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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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5: Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras The Emergence of Secular State Corporatism It was Wyndham Lewis who, in 1926, published his assertion in The Art of Being Ruled that in the work of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) is nothing less than the "key" to the political thought of the era. [1] Yet others, in his own lifetime and after, have dismissed Sorel as merely a "chatterbox," little more than a garrulous fool. What are we to make of such a figure, who was at various times a supporter of radical syndicalism, Bolshevism, communism, and fascism, who influenced both Lenin and Mussolini, and whose work is said to be instrumental for the emergence of totalitarianism even during his own lifetime? It would be a mistake to attribute too much of an intellectual system to Sorel, for his work is often disorderly and rambling. Any greater coherence lies in Sorel's elastic ability to project his fundamental enthusiasms for a "workers' revolution" into whatever movement might seem at the moment a suitable vehicle, whether on the "left" or the "right." But in fact Sorel also represents something quite important for our argument here: he represents an important link in the lineage that runs from Maistre and Donoso to both communism and fascism. At first glance -- and even after repeated closer looks -- Sorel appears to be a figure of multiple intellectual personae. Indeed, Jack Roth arranged his book The Cult of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians (1980), with sequential biographically organized sections for each chapter: "the man," "the idea," and "the impact." Thus, chapters on integral nationalism, Bolshevism, communism, fascism, and so forth, each begin with a section entitled "the man," giving the distinct impression that Sorel's association with a new movement, somehow gave birth to a new man -- over and over. Such an impression would not be entirely mistaken. Sorel's intellectual life was a series of infatuations with one radical movement after another, culminating in the adoption of at least some of his ideas by both Lenin and Mussolini, as well as by various influential figures just before and during the period of National Socialism in Germany. [2] Sorel himself was neither a revolutionary nor a man of action. Trained as an engineer, he retired early from that occupation in order to devote himself to his publishing career as a controversialist and radical. It is, of course, paradoxical that Sorel was consistent in his anti-intellectualism even as he himself was fundamentally an intellectual. He extolled the working class even as he despised the intellectuals; and yet at the same time his thought turned frequently to the notion of a revolutionary sect, an elite and ascetic group that could ultimately transform the world through a kind of apocalypse or secular millennium. Despite his own abstemious moralism, especially in regard to sexual mores, Sorel was interested in the Mafia or the Camorra as potential models for clandestine revolutionary sects that, like the furtive organization of early Christians, might bring about his imagined new world order. [3] Sorel's conjoining of the Mafia and early Christianity at first glance may seem rather counterintuitive, but this is in fact a very revealing linkage. Freund remarks that Sorel's lifelong interest in semisecret criminal organizations derived from their "halbmilitarische" character, and he even went so far as to suggest that the early Christian church resembled the Mafia, using in particular the word "apaches." Politicocriminal organizations are "extralegal" and thus can break through social convention as a more or less unified body not subject to the constraints of parliamentary democracy, or checks and balances. One can understand Sorel's interest in criminal or secret religious organizations because they represent models for the ways revolutionary political organizations (themselves often illegal) necessarily have to work -- and what is more, reveals very much how both fascism and communism actually did come to power. Sorel saw the early Christians, furtively allied against Rome, as inherently similar to contemporary revolutionaries. Thus, not surprisingly, in a pattern that by now already is becoming familiar, he identified with Tertullian and Irenaeus, and attacked that mossy enemy, the Gnostics. One begins to see traces of this identification in La ruine du monde antique (1894), but it becomes more visible in Le systeme historique de Renan (1905-1906) and especially in "Le caractere religieux du socialisme," an essay first published in 1906, but published in 1919 in a much more extensive version.' Sorel explores, in La ruine du monde antique, and in Le systeme historique de Renan, exactly how it was the messianic religious organization of Christians was able to emerge in late antiquity, and what it was that held them together. He looked specifically to the Church Fathers, and there found the idea of the eucharist as the means of union, the creation