This is Part II of the essay by Julius Evola that was published as “La disfatta e il futuro dell Francia secondo l’Action Française” in La Vita Italiana, in April 1942.

This piece is of historical interest since the issues in 1941 are still in play in 2013. We also get an “inside” look at certain thought processes when both Evola and Maurras expected victory for their side. Philippe Pétain and Charles Maurras had been well respected figures in France before the war but then ended their days in disgrace.

The scission in France referred to was between two generals: Charles de Gaulle and Petain, the former representing the Republic and cosmopolitanism and the latter, identitarianism. I don’t know the specific features of the laws against the Jews; unfortunately, neither Evola nor Maurras admits that France was under the thumb of Germany, so that France’s internal “Jewish problem” was more far-reaching as many were sent off to concentration camps. This policy resulted in the discrediting of identitarian movements to this day as they stoke up that very real fear.

Defeat has consequences, so the victory of the Allies has established republican and cosmopolitan values as the default position of the West. Jewish and Masonic values are now considered part of the mainstream of Western thought and beyond debate. The third element, that of foreign immigration, is still contestable, although the opposition is weak and unconvincing.

The words must have stuck in his throat, since Evola could not quite name the “spiritual and traditional authority”. On the other hand, I doubt anyone in the Vatican II church would be happy to know that the Catholic Church was at the spiritual center of Vichy France. This shows how much the spirit of the church has changed in the intervening 70 years, since it was then considered compatible with nationalism. Although it is now more cosmopolitan and its sophisticated social teachings are now little more than “Marxism light”, this has not led to more acclaim by the modern world as the architects of Vatican II had hoped, but instead has led to its marginalization.

However, that does not prevent what Maurras documents and says about English politics, which had not the least regard for French interests, from being completely fair. Maurras takes a truncated position against De Gaulle. He, on the contrary, dedicates a chapter to demonstrate that England, basically, continued to be even in more recent times, in spite of appearances, the enemy of France, jealous of its colonial empire: it has always done everything to impede them from taking the rank that was due to them. Maurras fears that England seeks to exploit the French disaster to realize definitively their hidden ambitions, indeed making use from De Gaulle for this end, and stoking the internal French schism by every means.

For this reason, Maurras exhorts his compatriots to convince themselves of the absolute necessity of an internal concentration on the government of Marshall Petain as conditions for any recovery of France, after such a hard and tragic experience. So he devotes the second part of his book to highlighting and developing everything that the new Government tried to do. Maurras, although a realist, is pro Petain, because he eventually moved to establish a personal, national, authoritarian government, saved from parliamentary bedlam. France must, in that way, rediscover the true idea of the State: the State connected to the real country, freed from international influences, strong and disciplined, but against every leveling centralization.

Having such a State in mind, Petain had already begun to act to return France to the French: and here Maurras illustrated the new laws intended to build a dam against the influx of foreigners, metics, and immigrants that previously had found in France a type of promised land. Laws against Jews and Masons followed. Regarding the Jews, Maurras made the French point of view clear: they do not originate from an anti-semitic hatred, but from the fact that a Jew can only be considered to be an alien, who as such cannot be equated to the citizens of a country and moreover must accept the conditions that are imposed on whoever desires to be a guest. Maurras however correctly observes that French legislation on the Jews conveys mainly a juridical point of view, inspired by effects more that by causes: Maurras’ central point is to understand that a style and a hereditary mentality, a tradition and indelible custom will always make the Jewish substance something inassimilable and corrosive. Maurras recalls that France seized a large number of significant Jewish refugees, starting with the five Rothschilds. It advanced a sensible proposition: to appropriate such fortunes for the restructuring of rural debt, i.e., of those contracted or to contract for the acquisition and cultivation of land. That would mean to strengthen the class which more must be counted on for the reconstruction of a nation. As to the anti-masonic battle, Maurras brings to light the danger inherent in proceeding, in this regard, with a direct and practical action, extremely difficult where it is about a secret association. They can have effective results when they have complete possession of the State. As Mussolini did, only then will it be able to little by little paralyze the Masonic influence. The first step, i.e., the formal prohibition of Masonry, was already accomplished by France. What followed is:

to promote a moral publicity without rest and carry everywhere the tip of its fire.

Maurras then alludes to social reforms: the question naturally arises the reconciliation of classes and social justice. But, in this regard, Maurras also makes a rather appropriate point:

If the protection of the poor is the natural duty of the State—when is not exercised spontaneously by some powers worthy of their strength—it must however also defend isolated, but just, powers against certain coalitions of “the poor” who gain an enormous voice, capable of crushing everything under the darkest and most brutal tyranny.

And France, which first had the Revolution (revolution, says Maurras correctly—is still so stupid to be called French, being instead the most cosmopolitan of all of them), has from historical experience everything that it needs in order to understand, better than any other nation, the timeliness of a similar warning.

After some other specific points, Maurras addresses the reform of education in France, indicating what was already done and what still is to be done. The fundamental need is that the State in France is made truly father of its schools by proceeding systematically in the formation of a new mentality in the next generations. In our opinion, this is really the crucial point, on which almost everything else depends. The French mentality still needs to be detoxified from the deleterious effects of ideology, which in that country has existed for a while and had a characteristic diffusion, in width as in depth. And that, in good measure, must happen through the schools.

Maurras indicates here correctly a point that, in the current state of reform, was not sufficiently considered; i.e., that which is not limited to a more or less autonomous moral teaching, but at whose center the principle of a spiritual and traditional authority is returned, the only one that can make well understood all the errors and deviations in which France has incurred: the return to the classical spirit, the battle against romanticism and humanitarianism, the decisive antithesis to the Revolution and all the phenomena of degeneration, decadence, and anarchy that were its consequences.

In one point of his book Maurras develops some rather important considerations in connection to the idea that the French disaster of 1940 seems to be the ultimate effect of a chain of causes that go back far in time and of that only some are of general rule.

The mass that constitutes an avalanche is formed of sand and stone coming from the most various rocks, something that however does not prevent the observer from understanding the small movement or the smallest human push that detached the first lump of snow—thus, before the evidence of any accusing traces (an impression of human finger), before the still visible trajectory of any suspicious footprint (explicitly oriented, clearly directed), the watchful eye discovers in the right point the impulse and the form of a criminal act—that waits only to be identified with the name of its author.

This is an observation which demonstrates, in Maurras, the right orientation to truly deepen the secret history of his country and therefore even to identify the premises of a true reconstruction. Here we are in the area of what we call the “science of subversion”: in regard to which perhaps no country in the world offers such precious research material, as does France.

If we have to indicate any defect in Maurras’ book, it is that it does not touch at all the problem of the new European order and the corresponding supernational arrangement. We can well understand, in Maurras, the need connected to the formula: France alone first—he himself indicates as much its provisional nature, when he says that, if there is going to be a European “concert”, it is first necessary to make France able to play its part in it. But this image makes clear exactly the gap noted: a single part can be played correctly only by taking the movements from the central motif of an entire symphony. We therefore propose to French nationalism the further task of also taking this point into account and proceeding to an action of mental formation in the sense, as soon as the more immediate needs of reconstruction and internal recovery are realized.

⇐ Part I