On France's Purveyors of Hatred

This is a short and interesting little book. It is not a history of the French extreme right in its totality during the interwar years and the Second World War. Instead, the book works more like a collection of essays regarding a variety of “aspects” of the far right, something indicated in the title but not particularly clear until you starting reading the text.

The book is written in three sections. Interestingly, after the introduction—which is a overview of the far right before 1918 (the big names are all here and briefly discussed: Boulanger, Barrès, Drumont, Maurras, and Sorel)—the book jumps straight into the ways that the extreme-right influenced other far right movements overseas. The first chapter discusses other Catholic countries while the remaining in the section discuss aspects of British political life. The real focus of this section is the Action Française, which had followers in Portugal, Belgium, Spain, England, Wales, Greece, and beyond.

In the second section, Griffiths discusses various aspects of the far right during the interwar movement—the right-wing leagues, anti-Semitism, pro-/anti-Nazi sentiment (I found this really interesting, as it’s something I’ve touched upon in writing my dissertation and it was nice to have it corroborated and compared with the British—the British far right saw Nazism favorably while the French saw it as a foe), planism, etc.

Finally, the third section discusses the French far right within the context of the Second World War. There’s a heavy emphasis here on the role of collaboration, and Griffiths does a good job of problematizing it. The French built a distinction between “political” and “non-political” collaboration. I also found his chapter on views from various cities—Vichy, Paris, London, Algiers—to be fascinating, as it shows the ways in which fascist sympathies and activism were determined by physical location.

If you’re just beginning to read on the French far-right in the interwar years, this is probably not the place to start, but it does offer great supplementary material for those who are looking for more details and applied case studies to make sense of the wide range of right-wing movements in France.