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Le Figaro: "Castelnau, le maréchal escamoté, by Jean-Louis Thiériot: a discreet hero and a lucid conservative".
THE CHRONICLE OF JACQUES DE SAINT-VICTOR : The essayist evokes the military and political destiny of this Catholic right-winger, who was three times deprived of the Marshal's baton.
General de Castelnau. www.bridgemanimages.com/Bridgeman Images
Is God right-wing? was the ironic question asked of General de Castelnau during the Popular Front. At the head of a powerful National Catholic Federation (FNC), created in 1924, he had forced the Cartel des gauches to abandon plans to extend the 1905 law to Alsace-Moselle. Since then, this " booted Capuchin ", as his opponents call him, has been the subject of caricature after caricature.
With this new biography, Jean-Louis Thiériot reveals a little-known model of a conservative who was opposed to the Front Populaire, but who never wavered on the essentials, namely racism and anti-Semitism, precisely because of his Christian values. Born in Rouergue in 1851, this descendant of an old, penniless sword nobility and hero of the Battle of the Marne was never able to attain the dignity of Marshal of France due to political pettiness. This right-wing man remained faithful to his youthful ideas right up to his death, and never gave in either to the siren calls of the neo-Monarchism of Action Française, which tried in vain to recapture him, or to the illusions of Marshal Pétain's "national revolution", which, with its cult of the "return to earth", seduced so many notables like Henry Bordeaux.
Despite his distrust of the Republic, which continued to put so many obstacles in his way, Castelnau, who came from a family that had given several children to Condé's army, never wavered. Unravelling the mystery of this lucid conservatism makes for fascinating and highly instructive reading. A tenuous clue emerges from these pages. Part of the fatalism of the Petainist right in 1940 was nourished by "providentialism", which goes back to Bossuet and was revived by Joseph de Maistre. Castelnau is not part of this tradition, which sees defeat as divine retribution. A whole forgotten current of thought is emerging, from the first counter-revolutionaries of 1789 - before Maistre and Bonald - to Cochin and social Catholicism, which, while conservative, distances itself from the providentialism and scientistic, positivist dogmatism of Maurras and his anti-Semitism. And it was probably this rediscovered tradition that kept Castelnau on course.
" General de la jésuitière
The man whom the author describes as a "discreet hero", "a type of man that is hard to imagine today", far from the morgue of a Pétain (even if, like him, he was stingy with the blood of his men), first made his mark on the battlefield. We'll leave it to specialists in military history to discuss his strategic finesse. Thiériot is a specialist in these matters, which is fitting since he is now Minister Delegate to the Minister of the Armed Forces. What will be remembered above all is the general's political action after 1918, when he sought to reconcile the " two France's ".
Elected to the Horizon Blue Chamber, he used the solidarity of the trenches, where those who believed in heaven mingled with those who didn't, to calm the prevailing anticlericalism. A close friend of Pius XI, he encouraged the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the Holy See, which had been severed since 1905. Unfortunately, in 1924, the Cartel des gauches revived the " secular question " by proposing to extend the law of separation to Alsace-Moselle. At the head of his FNC, Castelnau organized huge demonstrations across France, using methods far more modern than those of the trade unions. He succeeded in getting the Cartel to back down. Unclear about Mussolini, and later Franco, in his early days, he pulled himself together in 1937, purged the FNC of radical elements (such as Xavier Vallat), and vigorously opposed Hitler in the press.
He did not allow himself to be distracted either by pacifist rhetoric or by the anti-communism of a bourgeoisie that then proclaimed "rather Hitler than Blum". He could have become a Gaullist, but, recalls Thiériot, there were too many differences in style and character. He didn't have the same vision of man, nor the same taste for "grandstanding". More humbly, during the war he drew closer to Cardinal Saliège, who in 1942 vigorously condemned the deportation of Jews. Castelnau died too soon, in March 1944, to reap the benefits of his foresight. In short, the "General de la Jésuitière" was a leading figure in French conservatism, which has now been forgotten or complacently confused with Maurrassism.
Castelnau, le maréchal escamoté 1851-1944, by Jean-Louis Thiériot, Tallandier, 446 p., €23.50. Tallandier
