A History of Fascism in France

From the First World War to the National Front

Chris Millington

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350006560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2021 A History of Fascism in France explores the origins, development, and action of fascism and extreme right and fascist organisations in France since the First World War. Synthesizing decades of scholarship, it is the first book in any language to trace the full story of French fascism from the First World War to the modern National Front, via the interwar years, the Vichy regime and the collapse of the French Empire. Chris Millington unpicks why this extremist political phenomenon has, at times, found such fervent and widespread support among the French people. The book chronologically surveys fascism in France whilst contextualizing this within the broader European and colonial frameworks that are so significant to the subject. Concluding with a useful historiographical chapter that brings together all the previously explored aspects of fascism in France, A History of Fascism in France is a crucial volume for all students of European fascism and France in the 20th century.

Chapter 1

Searching for a French Mussolini during the 1920s

On the night of 23 April 1925, two men waited in the shadows on the rue Damrémont in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris. Jean-Pierre Clerc, a thirty-seven-year-old engraver, and Joseph-Marie Bernardon, a varnisher ten years Clerc’s junior, were members of the Communist Party. Armed with revolvers, they were about to commit murder. A short distance away, a company of activists belonging to the extreme right-wing Jeunesses Patriotes disembarked the metro at Jules Joffrin and made their way towards the communists’ position. The young leaguers had received word that their leader, Pierre Taittinger, had been threatened with violence during an electoral meeting in the vicinity. Their mission was to protect Taittinger as he exited the gathering. The men marched in a column and sang the Marseillaise as they approached the meeting venue on the rue Championnet. Informed upon their arrival that their services were no longer needed, the column trooped up the rue du Poteau, harassed by a crowd of communists. The leaguers held their formation and continued to sing as they turned left onto the rue Damrémont. At this moment, Clerc and Bernardon unleashed a volley of bullets. Three leaguers fell to the cobblestones, all mortally wounded in the back. The communists fled. Unfamiliar with the geography of the district, they ran towards the police station on the rue Belliard, and into the arms of waiting constables.

Taittinger left the meeting at midnight. Surrounded by thirty bodyguards, he walked towards the Simplon metro station. As the group passed 109, rue Championnet, a man stepped out from the darkness and opened fire, fatally injuring a leaguer. Communist street brawlers chased the Jeunesses Patriotes to the metro where a fight ensued. The leaguers managed to escape on a train, leaving behind them ‘quite large pools of blood’; they had beaten back their attackers with canes, truncheons and a fire axe. Similar violence was witnessed at the Jules Joffrin station, where police reported that a Jeunesses Patriotes blinded a communist with his bare hands.¹

A year later, Clerc and Bernardon stood trial for murder at the assizes court of the Seine. Police had confirmed that the bullets removed from the victims were fired from the Browning revolvers found on the two men. Clerc and Bernardon’s defence – that they had fired to protect themselves from a beating – seemed unlikely given that the fatal wounds were inflicted from behind. The lawyers for the defence thus attempted to turn proceedings to their advantage and put the political doctrine of the Jeunesses Patriotes on trial. Jean Piot, editor of the newspaper L’Oeuvre and a witness for the defence, summed up this tactic in his deposition: ‘For certain simple men, it is evident that ideas are inseparable from the men who represent them. If Clerc and Bernardon fired, it was not on men, nor on Frenchmen, [but] on Fascism.’²

Had fascism travelled across the Alps and taken root in France? Historian Robert Soucy believed so; he termed the extreme right-wing movements of the mid-1920s the ‘first wave’ of French fascism. The Jeunesses Patriotes, founded by deputy and businessman Taittinger in November 1924, was an offshoot of the nineteenth-century Ligue des Patriotes. The league proposed to launch a ‘National Revolution’ to end parliamentary decadence while in the street and meeting halls of France its uniformed ‘centuries’ engaged in political violence. Georges Valois’s Faisceau, established in November 1925, celebrated Mussolini and sought to imitate its Italian counterparts with blue-shirted legions and a plan for an authoritarian ‘Combatants’ State’. Meanwhile, the Action Française’s ruffians plied their violent trade in the Latin Quarter. The camelots du roi street fighters ransacked left-wing newspaper offices and threatened their enemies with purgation with castor oil. In total, at least 100,000 French held a membership to the leagues of the 1920s.³

