’s anti-semitism as “coarse and plebeian” (85). Concerned with ‘revanche,’ Drumont regarded the 1870 war as “engendered by Jewish high finance” (id.). So, here’s one old source for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the NSDAP, the assholes described in Lowenthal’s Prophets of Deceit, and David fucking Icke.
Review of his writings reveals silly statements such as how “the Semite and the Aryan […] represent two distinct races which are irredeemably hostile to each other” (88). Purportedly semitic societies such as Carthage and Arabia are “ephemeral,” whereas (destroyed) Greece and Rome are “durable” (90). Gotta love the Beyond Stupid. “The Aryan or Indo-European race is the only one to uphold the principles of justice, to experience freedom, and to value beauty” (90). Barf. Stalin was quite correct to summarily execute these sort of fuckers.
We learn that “the Semite is mercantile, covetous, scheming, subtle, and cunning” (92). “He can live only at the common expense” (93), and is “by nature an oppressor” (94). “The Jew’s right to oppress other people is rooted in his religion; for him it is an article of faith; it is proclaimed in every line [sic] [no, really, sic] of the Bible and the Talmud” (98)—i.e., this is completely embarrassing. The gold standard of the rightwing, apparently. Lots more, pages & pages of idiocy, up to and including PEZ ideas such as “With Hertzen in Russia, Karl Marx and Lassalle in Germany, everywhere [!] one looks, there is, as in France, a Jew preaching communism or socialism” (109).
Sorel—
Introduction notes that he began as a marxist, but became a Spenglerian insofar as he believed that liberal democracy is ‘decadent’ (117); Sorel became an editor of L’Independence when Maurras (q.v.) was also on the board. Ugh.
Sorel himself argues in the Reflections on Violence that “all that is necessary to know is whether the general strike contains everything that the socialist doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat” (130). As “there is no process by which the future can be predicted scientifically” (127), opponents of the liberal order must “return to the old methods of the Utopists” (id.). Eww?
Le Bon—
This is the “psychology of Boulangism and Caesarism” (133), and dude’s “theory is the psychological corollary of Barres’ notion of the deracine” (id.). We are in the era of the crowd, the introduction continues, and “the only way in which the crowd can be kept under control is through the agency of the strong man who can dominate the mass as the hypnotizer dominates the hypnotized or the seducer the seduced” (id.). This is the “classic sociological theory of totalitarianism as the mobilization of the uncommitted who are searching for a leader and a goal” (id.).
The actual text of The Psychology of Crowds, which fears “the entry of the popular classes into political life” (134). “The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings” (135)—FFS.
Barres—
Intro argues that “Barres made his intellectual reputation with the idea of the deracine--the rootless cosmopolitan metic—and harnessed it to a mystical nationalism” (143).
Barres actually likes Proudhon: “what lies at the heart of Proudhonism is its native French quality, the heritage of the Rousseaus, the Saint-Simons, the Fouriers” (154). Weird, no? Otherwise, “nationalism is the acceptance of a particular kind of determinism” (159), whatever that might mean.
Quite a charmer: “The sovereign individual with his intelligence and his ability to seize on the laws of the universe! This idea must be destroyed. We are not in control of our thinking” (162). Rather, “the individual is bound to all his dead ancestors by the efforts and sacrifices of individuals in the past” (163). So, yeah, supergross.
More or less totally defective when he describes the Dreyfusards as “the camp which supports Dreyfus as symbol, would put into power those men whose intention is to remake France in the image of their own prejudice” whereas “I want to preserve France” (167). So, yaknow, fuck off Barres. Sadly, it is not difficult to imagine persons more loserish than this (NSDAP, teabaggers, Trump voters, et al.).
Weird fetish for “the land of our dead” (181), as though the soil mattered somehow, or the fact that the dead were rotting thereunder were somehow significant. What a worthless waste of space. Dude wants to know “the cause of our decadence” (183). The “serious disease” is apparently “a thousand separate wills and a thousand separate individualistic imaginations” OH NOS!!!!1 (183).
Dude complains a lot about Kantianism as the state philosophy (176 ff), and therefore appear to be the source of Ayn Rand’s similarly asinine complaints about same. We always did see her coming as a fascist fuckwit. Totally precursor to Rand when he barfs out denunciations of “our Kantian intellectuals” who wish “to destroy society rather than endorse justice” (179). Whatever. Fuck this guy, fuck anti-semitism, and fuck Ayn Rand.
He also conflates all sorts of dumb, such as the notion that the Germans “dream of destruction” and are “more cruel than orientals” (191); it is “a holy war” wherein the Germans “campaign for the destruction of our tongue and our thought” (id.) (Lemkin will of course confirm the cultural genocide in WW2). Lotsa vitriol directed toward Germania, though these writings tend to be in the neighborhood of WW1, so that may be understandable, even if still as yet plainly erroneous. That said, “the French make war as a religious duty” (208), the “first to formulate the idea of a holy war.” This is a boast, NB, so, yeah.
Maurras—
Approximately one-third of the volume on this clown. From the intro:
Actual writings here are abject. First excerpt is monarchist agitation to “bring freedoms downstairs to the people and restore authority at the top” (216), a reversal of alleged republican doctrine. The republic “inflicts upon [the citizen] some very insidious comforts” apparently (217), returning the citizen “to the individualist condition of the primitive savage” (218). It is “irretrievable decadence” (id.) (if so, how is this screed to retrieve France? The instabilities in the argument are comical). Liberal institutions are filled with “a class of citizens, heartily despised by the entire country, that makes its living by a trade in influence and intrigue” (221)—standard illiberal topos—“parliament, composed by some chance of enlightened men, would of necessity be very quickly replaced, like the Assembly of 1871, by a horde of agitators, catchers of the popular vote” OH NOS (id.).