of a corporate body of Christians. Sorel already in his work on Renan was aware that "the Gnostics created highly complex mythologies with Reason, Truth, the Abyss, Wisdom, etc.," but he dismissed them as "only fantasy" and endorsed instead a strict historicism and a narrow understanding of how Christianity was to be understood. s Thus, he asserts that "The Gnostic theories are of little interest," and, further, "the Gnostics were not Christians." [6] One can readily understand why Sorel would dislike the Gnostics. The Gnostic writings we possess now, notably in the Nag Hammadi collection discovered in 1945, reveal that indeed many of the Gnostics were fundamentally otherworldly in inclination, visionaries who regarded this world as a vale of tears and a place of deception and ignorance. Sorel, by contrast, is interested in this-worldly revolutions: he searches restlessly from one contemporary revolutionary movement to the next in order to find the one that might overturn liberal society and establish his imagined earthly millennium. He valorizes violence, and imagines that in Fascism or in Communism, it might be possible to bring about a this-worldly secular millennium. Thus, he searches among the Church Fathers for evidence of how Christianity emerged from the ruins of antiquity, and finds that he shares with the early church a rejection and denunciation of sexual freedom, and an assertion of the primacy of historicism as opposed to the visionary, otherworldly Gnostics. And so when Sorel turns to comparisons of contemporary radical groups that he dislikes, he finds them to be akin to the Gnostics. He attacks, for example, the Saint-Simonians and other utopian groups "whose adventures can serve to throw some light on the obscure history of Gnosticism." [7] Sorel thinks that the Saint-Simonians were "proud masters of an alleged superior science of the moral world," syncretists akin to "the Egyptian and Syrian Gnostics" before them who sought "the secret of the absolute" by mixing "all theogonies and all cosmogonies." [8] Sorel believes that both the Saint-Simonians and the Gnostics were "devoid of all critical spirit" and that the Saint-Simonian doctrines thus "could only be a mish-mash as 'confused and pernicious' as Gnosticism had been.'" [9] Renan had been somewhat sympathetic to the other-wordliness of Valentinus, but Sorel has not the slightest use for speculative Gnosticism. It is revealing that Sorel lumps together Saint-Simonians and the Gnostics of antiquity with early modern "prophetic enthusiasm" and "initiations," all of which belong (in his view) not to religion but to the "realm of magic." [10] Sorel, in other words, is quite hostile to the slightest hint of otherworldliness or mysticism, which he thinks of as, variously, "neuropathic excitation," "hypnotic suggestion," "delirium," and "magic." Thus, he absorbs from Catholicism into his restless revolutionary worldview exactly what we might have expected: an anti-heresiological inclination bound up with a thoroughly modem secular millennialism. Entirely in the tradition of anti-Gnostics Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Epiphanius, Sorel writes that "in my opinion Gnosticism gives us an example of those machinations of bold, unscrupulous and articulate men who procure for themselves women and money by speculation on the forces which impel so many on the path of magical superstition. The metaphysical apparatus was there only to conceal the true intentions of the adventurers." [11] Not surprisingly, Sorel reveals not the slightest sympathy for nor understanding of Gnostic or mystical inclinations: for him, such spiritual movements can be reduced to materialism, to outright fraud, deception, and prurient motives disguised as piety. He evinces not the slightest self-awareness that thus he transferred early Christian anti-heresiology into various nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionary movements. We can see in Sorel's work a kind of puritanical spirit -- an incipient form of the totalistic spirit that infuses modem revolutionary movements such as communism and fascism. And, indeed, this makes sense when we consider that the totalizing revolutionary is by nature all too willing to adopt a kind of secular asceticism in the service of the millennial revolution imagined to be just around the comer. Sorel recognized that "socialism is often compared with Catholicism; both claim to be unable to realize their true nature until they reign without opposition over the whole world." Thus, "the existence of capitalist and military states [sic] alongside Communist societies is scarcely conceivable." [12] Communism, Sorel recognized, had appropriated at least some of the universalism of Catholicism: neither religious nor secular ideology could brook heretical alternatives. Thus, he intended to develop the idea that the future of communism is to be found in "its resolute transformation into a metaphysics of behavior," in other words, in its extension throughout the whole of life as a kind of secular religion. It is perhaps only a little surprising to find, then, references to the works of Donoso Cortes and Maistre in Sorel's