Henri Massis (21 March 1886 – 16 April 1970) was a French conservative essayist, literary critic and literary historian.
. . .Massis converted to Catholicism in 1913 and, following World War I, called for a revival of the French spirit and Catholicism; from early on, he was a follower of Charles Maurras and the Action Française. From 1920 he served as editor of the newly formed Revue Universelle, a magazine closely associated with Action Française which worked to spread Christian political philosophy.
. . .Massis' political writings expressed his concerns over what he viewed as threats to post-World War I French society, including Bolshevism and Oriental mysticism. Together with Robert Brasillach he wrote Les Cadets de l'Alcazar (1936; in English as The Cadets of the Alcazar, 1937), where he expressed support of General Franco and the Nationalists in the ongoing Spanish Civil War. He visited Portugal in 1938, expressing admiration for the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar. In 1939, Chefs ("Chiefs"), a collection of interviews with Franco, Salazar and Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy, was published. However, Massis condemned Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany, as he shared the Germanophobe views of the Action Française.
On 23 January 1941, Massis was made a member of the National Council (parliament) of Vichy France. He was also decorated with the Order of the Francisque. While involved in the Vichy Government during World War II, Massis refused to collaborate with the Nazis. After the war, he was arrested and imprisoned in Fresnes Prison in December 1944. After being released after only one month in January 1945, he went on to work as an editor for Plon. He devoted himself to biographical studies of Ernest Renan, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and António de Oliveira Salazar. Still a follower of the integralist and nationalist philosophy of the Action Française after the war, his writings from this period reflect his continued disdain of Nazism in Germany and Bolshevism in the Soviet Union.
An excerpt from, "Defence of the West" by Henri Massis, Translated by F. S. Flint, Faber & Gwyer, 1928, Pg. 1-2:
The future of Western civilisation, indeed the future of mankind, is to-day in jeopardy. This is no imaginary peril, none of those dark forebodings that weak minds love to dwell upon, to feed and nourish their fearful distaste for all effort. There is no worse moral collapse, no more degrading misfortune for a people, than to yield to these nameless fears, to this terror of the future which betray only the disorder of minds anxious and defeated in advance.
Therefore, all those who are seeking to change us, to put a different bent on us, to turn us into other paths, never cease to prophesy our death throes, to appeal to our agonies, to call our culture in question, to throw doubt upon the worth of our possessions, in order finally to ruin our humanity in its principles. These prophets of disaster, the conspiracy of whose voices clashes over the mangled body of Europe — it is against their designs that we have first of all to defend ourselves. The sole certain outcome of such propaganda, which is aimed far more at the overthrow of the order of the world than at its determination, can only be to make uneasiness universal and renunciation possible, to sap resistance and to darken counsel, to cause us to lose sight of the rules of preservation and to neglect the measures vital to our recovery.
But in refusing to give way to this fatal disorder, in which the individual recoils before the effort necessary to defend himself, we do not any the less appreciate the mortal danger overhanging Europe. There is no man of sense, no thinking man heedful of the future, who does not feel both the tragic greatness of the danger, and the stern need to serve in order to survive. These are no vague conjectures: the facts are ‘ clear and pitiless ’, and things have left us no choice. The series of events, as an outcome of which Western civilisation runs the risk of being engulfed or of falling into servitude, can be understood by everybody: they ‘are in the newspapers'.
An excerpt from, "Defending the West: The Cultural and Generational Politics of Henri Massis" By Paul Mazgaj, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Spring 1991:
Just before the First World War, Henri Massis, in the words of one commentator, "throbbed with the ill-concealed ambition of becoming a leader of youth and a spiritual guide." This ambition was largely realized when Massis, still in his twenties, teamed up with Alfred de Tarde to become "Agathon," pseudonymous author of two enormously influential prewar studies that examined, successively, the "New Sorbonne" and the "generation of 1912. These two early efforts earned Massis- the more precocious side of Agathon- a repuatation as an important cultural critic and a purveyor of generational sensibilities.
Historical interest in Massis has taken several distinct turns. Until about 1970 historians, focusing almost exclusively on his coauthorship of the study of the generation of 1912, tended to view Massis as an articulate witness of the shift in generational attitudes purported to have occurred before the outbreak of the war. In fact, Massis and de Tarde provided much of the evidence for the familiar image of the prewar generation as increasingly nationalist and Catholic, enchanted by a mystique of energy and activism, and in open revolt against its cosmopolitan, skeptical, and lethargic elders.
Then, starting about 1970, certain historians began to look critically at Agathon's claim to speak for the generation of 1912. At best, these historians concluded, Agathon spoke for a small, lycee-educated, exclusively male and bourgeois elite. His credibility as a generational witness called into question, Massis seemed destined to melt into that great undifferentiated mass of nationalist polemicists, so prominent in the middle and late Third Republic, yet so uninteresting to the post-1945 imagination.
Yet another turn came in 1979 with the publication of Robert Wohl's Generation of 1914, where Massis resurfaced as a central figure. Though Wohl agreed with earlier critics that Massis's claim to represent French youth must be highly qualified, he went on to suggest that Massis's importance should not stand or fall with his credibility as a generational witness. As Massis had candidly admitted, his ambition was not so much to record generational change but to help promote it. Thus, Agathon's profile of the prewar generation was, in Wohl's rendering, "an act of cultural politics, not an effort at objective reportage." And, one might add, a highly successful act of cultural politics, given the fact that only recently have historians begun to challenge Agathon's portrait of the prewar French generation.
According to Wohl, however, Massis's significance went beyond his talent as a generational portraitist. His generationalist writings were some of the earliest and most complete articulations of what was to become a pan-European and remarkably potent language of cultural politics. Protean enough to include figures as diverse as Ortega y Gasset and the young Mussolini, this language, nevertheless, converged on a simple set of dialectically-related oppositions: age and decadence versus youth and renewal.
On the one side stood the symptoms of decline, which, taken together, constituted a veritable "crisis of civilization." They included a rampant commercialism and materialism disguised as progress, a sterile positivism claiming the mantle of scientific achievement, and a precipitous decline of cultural and educational standards parading under the banner of democracy. All, however, was not lost, for a new generation stood in the wings preparing to assume the tasks of regeneration. Against the reigning materialism, it would pursue cultural renewal; in the face of a narrow scienlism, it would reclaim larger spiritual and philosophical projects; and against the evermore numerous masses, it would reassert the rule of quality over quantity and reassume the burdens of elite leadership.
