Serviam: The Political Ideology of Adrien Arcand

[1]3,783 words

Paul Beaumont, compiler
Serviam: The Political Ideology of Adrien Arcand [2]
Quakertown, Pa.: Antelope Hill Publishing, 2022

“Serviam,” or “I will serve,” was said to be the answer to Lucifer from the Archangel Michael when Lucifer told God that he would not serve. Serviam was also the motto of Adrien Arcand’s Christian national-corporatist movement before and after the World War, as well as the name of his post-war magazine.

In this instance, Serviam is the name of an anthology of Arcand’s articles and speeches from 1930 to his last in 1966. The motto encapsulates the entire philosophy and life-story of Arcand as firstly a servant of God, and secondly in terms of the politics that arose therefrom. At the time, what has been described generically as “clerical fascism” was a worldwide phenomenon that proposed a third option to capitalism and socialism.

Fascism as a spontaneous worldwide movement drew inspiration from a variety of strands, among which were Catholic social doctrine and syndicalism. Despite the Leftist atheism and materialism that imbued syndicalism, this doctrine has a kinship with the Medieval guilds that were a feature of Catholic Europe for centuries, and which Catholic social doctrine sought to restore as an alternative to Marxism and plutocracy. A Catholic-Syndicalist synthesis emerged, of which Arcand was a significant leader and theorist.

This Catholic-Syndicalism found expression in the Rexism of Belgium led by Léon Degrelle (another book from Antelope Hill being the superb Léon Degrelle in Exile [3]), as well as the New State of Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, in Portugal under António de Oliveira Salazar, Brazil under Getúlio Vargas, and France under Philippe Pétain. There was also Falangism in Spain, Hungary’s Arrow Cross (whose leader, Ferenc Szálasi, also developed a very detailed corporatist program), Eoin O’Duffy’s Blue Shirts in Eire, and so on. Corporatism was the name generally given to the Catholic varieties of the doctrine. In Canada it was Adrien Arcand who was the leading ideologue of what he termed National Corporatism.

Beginnings in Journalism

Arcand was particularly concerned with the Jewish issue, and much of the anthology deals with this. It was also integral to his profound commitment to Catholicism, and the anti-Christian teachings of the Talmud were seen by Arcand as a manifestation of the battle that had been started in Heaven. Hence, the first speech published in this anthology is on the Jewish use of materialism, delivered in 1930 to the Patriotic Order of Bobolinks. While Arcand seems to have been drawn to National Socialism and to Fascism by his Catholic concern for Talmudism’s activities, however, he did not allow this to stunt his development of a detailed doctrine, to the extent that Arnold Leese of the Imperial Fascist League, for example, barely got beyond anti-Semitism.

A Preface by Father Olivier Rioult places Arcand’s life and beliefs in a religious context. Father Rioult is himself an interesting character. Ordained by the famous traditionalist Archbishop Lefebvre, Fr. Rioult has been condemned by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as no less than an “antisemitic neo-Nazi self-proclaimed priest.”[1] [4] From this we might deduce that Fr. Rioult is a priest who continues to follow actual Catholicism rather than the Masonic bastardization that has overtaken the Vatican since the 1960s. He is associated with Bishop Williamson, who himself has earned the ire of the Talmudists.

Arcand was by profession a newspaper editor and journalist. He founded the first union for journalists in Montreal. This enabled him to establish the foundation for what developed into a movement, while also cultivating relations with some important elements of the Conservative Party in Quebec, which continued even after the war.

In 1934 he founded the National Social Christian Party (NSCP). In 1938 the NSCP united with two other parties to form the National Unity Party (NUP) under Arcand’s leadership. Arcand was a skilled orator, and the NUP gained a significant following. When the war broke out, with Quebec solidly against participation in the war against the Axis, Arcand and other prominent members of the NUP were interned. They were joined by the popular Conservative mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, an admirer of Benito Mussolini and Pétain, who had made an appeal against military registration.[2] [5]

[6]

You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here. [7]

It was this resistance to the war draft in Quebec that prompted Yockey to note in 1949 in The Proclamation of London that the Quebecois remained a healthy cultural organism. Yockey referred to the “entire Quebec regiment” laying down its arms and refusing to fight as a unit when ordered to invade “the sacred soil of Europe” as an inspiring example of European potential, even in its colonies.[3] [8]

Arcand was very far, then, from being an inconsequential fringe figure.

