The Extreme Right in France

From Pétain to Le Pen

James Shields

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415097550
• eBook ISBN: 9781134861101
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Regierung

A comprehensive new historical study of the extreme right in France, from the Vichy regime to the present day.

The Front National has for some years been France's third political party and the most significant extreme-right force in Europe; its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, contested the second round of the 2002 presidential election with 5.5 million votes.

This wide-ranging and authoritative book examines the resurgence of right-wing extremism in France from a historical perspective, tracing the political lineage of Le Pen and the FN through key figures and movements on the French extreme right since 1940. Part 1 devotes chapters to the Vichy regime, the aftermath of the Occupation, the Poujadist movement, the Algerian War, the 'Nouvelle Droite', and extreme-right ideology and activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Part 2 analyzes the electoral rise of the FN, its evolving programme and exploitation of salient issues, the geography and sociology of its electorate, its exercise of local power, and its impact on national political culture in contemporary France. The FN, it is argued, represents both the latest manifestation of a long tradition of right-wing radicalism and a complex new phenomenon within the changing social and political dynamics of France today.

This is an essential book for all readers with an interest in French and European politics and modern history.

Part I
Lost opportunities and lost causes

1 The Vichy regime
A laboratory for the extreme right

The path of collaboration

In May and June 1940, the lightning invasion of France by German panzer divisions brought about the worst military catastrophe in the country’s history. In the shock of defeat, parliament voted its own disempowerment and, in search of an homme providentiel, vested full constituent powers on 10 July 1940 in the First World War hero of Verdun, Marshal Philippe Pétain. This was not a vote of confidence in what history would come to know as the Vichy regime, but rather an expression of support for the paternalistic 84-year-old chosen to head it, with even a majority of Socialists and Radicals in favour.¹

Pétain’s route to power had been as short as France’s to defeat. He had been brought into Paul Reynaud’s government as deputy premier on 18 May 1940, within a week of the German advance across the Meuse; on 16 June, with military collapse imminent, he had replaced Reynaud at the head of a crisis government. Foreclosing the prospect of further military resistance, the new premier’s immediate priority was to conclude an armistice with Hitler in breach of a Franco-British agreement struck some weeks earlier that no such negotiation would be sought. The armistice saw France divided into two zones: a zone occupée centred on Paris and including the more developed northern half of the country together with the entire Atlantic seaboard, and an unoccupied southern zone libre to be governed from the spa town of Vichy in the central Allier department.²

The 24 clauses of the armistice convention laid the contractual grounds for collaboration. Signed on 22 June 1940 in the same railway carriage at Rethondes where the armistice had been dictated to Germany in 1918, its terms were onerous and humiliating. The French army, navy and air force were to be demobilised, with the retention of only a small armistice army for the maintenance of order in the unoccupied zone and a limited naval force for the defence of overseas territories. Though the docked fleet was to remain in French hands, aerodromes, military installations and armaments were to be handed over to German control. The French administration in the occupied zone was required to cooperate fully with the German military authorities; the French treasury would assume all maintenance costs for the troops of occupation; and, most infamously, France would agree to surrender on demand German nationals who had taken refuge there from the Nazi regime. As surety, more than 1.5 million French prisoners of war would remain in German camps, until it later became expedient to trade some of them against a French volunteer – then conscript – labour force.

From abject defeat, the new regime in embryo extracted its own putative victory. In his radio broadcast of 25 June 1940, Pétain announced that much of the country was to be ‘temporarily occupied’, but ‘honour has been saved’ and ‘France will be administered only by Frenchmen under a government that remains free’.³ Soon the term ‘occupation’, with its connotations of defeat and passivity, would give way to a quite different term suggesting that France could remain at the helm of its own destiny. In a radio broadcast of 30 October 1940, Pétain reported on his recent meeting with Hitler as ‘the first step towards our country’s recovery’, exhorting his listeners ‘in the interests of French unity’ to follow him down ‘the path of collaboration’. Four months on from total military and political collapse, France had contrived its salvation as self-appointed partner in the Nazi project of constructing a ‘new European order’.⁴

The foremost concern of those who had sought an armistice was that France should be spared the indignity of ‘Polonisation’, or rule by an appointed governor. Despite the demarcation line between occupied and unoccupied France, the French government retained nominal authority over the whole of France and its overseas territories (with the exception of Alsace-Lorraine, where three departments were annexed and run by Gauleiter). In his broadcast of 30 October 1940, Pétain acknowledged the ‘numerous obligations’ imposed on a defeated France, but presented the paramount objective as having been secured: ‘At least she remains sovereign.’⁵ By contrast with other countries under Nazi occupation, a semblance of French national sovereignty was thus preserved – for a time. In November 1942, the southern zone too would be occupied, reducing the whole of France to a satellite of the Third Reich, despite the continued pretence of an ‘Etat Français’ governed from Vichy.

