Hugues Rebell and Charles Maurras before L’Action Française

Abstract

Little is known about the relation of Hugues Rebell and Charles Maurras. Their correspondence has not come to light, and the extent and duration of Rebell's collaboration with Maurras and the group of Action Francaise have never been established with certainty. In L'Enquete sur la monarchie (1900), Maurras mentioned that their friendship dated from their early days in Paris: Que de fois, wrote the founder of the Action francaise, avons gemi ensemble sur les faiblesses ou les paresses d'un 'parti' ignorant de ses magnifiques ressources [i.e., the royalist camp before being organized into a political party]. Quelles demarches nous avons faites tous deux! Quelles lamentables conversations nous avons tenues et souffertes, sur des gens qu'un bruit public nous assignait comme chef! (149-50). These remarks suggest that Rebell played a significant role in the formation of the future royalist party--if not in the work of organization and propaganda, at least in the ideological formation of its doctrine. Victor Nguyen, the historian of the Action Francaise, once suggested that the young Maurras assimilated the theories of Nietzsche almost entirely through Rebell, ideas that were of capital importance in the development of Maurras' thought, and which later, as we shall see, he went to considerable length to deny (696). These ideas were gradually shaped as he came to articulate his literary and aesthetic views in the 1880s and early 90s. It was in the debates around the Ecole Romane and against the Symbolist movement that they were molded. Rebell was one of the adherents to this short-lived movement and defended it on several occasions. However, as I will attempt to show, a number of differences and tensions came to increasingly separate the two men. From the beginning, Rebell's literary practice did not correspond in any way to the precepts of the Ecole Romane, and the development of his writing in the course of the 1890s led him in a very different direction. Furthermore, be was reluctant to see aesthetic and literary ideas applied directly to politics and in particular to the creation of organized, political parties, a task that increasingly occupied Maurras in the latter half of the 1890s and after the Dreyfus Affair. In the later years of his short life (he died in 1905), Rebell did not engage in a debate with Maurras, but a few signs point to his suspicion of the direction taken by the Action Francaise and his estrangement from the movement (though he continued writing for the royalist paper Le Soleil). In what follows, I will examine the relationship of the two men through the literary and political currents and debates of the early 90s and seek to determine the extent of the influence that Rebell exerted on the young Maurras. Hugues Rebell was the pseudonym of Georges Grassal, who was born in Nantes on October 28th, 1867 into a bourgeois family of ship owners and captains. (1) Barely eighteen years old, he began a review entitled Le Gai Scavoir in 1885, enamored as he already was with Nietzsche who was at this time completely unknown in France (the young Grassal could read German). Les Meprisants, published in the following year, bears the traces of his Nietzschean aristocratism and his contempt for the masses: Et ces hommes,--les poetes--vivant et mourant parmi le mepris des utilitaires, rudes pedants qui usurpaient un titre dont les meprises seuls etaient dignes [...] (8). Many of the themes of Rebell's later work are already present in this adolescent book: the idea (derived from Renan and Nietzsche) that art and culture have no place in democratic societies that are driven by utilitarian values, and secondly, and more importantly, that art is first and foremost the celebration of life in its physical and sensual dimensions, and that the puritanical ethics of modern societies do not permit such an affirmation of the life of the instincts. In this aspect of his art, Rebell was deeply influenced by the libertine of the eighteenth century, which increasingly surfaced in his work in the course of the next decade and, coupled with his interpretation of Nietzsche, pushed him towards a literature of transgression. …