most well-known and influential work, Reflections on Violence. Donoso, in particular, appears during Sorel's strange discussion of the Inquisition in relation to state violence. Sorel outlines a history of state-sponsored violence that claims -- in the line of Donoso and of Maistre before him -- that the Inquisition was "relatively indulgent, having regard to the customs of the time." [13] In Sorel's narrative, "from the Inquisition to the political justice of the monarchy, and from this to the revolutionary courts of justices, there was a constant progress toward greater severity in laws, the extension of the use of force, and the amplification of authority." [14] The Church had harbored doubts about "exceptional methods;" monarchies had few scruples; and revolutionaries such as Robespierre required only the slightest of dubious "proof" in order to assure "the triumph of the republic and the ruin of its enemies." [15] Sorel evidently prefers, instead of these juridical processes of the state, "proletarian acts of violence" that are "simply acts of war." "Everything in war," he continues in a bizarre passage, "is carried on without hatred and without the spirit of revenge." [16] Sorel thinks that class warfare is thus somehow an improvement on state violence. Although Sorel reproaches Maistre with being too clever, in truth, the concluding chapter of Reflections on Violence -- "Unity and Multiplicity" -- continues Sorel's lifelong quest to find a secular substitute for Catholicism that for all that, resembles the unitary state imagined by Maistre. [17] Sorel likes to see the history of Catholicism in a military light: it triumphed with "elite troops, perfectly trained by monastic life, ready to brave all obstacles, and filled with an absolute confidence in victory." [18] Communism also, he thinks, should develop such a military-style "division of functions," and a similar overarching social unity that dominates "the economic-juridical life of the whole of society," so that the "leaders" of the "class struggle" "create the ideological unity that the proletariat requires in order to accomplish its revolutionary work." [19] Maistre would have been appalled by Sorel's imagined totalizing secular state, and yet he certainly would have recognized its reference points in Catholicism all too well. Sorel represents a bridge between the antirevolutionary state totalism imagined by Maistre and Donoso Cortes and the "revolutionary" state totalism of communism and fascism. Both Lenin and Mussolini were indebted to Sorel and his notion of revolutionary violence led by a pure and dedicated (nonintellectual) elite. Indeed, Mussolini remarked that "I owe most to Georges Sorel. This master of syndicalism by his rough theories of revolutionary tactics has contributed most to form the discipline, energy, and power of the fascist cohorts." [20] Even when "Sorelism" fell into disfavor among some Fascist apologists, Mussolini himself "continued to speak of Sorel as his foremost mentor." [21] As to Sorel himself, he extolled both Lenin and Mussolini. Sorel thought that Lenin was "saintly," almost ascetic in what Sorel believed was Lenin's "disinterested" and charismatic advocacy for the masses. [22] Thus Sorel published, in 1918, his "Defense of Lenin," occasioned by an article that claimed Lenin and Trotsky had certainly read Sorel's work during their stay in Switzerland. In Sorel's "Defense of Lenin," he compares Lenin to the great leaders of Russia like Peter the Great, he claims that the number of those the Bolsheviks shot was inconsequential compared to the greatness of Lenin's aspirations, and he acknowledges by way of self-defense that Lenin's terrorism might not have been inspired only by Sorel's own Reflexions sur la violence. [23] Why did Sorel shift his allegiance from Lenin and the Bolsheviks to Mussolini and the Fascists? Deceived by each new revolutionary movement that came along, Sorel was incapable of learning from the experience. As Richard Vernon put it, Sorel's career was one long chronicle of self-deception:
Sorel invested quasi-religious faith in the transformation of bourgeois society through revolutionary violence: he imagined a political sect that would, through what he conceived as therapeutic violence, bring about a new society with new mores. Democratic or republican political organization tended to generate social decadence, and Sorel, like the National Socialists in Germany and the Fascists in Italy, saw hope only in the violent struggle that, he imagined, alone could make people heroic warriors and unify society so as to bring about a new form of corporatist or "integral" social integration such as that possessed by Catholic societies during the medieval period. Thus Sorel was ready, indeed, eager to be deceived by every nascent totalitarianism that came along. It should be noted that Sorel does not endorse violence for its own sake, even though he devoted numerous pages to defending violence as an expression of class war. He hoped for a "Cromwellian army" of rabble that would restore to society some higher values that had mostly disappeared with the waning of Christianity and in particular of thoroughly