Art. 7.-THE POPE AND THE ACTION FRANÇAISE. CONSIDERING the very important repercussions which it has had upon the international relations of France, it is curious that the condemnation of the Action Française movement by the Pope a year ago has received so little attention in this country. The chief effect of the condemnation may be summarised by saying that, while the most irreconcilable nationalists of France in regard to the appeasement of Europe since the war have been predominantly Catholic, it is the Pope who has dealt the most severe blow to their influence. In condemning the Action Française movement, not for its programme of a royalist restoration, but for the implications of its doctrines of nationalisme intégral and for its subservience to the ideas of its agnostic leader, M. Charles Maurras, the Pope has had to strike those who have been among the most devoted and vigorous champions of the rights of the Church in France. He has, moreover, had to denounce and proscribe a movement which had rendered loyal and very considerable services to the Church; which had won the sympathies of many of the most enthusiastic among the young Catholics in France, in addition to its following among the traditionally Catholic aristocracy. More than that, the neo-royalist movement which M. Maurras has created in the past thirty years had gained the warmest approval from many eminent Catholic prelates because of its general attitude towards politics, in insisting upon the necessity for Authority as a first principle of sound government-in reaction against the doctrines of individualism and of universal liberty and equality which had dominated French political thought since Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Encyclopædists, who paved the way for the revolution in the 18th century.

That the Pope's intervention to condemn a movement which had inspired so much of the best Catholic thought in France should have led to many complications, and should have caused profound distress and resentment among many French Catholics, was not surprising. No more conclusive proof could be found of the intense loyalty of French Catholicism towards the Holy See

than the unreserved acceptance of the Pope's condemnation which has in fact taken place. This unqualified obedience to the Pope's instructions is all the more remarkable because of the extraordinary mishandling of the attack upon M. Maurras when it was decided to make a pronouncement against him in the late summer of 1926; which actually mobilised in his defence, at the beginning, many ardent Catholics who did not guess that the Pope would lend his support to the clumsy denunciation of the Action Française that was opened by Cardinal Andrieu in Bordeaux. But once the issues involved had become reasonably clear; when it was plain that the royalist movement was not being attacked as such, and that M. Maurras himself was being denounced only for certain aspects of his political teaching; the Catholic hierarchy and Catholics of every class in France rallied with astonishing loyalty and unanimity in supporting the Pope. In March 1927 a joint pastoral letter was issued by the French Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops, bearing no less than 117 signatures, expressing their complete acceptance of the Pope's attitude in the matter, and giving a detailed exposition of the reasons why the Holy Father's intervention had become necessary.

The international importance of this general submission by the French Catholics to the Pope's condemnation of the extreme nationalists of the Action Française has been strangely overlooked in this country. M. Maurras and his supporters, who were predominantly Catholics, had been since the war by far the ablest and most vehement advocates of a policy of coercion against Germany. When the Bloc National Parliament was led by M. Poincaré until the elections of 1924, it is not too much to say that M. Maurras and his sympathisers on the extreme Right of the Chamber virtually dominated the foreign policy of France, and were chiefly responsible for leading M. Poincaré into the occupation of the Ruhr. Ever since 1924 they have denounced every movement towards a reconciliation with Germany as a new act of treachery against France by the politicians. They used every possible influence to obstruct the admission of Germany to the League of Nations, and they regarded the policy of Locarno as the climax of a vast international intrigue, to deprive France of the fruits of

victory and to enable Germany to escape the obligations of paying for the devastation of the war. During the Bloc National Parliament their influence had grown out of all proportion to the actual following which they could count upon in the elections, and this influence arose largely from the general belief that the Action Française enjoyed the active sympathies of most of the Catholic conservatives in France. The effect of the Pope's condemnation of the movement has been to achieve the result which many Catholics in France had urgently desired. The Church in France has now been publicly and dramatically dissociated from its former identification with the extravagant programme of a violent political party over which it had no control, and, above all, from the doctrines of implacable revenge upon Germany which M. Maurras and his followers have preached in season and out of season since the war.

