The phalangist, a Catholic Christian with every fibre of his heart and mind, reacts to all life’s questions and difficulties in harmony with the Church of all times, in full conformity of conviction and sentiment with Christians throughout the ages.
1. The first Christians submitted to the Jewish authorities without contestation until the fall of Jerusalem. They then submitted to the pagan emperors, also persecutors, until the conversion of Constantine and the Edict of Milan, which gave the Church her freedom (313). Faithful to the lesson of the martyrs, Christians remain submissive to the legitimate powers and even in the hardest persecutions they do not fear them, for "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians" (Tertullian).
2. The Gallo-Roman bishops, the only authority left standing amid the crumbling ancient world and wonderful defenders of their cities, recognised the new powers, even though they were barbarian, pagan or Arian, and despite their violence and pillage. They succeeded in converting them and thereafter supported and guided them in their task. Thus it was that Saint Remi led the pagan Clovis to baptism at Rheims (496) and anointed him king of the Franks. It is due to this fact and thanks to the merit and genius of the bishops of France that this predestined nation was to have a Catholic king for more than a thousand years of its brilliant history.
The phalangist sees in this national past and in this history of a truly prestigious sacred legitimacy the manifestation of a providential will, a design of God, brutally and criminally interrupted. This human ideal, this divine plan remains intact in our hearts: a Catholic France governed by a most Christian King, with public worship of Christ, devotion to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, respect for the Church, defence and service of the Church, and submission to all her laws.
3. The phalangist quite naturally concludes that the alliance contracted at Rheims between the Church and the French monarchy has never been annulled or broken by either of the contracting parties, but simply prevented from yielding its fruit because of the Revolution. He understands that the Church has enemies who are seeking her death and that kings have the mission of repressing these same enemies at the temporal level by using justice and force. If either of these two powers should fail the other, then both are in danger. If heresy triumphs over the Church, it will then turn against the royal power and overthrow it. If the Revolution triumphs over the monarchy, it will seize hold of the State and mobilise all its power in order to dominate and conquer the Church. Political augustinianism and its theory of the necessary harmony and the proper subordination of the "two swords", the temporal and the spiritual, are so essential to human well-being and to the divine good of nations, that any contestation of their legitimacy is the prelude to the apocalyptic upheavals of the modern world.
1. The origins of contemporary France – the wrenching of our country away from the Church and from her monarchy, and her being handed over to a libertarian, anticlerical and republican State – are rationalist and masonic. In the 18th century, the "philosophers of the Enlightenment" and the "societies of thought" worked for the emancipation of the people from the Church to which they were deeply attached. But they came up against a formidable obstacle in the most Christian monarchy, which blocked their plans by outlawing freemasonry (1740). Abandoning the hope of winning over and dominating the monarchy they swore to overturn it; God and the king were of the same party. Foreign aid, from a hostile England jealous of France, was necessary for this end. And so a fine anti-French and anti-Christian plot was hatched. It will rouse the malcontents, stir up disorders in the kingdom, buy over the agitators in Paris, and finally unleash the Revolution on 14 July 1789.
Its goal was reached the day when the Convention pronounced the deposition of King Louis XVI, ordered his trial to be opened and finally led him to the guillotine. This martyrdom, willed by the lodges out of hatred for the faith and decreed in the name of the French people, finally broke the thousand year old alliance of the nation with its king and – higher than him – with "Jesus Christ, who is the true King of France" (Saint Joan of Arc). That was on 21 January 1793, and its moral crime will be renewed on 29 July 1830.
2. Every father of a family, every patron, was guillotined in effigy on that day, for the King was their living image and the guarantor of their natural authority. God was dethroned with the king. The goddess Reason was enthroned and worshiped on the altar of the Cathedral in Paris. She represented man who makes himself god, just as he had already made himself king. The Republic proclaimed the sovereignty of the people and established it through the bloodshed of the royal family, priests, nobles and countless ordinary people, who were either good Catholics or simply disaffected. Even at that time, what hecatombs there were in the name of Liberty! The Terror, which foreshadowed the horrors of the modern totalitarian states, began in the very year of the king’s death.
