French Social Party

La Rocque envisioned the PSF as the more explicitly political successor of the Croix-de-Feu, the World War I veterans' organization founded in 1927, which had by the early 1930s emerged as the largest [2] and one of the most influential of interwar France's numerous far-right leagues. Though the Croix-de-Feu had adopted as its slogan "Social d'abord" ("Social First") as a counter to the "Politique d'abord" ("Politics First") of Action Française, it espoused the political goals elaborated by La Rocque in his tract Service Public — including social-Catholic corporatism, the institution of a minimum wage and paid vacations (congés payés), women's suffrage, and the reform of parliamentary procedure.[3] The programme of the Social Party would further develop these same themes, advocating "the association of capital and labour", a traditional platitude of French conservatism, and the reform of France's political institutions along presidential lines, in order to bolster the stability and authority of the state.[4]

Though the Croix-de-Feu participated in the demonstrations of 6 February 1934, La Rocque forbade its members from involving themselves in the subsequent riot, demonstrating a respect for republican legality that the PSF would also uphold as one of its essential political principles. Thus La Rocque, who had previously maintained a certain mystique with regard to his attitude towards the Republic, explicitly rallied to it, denouncing, in a speech on 23 May 1936, totalitarianism (both Nazi and Soviet) along with racism (with regard to which he explicitly rejected antisemitism) and class struggle, as the principal obstacles to "national reconciliation".[5]

Nevertheless, critics of the left and centre denounced the Croix-de-Feu, together with the other leagues, as fascist organizations. A desire to defend the republic was not their sole motivation: politicians of the centre-right and left alike opposed La Rocque due to the perceived threat of his success in mobilizing a mass base within their traditional, and particularly working-class, constituencies.[6]

Due to the disruptive nature of the leagues' activities, the Laval government outlawed paramilitary groups on 6 December 1935, and although this decision was succeeded by the law of 10 January 1936 regulating militias and combat organizations, the law was only partially implemented: of all the leagues, only Action Française was dissolved, and the Croix-de-Feu was allowed to continue its activities essentially unimpeded. Following the victory of the Popular Front, which had included in its electoral programme a promise to dissolve the right-wing leagues, in the parliamentary elections of May 1936, the government issued a decree banning the Croix-de-Feu, along with the Mouvement social français, on 18 June. Within weeks, on 7 July, La Rocque founded the French Social Party to succeed the defunct league.

The Danzig crisis of 1939 deprived the PSF of the chance to make serious inroads in parliament: on 30 July, Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, fearing that the imminent electoral campaign would distract the Chamber of Deputies from the business of national defense, used the decree powers granted him by the Chamber to extend its term until May 1942.[19]

Following the fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime, which La Rocque denounced as defeatist and anti-Semitic, but he still proclaimed his personal loyalty to Marshal Philippe Pétain,[20] and the PSF was renamed Progrès Social Français (French Social Progress) and took on the form of a social aid organization because of the occupation authorities' prohibition of organized political activities.

La Rocque's attitude towards the Vichy government was initially ambiguous. As stated, he continued to affirm his loyalty to Pétain and was amenable to certain of the more moderate aspects of Vichy's reactionary program, the Révolution Nationale, notably its corporatism and social policies. The PSF further refused to recognize General Charles de Gaulle's Free French, along with the National Council of the Resistance, as the legitimate French authorities in opposition to Vichy, which also claimed constitutional legitimacy (despite some members of the PSF, such as Charles Vallin, joining the Free French). However, La Rocque was hostile to Vichy's enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazi occupiers and forbade PSF members from participating in Vichy-sponsored organizations such as the Service d'Ordre Légionnaire, the Milice, and the Legion of French Volunteers.

In August 1940, La Rocque began actively to participate in the French Resistance by transmitting information to the British Secret Intelligence Service via Georges Charaudeau's Réseau Alibi ("Alibi Network") and forming the Réseau Klan ("Klan Network") in 1942 as a means of coordinating intelligence-gathering activities among PSF members. Nevertheless, he continued to believe that he could convince Pétain to abandon his collaborationist line and so he requested and was granted, three meetings with the Marshal in early 1943. Two days after their last meeting, on 9 March, La Rocque was arrested by the Gestapo during a nationwide roundup of over 100 PSF leaders.[21] Deported first to Czechoslovakia and later to Austria, he returned to France only in May 1945.

As with nearly all other political parties that had existed under the Third Republic, the PSF produced both collaborators with and resisters of the Vichy regime. In most cases, individual circumstances dictated more ambiguous loyalties and actions. Although former PSF deputy Jean Ybarnegaray, for instance, served in the first Vichy government under Pétain as Minister for Veterans and the Family, he resigned his post in 1940 and was in 1943 arrested and deported because of his efforts in helping Resistance members to cross the Pyrenees into Spain.[22]

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;[26] Milza, in La France des années 30, writes that, "the PSF was more anti-parliamentarian than anti-republican".[27] More recently, Lacouture has written that "La Rocque's movement was neither fascist nor extremist".[28] 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.[29] Jacques Nobécourt has made similar assertions: "La Rocque spared France from a pre-war experiment with totalitarianism".[30]

The lasting confusion over the "fascist" tendencies of the PSF can be ascribed, in part, to two factors. Firstly, the PSF's predecessor, the Croix-de-Feu, had aspired 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).[31] Secondly, the PSF's condemnation of parliamentarism, which was considered synonymous with French republicanism by most leftist and centrist politicians of the left and centre, marked it as inherently anti-republican and thus "fascist" in the period's political discourse in their opinions.

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.[32] This minority view is partially shared by Robert Soucy,[33] William D. Irvine, and Michel Dobry,[34] 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, which was 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 enough to disqualify his movement as fascist.

• Far right leagues
• History of far right movements in France
• Interwar France
• François de La Rocque
• Travail, Famille, Patrie, PSF motto appropriated by Vichy