Action Française

"During the interwar period, the Italian Fascists took the lead in romanticizing the Imperium Romanum, but Rome also had its admirers among the French Right. The conservative French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges had, as indicated in the previous chapter, tried to replace the Enlightenment image of Rome as the Republican Rome with an idealized image of an older period when the patricians held power and when the ancestors and private ownership were still holy. The members of Action française, a French Fascist movement that arose from the Dreyfus affair, studied Fustel De Coulanges's texts, and the leader of the movement, Charles Maurras, declared that he was a Roman at heart. Fustel de Coulangess love of pre-Republican times suited the members of Action française, who were royalists—or "neo-royalists" as they preferred to call themselves, since they did not defend the monarchy simply because it was a time-honored tradition, but because there were rational reasons for doing so."