Nouvelle histoire de l’extrême droite: France 1780-2025, Baptiste Roger-Lacan (dir) Éditions du Seuil, €24, 384 pp, ISBN: 978-2021586954

On February 6th, 1934, with a crowd of 50,000 demonstrators converging on the French parliament in what was billed as a protest against corruption, Paris was subjected to a level of politically motivated violence it had not experienced for more than sixty years. The newspaper Le Petit Parisien reported on the following day that nine civilians had been killed in the disturbances, while hundreds more were in a serious condition in hospital. Over a thousand shots were fired by police blocking access to the bridge across the Seine at Concorde that led directly to the parliament building on the left bank of the river.

The business being conducted in the chamber that night as the riot proceeded nearby was the formal installation of a new prime minister, the Radical Socialist party’s Édouard Daladier, who after a rowdy debate was confirmed in office by a vote of 360 to 220. Daladier’s triumph, however, was to be short-lived. When he convened a meeting of ministers late in the night to discuss what steps should now be taken to restore order it became clear that he did not have the full backing of his ministers, while the police and security services told him that the organisers of the disturbances of the previous evening were now securing arms and preparing for a further, more serious, assault on parliament in the next few days. The best way, perhaps the only way, to calm the situation, the prime minister was advised, would be for him and his government to resign. This Daladier did, just eight days after having been nominated as prime minister by the president. He was replaced by a ‘government of national unity’, whose political make-up was considerably to the right of its predecessor.

The organisations that laid siege to parliament on February 6th and whose violence and threats of violence brought about the collapse of a constitutionally appointed government were multiple and various, though almost all of them belonged on the right and far right of the political spectrum. There was the influential royalist league Action française, which enjoyed significant support among the Catholic bourgeoisie and whose daily paper was sold in the streets by students, who also formed the nucleus of its muscular ‘security service’, the Camelots du roi. Solidarité française and Jeunesses patriotes were the creations of the wealthy businessmen François Coty and Pierre Taittinger (respectively dealing in perfume and champagne) who dressed their street militias in the fascist style and furnished them with a basic political programme, which did not extend far beyond virulent anti-communism and support for the interests of ‘the small man’. Marcel Bucard’s Franciste movement (known as ‘the blue shirts’), enjoyed the financial support of Benito Mussolini, yet failed to attract many adherents.

By far the strongest group on the extra-parliamentary right was the Croix-de-Feu (Cross of Fire) led by Colonel François de La Roque, a decorated officer from his service in the First World War strongly influenced by Catholic social teaching’s injunction that the rich should extend a helping hand to the poor. Otherwise the Croix-de-Feu stood for tax cuts; protection of French industry from foreign competition; the removal of the state from any involvement in economic activity and a policy of ‘national preference’, giving priority in access to employment to French workers over immigrants. Though present on the streets in force on February 6th, the colonel’s followers stayed away from the flashpoint at the Concorde bridge and were not involved in violence. La Rocque manifested a powerful fetish for the minute marshalling of his men, who held him in great affection for his personal modesty and probity. Unlike many of the other elements out in force and primed for violence on February 6th, the Croix-de-Feu had more of the character of a boy scout troop than a company of stormtroopers.

The violence that broke out on February 6th did not end with Daladier’s resignation. A further twelve demonstrators died in disturbances over the following days, including six young communists killed on February 9th and 12th. The socialist party (SFIO) saw the attack on parliament as an attempted fascist coup d’état that came very close to succeeding, an event analogous to and perhaps modelled on Mussolini’s ‘march on Rome’ in 1922 when King Victor Emmanuel refused to back his prime minister, Luigi Facta, in facing down the rebellion. Such an analysis, however, is more usefully seen in terms of its political value to the left than as an accurate account of who were the active forces in the February events, what their aims were and how genuine a threat they posed to the state. The multiplicity of small groups operating on the far right in France in 1934, and the similarities that some of them bore – or wished to bear – to contemporaneous movements in Germany, Italy and elsewhere suggests that the country was not, as some historians once suggested, immune to the fascist virus by reason of its great attachment to republican values. Not quite. But the most fascist or fascisant of these groups tended to be numerically rather insignificant. Nor were they united or focused on a single clear objective. What they did have in common was an aversion to the parliamentary form of democracy, seen as both corrupt and inefficient, or more plainly to liberal democracy itself, a system in which in their view universal (male) suffrage seemed to be repeatedly bringing the wrong people to power.