From democracy to despotism

By the time Pétain shook Hitler’s hand to seal the policy of collaboration at Montoire on 24 October 1940, the parliamentary Republic in France had given way to a profoundly anti-democratic regime. The ‘National Revolution’⁶ ushered in by Pétain owed much to a French right-wing tradition of anti-parliamentarism dating back to the Revolution of 1789. It repudiated the liberal, humanistic rationalism of the Enlightenment and preached a reactionary, authoritarian nationalism. It drew inspiration in particular from the ideas of Charles Maurras and his Action Française movement, with their sustained assault on the democratic values and institutions of the Third Republic as inimical to the culture, traditions and interests of the French nation.

The change of regime was signified in the replacement of the universalist principles ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ’ by the slogan ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ (‘Work, Family, Motherland’).⁷ For the Vichy authorities, these represented the natural, concrete, time-honoured bonds that held organic communities together, as opposed to fictitious abstractions. What sense, ironised Pétain, could ‘liberty – the abstract concept of liberty – have for an unemployed worker or a ruined small employer in 1940, except the liberty to suffer helplessly amidst a defeated nation?’ Equality – that ‘false idea of a natural equality between men’ – was scorned in similar terms as a vacuous notion that had no place within a regime proclaiming itself ‘authoritarian and hierarchical’.⁸ The various strata of the democratic state were removed, with the dissolution of elected departmental and (in all but the smallest communes) municipal councils. Elite appointments by decree replaced elections, since responsibility in public life was now to be determined by ‘weighing up value’ rather than merely ‘counting votes’.⁹

The constitutional law of 10 July 1940 consigning full political authority to Pétain marked the passage from the Third Republic to the Etat Français.¹⁰ It was adopted by a National Assembly of deputies and senators improvised in the Grand Casino at Vichy. The overwhelming vote of 569 to 80, with 17 abstentions, was the final act of a 70-year-old Republic.¹¹ This was followed on 11 July by constitutional acts to suspend both chambers of parliament indefinitely, depose the sitting President (Albert Lebrun) by abolishing his function, install Pétain formally as ‘chef de l’Etat français’, and affirm the new Head of State’s extensive legislative and executive powers. These gave him authority to appoint and dismiss all members of the government, promulgate and implement legislation, control key appointments of state, determine budgetary and fiscal policy, negotiate international agreements, and command the armistice army. Declaration of war was the only initiative that Pétain could not undertake without the approval of parliament. In a further constitutional act of 12 July, Pétain arrogated to himself the power even to designate his own successor (namely the vice-président du Conseil, Pierre Laval). As his chef de cabinet observed, the head of Vichy would shortly come to enjoy ‘more powers than Louis XIV’.¹² So much that had been achieved in France since 1789 (and that had been celebrated only a year before in the 150th anniversary of the Revolution)¹³ was undone at a stroke, with government under Pétain effected by diktat. To his powers as supreme legislator and head of the executive were added special judicial prerogatives, making Pétain the very embodiment of the despot as conceived by Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century.

The symbol of the new regime was the Francisque, a double axe-head on a marshal’s baton, linking Pétain with the ancient warrior Gauls and serving as the decoration bestowed by Vichy on its favoured servants.¹⁴ The emphasis on service and fidelity in the oath sworn by recipients of the Francisque reflected the shift in official discourse from the notion of rights to that of duties. In morality at large, the regime sought to foster a new spirit of asceticism, preaching solidarity and sacrifice and denouncing the pleasure-seeking ethos of liberal individualism. Accordingly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the founding document of the French Republic dating from 1789, was replaced by newly drafted Principles of the Community. Sixteen in number, these aped the format of the Declaration, with the first setting the tone: ‘Nature bestows upon man his fundamental rights, but these are guaranteed only by the communities around him: the family by which he is raised, the profession by which he earns his living, the nation by which he is protected.’¹⁵ Such precepts, together with a welter of Pétain’s utterances collected in diverse publications, were invoked as a new moral code. René Jeanneret’s Maxims and Principles of Marshal Pétain Drawn from his Messages to the French People, with its dictum for every day of the year, was a classic example of this quasi-catechismal genre.¹⁶ The cult of Maréchalisme reached its apogee in the hymns to Pétain’s glory and even the paraphrasing of the Lord’s Prayer in his name (culminating in the plea: ‘And deliver us from evil, oh Maréchal’).¹⁷

