The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  It is not enough, of course, to simply count up the number of prominent French intellectuals who spoke a language that sounded fascist, along with the colorful array of movements that demonstrated and pontificated in 1930s France. Two questions arise: Were they as significant as they were noisy, and were they really fascist? It is important to note that the more closely a French movement imitated the Hitlerian or (more frequently) the Mussolinian model, as did the tiny blue-shirted Solidarité Française or the narrowly localized Parti Populaire Français of Jacques Doriot, 49 the less successful it was, while the one far Right movement that approached mass catch-all party status between 1936 and 1940, Colonel François de La Rocque’s Parti Social Français, tried to look moderate and “republican."

  Any assessment of fascism in France turns on La Rocque. If his movements were fascist, fascism was powerful in 1930s France; if they were not, fascism was limited to the margins. La Rocque, a career army officer from a monarchist family, took over in 1931 the Croix de Feu, a small veterans’ association of those decorated with the Croix de Guerre for heroism under fire, and developed it into a political movement. He drew in a wider membership and denounced the weakness and corruption of parliament, warned against the threat of Bolshevism, and advocated an authoritarian state and greater justice for workers integrated into a corporatist economy. His paramilitary force, called dispos (from the French word disponible, or “ready"), embarked on militaristic automobile rallies in 1933 and 1934. They mobilized with precision to pick up secret orders at remote destinations for “le jour J” (D day) and “l’heure H” (H hour) in apparent training to combat by force a communist insurrection.50

  The Left, made jittery by supposed fascist marches on Rome, Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid, branded the Croix de Feu fascist. That impression was fortified when the Croix de Feu participated in the march on the Chamber of Deputies in the night of February 6, 1934. Colonel de La Rocque kept his forces separate from the others on a side street, however, and in all his public statements he gave the impression of strict discipline and order more than of unbridled street violence. Unusually for the French Right, he rejected anti-Semitism and even recruited some notable patriotic Jews (though his sections in Alsace and Algeria were antiSemitic). Although he found good in Mussolini (except for what he saw as excessive statism), he retained the anti-Germanism of most French nationalists.

  When the Popular Front government dissolved the Croix de Feu along with other right-wing paramilitary groups in June 1936, Colonel de La Rocque replaced it with an electoral party, the Parti Social Français (PSF). The PSF abandoned paramilitary rallies and emphasized national reconciliation and social justice under a strong but elected leader. This move toward the center was enthusiastically ratified by rapidly growing membership. The PSF was probably the largest party in France on the eve of the war. It is very hard to measure the size of any of the French far Right movements, however, in the absence of electoral results or audited circulation figures for their newspapers. The parliamentary elections scheduled for 1940, in which La Rocque’s party was expected to do well, were canceled by the war.

  As France regained some calm and stability in 1938–39 under an energetic center-Left prime minister, Édouard Daladier, all the far Right movements except the most moderate one, La Rocque’s PSF, lost ground. After the defeat of 1940, it was the traditional Right, and not the fascist Right, that established and ran the collaborationist Vichy government.51 What was left of French fascism completed its discredit by reveling in occupied Paris on the Nazi payroll during 1940–44. For a generation after the liberation of 1945, the French extreme Right was reduced to the dimensions of a sect.

  The failure of fascism in France was not due to some mysterious allergy,52 though the importance of the republican tradition for a majority of French people’s sense of themselves cannot be overestimated. The Depression, for all its ravages, was less severe in France than in more industrially concentrated Britain and Germany. The Third Republic, for all its lurching, never suffered deadlock or total paralysis. Mainstream conservatives did not feel sufficiently threatened in the 1930s to call on fascists for help. Finally, no one preeminent personage managed to dominate the small army of rival French fascist chefs, most of whom preferred intransigent doctrinal “purity" to the kind of deal making with conservatives that Mussolini and Hitler practiced.

  We can put a bit more flesh on these bare bones of analysis by examining one movement more closely. The Greenshirts were a farmers’ movement in northwestern France in the 1930s, overtly fascist at least in its early days, which succeeded in sweeping some embittered farmers into direct action, but failed to construct a permanent movement or to spread outside the Catholic northwest to become a truly national contender.53 It is important to investigate rural fascism in France, since it was among farmers that Italian and German fascisms first successfully implanted themselves. Moreover, in a country that was more than half rural, the potential for fascism in France would rest upon what it could do in the countryside. That being the case, it is curious that all previous studies of French fascism have examined only the urban movements.

  Space opened up in rural France at the beginning of the 1930s because both the government and the traditional farmers’ organizations, as in Schleswig-Holstein, were discredited by their utter helplessness in the collapse of farm prices.

  The Greenshirts’ leader, Henry Dorgères (the pen name of an agricultural journalist who discovered a talent for whipping up peasant anger on market day), openly praised Fascist Italy in 1933 and 1934 (though he later declared it too statist), and he adopted a certain number of fascist mannerisms: the colored shirt, the inflamed oratory, nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism. At peak form in 1935, he was capable of gathering the largest crowds ever seen in distressed French rural market towns.

