4 - Blondel and Maurras

Summary

Theologico-philosophical justification of Maurras's politics challenged by Blondel

Several months after the publication of the last article on Maurras in Etudes, Descoqs received a stinging rebuke from a leading member of the French Catholic lay intelligentsia, the philosopher Maurice Blondel. Such a type of apology for Maurras, said the latter, represented a radical deformation of Christianity and Catholicism.

Blondel, who was a prudent and pious Catholic as well as an active debater in the philosophical and theological circles that came to be seeny as constituting the Modernist movement, was professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Letters in Aix-en-Provence. The incumbency of this chair for the rest of his university career and the continued flocking of students and disciples to his home in Aix up to the time of his death some years after the end of the Second World War were to identify him, a native of Dijon, with the historic capital of Provence, a town that Maurras knew so well.

Blondel's first and perhaps most lasting claim to fame was his Sorbonne doctoral thesis, L'Action, which had provoked in university circles something of a sensation and indeed scandal when it appeared in 1893.