Republicanism “is synonymous with the absence of a master will and continuity of thought at the centre of power” (224)--but you just fucking said “Great provincial councils, under the ultimate but distant control of the state, will collaborate in the reawakening and renewal [NB standard fascist bullshit] of the whole body of the nation now shriveled by a Jacobin policy of centralization” (220).
Monarchism allows “central power” to be “freed from the rivalry of parties, assemblies, and electoral caprice: the state will have a free rein” (227), which was kinda the objection to republicanism. Republican rights “are entirely theoretical” whereas “monarchist theory [sic] confers upon the citizen practical guarantees, guarantees of fact” (231). “Liberty is a right under the republic—but only a right” (id.)—standard illiberal topos there. Royalist policy recommendations: Catholicism (232), large professional army (id.), economic producerism contra “parasites” (233).
Other essays follow. One disputes Taine’s thesis that revolutions arise out of the classical tradition, imputing them instead to romanticism (239 ff), which is of course identified with Judaism (241). We see that “Paris of 1750 was nothing like an Asiatic shanty-town full of grubby Jews” (245). Text is filled with comments such as “the level of indeterminate freedom is pitched so low that men bear no other label but that which they share with every plant and animal: individuality” (250), which is pregnant talk for an agambenian reading. Regardless, the “revolutionary library” contains only Plutarch and Plato from the classics, because Rousseau ‘borrowed’ from them (261): “Plutarch was well aware of semitic ideas […] As for Plato, he is, of all the Greek sages, the one who brought back from Asia the most Asian ideas” (id.).
Some notable instability in the argument that "Reason foresees that the quality of life will decline when the unbridled individual is granted, under the direction of the state, his dreary freedom to think only of himself and to live only for himself” (251) in comparison with how the republican state “helps [the citizen] in situations where he ought to help himself. It weans him from the habit of thought or personal initiative” (217).
Republican doctrine is “squaring the circle” (253), as libertarianism destroys respect for law and egalitarianism gives authority to “the most numerous, that is to say the most inferior elements” (254), and fraternity is just cosmopolitanism. Ewwww say the rightwingers.
Thereafter follows totally philistine essays on the propriety of inegalitarianism (264 ff) and some nimrod ruminations on the purported rebirth of nationalism after WW2 (295 ff). Whatever.
Claudel—
Numbnut Vichy loser tacked on almost as a coda, with weak verses in praise of Petain.
FFS. Fuck these guys. Useful introduction by an unsympathetic scholar. Series (‘Roots of the Right: Readings in Fascist, Racist, and Elitist Ideology’) is very much premised upon preserving dreadful political ideas in a museum of sorts, so as to avoid repeating &c &c &c. Looks like we need a Plan B? (Is the Trump Regime incidentally a pure reiteration, or just ‘second time as farce’?). I could've used perhaps more balanced selections, such as less proportionally of Barres and Maurras and more on the others.
Recommended, of course.
de Maistre—
The original post-1793 rightwing MF, monarchism with a pope above the monarchs. FFS. FFS. It is fairly sickening that Baudelaire and Poe were adherents of this guy who found in the French Revolution only horror. His manner of argumentation is about as effective as every other rightwinger: “and in place of the quite simple solutions that naturally present themselves to the mind, all sorts of metaphysical theories have been put forward to support airy hypotheses rejected by common sense and experience” (39). It seems that de Maistre is somehow a historical immaterialist:
Every question about the nature of man must be resolved by history. The philosopher who wants to show us by a priori reasoning what man must be does not deserve an audience [!]. He is substituting expediency for experience and his own decisions for the Creator’s will. (40)Yeah, I’m WTFing, too. Pretty much the opposite of Marxism in the insistence that “society is not the work of man, but the immediate result of the will of the Creator” (41), which is supergross. It is said that Thomas Paine wrote an “evil book” (44); contra liberalism, “every particular form of government is a divine construction” (id.), which would suggest, contrary to author’s beliefs, that a liberal constitution or a communist state is ordained by Jesus? (Obviously dude has not thought this through very carefully.)
Irrationalist insofar as “human reason left to its own resources is completely incapable not only of creating but also of conserving any religious or political association, because it can only give rise to disputes and because, to conduct himself well, man needs beliefs” (45); “Nothing is more vital to him than prejudices” (id.), which “are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires [NB the gross conjunction]” (id.). Like any far rightest, he desires a “general or national mind sufficiently strong to repress the aberrations of the individual reason which is, of its nature, the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it gives birth only to divergent opinions” (46) OH NOS! “What is patriotism? It is the national mind of which I am speaking; it is individual abnegation” (id.). So, yeah, fuck de Maistre?
A second piece by the same author in this volume is a dialogue, regarding belligerence, wherein for the warrior, “amid the blood he spills, he is humane, just as the wife is chaste in the transports of love” (49). Eww? The warrior has “enthusiasm for carnage” (id.). He asserts, via dialogue, “this law of war, terrible in itself, is yet only a clause in the general law that hangs over the world” (50).
