Assorted English-language War Articles of Maurice Barrès

Assorted English-language War Articles of Maurice Barrès

Author: Maurice Barrès

Year: 1918

Maurice Barrès was a nationalist and an anti-Semite, and therefore naturally an anti-Dreyfusard as well. He was born in Charmes-sur-Moselle on 17 August 1862. The son of an engineer, Barrès earned a law degree and was part of the literary milieu. In 1884, he published a review, Les Taches d'Encre. He was elected a Boulangist deputy from Nancy in 1889, and became famous for The Cult of the Ego, a book that contained his first three novels published between 1888 and 1891. Defeated in the legislative elections in 1893, he became director of the daily newspaper La Cocarde, where he denounced corrupt politicians associated with Jews, and deduced Dreyfus's guilt "by his race"! In 1897, Les Déracinés, the first volume of his trilogy Roman de l'énergie nationale, rejected the legacy of the Enlightenment, which had made a moron of France. According to Zeev Sternhell, it opened the path to anti-Dreyfusism." At the moment when the first review was under discussion, he viewed the possible freeing of the deportee as "a minor fact," and added: "if Dreyfus is more than a traitor, if he is a symbol, it is another affair: it is the Dreyfus Affair! Hold on!" He denounced the intellectuals as "simple