Healthy minds and healthy bodies

The National Revolution was to take root in the schools. For those in power at Vichy, the war had been lost not so much on the battlefield as in the classroom, where French youth had been inculcated with a corruptive individualism at the hands of decadent primary school teachers. Appointed Minister of War in the government of Gaston Doumergue in 1934, Pétain claimed that he would have preferred the Education Ministry in order to ‘deal with communist teachers’ and reform an education system that was ‘destroying State and society’.¹⁸ In 1940, in his self-assigned role as national educator-in-chief, he seized his opportunity. Under Vichy, the teacher training institutes (écoles normales d’instituteurs), reviled as ‘evil seminaries of democracy’, were abolished, and a purge was undertaken of communists and other ‘elements of disorder’ within the teaching profession.¹⁹ Those teachers who remained would be required to swear an oath of loyalty to Pétain. Schoolchildren were taught to honour the Marshal and encouraged in their millions to send him letters and drawings. The assiduity of his office in replying to these (with a personalised message and photograph of Pétain) signalled how seriously it took this aspect of its propagandist mission. As government and clergy propounded their shared ideals of order, discipline and duty, a close alliance of interest and ideology made the Church a pillar of the National Revolution and an important political player in France for the first time in over half a century. Religious instruction, banished by the secular laws of the 1880s, returned (for a time) to the curriculum; religious orders regained their right to teach; state subsidies were granted to Catholic schools; and crucifixes reappeared, alongside Pétain’s portrait, in state schools.

The new moral hygiene was to be accompanied by a hygiene of the body. Measures were taken to promote physical education and sports in schools. Vichy did not create a single youth movement on the Nazi model, but it placed a premium on reforming youth culture. Two notable movements, the Chantiers de la Jeunesse (Youth Work Sites) and Compagnons de France (Companions of France), were launched with the purpose of instilling in the young an ethic of duty and service.²⁰ Structured along quasi-militaristic lines, these movements organised camping, hiking, sporting and community activities, and exalted the virtues of self-discipline, hard work and the traditional rural life. A surrogate form of military service, the eight-month spell on the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, became compulsory for all 20-year-olds in the unoccupied zone, while both the Compagnons and the Chantiers were banned from the occupied zone as potentially dangerous expressions of chauvinistic fervour. Prominent among youth movements north of the demarcation line were the Jeunes de l’Europe Nouvelle (Youth of the New Europe) and the Jeunes du Maréchal (Marshal’s Youth). Drawn largely from lycée and university students, these were small but strongly collaborationist movements evincing National-Socialist sympathies and admiration for the Hitlerjugend.²¹

While measures were set in place to combat symptoms of social degeneracy such as venereal disease and alcoholism, youth affairs were entrusted to such paragons of sporting prowess as the pelota specialist Jean Ybarnégaray and the tennis champion Jean Borotra. The family was invested with a pre-eminent role as the ‘essential cell and very foundation of the social edifice’.²² Family mores were centred on a celebration of motherhood, with mothers of three or more children being granted a priority card for first access to some public services. Similarly, fathers of large families were favoured in the workplace in terms of job prospects and, following the statute on state employees of September 1941, pay. Draconian legislation was introduced against abortion, with abortionists facing life imprisonment and even the death penalty; divorce was made more difficult and forbidden within the first three years of marriage; and a law was passed barring married women from employment in the public sector.²³ At the same time, Pétain sought to construct national unity through a paternalist discourse that projected him not just as chef but also as père.

In the early days of the regime, all of these concerns were brought together in a single Ministry for Youth, the Family and Sport under Ybarnégaray. In December 1942, a law of a quite different tenor was passed obliging couples to undergo a pre-marital medical examination to screen for congenital defects. This was the most overtly eugenicist measure implemented by the Vichy regime, which described it as ‘only a first step’ that might eventually be extended. It never was. Fear of depopulation kept the emphasis of the regime firmly on procreation, despite voices calling for a full-blown programme of intervention...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Maps and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Lost Opportunities and Lost Causes
• Part II: Political Legitimation and the Fruits of Electoralism
• Appendix: Votes for the FN and Le Pen, 1973–2004
• Notes
• Bibliography