Jean Madiran

Jean Madiran (1920-2013)

The last disciple of Maurras

By Miguel Ayuso

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

Charles Maurras himself predicted it in one of his last public appearances. It was in 1944 when, before students of Action française, he extolled two young men as his continuators: Jean Ousset and Jean Arfel. The former was to found Cité Catholique some time later, which so much ink it would cause to be spent by the French press and which, thanks to Eugenio Vegas Latapie and Juan Vallet de Goytisolo would have a lasting passage to this side of the Pyrenees, While the latter, who would later adopt the nom de plume Jean Madiran, to his occupation of political chronicler would add that of professor at the school ran by André Charlier that was located at the chateau de Masslacq. Through it, along with Maurras, a second seminal reference would enter Madiran's intellectual biography: Charles Péguy, of whom André Charlier and his brother Henri, sculptor and writer, both of them converts, had part in his spirit. In this double heritage, and for the sake of inventory, made his own on the foundation of Christian philosophy is, in a nutshell, all the inspiration of Madiran's work

In 1956, he gives life to a journal, Itineraires, called to constitute itself in a geometric position of a combative Catholicism, against communism in accordance with the overriding necessity of the time, but no less against the anonymous and vagabond fortune, or against the modernist clericalism, which would forebode the iron times of the post-conciliar era. A monthly review, a hundred pages in length, with carefully written contributions but with no academic pretenses, which would last with such formula until 1989, and with lesser frequencies later, until its disappearance in 1996. A review of which he did not want to be the editor but only to inspire, since he had thought of putting it under the charge of André Fossard. Years later he admitted that this would have been an error, as Frossard quite soon fell into the comfortable side of power in the battles that devastated French Catholicism, even before the Council, but especially afterwards. While Madiran and Itineraires suffered not only ostracism but also a formal condemnation, an outrageous part, as usual, of the modern inquisition processes. Among its contributors, the Charlier brothers, the "peasant philosopher" Gustave Thibon, economist Louis Salleron, the Belgian philosophers Marcel de Corte and Charles de Koninck, Admiral Auphan, writers Jacques Perret, Henri Paurrat, Michel de Saint Pierre, and the Brasilian Gustavo Corçao, stand out. Later on, also historian Jean Dumont. And, from the ecclesiastical camp, Dominican Calmel, abbés Dulac and Berto, Benedictine Calvet, and Archbishop Lefebvre.

Thus, Itineraires placed itself on the austere road of criticism against -- what Madiran in one of his books called -- "the heresy of the twentieth century", and was ahead in combatting posterity, no matter that it should have been initiated before the Vatican II council. Particularly the "new mass", imposed violently on the entire Catholic world. Before Archbishop Lefebvre would start his struggle, the men at Itineraires had raised their voice. In 1988, in contrast, when Lefebvre, without a mandate -- or despite a prohibition -- from Rome, decided to go ahead and consecrate four bishops, Madiran refused to take a position, neither condemning nor approving the deed. Marcel Lefebvre and the Fraternity of Saint Pius X, naturally radicalized in very delicate moments, were not able to understand the reasons of him who -- again with Péguy -- proclaimed that "when there's an eclipse, we are all in the dark." They decided to boycott, and the journal bled to death for the defection of subscribers who seconded them. Madiran, to say the truth, did not persist in the battle beyond his own defense, and always maintained (and manifested) sympathy with the work of him who had been his friend. To the point that, when some years ago a documentary was filmed on the deceased prelate's life, Madiran had no qualms in recognizing ex-post-facto, that with such an action, Lefebvre had given solidity to the fraternity he had founded. Even when I am still not sure, to such master, such honor. Perhaps in this order of things, the most relevant may be his letter to Paul VI of 1972, where he pleaded: "Holy Father: Give us back the Holy Scripture, the Catechism, the Mass. We are being deprived of them ever more by virtue of a collegiate, despotic, and impious bureaucracy that intends, justly or not but nevertheless intends, without being contradicted, to impose itself in your name and in that of the Second Vatican Council."

In 1982, he adds a new one to said undertakings: That of giving life to the first "Catholic and national" newspaper in France after the end of the Second World War: Présent, which keeps on appearing five days a week, and in which Madiran -- turned into editor emeritus since 2007 -- would continue contributing frequently with editorial pieces and chronicles, up until a few weeks before his death. In the pages of the newspaper, even more than in those of the monthly review, his gifts as a writer of lineage have become evident. If the man is the style, still with greater reason is the writer. And Madiran had an admirable style; steely and elegant, direct and elevated. It has been said that if on the surface the intellectual appeared to dominate, in his manners the emotional would easily emerge, always hiding the spiritual. Not in vain was he a Benedictine oblate of the Provenzal abbey of Saint Mary Magdalene in Le Barroux, and a great friend of its founder and first abbot, Dom Gérard Calvet. Again Peguy's legacy, as Dom Gérard was a disciple of the Charlier brothers. It has been claimed -- and now comes the fame of Maurras -- that he was a polemicist. Thing that displeased him, claiming for himself the role of controversy cultivator, in which he sought not to defeat an enemy but to convert or at least unmask an adversary. That is why, far from making his adversaries' reasons disappear, he would weigh them, sift them, quote them and quote them again, with that admirable and efficient prose. It seems to me that Madiran ties directly in this respect with Louis Veuillot, the chief editor of L'Universe during a good portion of the second half of the nineteenth century, and whom Pius X proposed as a model for Catholic journalists. Veuillot wrote that "a newspaper is essentially a war machine". And Maridan would explicate it thus: "Veulliot was right, because it is not us who have willed the war, it is not us who have installed the political war in France, the school war, the religious war which for over a century is determined to de-christianize our nation and to eliminate the spiritual power of the Catholic Church." On the realm of the contingent, where the most human of virtues, prudence, is exercised, he opted to support the National Front. Not without reserves, not without exceptions. But I believe that also without duplicity or rancor. And, in general, without interfering in their quarrels. Just as he had previously supported Marshall Petain and his "national revolution." Optavi et datus est mihi sensus reads the book of Wisdom. Although, not all options are always wise...