FFS. Just in case there’s any ambiguity: “The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death” (52). Why the Jacobins didn’t make it a special mission to track this fucker down in Savoy is beyond me. “War is thus divine in itself” (53): thank you kindly for your astute contributions. Some shades of the RSB here, however, when dialogue proclaims that “opinion is so powerful in war that it can alter the nature of the same event” (58) (‘unconquerable belief, indomitable conviction,’ &c. recall).
Hippolyte Taine—
Introduction notes that Taine assessed Rousseau and the revolution as “the idea that the state is something men choose can lead, paradoxically, only to despotism and anarchy” (61), a formulation muddled beyond measure. The only social contract for Taine, apparently, is “an agreement of their ancestors about how the polity should be run” (id.), a “democracy of the dead.” Gross. Taine himself comes across as a complete elitist: “According to the new ideology all minds are within reach of all truths” (66). He fears ochlocracy, apparently, the “crowd of dangerous maniacs” (69).
He believes that “man is an imbecile” (id.): “not only is reason crippled in man, but it is rare in humanity” (70), whatever the hell that might mean.
In a peasant or a villager, in any man brought up from infancy to manual labor, not only is the network of superior conceptions defective, but again the internal machinery by which they are woven is not perfected. (70)A true humanitarian! But also: “Too soon will this be apparent when, in the name of popular sovereignty, each commune, each mob, shall regard itself as the nation and act accordingly” (71). We are apparently undecidably “a remote blood cousin of the monkey” (72), or perhaps rather “closely related” to same. “The dogma of the sovereignty of the people, interpreted by the mass, is to produce a perfect anarchy, up to the moment when, interpreted by its chiefs, it produces a perfect despotism” (76). Am yawning at the strawpersons and bad generalizations.
When he states “revolt is simply just defence” (64), we recall the echo in Ayn Rand 100 years later: first time as tragedy, second as farce, no? He proclaims that “I enjoy my property only through tolerance and at second-hand; for, according to the social contract, I have surrendered it” (79). Duh? Overall, lotsa silly carping here. Taine strikes me as fairly second rate among rightwing greasers.
Drumont—
Introduction describes this asshole’s anti-semitism as “coarse and plebeian” (85). Concerned with ‘revanche,’ Drumont regarded the 1870 war as “engendered by Jewish high finance” (id.). So, here’s one old source for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the NSDAP, the assholes described in Lowenthal’s Prophets of Deceit, and David fucking Icke.
Review of his writings reveals silly statements such as how “the Semite and the Aryan […] represent two distinct races which are irredeemably hostile to each other” (88). Purportedly semitic societies such as Carthage and Arabia are “ephemeral,” whereas (destroyed) Greece and Rome are “durable” (90). Gotta love the Beyond Stupid. “The Aryan or Indo-European race is the only one to uphold the principles of justice, to experience freedom, and to value beauty” (90). Barf. Stalin was quite correct to summarily execute these sort of fuckers.
We learn that “the Semite is mercantile, covetous, scheming, subtle, and cunning” (92). “He can live only at the common expense” (93), and is “by nature an oppressor” (94). “The Jew’s right to oppress other people is rooted in his religion; for him it is an article of faith; it is proclaimed in every line [sic] [no, really, sic] of the Bible and the Talmud” (98)—i.e., this is completely embarrassing. The gold standard of the rightwing, apparently. Lots more, pages & pages of idiocy, up to and including PEZ ideas such as “With Hertzen in Russia, Karl Marx and Lassalle in Germany, everywhere [!] one looks, there is, as in France, a Jew preaching communism or socialism” (109).
Sorel—
Introduction notes that he began as a marxist, but became a Spenglerian insofar as he believed that liberal democracy is ‘decadent’ (117); Sorel became an editor of L’Independence when Maurras (q.v.) was also on the board. Ugh.
Sorel himself argues in the Reflections on Violence that “all that is necessary to know is whether the general strike contains everything that the socialist doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat” (130). As “there is no process by which the future can be predicted scientifically” (127), opponents of the liberal order must “return to the old methods of the Utopists” (id.). Eww?
Le Bon—
This is the “psychology of Boulangism and Caesarism” (133), and dude’s “theory is the psychological corollary of Barres’ notion of the deracine” (id.). We are in the era of the crowd, the introduction continues, and “the only way in which the crowd can be kept under control is through the agency of the strong man who can dominate the mass as the hypnotizer dominates the hypnotized or the seducer the seduced” (id.). This is the “classic sociological theory of totalitarianism as the mobilization of the uncommitted who are searching for a leader and a goal” (id.).
The actual text of The Psychology of Crowds, which fears “the entry of the popular classes into political life” (134). “The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings” (135)—FFS.
Barres—
Intro argues that “Barres made his intellectual reputation with the idea of the deracine--the rootless cosmopolitan metic—and harnessed it to a mystical nationalism” (143).
Barres actually likes Proudhon: “what lies at the heart of Proudhonism is its native French quality, the heritage of the Rousseaus, the Saint-Simons, the Fouriers” (154). Weird, no? Otherwise, “nationalism is the acceptance of a particular kind of determinism” (159), whatever that might mean.
Quite a charmer: “The sovereign individual with his intelligence and his ability to seize on the laws of the universe! This idea must be destroyed. We are not in control of our thinking” (162). Rather, “the individual is bound to all his dead ancestors by the efforts and sacrifices of individuals in the past” (163). So, yeah, supergross.
More or less totally defective when he describes the Dreyfusards as “the camp which supports Dreyfus as symbol, would put into power those men whose intention is to remake France in the image of their own prejudice” whereas “I want to preserve France” (167). So, yaknow, fuck off Barres. Sadly, it is not difficult to imagine persons more loserish than this (NSDAP, teabaggers, Trump voters, et al.).
