Fascism In France Research Articles

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

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

French Fascism and the Croix de Feu: A Dissenting Interpretation

Although scholars have differed fundamentally in their interpretations of both German and Italian fascism, the study of French fascism has been a less contested field. Most historians who have written on French fascism agree that it lacked popular support and was limited to a few marginal political movements.' A major exception is Zeev Sternhell, who has argued that fascist ideas had a widespread appeal in France, especially in intellectual circles, from the 1880s onward. Sternhell agrees with most French scholars, however, that fascism in France was sharply at odds with traditional French conservatism. Although he states that it was 'neither right nor left' but a combination of both, he portrays it as largely inspired by 'revolutionary', 'anti-bourgeois' intellectuals who sought to 'revise' Marxism. In brief, French fascism has been described as either limited to a few insignificant fringe groups or, if more pervasive than that, primarily the work of non-conformist left-wing intellectuals. To demonstrate, even partially, that the Croix de Feu was fascist would throw into question both of these interpretations. Colonel de

The Birth of the Weekend and the Revolts against Work: The Workers of the Paris Region during the Popular Front (1936-38)

The Popular Front period in France has often been described by both Left and Right as a revolution manquee, a missed opportunity for the working class to take control of the means of production. When workers occupied and staged sit-down strikes in the factories during May and June, 1936, commentators of various political persuasions believed that the workers were on the road to revolution. Yet despite an unprecedented one million workers occupying factories all over France, the bourgeoisie managed to retain its ownership of the means of production. Instead of making revolution during the governments of the Popular Front, the workers demanded-and received-paid vacations and the forty-hour week. In the midst of the greatest economic depression that capitalism has ever known, France gave birth to the weekend. In the face of high unemployment and the increasing threat of war, French workers fought for their forty-hour week with Saturday and Sunday off. Thus the Popular Front was not only an alliance of unions and left political parties to prevent fascism in France, but it was also the birthplace of mass tourism and leisure. The demand for a social revolution in which the workers take over and develop the means of production was superseded by numerous struggles against work. This article will examine the revolts against work, and it will explain in detail

French ‘Left-Catholics’ and Communism in the Nineteen-thirties

Not long before he died, Lenin told a French Catholic visitor that “only Communism and Catholicism offered two diverse, complete andinconfusibleconceptions of human life.” Lenin's belief that Communism and Catholicism were incon fusible was probably shared by most Communists, and most Catholics, in France in the nineteen-thirties. When the French Communists offered an “outstretched hand” to Catholic workers in 1936 in an effort to achieve a tactical alliance to head off fascism in France and Europe and to promote social progress—ignoring the incompatibilities of world view as much as possible—a number of French Catholics sought to grasp it. But these Catholics were not, for the most part, the “Catholic workers, clerks, artisans, peasants” to whom Maurice Thorez had addressed his appeal, but rather Catholic philosophers, “social priests,” journalists, and cardinals. They grasped, or considered grasping, the outstretched hand with a variety of motivations, hopes, and intentions which were quite often different from the intentions of the Communists who proffered it.

French Fascism and Modernization

It is only relatively recently that the fascist phenomenon in France1 has been subjected to a closer examination. There were a variety of reasons for this. Fascism in France, when set beside fascist movements in other countries, particularly those which eventually attained power, never became a political factor of any great significance. The plethora of small groups which went to make up French fascism never succeeded in settling their differences and merging into one larger, unified movement. The reasons for their failure to do so have likewise never yet been thoroughly investigated; the common, somewhat glib explanation has been that there was no charismatic figure available to act as leader.2 The fascists never, not even during the Vichy period, penetrated beyond the vestibule of power.3 The comparative neglect of the whole complex of right-wing extremism in France (after Ernst Nolte had freed fascism from the context of comparative theories of totalitarianism and reinstated it as a phenomenon in its own right4) was partly due to the fact that scholars initially chose to devote their attention to fascist seizures of power and systems of rule rather than to fascist movements or groups that never rose to power. Nevertheless, there is no denying that during 1930s concepts such as 'fascism' and 'anti-fascism' were recurrent leitmotifs of the political debate in France. Even after 1945, writers and intellectuals like Bardeche and Celine continued more or less openly to espouse fascism or fascist ideas.5 More particularly, there can be no doubt that such movements as Valois' 'Faisceau', in the 1920s, or the PPF of Jacques Doriot and the right-wing Croix de Feu of Colonel de la Rocque, in the 1930s, were for a time definitely of more than just peripheral importance. The last ten years, however, have seen an increasing number of

Some Recent Studies of Fascism

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticlesSome Recent Studies of FascismCharles S. MaierCharles S. Maier Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 48, Number 3Sep., 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/241464 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1976 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Roger Griffin Fascism and Culture: A Mosse-Centric Meta-Narrative (or how Fascist Studies Reinvented the Wheel), (Jan 2011): 85–116.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230295001_4 장문석 Fascism and Modernity, Journal of Mediterranean Area Studies 10, no.44 (Dec 2008): 85–113.https://doi.org/10.18218/jmas.2008.10.4.85

Review. Fascism in France. The Case of Maurice Barres. Soucy, R.

Review. Fascism in France. The Case of Maurice Barres. Soucy, R.

Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barres

Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barres

Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barres

Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barres

Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès

(1973). Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barres. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 84-84.

Barres and Fascism

In recent years several important studies have drawn a sharp dividing line between conservatism and fascism in modem French history. In La Droite en France de 1815 a nos jours (1954), for example, Rent R&mond suggests that fascism entered France in the 1920's as a foreign importation, almost abruptly, as a phenomenon alien to native French political traditions, including those of French conservatism. According to R6mond, if such a leading representative of French conservative nationalism as Maurice Barres (1862-1923) had been alive when Nazism threatened Europe in the 1930's, the right-wing patriot would have regarded its acceptance as unthinkable.' That Barres was somehow a precursor of fascism in France has been denied also by Jacques Madaule and Henri Clouard in works on Barres published during the German Occupation. Both authors insisted, if necessarily somewhat obliquely, that Barrtsian nationalism was fundamentally different from later facism and should not be confused with the beliefs of the invader.2 In

The Nature of Fascism in France

The Nature of Fascism in France