France and the Royal Tradition after 1940 - Another post-Normandy reflection
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Dear Reader,
Too often, the gravest threats to tradition come not from its declared enemies, but from those who claim to defend it. The posers. This is the lesson of Vichy France. When posers and opportunists wrap themselves in the language of family, faith, and flag while undermining liberty, justice, and morality, they do more damage to conservatism than its fiercest critics ever could. In 1940, French traditionalists thought they were preserving their heritage by backing Marshal Pétain’s regime. Instead, they handed the reins of power to collaborators who disgraced France and killed political vitality of the old latent traditional monarchism of France.
We think of the French Revolution of 1789, and what comes to mind is the murder of Marie Antoinette, the Reign of Terror, the Haitian Revolution, the totalitarianism of Dechristianization, and eventually we may think about the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was de facto inactive during the Terror. Despite all this coming at the end of the 18th century, France spent most of the 19th century as a monarchy.
Yes, France was a monarchy for most of the 1800s. From 1804–1814/15 was the First Empire of Napoleon the Great. After Paris capitulated to his enemies in 1814, the coalition powers refused to let his son reign as Napoleon II and instead installed the brother of the executed Louis XVI, who took the throne as Louis XVIII. This Bourbon Restoration lasted from 1814–1830. In 1830, the senior Bourbon line was overthrown in a revolution, and their cousins, the House of Orléans, were made constitutional monarchs from 1830–1848, when they were overthrown and the Second Republic was created.
The Second Republic elected Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon the Great, as its president, and he waited three years before overthrowing the Second Republic’s constitution, replacing it with one that made him an almost absolute Prince-President. Then the next year he declared himself Emperor Napoleon III, a concept known as a self-coup, where a leader who is already in power overthrows the system that gave him power in the first place. He was called “the third” because the Bonapartist faction saw the son of Napoleon the Great as the legitimate emperor of the French, even though he never ruled and died in exile in Austria. Louis Napoleon won the people over in October 1852 with a speech where he declared L’Empire, c’est la paix—the empire is peace.
…Today France surrounds me with its sympathies, because I am not of the family of ideologues. To do the good of the country, it is not necessary to apply new systems; but to give, above all, confidence in the present, security in the future. That is why France seems to want to return to the Empire.
There's, however, a fear that I have to answer. By a spirit of distrust, some people say to themselves: The Empire is war. I say, "The Empire is peace."
It's peace, because France wants it, and when France is satisfied, the world is quiet. Glory is well inherited as an inheritance, but not war. Did the princes who just honored themselves to be Louis XIV's grandsons, begin his struggles again? War is not done by pleas, it is done out of necessity; and in these transitional times when, alongside so many elements of prosperity, germinate so many causes of death, one can say with truth: Woe to those who, first, give Europe the signal of a collision, the consequences of which would be incalculable.
I agree, however, I have, like the Emperor (Napoleon the Great), many conquests to make. Like him, I want to conquer the dissenting parties and bring back the hostile derivations that will be lost for no benefit to anyone in the mainstream of the great popular river.
I want to conquer religion, morality, that still so many of the population who, in the midst of a land of faith and belief, barely know the precepts of Christ; who, within the most fertile land in the world, can barely enjoy his basic necessities.
- Prince-President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, October 9, 1852, justifying the creation of the Second Empire and the end of the Second Republic.
The Second Empire of Napoleon III lasted from 1852 to 1870, when it was defeated in war by the Prussian-German coalition and replaced by another revolutionary bout of insanity, the Paris Commune, which was eventually suppressed, and the new government was forced to make peace with the now unified German Empire. At this point in the 1800s, France had been a republic for approximately eight years, and with the exception of a few months in 1848, all of those were under a Bonaparte—only three of which were periods when he did not hold near-absolute power. At heart, France was still monarchist.
The Third Republic, created in 1871, was a fluke.
After the 1871 French elections for the 758 seat National Assembly the two factions of the Bourbon dynasty (the royalists) won a combined 408 seats, much more than the 320 needed for a majority. The Bonapartists, the imperialists won barely more than twenty seats. The royalists agreed on a compromise candidate for the throne and had the power to restore the Bourbons. Yet, the Third Republic of France was established anyway, clearly not because most members of the Assembly wanted it, no it was because of a symbolic but critical disagreement over the national flag. Okay, actually the disagreement is almost farcical but this is what happened.
Although a royalist super-majority in the 1871 National Assembly favored a constitutional monarchy under the Bourbon heir, Henri, Count of Chambord, he refused to accept the tricolor flag—the symbol of the French Revolution—and instead demanded the return of the white Bourbon flag of pre-1789 France. To most people in 1871, and still in 2025, the tricolor is just the flag of France, not the Revolution. Henri’s stance alienated the public and even his own supporters in parliament who knew replacing the flag would send the wrong message and likely cause another revolution. The thing he supposedly hated. Yes, this man really gave up restoring the monarchy of his forefathers, when it had a democratic mandate, because he did not like the flag. He wins the title of perhaps the dumbest heir in history. Even Pope Pius IX could not believe it when he heard of the decision and exclaimed, “And all that, all that for a napkin!”
The French argued about this for more than two years and then, in 1873, after Henri would not change his mind, the Assembly decided to create a temporary regime and wait for Henri to die. They hoped he would die soon. Unfortunately, he lived another decade, and by the time he finally died in 1883, the royalists had lost their majority in the 1876 election when his behavior led to their being crushed and reduced to 64 seats; and the French were stuck with the Third Republic because there was no longer a majority for a clear alternative. Few were happy with the Third Republic. Posterity has given Henri the mocking nickname the man who saved the Republic.
