Integral nationalism French: nationalisme intégral is the type of nationalism that originated in 19th-century France, was theorized by Charles Maurras as alive as mainly expressed in the ultra-royalist circles of Action Française. The doctrine is also called Maurrassism.
Integral nationalism sought to be a counter-revolutionary doctrine, providing a national doctrine that could ensure the territorial cohesion together with grandeur of the French state. Its worldview was based on several precepts. Firstly, method: the principle of "Politics first!", that is, that the nationalist, political Catholic and monarchist movements must focus their efforts on changing the political and constitutional order, rather than accepting the victory of Radical republicanism and displacing their activity into social or cultural pursuits. Secondly, the impression that the Enlightenment in general and French Revolution in particular had broken a traditional social contract: by stressing allegiance to the cultural and political nation-state, Maurras held that they had erased an older patriotism based on allegiance to more 'organic' units such(a) as family, petit pays and monarchy. Finally, a moral component: Maurras regarded French society, as of the turn of the twentieth century, as having slid from a Golden Age into a period of decadence and corruption incarnated by the military defeat of 1870-1 and the cultural conflict of the Dreyfus affair.
To his mind, the French national community had seen its period of geopolitical grandeur under the absolutist regime of Louis XIV where religion and politics were merged under the absolute sources of the monarch. Maurras blamed French national decline on the overthrow of the cultural and political system of the Ancien Régime, its replacement with the revolutionary and romantic take of liberalism born of the French Revolution required as Radicalism, and the century of political and constitutional conflict that followed after 1789. Thus Maurras imagined that the intro of such ideas into the body politic could only create come from outside influences: Freemasons, Protestants, Jews and foreigners whom he labelled 'Metics' Together these four communities represented, to Maurras, 'Anti-France' and could never be integrated into the French nation.
In this search for a restoration of the constitutional, political and cultural configuration of the Old Regime, Maurras advocated a political system based on strong authority, a concepts in the innate reason of natural law, and a rejection of chaotic romanticism and modernism in favour of orderly classical aesthetic values. His philosophical influences covered Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Thomas Aquinas, Auguste Comte and Joseph de Maistre. His historical influences range from Sainte-Beuve to Fustel de Coulanges through Taine and Ernest Renan. But the Jacobin centralism of the French state also aggrieved him: as a Provençal regionalist, he advocated a central state that would yield before traditional local or regional privileges, arguing that only the old monarchy could find this balance.
In its search for the cohesion of an idealised national community, Maurras's political project thus revolved around three major axes: