1st Edition
France’s Purveyors of Hatred Aspects of the French Extreme Right and its Influence, 1918–1945
This book examines the extreme right in France during the interwar period.
It begins by describing the background of the French right before 1914 and then provides commentary and analysis of the broad range of the extra-parliamentary right in interwar France. Organisations such as Action Française and the militant ligues are examined as well as prominent extreme-right intellectuals such as Lucien Rebatet, Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. The various forms of French anti-Semitism are assessed, and the book also situates the French extreme right within a broader context by assessing its impact on other European countries, including the UK. It concludes by exploring the complicated politics of wartime France where some extreme-right activists collaborated with the Nazis while others opposed them, and where few generalisations prove possible.
This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of French history, the extreme right and interwar politics.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Conventions
Chapter One: Introductory: The Radical Right in France Before the First World War
Section A: Some Aspects of the French Radical Right’s Impact Outside France in the Interwar Period
Chapter Two: The French Right and Catholic Movements in Other European Countries
Chapter Three: A Kind of ‘torysme français’? Action Française and English Cultural Life
Chapter Four: ‘There are some among our younger Welshmen to whom Maurras means a great deal’: The French Right as a Driving-Force of Welsh Nationalism
Section B: Interwar France
Chapter Five: Backdrop to Extremism: A Peculiarly French Form of Social Anti-Semitism
Chapter Six: Old and New, Homegrown and Foreign: The Ligues
Chapter Seven: Pro-Nazism and the French Right in the Thirties: A Comparison with the British Experience
Chapter Eight: Joy and Despair; Two Contrasting Fascist Intellectuals, Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
Chapter Nine: Fascism from the Left? ‘Neo-socialism’ and ‘planisme’ in France and Belgium in the 1930s
Section C: The Second World War
Chapter Ten: Nazi Encouragement of Independence Movements: The Case of Brittany
Chapter Eleven: ‘Non-political’ Collaboration: A Complicated Picture
Chapter Twelve: Dilemmas of the French Right in Wartime Vichy, Paris, London and Algiers
Conclusion
Appendix One: The Wartime Situation
Appendix Two: Rogues’ Gallery
Index
Biography
Richard Griffiths is the author of Marshal Pétain; Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–1939; Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939–40 and What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940–45.
