Si le coup de force est possible

Si le coup de force est possible (If the coup is possible) is a pamphlet by French journalist and politician Charles Maurras, director of L'Action française, and Henri Dutrait-Crozon, a pseudonym borrowed by two officers and polytechnicians: Georges Larpent and Frédéric Delebecque. Published in 1910, this booklet is a collection of articles published in the Revue d'Action française between January and March 1908. The authors review "the different possible scenarios of a return to the monarchy in France". In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, Charles Maurras confided that he was wary of theories and preferred to refer to organizing empiricism. It is therefore from experience that he sets out the different types of coup de force. The book is dedicated to the authors of Comment nous ferons la révolution sociale Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget, two revolutionary trade unionists with whom the Action française attempted a rapprochement before the World War I. Both men promoted the use of sabotage and direct action in their revolutionary prose. The introduction lays the groundwork for the conception of the Maurrassian coup de force :Anyone who reads L'Action française constantly encounters two ideas that can only be found there. It is necessary, she says, to build up a royalist state of mind. And as soon as this public spirit is formed, a coup de force will be struck to establish the monarchy.The authors of the booklet rely on the failure of the Ligue de la Patrie française of General Boulanger and in particular of "the electoral impasse in which it had been misled" to propose an "open-air conspiracy". Historian Martin Motte notices in the Maurrassian coup de force tactic an analogical reduction similar to that developed byFrédéric Mistral in his Écrits politiques of 1869 : Hope and aspire. Isn't the aspiration worth the conspiracy?In 1907, Action française identified itself as follows:What we are is a conspiracy. We conspire to determine a state of mind.