Solidarité Française
Solidarité Française ("French Solidarity") was a French far right league founded in 1933 by perfume manufacturer François Coty and commanded by Major Jean Renaud, they dressed in blue shirts, black berets, and jackboots, and shouted the slogan "France for the French". While Marcel Bucard's Francisme imitated Italian fascism, Solidarité française imitated the Nazi party.
Coty, former owner of Le Figaro, the sponsor of a newspaper which styled itself L'Ami du peuple after Jean-Paul Marat's (being nonetheless anti-republican), called himself the French Duce. He had financed the syndicalist proto-fascist Georges Valois and his Faisceau in the 1920s, the Croix-de-Feu in the early 1930s, finally deciding to form his own faction.
The movement claimed a strength of 180,000 in 1934, with 80,000 in Paris; the Parisian police thought the number in Paris closer to 15,000. The small membership did not however isolate Coty's group: the Solidarité Française found itself integrated in the loose coalition of far right movements such as Action Française and Pierre Taittinger's Jeunesse Patriotes. In this context, Coty's financing found its importance, as L'Ami du peuple had a fairly large circulation.
The group gained notoriety during the rally and later riot during the 6 February 1934 crisis, in front of the Parliament seat in the Palais Bourbon. It was dissolved by a law adopted by the Popular Front government of Léon Blum in June 1936. Many members of Solidarité Française subsequently joined Jacques Doriot's fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF).
See also
Bibliography
- R. Soucy French fascism: the first wave, 1924-1933 (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1986)
- Z. Sternhell Neither Right nor Left: fascist ideology in France (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1986)