Mouvement Franciste

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The Mouvement Franciste ("Francist" Movement) was a French Fascist and Antisemitic league created by Marcel Bucard in September 1933; it edited the newspaper Le Francisme. Mouvement Franciste reached of membership of 10,000, and was financed by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Its members were deemed the francistes or Chemises bleues (Blueshirts), and gave the Roman salute (a paramilitary character which was mirrored in France by François Coty's Solidarité Française).

The Mouvement took part in the violent Paris rallies of 6 February 1934, during which the entire far right (from Action Française to Croix-de-Feu) protested the implications of the Stavisky Affair and possibly attempted to topple the Édouard Daladier government. It incorporated the Solidarité Française after Coty's death later in the same year.

All the 6 February participant movements were outlawed in 1936, when Léon Blum's Popular Front government passed new legislation on the matter. After a failed attempt in 1938, the Movement was refounded as a Party (Parti Franciste) in 1941, after France was overrun by Nazi Germany.

Together with Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français and Marcel Déat's Rassemblement National Populaire, the francistes were the main collaborators of the Nazi occupiers and Vichy France. The Parti Franciste did not survive the end of World War II, and was considered treasonous.

[edit] References

• John Bingham Defining French fascism, finding fascists in France Canadian Journal of History (Dec. 1994)
• Stanley Payne A history of fascism, London, University College of London Press, 1995, pp. 400-401.