this direct conflict between the foreign policy of the Vatican and of the Action Française had become plainly apparent. Cardinal Ceretti during his term of office as Papal Nuncio in Paris had been lending his support, in pursuance of the Vatican's general efforts towards reconciliation in Europe, to the endeavours of M. Briand and of the Quai d'Orsay to reach a settlement which would be inspired by peaceful ideas. The Action Française soon recognised that the Papal Nuncio, with his great personal abilities as a diplomatist, enjoying unique opportunities in Paris for bringing the representatives of conflicting nations together, had become one of the most formidable adversaries of their own programme of revenge. What possible relations can there be between Germany and France,' said the publicists of the Action Française, day after day, 'except those of a fraudulent debtor with the creditor whom he is still trying to defraud?' And the policy of reconciliation, which was to culminate later in the agreement of Locarno, was utterly incompatible with all such claims. The Action Française has always been ruthless and unscrupulous in its methods against those who oppose it: and before long the newspaper openly denounced the Nuncio, and the Action Française propagandists began to employ the familiar methods of spreading personal calumnies concerning its enemies.

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These unprovoked attacks upon the Papal Nuncio were one of the contributory causes to the subsequent condemnation. They were indeed evidence of the effect upon certain French Catholics of the extraordinary personal ascendancy of M. Maurras and his teaching. Months afterwards, when the Pope virtually issued a formal condemnation of the Action Française in his speech to the Consistory on Dec. 20, 1926, the Action Française replied with its famous manifesto entitled Non Possumus. It was a remarkable document in many ways, showing the unbounded confidence of the leaders in their own mission to save France from the intrigues of all other politicians. It contained two parts, incorporating a separate statement prepared by the Catholic leaders of the movement, in distinction from M. Maurras and those who were not Catholics. And the Catholic leaders went even further than

M. Maurras and his friends in proclaiming their belief in their own infallibility:

'To lend ourselves to the suppression of the Action Française,' they declared, would be to commit a grave crime against the country, would risk leaving her defenceless. That is no subjective illusion on our part, it is a conviction strengthened by an unceasing experience, which is constantly confirmed by events. The Action Française is the only organised force capable of saving the country, the only one which is feared by the elements of disorder If that is not certain, nothing is certain.'

And they conclude by contending that to obey the Pope's commands would be tantamount to committing a crime against their country which could only be com pared to parricide.' 'The father who tells his son,' these Catholic leaders reply to the Pope with amazing effrontery, to kill his mother, or to allow her to be killed, which comes to the same thing, may be listened to with respect but he cannot be obeyed.'

A week later, the same attitude revealed itself in a no less striking form. Mgr Ceretti had left Paris and Mgr Maglione had succeeded him as Papal Nuncio, when the diplomatic corps in Paris had to call at the Elysée Palace on New Year's Day to present their customary compliments and good wishes for the new year to President Doumergue. The Papal Nuncio is traditionally the doyen of the diplomatic corps, and in that capacity he makes the brief formal speech on behalf of all his colleagues. On this occasion Mgr Maglione went slightly further than is usual on such occasions, by making a special reference to the efforts of France's Foreign Minister during the previous year to bring about reconciliation in Europe. The speech obviously could not have been made without obtaining in advance the general approval of the other Ambassadors and Ministers, and Mgr Maglione expressed what they all felt with his customary tact and distinction. His whole speech amounted to little more than the following passages:

'Be good enough to accept our good wishes,' said the Nuncio. 'They are sincere and cordial. They express to you with what sympathy and satisfaction we watch the efforts that France has accomplished for the pacification of

peoples. We are certain that your government will pursue this work, worthy of the traditions of your country, of its most noble soul and its generous heart. The complete confidence which we had in this has been further confirmed by the proposals which your Foreign Minister expounded, little more than three months ago, to the representatives of so many nations. No one can recall without emotion the speech which he then delivered. His words, so eloquent and so full of feeling, expressed the aspiration of the peoples towards that rapprochement and that brotherhood of the spirit which will enable them to heal their wounds and will lead them, by an entirely peaceful rivalry, towards always greater moral and economic and social progress.

In that beneficent work France can count upon the active and loyal collaboration of our governments, and in particular -if I may say so-of Him who has never ceased to plead, with the tenderness of a father and in the name of the Prince of peace, for the disarmament of minds. May God grant that soon and in all truth it may be possible to apply to the relations between the members of the great human family the words of the Sacred Scriptures which are joyfully recalled in our liturgy in these days: "Justice and Peace have embraced one another."'

