The Untameable Provence of Charles Maurras

Abstract

When the journal La Pensee de Midi first appeared in May 2000, it carried a short article by the political scientist Daniel Lindenberg entitled 'Le Mirage provenc;al de Charles Maurras'.l Though written with Lindenberg'S customary incisiveness and rich scholarship, the article appeared to have something of an ideological undercurrent. It seemed to say that whatever pensees de Midi found their place in this new journal, among them would not be the pensee maurrassienne. As the journal began its ambitious trajectory, its editors from the outset deployed Lindenberg to mark the boundaries of the Midi's cultural history by positioning Maurras well outside ofthem.2 Lindenberg'S concern over Maurras was understandable. In 1995 Stephane Giocanti's Charles Maurras, felibre: l'Itineraire et I' (Euvre d 'un chantre explored Maurras's provenr;al roots and his links to the Felibrige movement and Frederic Mistral. Giocanti's work was published only a couple of years after Dolores Buttry's article on Maurras as I 'homme du Midi which identified Maurras's neoclassical Provence as a way stage along the road towards fascism. Legitimizing links between Provence and Maurras, and implicating Provence in extreme rightwing politics, were of course the kind of projects that Lindenberg's own article was meant to undermine. Since the tum of the millennium, Lindenberg'S fears of reactionary revivalism can only have been exacerbated by the active interest Charles Maurras and Action Franc;aise have continued to elicit in some constituencies of academia.s Just in the last five years Maurras has been the subject of two intellectual biographies,