France Faces Fascism

This volume brings together the leading critics of the 'immunity thesis' to fascism in France in the 1930s - Robert Paxton, Zeev Sternhell and Robert Soucy - who have refined and updated their positions in these essays.

France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis is the first English-language book to examine the most significant political event in interwar France: the Paris riots of February 1934. On 6 February 1934, thousands of fascist rioters almost succeeded in bringing down the French democratic regime. The violence prompted the polarisation of French politics as hundreds of thousands of French citizens joined extreme right-wing paramilitary leagues or the left-wing Popular Front coalition. This ‘French civil war’, the first shots of which were fired in February 1934, would come to an end only at the Liberation of France ten years later. The book challenges the assumption that the riots did not pose a serious threat to French democracy by providing a more balanced historical contextualisation of the events. Each chapter follows a distinctive analytical framework, incorporating the latest research in the field on French interwar politics as well as important new investigations into political violence and the dynamics of political crisis. With a direct focus on the actual processes of the unfolding political crisis and the dynamics of the riots themselves, France and Fascism offers a comprehensive analysis which will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as scholars, in the areas of French history and politics, and fascism and the far right.

Did fascism have a significant following in France in the 1930s? Were its supporters predominantly from the political right or left? This provocative book, in conjunction with its acclaimed predecessor, French Fascism: The First Wave, demolishes the notion that fascism never took hold in France. Robert Soucy argues that France has a long-standing fascist tradition, one that arose, he argues, more from counterrevolutionary forces on the right than from forces on the left. Analyzing fascist "double-talk," Soucy underscores the social and economic conservatism of such mass movements as Francisme, the Solidarit� Fran�aise, the Parti Populaire Fran�ais, and the Croix de Feu--as well as the ideological and membership crossovers between them. Examining police reports of the era, he penetrates beneath the "socialist" rhetoric of these movements and describes their financial backing from the steel and electricity industries and the middle- and lower-middle-class constituencies (rather than workers) who provided most of their recruits. Soucy investigates why thousands of French men and women found fascist ideas attractive during this period and what fueled the more authoritarian and brutal aspects of French fascism. According to Soucy, these tendencies (seen most recently in the right-wing activity of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front) periodically emerge from perceived threats from "alien" elements in French society--whether they be Communists, Socialists, immigrants, Jews, feminists, hedonists, democrats, or liberals "soft" on Marxism and secularism.

The role and influence of intellectuals is one of the flashpoints in the recurring debate on the nature and dimensions of French fascism. At the forefront of this debate are a group of emerging writers, collectively known as the Young Right. Though thoroughly schooled in the reactionary nationalism of Charles Maurras' Action francaise, whose orbit they entered in the early 1930s, they were soon seduced by the mobilizing force of neighboring fascist movements and regimes. Led by two precocious literary talents, Robert Brasillach and Thierry Maulnier, the Young Right set themselves to rejuvenating French nationalism and winning a place for France in an emerging new Europe. Their project - an attempt to graft lessons from foreign sources onto a native language of French generational and cultural politics - was one of several efforts to create a distinctive French fascism.

During the interwar years France experienced severe political polarization. At the time many observers, particularly on the left, feared that the French right had embraced fascism, generating a fierce debate that has engaged scholars for decades, but has also obscured critical changes in French society and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. This collection of essays shifts the focus away from long-standing controversies in order to examine various elements of the French right, from writers to politicians, social workers to street fighters, in their broader social, cultural, and political contexts. It offers a wide-ranging reassessment of the structures, mentalities, and significance of various conservative and extremist organizations, deepening our understanding of French and European history in a troubled yet fascinating era.

"Few books on European history in recent memory have caused such controversy and commotion," wrote Robert Wohl in 1991 in a major review of Neither Right nor Left. Listed by Le Monde as one of the forty most important books published in France during the 1980s, this explosive work asserts that fascism was an important part of the mainstream of European history, not just a temporary development in Germany and Italy but a significant aspect of French culture as well. Neither right nor left, fascism united antibourgeois, antiliberal nationalism, and revolutionary syndicalist thought, each of which joined in reflecting the political culture inherited from eighteenth-century France. From the first, Sternhell's argument generated strong feelings among people who wished to forget the Vichy years, and his themes drew enormous public attention in 1994, as Paul Touvier was condemned for crimes against humanity and a new biography probed President Mitterand's Vichy connections. The author's new preface speaks to the debates of 1994 and reinforces the necessity of acknowledging the past, as President Chirac has recently done on France's behalf.