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    [Part 2/2]

    A quick post on the Dreyfus Affair which I mentioned in Part 1 and said I’d come back to, because it’s linked to the events of the 1930s that shaped the beliefs of people like Déat and Mitterrand.

    I am not conflating Déat and Mitterrand on this anti-Semitic issue BTW, we have no direct evidence to ascertain that Mitterrand was anti-Semitic. However, that accusation has been levelled at him, by moderate people, and it’s not difficult to see why as, throughout his life, Mitterrand had strong connections with anti-Semites, such as René Bousquet and Gabriel Jeantet, he joined anti-Semitic movements in his youth, he demonstrated with the fascists in 1935-37, worked for the Vichy administration for nearly a year ½ (one of his tasks was to compile lists of resistants IIRC), he admired Pétain, he even lauded Pétain’s ideology and strategy in writing (in far right anti-Semitic publications, right up to December 1942 – whereas he said that he entered the Resistance, while working for Vichy, in June 1942; he then justified the overlap by saying that it was a cover, that he was really a resistant and playing a double role as what's called a Vichysto-resistant) etc. So he is at least certainly guilty of that, although some historians say that these movements were more than just anti-Semitic so it makes it difficult to categorically label him anti-Semitic (debatable); there are many troubling signs then. We could add more recently this conversation he had with historian Jean D’ormesson a few months before he died where he talked about “the Jewish lobby in France”.

    At his juncture, it is important to stress not just how divisive the Dreyfus Affair was in France but also how it heightened anti-Semitism throughout the ordinary French population, and how enduring and harmful its legacy was. Most historians agree that, as far as anti-Semitism in France is concerned, there is a before-Dreyfus and an after-Dreyfus in the way it developed and magnitude it took.

    The Dreyfus Affair started in 1894 and was officially over in 1906 with the rehabilitation of Dreyfus (sadly, Zola never saw that as he died in 1902) but it profoundly divided France between the pro-Dreyfus and the anti-Dreyfus. It really was the Brexit of the day, you were defined along the same lines, you were either un Dreyfusard or un anti-Dreyfusard and it split families apart. There is this famous two-part cartoon in France called “Un dîner en famille” published in Le Figaro in 1898:



    In the top drawing you see a family happily dining together with this warning as caption: “Above all, let us not discuss the Dreyfus Affair”; the bottom cartoon shows the family fighting and the caption goes: “They’ve discussed it”.

    Anti-Semitism obviously existed before in France but was roughly limited to the intelligentsia and a small number of readers (that grew from the 1880s), although the Dreyfus case didn’t appear out of nowhere of course. The right and far right in particular had been actively waging anti-Semitic campaigns and the far right journalist-writer Édouard Drumont for instance became a successful propagator of anti-Semitism through his daily newspaper La Libre Parole and his books, particularly La France Juive (1886) which sold well. Drumont was probably the first in France to create “fake news” and propagate conspiracy theories on this Jewish issue, the first to do that on a wide scale anyhow. He also founded the Antisemitic League of France (also anti-communist) in 1889 and was even elected MP (for Algiers – but failed to be re-elected in 1902). The far right was also active, focusing particularly around the concept of race (“scientific racism” was then a popular theory throughout Europe), since the beginning of the Third Republic, so about 25 years before the Dreyfus Affair.

    Circa 1880, religion issues became more prominent and the old anti-Judaic sentiment and prejudice held by Christianity leaders resurfaced. A few financial scandals were weaponised against the Jews too, such as the Panama Canal scandal (which involved two Jews), nationalism was on the rise (eg Boulangism) along with an anti-German sentiment (humiliating French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War), what was termed “revanchism” (was closely linked to Boulangisme).

    But with the Dreyfus affair, the topic of anti-Semitism became a national issue, including with sections of the left for whom the Jews = imperialism, money, greed, therefore the enemy. Again, this wasn’t new. Eg the philosopher Pierre Leroux, one of the first champions of socialism in France, turned openly anti-Semitic in the middle of the 19th century when the industrial revolution and capitalism made some Jewish families wealthy. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a famous anarcho-socialist who greatly influenced working-class movements (he coined the slogan “Property is theft/La propriété, c'est le vol”), called in 1847 for the Jews “to be sent to Asia or be exterminated” (he was fiercely anticlerical of course as befits anarchists but hated Jews in particular).

