The Extreme Right in the French Resistance: Members of the Cagoule and Corvignolles in the Second World War. By Valerie Deacon.

Abstract

This book challenges much conventional thinking. By focusing on two groups considered among the most extreme in 1930s France, the Cagoule and the Corvignolles, Valerie Deacon illustrates that many members, rather than gravitating towards collaboration with the Nazis, instead spent the Second World War resisting them. She thereby illustrates that in addition to communists, progressives, and Gaullists there were ultra-nationalists and racists who fought the German occupation. The Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire, or Cagoule as it is known, combined anti-republicanism, anti-communism, authoritarianism, royalism, racism, and anti-Semitism with extreme violence. It is tempting to mock the organization’s half-baked plans to stage a Reichstag Fire-like event in order to seize power, but truthfully the schemes of the Cagoule were no laughing matter. In the mid-1930s, they murdered several people, committed acts of sabotage, and stockpiled a considerable cache of weapons owing largely to the support of Fascist Italy. Thus, given that former Cagoule leader Eugène Déloncle helped to found and lead two collaborationist organizations and that one of his henchmen, Joseph Darnand, became the leader of the Vichy government’s brutal paramilitary ‘Milice’, many scholars infer that their trajectories typified the wartime activities of the Cagoulards. Less is known about the even more secretive Corvignolles. Founded by commandant Georges Loustaunau-Lacau (Corvignolles was a reference to the family name of maréchal de Vauban, a military leader under Louis XIV), the Corvignolles was a clandestine organization of mainly military figures who desired to see ‘authority’ returned to the French state. This was code for a new constitutional order with a stronger president; sometimes it masked outright authoritarianism. Certainly, the Corvignolles’ leaders shared a staunch anti-communism and stood ready to oppose a communist coup if necessary. Deacon points out that after the fall of France in June 1940 these groups were well positioned to engage in Resistance work. They had pre-established underground networks and were accustomed to subversive politics; the Corvignolles, in particular, became a successful Resistance organization. Here Deacon makes another key contribution when she notes the centrality of women to the group’s activities. The male leadership was largely rounded up and arrested in 1941, leaving women, including the redoubtable Marie-Madeleine Méric (Fourcade), to run the show. She thus challenges the highly masculinist image most have of the Resistance. Finally, Deacon’s book demonstrates that not only did these extremists feature prominently in the Resistance, but they went on to populate the right wing of Gaullism in the post-war period. Many former would-be putschists of the inter-war years, in other words, were rehabilitated as conservatives post-1945. This is a highly successful book; it challenges many sacred cows and gives historians of twentieth-century France much to think about.