Politicians From France

"Le désir de s'enrichir est leur passion dominante, et à vrai dire leur seule passion."

"... many Europeans today go to Pelasgians, who are no less distant or savage, and for equally slight gains, to discover African Arkadias. The taste for voyages and adventures is not the monopoly of any one period or any one race, and the extraordinary dispersion of Semites in the contemporary world ... It is true that modern travellers have two motives that the Sidonians do not appear to have possessed, at least to the same degree: scientific curiosity and religious zeal. Furthermore, this comparison between the Pelasgians and the modern Congolese may be surprising. However, one should be on guard against two preconceived ideas, or rather two little-reasoned and almost unconscious feelings: ... our European chauvinism and also what one could call, without too much irreverence, our Greek fanaticism.From Strabo to Ritter, all the geographers have taught us to consider our Europe as a land favoured above all others, unique and superior to all the others in beauty ... in elegance of forms and power of civilization ... This way of looking at the world perhaps can influence a large number of our most habitual thoughts, despite ourselves or almost without our knowledge. We put Europe on one side and Asia or Africa on the other—and between the two, an abyss. When we talk about Asiatic influences on a European country we cannot imagine ... that barbarians could have dared to come to us. Harsh reality forces us to admit that they have sometimes flooded in. Certain people even maintain that the cradle of our first ancestors was far from our Europe, in the centre of Asia. But for our Aryan fathers we have the indulgence of good sons in that even if they came from Asia, they were not Asiatics, they were for all eternity Indo-Europeans. By contrast, an invasion from Semitic Asia to our Aryan Europe is repugnant to all our prejudices. It seems really as if the Phoenician coast was further away from us than the Iranian plateau. It also appears that the Arab invasion throughout the Mediterranean was only a unique fluke, an unfortunate chance ... which one should not for an instant suppose could be repeated. That the Phoenicians occupied Carthage and possessed half Tunisia only concerns Africa. That the Carthaginians in their turn conquered Spain and three-quarters of Sicily is [all right because they are] only, as we say, Africa. But when we find Phoenician traces at Marseilles, Praeneste, Kythera, Salamis Thasos and Samothrace, in Boiotia and in Lakonia at Rhodes and in Crete we do not want, as in Africa, real occupations; we only talk about temporary landings or simple trading posts ... If we go as far as pronouncing the words fortresses or Phoenician possessions we hasten to add that they were only coastal establishments ... This European chauvinism becomes a veritable fanaticism when it is not in Gaul, Etruria, Lucania or Thrace but in Greece that we meet the stranger. At the beginning of this century, all Europe rose up ... the generous Philhellenism of 1820 is no longer fashionable. But one can say that the sentiment has not greatly changed ... We can only conceive of Greece as the country of heroes and gods. Under porticos of white marble ... In vain does Herodotos tell us that everything comes from Phoenicia and Egypt. We know what we should think of dear old Herodotos. After twenty years of Archaeology have provided us, every day and in all the Greek states, with indisputable proofs of Oriental influence, we are still not allowed to treat Greece as an Oriental province like Caria, Lycia or Cyprus because of this. If in our geography we separate Europe from Asia, in our history we separate Greek history from what we call ancient history. We see, nevertheless, from their material and tangible monuments that the Greeks ... were the pupils of Phoenicia and Egypt, and we see that they borrowed from the Semitic Orient right up to their alphabet; yet we recoil with some shock at the sacrilegious hypothesis that their institutions, their customs, their religions, their rituals, their ideas, their literature and all their primitive civilization could also be inherited from the Orient."

"Utopia! such is the name with which ignorance, folly, and incredulity have always characterized the great conceptions, discoveries, enterprises, and ideas which have illustrated the ages, and marked eras in human progress."

"At the age when the faculties droop, when stern experience has destroyed all sweet illusions, man may seek solitude; but, at twenty, the affections which he is compelled to repress are a tomb in which he buries himself alive."

"No faith has triumphed without its martyrs."

"Without the ideal, this inexhaustible source of all progress, what would man be? and what would society be?"

"The woman who loves us is only a woman, but the woman we love is a celestial being whose defects disappear under the prism through which we see her."

"A woman by whom we are loved is a vanity; a woman whom we love is a religion."

"Servility is to devotion what hypocrisy is to virtue."

"Modesty is the chastity of merit, the virginity of noble souls."

"Esteem is the strongest of all sympathies."

"Illusions ruin all those whom they blind."

