Your Daily Cup of Bile As part of a fitful attempt to know what I’m talking about, I went to the library and checked out William L. Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940. I thought I recognized something in this passage:
Succeeding all the Leagues in an attempt to resolve the tangled yearnings of the
disunited rightest enemies of the Republic there sprang up at the turn of the century a curious
organization, strongly led by a strange and rather unlikely figure, which would give them a
doctrine, a faith, a confidence, a goal of sorts, and a coherence that, while it would never
achieve political power, would wield an influence on the country out of all proportion to its
numbers, and toward the end, by poisoning the wellsprings of democracy and further dividing the
French, help mightily, with the aid of Nazi German bayonets, to dig the grave of the Third Republic
it so despised. The organization was called "Action Française." Its undisputed leader for half a century was Charles Maurras, a stone-deaf-poet from Provence, steeped in Greco-Roman classicism, out of touch with the modern world, which he loathed, a brawling formidable pamphleteer and journalist (his followers believed him to be a profound philosopher) whose genius lay in his capacity to hate and to stir up hatred with his poison pen. His hates were endless: The Revolution, the Republic, democracy, Parliament, the common people, popular education, the rights of man. He had a specially brewed venom for what he called "the four alien poisoners of the motherland": Protestants, Jews, Freemason, and naturalized foreigners—whom he cursed as metèques. An agnostic who once described the Christian gospels as fairy tales written by "four shabby Jews" (his anti-Semitism was notorious) and Christianity as religion for the rabble, Maurras would seek and—until the pope finally stepped in in 1926—receive support from the Church and the militant Catholics. He had a flair for gathering around him provocative writers such as Léon Daudet, the boisterous son of the novelist Alphonse Daudet and for a time the husband of the granddaughter of Victor Hugo, and Jacques Banville, a brilliant if erratic historian, and he made his daily newspaper, L’Action Française, the most livelily written journal in Paris. Though it preached royalism and all other sorts of foolish reaction—the idea of restoring the monarchy was dead as a doornail in France by this time—it was an interesting journal to read, no doubt in part because it was so scurrilous, venomous, and vituperous. Though Maurras, if memory serves (I read him daily for years), could grow dull when he left off character assassination or a call to bump off some Republican scoundrel and indulged in pseudo-metaphysical speculation, displaying his considerable classical learning, Léon Daudet, a lighthearted Parisian to the core, was almost always amusing and sometimes hilarious. He had an impish, Rabelasian mind—most of his novels were considered risqué if not somewhat pornographic—a boyish love of scandal and a passion for exposing it, a fantastically rich and vulgar vocabulary for vituperation, and a carelessness about the truth which often got him into the clutches of the law. He also had a passion for literature, in which he was widely read, and a certain tolerance of human foibles which Maurras, a misanthrope, lacked, and an abiding love for the Parisian scene, with all of its chinoiseries, its excitement, and its beauty. I was often astonished at the waste of such a talent on such a forlorn and lost cause, but I confess that in my years in France I usually began my day at breakfast by turning to the front page of L’Action Française and the outrageous outbursts of Daudet, Maurras, and their frenzied collaborators. |