  There was even a space in France that superficially resembled the opportunities offered to direct action by Italian Fascists in the Po Valley: in the summers of 1936 and 1937, when massive strikes of farm laborers on the big farms of the northern plains of France at crucial moments— thinning the sugar beets, harvesting the beets and wheat—threw farm owners into panic. The Greenshirts organized volunteers to carry out the harvest, recalling the Blackshirts’ rescue of Po Valley farmers. They had a keen sense of theater: at the end of the day, they gathered at a memorial to the dead of World War I and laid a wheat sheaf there.

  Direct action by Dorgères’s harvest volunteers led nowhere, however, and these tiny groups that bore a family resemblance to Mussolini’s squadristi never became a de facto local power in France. A major reason for this was that the French state dealt much more aggressively than the Italian one with any threat to the harvest. Even Léon Blum’s Popular Front sent the gendarmes instantly whenever farmworkers went out on strike at harvest time. The French Left had always put high priority on feeding the cities, since the days in 1793 when Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety had sent out “revolutionary armies" to requisition grain. 54 French farmers had less fear than the Po Valley ones of being abandoned by the state, and felt less need for a substitute force of order.

  Moreover, over the course of the 1930s, the powerful French conservative farm organizations held their own much better than in Schleswig-Holstein. They organized successful cooperatives and supplied essential services, while the Greenshirts offered only a vent for anger. In the end, the Greenshirts were left on the margins. The crucial turning point arrived when Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, president of the powerful French Farmers’ Federation (FNEA, Fédération Nationale des Exploitants Agricoles), who had earlier helped Dorgères work up rural crowds, decided in 1937 that it would be more efficacious to construct a powerful farmers’ lobby capable of influencing the state administration from within. The power of entrenched conservative farm organizations like the FNEA and the mighty cooperative movement based at Landerneau in Brittany was such that the Greenshirts found little space available.

  This suggests that fascist interlopers canno
t easily break into a political system that is functioning tolerably well. Only when the state and existing institutions fail badly do they open opportunities for newcomers. Another shortcoming of Dorgères’s Greenshirts was their inability to form the basis for a catch-all party. While Dorgères was a genius at arousing farmers’ anger, he almost never addressed the woes of the urban middle class. As an essentially ruralist agitator, he tended to see urban shopkeepers as part of the enemy rather than as potential alliance partners in a fully developed fascism.

  Still another reason for Dorgères’s failure was that large areas of rural France were closed to the Greenshirts by long-standing attachment to the traditions of the French Revolution, which had given French peasants full title to their little plots of land. While peasants of republican southern and southwestern France could become violently angry, their radicalism was channeled away from fascism by the French Communist Party, which was rather successful among French small farmers of traditionally Left-leaning regions. 55 And so rural France, despite its intense suffering in the Depression of the 1930s, was not a setting in which a powerful French fascism could germinate.

  Some Other Unsuccessful Fascisms

  Outside Italy and Germany, only a rather limited number of nations offered conditions that enabled fascism to win large electoral support, along with eager conservative coalition partners. Next after Germany in order of electoral success came the Arrow Cross Party–Hungarist Movement of Ferenc Szálasy, which won about 750,000 votes out of 2 million in the Hungarian elections of May 1939.56 The government, however, was already firmly in the hands of the conservative military dictatorship of Admiral Horthy, who had both no intention of sharing power and no need to do so. The other important vote winner in eastern Europe was the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania, which, running under the label “All for the Fatherland," was the third largest party in the general election of 1937, with 15.38 percent of the vote, and 66 seats out of 390 in the legislature.57

  The most successful fascist vote winner in western Europe, at least momentarily, was Léon Degrelle’s Rexist movement in Belgium. Degrelle began by organizing Catholic students and running a Catholic publishing house (Christus Rex), and then developed wider ambitions. In 1935 he embarked on a campaign to persuade Belgian voters that the traditional parties (including the Catholic Party) were mired in corruption and routine at a moment that demanded dramatic action and vigorous leadership. In the national parliamentary elections of May 1936 the Rexists campaigned with a simple but eloquent symbol: a broom. A vote for Rex would sweep the old parties away. They also called for unity. The old parties divided Belgium, for they gathered voters on confessional or ethnic or class lines. Rex promised—as all effective fascist movements did—to gather citizens of all classes in a unifying “rassemblement” rather than a divisive “party."

  These appeals struck home in a country plagued by ethnic and linguistic division aggravated by economic depression. The Rexists won 11.5 percent of the popular vote in May 1936 and 21 out of 202 seats in the legislature. Degrelle was not able to hold on to his mushroom vote, however. The conservative establishment united against him, and Church leaders disavowed him. When Degrelle ran in a by-election in Brussels in April 1937, the entire political class from communists to Catholics united behind a popular young opponent, the future prime minister Paul Van Zeeland, and Degrelle lost his own parliamentary seat.58

  Degrelle’s rapid rise and equally rapid decline reveals how hard it is for a fascist leader to keep the bubble intact after managing to assemble a heterogeneous protest vote. Rapid flows of the vote into a new catch-all party could be a two-way current. The feverish swelling of the party could be followed by an equally rapid collapse if it did not establish itself as capable of representing some important interests and gratifying ambitious career politicians. One big vote was not enough to root a fascist party.