Resumption of Work after theWar

Like Oswald Mosley in Britain, Arcand, to his disappointment, was never tried, and the charges against him were dismissed. He resumed work immediately after the war. In 1949 he ran for Parliament in the name of the NUP, gaining 5,590 votes and placing second behind the Liberal candidate with 12,795 votes.

In 1953, with the support of Maurice Duplessis, Premier of Quebec, who was a fervent Catholic and corporatist, he ran again for the NUP, gaining 7,596 votes against his rival’s 10,709 votes. Such was the respect that Arcand retained that he was invited to give a lecture to the Premier’s party, Union Nationale. The NUP was very much a movement of Catholicism, however, and as Canada secularized, the party declined while Canada decayed along with the rest of the West. Arcand resigned from the leadership for health reasons in 1965. His passing in 1966 was marked by a funeral attended by hundreds.

Fascism as a Spiritual Restoration

In 1933 Arcand gave a lecture on “Fascism or Socialism?” to the Palestre Nationale in Montreal, in which he referred to the organic society of the Medieval era, with its guilds. Corporatism was the modern restoration and adaption of this organic society, and one moreover that accorded with the doctrine expounded in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum (“Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”), in 1891. Leo urged the restoration of the guilds and the wider distribution of private property rather than its elimination under socialism or its concentration under capitalism, and stated that Catholics cannot be socialists.

Arcand stated in the lecture that “there is no such thing as a socialist Christianity,” and referred to Pope Pius X. He cited Mussolini as describing the Fascist state as spiritual and moral. Tradition and “the ancestors” provide an enduring foundation above the transience of democracy. Religion provides the means, repudiating the doctrines on the perfectibility of man that Jacobinism attempted to enforce, as have liberalism and socialism; what Arcand referred to as rejecting the “dream of the divine man and paradise on earth, spawned by the 1789 Revolution.” In corporatism, “social solidarity” would be attained. Again in accord with papal doctrine, Arcand stated that “property rights are sacred,” but explained that this “involves certain duties.” The inanity and scam of democracy and party politics would be superseded by corporatism; the undifferentiated democratic electorate would be replaced by corporative — guild — organization established to represent the specific, not the amorphous.  This lecture is one of the most comprehensive of Arcand’s explanations of fascism.

In 1934, with the founding of the National Social Christian Party, Arcand declared the party’s “principles and program” at the National Monument in Montreal. The theme was a battle against the forces of materialism in which finance-capital was rejected as much as Bolshevism, in favor of productive human capital. This new — restored — ethos would be implemented on the practical level through the corporations of professionals.

Worldly and Otherworldly

My Book of Hours, written during 1935-1936, was not published during Arcand’s lifetime. The version published here does not include prayers and apologetics, but focuses on the religious basis of Arcand’s views on the Jewish issue, where “racism” is an aspect of “natural law,” and on the religious character of the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, the latter being based on a “dead covenant.” His view was that the Messiah was promised to the Jews because God offers mercy to those who need it most. Arcand distinguished between the realities of the material world and those of the spiritual. Racism, wrote Arcand, is the basis of nationalism, as it unites through the bond of blood. What universality of humanity exists is something resolved in realms other than the earthly.

Arcand’s 1937 text, The Key to the Mystery, was an extensive collection of quotes from Jewish sources about Jewish agendas. Here it seems to have been confined to Arcand’s introductory remarks.

Conspiracy Theory

“The Universal Republic” (1950) discusses the role of Jews, liberalism, the World Wars, socialism, Zionism and Freemasonry, the League of Nations, and the United Nations, as well as the Church’s historical role in condemning the plans for a world superstate that is built on the ruins of the natural, divine order. We are now familiar with the concept of the “new world order.” Although those who suppose themselves to be intellectually sophisticated scoff at the “simplicity” of “conspiracy theories,” it takes a naïve mind to insist that certain economic and political factions do not use conspiratorial methods to advance their agendas. Criminal courts and Congressional hearings have investigated the mafia as an ethnically-based “criminal conspiracy,” a centuries-old secret society with rituals, oaths, and a cell structure reaching into the highest levels of society, yet “conspiracy theories” involving bankers, Freemasons, or Jews are dismissed as too outlandish to even discuss.

