Maurice Barrès Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), French novelist and nationalist politician whose eclectic career exerted a major influence on his generation, was born in Charmessur Moselle, France, in a traditionalist family. His father was a member of the Napoleonic imperial guard.

Barrès began legal studies at the faculty of Nancy (Lorraine) before continuing his academic training in Paris in 1883. His work as a journalist in Jeune France (Young France) allowed him to frequent the symbolist artistic circles of Paris. In 1888, he published Sous l’oeil des barbares, the first volume of his trilogy Leculte dumoi (The Cult of the Self), followed by Un homelier (1889) and Le jardin de Bérénice (1891). He was considered the leading authority of the individualist, exalting the quest of new sensations and the satisfaction of senses.

In parallel to his literary activity, Barrès was elected as a deputy of Nancy at the French National Assembly in 1889 and retained his seat in the legislature until 1893. Rebelling against the establishment, he became a member of the nationalist populist party of Georges Boulanger. This political involvement was one of the expressions of his ideological evolution toward patriotism and traditionalism. The lyrical transcendence of the ego by “historical roots” and “the land and the deaths” was visible also in his new literary trilogy Le roman de l’énergie nationale (Les déracinés, 1897; L’appel au soldat, 1900; Leurs figures, 1902) and in La cocarde, the short-lived newspaper he launched in 1894.

During the Dreyfus Affair—in which a French Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused of being a German spy in 1894 and deported to Guyana—Barrès became one of the leading authorities of the anti-Dreyfusards. He joined the ultranationalist Ligue des patriotes (League of Patriots) created by Paul Déroulède and wrote a series of violent anti-Semitic articles.

In 1906, Barrès was elected to the Académie française (French Academy) and as deputy of Paris. In parliament, he opposed Jean Jaurès, founder of the French Socialist Party, by refusing to allow burial of the writer Émile Zola, a defender of Dreyfus, at the Panthéon. Despite their political differences, Barrès was one of the first to show his respect at Jaurès’s tomb after his assassination by a French nationalist because of Jaurès opposition to a new war against Germany.

Succeeding Déroulède as head of the Ligue in 1914, Barrès became an important figure in World War I (1914–1918), emphasizing the importance of revenge against the panGermanist policy of the Kaiser. Such propaganda provoked harsh debates with pacifists, although the majority of French opinion was in favor of war. Barrès’s private notebooks, however, revealed he was very circumspect about the outcome of the war.

Diverging from Charles Maurras, the monarchist leader of the antiparliamentarist Action française (French Action), Barrès revised some of his earlier assumptions after the war by reincluding French Jews as one of four components of the French national essence, alongside traditionalists, Protestants, and socialists.

Bibliography:

Curtis, Michael. Three against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barres, and Mauras. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Doty, Charles Stewart. From Cultural Rebellion to Counter-revolution. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976.
Soucy, Robert. Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barres. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.