Georges Valois
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Georges Valois (real name Alfred-Georges Gressent; 1878–1945) was a French journalist and politician.
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[edit] Life and career
He went to Singapore at the age of 17, returning to Paris in 1898. In his early years he was an Anarcho-syndicalist. He found work as a secretary at L'Humanité Nouvelle where he met Georges Sorel. Later, after a stay in Imperial Russia (1903), Gressent worked as a secretary at Armand Colin publishing house.
Georges Valois then met nationalist Charles Maurras and became a member of the monarchist Action Française (AF) party, where he continued to follow the workers' movement. As his employment would have been compromised by an involvement in extremist politics, he started using his pseudonym. In 1911 he created the Cercle Proudhon, a syndicalist group, and took direction of the Action Française's publishing house, the Nouvelle librairie nationale, in 1912 (a job kept until 1925). The Cercle mixed Sorel's influence with the Integralism favored by Charles Maurras, and was overtly Antisemitical. According to historian Zeev Sternhell, this politic was the prefiguration of Italian fascism.
In 1925 he founded the first overtly fascist party outside Italy, the Faisceau league, one assisted by major entrepreneurs in their fight against the agitation of the French Communist Party (PCF). After some initial success (it was joined by such extremist figures as Hubert Lagardelle and Marcel Bucard), it disappeared in 1928, by which time Valois himself had already been excluded from the party. The middle-class may have withdrawn its support due to its lack of confidence in fascism as a plausible solution for France, or because it considered, following a trend established by the Roman Catholic Church (which, in 1926, excommunicated the Action Française), that the best solution was to infiltrate the republican institutions.
Either way, he lost financial support, and after the dissolving of the Faisceau league in 1928, he founded the Republican Syndicalist Party. After the 6 February 1934 crisis, Valois founded Le Nouvel Age, which he presented as a left-wing review - both were nonetheless advertising themselves as corporatist, thus following fascist tenets. In 1935, he attempted to join the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière, but was turned down, although being backed by Marceau Pivert.
He joined the Resistance during the Second World War, was arrested by the Nazi German occupiers, and died in 1945 of typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
[edit] Works
- Basile ou la politique de la calomnie, 1927
- L'Homme contre l'argent, 1928
- Un Nouvel âge de l'humanité, 1929
- Finances italiennes, 1930
- Économique, 1931
- Guerre ou révolution, 1931
- Journée d'Europe, 1932
- 1917-1941 : fin du bolchevisme, conséquences européennes de l'événement, 1941
- L'Homme devant l'éternel (published posthumously), 1947
[edit] See also
- Faisceau league
- 6 February 1934 crisis
- Historian Zeev Sternhell
[edit] References
- Yves Guchet, Georges Valois, L'Harmattan, 2001, ISBN 2-7475-1214-2
- Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 1930, Points Histoire, Seuil, 2001, ISBN 2-02-048701-2
- Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire, Points Histoire, Seuil, 1978, ISBN 2-02-006694-7 (The Birth of Fascist Ideology, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, published by Princeton University Press, 1989, 1994 (ISBN 0-691-03289-0) (ISBN 0-691-04486-4)
- Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, Princeton Univ. Press, California ISBN 0-691-00629-6
