From H. Stuart Hughes, *The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation 1930-1960*:
"From our post-Johannine vantage point--from our perspective on the far side of Pope John's pontificate and the Second Vatican Council--it requires a mighty effort of imagination to appreciate the shock that ran through French Catholicism when Pius XI put on the Index the works of Charles Maurras and the newspaper that was his mouthpiece. To us the condemnation seems only natural; our question would rather be why it was not done earlier. For Maurras had made no secret of his own disbelief and positivist philosophy; he was quite frank in stating that the Action Francaise favored the Catholic Church for instrumental reasons--as spiritual support for political reaction. But most of the French Catholic elite had been blind to such distinctions. Obsessed with the sins of the godless Republic, they had given thanks to heaven for ideological support from however suspect a source. The Action Francaise had grown up in the wake of the Dreyfus Case and the separation of church and state that had been its sequel. In this perspective, Maurras and his co-workers appeared as avenging angels, come to rescue French Catholicism from intellectual scorn and material spoliation. To the great majority of the bien-pensants, it seemed incredible that the Holy Father himself should have repudiated the gallant defender of the Church in France. For them the association of Catholicism with royalism and reaction was simply assumed as the normal order of things human and divine.
"Before 1926, nearly all the chief figures in the Catholic intellectual revival--with rare exceptions such as Claudel and the novelist Francois Mauriac--had been either members of the Action Francaise or within its ideological orbit. After the Papal condemnation, such an association could no longer be automatic. Each individual was obliged to examine his conscience and to make his personal decision. After 1926, the French Catholic was on his own in a fashion almost without precedent. Two decades earlier the act of separation had cut him off from the material reassurance of state support; now he was required to break a further tie--either with Rome or with the secular organization that had long appeared his strongest bulwark. Most conservative Catholics, quite predictably, tried to avoid the choice: they made formal submission to the Papal ban while sabotaging it in practice. Such was the path of a number of the literary mediocrities who populated the French Academy. The more rigorous thinkers scorned so slippery an evasion. Very few defied Rome openly: it took the exceptional ruggedness of a Georges Bernanos to go for years without the sacraments as witness to his political allegiance. It happened much more frequently--as in the case of Jacques Maritain--that the condemnation reinforced doubts which had earlier been held just under the surface of consciousness and pointed the way to a radical rethinking of positions which had had behind them little besides mental inertia and the approval of literary peers..."
http://books.google.com/books?id=BbMhvGpC6EcC&pg=PA67
Specifically on the impact of the condemnation on Jacques Maritain, Hughes writes:
"By the mid-1920's, a permanent impression of Maritain seemed fixed in the public mind: his writing was austere, difficult, and mercilessly abstract; his personal polemic could be devastating, as his break with Bergson had shown; his own predilection was against nearly all the manifestations of the modern world—in brief, reactionary. In 1922 he had published a little book, Antimoderne, whose title gave sufficient evidence of its contents, and in 1925 Three Reformers, whose targets, predictably enough, were Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau.
"Had the great explosion over the Action Francaise not intervened, Maritain might never have attained to the serenity and humanity that were characteristic of his later judgments. Nor would he have figured in a prominent place in the history of contemporary French social thought. Maritain himself was fully aware of the significance of this turning point. Several years later he noted in his diary:
"'Today more than ever, I bless the liberating intervention of the Church which . . . exposed the errors of the Action Francaise, following which I finally examined Maurras' doctrines and saw what they were worth. There began for me then a period of reflection devoted to moral and political philosophy in which I tried to work out the character of authentically Christian politics and to establish, in the light of a philosophy of history and of culture, the true significance of democratic inspiration and the nature of the new humanism for which we are waiting.'
"Before 1926, Maritain had never formally adhered to the Action Francaise. But the influence of the priest who was his spiritual director and his own polemic against ihe modern world had led him to extend to it his sympathy and to write on occasion for its journals. Among the wider public many assumed him to be the philosopher of the movement. His 'apostasy'--as Maurras's adherents called it-—surprised both ideological wings of French Catholicism; to the democratic and social Catholics it brought welcome reinforcement in the struggles that lay ahead..." http://books.google.com/books?id=BbMhvGpC6EcC&pg=PA74
If the condemnation came as such a shock to so many French Catholics, including much of the clergy, I have to assume that if not Pius XI at least some conceivable Pope might *not* have condemned Action Francaise or placed Maurras' writings on the Index. (I'm not saying that any Pope could endorse Maurras' agnostic philosophy, however "useful" to the Church it might be--only that a Pope might decide that *condemning* Maurras would not be prudent.) What would the effects of such a non-condemnation have been? One has already been mentioned--the effect on Maritain, and the strengthening of the "social" or "progressive" wing of French Catholicism in general. But there could be other effects as well. The French far right, not divided between a Catholic far right and a secular far right, could be signifcantly stronger--though it woud still be (at least temporarily) discredited after World War II.
(Maurras, incidentally, who was imprisoned after World War II, did ultimately convert to Catholicism shortly before his death.)
