Action Francaise

In the years following France's fall to Germany in 1940, many of her most distinguished intellectuals, living in exile, tried to understand what had happened to their country--not only during the disastrous sitz- and blitzkriege, but throughout the whole vacillating course of the 1930's. The majority of these intellectuals had been leftists during the period; and they saved their strongest condemnation for the group of men collectively known then and since as "the French Right."

In their books on France, Andre Malraux, Albert Guerard (pere), Genevieve Tabouis (of the leftist L'Oeuvre), and the Popular Front's Minister of Air Pierre Cot argued that the doctrinaire opposition of these men to the Third Republic--their verbal and physical violence against it--had demoralized the French: in incompetence of her generals in the brief military campaign only made more swift the country's by then inevitable collapse. Since many on the Right went on to become collaborators with the Germans--at least in associating themselves with the Vichy government--and since, after the Liberation, almost all who had survived the war were executed as traitors, their historical interest would seem to be minimal. They betrayed their country and died appropriately. What else is there to study?

As Professor Weber's mammoth and fascinating study demonstrates, the answer is, a great deal. The Action Francaise was the most important political organization on the Right and the training ground for many Rightists who went on to found their own organizations. Though it only attracted the world's eye after Hitler's rise to power, it was organized nearly ten years before the First World War, and it collected within its "cells" the inheritors of a tradition of nationalist, monarchist and reactionary thought extending back almost 100 years. It was no mere cabal of amoral big businessmen such as supported the so-called Comite France-Allemagne and the ultra-conservative grande presse; but a meeting-place for distinguished and gifted intellectuals whose disdain for the republic was wholly disinterested, the result of literary and philosophical predispositions, not any desire to safeguard financial investments. Its members included Paul Claudel, Jacques Maritain, Georges Bernanons, Maurice Barres and Leon Daudet (son of Alphonse). Charles Maurras, who founded and led the movement until its demise in 1944, began as a critic propagandist, really--calling for the revival of the classical literary norms and the scuttling of romanticism: only later did he embark on a career of agitation for a social and political order which, in the harmony of its parts, restraint of form and moral decorousness, would nicely complement the reborn ancien regime litteraire.

Maurras's thought was not always as clear as his prose, but he realised that a coup de force would be necessary to bring about the wished-for return of the king. However, though he often considered the possibility of the coup, in books and in the pages of his movement's newspaper (also called Action Francaise), it is doubtful that he ever actually planned a revolution; on the one occasion which fate presented to his grasp--the riots before Chamber on February 6, 1934--he did nothing. Professor Weber calls the 6 fevrier a "victory lost." Murras's hesitation at what seemed the very gates of power--though this impression was exaggerated--was as Professor Weber says, "the moment of truth which showed up the emptiness of almost everyone's position;" the Parliamentary regime was shown to be a tottering, precarious structure--the Rightist rioters had made their point--but the Right itself was exposed as well, "exposed as a lot of theorists... sorely lacking the capacity to carry out their dreams." The Action Francaise had organized publications, public meetings, a "party" structure that extended throughout France Known as the Camelots du Roi--but they lacked the "will to power." They were incapable of a Munich Putsch, much less a ten-year conspiracy to capture Parliamentary power. At the moment of reaction's greatest political triumphs in Europe, "French fascism" collapsed.

If the A.F. failed to restore the monarchy, it helped in its negative goal, freeing France from the grip of the decadent Parliamentarians: during the six years of life remaining to the Third Republic, the A.F. fought any aggressive policy with all the venom of the defeated. When France fell, however, the Action Francaise fell with it; it was essentially parasitic, and died with its host.

Professor Weber's books, fabulously documented, is preeminently a social history, filled with anecdotes about men whose involvement in the political life of their times was of a sort without parallel in any other country. For the Action Francaise was a personal movement, not a party; it was an organization built almost solely on individual passion and concern about the destruction of Western civilization at the hands of democratic decadence and communist barbarism. And to save it, the Action Francaise offered not a platform, not a programme, but the example of their devotion to la grande France: France, only France.