  Other western European fascist movements had less electoral success. The Dutch Nationaal Socialistische Beweging (NSB) won 7.94 percent of the votes in the national election of 1935, but declined rapidly thereafter. 59 Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling received only 2.2 percent of the Norwegian vote in 1933 and 1.8 percent in 1936, though in the port of Stavanger and in two rural localities the vote was as high as 12 percent.60

  Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was one of the most interesting failures, not least because Mosley probably had the greatest intellectual gifts and the strongest social connections of all the fascist chiefs. As a promising junior minister in the Labour government of 1929, he put forward a bold plan in early 1930 to combat the Depression by making the empire a closed economic zone and by spending (into deficit, if need be) for job-creating public works and consumer credit. When the leaders of the Labour Party rebuffed these unorthodox proposals, Mosley resigned and formed his own New Party in 1931, taking a few left-wing Labour MPs with him. The New Party won no seats, however, in the parliamentary election of October 1931. A visit to Mussolini persuaded the frustrated Mosley that fascism was the wave of the future, and his own personal way forward.

  Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (October 1932) won some important early converts, like Lord Rothermere, publisher of the mass-circulation London Daily Mail. Mosley’s movement aroused revulsion, however, when his black-shirted guards spotlighted and beat up opponents at a large public meeting at the Olympia exhibition hall in London in June 1934. Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, at the end of the same month, provoked the departure of 90 percent of the BUF’s fifty thousand members,61 including Lord Rothermere. At the end of 1934, Mosley took an actively anti-Semitic tack and sent his Blackshirts to swagger through London’s East End, where they fought with Jews and Communists, building a new clientele among unskilled workers and struggling shopkeepers there. The Public Order Act, passed soon after the “Battle of Cable Street" with antifascists on October 4, 1936, outlawed political uniforms and deprived the BUF of its public spectacles, but it grew again to about twenty thousand with a campaign against war in 1939. Mosley’s black shirts, violence, and overt sympathy for Mussolini and Hitler (he was married to Diana Mitford in Hitler’s presence at Munich in 1936) seemed alien to most people in Britain, and gradual economic revival after 1931 under the broadly accepted National Government, a coalition dominated by conservatives, left him little political space.

  Some of the European imitators of fascism in the 1930s were little more than shadow movements, like Colonel O’Duffy’s Blueshirts in Ireland, though the poet W. B. Yeats agreed to write his anthem and he sent three hundred volunteers to help Franco in Spain. Most of these feeble imitations showed that it was not enough to don a colored shirt, march about, and beat up some local minority to conjure up the success of a Hitler or a Mussolini. It took a comparable crisis, a comparable opening of political space, comparable skill at alliance building, and comparable cooperation from existing elites. These imitations never got beyond the founding stage, and so underwent none of the transformations of the successful movements. They remained “pure"—and insignificant.

  Comparisons and Conclusions

  Fascist movements appeared so widely in the early twentieth century that we cannot learn much about their nature from the mere fact of their foundation. But they grew at different rates and succeeded to different degrees. A comparative look at their successes and failures suggests that the major differences lay not only in the movements themselves but also, and significantly, in the opportunities offered. To understand the later stages of fascism, we will have to look beyond the parties themselves to the settings that offered space (or not) and to the sorts of helpers who were (or were not) available.

  Intellectual history, vital for the first formation of fascist movements, offers us less help at this stage. Fascism remained marginal in some nations that would seem, at first glance, to have had powerful intellectual and cultural preparation for it. In France, for example, the richness, fervor, and celebrity of the intellectual revolt against classical liberal values i
n the early twentieth century would seem, on intellectual history grounds alone, to make that country a prime candidate for the successful establishment of fascist movements.62 We have seen why it did not happen.63 Indeed, all European countries produced thinkers and writers in whom we can perceive today a strong current of fascist sensibility. It is therefore difficult to argue that one country was more “predisposed" than another by its intellectuals to give an important role to fascist parties.

  Anti-Semitism needs special mention. It is not clear that cultural preparation is the most important predictor of which country would carry measures against Jews to extremes. If one had been asked around 1900 to identify the European nation where the menace of anti-Semitism seemed most acute, who would have chosen Germany? It was in France after 1898, during the Dreyfus frenzy, that Jewish shops were looted, and in French Algeria that Jews were murdered.64 Ugly anti-Semitic incidents occurred in Britain at the turn of the century,65 and in the United States, such as the notorious lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta,66 not to mention those traditionally rabid centers of endemic anti-Jewish violence in Poland and Russia, where the very word pogrom was invented.