"From our post-Johannine vantage point--from our perspective on the far side of Pope John's pontificate and the Second Vatican Council--it requires a mighty effort of imagination to appreciate the shock that ran through French Catholicism when Pius XI put on the Index the works of Charles Maurras and the newspaper that was his mouthpiece. To us the condemnation seems only natural; our question would rather be why it was not done earlier. For Maurras had made no secret of his own disbelief and positivist philosophy; he was quite frank in stating that the Action Francaise favored the Catholic Church for instrumental reasons--as spiritual support for political reaction. But most of the French Catholic elite had been blind to such distinctions. Obsessed with the sins of the godless Republic, they had given thanks to heaven for ideological support from however suspect a source. The Action Francaise had grown up in the wake of the Dreyfus Case and the separation of church and state that had been its sequel. In this perspective, Maurras and his co-workers appeared as avenging angels, come to rescue French Catholicism from intellectual scorn and material spoliation. To the great majority of the bien-pensants, it seemed incredible that the Holy Father himself should have repudiated the gallant defender of the Church in France. For them the association of Catholicism with royalism and reaction was simply assumed as the normal order of things human and divine.
"Before 1926, nearly all the chief figures in the Catholic intellectual revival--with rare exceptions such as Claudel and the novelist Francois Mauriac--had been either members of the Action Francaise or within its ideological orbit. After the Papal condemnation, such an association could no longer be automatic. Each individual was obliged to examine his conscience and to make his personal decision. After 1926, the French Catholic was on his own in a fashion almost without precedent. Two decades earlier the act of separation had cut him off from the material reassurance of state support; now he was required to break a further tie--either with Rome or with the secular organization that had long appeared his strongest bulwark. Most conservative Catholics, quite predictably, tried to avoid the choice: they made formal submission to the Papal ban while sabotaging it in practice. Such was the path of a number of the literary mediocrities who populated the French Academy. The more rigorous thinkers scorned so slippery an evasion. Very few defied Rome openly: it took the exceptional ruggedness of a Georges Bernanos to go for years without the sacraments as witness to his political allegiance. It happened much more frequently--as in the case of Jacques Maritain--that the condemnation reinforced doubts which had earlier been held just under the surface of consciousness and pointed the way to a radical rethinking of positions which had had behind them little besides mental inertia and the approval of literary peers..."
http://books.google.com/books?id=BbMhvGpC6EcC&pg=PA67
Specifically on the impact of the condemnation on Jacques Maritain, Hughes writes:
"By the mid-1920's, a permanent impression of Maritain seemed fixed in the public mind: his writing was austere, difficult, and mercilessly abstract; his personal polemic could be devastating, as his break with Bergson had shown; his own predilection was against nearly all the manifestations of the modern world—in brief, reactionary. In 1922 he had published a little book, Antimoderne, whose title gave sufficient evidence of its contents, and in 1925 Three Reformers, whose targets, predictably enough, were Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau.
"Had the great explosion over the Action Francaise not intervened, Maritain might never have attained to the serenity and humanity that were characteristic of his later judgments. Nor would he have figured in a prominent place in the history of contemporary French social thought. Maritain himself was fully aware of the significance of this turning point. Several years later he noted in his diary:
"'Today more than ever, I bless the liberating intervention of the Church which . . . exposed the errors of the Action Francaise, following which I finally examined Maurras' doctrines and saw what they were worth. There began for me then a period of reflection devoted to moral and political philosophy in which I tried to work out the character of authentically Christian politics and to establish, in the light of a philosophy of history and of culture, the true significance of democratic inspiration and the nature of the new humanism for which we are waiting.'
"Before 1926, Maritain had never formally adhered to the Action Francaise. But the influence of the priest who was his spiritual director and his own polemic against ihe modern world had led him to extend to it his sympathy and to write on occasion for its journals. Among the wider public many assumed him to be the philosopher of the movement. His 'apostasy'--as Maurras's adherents called it-—surprised both ideological wings of French Catholicism; to the democratic and social Catholics it brought welcome reinforcement in the struggles that lay ahead..." http://books.google.com/books?id=BbMhvGpC6EcC&pg=PA74
If the condemnation came as such a shock to so many French Catholics, including much of the clergy, I have to assume that if not Pius XI at least some conceivable Pope might *not* have condemned Action Francaise or placed Maurras' writings on the Index. (I'm not saying that any Pope could endorse Maurras' agnostic philosophy, however "useful" to the Church it might be--only that a Pope might decide that *condemning* Maurras would not be prudent.) What would the effects of such a non-condemnation have been? One has already been mentioned--the effect on Maritain, and the strengthening of the "social" or "progressive" wing of French Catholicism in general. But there could be other effects as well. The French far right, not divided between a Catholic far right and a secular far right, could be signifcantly stronger--though it woud still be (at least temporarily) discredited after World War II.
(Maurras, incidentally, who was imprisoned after World War II, did ultimately convert to Catholicism shortly before his death.)