brutalization of political life in many parts of Europe was accompanied by a new acceptance of violence.
—Stanley G. Payne in A History of Fascism 1914–45
Fascism did not spring out of nowhere in the aftermath of the First World War but had clear precedents in a number of groups across Europe that were authoritarian, anti-Semitic, racist, ultra-nationalist and violent in various degrees. The ideas represented by these groups along with the effects of the First World War helped create the early fascist parties. The fetishism of uniforms, war and patriotism alongside borrowings from syndicalism, socialism, republicanism and monarchism presented a fetid potpourri of possibilities for disillusioned ex-soldiers who added national grievances and personal bitterness to these often contrary ideologies. The successes and failures of these parties varied in some countries, like France and Romania, some being particularly strong and other groups being co-opted or suppressed by governments.
In France, Le Faisceau was founded by Georges Valois, a former member of Action Française ( AF) who eventually moved to the Resistance and died in a concentration camp: in a rather grim irony, the fascism that he sought to establish eventually did him in. Members of Le Faisceau were subject to violent assaults from the left but also from AF, which ran a vehement campaign against them. On one occasion the AF stormed a meeting and attacked Valois putting him on his arse. The Patriot Youth were a ten-thousand-strong right-wing movement that emerged around 1924 and, after a large and bloody clash with the communists in 1925, ended up with four fatalities, creating martyrs for the sake of increased Patriot Youth membership. In the 1930s, there was militant opposition to right-wing events in France and ‘because of frequent violent clashes provoked by the presence of counter demonstrators at such political rallies, the police occasionally banned public meetings or parades where the threat of violence was great’.51 Several extremists displayed the usual far-right-wing penchant for individual terrorism and were caught up in bomb plots and illegal arms caches with the Cagoule group. Various other patriotic leagues and organizations subsequently formed and faded, all agitating for an authoritarian regime and culminating in mass riots in Paris in 1934 with largely negative results: ‘the result of the scare, however, was to magnify French anti-fascism…[which] became the dominant political fact in France and led to the election of the Popular Front in 1936.’52
Following the end of the Spanish Civil War, more than half a million Republican refugees headed for France. Having been ill-supported by Leon Blum and the Popular Front government, they could hardly expect to be received with much sympathy. Many were interned in ‘refugee camps’ that were little better than concentration camps: ‘Communists [and] anarchists had been sent to special disciplinary camps,’ some of which were in North Africa. French authorities tried to repatriate many republicans, whilst other ‘battle-hardened Spanish veterans’ were viewed as useful and encouraged to join the Foreign Legion. The International Brigaders from fascist-dominated countries could hardly expect to go home and were treated appallingly. However, the militant spirit in some veterans was not crushed, particularly the ‘many Spanish republicans [who] disappeared from labor camps in the Auvergne and joined French maquis groups or formed their own Spanish resistance units. One such group participated in the liberation of Montlucon’.53
Many French anti-fascists continued their propaganda activities, whether chalking anti-Vichy slogans on a wall or distributing leaflets in the workplace. The communist resistance paper L’Humanite was produced under severe duress. Other resistance propaganda supported the exiled De Gaulle and there was suspicion and mistrust between camps: the left saw De Gaulle as an imperialist stooge and the right saw the communists as Soviet agents. Whatever political bias, acquiring material for such propaganda was difficult, dangerous, and closely monitored. The Vichy police ‘considered Gaullist resisters to be misguided patriots, but were unwilling to extend such “tolerance” to the Communists’.54 There could be moments of community resistance such as on Bastille Day and May Day in 1942 when demonstrators took to the streets. In one town ‘no one had been arrested thanks in part to the vigorous reaction of several armed men who were former volunteers for the International Brigades in Spain’—something that was contradicted in the following day’s police report.55 Resistance took place in the workplace with sabotage, absenteeism and violence against collaborators, as well as ‘thefts of equipment, clothing, ration coupons, and other resources needed to supply the Maquis’.56
Under the Vichy regime, armed and pro-fascist militias joined in anti-resistance activities whilst simultaneously exploiting their positions of power, their motto being ‘To save France from Bolshevism’.57 As in Italy and Germany, extremist militia members indulged in gangsterism and ‘had a direct hand in the robberies, murders, deportations, and torture for which the Milice were justly notorious in the region…their actions could hardly be distinguished from those of common criminals—extortion, robbery, acts of vengeance against rivals, and much seemingly senseless violence’.58
Endnotes:
51 John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation (Oxford: University Press, 1994), 85.
52 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (London: UCL, 1995), 294.
53 Sweets, Choices in Vichy France, 112–115.
54 Ibid., 205.
55 Ibid., 209.
56 Ibid., 213.
57 Ibid., 108.
58 Ibid., 95.
Austria: Fascist Violence Could Only Be Met by Violence
In 1918, far right nationalism was hardly a new concept in Austria: in the 1880s Georg Ritter von Schönerer, a fervent nationalist who Hitler mentioned in Mein Kampf, was agitating for the unification of the German-speaking peoples. He was both anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic and referred to his compatriots as ‘racial comrades.’ In 1885, Schönerer backed the ‘Linz Programme’, which pledged to ‘eliminate Jewish influence from all spheres of public life’ and later, in 1887, urged that the ‘unproductive and obnoxious behaviour of many Russian Jews’ fleeing the pogroms be confined to the ghettos. Along with his anti-Semitic ultra-nationalism, Schönerer also appeared to sympathise with the worker and middle-class fears of ‘big capitalism’ and urged the nationalization of the Viennese railway as well as a limit on working hours. The socialist Karl Kautsky warned about these groups whose ‘appearance is oppositional and democratic thus appealing to the workers instincts’ as well as their anti-Semitism.1
It seems that wherever this strain of ultra-nationalism appears it is inevitably followed
