France and Fascism

February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis

Brian Jenkins, Chris Millington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317507246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1 War, revolution and depression

The six février in historical context

Brian Jenkins and Chris Millington

No serious evaluation of France’s experience in the interwar years can fail to acknowledge the immense impact on all European societies of the Great War and its revolutionary aftermath, an historical cataclysm that defined the political landscape of the period.¹ The human costs of the 1914–18 conflict, both physical and psychological; the economic and demographic repercussions; the social dislocation and bitter political animosities; the deep resentments, anxieties and unresolved tensions bequeathed by the Versailles settlement; the unprecedented bourgeois fear of social revolution that followed the establishment of the Soviet Union as the first workers’ state; the deep divisions that the same event created within the European Left: the effect of all these developments was to destabilise societies internally and to destabilise the international order.

‘Immunity thesis’ historians have a somewhat anomalous position on this subject. On the one hand they seem to recognise fully the vital importance of the Great War and the Russian Revolution as a sine qua non for the emergence of Fascism in Europe. With some justification, they berate Sternhell for overestimating the role of ideas in history when he seeks to locate the intellectual origins of Fascism in pre-1914 France: as Winock puts it, Fascism was derived not from books but from the Great War and its revolutionary aftermath.² However, they seem curiously reluctant to include France in this particular analytical framework. According to this approach, while this great historical watershed of the twentieth century was deemed to have transformed the external context, it was not perceived to have affected France’s internal political life in the same way. Thus the socio-economic foundations of the Republican consensus remained intact and, with the exception of the Communist Party, the main political formations pre-dated the war. The normal patterns of Republican parliamentary politics therefore proceeded as before.³ This emphasis on continuities from the pre-war era seems to imply that France was largely unaffected by the wider historical processes that were reshaping socio-economic relations, internal politics and the relationship between states across Europe.

And yet, many studies of interwar France take a different view, acknowledging the economic, social, demographic and psychological dislocations wrought by the war: the heightened class tensions produced by the Bolshevik Revolution, the destabilisation of the political system, and the rise of paramilitarism, anti-parliamentarism, racism and xenophobia. Indeed, ‘immunity thesis’ historians themselves (especially when writing in a different register⁴) recognise that by the early 1930s France was experiencing a deep political ‘crisis’. Clearly there are tensions and inconsistencies here, even within the mainstream historiography. The widely shared assumption is that France’s experience of the key events that defined the interwar period – from the Great War to the Depression – was significantly different from that of her neighbours. However, the singularity of the French case does not seem to have been demonstrated by serious comparative analysis. Rather it seems to be derived from a kind of blinkered parochialism.

The aftermath of war

Let us look more closely at some of the key elements of this argument. It is often suggested that France was immunised against Fascism by its military victory in 1918 and its success at the Versailles Peace Conference. This proposition seems to make a narrow equation between Fascism and territorial expansionism, but it also rests on an assumption which owes more to conjecture than to proof: namely that German ‘national humiliation’ and Italian ‘frustration in victory’ produced immeasurably stronger feelings than those provoked by the French ‘lost peace’. It is true that the aftermath of the Great War in central and eastern Europe was violently convulsive. As nations came to terms with the end of the wider conflict and the redrawing of Europe’s frontiers, fighting continued in the east, fed by the violent tendencies of brutalised young men and the territorial and ethnic tensions in what Donald Bloxham has termed the ‘shatter zones’ of the former empires. States struggled to maintain their monopoly of violence. Paramilitary revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries transformed physical aggression into an acceptable method of political competition while their violent practices and mentalities were transferred across national boundaries. Political violence in these immediate post-war years was a European phenomenon.⁵

Certainly, France did not suffer the violent aftermath to the Great War witnessed in those nations left defeated or disappointed with victory. While violent extra-parliamentary organisations mobilised throughout the continent, the solidity of the French state and its police combined with the successful outcome of the war to leave little room for paramilitarism to flourish.⁶ Nevertheless, though French politics did not descend into the bloody violence witnessed in neighbouring countries, the legacy of the war was still keenly felt. Victory had come at a high cost. France had conscripted over 8.4 million men into the armed forces and drafted six hundred thousand men from the colonial territories. Over 1.3 million of these soldiers were killed, while a million were left permanently disabled. In total, 73 per cent of those mobilised were either killed or suffered some form of injury.⁷ Throughout the interwar years, bodily disability and disfigurement provided a highly visible reminder of the war’s legacy on the streets of France, from young men with walking canes to the mutilated faces of the gueules cassées.⁸

In addition to the great physical destruction and dismemberment of male bodies, the war had immeasurable social and psychological consequences. The loss of so many young men – and potential fathers – exacerbated existing fears over France’s declining birthrate. Since 1871 pronatalist associations had blamed France’s defeat to Prussia on the former’s numerically inferior population and stagnant birthrate. Yet it was only in 1920, when the aftermath of the war nourished pronatalist fears, that such concerns were reflected in legislation, while prominent members of the birthrate movement such as Auguste Issac and Jean-Louis Breton assumed ministerial posts. Concomitantly, conservative anxiety over the emergence of the financially and sexually independent ‘new woman’ and the perceived decline of traditional motherhood caused a backlash against women in the workplace.⁹