Catholic societies. If Christianity was not capable of imposing moral order on society, then what could? Sorel imagined a ricorso, or social renewal through violent upheaval that in turn brought into being a revolutionary, totalized society infused with new revolutionary values. And he imagined a disciplined elite, along the lines of Lenin's Bolsheviks, who would govern society on behalf of the masses whom, he thought, they would represent in a kind of new social unity. War was the means through which this new social order would come about. Thus Sorel was predisposed to embrace whatever new movement came along that might represent such sweeping social changes -- and thus he was destined to be perpetually disappointed by reality. A hater of self-deceiving intellectuals, he was himself the most self-deceived intellectual of all. We see in his disdain for parliamentary democracy and political parties, in his longing for a unified state informed by a juridical "sentiment" that enforced morality, in his encouragement for and defense of violence, in his belief that only war was sufficient to bring about profound social revolution, in his belief in a society that encouraged "heroism," and, most of all, in his desire for a new, totalized or "integral" unified and moralistic society, not only the traces of Maistre and Donoso before him but also a conduit directly through him to German Nazism (in particular to the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt) and to the Soviet state. All of these individuals -- Maistre, Donoso, Sorel, Maurras, and Schmitt -- longed for a unified Catholic society that could no longer exist, if it ever did -- and all of them encouraged the creation of a new, pseudoreligious social order that, if it possesses none of the loving bonds or the otherworldliness of Christianity, certainly continues and intensifies the imposition of social order through force that was inaugurated by the Inquisition. What we see slowly being born here is the political religion of secular millennialism that is the driving force of totalitarianism. Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras: The Nationalist Substitute for Catholicism These three -- Sorel, Barres, and Maurras -- are among the most prolific writers of that era. Sorel's work and influence we have already seen, and now our attention must turn to two more figures instrumental in the founding of the French nationalist movement Action Francaise: Maurice Barres (1862-1923) and Charles Maurras (1868-1952). I will only briefly sketch their works, and then delve immediately into their importance for our purposes: to trace yet another transformation of Catholicism into a parodic form of political religion. Barres is similar, in many respects, to Sorel -- above all, both are notoriously difficult to pin down. For all the volumes of fiction and nonfiction produced by Barres and Sorel, one is generally hard-pressed to determine exactly what they thought or meant. This is especially true of Barres, who first came to public attention with the publication of his trilogy, Culte du moi (1888-1891). In it, as the title would suggest, he celebrated the subjective -- it is a paean to egotism. This was followed by another trilogy, Le Roman de l'energie nationale (1897-1902), and Sacred Hill (1913; trans. 1929). In these later works, Barres had become an advocate of "integral nationalism" along the lines of Charles Maurras, and by this period of his life, had come to see Catholicism as a hindrance to the necessary emergence of French nationalism. Unlike Sorel and Maurras, Barres also took on a real political role: elected to the French parliament, he served there until the end of his life as an egregiously outspoken character who, in the end, got a state funeral. Barres was notoriously amorphous and indeterminate as a writer, despite his fifty-six books. Jules Renard said Barres was "a great writer, but what does he mean? One understands each phrase, but the total meaning is obscure." [25] Barres himself wrote that "Life has no sense," and he reflected what he saw as life's absurdity in his writing. Yet, in the latter half of his life, Barres came to speak and to stand for French national unity and a strong leader. Disillusioned with an electoral system and with the parliamentary democracy in which he served, he stressed again and again the importance of national unity. Like Maurras, Barres detested what he saw as the decadence, partisanship, and demagoguery of the Republic. As with Donoso Cortes before him, Barres, along with Maurras and the other nationalists saw the Republic as sick, indeed, as decomposing under the cancerous plutocracy and deceitfulness of the ruling elite, as well as foreign influence. Anti-Semitism played no small role here, but it was accompanied by its complements, anti-Masonry and anti-Protestantism. Barres, like Maurras, wanted to eliminate from France the four Etats Conjederes, the Freemasons, the Protestants (mainly Swiss, English, and German), the Jews, and the "meteques," a word coined by Maurras and first published in Barres's journal, referring to recently naturalized visitors to France. Thus, the nationalists refined their