Weird fetish for “the land of our dead” (181), as though the soil mattered somehow, or the fact that the dead were rotting thereunder were somehow significant. What a worthless waste of space. Dude wants to know “the cause of our decadence” (183). The “serious disease” is apparently “a thousand separate wills and a thousand separate individualistic imaginations” OH NOS!!!!1 (183).
Dude complains a lot about Kantianism as the state philosophy (176 ff), and therefore appear to be the source of Ayn Rand’s similarly asinine complaints about same. We always did see her coming as a fascist fuckwit. Totally precursor to Rand when he barfs out denunciations of “our Kantian intellectuals” who wish “to destroy society rather than endorse justice” (179). Whatever. Fuck this guy, fuck anti-semitism, and fuck Ayn Rand.
He also conflates all sorts of dumb, such as the notion that the Germans “dream of destruction” and are “more cruel than orientals” (191); it is “a holy war” wherein the Germans “campaign for the destruction of our tongue and our thought” (id.) (Lemkin will of course confirm the cultural genocide in WW2). Lotsa vitriol directed toward Germania, though these writings tend to be in the neighborhood of WW1, so that may be understandable, even if still as yet plainly erroneous. That said, “the French make war as a religious duty” (208), the “first to formulate the idea of a holy war.” This is a boast, NB, so, yeah.
Maurras—
Approximately one-third of the volume on this clown. From the intro:
the one consistent political position in all his writings is hatred of Germany. His position is precarious, but not without a certain rigor. He hated the same things that the Nazis did – democracy, the republic, certain kinds of socialism, Jews, and individualism. But whereas the Nazis were claiming that democracy was foreign to the spirit of Germany, being a foreign import from Jerusalem and Paris, Maurras was saying the same thing, only blamed Jerusalem and those Teutonic forests where Tacitus had first descried the seeds of a rough Germanic liberty. The Nazis claimed that Marxism was Jewish, Maurras claimed it was both Jewish and German. (213)Alrighty then!
Actual writings here are abject. First excerpt is monarchist agitation to “bring freedoms downstairs to the people and restore authority at the top” (216), a reversal of alleged republican doctrine. The republic “inflicts upon [the citizen] some very insidious comforts” apparently (217), returning the citizen “to the individualist condition of the primitive savage” (218). It is “irretrievable decadence” (id.) (if so, how is this screed to retrieve France? The instabilities in the argument are comical). Liberal institutions are filled with “a class of citizens, heartily despised by the entire country, that makes its living by a trade in influence and intrigue” (221)—standard illiberal topos—“parliament, composed by some chance of enlightened men, would of necessity be very quickly replaced, like the Assembly of 1871, by a horde of agitators, catchers of the popular vote” OH NOS (id.).
Republicanism “is synonymous with the absence of a master will and continuity of thought at the centre of power” (224)--but you just fucking said “Great provincial councils, under the ultimate but distant control of the state, will collaborate in the reawakening and renewal [NB standard fascist bullshit] of the whole body of the nation now shriveled by a Jacobin policy of centralization” (220).
Monarchism allows “central power” to be “freed from the rivalry of parties, assemblies, and electoral caprice: the state will have a free rein” (227), which was kinda the objection to republicanism. Republican rights “are entirely theoretical” whereas “monarchist theory [sic] confers upon the citizen practical guarantees, guarantees of fact” (231). “Liberty is a right under the republic—but only a right” (id.)—standard illiberal topos there. Royalist policy recommendations: Catholicism (232), large professional army (id.), economic producerism contra “parasites” (233).
Other essays follow. One disputes Taine’s thesis that revolutions arise out of the classical tradition, imputing them instead to romanticism (239 ff), which is of course identified with Judaism (241). We see that “Paris of 1750 was nothing like an Asiatic shanty-town full of grubby Jews” (245). Text is filled with comments such as “the level of indeterminate freedom is pitched so low that men bear no other label but that which they share with every plant and animal: individuality” (250), which is pregnant talk for an agambenian reading. Regardless, the “revolutionary library” contains only Plutarch and Plato from the classics, because Rousseau ‘borrowed’ from them (261): “Plutarch was well aware of semitic ideas […] As for Plato, he is, of all the Greek sages, the one who brought back from Asia the most Asian ideas” (id.).
Some notable instability in the argument that "Reason foresees that the quality of life will decline when the unbridled individual is granted, under the direction of the state, his dreary freedom to think only of himself and to live only for himself” (251) in comparison with how the republican state “helps [the citizen] in situations where he ought to help himself. It weans him from the habit of thought or personal initiative” (217).
Republican doctrine is “squaring the circle” (253), as libertarianism destroys respect for law and egalitarianism gives authority to “the most numerous, that is to say the most inferior elements” (254), and fraternity is just cosmopolitanism. Ewwww say the rightwingers.
Thereafter follows totally philistine essays on the propriety of inegalitarianism (264 ff) and some nimrod ruminations on the purported rebirth of nationalism after WW2 (295 ff). Whatever.
Claudel—
Numbnut Vichy loser tacked on almost as a coda, with weak verses in praise of Petain.
FFS. Fuck these guys. Useful introduction by an unsympathetic scholar. Series (‘Roots of the Right: Readings in Fascist, Racist, and Elitist Ideology’) is very much premised upon preserving dreadful political ideas in a museum of sorts, so as to avoid repeating &c &c &c. Looks like we need a Plan B? (Is the Trump Regime incidentally a pure reiteration, or just ‘second time as farce’?). I could've used perhaps more balanced selections, such as less proportionally of Barres and Maurras and more on the others.
