Another interesting (and very disturbing) anti-Romanticism view---

I was recently going through a volume of French right-wing/conservative theory, published in George Steiner’s Roots of the Right series, and the notorious Charles Maurras, editor of the French Catholic/Royalist periodical, Action Francaise (sort of a pre-WWII European version of William F. Buckley’s later Catholic periodical, the National Review), had a vaguely similar view of the “destructive” effects Romanticism- although Maurras’s anti-Romantic writings are colored by a fundamental racism and anti-Semitism. (Maurras, as one might expect, was a supporter of the French Vichy government, and, writes editor J. S. McClelland, “hated the same things that the [n]azis hated- democracy, the republic, certain kinds of socialism, Jews, and individualism.“ [213])

For Maurras, Romanticism (in France) was ANTI-Royalist. And as a classicist (and anti-Semite), Maurras directly links the origin of Romanticism to Judaism, via the seminal Judaic-Zealot rebellion against Rome. (One wonders what Charles Maurras would have thought if he ever learned of Robert Eisenman’s recent theory, relating Christian origins to these same Jewish revolutionary forces!)

In his rather paranoid 1922 book, Romanticism and Revolution, Charles Maurras asserts:

“…friend and foe of romanticism agree that its identity with revolution is close and deep. Romanticism and revolution resemble nothing so much as two stems, which, though they look different, grow from the same root. The movement of ideas or rather of dreams, of which 1750, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1898 are the landmarks, is something which obtains or which can be sustained in every field of action or the imagination: morality, politics, poetry, history, philosophy, religion.” (pp. 239-40)

Maurras then goes on to contrast the so-called “classical spirit” with this romantic/ revolutionary one, observing rather dubiously that,

“The traditions of Athens and Rome are as innocent of revolutionary content as was the inspiration of the medieval Catholic Church. The ancestors of revolution are to be found in Geneva, in Wittenberg- more distantly in Jerusalem. They spring from the Jewish spirit and from the varieties of independent Christianity that grow wild in the deserts if the East, or in the dark Teutonic forest, wherever barbarians meet.” (p. 241)

Elsewhere, Maurras goes one even more explicitly, and writes:

“…Catholic political thought appropriates to itself the methods of Roman politics. Such is the nature of the classical tradition. The classical spirit is the essence of the doctrines of humanity at its highest point. To call the spirit of the [French] Revolution classical is therefore to strip the word of its true meaning and to open the way for unimaginable misunderstandings.
“Revolution came from a different direction altogether: the Reformation Bible, the statutes of the Geneva Republic, the Calvinist theologians, the old individualist ferment of the Germanic race for which trilingual Switzerland already served as the European corn-exchange, the personal élan of a sensibility unrestrained by either hereditary morality, rigorous scholarship or healthy reason- these were the humble origins of the ideas which were born in the spirit of Rousseau.” (262)

By its very nature, Maurras writes, the “German and Anglo-Saxon world”, which was “ill-infused by Catholic humanism”, allowed “Judaism” to “penetrate unchecked”. (p. 242)

Therefore, Maurras goes on, when French philosophers Montesquieu and Voltaire visited London, it marked:

“the first important encounter of the classical French spirit with that Hebrew and German spirit by which England recently had been troubled. The intellectual curiosity of these two great writers should have been accompanied by vigilance. Mediocre novelty more than it should caught their eye. They brought home to Bourdeaux some seeds of foreign anarchy and unrest, without being greatly affected by it themselves: in their great works both bear the marks of fever while remaining free from its rage: the Oriental graft has left their blooms unwithered….” (p. 243)

Not so, however, for French naturalist/pre-Romantic writer, Rousseau ---who came from a part of the world, Maurras writes, “where for two hundred years had hung the stench of decomposition” (243), and whose works went on to directly, Maurras writes, influence the French Revolution. (240) Rousseau’s works, Maurras asserts, contain:

“in almost equal measure the criminal, the savage and the lunatic. Madness, savagery and crime, the adventurer, fed on Jew-inspired revolt, called that virtue. Virtue, incarnate in a ‘me’ of dingy quality, was declared the right and proper judge of the human race…” (244)

And, Maurras writes, although “the Paris of 1750” to which Rousseau’s ideas came “was nothing like an Asiatic shanty-town full of grubby Jews [these are Maurras' words]”, still:

“The glory of France and the dominance of Paris were used to spread abroad the ravings of a madman. This wild subhuman thing, this life-form scarce emerged from the principal swamp, seduced the world by the paradox and the principal challenge of his primitive intellectual equipment. Hearts too sensitive, minds too cultivated, found it interesting; inevitably those parts of the world [Germany] that were least advanced were more responsible: unsophisticated Europe could hardly fail to see itself and to admire itself in that child of nature that sophisticated Paris had made its adored idol….” (245)

Worst of all, Maurras goes on, it was Rousseau’s reduction of religious life “to the god within oneself, without ritual or priest, that is the culmination of Protestant logic; his political ideas are soon to subject France to the doctrine which destroys monarchies and which dreams up republics.” (246) The “The French Romantics of 1830,” Charles Maurras goes on, “furnished an admirable example” of this, in that "their literary taste, which turned them away from classical ideas and principles, shook their loyalty to the established crown.” (247)

As an aside, it is interesting to compare the overwrought, paranoid, and almost hysterical aspects of Charles Maurras’ language here, with that of the equally conservative and anti-Semitic H. P. Lovecraft, although in Lovecraft, such things as a “two hundred years …. stench of decomposition”, “wild subhuman things”, and “life-forms scarce emerged from the principal swamp”, are not figural, but rather literal embodiments of Lovecraft’s polemical antagonisms (much in the same way that nazi propaganda films, right around the same time Lovecraft was writing, were literally depicting Jews as “the rats in the walls”….)

For my part, I have always thought of Romanticism as something of a second European Renniassance: a return to vulgate forms and language, to native folklore and local legendry, after centuries of slavishly aping the stultifying forms of the classical past and the language of Rome. Romanticism brought about a revival of antiquarian forms: the ballad, folklore, the broadside, paving the way for the use of regular English, and everyday language, in poetry and literature. The German Romantics, in particular, made the novel, or "roman", the basis of an entirely new form of European art, and performed feats with structure, medium, and plot, which the Surrealists, a century later, only vainly and palely were able to recapture.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 20 Jan 09 | 05:55PM by Gavin Callaghan.

For me, Romanticism is far more about the exaltation of the imagination, emotion, and the confrontation with sublimity than anything else, and that is its enduring legacy, as well as its link to such poets as CAS. In this context, though, I am glad to see this example of anti-Romantic Fascism, which, with its idealization of war, monarchy, and Classicism (ever see the style of architecture known as "Mussolini Modern"? Ugh...) is far truer to reality.