More quotations from Charles Maurras

From Mes idées politiques:

In the Republic, we do not live in the domain of reasoned debate and reflection, but in the realm of brute events.

Currents and counter-currents of opinion, the round of offices, campaigns and official parades, colonial greed, the activities of groups of parliamentarians and financiers - these disparate forces do not add up to policy.

A conservative and patriotic voter should take stock of what such a machine-for-doing-evil [machine à mal faire] costs him.  Financial sacrifices - these are considerable at election time.  Sacrifices of his ideals, his judgement, his convictions and sometimes his honour: he commits a mad offence against himself for the sake of a man who does not represent his way of thinking, nor indeed any way of thinking - religious, social, economic, national - that is tolerable to him.  In the final analysis, he is defeated, without any benefit other than having dispersed, demoralised and discouraged an ever-growing number of good Frenchmen.

He should reflect that, if these are the rules of the game - and they assuredly are the rules - there is nothing more immoral or more contrary to good order than to call these errors "law" and these sins "rules".

Under the name of equality, what the Republic creates is not order but covert and concealed anarchy, and one might ask if a naked and raw anarchy would not be less dangerous than the constant operation of these rules and this law.

Democracy secretly worships anarchy as its own self-expression, frank, bold and pure.  When the ills of the age require democracy to fight against anarchy, it nevertheless falls prey to a secret fascination with it, and it is always from this side that its fall will come when an external force ceases to bear upon it.


From Le Cinquantenaire de la République:

It is by results that we judge a system of government. It is because of the results produced by monarchy - the creation, establishment and governance of the fatherland over a thousand years - that we are supporters of monarchy.  It is because of the moral, territorial and national results produced over the last one hundred and thirty years that we abhor democracy.  It is because of the peculiarly decadent and divisive nature of its consequences in every sphere that, so it seems to us, the Third Republic proclaims its own downfall.

It was born out of defeat.  It was recommended and imposed by Bismarck, for Bismarck's convenience.  It talked about revenge for fifteen years, and in half a century it was neither able nor willing to choose a time to take revenge.  It was nevertheless unable to avoid the war with Germany.  It had neither foreseen nor prepared for the war.  It saw it imposed upon it.  It carried the whole burden of it.  It sacrificed the whole flower of its people.  It could not even work to shorten it effectively, but it ended it too soon.  It left the spoils to its allies.  It lost the peace after it lost the armistice.  It lost all authority overseas without even regaining the borders of 1814 back at home.  It placed itself, in the naval sphere as in the financial sphere, at the mercy of its Anglo-Saxon allies....  It suffered all these external reverses by reason of an abominable internal politics riven by religious, moral, domestic, fiscal and social divisions....  It lives, or rather stagnates, under an unimaginative and dull leadership which surrenders both stability and progress to the impulses of factions and parties.  When it is not a question of parties, it has no overall vision or overarching plan.  It has neither a lasting leader nor stable governments, nor fixed laws.  It oscillates perpetually from a fever of sterile agitation, wrongly called "progressive", to an even more sterile inaction, wrongly described as "conservative".  All things being equal, it is smaller, weaker and humbler than in 1870, when it was smaller, weaker and humbler than in 1789.  This is what the Third Republic has to try to celebrate and to be proud of!...

Yes, such is the madness that has governed and administered this country for fifty years.  We have stated the results.  They are not surprising.  The amazing thing is rather the resistance of the country, the endurance of the people, the maintenance of national identity, the survival of France.