    The great socialist, intellectual and pacifist Jean Jaurès (1859-1914, assassinated on 31 July… The other assassination that led up to World War I), one of the historic figures and heroes of the left in France, co-founder of the communist daily L’Humanité etc., was somewhat anti-Semitic too, although he was a Dreyfusard and even defended Dreyfus in parliament despite the contrary instructions of the socialist leaders (such as Jules Guesde, the founder of the first socialist party in France in 1882, the Parti Ouvrier) who urged their members “not to take position in this conflict between two rival factions of the bourgeois class” (those 2 factions being Christians and Jews). Jaurès also hardened his position on the issue from 1905 post creation of the SFIO (the forerunner of the Parti Socialist, which established a strong anti-capitalist ideology in France).

    However, even at that point, in the 1900s, open anti-Semitism was much more the preserve of the (far) right than the left, especially as the Dreyfus Affair and his rehabilitation was considered a success for the left (even if many of his detractors for most of this protracted affair were left-wingers) and one victory that enabled the left to regain some prestige and stave off the demons of anti-Semitism in its midst for a while. Twenty odd years later, those demons returned.

    Comment


      That's powerful stuff entirely PF.

      Admittedly it does nothing to dampen my suspicions that a lot of respectable French conservatives are no more than three drinks away from advocating genocide, or that truculent left wing fire-brands are more than a bottle of pernod away from becoming fascists. You're painting a picture of a society with an element with a curdled sense of entitlement and anger based on a misunderstanding of their own too-long history, and an unwillingness to engage with the rest of the world. It would seem as though England isn't the only country in Europe with a pressing need to sit down in a dark room with its own history.
      Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 10-11-2018, 21:59.

      Comment


        Originally posted by Pérou Flaquettes View Post
        [Part 2/2]
        The great socialist, intellectual and pacifist Jean Jaurès (1859-1914, assassinated on 31 July… The other assassination that led up to World War I), one of the historic figures and heroes of the left in France, co-founder of the communist daily L’Humanité etc., was somewhat anti-Semitic too, although he was a Dreyfusard and even defended Dreyfus in parliament despite the contrary instructions of the socialist leaders (such as Jules Guesde, the founder of the first socialist party in France in 1882, the Parti Ouvrier) who urged their members “not to take position in this conflict between two rival factions of the bourgeois class” (those 2 factions being Christians and Jews). Jaurès also hardened his position on the issue from 1905 post creation of the SFIO (the forerunner of the Parti Socialist, which established a strong anti-capitalist ideology in France).
        Is he not Etienne's avatar??

        Comment


          Originally posted by jdsx View Post
          Is he not Etienne's avatar??
          What I wrote about Jaurès (“he was somewhat anti-Semitic”) is barely known at all in France, so Etienne really couldn’t have known, it’s only now (2018) really that it's starting to be talked about, in a very low-key way (I heard a France Inter programme about it and heard s.o mention it on Arte a few months ago but no articles, no mention of it anywhere etc.). I've only known about this side of Jaurès since last spring, through my father, who’s read a book released in January 2018 called J'accuse…! 1898-2018: Permanences de l'antisémitisme (written by L’Express mag journalist Alexis Lacroix) and my dad told me about it.

          I subsequently searched on the Net to see how well-known and widely commented this was etc. and didn’t find much. I was able to find several more examples of (to me) anti-Semitism by Jaurès but very few writers/historians/journalists have actually spent much time on it as far as I can gather.

          The French Jaurès Society has critiqued (some) of these anti-Semitic comments (here) when it was first talked about in academic circles in the mid-2000s, mainly after the publication of a little-known book called De la question berbère au dilemme kabyle (2004), but the writer of the piece only superficially parses Jaurès' comments IMO. But then again it's not called the Jaurès Society for nothing, these fan clubs are wont to write hagiographically about their subject, obviously.

          I think the left are embarrassed TBH, not just the left but the Republican right too as Jaurès is a public figure who transcends parties. And I understand, it is very unpleasant to realise that s.o like him who is held in great esteem could have made such comments (see below).