xenophobia as the essential complement to their "integral nationalism." In order to affirm France, they had to create enemies to denounce -- that old and familiar dynamic. Although Barres is significant in the emergence of "integral nationalism," it is Maurras who really was responsible for it more than anyone else. Whereas Barres (like Sorel, only worse) is often obscure in his writing, Maurras is not. Maurras, whose prolific work is little short of astonishing (he is said to have published some twenty thousand articles in his lifetime), is remarkably consistent in his temperament and ideology. He wrote consistently in favor of French nationalism and national identity, in favor of monarchy, in favor of the imposition of social order, against what he perceived as alien or foreign influences, and against the forces of anarchism or disorder. These political themes emerged out of and are reflected in his prodigious literary writing as well, notable within which is his rejection of what he saw as Romantic individualism and self-indulgence. Maurras saw Catholicism in ways quite akin to those of Maistre and Donoso Cortes, as well as Sorel and, later, Carl Schmitt: Roman Catholicism exemplified the principle of order in society. Maurras loved about Catholicism its Latinity, its continuity of tradition, the unity of society that it represented, its hierarchic, undemocratic character, its formal beauty -- everything, one may say, except its religious heart. For what Maurras sought, what he advocated throughout his life, was nothing less than a political religion. Maurras was born in Martigues, in Provence, in a small fishing village. He enjoyed a most pleasant and bucolic childhood, although his father died when Maurras was six; and from his mother he drew a lifelong love of poetry and literature. When he was seventeen, his mother moved the family to Paris, chiefly so that he might receive the best education. Hard of hearing, Maurras immersed himself in study and entered into what he later called an almost Buddhist contemplative way of life. [26] During this period of intense reading, he came into contact with works that formed the inner basis of his perspective, among them the works of Maistre, Bonald, Bossuet, Renan, and Comte. He concluded that most important in the continuity of culture is what he termed "Tradition," meaning that which in the human inheritance is beautiful and true. Thus, he writes that "Le nom de Tradition ne veut pas dire la transmission de n'importe quoi. C'est la transmission du beau et du vrai." [27] He opposed what he saw as sickly in literature, and insisted instead on a renewal of the "ancient Roman synthesis" of "Gallic strength" and "the tradition of 'Rome the Great,' " under the twin signs of beauty and truth. [28] It appears at first paradoxical that Maurras could extol Catholicism with such vigor, and yet not himself be Catholic. What is one to make of this? He claimed, on the one hand, that the Catholic Church is the "incarnation and terrestrial apotheosis of Thought," and that its wise maxim was "experience and tradition, order and progress." [29] Yet, on the other hand, he detested the emotional and irrational dimensions of Christianity, what he termed "Biblism," and which he associated with what he called the "Jewish spirit," or, more characteristically, the "Semitic leprosy." [30] Maurras insisted on the integral unity and worth of Latin civilization as a Greco-Roman inheritance, and thus detested also the Reformation and Protestantism, which he associated with the spirit of fragmentation that he attributes also to Jews. Maurras affirmed Catholicism as a purely political concept, for his was a secular Catholicism defined by contrast with its enemies, Jews, Masons, Protestants, and at heart, a Catholicism without Christ. Thus, it is not so surprising that, for all his extolling of Catholicism, Maurras's works were placed on the Papal Index as proscribed. Already by the late 1890s, a violent, inquisitional spirit had shown itself in Maurras, awakened along with the anti-Semitic wave that had passed through France in the wake of the Dreyfus affair. Thus, he wrote in newspaper columns published in 1899 that Jews should be subject to a "bloody repression" that Maurras claimed to be "inevitable." "Although certain inexpiable crimes entail the penalty of penalties, it must be as short and as moderate as possible," he added. [31] A chronicle of the Dreyfus affair, Joseph Reinach, Maurras found particularly objectionable, and so wrote that he should go immediately to the guillotine, that "the daily outrage of this German Jew against the soul of the fatherland designates him for capital punishment. Let the penalty be inflicted as soon as possible. I desire and demand it." [32] Maurras drew from Catholicism the inquisitional idea that "political criminals" or "political heretics" (scapegoats of Action Francaise: Protestants, Masons, Jews) were to be eliminated from French society, by bloodshed if necessary. Not surprisingly, Maurras decried the advent of Protestantism as a watershed moment. In Romantisme et Revolution, he inveighed against the decline that he saw from les traditions