Recommended, of course.
July 6, 2018
This book should be reviewed properly, by someone capable of actually making cogent points without descending into a 6-year old tantrum. If you don't enjoy reading controversial right wing thought, then you would only read this to torture yourself, as the other reviewer clearly did (in fact despite responding to 'fascism' and 'antisemitism' with such award-winning insights as "ewww!" "gross!" and even "supergross!" he apparently devotes a huge amount of his life reading 'fascist' literature).
Anyway, to the book itself. 'The French Right: from De Miastre to Maurras' is not a good book in terms of achieving what it ought to set out to do, to present French right wing thought to the audience and give them a sense of its contours. The introduction in fact betrays the book's real intention as McClelland is as biased as they come and intends to present the works herein in the worst possible light. You're better off skipping this.
Now, to the texts themselves. I should say that about half this book is relatively useless due to the fact that it consists of extracts which in no way develop the author's thoughts. Among those authors who have 'extracts' included are the post-revolutionary monarchist Savoyard Joseph de Maistre, a historian who commented negatively on the French Revolution Hippolyte Tain, the somewhat vulgar anti-semite Edouard Drumont, the anarcho-syndicalist philosopher of political violence Georges Sorel, and the father of crowd psychology Gustave Lebon. All of these thinkers are interesting (with perhaps the exception of Drumont who was merely a crude demagogue), though Sorel is only included here because Benito Mussolini took inspiration from him, in fact he was an unorthodox Marxist. As mentioned above the problem is the extracts don't really do any of them justice, and some are so fleeting as to only be a few pages. Maistre is undoubtedly the best thinker of the group, but his works are worth buying by themselves, rather than trying to get a sense of his thought through this pitiful cut-and-paste scrapbook of musings. Sorel and Lebon's books (I believe) are available in English, so again, this collection proves unnecessary. The first half of the book has very poor value in only the paltry extracts from Drumont and Tain.
Now, what you do pay for the book is made up for in the second half, with most of the space dedicated to the works of Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras. In their case, full essays and articles are included and a nice range of topics is covered. It's not as much as one might like, but you get a better sense of these thinkers due to the space afforded. These appear nowhere else in English, so this is really what you will be buying this for if you chose to pick it up, and in my opinion the essays are worth it. As an addendum, Paul Claudel's poem about Vichy France is included in full, a nice touch, even if it gives little insight into Catholic thinker's politics.
All in all, its a big miss for the editor. He does bring to light some important and enjoyable-to-read essays for the first time in English (Maurras on royalty and dictatorship is particularly strong), but the other authors are either poorly chosen or poorly represented. If he had wanted to produce a truly valuable tome, he would have dropped Drumont, Sorel, and Lebon, the former for being too crude and the latter for being superfluous, while expanding on Tain and Claudel's contributions, along with selecting untranslated passages from Maistre rather than ones which are accessible in their full context already. To conclude, if you want seven essays from Barres and Maurras, and you can find it at a reasonable price (don't pay over $10 for it), then pick it up. If not, there are other places to go for better insights into French right wing thought.
Anyway, to the book itself. 'The French Right: from De Miastre to Maurras' is not a good book in terms of achieving what it ought to set out to do, to present French right wing thought to the audience and give them a sense of its contours. The introduction in fact betrays the book's real intention as McClelland is as biased as they come and intends to present the works herein in the worst possible light. You're better off skipping this.
Now, to the texts themselves. I should say that about half this book is relatively useless due to the fact that it consists of extracts which in no way develop the author's thoughts. Among those authors who have 'extracts' included are the post-revolutionary monarchist Savoyard Joseph de Maistre, a historian who commented negatively on the French Revolution Hippolyte Tain, the somewhat vulgar anti-semite Edouard Drumont, the anarcho-syndicalist philosopher of political violence Georges Sorel, and the father of crowd psychology Gustave Lebon. All of these thinkers are interesting (with perhaps the exception of Drumont who was merely a crude demagogue), though Sorel is only included here because Benito Mussolini took inspiration from him, in fact he was an unorthodox Marxist. As mentioned above the problem is the extracts don't really do any of them justice, and some are so fleeting as to only be a few pages. Maistre is undoubtedly the best thinker of the group, but his works are worth buying by themselves, rather than trying to get a sense of his thought through this pitiful cut-and-paste scrapbook of musings. Sorel and Lebon's books (I believe) are available in English, so again, this collection proves unnecessary. The first half of the book has very poor value in only the paltry extracts from Drumont and Tain.
Now, what you do pay for the book is made up for in the second half, with most of the space dedicated to the works of Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras. In their case, full essays and articles are included and a nice range of topics is covered. It's not as much as one might like, but you get a better sense of these thinkers due to the space afforded. These appear nowhere else in English, so this is really what you will be buying this for if you chose to pick it up, and in my opinion the essays are worth it. As an addendum, Paul Claudel's poem about Vichy France is included in full, a nice touch, even if it gives little insight into Catholic thinker's politics.
All in all, its a big miss for the editor. He does bring to light some important and enjoyable-to-read essays for the first time in English (Maurras on royalty and dictatorship is particularly strong), but the other authors are either poorly chosen or poorly represented. If he had wanted to produce a truly valuable tome, he would have dropped Drumont, Sorel, and Lebon, the former for being too crude and the latter for being superfluous, while expanding on Tain and Claudel's contributions, along with selecting untranslated passages from Maistre rather than ones which are accessible in their full context already. To conclude, if you want seven essays from Barres and Maurras, and you can find it at a reasonable price (don't pay over $10 for it), then pick it up. If not, there are other places to go for better insights into French right wing thought.
