# Action Française **Action Française** is the French monarchist and "integral nationalist" movement founded in 1899, and the organizational prototype of the twentieth-century European far right. Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois founded it out of the anti-Dreyfusard camp of the [[Dreyfus Affair]]. [[Charles Maurras]] joined almost at once and turned it from a republican-nationalist protest into a royalist, counter-revolutionary movement against parliamentary democracy itself. ## What it built - **A doctrine.** Maurras's *nationalisme intégral* held that the nation is the supreme political good, that liberal democracy dissolves it, and that only a hereditary monarch could restore it. The slogan was *politique d'abord*, "politics first." The doctrine was antisemitic and anti-Protestant, and it treated Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and naturalized foreigners as the "anti-France." It was Catholic in politics though led by an agnostic, using the Church as an order rather than a faith. - **An apparatus.** The movement had a daily newspaper, *L'Action française*, from 1908. The Camelots du Roi was a youth wing that sold the paper and fought in the streets. The Institut d'Action française was a counter-university. By 1914 it was the best-organized nationalist movement in France. ## Rise and fall 1. **Condemned by the Church (1926).** Pope Pius XI condemned the movement, and its paper became the first newspaper placed on the Index. Members faced denial of the sacraments. Pius XII lifted the condemnation in 1939. 2. **The street (1934–36).** The Camelots were central to the **February 6, 1934** riots against the Republic. After Camelots attacked Léon Blum in 1936, the government dissolved the leagues. 3. **Vichy (1940–44).** Maurras hailed Pétain's regime as a "divine surprise." The movement's cadres and ideas fed [[Vichy France]]'s "National Revolution," though some members joined the Resistance. 4. **The verdict (1945).** Maurras was sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration, was reprieved in 1952, and died that year. The organization was dissolved. Successor groups such as Restauration Nationale survived on the margins. ## The lineage Action Française matters for this vault less as an organization than as a template. It pioneered the combination of an intellectual review, a street wing and a doctrine of national-cultural decline that later movements copied. Its line of descent runs through [[Philippe Pétain]]'s Vichy, through Catholic [[Integralism]], through Salazar's and Franco's admirers, and into the post-war [[Nouvelle Droite]]. Historians still debate whether it reaches the [[National Rally]] of [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]] and his successors. ## See Also - [[Charles Maurras]] · [[Dreyfus Affair]] · [[Vichy France]] · [[Philippe Pétain]] - [[Integralism]] · [[Nouvelle Droite]] · [[New Right]] · [[National Rally]] - [[French History Hub]] · [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]