Deprived of this fictitious support, which was based upon an illusion which it skilfully fostered and exploited, the Action Française has in fact been reduced to insignificance as a political force. The Catholics of France-who, although they are at most a minority of about one-fourth of the whole people, yet command a very considerable influence upon French public life through their sense of common interests in self-defence -have been explicitly forbidden under pain of excommunication to have any active connexion with the Action Française movement, and are most strictly forbidden even to read its newspaper. Detailed statistics which have been obtained of the sales of the newspaper in different towns and districts where the royalists have always boasted of their strength, show that its circulation has become almost negligible. The paper is still sold outside church doors in some of the principal centres, as it used to be, by young camelots du roi; but its sale is almost dead in comparison with what it had before the condemnation. Its former influence among the younger clergy and in the seminaries has completely ceased, though the wider aspects of M. Maurras' political philosophy cannot fail to leave a permanent mark upon French political thought. Not only have Catholics been ordered to dissociate themselves entirely from the movement, but M. Maurras him

self has retaliated by ordering his own followers to discontinue their membership of every Catholic organisation of any kind-including the big national organisations like the Catholic Young Men's Society or the Scout clubs, and even the great National Catholic Federation, which has reached a membership of nearly three millions, under the presidency of General de Castelnau, since M. Herriot renewed the old anticlerical vendetta against the Church after his return to power in 1924.

It would be hard to exaggerate the influence of this sweeping change in France in regard to French foreign policy and the appeasement of Europe. The general policy of reprisals against Germany, which culminated in the occupation of the Ruhr, was discredited at the general elections that replaced M. Poincaré by M. Herriot three years ago. But the uncompromising nationalists still remained as a vigorous force, which the politicians who were pursuing a policy of reconciliation never dared to ignore or to offend unduly. And the one formidable group which was ready at any moment to denounce the smallest concession made by France, in a way that would shake the nerves of the Chamber of Deputies, was the Action Française, with its organised companies of young enthusiasts throughout the country, with its brilliantly conducted system of propaganda, and its undoubted influence upon the whole policy of French conservatism. That group has now not only lost most of its membership and of the circulation of its newspaper. It has been exposed to the Catholics of France beyond all possibility of contradiction, as having adopted and preached an attitude in regard to Germany which is in direct conflict with the endeavours of the Vatican to promote reconciliation in Europe. And after months of bewilderment and heart-burnings, the Catholics of France have come to realise that the hatred of Germany which was preached by M. Maurras and the Action Française is in fact incompatible with those principles of Christian charity in international affairs which govern the policy of the Holy See, and which can even become a matter of authoritative teaching by the Pope, as a question of faith and morals.

Long before the first steps were taken towards a public condemnation of M. Maurras by the Holy See,

this direct conflict between the foreign policy of the Vatican and of the Action Française had become plainly apparent. Cardinal Ceretti during his term of office as Papal Nuncio in Paris had been lending his support, in pursuance of the Vatican's general efforts towards reconciliation in Europe, to the endeavours of M. Briand and of the Quai d'Orsay to reach a settlement which would be inspired by peaceful ideas. The Action Française soon recognised that the Papal Nuncio, with his great personal abilities as a diplomatist, enjoying unique opportunities in Paris for bringing the representatives of conflicting nations together, had become one of the most formidable adversaries of their own programme of revenge. 'What possible relations can there be between Germany and France,' said the publicists of the Action Française, day after day, 'except those of a fraudulent debtor with the creditor whom he is still trying to defraud?' And the policy of reconciliation, which was to culminate later in the agreement of Locarno, was utterly incompatible with all such claims. The Action Française has always been ruthless and unscrupulous in its methods against those who oppose it: and before long the newspaper openly denounced the Nuncio, and the Action Française propagandists began to employ the familiar methods of spreading personal calumnies concerning its enemies.

These unprovoked attacks upon the Papal Nuncio were one of the contributory causes to the subsequent condemnation. They were indeed evidence of the effect upon certain French Catholics of the extraordinary personal ascendancy of M. Maurras and his teaching. Months afterwards, when the Pope virtually issued a formal condemnation of the Action Française in his speech to the Consistory on Dec. 20, 1926, the Action Française replied with its famous manifesto entitled Non Possumus. It was a remarkable document in many ways, showing the unbounded confidence of the leaders in their own mission to save France from the intrigues of all other politicians. It contained two parts, incorporating a separate statement prepared by the Catholic leaders of the movement, in distinction from M. Maurras and those who were not Catholics. And the Catholic leaders went even further than