La monarchie imaginée: sur le royalisme dans l’idéologie de l’Action Française

This paper focus on the links between nationalism and royalism within the Action Française. By analyzing different angles of Maurras’ ideological construct of Monarchy, disowned by both the old royalists and the pretenders to the throne, we try to explain why this way of picturing the royalty was not a simple anachronistic nostalgia of times gone by. Following Brian Jenkins and Zeev Sternhell’s vision of a “populist-modern” rather than “elitist-reactionary” Action Française, this paper explains to what extent and through which channels monarchy became to this movement an increasingly symbolic choice to create an alternative national imagination against the Third Republic’s one. A conceptual tool, necessarily dynamic and creative, subordinate to the integral nationalism’s requirements