May 20, 2024
The French Right:
An Essential Introduction
In many ways, I am exactly the WRONG person to read this book. I am a proud Marxist, feminist, secularist and an unalloyed progressive. However, in this day and age, ideological openness has been superseded by ideological isolationism. I believe in the spirit of dialogue and conversation, something that increasingly sets me at odds with the Left.
Reading through these writers, it strikes me that those we disagree with are often capable of having just as much intelligence as us. It is profoundly naive to assert that intelligence is on your side when you do not possess sufficient openness to read and converse with your adversaries. To be sure, this book does have its fair share of what we call vulgar and prejudiced people, but there are also relative gems like DeMaistre and Maurras within too. I found DeMaistre's attitude to modernity surprisingly complex with his approval of gunpowder and by implication more advanced weapons of war, but rejecting modernity in the public sphere.
DeMaistre valorizes war and militarism in ways that are hauntingly familiar to students of fascist thought, yet he also compares war to the joy of making love with a loving wife. The feminine image of war that DeMaistre proposes is at odds with the conventional ultramasculine image of militarism. DeMaistre strikes one as a considered thinker and someone who should not just be dismissed for his deeply reactionary views.
DeMaistre not only goes as far as rejecting the Enlightenment but also rejects Grotius's conditions for a just war. DeMaistre refuses the need to justify war, and that sets him apart from many thinkers. For him, war and violence are ennobling and are what lay the seeds for greatness. Yet his invocation of Alexander the Great fails to mention how his empire immediately collapsed/fragmented after his death. Tyrants everywhere create the seeds for their downfall in the people they oppress.
Another thinker who strikes one as rather intelligent is Charles Maurrus. His thought has many of the antecedents of fascism. Its championing of corporatism is an excellent case in point. Yet Maurras also valorizes the Bourbon monarchy. In practice, fascism often made strategic compromises with established elites but maintained an often ambiguous relationship with republicanism. To seize power Fascist leaders in Italy, Romania, and Spain often collaborated with aristocrats and monarchists but would also maintain a rhetorical republicanism.
Royalism of the sort preached by Maurras cannot be easily classified. At the most, one can say he's an ultra-royalist, a decentralist, a corporatist, and an ardent nationalist. Bizarrely Maurras sees no contradiction with esposing absolute monarchy and decentralization. If the king is all-powerful, does that not necessitate centralization? Instead of the rhetorical obscuritainism and obfuscation common amongst today's right, Maurras is extraordinarily transparent about his goals, objectives, and beliefs. This may be because today multi-party elections are the norm worldwide, wannabe authoritarians today often have to legitimate themselves as being more democratic than their opponents.
Additionally, Maurras's introduction of a corporative chamber also prefigures the Catholic corporatists in Austria and Portugal. It's not for nothing that the historian Ernst Nolte characterized his writing as fascistic. Nolte missed the mark but to call Maurrassisme and Action Française proto-fascist is quite accurate. Anyways, Maurras is ideologically a reactionary but also an innovator. A defender of absolutism but a supporter of provincial republicanism if his rhetoric is to be believed. Characteristically, Maurras abounds in contradiction.
Finally, Hippolyte Taine strikes me as the most reasonable of all thinkers in this volume. For instance, Taine's distrust of the masses is one I share. The masses often lack any sort of appreciation for the arts and are consummate philistines. Philistinism has been elevated to the status of a religion in America. Long live philistinism! Yet, the masses can be cured of their unculturedness. It is there that I part ways from Taine's pessimism in favour of radical optimism. Create the conditions for the revival of high culture, agitate for its revival, and protest against the capitalist dystopian cityscapes. High culture cannot come just under socialism but must be paired with an education of classicism. Socialism is not always the great leveller we make it out to be. Democratize high culture without diluting it!
The rest are second-rate thinkers. They are often vulgar and crass, lacking any sort of logical reasoning, and in the case of Dumont, genuinely wild and outlandish. I believe in intellectual respectability, not foul bigotry. Phrasing your words with courtesy and clear thought is any day better than disjointed rants like those of Dumont.
You cannot understand why our twentieth century was so cataclysmic without reading and understanding how they justified their extraordinary beliefs. You cannot understand Nazism fully without reading Nazism. You cannot understand why the South fought to preserve Slavery without reading the proslavery thinkers too. This is not to insist on both sides but to read them knowing their sheer depravity and also seeing their humanity builds a deeper bond with humanity as a whole. We could all be like them, and that is sobering.
Disclaimer:
Nowhere in this review should its author be taken as endorsing fascist, racist, misogynistic, queerphobic, antisemitic, or otherwise extremist views. The author is interested in an intellectual exploration and examination ONLY and remains resolutely opposed to all forms of fascism.
An Essential Introduction
In many ways, I am exactly the WRONG person to read this book. I am a proud Marxist, feminist, secularist and an unalloyed progressive. However, in this day and age, ideological openness has been superseded by ideological isolationism. I believe in the spirit of dialogue and conversation, something that increasingly sets me at odds with the Left.