While senior historian Professor Richard B. Spence has differentiated between “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy fact” in his scholarly Wall Street and the Russian Revolution 1905-1925, the eminent Oxford historian Niall Ferguson in his The Square and the Tower dismisses “conspiracy theory” in favor of “network theory,” but ends up at the same place as “conspiracy theorists.”

It is a “conspiracy” that Arcand stated “encompasses the whole globe [and] reaches all peoples and all of humanity” (p. 67). Arcand was doing no more than following the line that the Church had traditionally held for centuries in regard to both the Christ-hatred of Talmudism and the Universal Republic that has been intrinsically associated with Grand Orient Freemasonry, whose raison d’etre has been the destruction of the Church. Here too, traditional Church doctrine had common ground with fascism.

That year, Arcand wrote a pamphlet under the pseudonym of Vigilans, Instructions and Sermons on the 33rd degree of Freemasonry. Arcand referred to the Scottish Rite, which has 33 degrees. He saw Masonry as serving “global messianism,” and as being served by both liberalism and Marxism.

If the Church since the 1960s has retreated from its role, it is largely because of a subversion that saw Masons achieve the highest offices in the Vatican, which allowed them to both change the traditional liturgy and to appoint the upper hierarchy. In this and other respects, it was the Church that was out of kilter with its doctrines; not Arcand, just as we can still say the same about Fr. Rioult and so on.

Such was the extent of the subversion that Pope Paul VI authorized Cardinal Eduard Gagnon to undertake a three-year investigation of Masonry in the Church, but Gagnon’s extensive dossiers remain buried; the most that can be said is related by his close friend Father Charles Murr in a recent self-published book, Murder in the 33rd Degree. Another factor was explained by no less than the senior editor of Look magazine in 1966 in the wake of Vatican II.[4] [9]

It is this situation that prompted Archbishop Lefebvre to start a resistance that includes Father Rioult, the author of this book’s Preface, who expresses appreciation for Arcand as a true servant of the Church.

Arcand’s brief 1950 essay “The Inevitability of Social Reconstruction” posits “corporatism” as the next logical phase in historical development upon the defeat of liberalism. “Communism established at home” again sees Freemasonry as a primary villain, enabling Marxism, and that in turn is a steppingstone to globalism by undermining the spiritual nature of man, leading to the dictatorship of money (“From Globalism to Communism,” 1950-1951).

Religion Essential to Civilization

In a two-part talk in 1954 (“Has Christianity become Bankrupt?”), Arcand states that religion is the essential basis of all civilizations, and that the collapse of civilization ensues with the undermining of its religious foundations. For the West this is Catholicism, which is being attacked on a multiplicity of fronts, led by “an external parasite.” The United Nations doctrine of “human rights” has replaced the Christian ethos for the purpose of creating a world superstate (p. 122). Here again, Masonry and Talmudism are aligned.

Arcand credited Hitler and Mussolini with having fought this multiheaded hydra. He alludes to the rapprochement with the Church that Mussolini achieved. Intriguingly, Arcand cites the money reformer Arthur Kitson, who visited Hitler. Despite Kitson’s admiration, he did not like the symbols of “Papism” (sic) that adorned Hitler’s private rooms (p. 127). Arcand also refers to Kurt Ludecke, an early emissary and fundraiser for the NSDAP, who, in contrast to the absurd associations of Hitler with occultism by the fantasist Herman Rauschning (Hitler Speaks, 1939) and a spate of subsequent rubbish like The Spear of Destiny (Trevor Ravenscroft, 1972), referred to “Hitler’s divine muse” being the Virgin Mary (p. 127). These surprising insights are confirmed by the Rexist war hero Léon Degrelle in the aforementioned Léon Degrelle in Exile 1945-1994. Arcand gave additional plaudits to Francisco Franco, Salazar, Ioannis Metaxas, A. C. Cuza, and the Japanese Prince Fumimaro Konoe for having asserted national sovereignty against Masonry and Communism.

Arcand saw the rot as having escalated since the French Revolution, with Zionism having assumed a position above Masonry and Marxism, especially via “the power of the high bank.” Freudianism was an added component that degraded the spirit of man further. (Here we might recall the synthesis of Freudianism with Marxism to form Critical Theory, which has become a dominant factor in the social sciences). The answer was a “Christian revolution,” from the faith that inspired the high culture of the West; what Arcand called “the movement that animated all domains, in arts and sciences (p. 138).