helleno-latines and medieval Catholicism to the Protestantism of Huss, Wycliff, and Luther, who belong to what he claimed to be the more barbarous Germanic and Anglo-Saxon worlds. [33] Maurras, like Sorel, looked for a kind of renaissance or resurgence of a more traditional world, but he also evinced a pessimistic antimodernism that perceived Romantic and Protestant individualism as inherently leading toward anarchy and revolution. [34] It is not that Maurras himself was deeply Catholic, but, rather, that he saw in Catholicism (as did Schmitt) the basis for an organic unity in society that, in modernity, had been dissolving since at least the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period is, of course, precisely when Europe saw an explosion of esoteric movements, among them Freemasonry. But Maurras's anti-Masonry is not simply a matter of anti-esotericism, although he had denounced astrology, too. Indeed, Maurras had attracted a body of followers who reportedly were inclined toward "ardently prophesying the Fall of Democracy and the Return of Monarchy, by Astrology, prophecy, crystal-gazing, palmistry, card-shuffiing, phrenology, psychometry, and every kind of medium-ship." [35] Rather, Maurras's anti-Masonry derives from his belief that a unified monarchic society requires that society's members not be hindered by outside allegiances or secret counteralliances, especially with organizations such as Freemasonry. Ironically, this perspective, which was widespread in Action Francaise, itself generated a variety of secret groups within Catholicism itself, like the Sodalitium Pianum, or Fellowship of the Pine, "a secret international federation of integral Catholic groups. Dispersed throughout the Church, its members and agents kept careful watch on all Catholics suspected of "demo-Christianity." [36] It is perhaps paradoxical that the Maurrasian/Action Francaise fear of Masonry as a secret organization itself generated secret counterorganizations. But anti-Masonry in French nationalism during this period is entirely bound up with anti-Semitism. On this subject, Michel Winock offers an excellent overview. He observes in Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France that Action Francaise in general was known for "its exaltation of the 'show of force' and authoritarian powers, and perhaps even more, its teaching of a certain style consisting of invectives, outrageous acts, slander, and ad hominem attacks." [37] Or, to put it another way: many in Action Francaise were what Mark Twain would have called "good haters." Robert Brasillach, one member of that circle, said that "Fascism is for many a vital reaction, a sort of anti-antifascism." [38] One was defined not only by what one was for -- authoritarianism -- but also by what one was against: an enemy. Thus Maurras called the leader of the Front Populaire, Leon Blum, "human detritus," and another member of Action Franc;:aise said that Blum "incarnates everything that turns our blood cold and gives us goose flesh. He is evil, he is death." [39] And these chilling words were announced at a meeting of the Solidarite Francaise: "if ever we take power, this is what will happen: at six, suppression of the Socialist press; at seven, suppression of Freemasons; at eight, M. Blum will be shot." [40] These speakers are nothing if not Twain's "good haters." Such hyperbole is an extreme form of the secular anti-heretical rhetoric that we are tracing here. At least the Inquisition generally offered "heretics" the possibility of recantation and some kind of rehabilitation. But in national socialist and authoritarian movements of the early to mid-twentieth century, the enemy was imagined as irredeemably evil, as inherently less than human. The consequences of such an attitude are obvious, not only in the Nazi slaughter of Jews, but also in the gulags and countless murders of Stalin's Soviet Union. To be a dissident or in the opposition to the totalitarian worldview is to become the subject of virulent and total hatred: somehow, through ideology, one is objectified and so regarded as less than human. Modern anti-Masonry and anti-Semitism have clear antecedents in Catholic anti-heresiology and in the Inquisition, but the intensity of invective at certain points in the twentieth century is shocking: at its worst, it constitutes nothing less than a total disavowal of common humanity. It is true that one does not find a great deal of anti-occultism as such in Maurras's work, but that is almost certainly a reflection of his own secularism. Because Maurras endorsed a secular Catholicism -- if one could put it that way -- one ought not be surprised that his projected enemies were envisioned as fundamentally secular, too. Thus, Jews were despised in the French nationalist right because they represented big banking interests and were said to be a group of people "without a homeland," just as the Masons were detested not for the esoteric dimensions of Masonry, but because they represented a secret society seen as separate from a projected national unity. Somehow -- one is never quite certain how -- the two even became fused, so that various writers of the time fulminate against nothing less than "Judeo-Masonic" interests, whatever those might be. And whatever they are, they exist in a secular, not a religious world. The Secularization of Heresiophobia What we see in Sorel, and even more so in Maurras as well as more broadly in the nationalist movement Action Franc;:aise, is the secularizing of what in earlier periods was the persistent Catholic (and subsequently also the Protestant) fear of heresy and schism. In earlier eras, the pervasive fear was that a competitor to the Church or to orthodoxy (however that category was conceived) would rise up to threaten the prevailing institutional hierarchy. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we see heresiophobia being transferred from a religious to a state category. In Sorel's work we see again the influence of Tertullian's and Irenaeus's fear of heresy, but this fear of divergence from accepted orthodoxy is not any longer religious: it is depicted as (and it is already) fundamentally political. Maurras commented directly on Sorel's Rijlexions sur la violence in his La Contre-revolution Spontanee, and observed that unlike that which Sorel encouraged, "our violence stands in the service of reason." [41] And this politicization of religion becomes even more explicit in the voluminous writings of Maurras and of his fellow writers in Action Francaise. Thus, whereas Sorel is only nascently anti-Semitic, Maurras and Action Francaise are virulently so, and indeed widen anti-Semitism to incorporate Freemasonry and even Protestantism as categories threatening to the unified, totalized state. "Heresy," in this secular, politicized sense is simply that which diverges from the projected Maurassian national construct united under a single party and a dictator-monarch. Whatever "unites" the nation-state into a single entity is good, and whatever "divides" it by preserving a separate identity or allegiance, like Judaism, Masonry, or Protestantism, is conceived of as bad. Of course, all three of these traditions do maintain traditions of independent thought and conscience that, in forms like Anabaptism, often totally refuse military service as well as, sometimes, even industrial society itself (as in the case of the Amish). But in the new political religion, the imagined, totalized national state becomes "orthodoxy," and independence becomes "heresy." "Heretics," once again, have to be expunged. Hence Maurras cites the history of French "civil war," by which he means the extirpation of "heretics" like the Albigensians, the Camisards, and the Templars, who are "enemies" of the unified French identity. "Heretiques" and "insurges" are fundamentally alike: they divide. By contrast, what he supports is the "unite Catholique," the projected indivisibility of French society under a monarch or dictator who is the secular equivalent of the Pope. [42] It is not that Maurras cares about the concept of heresy itself as a religious idea: what concerns him is the political notion of heresy as schism or sectarian division that splits one group away from society as a whole. Thus, he represents very clearly an example of the secularization of heretic-hunting. Of course, as we have already seen in the case of Sorel, this anti-"heresiological" dynamic is found on both the left and the right. As Michel Winock points out, Maurras and Action Francaise exemplify the anti-Semitism characteristic of those who long for a closed society, the anti-Semitism of the "counter-revolutionary, traditionalist, and Catholic society." But, Winock rightly points out, "anti-Semitism also raged on the left" in France: socialist universalism was as hostile to the independence of Jewish identity as was the Maurrasian right, and indeed, those in Europe who extolled Stalin failed to recognize that at that very time Stalin was busily engaged in the extermination of Russian Jews. [43] The larger point of my argument here holds: the inquisitional model reemerges in a secular context in authoritarian or totalitarian movements on both the right and the left. What matters is the dynamic in question, far more than the labels of Fascist or Communist. Thankfully, Action Francaise never took over France in the way that Mussolini's Fascist party overtook Italy, or that Hitler's National Socialism overcame Germany. If they had, however, we can easily predict that there would have been similar consequences, probably somewhere between those of Italian Fascism and Nazism. The extreme virulence of French nationalist rhetoric would have translated into real victims, of that one can be reasonably sure. It is ironic, I suppose, but nonetheless true that Jacobins (and some anti-Jacobins) engage in the same kind of rhetoric and that their ascent to power inexorably results in victims. Those who wish to impose monarchic-dictatorial authority upon society and thus enforce systemic order, automatically engage the rhetoric and, if they gain power, the mechanism of the Inquisition. For a variety of reasons, totalitarianism requires enemies, and a primary theoretician of state "enemies" is not French but German: the well-known juridical scholar, Carl Schmitt.
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