3. The founding myth of the French Republic and of every masonic republic in the world which, before or after, adopted its principles, is this: having escaped from the slavery of priests and nobles, pope and kings, the people finally decided to govern themselves, for such was their good pleasure.
For the phalangist who is firstly a good Catholic and equally an ardent Frenchman – these two fidelities never being prized asunder in his heart – the matter is settled. He can submit to this masonic Republic. But rally to it, support it or take part in it – never! Since 21 January 1793, with the exception of the Restoration and Marshal Petain’s French State, France for him is divided between the real country to which he is passionately attached, and the Republic, the legal country, the devouring cancer of the former, to which he can only concede an external and grudging submission, a submission that is due to any de facto authority, even to a power such as his that is fundamentally atheistic, persecuting and corrupting.
Modern democracy was never intended – except in lying speeches made to get Christians to accept the word and then to swallow the thing itself – as a simple procedure for designating rulers who will continue to receive their full authority from above. As a new theory of political power – and soon of all human power – modern democracy effectively declares itself to be "the government of the people by the people." It is the sovereign people who designate, under whatever form it may be, those whom they wish to be their leaders. It is they who delegate to them their powers for this purpose, according to the conditions and within the limits that they are pleased to decree, in such a way that they never cease to govern themselves absolutely. Modern democracy’s first principle is the affirmation of the people’s sovereignty, entire, universal and inalienable.
1. Such a democracy, in theory and in practice, is essentially anti-religious and anti-national. It implies a permanent and integral revolution, since it makes all truth, authority, public order, the private freedom of persons, and even the very secrets of their conscience, depend no longer on God and the Church, nor even on political and social authorities of natural right and of divine right, but on man! Or rather, on the crowd, on the mass of men, and on their arbitrary wills, which are counted up and – for want of an impossible unanimity – decreed as the general Will of the majority against the minorities. And all the while there is the expectation that a party – and its leader – will present itself as the infallible incarnation of the popular will.
2. Every way of reconciling the real exercise of political authority with the democratic delegation of power to those who govern has been tried in France since 1789. Under no matter what regime, we are presented with the contradiction of authority which is exercised from the top downwards, as one over many, and of democracy which wants at all costs to delegate from the bottom upwards, as the sovereign crowd to its appointees, the rulers. Such a contradiction produces a shock between two forces, conventionally called right and left, each armed with its own principles, mental reservations, accusations, and religious and metaphysical implications.
"Every Protestant was a pope, with a bible under his arm" (Boileau). Every citizen is a king, with the Declaration of the rights of man in his hand. In either case, the result is a perpetual agitation caused by the conflict of ideas, the clash of interests, ambitions and persons, and corruptive foreign influences and pressures. It must truly be a diabolical ferment that controls an entire people for so long, and today the whole world, in its adoration of democracy, a regime of opinion. For is there anything more absurd and more abject? There is no doubt that the strength of democracy lies in the disordered self-love of modern man, who wishes and imagines himself to be his own master, king and god, but does not tolerate that other men should claim as much as he does.
All democratic countries are governed by their own representatives. Despite their impressive title of "national representation", they do not in fact represent the nation’s higher convictions and permanent interests, but merely the opinions, desires and interests that unite the various parties.
1. The extreme left represents the will of integral democracy, revolutionary at the present time, making a clean slate of the past, and anarchic for the future. Its strength is to incarnate and to impose on all the logic of the system, to the point of folly, without any baulking at the consequences. Such, in our democratic assemblies, is the communist party. There is no doubt that it alone is the fully libertarian and democratic party. Wherever it has seized power, it is a different matter. In the meanwhile it lays down the law or else claims that it is being unjustly gagged.
