Charles Maurras – LE ROMANTISME FÉMININ (Feminine Romanticism)
Essay – 164 pages – Éditions de la Reine Rouge, October 2026.
Foreword by Nicolas Le Bault.
Available now on Amazon and directly from the publisher's website.
First published at the dawn of the twentieth century, this work of literary criticism sought to reveal, through the analysis of an emerging aesthetic phenomenon, a profound social upheaval characteristic of modernity.
For Maurras, the identification of the feminine ethos with the artistic avant-garde is entirely natural: woman is inherently modern, for, carrying the future within her womb, she is ontologically oriented towards what is yet to come. Women artists thus tend to create unprecedented forms, even at the cost of overturning the established standards of traditional aesthetics and conventional morality.
Observing the emergence of an art created by women, for women, and intended for a female audience, Maurras puts forward bold hypotheses about the future of societies, drawing upon the evolution of literary creation. This new women's literature signals a decisive anthropological shift in the modern world. It embodies the primacy of the self that defines the Romantic era, in which "every idea becomes a feeling".
Introspection, individual psychology, and the study of character become the dominant artistic principles of an age founded upon the primacy of the individual. Maurras perceives in the nascent feminist movement a pure spirit of individualistic rebellion characteristic of Romanticism, of which women's artistic creation represents the logical culmination.
Through four portraits of women poets of his time — Renée Vivien, Marie de Régnier, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, and Anna de Noailles — the thinker associated with Action française develops a critical yet genuinely inquisitive perspective on this transformation of both the literary world and prevailing attitudes.
At a time when the condition of women is confronting the limits of emancipation, revisiting this remarkable study, with the hindsight afforded by a century of progress, offers valuable insight into the objective benefits, dangers, and contradictions inherent in this evolution..