Reading through these writers, it strikes me that those we disagree with are often capable of having just as much intelligence as us. It is profoundly naive to assert that intelligence is on your side when you do not possess sufficient openness to read and converse with your adversaries. To be sure, this book does have its fair share of what we call vulgar and prejudiced people, but there are also relative gems like DeMaistre and Maurras within too. I found DeMaistre's attitude to modernity surprisingly complex with his approval of gunpowder and by implication more advanced weapons of war, but rejecting modernity in the public sphere.
DeMaistre valorizes war and militarism in ways that are hauntingly familiar to students of fascist thought, yet he also compares war to the joy of making love with a loving wife. The feminine image of war that DeMaistre proposes is at odds with the conventional ultramasculine image of militarism. DeMaistre strikes one as a considered thinker and someone who should not just be dismissed for his deeply reactionary views.
DeMaistre not only goes as far as rejecting the Enlightenment but also rejects Grotius's conditions for a just war. DeMaistre refuses the need to justify war, and that sets him apart from many thinkers. For him, war and violence are ennobling and are what lay the seeds for greatness. Yet his invocation of Alexander the Great fails to mention how his empire immediately collapsed/fragmented after his death. Tyrants everywhere create the seeds for their downfall in the people they oppress.
Another thinker who strikes one as rather intelligent is Charles Maurrus. His thought has many of the antecedents of fascism. Its championing of corporatism is an excellent case in point. Yet Maurras also valorizes the Bourbon monarchy. In practice, fascism often made strategic compromises with established elites but maintained an often ambiguous relationship with republicanism. To seize power Fascist leaders in Italy, Romania, and Spain often collaborated with aristocrats and monarchists but would also maintain a rhetorical republicanism.
Royalism of the sort preached by Maurras cannot be easily classified. At the most, one can say he's an ultra-royalist, a decentralist, a corporatist, and an ardent nationalist. Bizarrely Maurras sees no contradiction with esposing absolute monarchy and decentralization. If the king is all-powerful, does that not necessitate centralization? Instead of the rhetorical obscuritainism and obfuscation common amongst today's right, Maurras is extraordinarily transparent about his goals, objectives, and beliefs. This may be because today multi-party elections are the norm worldwide, wannabe authoritarians today often have to legitimate themselves as being more democratic than their opponents.
Additionally, Maurras's introduction of a corporative chamber also prefigures the Catholic corporatists in Austria and Portugal. It's not for nothing that the historian Ernst Nolte characterized his writing as fascistic. Nolte missed the mark but to call Maurrassisme and Action Française proto-fascist is quite accurate. Anyways, Maurras is ideologically a reactionary but also an innovator. A defender of absolutism but a supporter of provincial republicanism if his rhetoric is to be believed. Characteristically, Maurras abounds in contradiction.
Finally, Hippolyte Taine strikes me as the most reasonable of all thinkers in this volume. For instance, Taine's distrust of the masses is one I share. The masses often lack any sort of appreciation for the arts and are consummate philistines. Philistinism has been elevated to the status of a religion in America. Long live philistinism! Yet, the masses can be cured of their unculturedness. It is there that I part ways from Taine's pessimism in favour of radical optimism. Create the conditions for the revival of high culture, agitate for its revival, and protest against the capitalist dystopian cityscapes. High culture cannot come just under socialism but must be paired with an education of classicism. Socialism is not always the great leveller we make it out to be. Democratize high culture without diluting it!
The rest are second-rate thinkers. They are often vulgar and crass, lacking any sort of logical reasoning, and in the case of Dumont, genuinely wild and outlandish. I believe in intellectual respectability, not foul bigotry. Phrasing your words with courtesy and clear thought is any day better than disjointed rants like those of Dumont.
You cannot understand why our twentieth century was so cataclysmic without reading and understanding how they justified their extraordinary beliefs. You cannot understand Nazism fully without reading Nazism. You cannot understand why the South fought to preserve Slavery without reading the proslavery thinkers too. This is not to insist on both sides but to read them knowing their sheer depravity and also seeing their humanity builds a deeper bond with humanity as a whole. We could all be like them, and that is sobering.
Disclaimer:
Nowhere in this review should its author be taken as endorsing fascist, racist, misogynistic, queerphobic, antisemitic, or otherwise extremist views. The author is interested in an intellectual exploration and examination ONLY and remains resolutely opposed to all forms of fascism.
March 28, 2023
8.25/10.
An excellent collection of passages from members of the French Right. The character of the French Right (from after the French Revolution to the 1930s) revolves around Political Catholicism, Monarchism, the essence of prejudice/dogma, the futility of individualism, and the fight against the twin evils of usurious banker capitalism and materialistic, atheistic communism. Here are some illuminating passages:
De Maistre on the creators of new "values", "rights", and "religions":
"But can you, insignificant man, light this sacred fire that inflames nations? Can you give a common soul to several million men? Unite them under your laws? Range them closely around a common centre? Shape the mind of men yet unborn? Make future generations obey you and create those age-old customs, those conserving prejudices, which are the father of the laws and stronger than them? What nonsense!"