2. The left represents the popular will, resolutely and religiously democratic, but smitten with justice and equality, and very concerned to see its sacred liberty organised in an ideal way! It trusts the Republican state to moderate any arbitrary desires of the people and to make their wishes, the Will of the people, coincide with the interests of the nation, reconciling disorder with order and democracy with state authority. Such is socialism, whose false position is plain for all to see, but it is reassuring for a public opinion that has little inclination for grandiose, disastrous and bloody revolutionary adventures.
3. The right represents a will that is more conservative than revolutionary, more oligarchic than democratic. It is realist! It places above the popular will the conservation of order, the safeguarding of the material and spiritual benefits compromised by the Revolution. Democratic in its approach to power, the right is authoritarian when in government and, in times of crisis, readily caesarean. Democratic but authoritarian, liberal but conservative, the right wants the country to govern itself, the better to dominate it according to its own interests.
4. The extreme right wishes the reality of being, truth and goodness to prevail over the whims of men and for the nation to be out of reach of the revolution. Although democratically elected, its representatives constitute, in everything they stand for, the total contradiction of democracy. Their presence in democratic assemblies is endured but never accepted. They are excluded on the mental level and, at the first possible opportunity, on the physical level as well, being regarded as reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries.
The phalangist is necessarily of the extreme right. He is a legitimist. But he deplores the sight of integral Catholic nationalism figuring as a party and as an opinion, when it is the only expression of the country’s common good and tradition. Nor has he any time for a supposed new right that would impose on the country and on the world its atheist and racist Nietzschean ideology as the culmination of democratic paranoia.
What an interesting game it is! What excitement and a never-ending succession of dramas the life of a democratic society has to offer! The entire people take an active part in it, forming parties to represent their most cherished convictions and choosing from among the programmes of the candidates that which best corresponds to their ideas and desires. In Parliament everything is openly discussed in clear and magnificent speeches, so that the people can see how they are governed and in the name of which principles and interests major decisions of state are taken. If Parliament should commit some wrong, the government is immediately challenged, the administration is overturned, and fresh consultations automatically allow a new, wiser and more just, administration to be formed.
Believe it if you like…
1. The irresistible evolution of democratic life, as can be clearly demonstrated, leads from the lofty debate of ideas to sordid rivalries of interest, from great international, patriotic and religious politics to the politics of capitalist and trade union pressure groups. The people, whose ideas were supposed to find expression, are transformed through demagogic party competition into an amorphous mass that expresses nothing more than their immediate needs, their desires and passions. Essentially it is a struggle of rich against poor, of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, of the masses against the propertied classes.
2. The irresistible evolution of the parties leads them from their ostensible claim to represent the nation and to govern it according to its convictions, its sovereign interests and choices, to the necessity of selling themselves to the foreigner. "The Republic is the reign of the foreigner" (Charles Maurras). All parties – and this was already true of the parties of our old feudal wars and of our wars of religion – can only win decisively over the others by having recourse to foreign money and weapons. Communist ideology draws on the gold of the Urals, nazism was supported by the German army, the Entente cordiale was maintained by the Bank of London, Europe by the American dollar… There is no one, including those of the extreme right, who does not dream of gaining importance by forming a coalition in a Euroright of need and poverty!
3. The irresistible evolution of the democratic State leads it from a lofty ideal of public security to an abject servitude under the thumb of the very worst. To begin with, the new power promises to govern virtuously by being incorruptible and generous: the "Republique dure et pure"! But a democratic government cannot take on unpopularity. If it imposes rigour on the one side, it has to bring in compensating facilities on the other. As the parties aspiring to power freely outbid one another for popularity, so the party in power is obliged to flatter the passions of the majority and finally to fall to the level of the Roman Lower Empire: panem et circenses, which is where we are now. Bread and games. When a people has reached that point, barbarity is not far off and ready to commit massacre.