At a later parliamentary inquiry into the February events the socialist deputy Vincent Auriol interrogated Pierre Taittinger of the Jeunesses patriotes: ‘Auriol: So what you were seeking, in essence, was the departure of the government? Taittinger: Precisely, and we got it.’ In that context, the events of February 1934 can be seen as constituting a coup of sorts, not, as the socialists suggested, a fascist one that narrowly failed but a hard conservative one that succeeded.

****

The far right may have been able to create occasional large-scale disturbances in mid-1930s France but its underlying weakness, and particularly the absence of any effective fascist party, can be seen in a comparison of electoral results in France and Germany. In Germany, the Nazi party (NSDAP) had grown from twelve seats in the Reichstag in 1928, to 107 in 1930 and 230 in 1932. There was no such progression in France, where the socialists and the mostly centrist radical party remained strong and were able to form a Popular Front government in 1936, having won – between three parties, socialists, radicals and communists (the latter supporting the government from outside) – 58 per cent of the popular vote. The left was not wrong about the existence of a growing threat to democracy, but they were looking in the wrong place: the threat was not a domestic but a foreign one. The ingrained pacifism of many political actors of both left and right in the later 1930s, however, militated against taking a firm stand against Hitler’s expansionist ambitions until it was too late.

The far right eventually overcame its democratic enemies in summer 1940 after the French army was routed in six weeks in the German invasion of May/June. A traumatised assembly, meeting in emergency session in the central town of Vichy, ceded its powers to the First World War hero Marshal Philippe Pétain, who proceeded to suspend parliament and gather its functions, together with those of the president and the prime minister, to himself, thus effectively abolishing democracy. Pétain pursued a policy of close collaboration with the German occupier, implemented in detail by his deputy, Pierre Laval, while domestically he ruled on the basis of a strict principle of hierarchy – he was the boss – habitually laced with a sanctimonious masochism: France was indeed suffering, but it must embrace that suffering, which had come upon it because of its own failings, particularly its weakness and moral decadence in the 1920s and ’30s. Salvation for the French lay somewhere on the other side, after a long period of penitence.

Pétain and Laval had miscalculated, however, in their assumptions about how the war would pan out. The rapid German military victory they were counting on did not arrive. Britain remained defiant and undefeated and was eventually joined in the struggle against Nazism by powerful allies in the United States and Soviet Russia. In late 1943, as the prospects for Germany began to look bleak, and with them the survival of the collaborationist government, some of Pétain’s advisers urged him to introduce, through an elected consultative body, at least a veneer of democracy to underpin his legitimacy as France’s leader. The marshal adamantly refused: ‘I have declared that authority does not come from below. I can’t go back on that.’ In spite of the respect and affection which Pétain commanded among many sections of the French population, a legacy of his First World War generalship, the defeat of Germany, and with it the disgrace of the French collaborators, buried the political prospects of the far right for a generation after 1944.

****

Baptiste Roger-Lacan’s Nouvelle histoire tells the long history of the far right through a series of fourteen essays by contemporary French scholars. The historical phases of this political current, as well as the faces it chose to show to the public, varied considerably over time: from the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers of the nineteenth century who refused to accept the changes ushered in by the French Revolution, or indeed any society which derived its authority from the people rather than God; to the followers of the deposed royal houses of Bourbon and Orléans, who wished to see the monarchy and its privileges restored; to political Catholicism in its various strands, from the intransigents who, following Pius IX and his encyclical Quanta Cura (1864), popularly known as the ‘Syllabus of Errors’, seemed to reject modernity en bloc to those who, following the lead of his successor, Leo XIII, sought to defend the interests of the Church from within the structures of the Republic; from the fanatical antisemites and national chauvinists who emerged in the 1890s and whose influence was felt until the 1940s to the small groups of fascist ideologues who, raised in the Action française tradition, increasingly discerned the wave of the future in developments in Germany, Spain and, particularly, Italy.

A collection of individual essays on a subject may lack the single interpretive focus of a monograph, but this is not always a bad thing. The French ‘far right’ – a formulation that is itself open to question but ultimately serviceable – was, viewed over the wide span of almost 250 years, extremely various in its ideology and its manifestations. It was usually associated with nationalism, even though this was originally an idea associated with the left: royalty was in some ways a caste rather than a part of ‘the people’ or the nation, its members often willing to be kings and queens anywhere. Every nation needs an enemy and from the mid-nineteenth century, France’s chief enemy was Germany, with whom it went to war in 1870, 1914 and 1940. For many on both the far right and on the left, les anglo-saxons (Britain and America) were also enemies, cultural rivals or allies whose help was accepted but soon resented.

