Reactionary

Usage and history

During the French Revolution, conservative forces (especially the Roman Catholic Church) organized opposition to the progressive socio-political and economic changes brought by the revolution, and to fight to restore the temporal authority of the Church and Crown. In nineteenth-century European politics, the reactionary class included the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy—the clergy, the aristocracy, royal families, and royalists—believing that national government is the sole domain of the Church and the state. In France, supporters of traditional rule by direct heirs of the House of Bourbon dynasty were labeled the legitimist reaction. In the Third Republic, the monarchists were the reactionary faction, later renamed conservative.

However, Gentile and Mussolini also attacked certain reactionary policies, particularly monarchism and—more veiled—some aspects of Italian conservative Catholicism. They wrote, "History doesn't travel backwards. The fascist doctrine has not taken De Maistre as its prophet. Monarchical absolutism is of the past, and so is ecclesiolatry." They further elaborated in the political doctrine that fascism "is not reactionary [in the old way] but revolutionary." Conversely, they also explained that fascism was of the right, not of the left. Fascism was certainly not simply a return to tradition: it carried the centralised state beyond even what had been seen in absolute monarchies. Fascist single-party states were as centralised as most communist states, and fascism's intense nationalism was not found in the period prior to the French Revolution.

The National Socialists did not consider themselves reactionary, and numbered the forces of reaction (Prussian monarchists, nobility, Roman Catholic) among their enemies right next to their Red Front enemies in the Nazi Party march Die Fahne hoch. The fact that the Nazis called their 1933 rise to power the National Revolution, shows that they supported some form of revolution. Nevertheless, the idealization of tradition, folklore, classical thought, leadership (as exemplified by Frederick the Great), their rejection of the liberalism of the Weimar Republic, and calling the German state the Third Reich (which traces back to the medieval First Reich and the pre-Weimar Second Reich), has led many to regard the Nazis as reactionary.

Clericalist movements sometimes labeled as Clerical fascist by their critics, can be considered reactionaries in terms of the 19th century, since they share some elements of fascism, while at the same time promote a return to the pre-revolutionary model of social relations, with a strong role for the Church. Their utmost philosopher was Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

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Category:Conservatism Category:Counter-revolutionaries Category:Political theories Category:Right-wing politics Category:Pejoratives