His written work is abundant and, beyond his journalist contributions, since I have not always acceeded to Présent, I think I have read all of his books and most of his articles in Itineraires. They can be separated into three fields, that of political criticism, that of social philosophy, and that of religious chronicle. Even though it is not always possible to neatly trace the boundaries because they frequently overlap. This is why it turns out to be easier to unfold it in books that deal preferably with the city and others that that deal with the Church. Although, even here, it is not easy to find the safe tissue where to apply the scalpel.

With respect to the former, to begin with we find some of the works of his youth and, in particular, his book on the political philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1948), with a prologue by Maurras himself and still under a different pseudonym. Then, the writings opposing the proximity of some Catholic circles to Communism, with provocative titles: Ils ne savent pas ce qu'ils font and Ils ne savent pas ce qu'ils dissent (both of 1955). Starting with a book of 1959, with an similarly literary but also scriptural title, On ne se moque pas de Deus, which, in embrio, contains part of his analysis, he sagaciously develops the demarcation line of the right and left political categories (1977), turns to the differentiation between a classical democracy, a pure form of government, and a modern one which claims to be the foundation of all government (1978), and describes the process that had lead France from the "advanced" liberalism of Giscard to the socialism of Miterrand (1981). In the meanwhile, from 1966 is his essay on communism under the caption La vieillese du monde, which ends thus: "The object of the virtue of fortitude lies in living every day and giving daily witness. Because an iron energy is today necessary to resist, in thought and action, the clerical or profane pressures, anonymous, collective and irresponsible, that crush the consciences and colonize them". Which, obviously, do not apply to Communism only. But he will cover, always monographically, certain central issues of the social doctrine of the Church, such as social justice, (1961), the principle of totality (1963), the connection between doctrine and prudence, (1960) and, later, the "rights of the Godless man" (1988) and natural law (1995). Likewise on this side, his books on Maurras, (1966, 1992 and 2004) or Gilson (1992). I have left to the end his Une civilisation blessée au coer (2002), in which he turns into his central topic one of his constant concerns, that of understanding civilization in the perspective of pietas, destroyed in a world that rejects, aside from the first commandment, also the fourth, and from there, all the rest.

On the other hand, the contributions that came out of his pen are not lesser. They run, as the former, through his entire trajectory. So, the defense of the Catholic City (1962) fits to a great degree in this group. As sub-species historiae, his study on integrism starting off from Sodalitium pianum (1964). Although it is the denunciation of the heresy of the twentieth century and the demand to the Holy Father (1970 and 1974), referred to above, the ones that contain the greatest doctrinal charge and polemics. At a third moment, the discussion on the Council with Dominican Congar (1985) or the compilation of the texts produced around the bishop consecrations made by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988 (1990). He does not desist, however, from then on, as evidenced by his denunciation of the "Copernican revolution in the Church" (2002) or the "secularity in the Church" (2005), and the most thematically encircled works surrounding the "betrayal of the commissars" (2004), the history of the French Catechism (2005), the surrender of the Church to Communism (2007) or the history of the "forbidden Mass" (2007 and 2009). Still at ninety, he would glean chronicles of the pontificate of Benedict XVI (2010) and, a year later, he would provide the presses with a literary divertimento, Dialogues du Pavillon Bleu, a more platonic dialogue on the situation of the Church and of the world. 

With Jean Madiran, the militant Church abandons the last of the greats of the French traditional (or traditionalist) Catholicism. In Spain, Eugenio Vegas Latapie, who admired him so much, had an important part of Madiran's writings published in the Verbo review in the sixties. I have done nothing else in the same position during the last few years. As, from the different accents of Spanish traditionalism, it seemed necessary not to do without Péguy's "deep, necessary and obsessive voice" which he reverberated, the voice of religious piety, brotherly and patriotic, the voice of the intellectual and moral reform. Along with the voice of the political reform, which through Maurras, he also incarnated. And it is that, as Madiran wrote in one of the books of his youth, "the most precious realities are also the most fragile if they are not surrounded by institutions, if they are not provided with fortifications."