          If Etienne wants me to (as I have many other posts to write so I'll only do it if he asks), I will post on it in a more detailed way so you can judge for yourselves the degree of anti-Semitism contained in those statements made by Jaurès but before that I really need to finish writing my full reply to Etienne’s post #898, which I’ve only started to address in my posts # 901 & 902, and that’s going to take a while as this megapost will probably be 5 parts long. I'm just going to post now the main incriminating piece that the MP Jaurès wrote after a parliamentarian visit in Algeria in May 1895 so it gives you a flavour of his frame of mind at the time (after his visit, Jaurès wrote his findings in the daily La Dépêche de Toulouse – now La Dépêche du Midi – over 2 articles, below is an excerpt from the first article):

          Dans les villes, ce qui exaspère le gros de la population française contre les Juifs, c’est que, par l’usure, par l’infatigable activité commerciale et par l’abus des influences politiques, ils accaparent peu à peu la fortune, le commerce, les emplois lucratifs, les fonctions administratives, la puissance publique . […] En France, l’influence politique des Juifs est énorme mais elle est, si je puis dire, indirecte. Elle ne s’exerce pas par la puissance du nombre, mais par la puissance de l’argent. Ils tiennent une grande partie de la presse, les grandes institutions financières, et, quand ils n’ont pu agir sur les électeurs, ils agissent sur les élus. Ici, ils ont, en plus d’un point, la double force de l’argent et du nombre.”

          = In cities [in Algeria], what exasperates the bulk of the French population against the Jews is that, by usury, by tireless commercial activity and by abuse of political influence, they [Jews] hoard little by little the fortune, trade, lucrative jobs, administrative functions, public power. […] In France, the political influence of the Jews is huge but it is, if I may say, indirect. That influence is exerted by the power of money rather than by their number. They control most of the press, the large financial institutions and, if they’ve failed to convince voters, they work on the elected officials. Here [in Algeria] however, in more ways than one, they have the dual force of money and numbers.
          Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 13-11-2018, 23:22.

          Comment


            [Part 1 of 3 or 4 or 5 – or more, we shall see]

            Pre-timeline of Mitterrand’s political evolution and other related events (1934-1946) to finish answering Etienne’s query (his post #898) as I said I would. The timeline proper will start in Part 2 or 3.

            In my posts #901 & #902, I've provided the background since the late 19th century, so let’s now look more closely at Mitterrand’s political cheminement (evolution) as per Etienne’s question in his post: Did Mitterand start on the right before WW2 or drift that way as a socialist becoming a national socialist (like Déat for instance?).

            The first thing to stress is: Mitterrand was both complex and very opportunistic. Politicians usually are opportunistic but he had that characteristic firmly embedded in his DNA I would say. He had created this mystique around him and his public persona was shrouded in mystery (his moniker was “Le Sphinx”) and had a knack for knowing which side of his tartine should be buttered (my opinion, but shared by many, including Mitterrandists).

            At this point, as I’ll write unpleasant things about him in the next posts, I’d like to make clear that I am not anti-Mitterrand, I even think that he did fairly well on the whole, socially, culturally, technologically, organisationally (decentralisation) etc. even if there were many negatives too of course, eg Rainbow Warrior bombing, strong preservation of the Françafrique model until 1990 less so after, active promotion of the Front National just to eat into Chirac’s electorate (for someone who had lived through WWII, been injured by the Nazis, sent to a PoW camp etc. it was horrid to do that). He just stayed too long: 14 years (7 yr-terms then) with a brace of 2-yr long cohabitation periods with the right during that 14 year-period (was ill/very ill in the last 2-3 yrs). This is from his wiki: Overall, as President, Mitterrand maintained the "basic characteristic of a strong welfare base underpinned by a strong state." A United Nations Human Development report concluded that, from 1979 to 1989, France was the only country in the OECD (apart from Portugal) in which income inequalities did not get worse. During his second term as president, however, the gap between rich and poor widened in France, with both unemployment and poverty rising in the awake of the economic recession of 1991–1993. According to other studies, though, the percentage of the French population living in poverty (based on various criteria) fell between the mid-Eighties and the mid-Nineties.

