Robert Soucy

The Nature of Fascism in France

In 1961 Maurice Bardtche, a French writer who had been a fascist before the war, published a provocative new work entitled Qu’esf-ce que Ze Fascistne ?. Bard2che boldly reaffirmed his commitment to fascism and argued that it is an ideology, especially in its French version, that has been badly misunderstood, unfairly maligned, and wrongly given up for dead. True fascism, he contended, is no more brutal than the democratic or Marxist philosophies that condemn it; German atrocities committed against Frenchmen during the Occupation derived largely from wartime conditions and the need to deal with guerrilla warfare, atrocities duplicated in any case by Allied soIdiers against German civilians. Nor should true fascism be confused with Nazi racist and extermination policies aspects of German national-socialism which were ‘deviations’ from the basic creed. Because of confusion in the public mind as to what fascism really is, said Bardtche, there has been a failure to acknowledge that fascism is rapidly being reborn today in many parts of the world, including France, although, because the word itself has fallen under a cloud, the phenomenon itself now exists under new labels. Consequently, neo-fascists like Nasser in Egypt and young technocrats in France, men working to fuse nationalism and socialism together once again, are seldom associated with an ideology that is discredited in theory if not in practice. Thus, there are thousands of young men in the world today who are fascists without knowing it. Whatever the shortcomings or insights in Bardtche’s analysis, it once again raises a basic problem faced by historians of modern France: what exactly was the nature of French fascism both before and during the Second World War; what exactly were its fundamental or predominant characteris tics ? Bardkhe himself points out one of the very real difFiculties in dealing with the subject: the