Maurras, la destinée et l'œuvre

1984 book by Pierre Boutang

*Maurras, la destinée et l’œuvre*

Editor	Plon
Author	Pierre Boutang
Country	France
Publication date	1984
Pages	715

Maurras, la destinée et l’œuvre is a biography on the French journalist and politician Charles Maurras written by his disciple the French novelist and philosopher Pierre Boutang, published in 1984.

Presentation

Pierre Boutang warns: "I write about Maurras, I do not write the history of Action française, which has been sketched out, which remains to be done, but it will not be by me".^[1]

Journalist Paul-François Paoli considers the book a "great biographical work".^[2]

Historian Bruno Goyet considers that Boutang's account of Maurras makes it possible to recompose "the canonical succession of the episodes of his life, by recreating their chronological coherence from a completely fragmented bibliographic substrate".^[3]

Maurras's support for Marshal Pétain is justified in the name of the Sacred Union already supported by Maurras during the First World War. Pierre Boutang reports that Maurras considered Pétain "an instrument of revenge".^[4]

As for the state anti-semitism of Charles Maurras, Boutang cites a letter from Charles Maurras to Benjamin Crémieux, published in La Nouvelle Revue française in July 1934, advocating the creation of a "Jewish province".^[5],. Boutang goes beyond the anti-Semitism of Maurras' work to "grasp the singular aspect of Israel's destiny as a nation".^[6] In his book, which stands as a tribute, he writes that "Maurras' anti-Semitism is the most formidable obstacle to the understanding of his doctrine and his life".^[6] He adds :

the idea of a Catholicism saving the world from the “Hebrew Christ” is the worst, the least defensible, that Maurras conceived. Why deny that he actually designed it? Christ in his human nature was Hebrew, and even a “Jewish patriot”. The Jews recognized neither the divine nature nor that patriotism which made him weep over Jerusalem. It is too clear that Catholicism saved the world from the numberless heresies which disfigured Christ and his message; there was nothing Jewish about these heresies, the only religion where the Jewish influence was decisive was Islam, another religion, perhaps largely forged by the rabbis of Medina, themselves heresiarchs of the Judaism.
— ^[7]

Reception

The book received the Gustave-Le-Métais-Larivière Prize from the French Academy in 1984.^[8]

The biography of the "spiritual son of Charles Maurras"^[9] drift into hagiography time and time again.^[1]^[10] Boutang strives to treat "less the man than his work".^[10] Critics compare the relationship maintained by Pierre Boutang and Charles Maurras to that of Plato with Socrates.^[1]^[11]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c "Maurras, objet de toutes les admirations". Le Monde.fr (in French). 1984-09-28. Retrieved 2022-12-01.
^ Paoli, Paul-François (2018-09-21). Les confessions d'un enfant du demi-siècle (in French). Editions du Cerf. ISBN 978-2-204-12228-3. Retrieved 2022-12-01.
^ Bruno Goyet (2002). "Récits d'enfance et de jeunesse dans l'œuvre de Charles Maurras, entre stigmatisation et revendication". Genèses (47): 62-83.
^ Cohen, Julien (2014-09-19). Esthétique et politique dans la poésie de Charles Maurras (in French). Université Michel de Montaigne - Bordeaux III ; Universitat de Barcelona. p. 744. Retrieved 2022-12-01.
^ ""Un Juif, celui-là..." : Benjamin Crémieux, La Nouvelle Revue française et l'antisémitisme des années 1930 ⋆ Ent'revues". Ent’revues (in French). Retrieved 2022-12-01.
^ ^a ^b Gilles Banderier (December 2020). "De l'antisémitisme au sionisme : Pierre Boutang" (PDF). Revue des Deux-Mondes: 119-131.
^ Pierre Boutang, Maurras, la destinée et l’œuvre, Plon, 1984, p.153 et 328
^ "Prix Gustave Le Métais-Larivière | Académie française". www.academie-francaise.fr. Retrieved 2022-12-01.
^ Causeur.fr (2013-01-06). "Pierre Boutang le bagarreur". Causeur (in French). Retrieved 2022-12-01.
^ ^a ^b Billig & Berg 1984.
^ S. R. 1984.

Bibliography

Billig, Joseph; Berg, Roger (1984). "Les livres". Le Monde Juif (116): 193-199.
S. R. (1984). "Revue de Maurras, la destinée et l'œuvre". La Revue administrative. 37 (221): 540–540. ISSN 0035-0672. JSTOR 40779398. Retrieved 2022-12-01.