Integral nationalism
Finally, a moral component: Maurras regarded French society, as of the turn of the twentieth century, as having slid from a Golden Age into a period of decadence and corruption incarnated by the military defeat of 1870–71 and the cultural clash of the Dreyfus affair.
To his mind, the French national community had seen its period of geopolitical grandeur under the absolutist regime of Louis XIV where religion and politics were merged under the absolute authority of the monarch.
[5] His philosophical influences included Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Thomas Aquinas, Auguste Comte and Joseph de Maistre.
In its search for the cohesion of an idealised national community, Maurras's political project thus revolved around three major axes: Integral nationalism seeks to recover natural laws by observing facts and drawing upon historical experiences, even if it cannot contradict the metaphysical justifications which constitutes the true foundation for Christians; for positivism, for the Action Française, was by no means a doctrine of explanation, but only a method of ascertainment; it was by observing that the hereditary monarchy was the regime most in conformity with the natural, historical, geographical, and psychological conditions of France that Maurras had become monarchist: "Natural laws exist," he wrote; "a believer must therefore consider forgetting these laws as impious negligence.
[7] Despite the measured and cautious support he gave to the Proudhon Circle, a circle of intellectuals launched by young monarchists hostile to liberal capitalism and calling for union with the revolutionary syndicalist movement inspired by Georges Sorel,[8] Charles Maurras defended a social policy closer to that of René de La Tour du Pin; Maurras does not like Georges Sorel and Édouard Berth the systematic process of the bourgeoisie where he sees a possible support.
[9] In the class struggle, Maurras prefers to propose, as in England, a form of national solidarity of which the king can constitute the keystone.
[10] This last conception attracts him favors in the elites of the colonized peoples; Ferhat Abbas, for example, is an Algerian maurassian: he is the founder of L'Action Algerienne, an organ claiming integral nationalism.
[11] This movement fights for the adoption of concrete proposals: all are in the direction of local democracy and organized, the only form of democracy for which Maurras advocated, because in his opinion it is the only truly real one: autonomy of local and regional indigenous corporations, autonomy in social and economic regulation, universal suffrage in municipal elections, wide representation of corporations, communes, notables and native chiefs, constituting an assembly with the French government.
[citation needed] Maurras's national theory rejects the messianism and ethnicism that can be found in the German nationalists who inherit Fichte.
Maurras and the Action française have influenced different thinkers claiming a counterrevolutionary, anti-Enlightenment and Christian (mainly Catholic) nationalism worldwide.
[18][nb 1] According to this ideology, the nation was held to be of the highest absolute value, more important than social class, regions, the individual, religion, etc.
To this end, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) were urged to "force their way into all areas of national life", such as institutions, societies, villages and families.
In Spain, Maurras and his integral nationalism were highly influential upon the nationalist and Catholic right during the first half of the twentieth century.
[23][24] In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Dimitrije Ljotić and his Yugoslav National Movement (Zbor) were heavily influenced by Maurras's ideas.
