ABSTRACT
Theodore Zeldin has recently remarked that the division of France along the traditional lines of left and right has served more to mask the truth about French politics than to illuminate it, and the instance of France's pre-war youth is perhaps a case in point. Maurras was given low marks among members of the young elite for his royalism, his religious agnosticism, and especially his positivism. Catholicism would seem to have embodied an anti-bourgeois mystique of its own for the younger generation, and while not entirely incompatible with other anti-liberal affiliations, neither was it ever quite comfortable with them. For Catholic faith, if engaged in unconditionally or perhaps better, "integrally", in the literal, non-partisan sense of the word, evidently represented for elite young intellectuals a self-complete antidote for bourgeois schizophrenia and self-hatred, a pure mystique through which they could satiate their anti-liberalism by placing the goal of spiritual perfection and authenticity above all other commitments.
