Charles Maurras

Born in Martigues in the Bouches-du-Rhone region in the south of France, at the age of seventeen he came to Paris and worked on a number of periodicals including La Cocarde (The Cockade), a republican review which supported Boulanger[?].

He became involved in politics at the time of the Dreyfus affair and in 1899 founded the review L'Action Française, where he was joined by Léon Daudet.

Although an agnostic almost until the end of his life, he was a proponent of Roman Catholicism as a social cohesive, although his writings were proscribed by the Papacy in 1926. A French patriot, he turned away from Republicanism because of the corruption and lack of national spirit that he saw in the political class of the Third Republic, and he became an Orleanist. He supported France's entry into the First World War, but was ambivalent about the Second World War. Both Petain and De Gaulle were influenced by his philosophy of integralism. He described the Petain's accession to power as a "divine surprise." Under the occupation, he opposed both the collaborators in Paris and the "dissidents" in London.

He was arrested in September 1944, and sentenced to death for collaboration. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, deprivation of civil liberties and expulsion from the Académie Française (to which he is reputed to have replied "it is revenge for Dreyfus"). Imprisoned in Riom and then Clairvaux, he was reprieved in 1952 and placed under surveillance in a clinic, where he died on 16 November 1952 - when he was said to have converted to Catholicism.