            Enough of this socialist stuff, let’s go back to pre-WWII Mitterrand, a very different beast then.

            We need a bit of background here, family, historical, contextual, to understand how Mitterrand veered from far right to the Resistance within a few years, maybe even a few months. But let’s not forget that the Resistance was very diverse in its make-up and included plenty of far rightists. Even when Mitterrand was in the Resistance movement, he had ditched his far right ideas but was still solidly rightwing when he entered the Resistance movement alongside the very rightwing military ORA led by General Henri Giraud (Organisation de la Résistance de l'Armée) which was boycotted for a while by most of the other (mainly leftwing) Resistance movements as they suspected Giraud, the commander in chief of French North Africa from Nov. 1942 and De Gaulle’s main opponent in the Resistance, of being a stooge of the Americans and also of wanting to impose his very military Resistance model.

            The Resistance was made of many different political strands, it wasn’t a singular, monolithic bloc (many resistants were apolitical anyway). Resistants shared the same objective but they came from very different perspectives. That said, the Resistance leaders were overwhelmingly left-wing, and right-wingers like General Giraud were a minority, mainly because many right-wing leaders didn’t want anything to do with the big communist Resistance movements, and in particular with the Front National (de lutte pour la libération et l'indépendance de la France) who entered the Resistance very politically but then, from January 1943, became open to all (which it wasn’t before) and a few months later joined the National Council of the Resistance [wiki: The National Council of the Resistance, Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), was the body that directed and coordinated the different movements of the French Resistance - the press, trade unions, and members of political parties hostile to the Vichy regime, starting from mid-1943.]


            Plaque on Rivoli Street in central Paris commemorating 2 clandestine meetings of the Conseil National de la Résistance in spring 1944. Its early and historic leader, national hero of the Resistance Jean Moulin, was tortured to death by “The Butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie and his henchmen in July 1943. Barbie, who was directly responsible for the death of up to 14,000 people, was trialled in Lyon in 1987 after a lifetime of escaping justice [From his wiki: After the war, United States intelligence services employed him for his anti-Marxist efforts and also helped him escape to Bolivia.]




            I remember Barbie’s trial well, it lasted nearly 2 months and it was such an emotional piece of (legal) history. Barbie was defended by Jacques Vergès, France’s most controversial criminal lawyer ever, who specialised in defending terrorists, notorious war criminals, Holocaust deniers etc. throughout his career.

            From https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org...-klaus-barbie:

            When the trial began, the forty-lawyer prosecution team, which represented Klaus Barbie's myriad victims, opened its argument by reciting a list of Barbie's crimes. The list turned out to be so long that the entire first day of the trial was devoted to its reading.

            While the prosecution was preparing its witnesses, the defense was preparing its own argument. To defend Barbie, who France already sentenced to death twice, in absentia, would be a daunting and unpopular task, but for a radical lawyer named Jacques Vergès, the Barbie trial was the moment for which he had spent most his entire adult life preparing. Vergès' defensive strategy was in his own words to "attack the prosecution," and almost as soon as the judges let him speak, he transformed Barbie's trial into a trial of France and of something much greater, history itself.
            During the trial, while Barbie was in a Lyon prison awaiting a transfer to the courtroom, a man called Christian Didier tried to shoot him but was arrested just before he could. Turned out that this man wanted to kill every known WWII war criminal connected to France. He tried to kill notorious French Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier too but couldn’t find the vile bastard (Touvier was eventually tracked down in 1989 to a priory nestled in the beautiful Old Nice, yards away from the very touristic spots of the Vieux Nice, after 43 years on the run, being sheltered by ultra-traditionalist Catholics in religious set-ups, monasteries etc. He’d been sentenced to death in absentia in 1946 for treason).

            Christian Didier didn’t miss ex Chief of Vichy police René Bousquet though, he gunned him down in Paris in 1993 (served 5 yrs in prison).

            Big connection with Mitterrand here obviously as the latter stayed close to Bousquet until his brutal death in June 1993 outside of his posh Parisian flat, just before Bousquet’s trial (Mitterrand had known Bousquet from his time at Vichy but for some never-officially explained reason, had stayed close to him. I explained the unofficial reasons in this post).