"A corrupted and weakened community breaks down in immense catastrophes; the iron harrow of revolutions crushes men like the clods of the field; but, in the blood-stained furrows germinates a new generation, and the soul aggrieved, believes again."

"Instruction is to the proletary what liberty is to the slave: the latter emancipates the body, the former emancipates the intelligence."

"The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire."

"Whenever the good done to us does not touch and penetrate the heart, it wounds and irritates our vanity."

"Which is the best religion? The most tolerant."

"There is more poverty in the human heart than misery in life."

"My party and my friends can only profit by being better known; our dear country itself has everything to gain by getting to know them better, and, as it knows them, to accord them more of the sympathy and respect which is their due."

"This partisan of monarchy took office under President Louis Bonaparte; this defender of the coercive authority of the Church was ranked among "Liberal Catholics". To take advantage of opportunities was henceforth de Falloux's maxim as a practical statesman."

"The most obscure of men has his duty, and this is my excuse for associating with great minds in sending forth a protest against evil, as a child does his duty in joining with strong men to cast a drop of water upon a conflagration."

"The more denuded a man is of virtues, the more he seeks to surround himself with frivolous distinctions. [...] But since pride unfortunately is the most tenacious of passions, the reign of prejudice has been prolonged, for man seems not to be able to attain truth until he has exhausted all of error's possibilities."

"Kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical. Courts are the workshops of crimes, the lair of tyrants. The history of kings is the martyrology of nations."

"Assuredly no one of us would ever propose to retain in France the fatal race of kings; we all know but too well that dynasties have never been anything else than rapacious tribes who lived on nothing, but human flesh. It is necessary completely to reassure the friends of liberty. We must destroy this talisman, whose magic power is still sufficient to stupefy many a man. I move accordingly that you sanction by a solemn law the abolition of royalty."

"A la lanterne!"

"Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?"

"Que le peuple était trop heureux de pouvoir brouter l’herbe."

"Le silence du peuple est la leçon des rois."

"[Insert French]"

"Nous sommes assemblés par la volonté nationale, nous n’en sortirons que par la force."

"Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire (1861) remonstrated that "Mr. Max Muller would have done well not to have fixed things so precisely, and not to have circumscribed things so neatly""

"Maurras's nostalgia for his native province had inspired him to learn the Provençal language and eventually to join the Félibres, a tiny group of southern émigrés in Paris who sought to promote the Provençal renaissance inaugurated by the poet Frédéric Mistral. From this provincial, back-to-the-soil milieu emerged the guiding principles of Maurras's peculiar brand of royalism: political decentralization, restoration of the pre-revolutionary provincial boundaries, opposition to statism, official recognition of Provençal. Such doctrines hardly appealed to the cosmopolitan young Parisian who had recently observed the failure of Bavarian separatism and the enviable vitality of the unitary German Empire. In a subsequent letter Bainville declared himself in favor of centralization and accused Maurras of exaggerating the intelligence of France's rural population."

"These elements in French society were now to be given a lead by a man of genius whose power of argument, of sophistry, of tenacity, served to give an appearance of life to the dead monarchy and who provided a framework of political doctrine within which nearly all the critics of the Republic on the Right were to work and which was not without its influence on some critics of the Left."

"That France may live, the King must return."

"Maurras was no optimist; human life at best was hard; the wise man accepted this fact and adjusted himself to the world as it was and ever would be, a world in which the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong, in which mere sentimental pity was a weakness and an intellectual crime. Like Nietzsche, Maurras despised Christianity and thought its politically dangerous sentiments of "he hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble" order highly noxious. In his early writings he gave free expression to this hostility, but as a realist, a positivist, he had to admit that France had been profoundly marked by the teaching of the Church; and as a practical politician, he had to face the fact that many of his potential supporters were likely to be alienated by the frank expression of his distaste for Christianity. So whatever regrets he had for the old gods, he had to recognize that they were conquered, that the day of the "laurel, the palms and the paean" was over. He accepted the fact that the French tradition was Christian, but, fortunately, Christian with a Roman and Hellenic superstructure."

"Official orators have agreed amongst themselves to leave out one essential point: that to undertake the liberation of the fatherland, Joan had to go directly to the Dauphin Charles, acknowledge the right of his royal blood, and have him crowned and acclaimed on the cathedral square of Reims."

"After the Commune, thousands of workers were shot, while the leaders were allowed to escape; a King of France would have punished the leaders mercilessly, but he would have spared the people."