1. Democracy is a form of servitude. The people are declared to be sovereign, but so little are they the masters that they are not allowed to renounce this supposed sovereignty and hand it back to whom it belongs by right, to God, to the king, to a providential leader. Having been handed over to democracy, the people cannot free themselves from it! Which is a certain proof that this sovereignty is nothing but a sham. Those who ensure that it is perpetuated are the people’s new lords, the occult profiteers of a regime which works so well for them, that they will not permit it to be changed.
2. This regime of liberty demands, in effect, an electoral mechanism. And those who hold the key to this mechanism are the masters of a power that is apparently popular but in reality oligarchic. Now, who is able to direct, channel and finally appropriate the tumultuous torrent of democratic opinion? Only those who can create parties, assemble leading public figures, present candidates, control the press, create mass movements, hold gatherings, organise street demonstrations… And the only ones who can do these things are those with money, who invest it in this electoral industry, convinced that they can thereby make an excellent deal by dominating the State, occupying every place and periodically exploiting the national patrimony. Plutocracy buys up the men of the press and the men of parliament; it gets its candidates elected and then proceeds to govern in the name of the sovereign people for its own exclusive profit.
3. Above the people now levelled down, atomised, and shorn of their natural leaders, there soon struts a minority of no respectable name or address called "the ruling class" or "the political class", heedless of the scandalously anti-democratic character of the term and of the thing itself. This class enjoys a power more absolute than was ever that of the absolute monarchy of the kings of France or even of the supreme sovereignty of the popes of Rome. Its cunning is to have itself freely elected by a people whom it has intoxicated and then to decree everything in the name of this same people, hailing it as Sovereign!
4. This demonstration has been taken from Charles Maurras, and it dates from 1900. The "four confederated states" which share out among themselves the country’s power and revenue, the immovable plutocracy which profits from France’s every defeat and misfortune, are the organised minorities: Jewish, Masonic, Protestant and Metic, or foreign. Such parasites can be put up with by an organised Christian people, proud and free, but when they find themselves emancipated in a democracy, how could they not be tempted to use their filthy all-purchasing money to appropriate a power that is up for sale?
"Democracy is evil, democracy is death" (Charles Maurras). Thus democracy can only persist in our old Christian nations, whose solid acquisition of virtue and order can resist its forces of decomposition and whose great reserves of wealth can withstand its pillage. Ruin and anarchy, which elsewhere would result almost immediately from democracy, take time in our Christian countries, which have their stages and reassessments. One can shut one’s eyes and blame ill luck or misadventure, but democracy alone is the cause of all the evil. The longer the re-awakening, the harder it will be, and the more painful the restoration.
Every democracy owes its duration to a centrist majority, a union of liberal capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. The bond between this conservative right and this moderate left, the ideal centre, the decisive complement of all majorities, the arbiter of the situation, the mistress of decision, and the real republican power, is radical and radical-socialist freemasonry.
1. The conservative right manages society to its own advantage, in a small time way, with no coherent foreign policy, no financial stability, no social or family doctrine, and no overall ecological, educative or spiritual plan. It commercialises everything; it industrialises and thinks of nothing but the increased growth of national productivity. Making money, having fun and very few children.
It regains power when the coffers are empty, because its bourgeois administration allows it to contract fresh debts by still further borrowing in order to stimulate the economy. It proceeds amidst scandal, pillaging people’s savings. It stays in power by brandishing the bogey of the Revolution and thus justifies its radical irreligion, its immoralism, and its total lack of foresight and nationalist determination.
2. The socialist left succeeds it in accordance with the law of the pendulum, the so-called democratic alternation. It opposes this dreary materialism with a show of idealism and militant ardour. It makes itself a programme of Justice and Freedom. Freedom is in danger! Clericalism, militarism, and sometimes "the wall of money", the "two hundred families", are a threat to the people… Socialism saves the Republic by bringing the people back to the ballot box, the necessary means of their enslavement.
