Maurrassisme in Argentina is a far-right political movement aimed at establishing an integral nationalist authoritarian state in Argentina following the ideology of French thinker Charles Maurras.
Maurrassisme was, along with panhispanism, the most important ideological precedent of the development of nacionalismo. Acknowledging the lack of monarchist claims over the country, most of Argentine maurrassistes supported an authoritarian and anti-liberal traditionalist state similar to the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas over the 19th-century Argentine Confederation.
Except for extremely rare cases, Latin American maurrassistes were intransigent defenders of the Catholic Church as the official and only religion of Hispanic peoples. After Maurras was condemned by the Holy See, many relevant figures of early Argentine maurrassisme would drift towards Catholic integralism, what has been pointed out as evidence of the importance held by religion within the movement. Argentine thinkers identified the maurrasian with the Catholic and militarist identity of the nation, in contrast to the fictional created by secular politicians that promoted "marxist atheism". The views of Argentine maurrassisme may have influenced José Félix Uriburu religious policies.
Schools Aside from strictly orthodox maurrassistes and those who can not be classified in any particular tradition, the Argentine variant of the movement can be roughly divided in two main schools or "genealogies" which adapted Maurras' ideas to the country's context using different selective readings.
Traditionalist school
The first of them was the "traditionalist" (Spanish: Tradicionalista), which was based on Maurras' most integralist views and aimed at organizing the whole of society on Catholic standards. Believing Roman Catholicism to be "the only and true religion", traditionalists wanted to build a theocratic state in which all spheres of public life were subordinated to religion. Particularly emphatic of maurrasian historiography, the movement stressed the decadence of the western civilization since the Reformation, a situation aggravated by the advent of the French and Russian revolutions. Staunch defenders of elitism and hierarchy, traditionalists did not accept any form of popular participation in the government and considered Catholicism to be utterly incompatible with any of the political developments of liberalism. Started by writers and , the movement's emphasis in Maurras grew stronger after the papal ban on Action Française was lifted in 1939 and the author's conversion to Catholicism was made public. The second generation of traditionalism was impulsed by Catholic priest Mario Pinto, who considered Maurras "a guardian of the highest values of Christian civilization".
The traditionalist trend attempted to reconcile maurrasianism with Neo-Thomism. Pinto associated both methods by describing the "classical spirit of order" they shared and appealing to Henri Massis' analysis of Maurras in Maurras et notre temps, while most cautious Catholic figures such as Julio Meinvielle vindicated the maurrasian body of thought but subordinated it to Thomistic doctrine, considering the former to be incomplete. Other thinkers defended Maurras as an "ally" to Catholicism in combatting liberalism and socialism, and adopted his thought as a "third alternative" to the two poles of the Cold War. Cordoban publication La Nueva Provincia, closely related to Thomas Molnar, defended such ideological system as "the most brilliant synthesis of traditionalist ideas in what has passed of this century". Traditionalist maurrassisme saw its popularity peak in the 1960s-1970s decades, as the papal ban had diminished its relevance in the interwar period.
Populist school
The second school was the "populist" (Spanish: Populista), which vindicated Maurras' far-right nationalism and attempted to associate it to peronism. Despite most populist maurrassistes were Catholics, the role of religion was not as central as that of the nation, what has led to them being described as "better maurrasians" than the traditionalists. Their favourable views towards the populace and their lack of an idealized past, however, has been criticised as a significant ideological revision of the original system of thought. One of the most important exponents of the populist movement was Jacques-Marie de Mahieu, a post-war French exile in Argentina who, after drawing most of his political formation from Action Française during his youth, tried to expand his ideas at his new country while working as a professor at the National University of Cuyo. De Mahieu was close to the national-syndicalist Tacuara Nationalist Movement, in which he developed a conflictive relationship with traditionalist Julio Meinvielle, who considered him to be a communist.
De Mahieu wrote the prologue to the Prisoner's Soliloquy, Maurras' first published work in Argentina, in which he praised his figure as a theorist of "national revolutions" who could be useful to the development of peronism. Populist maurrassistes would eagerly embrace maurrasian national syndicalism, a trend mostly related to the Cercle Proudhon which attempted to fuse Maurras' reactionary criticism of modern capitalism with the ideas of Marxist Georges Sorel in order to create a third position between "liberal bourgeois individualism" and the "state collectivism of materialist socialism". De Mahieu considered Sorel a great complement to Maurras' ambiguous approach to the "proletarian problem": the synthesis of far-left and far-right criticisms of modern society was presented as a legitimation of Perón's third positionism, which could be supposedly traced back to René de la Tour du Pin economic views. In his article "The contemporary counter-encyclopedia: Maurras and Sorel", De Mahieu defended maurrasian economics as a way towards the development of a "national socialism".
