Action Française

Action Française appears as a political reference point in the narrator’s tangled account of synarchy, not as the group directing the novel’s central action. Its association with some synarchic theses sits beside sharply different accounts of what synarchy meant, exposing how readily political and occult histories are made to support incompatible explanations.

Political Association

The narrator says that many of the theses under discussion were taken up by Action Française. That connection initially seems to offer a political explanation: a movement could give synarchy a recognizable political color. But it does not settle the issue. The account moves from this association to a history in which synarchy also appears in reformist, cooperative proposals and in allegations of a hidden plot.

Competing Meanings of Synarchy

The narrator recounts that Vivian Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo founded Polaris in 1929, inspired by the myth of the King of the World. Their synarchic project proposed social service in opposition to capitalist profit and the removal of class struggle through cooperatives; the narrator compares its character to Fabian socialism and a libertarian, communitarian movement. The narrator then notes that Polaris and the Irish Fabians were accused of participating in a synarchic plot led by Jews. The charge came from the Revue Internationale des societes secretes, whose contributors included members of La Sapiniere, a secret right-wing organization.

Conspiracy and Contradiction

The account describes right-wing writers as grouping revolutionary movements together as fronts for a diabolical plot attributed to an occultist circle. It also notes that Mussolini followed a similar pattern of accusation. Yet the narrator’s reading of occultism, including Picatrix, suggests that occultists had little interest in the workers’ movement. Action Française therefore enters a chain of political associations that does not resolve into a single coherent doctrine: reformist proposals, right-wing conspiracy claims, and occult speculation overlap without becoming equivalent.

Narrative Significance

The passage makes Action Française part of the novel’s examination of how a name or doctrine can be recruited into competing histories. Its reported adoption of synarchic theses is a concrete political link, but the surrounding account refuses to treat that link as proof that all uses of synarchy share one origin or purpose. The resulting confusion is itself significant: the more the narrator reads, the more the apparent explanations multiply, while the notion of a secret power governing the world persists across opposing political interpretations.