Charles Maurras

Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras (/mɔːˈrɑːs/; French: [ʃaʁl moʁas]; 20 April 1868 – 16 November 1952) was a French author, politician, poet and critic. He was an organiser and principal philosopher of Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist, medievalist, conservative, corporatist, integralist, nationalist, traditionalist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras also held anti-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-liberal, anti-Masonic, anti-Nazi, anti-Islam, anti-Protestant and antisemitic views. His ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and integral nationalism, and led to the political doctrine of Maurrassisme.

While raised Roman Catholic, Maurras went deaf and became an agnostic in his youth, but remained anti-secularist and supported the Catholic Church solely for political reasons. An Orléanist, he began his career by writing literary criticism and became politically active as a leading anti-Dreyfusard. In 1926, Pope Pius XI issued a papal condemnation of Action Française. In 1927, several of Maurras's works were put in the Index of Forbidden Books, Action Française became the first newspaper ever to be placed on the Catholic Church's list of banned books, and AF members were forbidden from receiving the sacraments; the ban would later be lifted by Pope Pius XII in 1939.