[2] During World War II, Maurras supported the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime, believing that Free France was being manipulated by the Soviet Union.

[6] He has been described as the most important French conservative intellectual,[7] and has directly influenced a large number of politicians, theorists, and writers on both the left and right, including Eliot, Hulme, Douglas, Evola, Schmitt, Heidegger, Bernanos, Mauriac, Thibon, Sorel, Déon, Laurent, Henri of Orléans, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Maritain, de Oliveira, Sardinha, Pereyra, Althusser, Osma, Lanz, de Gaulle, Franco, Salazar, Duplessis, Coughlin, Degrelle, Pétain, Perón, Ferrara, Bannon, and Macron.

During a trip to Athens for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, Maurras came to criticize the Greek democratic system of the polis, which he considered doomed because of its internal divisions and its openness towards métèques (foreigners).

"[11] Maurras assisted with the foundation of the nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard Ligue de la patrie française at the end of 1898, along with Maurice Barrès, the geographer Marcel Dubois, the poet François Coppée and the critic and literature professor Jules Lemaître.

[13] In 1899, Maurras founded the review Action Française (AF), an offshoot of the newspaper created by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois the year preceding.

The AF mixed integral nationalism with reactionary themes, shifting the nationalist ideology, previously supported by left-wing Republicans, to the political right.

[16] Maurras then endorsed France's entry into World War I (even to the extent of supporting the thoroughly republican Georges Clemenceau) against the German Empire.

During the war, the Jewish businessman Emile Ullman was forced to resign from the board of directors of the Comptoir d'Escompte bank after Maurras accused him of being a German agent.

[17] In 1925, he called for the murder of Abraham Schrameck, the Interior Minister of Paul Painlevé's Cartel des Gauches's (left-wing coalition) government, who had ordered the disarming of the far-right leagues.

Many of its members left (two Catholics who were forced to look for a different path in politics and life were writers François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos); and it entered a period of decline.

[19] Maurras again voiced death threats against the President of the Council (prime minister) Léon Blum, organizer of the Popular Front, in the Action Française of 15 May 1936, emphasizing his Jewish origins (he once called him an "old semitic camel").

[20]During the 1930s – especially after the 6 February 1934 crisis[21]—many of Action Française members turned to fascism, including Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Abel Bonnard, Paul Chack, and Claude Jeantet.

Opposing Adolf Hitler because he was anti-German, Maurras himself criticized the racist policies of Nazism in 1936, and requested a complete translation of Mein Kampf – some passages had been censored in the French edition.

After his failure against Charles Jonnart in 1924 to be elected to the Académie française, he succeeded in entering the ranks of the "Immortals" on 9 June 1938, replacing Henri-Robert, winning by 20 votes against 12 to Fernand Gregh.

[19] In June 1940 articles in Action Française signed by Maurras, Léon Daudet, and Maurice Pujo praised General Charles de Gaulle.

[24] Vichy France's reactionary program of a Révolution Nationale (National Revolution) was fully approved of by Maurras, who inspired large parts of it.

[11] At the same time, he continued to express elements of his longstanding antipathy towards Germany by arguing in La Seule France that Frenchmen must not be drawn to that country's model and by hosting anti-German conferences,[26] and he opposed both the "dissidents" in London and the collaborators in Paris and Vichy (such as Lucien Rebatet,[27] Robert Brasillach, Pierre Laval, or Marcel Déat).

[citation needed] After the liberation of France, Maurras was arrested in September 1944 together with his right-hand man Maurice Pujo, and indicted before the High Court of Lyon for "complicity with the enemy" on the basis of the articles he had published since the beginning of the war.

At the end of the trial, during which there were many irregularities such as false dating or truncated quotations,[30] Maurras was sentenced to life imprisonment and deprivation of civil liberties.

[32] A Provence-born author, Maurras joined Félibrige, a literary and cultural association founded by Frédéric Mistral and other Provençal writers to defend and promote Occitan languages and literature.

[11] His "integral nationalism" rejected all democratic principles which he judged contrary to "natural inequality", criticizing all evolution since the 1789 French Revolution, and advocated the return to a hereditary monarchy.

[10] Like many people in Europe at the time, he was haunted by the idea of "decadence", partly inspired by his reading of the publications of Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan, and admired classicism.

Maurras further blamed France's decline on "Anti-France", which he defined as the "four confederate states of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons and foreigners" (his actual word for the latter being the xenophobic term métèques).

He believed that the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the eventual outcome of the French Revolution had all contributed to individuals valuing themselves more than the nation, with consequent negative effects on the latter, and that democracy and liberalism were only making matters worse.

He supported the political Catholic Church both because it was intimately involved with French history and because its hierarchical structure and clerical elite mirrored his image of an ideal society.

However, he distrusted the Gospels, written, as he put it, "by four obscure Jews",[35] but admired the Catholic Church for having allegedly concealed much of the Bible's "dangerous teachings".

Nonetheless, his agnosticism worried parts of the Catholic hierarchy, and in 1926 Pope Pius XI placed some of Maurras's writings on the Index of Forbidden Books and condemned the Action Française philosophy as a whole.

[37] The influence extended to Latin America, as in Mexico where Jesús Guiza y Acevedo[1] was nicknamed "the little Maurras", as well as the historian Carlos Pereyra or the Venezuelan author Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, who wrote a book titled Cesarismo democrático (Democratic Caesarism).

Maurras' thought also influenced Catholic fundamentalist supporters of the Brazilian dictatorship[1] (1964–85) as well as the Cursillos de la Cristiandad (Christendom Courses), similar to the Cité Catholique group, which were initiated during 1950 by the bishop of Ciudad Real, Mgr.

[1] The Argentine militarist Juan Carlos Onganía, who overthrew Arturo Illia in a military putsch in 1966, as well as Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, who succeeded Onganía after another coup, had participated in the Cursillos de la Cristiandad,[1] as did also the Dominican militarists Antonio Imbert Barrera and Elías Wessin y Wessin, chief of staff of the military and an opponent of the restoration of the 1963 Constitution after Rafael Trujillo was deposed.