A few days ago, I was at a conference on Lusitanian Integralism at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra. It fell to me to speak of the “mother of all European nationalisms” at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century – the French Actionby Charles Maurras.
Maurras is a central figure of European authoritarian conservative nationalism. He was born in 1868 in Provence and spent part of his childhood and youth in France, defeated during the Franco-Prussian War. It comes after the generation of Renan and Barrès, also marked by defeat, who defined, with some anthropological pessimism and geopolitical realism, the coordinates of the new French nationalism. Because French nationalism was born on the left, in the year 93, immortalized by Victor Hugo in Ninety-threethe unforgettable romance of revolution and counter-revolution.
Now, after the defeat, Renan had come to recognize that perhaps the Germans not only had military superiority on the battlefronts, but also on the political regime, on the militarized and para-authoritarian Prussian hereditary monarchy. Barrès had also recognized him and Maurras, when he became interested in politics during the Dreyfus affairwas going to shape a political doctrine that, in France, would influence the entire Right, from future Christian Democrats to French fascists.
The rest of Europe also suffers its influence. The French matrix, recognized as the best and most effective theoretical-practical construction of conservative nationalism, would end up conditioning not only political thought in France, but also in countries with a similar culture and context, such as Spain, where the Republic was proclaimed in 1931.
In December 1931, the magazine Spanish Actiondirected first by the Marquis of Quintanar, then by Ramiro de Maeztu. Intellectuals from various right-wing families collaborated there, including fascists and national unionists (Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Ramiro Ladesma Ramos, José António Primo de Rivera). The national-conservative José Calvo Sotelo, murdered by the “reds” in Madrid days before the Alzamiento, also wrote there. It ended the Civil War – when many of its collaborators were arrested or killed by the Popular Front.
In Portugal, it was the Lusitanian Integralism of António Sardinha, Luís de Almeida Braga, José Pequito Rebelo, José Hipólito Raposo, Alberto de Monsaraz and others that represented the new conservative nationalism inspired by French Action. It was also a reaction, not only to the Democratic Republic, but, as in France and Spain, to the crisis and national humiliation.
The expectation of people is always to cure the evils that come from behind, repair the humiliation suffered and change their lives. And if these movements, whether due to their elitist social composition or their traditionalism and conservatism, did not mobilize the popular masses, they played a critical role – in Spain, of secessionism, anarchism, socialism and anti-Christianism of the Left; in Portugal, the para-authoritarian democratism of Afonso Costa and the Democrats – which contributed to the dissemination of the ideas of organic nationalism and to the historical revision of the History of Portugal, then inspired by Pinheiro Chagas-style liberalism and anti-Bragança republican pamphleteering.
Despite some having broken their ways and even aligned themselves with the democratic opposition, the integralists were very important in deconstructing the ideology of the Left.
And Salazar was also, in his critical way, Maurrasian – in some content and form.
Political scientist and writer
The author writes according to the old spelling