Background
Maurice Barrès was born on August 19, 1862 in Charmes near Nancy, Vosges, France, and spent a happy childhood in a well-to-do family.
Barres was elected as a member of Academie Française in 1906.
(The Story of a Young Girl of Metz; This work has been sel...)
The Story of a Young Girl of Metz; This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
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1909
Maurice Barrès was born on August 19, 1862 in Charmes near Nancy, Vosges, France, and spent a happy childhood in a well-to-do family.
Barrès studied law at nearby Nancy, then at the age of nineteen moved to Paris, where he continued his legal studies.
In 1882 Barrès went to Paris and became involved in the literary life of the Latin Quarter and acquired a reputation as a rebel and dandy. He flaunted his egotism, while also expressing a profound desire for action, in his first trilogy, Le Culte du moi (Sous l'oeil des barbares, 1888, Under the Eye of the Barbarians; Un Homme libre, 1889, A Free Man; and Le Jardin de Bérénice, 1891, The Garden of Bérénice). The themes of exoticism and fascination with death and decay occur in these early works, as well as in some later ones, such as Du Sang, du volupté et de la mort, (1894, Of Blood, Pleasure, and Death), Greco ou le secret de Tolède (1911, Greco or the Secret of Toledo), and Jardin sur l'Oronte (1923, Garden on the Orontes).
Barrès made his political debut in 1889 as a successful Boulangist candidate for the Chamber of Deputies. Although presenting himself for election four more times after 1893, he did not reenter the Chamber until 1906, as deputy from the first arrondissement in Paris—a seat he held until his death.
In his second trilogy, Le Roman de l'energie national (Les Déracinés, 1897, The Uprooted; L'Appel au soldat, 1900, The Calling of the Soldier; and Leurs Figures, 1902, Their Faces), Barrès analyzes himself and his relation to Lorraine, the province of his birth. This examination leads his to believe that the individual, as well as the nation, is formed by the land and the dead. A rejection of the formative forces, and thus of identity, can only lead to disaster for both the individual and the collectivity. These novels serve as the literary expression of Barrès's espousal of nationalism as a political philosophy and as a guide to action.
Prior to 1906, Barrès, the leading anti-Dreyfusard intellectual, had been a vehement opponent of the parliamentary republic. After his reelection to the Chamber, he assumed a more moderate stance, viewing his proper role in politics as that of moral mentor.
Alsace-Lorraine was at the core of Barrès's political thought and literary activity. Before World War I he published two novels—Au Service de l'Allemagne (1905, In the Service of Germany) and Colette Baudoche (1909)— dealing with the dilemma facing people of French culture who chose to remain in the occupied territory. When the war broke out, he welcomed the conflict as the occasion for France's moral rejuvenation, and he devoted himself to propaganda sustaining morale on the home front. After 1918 he was one of the most prominent advocates of a strong Rhine policy and full implementation of the Treaty of Versailles. He died in December 1923 and was honored with a national funeral.
(The Story of a Young Girl of Metz; This work has been sel...)
1909(French Edition)
1922Barres was interested in occult mysticisms in his youth.
In later life, Barrès returned to the Catholic faith and was involved in a campaign to restore French church buildings and helped establish 24 June as a national day of remembrance for St. Joan of Arc.
In his youth, Barres was a passionate partisan of General Boulanger, becoming a Boulangist. But he moved to the right-wing during the Dreyfus Affair. He refused to become the Dreyfusard, when the Socialist leader Léon Blum tried to convince him to join, Barrès wrote several antisemitic pamphlets.
Barrès tried to stand up for his ideas attempting to bridge the divide between the far-left and the far-right, so that he established review La Cocarde (The Cockade).
Later Barrès became a leader of the Ligue de la Patrie française (League of the French Fatherland), before becoming a member of the Ligue des Patriotes (Patriot League) of Paul Déroulède. He was appointed as a leader of the Patriot League.
When Barrès was chosen as a deputy of the Seine in 1906, he blockaded the Entente républicaine démocratique conservative party. Two years later he was in the opposition of his friend and political opponent Jean Jaurès in Parliament, and refused the Socialist leader's will to Pantheonize the writer Émile Zola.
During World War I, Barrès was one of the supporters of the Union Sacrée. He himself did not always believe in his purported war optimism, being close to defeatism.
After World War I, Barrès was engaged to the irredentist forces in Luxembourg, and attempted to increase French influence in the Rhineland. On 24 June 1920 Barrès’s draft aiming to establish a national day in remembrance of Joan of Arc was adopted by the National Assembly.
Barrès is considered as one of the main thinkers of ethnic nationalism at the turn of the century in France, associated with Revanchism. Barrès considered the 'Nation' (which he used to replace the 'People') as already historically founded: it did not need a "general will" to establish itself. He considered the Nation to be a multiplicity of local allegiances, first to the family, the village, the region, and ultimately to the nation-state. According to Barrès, the People is not founded by an act of autonomy, but find its origins in the earth (le sol), history (institutions, life and material conditions) and traditions and inheritance ("the dead"). His early individualism was quickly superated by an organicist theory of the social link, in which "the individual is nothing, society is everything".
Through symbol and allegory Barres’s works celebrate traditional, even archaic, cultural values of the French nation and its distinct regions. In his active life as a politician, these native cultural values became the rationale for Barres to support the exclusion of foreign ideas and influences from France. Many modern critics, in fact, believe that Barres’s novels, where they exhibit xenophobia, racial animosity, and an exaggerated nationalism, belong to that component of French culture and politics that was sympathetic to the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
Quotations:
"The reader collaborates with the author in every book", or "The reader is co-author in every book" (Tout livre a pour collaborateur son lecteur)
"The individual is nothing, society is everything" (L'individu n'est rien, la société est tout).
"Reality, it cannot be repeated too often, varies with every one of us. "
"There is no reality for me but pure thought. Minds alone are interesting. "
"A strange rage this modern mania to give a common manner to all minds and to destroy individuality. "
"Young men in meetings put in common nothing but their mediocrity. "
"What distinguishes an argument from a play upon words, is that the latter cannot be translated."
Barres acquired a reputation as a rebel and dandy.
Quotes from others about the person
“Barres possesses the dangerous and penetrating weapon of style. His supple language, at once precise and elusive, has wonderful resources at its disposal.” - Anatole France
Barrès married Paule Couche. The couple had a son Philippe Barrès.