Drumont on the difference between "Aryans" and "Semites", and on the Aryan's patience:
"Not a single invention has been the work of a Semite. He exploits, organizes and produces whatever the creative Aryan has invented, and, needless to say, retains the profits for himself. The Aryan is an adventurer, and discovered America. The Semite then had an admirable opportunity to leave Europe behind and escape persecution, and, in so doing, to show he was capable of doing something on his own, but he waited until all the pioneer exploration had been accomplished, until the land was under cultivation, before going off to get rich at the expense of others. To sum up, anything which takes man on to unfamiliar paths, anything which involves an effort to extend man's knowledge of this earthly sphere, is quite beyond the Semite, and above all, the [REDACTED]. He can live only at the common expense, within a society which he did not help to build. What is unfortunate for the Semite — and this crucial observation should be remembered in my memory — is that he always goes just a little bit too far for the Aryan. The Aryan is a good-natured giant . . . only he must not be unduly provoked. He can be stripped of all his possessions, and then suddenly fly into a rage over a cherished trifle, such as a rose. Then he jerks out of his stupor, understands the situation at once, seizes the sword which was collecting dust in a corner, lashes out and inflicts a terrible vengeance on the Semite, who was exploiting, pillaging and tricking him, but who will bear the marks of this punishment for three centuries."
Sorel on an observer noting the similarity between the American adventurer and the Ancient Greek explorer, also on the Faustian spirit of Nordic man:
"He would have been struck by the singing analogies which exist between the Yankee, ready for any kind of enterprise, and the ancient Greek sailor, sometimes a pirate, sometimes a colonist or merchant; above all, he would have established a parallel between the ancient heroes and the man who sets out on the conquest of the Far West. P. de Rousiers has described the master type admirably: 'To become and to remain an American, one must look upon life as a struggle and not as a pleasure, and seek in it, victorious effort, energetic and efficacious action, rather than pleasure, leisure embellished by the cultivation of the arts, the refinements proper to other societies. Everywhere — we have seen that what makes the American succeed, what constitutes his type - is character, personal energy, energy in action, creative energy.' The profound contempt which the Greek had for the barbarian is matched by that of the Yankee for the foreign worker who makes no effort to become truly American. 'Many of these people would be better if we took them in hand,' an old colonel of the War of Secession said to a French traveller, 'but we are a proud race' . . . J. Bourdeau has drawn attention to the strange likeness which exists between the ideas of A. Carnegie and Roosevelt, and those of Nietzsche, the first deploring the waste of money involved in maintaining incapables, the second urging the Americans to become conquerors."
An excellent collection of passages from members of the French Right. The character of the French Right (from after the French Revolution to the 1930s) revolves around Political Catholicism, Monarchism, the essence of prejudice/dogma, the futility of individualism, and the fight against the twin evils of usurious banker capitalism and materialistic, atheistic communism. Here are some illuminating passages:
De Maistre on the creators of new "values", "rights", and "religions":
"But can you, insignificant man, light this sacred fire that inflames nations? Can you give a common soul to several million men? Unite them under your laws? Range them closely around a common centre? Shape the mind of men yet unborn? Make future generations obey you and create those age-old customs, those conserving prejudices, which are the father of the laws and stronger than them? What nonsense!"
Drumont on the difference between "Aryans" and "Semites", and on the Aryan's patience:
"Not a single invention has been the work of a Semite. He exploits, organizes and produces whatever the creative Aryan has invented, and, needless to say, retains the profits for himself. The Aryan is an adventurer, and discovered America. The Semite then had an admirable opportunity to leave Europe behind and escape persecution, and, in so doing, to show he was capable of doing something on his own, but he waited until all the pioneer exploration had been accomplished, until the land was under cultivation, before going off to get rich at the expense of others. To sum up, anything which takes man on to unfamiliar paths, anything which involves an effort to extend man's knowledge of this earthly sphere, is quite beyond the Semite, and above all, the [REDACTED]. He can live only at the common expense, within a society which he did not help to build. What is unfortunate for the Semite — and this crucial observation should be remembered in my memory — is that he always goes just a little bit too far for the Aryan. The Aryan is a good-natured giant . . . only he must not be unduly provoked. He can be stripped of all his possessions, and then suddenly fly into a rage over a cherished trifle, such as a rose. Then he jerks out of his stupor, understands the situation at once, seizes the sword which was collecting dust in a corner, lashes out and inflicts a terrible vengeance on the Semite, who was exploiting, pillaging and tricking him, but who will bear the marks of this punishment for three centuries."
Sorel on an observer noting the similarity between the American adventurer and the Ancient Greek explorer, also on the Faustian spirit of Nordic man:
"He would have been struck by the singing analogies which exist between the Yankee, ready for any kind of enterprise, and the ancient Greek sailor, sometimes a pirate, sometimes a colonist or merchant; above all, he would have established a parallel between the ancient heroes and the man who sets out on the conquest of the Far West. P. de Rousiers has described the master type admirably: 'To become and to remain an American, one must look upon life as a struggle and not as a pleasure, and seek in it, victorious effort, energetic and efficacious action, rather than pleasure, leisure embellished by the cultivation of the arts, the refinements proper to other societies. Everywhere — we have seen that what makes the American succeed, what constitutes his type - is character, personal energy, energy in action, creative energy.' The profound contempt which the Greek had for the barbarian is matched by that of the Yankee for the foreign worker who makes no effort to become truly American. 'Many of these people would be better if we took them in hand,' an old colonel of the War of Secession said to a French traveller, 'but we are a proud race' . . . J. Bourdeau has drawn attention to the strange likeness which exists between the ideas of A. Carnegie and Roosevelt, and those of Nietzsche, the first deploring the waste of money involved in maintaining incapables, the second urging the Americans to become conquerors."
May 28, 2023
An excellent read on excellent intellectuals the authors/compilers/editors bias notwithstanding, I can do without the introductions and notes. The reading is sufficient, the most interesting to me Pétain who sadly Is not included, but you also have Sorel and most interesting of all Maurras. A wide range of thinkers. Highly recommended.
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