TABLE TALK
Nation, race and the right
DENIS BROGAN
I have just been reading the first two books* in a new series, 'Roots of the Right', edited by Mr George Steiner. The venture is cer- tainly of great interest and should be of great value. It has been one of the illusions of Hampstead that all brains are on the Left. This would be a comforting thought if true. But it is not true. First of all, a great many people on the Left are not notable for their intelligence, and secondly, some of the Doc- trinaires of the Right, from the time of the French Revolution, have been very com- petent controversialists and some, like Joseph de Maistre, have been a good deal more than that. Of course a great deal of right wing doctrine has been nonsense. Just as a great deal of left wing doctrine has been nonsense, and it is difficult to read Gobineau without being irritated by prepos- terously bad history and absurd sociology. But Gobineau, all the same, was also part of the wave of the future when he began to write on the 'race' question, and however absurd his doctrines are, they had a great success and are by no means totally dead today.
In the same way, the doctrinaires of the French right, ably anthologised by Mr McClelland, could be very formidable con- troversialists indeed, and if the particular doctrines and the particular political organisations of the Action Francaise are now a mere shadow of what they were between the two wars, they were nevertheless very important then. We have, on the whole, in this country escaped the more foolish right wing doctrinaires simply because the country is not as deeply divided as France has been since the Revolution. But there has been a good deal of naive race theory circulating since the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is by no means dead.
There is, however, a slight danger in Dr Steiner's series for a common reader may think mainly in terms of the frightful results of race theory in Germany and of the at- tempted final solution applied to the Jews. It is worth while remembering that the Jews were only one example of the horrors that could be caused not only by race theory but still more seriously by nationalist theory and were not the first victims. It will be in- teresting, for example, to see how Mr Enoch Powell develops his campaign about the nefarious invasion of the Irish. Mixed up with anti-Catholicism, it might turn out to be of some use to the right wing of the Tory party. And of course it must be remembered that race theory, not exactly anti-Semitic in character, not even necessarily anti-Negro in character, is one of the permanent nuisances of American public life.
I think there is a defect in the planning of the series because it does not really discuss adequately the roots of nationalist doctrine.
The roots seem to me to be very visible in the French Revolution itself. It was a simple enough thing to organise loyalty round the King of France and Navarre. He owned France and he owned Navarre (he owned * The French Right from de Maistre to Maurras: edited and introduced by J. S. McClelland, and Gobineau: Selected Political Writings: edited and introduced by Michael D,• Biddiss. Cape, 35s each., very little of Navarre in fact—most of Navarre was by this time Spanish). But the loyalty to the King, like loyalty to the Czar, loyalty to the House of Stewart, offered no solution to the problem of how to create stable political order. There were, of course, dynastic wars. The Hundred Years' War was one, and Joan of Arc was one of the great pioneers of nationalist sentiment. But the French Revolution by basing political loyalty and duty on 'the consent of the governor', to quote from the Declaration of Independence, presented problems which are not solved down to the present day.
It is less race theory which has been so murderous in our bloody time than na- tionalist theory. The two are, of course, closely connected, but they are not identical. Thus, I think it can be truthfully said that Maurras, perhaps the most acute preacher of `integral nationalism', was not in the strictest sense a doctrinaire on race. He was anti-Semitic, but that was an aspect of his general nationalist doctrines. It was a turning point in French history, as I have pointed out, when at Valmy in 1782 the army of the new Republic fought under the slogan Wive la Nation' and not `Vive Le Roil' (There is an Alsatian story of a patriotic fete held in Colmar in 1795 in which a veteran of the old Royal army was called on to give a toast. He probably knew very little French, and when he got to his feet all he could think of to give as a toast was Wive le Roi', which horrified the Jacobins of that Jacobin city.) One consequence of French reactionary theory being very largely nationalist is that there' are very few bodies of doctrine to be compared with Mein Kampf. For example, in the excellent anthology edited by Dr McClelland, it is difficult for the editor to find a short and clear text which he could use to explain the Maurrasian doctrine. For 'If you write to the "Times" once more you may soon find yourself alone on a desert island with eight gramophone records.' Maurras was writing every day in the Action Francaise about• contemporary controversies, squeezing them by force to go inside the rigid framework of his doctrine, but he has very little time to create an organised body of doctrine. It is for this reason that the admirable book by Albert Thibaudet, Les Idles de Charles Maurras (linked in a series with the ideas of Bergson and Barres) is a better introduction to the Maurrasian doc- trine than anything Maurras himself wrote. This is perhaps revealed in the fact that few great, successful polemical writers have men remaindered sooner or so often in their life- time as Maurras was!
Thus, there is a problem which is that of all nationalist propagandists. It is easy to design a nationalist doctrine and apply it to all known political societies in 1970. This, however, is an artificial construction because very few nationalist writers have the con- sistency to defend nationalist theory when it interferes with the interests, real or imaginary, of their own nation. As Thibaudet points out, both Maurras and Barres simply refused to notice how im- portant and alarming was the fact of the permanence of German nationalism. It is, I think, a pity that the Rhineland did not stay under French rule, but one can hardly expect the Germans to feel that way, although as late as 1870, as Professor Michael Howard has pointed out, loyalty to the idea of a united Germany was pretty thin in central Germany. Maurras professed that his royalism was merely an aspect of his basic nationalism: it was 'the forty Kings who in a thousand years made France' that he was defending, because they had made France. It was not any question of mere descent from Clovis or Charlemagne: it was a utilitarian decision on how France had been made, and on the only way in which it could be re- made.
To defend royalism round 1900 was a very bold enterprise anywhere, but Maurras could not stick to his general royalist doctrine. For example, he attached far too much im- portance to the role of King Edward VII in international politics. He attached too much importance to the role of the House of Savoy; but when he had a case of a monarchy defending its country against demagogues, parliamentary politicians, miteques, as did King Constantine, 'Slayer of the Bulgars', grandfather of the Duke of Edinburgh, and probably the only good soldier any dynasty has produced in modern times, Maurras's French nationalism prevented him from seeing that the King of the Hellenes was behaving as a King of France and Navarre should have behaved in the same circumstances, i.e. keep out of a war which could end only in disaster, as it did for the Greeks. In the same way, he could not see how inevitably German na- tionalism would grow up in the Rhineland, and there was no way of restoring the days of the Treaty of Westphalia or finding a Pere Joseph to help to destroy the Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs.
Maurras was a brilliant controversialist. but he was not a brilliant political theorist.
For one thing, he was the victim of an ex- tremely phoney historian, Frederick Amouretti, and he suffered from not having gone through the state school system where he might have got a more rigorous training than he did in his Catholic college.
Nevertheless, the impact of Maurras on the intellectuals of France in the period from the Dreyfus case down to the outbreak of the Se- cond_World War was very great indeed.
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