An Affair To Be Remembered: Integral Nationalism among Fin-de-Siècle France’s Men of Letters

Abstract

In the opening decade of the twentieth century, France witnessed a powerful wave of nationalism that permeated nearly all spheres of cultural production. At the time when the country had a republican government and the political system known as the Third Republic, a new political option, the Action Francaise, emerged onto the French political scene. The Action Francaise quickly became the country’s chief right-wing movement and its members figured as some of the most vocal participants in the debates on nationalism that took place in the early 1900s. Interestingly, in the early twentieth century, literary critics — and not political figures — became some of the most vocal opponents of the Action Francaise. This study analyzes the main features of the Action Francaise’s nationalism as seen in its representative texts and its members’ public activities and explores some of the early responses and opposition to the Action Francaise generated by members of the literary journal la Nouvelle Revue Francaise (hereafter the NRF) founded by the writer Andre Gide in 1909.