Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras (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, corporatist and counter-revolutionary. Maurras also held anti-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-liberal, anti-Masonic, anti-Nazi, anti-Protestant and antisemitic views. His ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and integral nationalism, and led to the political doctrine of Maurrassisme.
. . .As a political theorist and major right-wing intellectual of 20th-century Europe, Maurras significantly influenced right-wing and far-right ideologies, anticipating some of the ideas of fascism. He has been described as the most important French conservative intellectual, and has directly influenced a large number of politicians, theorists, and writers on both the left and right
. . .Maurras' legacy has remained controversial to this day. Critics have derided him as a "fascist icon", while supporters, including Georges Pompidou, have praised him as a prophet. Others, including Macron, have taken a nuanced approach, with Macron stating: "I fight all the antisemitic ideas of Maurras, but I find it absurd to say that Maurras must no longer exist."
Thomas Steven Molnar (26 July 1921, in Budapest, Hungary – 20 July 2010, in Richmond, Virginia) was a Catholic philosopher, historian and political theorist.
An excerpt from, "Charles Maurras, Shaper of an Age" By Thomas Molnar:
There are serious obstacles in our way when we try to acquaint America with the personality, the role, and the thought of Charles Maurras (1868-1952). One of these obstacles is that American scholars and their academic endeavors have been mostly shaped by the Germanic spirit, with here and there a representative of Latinitas, a Santayana, or a Maritain. The French university system is far from their accustomed mode of thought, and the French model of schooling is more distant still. The works of Maurras have therefore been little translated, hardly discussed (this would be today politically incorrect), let alone read on any academic level. The fact, too, that T.S. Eliot was a great admirer of Maurras does not help, and even diminishes the French thinker in the eyes of American critics.
There are other reasons, too, for the wide gap. Maurras is the quintessential antidemocratic thinker, and “pluralism” would mean for him the coexistence of several closed worlds, “republics” under the unifying monarchy. Or they would be “minorities” as we would call them: Protestants, Freemasons, Jews, and foreigners. These almost self-contained "republics," these four riders of the Apocalypse, penetrated France as alien elements, and, with modernity coming, corroded the autochthonous substance. They would be “republics under the king,” an ideal image in need of a great deal of political architecture. For Maurras the State (politics) cannot be separated from the classical (aesthetic) canons.’
At this point we are at the heart of Maurrassian doctrine, at the farthest pole from Anglo-Saxon premises: a Mediterranean worldview in which Greeks and Latins commune. The State is a work of art (Aristotle balancing Plato in neverending tension), an orderly and just arrangement, built for permanence, an ideal. It is far, unbridgeably far, from pragmatic politics, the duel of lobbies, voting procedures, responses to polls, authorized flag-burning. The classical spirit is everywhere present in Maurrassian literature, even in his full name: Charles-Marie-Photius, the last-mentioned from the sixth-century Greek merchant discoverer of Marseille, metropolis of the Midi, not far from Maurras’s birthplace. The Greek ideal accompanied him to the end as the sign of perfection, peak-achievement, reference, and a kind of inner clock.