Justice, likewise invoked, authorises socialist governments to develop controls over political, economic, educative and social activities, and so to centralise and bring everything under state control, supervising everything by means of an excessive, pernickety, paralysing and parasitical administration, whose personnel are recruited from the ranks of the socialist militants. The minor war between employers and trade unions conceals another, the major war, which these two devouring monsters – in secret agreement – wage against that which only the legitimist and extreme right remains to defend : the nation’s moral and religious patrimony, the country’s security, its diplomacy and social peace, the independence of the magistrature, order, rural life, family vitality, the savings of the bourgeoisie, and the protection of the weak. In short, the real country.
A country, even a rich and wise one, cannot for long be placed in danger of war and invasion, in a situation of religious and social civil war, of being plundered and put up for sale, and of bureaucratic and administrative subjection, without dying from it. Or else rebelling, rising up and overthrowing the Republic! "From Demos to Caesar" (Charles Maurras). It is then that dictatorship comes on the scene. There are several varieties of it. Only one is good; all the rest are false or catastrophic.
1. False dictatorships call themselves democratic but are secretly plutocratic. When the republican regime is too far compromised, there is the likelihood of a great popular, military or religious movement sweeping the place clean and restoring a nationalist regime. More often than not the great bank will take the initiative and choose its own "providential man", whose party it will finance and whose coup d’état it will aid. And in exchange for supporting the dictatorship it will obtain the consideration of positions gained and fortunes made. Such dictatorships normally cost the nation very dearly, from Bonaparte to Charles de Gaulle, or else they degrade and weaken her, from Napoleon III to Thiers and to Giscard. It is a proven fact that they contribute handsomely to the banking and industrial oligarchies as well as to the republican personnel who are strangely spared.
Tied by their plebiscitary origin, which for them is "a crown of stones", these false dictatorships are exposed to the whims of the opinions that Money subsidises. Their fall is as troublesome as their rise.
2. Revolutionary dictatorships call themselves democratic, and, in order to be truly so, they are totalitarian. There is no revolutionary uprising not controlled by the plutocracy and, worse still, not directed against the clergy, the army or bourgeois districts, so that they may finally be dominated. So it was with the Republic of 1848, the Commune of 1871 and the "Liberation" of 1944. Unless, that is, a foreign power intervenes in this all too well regulated game of our decadent societies open to every wind, choosing an insurrectionary party and ideology, communist or pagano-racist, and providing it with the weapons of terror and the money for the conquest of power. No democratic republic can stand up to a revolution armed from abroad, just as no bank can withstand the submachine guns it has not paid for.
Such has been the communist seizure of power in twenty countries of the world. And for all of these countries there has been no return. Here indeed is the capital crime of high treason committed by our bourgeois democracies, which with open eyes lead the nations they degrade and plunder to this hell, to this Gulag without hope. It matters little whether their doctrine is dialectical materialism or racism, Muslim fanaticism or the cult of a divinised dictator. Whether half or wholly mad, dictatorship leads to the annihilation of all religion, civilisation and social peace, and to human savagery – today scientific and absolute.
The restoration of the State is a true miracle of Providence, which Charles Maurras aptly referred to as "the divine surprise", as he saluted Marshal Pétain’s legal and legitimate establishment of the French State after the Republic had collapsed and withdrawn of its own accord! Such a restoration requires the nation’s unanimous abjuration of the republican dogmas of the people’s sovereignty and of the cult of man.
1. Superficial democracies which are no more than traditional oligarchies – be they clerical, feudal, bourgeois or communal – have for centuries been able to renew this divine surprise, this permanent miracle of a power regularly given up to the popular will and continually restored to the nation’s tutelary aristocracies. But since the modern Revolution this miracle has become too hazardous! These aristocracies would be well advised to get out of the democratic rut as soon as and as decidedly as possible. If they delay further, the financial powers will master them.
2. National dictatorships of public security, occasioned by the anguish of a whole people in a major national crisis, also share in this divine grace. They are the only dictatorships that are acceptable and profitable. Still they must make a clean break with all democratic ideology and definitively free themselves from all public opinion controls, both electoral and parliamentary, which vainly seek to conceal the political and financial machinery of the anti-national oligarchies, anxious to recover power.