This transcription of two lectures is one of the most detailed in explaining Arcand’s doctrine, outlining the return to a natural social order that has been overturned by liberalism, Marxism, and finance-capitalism. Corporatism is the means by which this natural hierarchy can be restored on the basis of national unity and social justice. In a brief article attributed to the “early 1960s,” Arcand writes in “Liberalism: Diabolical Poison” of liberalism “as the greatest mistake of modern times,” leading to materialism. It is based on a misunderstanding of freedom, “giving as many rights to evil as to good.”

Talmudism

“Down with hatred” (1965) looks at the Jewish question, Talmudism, and Pharisaism, which, as many Christians have forgotten, was the rabbinic priesthood of Jesus’s time. He reminds readers what was once well known among Christians:  Jesus is described in the Talmudic literature of Orthodox Judaism as a bastard, blasphemer, and imposter. Arcand refers to anti-Semitism as a “natural reaction of defense.” He cites Jewish authors Bernard Lazare and Samuel Roth.

Arcand also addresses the issue of the Second World War and “war crimes,” contending that it was the Allies that repudiated the old Western chivalric ethos of warfare. This victor’s vengeance was reflected in the “war crimes trials” that criminalized defeat (p. 173). He called the post-war outlook anti-Christian and anti-Western. He alluded to the 4.5 million that were once said to have died at Auschwitz as an implausible figure (since scaled down to 1.1 million, of which 960,000 are said to be Jews, yet the magical figure of 6,000,000 is retained). Arcand sites the US Army commission of enquiry led by Judge Edward van Roden, which found that accused German prisoners had been tortured to extract confessions.

[10]

You can buy Kerry Bolton’s The Tyranny of Human Rights here [11].

As was generally the case among the pre-zionized Right — that is, until quite recently — Arcand had a sympathetic regard toward Muslims. He points out that the Koranic attitude towards Jesus and Mary is altogether different from the Talmudic.

Arcand’s attitude towards the Jews was not that of a personal enemy, but as a Christian opposing those who hated Christ. This was the traditional attitude of the Church until recently, when the Talmud was studied and condemned, and Catholics prayed for the salvation, not the destruction, of the Jews. It was an altogether more charitable and humane attitude than the eternal hatred that Talmudists have towards Christians, having its basis in the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. Now the Church, devoid of its traditional liturgy, its doctrine corrupted, as documented by Look magazine in 1966, prays for forgiveness from the sect that Jesus condemned as literally the “children of the devil,” while, as Father Gagnon found, Masonry has played a significant role. This final destruction of the main body of the Church was happening about the time that Arcand died. It seems particularly apt that Father Rioult, part of a “resistance” against the “modernism” of which Pope Leo XIII had warned (The Doctrine of the Modernists, 1907), has written the preface to this volume. Stated Arcand, “the true Christian cannot be hateful since his religion possesses a charitable foundation.” (p. 176).

In a speech given in Montreal, 1966, “The Revolt of Materialism,” Arcand stated that “the High Global Finance of Gold is the supreme authority that leads the financial and economic life of the world.” Again, he sees Talmudism as the inspiration. Since the system is global, the revolutionary reaction must be global, and ultimately a conflict between spirit and matter.

The volume returns for “Other Sources” to the year 1930 and quotes from Popeline, a novel by Arcand, appearing in the journal The Goglu. The theme includes Communists, Jews, and bankers, and a protagonist named “Syrup,” who “worked, worked and worked for his race sand homeland.” Sundry short essays follow: “The Call of the Blood” (circa 1933), stating that the origin of the woes of the world is from Lucifer’s rebellious non servium (“I will not serve”) to which the conflicting reply of St. Michasel is Arcand’s motto: servium, which also on many levels summarizes the essence of Fascism.

