Waters devotes large sections of this chapter to the ideas of various figures involved in the debate, including Jean Charles-Brum, Charles
Maurras, Maurice Barres, and Frederic Mistral.
Any serious student of Eliot has read about the relation of "impersonality" to poetic personae; anyone who has examined Eliot's idea of culture knows that he opposed an exclusive focus on one nation's or one language's literature and affirmed the importance of pan-European and extra-European influences and standards; anyone who has engaged with Eliot's politics at a level deeper than name-calling knows about the influence of Julien Benda and Charles
Maurras.
Charles
Maurras and his Action francaise is interpreted as a resurrection of recalcitrant Catholicism, but
Maurras was himself an agnostic and Pope Plus XI condemned the movement on December 29, 1926, as did many of the French episcopacy.
Topics addressed include the Paris political career of Jean-Baptiste Marchand, an icon of the anti-Dreyfusard right; the political battle for the streets of Paris in 1934-1938; the reception of the Paris electorate to the nationalist messages of Jean-Marie Le Pen; Paris as a theater for the construction of the conservative leadership of Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac; and representations of Paris by writers with right-wing sympathies, including Charles
Maurras, Robert Brasillach, Jacques Laurent, Roger Nimier, and Antoine Blondin.
On sait que dans les annees trente ses grandes lectures n'etaient ni romantiques ni surrealistes: c'etait Proust, Valery, Mauriac, Barres,
Maurras, et la majorite de ses textes critiques portait sur des auteurs de droite.
Eliot--Charles
Maurras. In 1898
Maurras was one of the founders of the political group L'Action Francaise, devoted to "integral nationalism," specifically Royalism (as opposed to Republicanism), the Roman Catholic Church, the military, and traditional values; he was openly and unabashedly anti-Semitic.
Charles
Maurras qualified as "definitif' (159) a statement from Francois Perilhou of L'Effort:
Eliot, no Roy Campbell, no Charles
Maurras, no Paul Valery, and no Paul Claudel came to the party, let alone to the Party.
In time there followed the papal prohibition of Action Francaise, a mass movement of romantic reaction led by a poet, Charles
Maurras, whose work is now little read.