Experience proves that it is very difficult and therefore very rare for a public security dictatorship not to allow itself to be infiltrated by the democratic spirit, to reject any attempt at "liberalisation" and any "return to democratic institutions", to political parties and popular consultations. As the problem of succession grows daily more insistent and the dictatorial regime itself offers no solution to this problem, the need to hold firm against the democratic spirit is all the greater. The legitimacy of the dictatorship, founded on an historical event, must find its permanent principle of identity. Will it be popular unanimity? the ideology of a party?… or God?
3. The most Christian dictator and king is the ideal figure of full legitimacy. In default of a miraculous and divine surprise, the historical dictator, who derives his personal present legitimacy from some glorious service to the nation, can at least lead his people to definitively renounce the democratic myth, its political absurdity and its impiety, in order to restore a national and Christian legitimacy, of itself immortal and fruitful: the monarchical and dynastic authority of our Catholic tradition.
That is what the best dictators of our times strove to do, Salazar, Franco and Marshal Pétain, who stood up to plutocracy and the revolution. And yet the "divine surprise" did not survive their prestige, dedication and personal sacrifice. Why?
The revolution is a scourge. It is consolidated by caesarean dictatorships. But the democratic idea eternalises it. Throughout all their wars, anarchies, tyrannies, declines and spectacular recoveries, the democratic idea enslaves or re-enslaves the peoples to the worst oligarchies, and thereby leads them on to still further catastrophes.
1. But why do the peoples hold on to the democratic idea? Because the men of the Church have chained them to it. First we had the compromise made by the Sulpician Émery with Napoleon, which led to the Concordat of 1801 and its organic Articles, enslaving the Church to a totalitarian power. Then there were the enthusiasms of Lamennais, Lacordaire and Montalembert, who dreamed of marrying God and Liberty, the Church and the Revolution, and who called for "a free Church in a free State", meaning a State without God, the democratic state (1830-1870). After that there was Leo XIII, who constrained the legitimists to go over to the antisocial, anti-national, anti-clerical, masonic, Jewish State (referred to in French as the act of "Ralliement" – translator’s note), and who accepted the idea of social "democracy", thereby opening the path to democrat priests and to the Sillon of Marc Sangnier, all of whom would preach an integral democracy, both political and religious, in opposition to Saint Pius X’s luminous condemnations of it (1910).
Then we had Pius XI coming to the rescue of the hard-pressed anticlerical Republic by his scandalous excommunication of the Catholics of Action Française for the crime of royalism (1926). There was the French episcopate rushing into the servitude of the civil war’s tripartism and forswearing their oath of fidelity to Marshal Pétain in order to return to their democratic enthusiasms (1944). And finally there was Paul VI. He would proclaim and celebrate the cult of man in the Temple of God, St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, the heart of Christendom, the source of the unity of the Catholic priesthood now become the source of the confusion of tongues and of the political apostasy of the Church (1965)!
2. A political science that would draw on the lessons of past experience, what Maurras called organisational empiricism, would suffice a hundredfold to make the nations abjure the mad and cruel dogmas of democracy, at least when they are struck by the misfortunes which democracy attracts and provokes. The nations would escape from this infernal cycle if the Church were to preach them a different kind of politics, if she were to remind them that political perfection and legitimacy cannot come from below or from the anarchic multitude, but must come from God, that they can only be exercised in the name of Christ and must reach their maturity in the fullness of the Holy Spirit through the establishment and extension of Christendom, which is God’s work in the world.
But no! Avid to please the people by exalting liberty, to please individuals by preaching them their rights rather than their duties, and still more avid to please the rich and powerful, the men of the Church no longer have the courage to fight for God against the Revolution. And from compromise to betrayal, they end up hand in glove with democracy, scandalously and inconsiderately making themselves the enemies of God’s glory and their brethren’s salvation!