RECONCILING FRANCE AGAINST DEMOCRACY. The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Francais, 1927-1945. By Sean Kennedy.
Julian Wright, Times Literary Supplement, 15 Feb 2008
This study of one of the most important and remarked on right-wing groupd of the interwar years in France is refreshing for its careful, scholarly approach ...
RECONCILING FRANCE AGAINST DEMOCRACY. The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Francais, 1927-1945. By Sean Kennedy.
Julian Wright, Times Literary Supplement, 15 Feb 2008
This study of one of the most important and remarked-on right-wing groups of the interwar years in France is refreshing for its careful, scholarly approach.
Not that this field, which Sean Kennedy outlines lucidly in his introduction, has wanted for painstaking historians. The importance of Reconciling France Against Democracy is that it offers a new narrative of the movement and its leader, the eternally frustrated Colonel de La Rocque. Kennedy senses a need for a genuinely "blow-by-blow" account, rather than one that errs too much towards the discussion of ideological definitions. He explains this by alluding at various points to the controversial debate about what, if anything, French Fascism stood for, and who could be said to belong to it. With his close reading of a mass of archival material, Kennedy offers a study that leans towards the worthy, covering essential areas - membership, ideology, leadership, political and militant activity - in a thorough and well-structured narrative. It is important to be reminded that movements whose antipathy to parliamentary democracy has left a lingering aftertaste in twenty-first-century France did, of course, develop their ideas through tortuous political positioning and repositioning, under the influence of the clash of personalities and party programmes between different factions of the Right.
The long story of how the Croix de Feu evolved through the early 1930s, mutating into a full-fledged but still rather idiosyncratic political party from 1936, and how its fortunes suffered during the Second World War, is itself a reminder of the importance of contingency and rapidly shifting parameters in the study of any extremist movement. And yet Kennedy does not simply deconstruct the movement and its ideas. While he explains the context for La Rocque's authoritarianism, he nevertheless perceives consistencies within Croix de Feu ideology, showing precisely how far it contributed to the development of an essentialism which Hermann Lebovics has labelled "True France" and which prepared some of the ground for Vichy France's cultural ideology. The value of Kennedy's work is that we can build his detailed research into accounts of the rise of French conservative ideology that have sometimes seemed driven by a quest for labelling and stereotyping. Sean Kennedy's fine-grained picture brings nuance and subtlety to this debate.
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