Economically, France was close to financial ruin. The unforeseen length of hostilities, the ensuing devastation and the financing of the war through international loans and the printing of money had turned France from a creditor into a debtor nation. It is little surprise that French triumphalism quickly turned to demands for recompense: ‘William II must pay’, demanded Le Matin, two days after the armistice.¹⁰ Destruction caused to communications and important industrial centres in the north east further hampered economic and material recovery. The Franc declined dramatically in value, exports were slow to recover and war debt payments exacerbated the dire economic situation further. The destabilisation of financial and currency markets led in the early 1920s to an inflationary spiral and a collapse of savings which deeply undermined the confidence of France’s broad property-owning classes. By 1924, the national deficit had reached 26 billion Francs. Many French feared that despite the victory, France was still weaker than Germany. The Weimar government’s apparent recalcitrance on the issue of reparations and its industrial potential (which remained great despite the defeat) drew attention to perceived French vulnerability.¹¹

If immunity thesis historians underestimate the impact of the Great War in France, likewise they argue that the European after-shocks of the Russian Revolution affected France much less than Germany or Italy. As a result there was less for Fascism to feed on in terms of a perceived revolutionary threat from the Left. In the short term that may appear to have been true: in comparison with the 1918–19 revolutionary struggles in Germany, or even the factory council movement that swept Italy after the armistice, the French strike waves of early 1919 and early 1920 seem relatively innocuous. Nonetheless, the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union had a profound impact on perceptions of class politics in France. Greatly intensified class antagonisms emerged. The traumas of the war and the frustrations of the peace reinforced the working-class sense of exclusion from the national community, and if anything this was further exacerbated by significant structural changes wrought both by the war effort and post-war economic reconstruction. Mechanisation and taylorised work processes in heavy industry drew in fresh migrants from the countryside, and began to make the semi-skilled production-line worker (ouvrier specialisé or OS) the new proletarian ‘norm’, with all the associated imagery of job insecurity and alienation from the modern division of labour which would provide such a potent theme of mass mobilisation. In social and economic terms alone, the intensity of fears and aspirations on both sides are sufficient to explain the class animosities that emerged, while international developments gave these internal class antagonisms a sharper political and ideological focus. The ‘light in the East’ (’lueur a l’est‘) would split the French Socialist and workers’ movement,¹² and would later attract the deep antipathy of many on the ‘democratic’ Left, but it nonetheless continued to be an inspirational reference-point, if only as living proof that capitalism was not invincible.¹³

On the other hand it also concentrated the fears of France’s traditionally timid and conservative property-owning classes. The Communist Third International was seen as immeasurably more dangerous than its pre-war Socialist predecessor, more disciplined and ruthless, and moreover controlled by a hostile foreign power. The French Right saw the hand of Lenin’s Third International behind post-war industrial unrest and the striking growth of the CGT.¹⁴ Believing that Moscow was trying to sabotage the peace as revolution gripped Germany, French conservatives feared the influence of Bolshevism in their own country.¹⁵ Moreover, in conservative minds the threat from Bolshevism was conflated with the likelihood of renewed hostilities with Germany. Since 1917 conservatives had linked Marxism with Prussian militarism as two sides of the same coin.¹⁶ Indeed the continued fear of Germany and the perceived threat of revolution informed immediate post-war political developments. Against the background of political, social and economic insecurity, the conservative Bloc National’s promise to deal firmly with the Communist threat at home and the German abroad brought victory in the elections of November 1919.

The new conservative government faced an immediate challenge from the labour movement. During the first six months of 1920, a strike wave paralysed industries and public services throughout France. Industrial unrest culminated in violence between demonstrators and police on May Day. The conservative response to the strikes came in the form of ‘civic unions’, associations that recruited blackleg labour largely among conservative war veterans and young bourgeois men.¹⁷ Though branded as ‘[l]eagues of scabs and propagandists’ by the Left, the civic unions were granted official status as an ‘auxiliary police’ in April 1920 and they sprung up across the country.¹⁸ Ultimately, the unions played no small part in defeating the post-war strike movement. Furthermore, through its support of the unions, the Republic had shown itself capable of dealing with the threat from left-wing agitators.

Nonetheless, despite the joy and relief at victory, and the defeat of the labour movement, political, economic and social strife had undermined any prospect of national unity. The cost of the war in material and psychological terms seemed crippling, while few were confident that the diktat peace would put an end to the threat from Germany. Meanwhile, further east, the Soviet Union looked to be encouraging domestic revolutionaries bent on paralysing France. The fear of red revolution reflected in the famous 1919 anti-Bolshevik election poster ‘the man with the knife between his teeth’ continued unabated.¹⁹

The birth of the leagues

The Right could take some solace from post-war developments. In domestic matters, the parliament of November 1919 was greeted with great optimism, thanks largely to two myths about the men elected. First, it was believed that the Chamber was made up of war veterans. For this very reason, the parliament was dubbed the ‘Sky Blue’ Chamber, after the dress uniforms of its veteran members. These men, who were said to have proved their national worth on the battlefield, inspired great confidence on the Right. In reality, vetera...