            Francois Mitterrand, his wife Danielle, here with René Bousquet. Photo taken in 1974 in Latche, south west France (Mitterrand’s summer retreat). Also present, Jean-Paul Martin, another great Vichy bastard (one of Bousquet’s right-hand men there).


            This short Le Monde article explains that the photographer, an admirer of Mitterrand who invited him to take pictures that day, was Jewish. When a French magazine exhumed the photo in 1994, this photographer said: “Mitterrand knew I was Jewish, I wish he hadn’t asked me to come that day…

            The Le Monde article also explains that when Bousquet’s exact role during WWII was established in 1978, it took a while for the trial to take place (for crimes against humanity), first because France was in no hurry then to re-examine the role of Vichy in WWII, and secondly because Mitterrand, elected president in 1981, intervened to delay that trial in order to “ne pas raviver les plaies” (not to reopen old wounds) he said later. Yeah right... The trial was meant to be held sometime at the end of 1993 but as Bousquet was shot dead by Didier Christian in June 93, there never was any trial, much to the anger of many people in France and beyond but certainly to the relief of Mitterrand and probably a few others too.
            Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 13-11-2018, 23:25.

            Comment


              Mitterand and Haughey were great buddies. Haughey and his mistress, and Mitterand and his mistress had a lovely weekend on Haughey's private island. Ortolans were served. The Eighties were fucking weird.

              Comment


                Yeuch. Terry Keane being the lizardman’s mistress?

                Comment


                  Yep.

                  Comment


                    Of course Haughey knew where to source fresh ortolans for delivery to his private island.

                    I bet the Foreign Ministry paid for them, too.

                    Comment


                      Thanks PF. Disappointing but not massively surprising that Jaurès succumbed to left wing antisemitism. It really was pervasive in France pre WW1, seemingly more so than Germany.

                      Comment


                        [Part 2 of maybe 5]

                        François Mitterrand, born in 1916 in a very Catholic family from the Charente, s-w France. His family environment is described in this article.

                        In summary: a bourgeois, Catholic, patriotic and conservative family, “very right-wing but open-minded” we’re told. The Mitterrands were more “Bloc national” than “Front populaire” the author of the piece adds, which I’m sure, Etienne, you’ll be well acquainted with as Marcel Déat was one of the Front populaire leaders (!) before he defected to the enemy in 1938.

                        Let’s have a look at these collaborationist parties as this runs in parallel with Mitterrand’s own situation although there’s no suggestion he was ever a collaborator himself (though at Vichy he was very close to those in charge of organising the collaboration nationally, more of which later, part 3-4).

                        As we’ve seen in post #901, there was a number of leftwingers/former leftwingers like Déat who jumped ship and joined the Vichy camp. The historian Pascal Ory, who I mentioned in that post, has written extensively about this. On studying the political affiliation of the collaborationist parties’ members, he found that a good % were leftwing/very leftwing or ex leftwing. These collaborationist parties were created either just before the war or, more often, during WWII. I’ll pick the main two: the French Popular Party (PPF in French, 1936-1945) and the National Popular Rally (RNP, 1941-1945).



                        The PPF, whose leader was ex communist MP Jacques Doriot, was the largest collaborationist party with 130,000 members at its peak in 1937 and 30,000 during WWII (competition with newer similar parties and disenchanted punters explain the drop). According to Ory, 33% of the PPF members were ex communists or socialists in 1937 (but mostly the former). This is high and Ory partly explains it by the fact that the party was created in Greater Paris which had a strong communist following. The make-up of the PPF’s regional sections was more what you'd expect from that sort of organisation, ex far rightists etc.

                        Many of these provincial sections included members of the Croix-de-Feu, the very organisation that François Mitterrand joined in 1934 (aged 18) on his arrival in Paris (more on this in Part 3) and also included established anti-Semitic movements such as Action Française whose main theoretician was Charles Maurras, still a reference today for the ultra right. [Britannica: Charles Maurras, 1868-1952, French writer and political theorist, major intellectual influence in early 20th-century Europe whose “integral nationalism” anticipated some of the ideas of fascism.]