The Third Republic faced a conflict between royalist-clerical parties and republican-anticlerical parties. Again it was a compromise regime that was not supposed to last. With republican victory, the more radical republicans moved against Royalists, imperialists, and traditional Catholic supporters of the clergy, who were eventually ousted from public life. Then the Dreyfus Affair, a major army scandal, further divided France, pitting those who defended the army’s honor against those who sought justice for Alfred Dreyfus. It was all a mess because much of France was deeply traditional and yet the country was deeply conflicted about itself and the meaning of its 1789 Revolution. This conflict continues in a diminished form, and partly explains the appeal of the centrist liberal President Emmanuel Macron, who has broken the unstated taboo on criticizing the 1789 Revolution’s removal of the monarchy.
the French people did not want the King’s death. Terror delved an emotional, imaginary and collective emptiness: the King is gone, democracy does not fill the space - Emmanuel Macron, 2015
In the 20th century the unfortunate outlet for the return of Catholic royalism was Action Française, a right-wing, anti-republican movement that dominated the reactionary imagination in France for the first four decades of the twentieth century. It was more than a political club. It was a daily newspaper, a network of youth activists called Camelots du Roi “The King's Peddlers,” and a rallying point for a disillusioned French middle class that had come to see the Third Republic as both unworthy and unsalvageable. Its leader, Charles Maurras wanted a Catholic king back on the throne for utilitarian nationalist reasons. For Maurras, monarchy was about national unity and order, which he believed only a sovereign could enforce in the demoralized, fractured mess of republican France that was in his view too tolerant of Jews. This doomed the movement eventually. The Nazis wanted a fuhrer for Germany, Maurras’s Action Française wanted a king for France not a peasant from Austria.
Action Française emerged in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. The movement fused antisemitism, an exaggerated Catholic traditionalism, and “integral nationalism,” Maurras’s theory. After the First World War, Action Française peaked as the death toll further discredited the Third Republic. But in 1926, the Vatican issued a public condemnation of the movement, reducing its appeal to the very Catholics who had long formed its base. You see, Maurras was one of those agnostics or atheists who like Catholicism because it is aesthetically non-Jewish or an anti-Judaism, and non-liberal, and there are many today who do not believe in Christianity but like it because it is aesthetically an anti-Islam. For those reasons, the Pope condemned it, because he was not playing their game. Catholicism is a faith that requires faith, not play actors like Maurras. Many actual Catholics supported Action Française, but the movement was led by a guy with bad intentions, and Pope Pius XI controversially put their newspaper on the index of banned items. Pope Pius XI did not mess around. Roman Catholics need popes who do not mince words. One cardinal protested the ban and resigned, the only one in the 20th century to do so. This was a big deal in the 1920s and 30s. The ban was lifted in 1939 by Pope Pius XII who agreed the Vatican should not try to dictate how the Catholic monarchist did secular politics. But the suspicion of utilitarian Christianity remained, as it well should. The movement likely would have been more impactful had it been led by someone who was not an antisemitic utilitarian cynic.
Still, the movement retained enough energy and popular backing to mount a challenge to the Third Republic during the 6 February 1934 crisis but the rightwing movements lacked unity and coherence. Then in 1940 that Republic was conquered by Nazi Germany during the Battle of France.
The former hero of the First World War Marshal Philippe Pétain was made prime minister, the Third Republic signed an armistice with Germany, and Pétain retreated to the town of Vichy and set up an authoritarian government with himself as head of state. The reactionaries who hated the Third Republic now had their chance. Pétain’s started a Révolution nationale which was enthusiastically supported by Action Française. The Nazis had broken the hated Republic for them and now they could remake France.
Pétain’s regime replaced Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood, Liberté, égalité, fraternité with Travail, Famille, Patrie, that is “Work, Family, Fatherland,” ideals that were associated with Catholic and monarchist conservatives. But under German occupation, this motto was the slogan of defeat and collaboration. Vichy did more than just comply with a conqueror, it anticipated Nazi demands, especially regarding antisemitic laws and the rounding up of Jews. This was eager collaboration. And because this betrayal of French Jewry, came cloaked in the language of conservative virtue signalling, postwar France responded by attacking all things associated with Vichy. After the success of the Normandy campaign and the liberation of France, Charles Maurras was sentenced to life in prison in 1944 for allegedly collaborating with the Nazis, but though he supported Pétain, and thought Pétain was initially too moderate regarding Jews, Maurras remained opposed to the Germans and the occupation. Yet he also attacked De Gaulle and the Free French. It was too convoluted a stance and he was punished for it. He is said to claimed that his own plainly irregular trial was C'est la revanche de Dreyfus! The revenge of Dreyfus. Maurras was released in 1952 and died soon afterward. Action Française was disbanded and thoroughly discredited as was traditional monarchism. Action Française reformed after the war and still exists but in a much reduced and largely irrelevant form. Organized monarchism is marginal in French politics today.
This is not to say conservatism died in France. After the war General Charles De Gaulle offered a conservatism of national dignity, resistance, and republican virtue. He was clean of any hint of collaboration obviously and this meant his personal stature became the refuge of tradition. Where he landed in 1944, after the success of D-Day, is now a monument. The French still revere the leader of the Fighting French. De Gaulle himself came from a traditional Catholic family and he came to embody the spirit of the state of France as an secular almost-king which is how he is mourned to this day.
But after 1944, the movement to reestablish the real thing was a spent force.
Do not cast pearls before swine.