The Social Thought of the Action Française

Abstract

The Action Française was the most notorious reactionary movement in twentieth-century France. From the Dreyfus Affair to the fall of the Vichy Regime it carried on its campaign against “the principles of 789”, which many Frenchmen (and other Western Europeans) mistakenly blamed for the “evils” of modern industrial society. But it represented neither the frustrated lower-middle classes that were attracted to fascism, nor the genteel bien-pensants who pined for the good old days” under Louis XVI or Charles X. Its leaders were café intellectuals who flaunted their newly acquired devotion to the monarchy and the church. They were professional nativists clamoring or a return to the traditional virtues of a golden age that never insisted. Their utopia was a highly intellectualized daydream invented by charles Maurras.