Japhethic Race

Of “race-mixing,” Arcand states in the same article that the creation of non-distinct races is “a crime against Nature and the will of God.” While the choice of the swastika was an usual emblem for a movement imbued with Catholicism, Arcand explained that it is neither solely Hitlerian nor national, but a symbol of a worldwide struggle of the “Japhethic races,” Arcand considering the white races as being descended from the line of Japheth. While it is not mentioned in this volume, such a lineage is not heretical to traditional Church teachings, deriving from the Genesis account of the origin of races from the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the latter being regarded as the father of the Europeans. This is mentioned by St. Jerome in Liber hebraicarum questionum. St. Augustine regarded Japheth (meaning “to enlarge, to spread”) as referring to the mission of the Japhetic race to enlarge and spread the Church (since the old covenant had been taken from the Jews). Hence, Europe became synonymous with Christendom.[5] [12]

The question has been contentious, and in 1950 Pius XII in Humani generis condemned the doctrine of polygenism, the differentiation of racial origins. Nonetheless, the theory has remained widespread among theologians, and as recently as 2003 the entry for “Monogenism and Polygenism” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia referred to “the present situation [as] “a quandary for theologians,” [since] “to deny the polygenistic origin of the human species places the theologian in clear opposition with science.”[6] [13]

In a letter to Father Saint-Joseph-de-Lanoraie on the encyclical of Pope Pius XI condemning National Socialism, Arcand contended that only the Wotanist pagan elements fostered by Alfred Rosenberg and others were condemned, and that Hitler fought the same enemies as the Church (“Mit Brennender Sorge,” November 27, 1966).  In an interview called “Law of Pardon,” of which only two sentences are given, Arcand states that he rejects the principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for as tooth.” One might conjecture that this was regarding “war crimes trials” and vengeance against the defeated of the World War.

“The Truth is Intolerant” consists of several remarks given at a conference held in 1965 or 1966. Arcand contends that truth and good cannot be regarded as “extremism.” He alludes to Jesus’ comment that those who are “lukewarm” shall be spat out. Some remarks headed “Anti-Semitism” state that this is just a cover to obscure anti-Gentilism and the assault on Western civilization. “The Common Good,” date unknown but published in Serviam in 1981, contrasts Leftist collectivism with the Christian common good. “Never Slacken!”, published in 1967 and written “to the members of his political party four months before his death,” refers to the liberation of Germany from finance-capitalism. Arcand exhorts his followers to stand firm against adversity.

The volume is concluded by a lengthy essay by Joseph Mérel examining the background of Arcand’s ideas, including corporatism and “racism,” as well as a biography by Rémi Tremblay. An appendix gives an extract, “Hail Mary,” from Arcand’s My Book of Hours; appendix B is a 1966 appeal “To the Youth of Canada,” a talk given in Montreal in 1966.

There is as much in this volume for the non-Catholic Rightist as for the Catholic. The fundamental doctrines are generically Rightist. Arcand was an important thinker and organizer of the Right, a truly dynamic leader who created a mass movement which was abruptly stopped by the war and internment. Given the extent of Arcand’s influence even among established political circles in Quebec, it would be interesting to know whether he still has a significant following on Canada’s Right. Certainly, his detailed program of National Corporatism (although the NUP party program is not included) provides a basis for not only the Canadian Right, but a social doctrine for the Right worldwide.

Antelope Hill Publishing [14] is providing works hitherto inaccessible, at least to the Anglophone Right, by and about figures such as Degrelle, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and Filippo Marinetti, with upcoming titles by Konstantin Rodzaevsky, Gregor Strasser, Giovanni Gentile, and others, while also providing an avenue for new authors.

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Notes

[1] [16]Wiesenthal Centre Calls for French Catholic Church to Condemn Antisemitic Neo-Nazi Self-Proclaimed Priest [17],” February 10, 2022.

[2] [18] The Canadian Encyclopedia, in its entry for “Camillien Houde [19],” states that “[a]t least 50,000 Montréalers welcomed Houde triumphantly after his release on 18 August 1944, and he was quickly re-elected mayor, a position he held comfortably through elections in 1947 and 1950.”

[3] [20] Francis Parker Yockey, “The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front,” in Kerry Bolton & John Morgan (eds.), The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey, Collected Writings, vol. III [21] (San Francisco: Centennial Edition Publishing, 2020), 88.

[4] [22] Joseph Roddy, “How the Jews Changed Catholic Thinking [23],” Look, January 25, 1966, vol. 30, no. 2, 18-23.

[5] [24] Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (London: Black House Press, [1920] 2012).

[6] [25] James R. Hoffmann, “Catholicism and Evolution: Polygenism and Original Sin [26],” Scientia et Fides, vol. 8, no. 2, September 10, 2020.