Charles MAURRAS (1868-1952). 61 L.A.S., 1911-1939, to Henri Massis; 188 in-8 or in-4 pages (mostly on the letterhead of L'Action Française), mounted on tabs and bound in an in-4 blue half-maroquin volume with corners (Semet et Plumelle). Very fine and important correspondence to Henri Massis, one of Maurras' most faithful disciples, and his best biographer. We can only give a brief overview here. The letters open with religious and philosophical discussions... "My two masters, the old Aristotle and the young Comte, would have brooded over such a pure mechanist! [...] The doctrine you call mechanistic is precisely the only one today that rallies courage, unleashes virtues and gives birth to deeds. Its disciples are of the type of those heroic children who have been fighting for four years under the leadership of Pujo and his friends for Joan of Arc, against Bernstein or for the King [...] I am not one of those who take socialism or syndicalism for the party of the belly, even when they define themselves as such, but finally to class honor they associate a feeling of individual interest, which is not perceptible in the devotion of which I speak to you"... Maurras speaks of "the moral element [...] contributed by Action française over the last twelve or fourteen years to the awakening of French patriotism"... They discuss nationalism, Catholicism, heroism and more. Maurras talks about Abel Bonnard, Maurice Barrès, Pierre Varillon, Albert Thibaudet, Anatole de Monzie, and so on. He gives indications for the preparation and correction of his works and articles, especially Sous le signe de Flore. He announces his future projects: the Dictionnaire politique, a book on Dante for Plon. In 1936, while imprisoned at La Santé, he sent a long letter on youth: "This youth, refined by common study and personal reflection, today holds in its ardent and firm hands more than the fate of a homeland, that, perhaps, of the human species, of the human face, of the human name. [...] Washed, combed, brushed, educated, even literate as they claim, the same Orientals who are rotting our French ideas and mores and drawing the fire of fratricidal wars to our borders are also the same ones who are developing and, when they can, applying a carnival - a social organization - that is at once bloody and bloody, arrogant and lying [...]....] it's as if an army of dressed-up monkeys had landed in Paris to impose or even, who knows? propose its mores and vices to the French people"... In 1938, during his candidacy for the Académie Française, Maurras refused to publish the letter he had received from the Pope: "I cannot give the white man's letter to win the green habit: it would be a kind of simony"... Etc.