Fascism in France and the Strange Case of the Croix de Feu

Abstract

One of the very few things historians of fascism in France can agree upon is that the Croix de Feu and its successor, the Parti Social Fran?ais (PSF), are irrelevant to their subject. Even when they agree on nothing else, most historians concur that to include the Croix de Feu/PSF among the ranks of French fascists is to adopt uncritically the partisan labels of the interwar Left. Indeed, the most recent judgment, accurately reflecting the existing consensus among scholars, declares that only dogmatists of the left consider the Croix de Feu to have been fascist.' A journalist writing in Le Monde on the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Colonel de la Rocque, leader of the Croix de Feu, nicely captured the current thinking on the subject. La Rocque, he wrote, was simply link in the rather pragmatic evolution of French 'moderates,' from Albert de Mun to Charles de Gaulle.2 No one, of course, denies that the Croix de Feu was by far the most dynamic and important formation on the French Right in the 1930s. Founded as a modest and largely apolitical veterans' organization in 1928, it became, under the post-1931 leadership of Colonel de la Rocque, a far larger and overtly political movement. Although its exact political stance was often hazy, there was no doubt about its intense hostility to the parliamentary regime and to the parties of the political Left. It was an avowedly paramilitary organization, given to making veiled allusions to an impending H hour and to organizing massive, disciplined, and menacing parades. Convoys of automobiles and motorcycles sped through the night making mysterious rendezvous; its action squads, the so-called dispos, stood ready for cryptic orders