French Social Party - Historiography

Historiography

See also: History of far right movements in France

Historical debate over the PSF, like its predecessor the Croix-de-Feu, has been driven by the question of whether they can be considered, in at least some respects, the manifestations of a "French fascism". Most contemporary French historians, notably René Rémond, Michel Winock, Jean Lacouture, and Pierre Milza, have rejected this assertion. Rémond, in his La Droite en France, identifies the PSF instead as an offshoot of the Bonapartist tradition in French right-wing politics — populist and anti-parliamentarian, but hardly fascist; Milza, in La France des années 30, writes that, "the PSF was more anti-parliamentarian than anti-republican". More recently, Lacouture has written that "La Rocque's movement was neither fascist nor extremist". Furthermore, Rémond has identified the PSF, at least in part, as a populist and social-Catholic "antidote" to French fascism; thus: "Far from representing a French form of fascism in the face of the Popular Front, La Rocque helped to safeguard France from fascism", by diverting the support of the middle classes away from more extremist alternatives. Jacques Nobécourt has made similar assertions: "La Rocque spared France from a pre-war experiment with totalitarianism".

The lasting confusion over the "fascist" tendencies of the PSF can be ascribed, in part, to two factors. First, the PSF's predecessor, the Croix-de-Feu, did aspire to a paramilitary aesthetic (described by Julian Jackson as a "fascist frisson" and dismissed by Rémond as "political boy scouting for adults") outwardly similar to that employed by the more overtly fascist of the right-wing leagues; furthermore, La Rocque continued to defend the leagues' activities even in the face of their condemnation by the parties of the established moderate right (though not the Republican Federation). Second, the PSF's condemnation of parliamentarism, considered synonymous with French republicanism by most politicians of the left and centre, marked it as inherently anti-republican — and thus "fascist" in the political discourse of the period — in the opinions of the latter.

A number of foreign historians, however, have questioned these defenses of La Rocque and the PSF: Zeev Sternhell, criticizing Rémond's classification of the PSF as Bonapartist in Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, associates the party and its leader with a "revolutionary right" tradition that owes its political heritage to Boulangism and the revolutionary syndicalism of Georges Sorel. This minority view is partially shared by Robert Soucy, William D. Irvine, and Michel Dobry, who argue that the Croix-de-Feu and the PSF were partially realized manifestations of a distinctively French fascism, their political potential (though not their tactics of organization and mobilization) destroyed by the German invasion and thus permanently discredited. Sternhell, pointing to the democratic path to power followed by the Nazi Party, has also made the argument that La Rocque's apparent respect for republican legality is not sufficient ground to disqualify his movement as fascist.