                        About 30% of the PPF’s members were right-wing in 1937, the rest was classed as apolitical. Socio-economically, it was roughly 40 % working class and 60% “classes moyennes”, admin workers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, professionals etc.

                        The RNP, considered more “moderate” than the PPF, started small but grew during WWII to 25,000 members at its peak in 1943. Its leader was Marcel Déat (cf previous posts), a former MP for the SFIO (forerunner of the socialist party) created in 1905 by Jean Jaurès. (Note that the French name is “Le Rassemblement National Populaire”, hence the uproar 8 months ago when Marine Le Pen changed the name Front National to “Rassemblement National”, very close in name to Déat’s party).

                        Now, let’s look at the general context in the mid-1930s when Mitterrand’s arrived in Paris from his native south-west and engaged in political activism.

                        The international recession, which hit France in 1931, ushered the country into an intense period of political instability, from 1932 onwards (the 1932 General Elections had been narrowly won by the left – mainly centre left & socialists – to the exclusion of the communists, but they were weak at the time, 10% of the electorate in the 1920s-early 1930s but they would shoot up from 1936 – Popular Front – to > 25% of the electorate from 1945 to 1960). With the economic downturn came a rise of nationalism, anti-Republicanism, anti-Semitism, Catholic traditionalism and a few other nasty –isms.

                        A coalition called "The Cartel of the Lefts" was formed… but the main left-wing player, the socialist party (SFIO), refused to enter the government. Cue a sort of hung parliament, a fragile coalition gvt and therefore a powder-keg of a political situation (6 different cabinets between May 1932 and Feb. 1934!).

                        The far right felt empowered by the annihilation of the Weimar Republic in 1933, the right exploited both the volatile situation and the omnishambles on the left, and that rhetoric emboldened violent far right organisations and fascists into coming forward, which led to the 6 February 1934 crisis that threatened to overthrow the divided left-wing coalition in power.

                        1934 is also a pivotal year in France in the chain of events that would lead to WWII and beyond. And this 6 February 1934 marked a turning point that’s key to understanding the subsequent events right to the Resistance.

                        On that day, a demonstration took place in Paris (about 60,000 people from across the political spectrum) against a number of things which we’ll leave aside for a minute as it’s mostly remembered for this: 6,000 far right rioters tried to overthrow the left-wing government after the demo degenerated on Concorde Square. A historian called that day “the apex of an acute parliamentary crisis”. The main far right movements present were the rabidly anti-Republican Action Française led by Charles Maurras, various patriotic youth groups and this Croix-de-Feu that François Mitterrand would join 8 months later on arriving in Paris to study law. The bloody riots on the Concorde Square with police left about 30 people dead and 2,000 injured, as the far rightists tried to storm the nearby National Assembly. Most historians are in agreement to say that this near-storming was spontaneous and disorganised, so not planned therefore less serious than it may look.



                        The violent political protests on that 6 February 1934 day were also directly linked to theStavisky scandal, France’s biggest political corruption scandal of the interwar involving left-wing politicians and Jewish financier-con man Alexandre Stavisky, which fuelled the far right’s anger. There’s a low-on-facts-but-still-good film made on this with the great Jean-Paul Belmondo (1974), The New York Times’ take on this film.



                        Anyway, this attempt to subvert democracy backfired for the fascists. It stirred people’s conscience and served as a big wake-up call for the divided left. The socialist SFIO, the French Communist Party (PCF), the workers’ union (particularly communist CGT) and anti-fash movements which had sprung up on the back of all this shit, mounted a riposte and this led to a series of (violent) counter-demonstrations all over France that month of February 1934, notably 7, 9 and 12 Feb. These left-wing groups would form the nucleus of the Resistance movement a few years later although the Resistance was more diverse in its make-up than is generally thought as we’ve seen previously, with many resistants having no particular ideology.


                        The front page of the communist daily L’Humanité’s on 9.2.1934

                        It also led in 1935 to a left-wing alliance between socialists and communists, which hadn’t happened in a while as they’d been at each other’s throats since 1920. In the face of evil and misery, they united. This alliance is known as the Front Populaire and is a key marker in French political and social history (The seminal Matignon Agreements).