"What are Pavia or Rosbach...compared to Sedan or Waterloo? Revolutions have succeeded revolutions. The state is bankrupt. Three times foreign invaders have occupied Paris. We have had two civil wars. We have witnessed the making of Italian unity and German unity and the enormous expansion of the double Anglo-Saxon empire. Never has political France been so small. And since then she has accomplished her masterpiece of smallness. She has turned herself into a Republic, in other words she has deliberately chosen to be weak and defeated."

"Comte put to flight the pernicious and artificial doctrine according to which there is an opposition between the interests of the ruler and the ruled, for the latter derives his greatest benefit from being directed and guided... Renan finally made me aware of the service any élite, when it sincerely concerns itself with the highest considerations, renders and must render to the multitude, even unconsciously."

"Maurras, like Bannon, was a Catholic nationalist, and he argued in the early 1900s that the Enlightenment had elevated the individual over the nation. (One person who knows Bannon said he has spoken of the coming end of the Enlightenment.) To Maurras, a hero of the modern French right wing, the French Revolution ideals of "liberty, equality and fraternity" were a liberal cosmopolitan corruption of France's authentic identity. Bannon has approvingly cited Maurras' distinction between the "legal country," led by elected officials, and the "real country" of ordinary people, as a frame for the populist revolt underway. Maurras even warned about the nefarious influence of Islam in Europe."

"The bourgeoisie does not understand the labour question."

"There can be no social peace in the Republic, and social reform is impossible without the king."

"This pre-existing capital brings men fortune and honour, equips and refines them from the moment they come into the world, without anything having been done about it by these happy animals... Whatever brings together this beneficent capital is therefore a good thing; whatever dissipates it is less good. Work is good, saving is good... It is in the closely knit and stable circle of the home that production, acquisition, conservation have the greatest chance of success, for the personal instinct is there moderated and regulated by immediate affection, and generosity balanced by healthy egoism. Thus strength, duration and hereditary are related and linked; so are also the constitution of great families, the accumulation of vast possessions, the possibility of education and culture."

"In London and Berlin, at the time when Berlin and London flourished, the government was dynastic; it was so in Paris when Paris flourished. Dynastic succession creates the coherence of all the strength of an empire. Etymology would tell one that, in the absence of history. Not only because dynasty does without the exhausting system of electoral and parliamentary competition, but because it is good and beautiful that the authority of the sovereign authority should not be a force fashioned by human hand, that it should come to us from the most ancient times, and that the centuries should have created it for us and transmitted it to us, named it and imposed it on us ready-made, helped as it were by its legitimacy, that right of the leaders which is based on the fact that they played the major part in the creation of the country."

"There are certain conservatives in France who fill us with disgust. Why? Because of their stupidity. What kind of stupidity? Hitlerism. These French "conservatives" crawl on their bellies before Hitler. These former nationalists cringe before him. A few zealots wallow in dirt, in their own dirt, with endless Heils. The wealthier they are, the more they own, the more important it is to make them understand that if Hitler invaded us he would skin them much more thoroughly than Blum, Thorez and Stalin combined. This "conservative" error is suicidal. We must appeal to our friends not to let themselves be befogged. We must tell them: Be on your guard! What is now at stake is not anti-democracy or anti-Semitism. France above all!"

"We are at the end of the Enlightenment. Have you read Charles Maurras?"

"The ultra-nationalist writer Charles Maurras believed there were “two Frances”. The one he loved was the "pays réel", the real country: a rural France of church clocks, traditions and native people fused with their ancestral soil. Maurras loathed the “pays légal”, the legal country: the secular republic, which he thought was run by functionaries conspiring for alien interests."

"Maurras had converted to monarchism during a visit to the eastern Mediterranean in 1896 when he realized how little influence republican France had in comparison to the monarchical empires of Great Britain, Germany and Russia. The Dreyfus Affair convinced him that the Republic had fallen into the hands of the "four confederate states" of Jews, Protestants, freemasons and foreigners, and that only a restored monarchy could bring back a strong state, a united nation and national greatness."

"Rather than be outraged, we need to understand. I fight all the antisemitic ideas of Maurras, but I find it absurd to say that Maurras must no longer exist."

"Developing on another level, emotion is nonetheless, between automatism and objective action, a moment of psychic evolution. It forms the link between movement, which pre-exists, and consciousness, which it inaugurates. Incentives currently without outcome develop an erethism, the accumulated charge of which must explode, even if by transforming itself."