Institut d'Action Française

The Institute of French Action (French: Institut d'Action Française) is a center of political education founded by the Action française. Modeled on precedents like the Institut Catholique and the École des Hautes Études, the Institute was created on the initiative of Léon de Montesquiou and established by Louis Dimier in Paris on February 1906.

History

At the dawn of the 20th century, the Action française noted that republican education, from primary to higher education, and in particular the teaching of history, had become a demolition project for the French nation. This observation led in 1906 to the creation of an Institute of French Action. For the historian Jacques Prévotat, this structure was a "sort of university created against the Encyclopedia and the official university," considered in the Almanachs of the Action française as a "counter-revolutionary institute of higher education". For Louis Dimier, "the teaching of which it is a question supposes the fundamental hostility, instructive and fertile hostility, between the intelligence and the Revolution". The institute is conceived as a school of the cadres.

The institute served a dual purpose: to attack the university symbols of the Third Republic, including the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, denounced by Henri Vaugeois, and above all the Sorbonne, and to attract the young people that Lucien Moreau federated into the French Action Students.

Closed briefly during the Great War, classes at the institute resumed regularly in 1919.

Organization

Originally, the institute was financed by Louise de Courville, a friend of Charles Maurras and the Barrès couple.

The Institut d'Action française was originally composed of seven chairs; others were subsequently added.

• The Rivarol chair, in the history of political ideas, was held by Louis Dimier
• The Frédéric Amouretti chair, in the history of international relations, was given to the young Jacques Bainville
• The Fustel de Coulanges chair, of national history, held by the historian Gustave Fagniez
• The Syllabus chair, for the teaching of the Syllabus of Errors, held by Dom Jean-Martial Besse
• The Auguste Comte chair, of positive politics, held by Léon de Montesquiou
• The Maurice Barrès chair, of French nationalism, held by Lucien Moreau
• The Sainte-Beuve chair, for organizational empiricism, was held by Charles Maurras
• The La Tour du Pin chair, of social economy, was held by Abbé Georges de Pascal
• The Louis le Grand chair, of French intelligence, created in 1908, was given to Pierre Lasserre

The courses

Access to the courses were free: all the students of the Parisian and provincial faculties as well as the free faculties could follow them without condition. They took place at No. 33, Saint-André-des-Arts street, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and were administered at the headquarters of the daily newspaper L'Action française, at No. 14, Rome street.

These courses focused on democratic ideas in order to better criticize and denounce them: the students of the institute studied the doctrine of the French Republic and the great men of the modern time. Courses were also taught on the study of laws, morals and the history of France.

Louis Dimier presented the counter-revolution as a work of the intelligence directed "to the destruction of what for a hundred years in France has been called the Revolution". In order to do this, Louis Dimier summoned the study of six themes and thirteen authors:

• The counter-revolution in politics: Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Antoine de Rivarol, Honoré de Balzac
• The counter-revolution in literature: Paul-Louis Courier, Sainte-Beuve
• The counter-revolution in the historical sciences: Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Fustel de Coulanges
• The counter-revolution in the social sciences: Frédéric Le Play, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
• The counter-revolution in art criticism: study of the Prix Goncourt
• The Catholic counter-revolution: Louis Veuillot

Some of the authors do not belong strictly to the counter-revolutionary register. Dimier preemptively refuted potential critics:

These masters are not all friendly people [...] Dare I say that we do not ask them for the love of them, nor with the aim of doing them honor, but for ourselves, for the solidity and the scope of a teaching of which they will have forged the necessary weapons. What we like is not the point; what is useful and strong, what cannot be distracted without historical lies, without detriment to counter-revolutionary criticism, that is what we take and we make our own.

Publications

The bulletins of the Cours de l'Institut d'Action française were published by the bookstore of Jean Rivain, son-in-law of Louise de Courville, then by the Nouvelle Librairie Nationale in which he participated.

Members

• Philippe Ariès
• Pierre Andreu
• Jacques Bainville
• André Bellessort
• René Benjamin
• Charles Benoist
• Georges Bernanos
• Jean-Martial Besse
• Pierre Biétry
• José le Boucher
• Hubert Bourgin
• Paul Bourget
• Eugène Cavaignac
• Jean Croué
• Léon Daudet
• Louis Dimier
• Roger Dumon
• Gustave Fagniez
• Bernard Frank
• Frantz Funck-Brentano
• Pierre Gaxotte
• Raoul Girardet
• Louis Gonnet
• Pierre Heinrich
• Jean Héritier
• Ernest Huan
• Georges Larpent
• Auguste Longnon
• Jean Longnon
• Charles Maurras
• Michel Mourre
• Léon de Montesquiou
• Lucien Moreau
• Marie de Roux
• Pauline Sériot

References

• Havard de La Montagne, Robert (1950). Histoire de l'Action Française. Paris: Amiot-Dumont.
• Osgood, Samuel M. (1970). French Royalism since 1870. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
• Prévotat, Jacques (2004). L'Action française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Richard, Gilles (2017). Histoire des Droites en France de 1815 à nos jours. Paris: Perrin.
• Sutton, Michael (1982). Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890-1914. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

External links

• Institut d'Action Française