Maurice Barrès was a key political thinker in France in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. I find out from Philippe Delorme’s review in the latest edition of the weekly Current Valuesthat Michel Guénaire published a biography of the author of The Uprootedtitled Maurice Barrès, the great writer rediscovered.
De Guénaire knew The Visita detailed and fascinating account of Hitler’s visit to Paris on the morning of June 23, 1940, days after the Armistice and the surrender of France, following the Wehrmacht’s victorious lightning campaign. As someone wrote, “it was the Lightning visitthe lightning visit, after the Blitzkriegthe lightning war”.
During the lightning visit, the führer he was accompanied by Albert Speer and the sculptor Arno Breker. He arrived in the early morning hours of a sunny summer Sunday, admired the Eiffel Tower and went to the Invalids honor Napoleon. It all lasted two and a half hours, but Hitler later confessed that “it was the most beautiful day of his life”.
Barrès would have suffered a repeat of what happened in the Franco-Prussian war, in 1870-1871, when he was 8 or 9 years old. In that war, Bismarck and Von Moltke’s Germans had also defeated the French, causing the Second Empire to fall, occupying Paris and taking Alsace-Lorraine.
Barrès, like Renan and Maurras and millions of French people, was marked by this defeat; and from the defeat, will seek, not only the revenge and the reconquest of the lost provinces, but also the reasons for this defeat.
For Renan, one of the fathers of French and European conservative nationalism and author of the famous “What is a Nation?“, the German victory came from the communal organicity of the institutions of the Prussian monarchy, which valued the State and the Nation over the individualism and parliamentarism that France overvalued. Like Renan, Barrès, initially a devotee of Cult of the Selfhe became the theorist of organic and social nationalism.
It is a nationalism that is based on the importance of “Earth and the Dead” as determinants of identity and sovereignty; but if it has this “right-wing” side, it also has a strong popular and social component, extremely critical of economic liberalism and materialism and their claim that the economic should determine the political. It will be at this point a precursor, and for some, like Zeev Sternhell, the inventor and pioneer, of the “revolutionary right”.
Unlike Maurras, with whom he converges in nationalist exaltation and condemnation of Dreyfus, Barrès will remain republican; in the trilogy National Energy Novelthrough the odyssey of seven young people from Lorraine, emigrated to Paris, will seek to prove the importance of family and provincial roots for the health and strength of the national community.
Looking at the new popular European nationalisms, born from the reaction to the globalism and mercantilism of the political-financial elites of Euro-America, it is not difficult to find coincidences with the thought of this father of nationalism, whose radical — and even racial — excesses and inaccuracies he himself sought to correct. Didn’t regret it Dreyfus Affairbut remembered the Jews who died for France on the battlefields of the Great War; and, in his last novel, A garden on the Orontesimagined the passion of a Christian Crusader for a Muslim princess, a plot that many of his disciples today would not find funny.
The author writes according to the old spelling
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