Ponderable Quote from The Future of the Intelligentsia and For a French Awakening by Charles Maurras

Before coming to a direct study of this solution, let us make sure that we are agreed on the evil that we are dealing with. Let us bear fully in mind a consciousness of the disaster. Popular government has been seen and recognised to be the direct and common cause of our dissolution. And not only parliamentary democracy but equally plebiscitary democracy. It is not a question of incriminating a vague electoral demagogy due to the perverse morality of men who wrongly interpreted a reform excellent in itself, it is a question of knowing that everything that leads to government of all by all, everything that claims to resemble it or encourages it, destroys the government and kills nations.

It is therefore not a question of renouncing the republic and transferring power to a single leader, this power should cease to be elected in order that it does not depend any longer on its powerless electors. But it should also cease to be surrounded by a horde of ambitious persons, rivals and eventual substitutes; it should govern for life. Longer than life: it should not be able to arouse any legal competition which would render the fate of France as uncertain as was that of the ancient Germans when their emperor was elected though the electors were only seven in number. At the death of the leader, everybody should shout: Long live the leader who has already been designated and announced? The leader whose successor is foreseen in this way is called the king.

But, you may stop us, you may say: Monarchy is dead'

What does one mean by that? These are words. An institution, a regime are not a gentleman or a lady one places in a coffin and who does not come out of it any more. No doubt there exists, in the store of doctrines, a system called 'organicism’, which maintains that peoples and governments are born, grow and die like vegetables and animals. This metaphor is the delight and profit of so many rhetoricians that one is hesitant and ashamed to deprive them of it. But no serious mind takes them seriously. When it is a question of a nation, a law, a collection of laws or customs, it is always possible to reconstitute one or two of them if one has at hand that which they are constituted of along with the plan according to which they are constituted.

Monarchy is dead! But something is not dead. It is the need that France has of monarchy to live. From that, it is enough that these materials exist, one can reconstitute the redeeming government, one will re-establish it as Augustus did in Rome long centuries after the departure of Tarquin, and General Monck in England hardly a few years after the execution of the Stuart.

In order that France become a kingdom once again, one requires:

First of all, a territory. Ravaged, ruined, razed, alas! ... But, finally, it is there; it did not drown in the waves.

One needs also a living people. Diminished, deceived, dragged from misery to misery. But it is still there, thank God! ...

Royalty supposes, moreover, a prime moral element which consists of two principles that are adhered to, alive and practised: orders and obedience.

* Reprinted from The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Awakening, Charle Maurras, translated with an introduction by Alexander Jacob, Arktos, 2016, pp.94-96