It seems strange that any one should have found fault with a speech so formal yet so full of simple idealism, genuinely felt and nobly expressed. It was hailed with enthusiasm in the press of every country when it was published, and the Temps' and other newspapers in Paris noted with approval that for the first time the Vatican had made it plain without any reserve that it sympathised entirely with the policy which had culminated in the Locarno agreement. But the Action Française alone denounced it with vehement protests, and not because of its own immediate conflict with the Holy See, but deliberately in pursuance of its whole programme of foreign policy for France. It attached so much importance to the Nuncio's speech that it declined even to publish it on the following day, in order to have time for reflection upon its implications. Then, reproducing the speech, as all the other newspapers had done, it published an editorial article of great length denouncing the whole policy that it enunciated. This appeal for reconciliation, it argued, showed only too plainly that the Holy See had been misled into advocating

the old policy of 'pretended peace' which could only lead straight to another war. The path outlined by Mgr Maglione, it declared, was the same that had been followed in the past by Waldeck Rousseau, by Rouvier, by Loubet, by Fallières, by all those who have believed in this imbecile means to peace: disarmament which has resulted in attack and in invasion.' The Nuncio had 'given a moral approval to all that is most questionable and most dangerous in the policy followed by the Cartel, by the governments of Herriot, of Painlevé, and of Briand.' Their Franco-German policy had been 'canonised.' 'The dream of peace as Briand has expressed it,' declared M. Maurras, involves such an internal relaxation, such an enfeeblement, such a surrender of the military spirit, which IN FRANCE is the true spirit of peace, that the unfortunate or the contemptible people who would pursue it, would in a few years, perhaps in the few months, find themselves destined to another hecatomb.'

This bitter conflict between the pacific policy of the Vatican and the diehard jingoism of the Action Française could not be more clearly stated. There is no need to emphasise the importance, in relation to European politics, of the success which has followed upon the Papal condemnation of the movement. But the conflict on foreign policy was far from being the only reason why the Action Française was condemned. M. Maurras has contended throughout that he and his movement were being condemned solely for political reasons. Undoubtedly, the political reasons for desiring such a condemnation were very strong, and it is impossible to understand the history of the condemnation without giving full weight to them. But in fact the condemnation itself was entirely on non-political grounds. No formal condemnation of the foreign politics of the Action Française has ever taken place, or even been attempted. In regard to its royalist programme, the question has never even been raised. The condemnation itself was extremely simple and limited. Five books by M. Charles Maurras were placed upon the Index-several of them being books which were published many years ago, and were literary rather than political. The condemnation of the Action Française newspaper was a

different matter. It was placed on the Index as well, but not until it had adopted an attitude of constant and open defiance of the decisions of the Holy See, and after it had published the celebrated Non Possumus manifesto in reply to the Pope's address to the Consistory in December. Membership of the Action Française movement was afterwards prohibited, as a natural corollary of the condemnation, by explicit injunctions issued from Rome; but again on the ground that the Action Française was openly defying the Pope.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to note the reasons converging simultaneously upon the Holy See which eventually brought about the decision to act, before dealing with the actual teaching of M. Maurras and the extent of his very profound influence upon Catholic thought in France. One of the reasons for the condemnation was, obviously, this conflict between the Action Française and the Papal Nuncio in Paris. But there were other urgent causes for interference also. In Belgium it had suddenly been discovered, as the result of a sort of referendum taken among the students of the Catholic colleges, that M. Maurras obtained vastly more votes than any one else in a competition as to who should be regarded as the greatest living thinker. The Catholic professors became alarmed, and after an exhaustive inquiry had been organised it was found that they were almost unanimous in deploring the influence of M. Maurras upon their students. It was well known that M. Maurras had very narrowly escaped condemnation in Rome before the war when similar protests had been raised; and urgent appeals were made to the Holy See by the Belgian hierarchy in 1926, for a clear pronouncement in warning against his influence.

Both these influences coincided in Rome with most urgent appeals from France on other grounds as well. The same forces which had endeavoured to procure the condemnation of M. Maurras in 1913 became active again. His opponents insisted that his whole theory of politics made the Church subordinate to the State in such a way that if ever a conflict of allegiances should arise, it was to be feared that the Catholics who followed M. Maurras so devotedly would certainly obey his instructions rather than those of the Pope or of the French