Maurice Barrès

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Barrès, 1906. (credit: H. Roger-Viollet)

(born Aug. 19, 1862, Charmes-sur-Moselle, France — died Dec. 5, 1923, Paris) French writer and politician. He served in the Chamber of Deputies (1889 – 93) and became a strong nationalist. With Charles Maurras, he expounded the doctrines of the French Nationalist Party in two newspapers, and in his novels he expressed an individualism that included a deep-rooted attachment to one's native region. His series of novels titled Les Bastions de l'Est earned success as French propaganda during World War I.

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The French writer and politician Auguste Maurice Barrès (1862-1923) was the author of numerous novels, essays, and articles and was a member of theChamber of Deputies and of the Académie Française.

Maurice Barrès was born in Charmes near Nancy and passed a happy childhood in a well-to-do family. In 1882 Barre's went to Paris to study law, but he soon became involved in the literary life of the Latin Quarter and acquired a reputation as a rebel and dandy. He flaunted his egotism, while also expressing a profound desire for action, in his first trilogy, Le Culte du moi (Sous l'oeil des barbares, 1888, Under the Eye of the Barbarians; Un Homme libre, 1889, A Free Man; and Le Jardin de Bérénice, 1891, The Garden of Bérénice). The themes of exoticism and fascination with death and decay occur in these early works, as well as in some later ones, such as Du Sang, du volupté et de la mort, (1894, Of Blood, Pleasure, and Death), Greco ou le secret de Tolède (1911, Greco or the Secret of Toledo), and Jardin sur l'Oronte (1923, Garden on the Orontes).

Barrès made his political debut in 1889 as a successful Boulangist candidate for the Chamber of Deputies. Although presenting himself for election four more times after 1893, he did not reenter the Chamber until 1906, as deputy from the first arrondissement in Paris - a seat he held until his death.

In his second trilogy, Le Roman de l'energie national (Les Déracinés, 1897, The Uprooted; L'Appel au soldat, 1900, The Calling of the Soldier; and Leurs Figures, 1902, Their Faces), Barrès analyzes himself and his relation to Lorraine, the province of his birth. This examination leads his to believe that the individual, as well as the nation, is formed by the land and the dead. A rejection of the formative forces, and thus of identity, can only lead to disaster for both the individual and the collectivity. These novels serve as the literary expression of Barrès's espousal of nationalism as a political philosophy and as a guide to action.

Prior to 1906, Barrès, the leading anti-Dreyfusard intellectual, had been a vehement opponent of the parliamentary republic. After his reelection to the Chamber, he assumed a more moderate stance, viewing his proper role in politics as that of moral mentor.

Alsace-Lorraine was at the core of Barrès's political thought and literary activity. Before World War I he published two novels - Au Service de l'Allemagne (1905, In the Service of Germany) and Colette Baudoche (1909) - dealing with the dilemma facing people of French culture who chose to remain in the occupied territory. When the war broke out, he welcomed the conflict as the occasion for France's moral rejuvenation, and he devoted himself to propaganda sustaining morale on the home front. After 1918 he was one of the most prominent advocates of a strong Rhine policy and full implementation of the Treaty of Versailles. He died in December 1923 and was honored with a national funeral.

Further Reading

Very little of Barrès's work has been translated into English, and there is no full-length biography of him in English. A view of aspects of his work and life is in Flora Emma Ross, Goethe in Modern France, with Special Reference to Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget and André Gide (1937). Michael Curtis, Three against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras (1959), has a detailed biographical and critical study of Barre's as an antirepublican intellectual. John Cruickshank, French Literature and Its Background (vol. 5, 1969), is useful for the literary background of Barrès's time.

Barrès, Maurice (1862-1923). French novelist, journalist, and politician of the Right. Barrès presented a distinctive voice which strongly influenced the young in the pre-war period, and a wide variety of authors of the next generation, from Montherlant to Mauriac. Born in Charmes-sur-Moselle, he was educated at the lycée of Nancy, studying philosophy under Burdeau. In 1883 he moved to Paris and was soon writing regularly for a number of prominent journals. In 1888 he published Sous l'œil des barbares, the first novel in his trilogy Le Culte du moi, in which he emerged as a fashionable exponent of the cult of individualism; the other two novels were Un homme libre (1889) and Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891).

Meanwhile, he was already showing a strong interest in politics. Having founded, in Nancy, a political journal, Le Courrier de l'Est, he stood successfully as a Boulangist [see Boulanger] in the 1889 elections. His complex political attitudes at this stage combined authoritarian republicanism, nationalism, and an anti-capitalist desire for social reform.

In 1893 he lost his seat, and from then till 1906 he was to try repeatedly but unsuccessfully to return to the Chamber. He played a major part (1897-9) in the battles of the Dreyfus Affair as an anti-Dreyfusard, his attitudes containing a strong element of antisemitism. His major political writings on the Affair were later gathered into Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (1902). Under the influence of the physiologist Jules Soury, Barrès had become convinced of the importance of human intuition, seeing it as being not individual, but based on ‘de très anciennes dispositions physiologiques’. In that we are the continuation of our parents, we must look for truth not in abstract theories but in instinctive urges.

In Les Déracinés (1897), the first of a new trilogy of novels, Barrès developed his philosophy of ‘la terre et les morts’; a group of young Lorrainers are uprooted from their province, and from the values of their forefathers, with disastrous results. The sequels, L'Appel au soldat (1900; on the Boulanger Affair) and Leurs figures (1902; on the Panama Affair), provide a highly partisan account of the politics of their era. The last, in particular, is a master-piece of literary polemic.

From 1904 onwards Barrès campaigned for the restitution of the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, both in the press and in his novels Au service de l'Allemagne (1905) and Colette Baudoche (1908). In 1906 he was returned to the Chamber, where he was to remain until his death. His main themes were Alsace-Lorraine, the defence of the Church against anticlerical policies, and the preservation of France's neglected churches.

Barrès's attitude to religion was complex; a fascination for the mystical, particularly in its least orthodox manifestations, was coupled with an appreciation of the Church as a continuity within the French tradition and as a force for order within society; and yet he remained an agnostic. These often conflicting attitudes were reflected in his novel La Colline inspirée (1913), a study of the brothers Baillard, the Vintrasian heretics who had set up their cult on the hill of Sion-Vaudémont in Lorraine.

Throughout World War I Barrès wrote a daily article for L' Écho de Paris and was a leading patriotic contributor to France's war propaganda. In 1922 his novel Un jardin sur l'Oronte, an oriental love-tale, aroused a furore. The public had been accustomed to a political writer; the Church had begun to regard him as an apologist. Barrès, whose aim was here purely literary, became aware, under attack, that a ‘committed’ writer is condemned to being perpetually judged on ‘committed’ criteria.

In December 1923 Barrès died suddenly of a heart attack. The posthumous publication of his Cahiers, from 1929 onwards, revealed a far more complex and sensitive figure than had appeared from the published works of his heyday. Barrès was a man of contradictions: a fin-de-siècle aesthete thrust into the political arena; a simplistic political apologist whose bases for belief were highly complex; a proponent of discipline who was fascinated by the unorthodox. This heady mixture made of him the exciting and influential figure that he remains. [See Dada.]

[Richard Griffiths]

Bibliography

• Z. Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (1972)
• P. Ouston, The Imagination of Maurice Barrès (1974)

Quotes:

"The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does."