For the ultra-nationalist, an internal enemy is just as valuable as an external one, and in times of international peace more politically useful. In the imagination of the far right, France’s internal enemy par excellence was its Jewish community: antisemitism was endemic among a succession of extreme-right movements from the 1890s until Marine Le Pen, in the 2010s, realised that this was an ideology past its sell-by date and that encouraging hostility to France’s more numerous Muslim community would be more electorally rewarding.

In a stimulating essay on the movements of the mid-1930s, ‘Juifs, franc-maçons, communistes: combattre l’Anti-France’, Valeria Galimi outlines the conspiracist strand in far-right thinking according to which an unlikely alliance of Jewish bankers and financiers, secularist freemasons and revolutionary Bolsheviks had united with a view to corrupting and destroying the organic French nation. Anne-Sophie Anglaret and Baptiste Roger-Lacan, in ‘Vichy, ou l’heure de la revanche’ emphasise the essentially counter-revolutionary character of Pétain’s regime (1940-44), which sought to discredit and undo the reforms of the Popular Front government led by the Jewish socialist Léon Blum. Blum’s introduction of such measures as a shorter working week, paid holidays and improvements in safety for key workers like coal-miners was in Vichy’s view an indulgence that France simply could not afford. In ‘Ranimer la flamme après 1945’, Pauline Picco traces the fortunes of the ‘keepers of the flame’ during what were lean decades for the far right, disgraced by its wartime alliance with Nazism. Apart from the brief flowering of Pierre Poujade’s populist movement in the 1950s, electoral success was scarcely a consideration during this period and the leading ideologues felt free, in a number of short-lived movements and small-circulation reviews, to indulge their most extreme instincts, elaborating theories of white supremacism, antisemitism and Holocaust denial and exhibiting virulent hostility to both liberalism and the left.

In 1972 the small neo-fascist group Ordre nouveau (New Order) decided to furnish itself with what it conceived of as ‘an electoral shop-window’ by recruiting as a front man the largely respectable former Poujadist deputy Jean-Marie Le Pen. It quickly became clear, however, that Le Pen, who had served in the army in France’s wars in Indo-China, Suez and Algeria and whose profile was more colonialist than fascist, was not prepared to be anyone’s puppet. From small and electorally unpromising beginnings, the Front national grew slowly but steadily over the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, its greatest asset being Le Pen’s determination, stamina and considerable talent as a demagogue. In Roger-Lacan’s words, ‘the Front national became a political force of the first rank, succeeding in attracting currents of opinion as diverse as nationalists, Identitarians [those who understood France as essentially a white and Christian nation], traditionalist Catholics [followers of Archbishop Lefebvre], neo-pagans, nostalgics for French Algeria, even neo-fascists’.

Le Pen’s eventual successor as party leader, his daughter Marine, retained her father’s chief electoral card, opposition to immigration and hostility to communities of immigrant origin, while outlawing open antisemitism, or perhaps driving it underground. In two successive presidential elections, in 2017 and 2022, she has edged closer to success, while her party, the renamed Rassemblement national (National Union), emerged as the largest single force in the parliamentary elections in 2024. Its candidate in next year’s presidential election – whether that is Le Pen herself or the thirty-year-old Jordan Bardella – is given a fifty-fifty chance of success. While many things have changed in the far right’s long history, some have not. The antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole (Free Speech), founded in 1892, carried on its masthead the slogan ‘La France aux français’ (France for the French). Rassemblement national’s website today calls for a fight against what it terms the nation’s ‘submersion’ and promotes a raft of discriminatory and exclusionary measures against immigrants. Aside from the immigration issue, RN’s remarkable electoral growth is at least partially based on a perception that the two long-dominant political blocs of the centre left (Parti socialiste) and centre right (Les Républicains) no longer have a recipe that can offer the French the hope of improved living standards. Next April and May the electorate will be asked to decide if they think the ‘national populist’ far right can do any better.

Students, and indeed interested general readers, have long been well-served by a tradition of French history-writing that combines academic rigour with style, comprehensiveness and accessibility. The maison d’édition Seuil has a well-merited reputation for publishing popular and widely read volumes on the politics of twentieth century France and in particular the challenge of the far right – the names Serge Berstein, Michel Winock and the late Pierre Milza stand out. Baptiste Roger-Lacan’s stimulating collection marks a worthy addition to that impressive corpus.

Enda O’Doherty’s book The Dark Side of France: Thirteen Chapters in the History of the French Far Right will be published by Head of Zeus on July 16th.