Action Française in the context of "Georges Sorel"

Integral nationalism (French: nationalisme intégral) is a type of nationalism that originated in 19th-century France, was theorized by Charles Maurras and mainly expressed in the ultra-royalist circles of the Action Française. Integral nationalism holds the nation as the highest absolute value to which all individual, class, and humanitarian interests are subordinated, with willpower prioritised over reason. The doctrine is also called Maurrassisme.

Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras (/mɔːˈrɑːs/; French: [ʃaʁl moʁas]; 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, medievalist, conservative, corporatist, integralist, nationalist, traditionalist, 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.

Raised Roman Catholic, Maurras went deaf and became an agnostic in his youth, but remained anti-secularist and politically supportive of the Catholic Church. An Orléanist, he began his career by writing literary criticism and became politically active as a leading anti-Dreyfusard. In 1926 Pope Pius XI issued a controversial papal condemnation of Action Française, which was swiftly repealed by Pope Pius XII in 1939. Maurras was elected to the Académie Française in 1938, and later expelled in 1945.

Social degeneration was a widely influential concept at the interface of the social and biological sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. During the 18th century, scientific thinkers including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans shared a common origin but had degenerated over time due to differences in climate. This theory provided an explanation of where humans came from and why some people appeared differently from others. In contrast, degenerationists in the 19th century feared that civilization might be in decline and that the causes of decline lay in biological change. These ideas derived from pre-scientific concepts of heredity ("hereditary taint") with Lamarckian emphasis on biological development through purpose and habit. Degeneration concepts were often associated with authoritarian political attitudes, including militarism and scientific racism, and a preoccupation with eugenics. The theory originated in racial concepts of ethnicity, recorded in the writings of such medical scientists as Johann Blumenbach and Robert Knox. From the 1850s, it became influential in psychiatry through the writings of Bénédict Morel, and in criminology with Cesare Lombroso. By the 1890s, in the work of Max Nordau and others, degeneration became a more general concept in social criticism. It also fed into the ideology of ethnic nationalism, attracting, among others, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and the Action Française. Alexis Carrel, a French Nobel Laureate in Medicine, cited national degeneration as a rationale for a eugenics programme in collaborationist Vichy France.

The meaning of degeneration was poorly defined, but can be described as an organism's change from a more complex to a simpler, less differentiated form, and is associated with 19th-century conceptions of biological devolution. In scientific usage, the term was reserved for changes occurring at a histological level – i.e. in body tissues. Although rejected by Charles Darwin, the theory's application to the social sciences was supported by some evolutionary biologists, most notably Ernst Haeckel and Ray Lankester. As the 19th century wore on, the increasing emphasis on degeneration reflected an anxious pessimism about the resilience of European civilization and its possible decline and collapse.

Orléanist (French: Orléaniste) was a 19th-century French political label originally used by those who supported a constitutional monarchy expressed by the House of Orléans. Due to the radical political changes that occurred during that century in France, four different phases of Orléanism can be identified:

• The "pure" Orléanism: constituted by those who supported the constitutional reign of Louis Philippe I (1830–1848) after the 1830 July Revolution, and who showed liberal and moderate ideas.
• The "fusionist" (or "unionist") Orléanism: the movement formed by pure Orléanists and by those Legitimists who after the childless death of Henri, Count of Chambord in 1883 endorsed Philippe, Count of Paris, grandson of Louis Philippe, as his successor. The fusion drove the Orleanist movement to more conservative stances, emphasising French nationality (rejecting claims to France of the Spanish Bourbons on account of their "foreignness") and Catholicism.
• The "progressive" Orléanism: the majority of "fusionists" who, after the decline of monarchist sentiment in the 1890s, joined into moderate republicans, who showed progressive and secular-minded goals, or into Catholic rally, like the Liberal Action.
• Contemporary Orléanism. The party Action Française embraced and still does advocate for its own variant of Orléanism which rejects the economic liberal policies of "pure" Orléanism and supports Integralism.

Orleanism was opposed by the two other monarchist trends: the more conservative Legitimism that was loyal to the eldest branch of the House of Bourbon after 1830, and the Bonapartism that supported Napoleon's legacy and heirs.

The Judeo-Masonic conspiracy is an antisemitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theory involving an alleged secret coalition of Jews and Freemasons. These theories are popular on the far-right, particularly in France, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Russia, Serbia, Eastern Europe, and Japan, with similar allegations still being published.

Georges Edmond Raoul Dumézil (French: [dymezil]; 4 March 1898 – 11 October 1986) was a French philologist, linguist, and religious studies scholar who specialized in comparative linguistics and mythology. He was a professor at Istanbul University, École pratique des hautes études and the Collège de France, and a member of the Académie Française. Dumézil is well known for his formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis on Proto-Indo-European mythology and society. His research has had a major influence on the fields of comparative mythology and Indo-European studies. In the 1930s he was a supporter (though not a formal member) of the far-right group Action Française, leading to criticism from left-wing scholars in the 1980s and afterwards.

The King's Camelots, officially the National Federation of the King's Camelots (French: Fédération nationale des Camelots du Roi) was a far-right youth organization of the French militant royalist and integralist movement Action Française active from 1908 to 1936. It is best known for taking part in many right-wing demonstrations in France in the 1920s and 1930s.