First introducers As in other Latin American nations, maurrassisme was initially introduced into Argentina by upper-middle class students who were ideologically influenced by the movement's political elitism during their studies in Europe, particularly due to the widespread availability of Maurras' works in France. Such ideas had made their first appearance in Argentina in relation to the Dreyfus affair, but would not boom until the end of World War I, when the whole continent was experiencing the deep cultural changes associated with the abandonment of the liberal economic model and the emergence of cultural nationalism over elitist cosmopolitanism. The development of the movement was also fostered by the process of re-Catholicisation of Latin American intellectual elites after a century of dominant anti-clericalism.
Maurrasian thought was brought to Argentina firstly through the figures of Juan Emiliano Carulla and of Alfonso de Laferrère. Among the first Argentines to come in contact with Maurras' works, Carulla would serve as director to the first nacionalista magazine of the country, La Voz Nacional, and later found his own press media, Bandera Argentina. He would later forsake maurrassisme and nationalism, embracing regular Argentine conservatism and adopting a pro-American stance. Unlike most Argentine followers of the French thinker, Carulla was favourable to monarchism in the 1930s decade. De Laferrère, who considered himself an "orthodox maurrassiste", would be central in the conversion to the movement of his younger brother Roberto, who would play an important role in the latter years of the movement.
Alfonso had been a staunch supporter of the Allied Powers during World War I, and had experienced his first ventures into journalism as a harsh critic of Hipólito Yrigoyen's radical government. After travelling to Europe in 1920, he would develop an active interest in Maurras' thought, whom he would consider "his master", and commit to propagate his ideas among the Argentine nationalist right. In 1923, De Laferrère founded the Política magazine along with Julio Noé, in which, aside from attempted literary criticisms, he vindicated Maurras' integral nationalism for "his monarchist doctrine of unsurpassed vigor", "his criticism of romanticism, developed with surprising dialectical virtue" and "his classical conception of the City and of Beauty". The young thinker also railed against the figure of John Maynard Keynes, in whom he saw a "disastrous apostle of the primacy of the economic and political". Alfonso renounced his pro-Allied position during the interwar period and ranted against Woodrow Wilson whom, due to his "evangelical and kantian education", had supposedly planned an excessively idealistic solution to World War I and paved the way for a "repetition of the tragedy". Maurrasian influence made De Laferrère follow a positivist comtean approach to politics over an idealistic one, espouse a contempt for economic interests despite defending private property, denounce the irrational character of romanticism in favor of classicism, defend outward anglophobic and germanophobic views, and criticize the Treaty of Versailles.
Two of the most relevant introducers of maurrassisme in Argentina were brothers Rodolfo and Julio Irazusta. After a four-years trip to Europe in which they lived at Spain, Italy and France, they came into contact with Maurras and were fascinated with his system of thought. Previously followers of radicalism and supporters of the Radical Civic Union, the impact of Maurras in their political formation was extensive. Julio would write numerous articles in praise of the French author on Argentine press media, considering him to be the restorer of the "eternal truths of politics" and the "most extraordinary journalist of all ages and places". Nevertheless, Irazusta did not follow Maurras' royalist ideals integrally, but aimed to adapt them to Argentina through the method of analysis devised by the philosopher. In 1952, after Maurras' death, Julio wrote an article vindicating his figure as "the first of citizens of his time" and organized a commemorative in memoriam event in 1972, to which renowned intellectual and political figures such as Julio Meinvielle or attended. Julio Irazusta was favorable to a monarchical form of government, while Rodolfo supported a non-democratic republicanism based on corporatist principles. Opposing the "republic" to ochlocratic democracy (similarly to the aristotelian view of politics), Rodolfo Irazusta would claim that "the Argentine state is Catholic in its origin and its constitution. Democracy is by nature anti-Catholic. Democracy is incompatible with argentine institutions". Latter Argentine maurrassistes would promote an illiberal republic, supposedly based on classical politics expressed in Cicero's De Re Publica, using as a motto that "democracy is not in the constitution".
Decades later, Irazusta would translate to Spanish Mes idées politiques and L'Avenir de l'intelligence and publish them in Argentina in 1962 and 1965.
Early media and thought
La Nueva República
Back to Argentina in 1927, the Irazusta brothers founded the () newspaper, of which renowned figures of right-wing Argentine nationalism such as Ernesto Palacio, Tomás Darío Casares or Juan Emiliano Carulla himself would become frequent writers. Staunchly anti-liberal, the publication served as a means for Argentine far-right intellectuals to come into contact with Spanish Catholic intellectual and diplomat Ramiro de Maeztu, who was staying in the country during his term as ambassador at Buenos Aires of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. La Nueva República finished its activities in 1931, after president Hipólito Yrigoyen was overthrown by a military coup d'état.