Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2011)
Action Française and culture : Life, Times and Legacy
Abstract
Review of: Olivier Dard, Michel Leymarie, Neil McWilliam (éds), Le maurrassisme et la culture. L’Action française. Culture, société, politique (III), Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2010. This book is the result of a collective work on the intellectual hegemony which the Action Française exercised in France in the interwar period. It studies some of the main actors who constructed Maurrassism, the stategies which allowed them to dominate French cultural life from the beginning of the 1920s to the end of World War II and their ideology. It shows how this ideology was disseminated in different fields, history, literature, music, etc. and how this plural approach contributed to the success of a movement whose aim was to disqualify the very idea of democracy.