The French left perceived fascism in the leagues. The violence of fascism was central to this understanding. In 1926, the Secours Rouge International, a communist aid organization, published L’Italie sous la terreur. The book described the ‘pogroms’ and the ‘orgy of violence’ in Italy that had seen hundreds of workers killed. It reprinted quotations from Mussolini that endorsed physical aggression against the left.⁴ Communist Marcel Cachin drew a comparison between the French leagues and Italian Fascism, describing the ‘punitive expeditions’ of leaguers as an attempt to ‘bring to France the customs of Italian fascism’.⁵ Communist newspaper L’Humanité condemned these ‘imitators of the Black Shirts’ and promised that the party would organize its own defence in the face of the lassitude of the police.⁶

The leagues understood ‘fascism’ in a variety of ways. The Faisceau emphasized the aspects of Italian Fascism that suited best its own domestic agenda, notably (for Valois at least) the heritage of revolutionary syndicalism. For similar reasons the monarchist Action Française, on the other hand, underscored the reactionary elements of Mussolini’s doctrine and drew attention to the role of the king in the Duce’s assumption of power.⁷ The Jeunesses Patriotes likewise conceived of Fascism as a counter-revolution in the name of order; it distanced itself from the more revolutionary aspects of the ideology.⁸ The word, while imported from Italy, was invested with meanings that drew not only upon understandings of the Italian experience but also on long-held values and ideas in French extremist politics.⁹

The Jeunesses Patriotes

In May 1924, the left-wing Cartel des gauches won 286 seats out of a possible 584 in the Chamber of Deputies. The Bloc National – the right-wing alliance that had swept to power in November 1919 – was reduced to 205 seats.¹⁰ The conservative coalition had come to power on a wave of patriotism and a promise to hold Germany to the punitive peace terms formulated at Versailles. The murderousness of the First World War left an indelible mark on France. With over two million men dead or permanently disabled and a further six million veterans having survived the conflict, the war loomed large in political, cultural and family life and few French were willing to forgive and forget. The emergence of Bolshevism in Russia sharpened fears of home-grown revolutionaries especially during the huge strike waves of the early 1920s. The Bloc National was therefore elected on the promise that it would secure French recovery at home and its rightful rewards abroad by administering a dose of authority to the Republic.

The experience ultimately proved frustrating for the right. The government failed to undertake any reform of the regime, missing the opportunity in the eyes of some right-wingers to render the Republic more ‘efficient’. Poincaré’s invasion of the Ruhr in January 1923 split right-wing and centrist elements in the parliamentary coalition. By the general election in 1924, many right-wingers were disappointed. From the vantage point of 1925, nationalist Jean Binet-Valmer scoffed at the legislature of 1919: ‘The Sky-Blue Chamber? Oh! How we were naïve, ready for sacrifice, but so unprepared for the exercise of power!’¹¹ The election result in 1924 and its repercussions – the eviction of Poincaré and the subsequent resignation of President Alexandre Millerand – represented no less than the vacation of power by the right.

