Croix-de-Feu - Continuing Debate Over The Croix-de-Feu

Continuing Debate Over The Croix-de-Feu

Some historians have argued that the Croix-de-Feu were a distinctly French variant of the European Fascist movement: if the uniformed rightist "Leagues" of the 1930s did not develop into classical Fascism, it was because they represented a shading from conservative right-wing nationalism to extremist fascism, in membership and ideology, distinctive to French inter-war society.

Most contemporary French historians (René Rémond, Pierre Milza, François Sirinelli in particular) do not classify the "leagues" of the 30s as a native "French Fascism", particularly the Croix-de-Feu. The organisation is described by Rémond as completely secret in aims with an ideology "As vague as possible." Rémond, most famous and influential of these post-war historians, distinguishes "Reaction" and the far-right from revolutionary Fascism as an import into France which had few takers. In the 1968 third edition of "La droite en France", his major work he defines fascism in Europe as a "revolt of the declasses, a movement of those on half-pay, civilian and military. Everywhere it came to power through social upheavals ... Although with a handful of fascists, there was a minority of reactionaries and a great majority of conservatives." Amongst these he places much smaller groups like the Faisceau, a tiny minority compared with the Croix-de-Feu, whose membership peaked at over a million.

Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, on the other hand, has argued for not only the existence of a native French fascism, but for groups like the Cercle Proudhon of the nineteen-teens being amongst the more important ideological breeding grounds of the movement. He, though, does not include the Croix de Feu in this category: "The 'centrist' right always had its own shock troops that served its own purposes, and took good care that they did not become confused with the fascists." Sternhell, interested in the Fascism as a "anti-material revision of Marxism" or an anti-capitalist, cultish, corporatist extreme nationalism, points out that groups like the Jeunesses Patriotes, the revived Ligue des Patriotes and the Croix de Feu were derided by French fascists at the time. Fascist leaders in France saw themselves as destroyers of the old order, above politics, and rejecting the corruption of capitalism. To them the Leagues were a bulwark of this corrupt regime. Robert Brasillach called them "old cuckolds of the right, these eternal deceived husbands of politics.." and claimed that "the enemies of national restoration are not only on the left but first and foremost on the right."

Other scholars, such as Robert Soucy and William D. Irvine, argue that the La Rocque and the Croix de Feu were, in fact, fascist, and a particularly "French" fascism. De la Rocque, however, if tempted by a paramilitary aesthetic and initially advocating collaboration with the Germans during WWII, finally came out against the more radical supporters of Nazi Germany.