Worse still for conservatives, twenty-six communist deputies for the first time took up their seats in parliament. In December 1920, the Communist Party was founded at the Congress of Tours. The Third International seemed even more terrifying than its socialist counterpart and the Bloc National had been intransigent in its anti-communism.¹² The government had sanctioned the use of ‘civic unions’ against strikers during 1919–20. With the official status as an ‘auxiliary’ police force the parallels between the unions and the later paramilitary leagues were striking. It was even suggested that ‘Civic Guards’ wear a sky-blue uniform and be equipped with firearms.¹³ The strikers were ultimately defeated, but conservative fear of communism continued unabated. It centred on the impoverished suburbs of Paris, where approximately one million workers and their families lived. Rapid and unplanned urbanization in the wake of the First World War saw the suburbs grow exponentially into ‘great working-class ghettos’. This ‘Red Belt’ was feted in communist circles as the ‘citadel of the working class’. Yet for the terrified bourgeoisie, it was the ‘nerve centre of French communism’; the capital was caught in the stranglehold of the revolutionary left.¹⁴ The policies of the Cartel – perceived as the ‘thin end of a Marxist wedge’ – threatened causes that the right held dear.¹⁵ In domestic affairs, new Prime Minister Edouard Herriot announced his intention to extend secularism to Alsace and Lorraine, a move that seemed to target Catholics. In foreign policy, the government recognized the existence of the Soviet Union while withdrawing its ambassador to the Vatican and seeking reconciliation with Germany. In conservative eyes, the Republic was in thrall to the left.

Right-wingers looked to new methods to combat the perceived revolutionary threat. In November 1924, former president Millerand established the Ligue républicaine nationale with a view to creating a mass conservative movement. The league addressed its appeal to ‘Republicans of all colours’, including those of the Catholic faith.¹⁶ Catholics who feared a new wave of anticlericalism from the secularists in government founded their own defence groups. These were eventually federated in General Edouard de Curières de Castelnau’s Fédération nationale catholique (FNC), founded in February 1925. The FNC aimed to ‘restore Christian Order to the individual, the family, society, and the nation’; by September 1926 it had 1.8 million members.¹⁷

A number of extra-parliamentary groups opposed the Cartel. The Action Française took up once again its campaign against the Republic. This was a successful period for the league with approximately 30,000 members across France and its North African territories; its eponymous newspaper sold 100,000 copies per day. The league had shown signs that it was ready to compromise with the Republican system: in 1919, it ran candidates for election, Action Française lieutenant Léon Daudet won a seat in Paris. Furthermore, Maurras had enjoyed warm relations with Bloc Prime Minister Poincaré, notably supporting the latter’s hard-line foreign policy on Germany.¹⁸ Some moderate politicians evidently saw practical use in camelot violence against the left. In June 1921, for example, an unnamed Radical politician apparently called upon the young brawlers to help prevent a socialist-organized celebration of Joan of Arc.¹⁹

The movement turned more forcefully to violence after the killing of leaguer Marius Plateau by anarchist Germaine Berthon in January 1923.²⁰ The camelots underwent paramilitary training under the supervision of Colonel Georges Larpent.²¹ Police noted that these young street fighters were reshaped into ‘a disciplined troop … called upon to play, according to circumstance, an offensive or defensive role in the style of the Italian fascists’. Comprised of men aged over sixteen years, they were grouped into teams of 100, which were themselves divided into squads. Armed with a cane, a knuckleduster, sometimes a revolver and ‘blindly obedient’, the squads could be mobilized in secret and at very short notice to commit violence against enemy activists or property.²²

New formations emerged. Antoine Rédier’s Légion, founded in June 1924, proposed the replacement of the weak and effeminate Republic with a regime built on order, discipline and hierarchy that prioritized fatherhood and virile masculinity.²³ The largest of the new leagues was the Jeunesses Patriotes. The league was founded in the wake of the transfer of the ashes of socialist luminary Jean Jaurès to the Panthéon in Paris. The ceremony, which took place on 23 November 1924, profoundly worried nationalist observers. Le Matin noted that, of the ten flags that flew around the coffin of Jaurès, a lone tricolour fluttered next to eight red flags and the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: What was fascism?
• 1 Searching for a French Mussolini during the 1920s
• 2 Bloodshed in the City of Light: 6 February 1934
• 3 The army of the death’s head: The Croix de Feu
• 4 Fascism defeated? The Parti Social Français and the Parti Populaire Français
• 5 Bombs, bullets and bloody murder: The Cagoule
• 6 National Revolution, 1940–4
• 7 The Front National
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The French allergy to fascism
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Copyright