                        The Front Populaire won the 1936 General Elections (Jewish Léon Blum headed the gvt) and the new links forged between the lefts then would prove significant in the fight against Nazism during WWII. The far right was pushing for a dictatorship à la Italy and Germany and this did make the divided French left (communists vs socialists, who were enemies, particularly the former toward the latter) look past their differences and realise that unity was the only way forward.


                        Hope, at last! The birth of the Front Populaire: March 1935 in Paris, 500,000 demonstrators – socialists, communists, trade unionists, anti-fascist intellectuals etc. – unite to fight fascism and advance workers’ rights. On the banner, their unity statement = We pledge to remain united to disarm and dissolve all subversive organisations, defend and develop democratic freedoms and preserve peace. (footage of that day and the Front Populaire on Youtube and on ina.fr, the national audiovisual archives).

                        It is in this very volatile context that the very conservative, staunchly catholic Mitterrand arrived in Paris from his tranquil countryside in October 1934. A bit of a culture shock you could say.
                        Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 14-11-2018, 21:17.

                        Comment


                          Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                          Of course Haughey knew where to source fresh ortolans for delivery to his private island.

                          I bet the Foreign Ministry paid for them, too.
                          Ooooh, probably not. It's hard to express how tight money was back then. He would have either taken it from the leaders fund paid to the party, (which paid for the Charvet Shirts) or from the (relatively) massive bungs he was getting all the time. The thing was, that at the time, he was ostensibly earning as much money as two teachers. like my parents, were earning between them. I must admit that if my parents had an Island, and a gandon mansion tucked away, they've yet to mention it to me.

                          Comment


                            Even in the World’s Best Shirts he looked like a reptile. Rarely has pure interior badness corresponded so well with the face.

                            Comment


                              I do have a pash for Leon Blum. I’m sure it’s misguided but.

                              Comment


                                I'm very rusty on this, but surely it needed a change of policy from the Kremlin to allow Thorez and the PCF to join the Popular Front. Was that in reaction to the disaster in Germany that resulted from not collaborating with the socialists?

                                Comment


                                  The previous congresses of the Communist International (Comintern) in the 1920s, particularly the 1928 one, made any rapprochement between the communists and socialists impossible, hence my comment that communists and socialists were enemies and at each others’ throats since 1920 particularly the communists towards the socialists, as the former considered impossible to ally themselves with a "bourgeois party" in the context of the 1920s as decided by the Comintern, i.e aggressive class warfare, proletarian revolution and all that jazz.

                                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Period

                                  According to the Comintern's analysis, the current phase of world economy from 1928 onward, the so-called "Third Period," was to be a time of widespread economic collapse and mass working class radicalization. This economic and political discord would again make the time ripe for proletarian revolution if militant policies were rigidly maintained by communist vanguard parties, the Comintern believed.

                                  Communist policies during the Third Period were marked by extreme hostility to political reformism and political organizations espousing it as an impediment to the movement's revolutionary objectives. In the field of trade unions, a move was made during the Third Period towards the establishment of radical dual unions under communist party control rather than continuation of the previous policy of attempting to radicalize existing unions by "boring from within."

                                  The rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany in 1933 and the annihilation of the organized communist movement there shocked the Comintern into reassessing the tactics of the Third Period. From 1934, new alliances began to be formed under the aegis of the so-called "Popular Front." The Popular Front policy was formalized as the official policy of the world communist movement by the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in 1935.
                                  The 7th congress of Comintern held in Moscow in 1935 made an alliance possible.

                                  Basically, as I wrote, the fall of the Weimar Republic (and subsequent arrival of Hitler) was a shock, as was the 6 February 1934 crisis in France and this combined provoked a political realignment on the left. Unity of the lefts became the top priority to combat fascism.

                                  That Comintern congress advocated alliances with any leftwing party against the right/far right, and therefore OKeyed the creation of the Front Populaire, officially created in 1936 but its basis had been established as early as mid-1934 when Thorez called for unity with the SFIO, with the endorsement of Moscow, hence that big March 1935 demo in Paris which I talk about in my previous post as it's the first big popular marker of this reluctant alliance (but when needs must…).

                                  The communists and the socialists (SFIO), along with the other left-wing party (centre-left Parti Radical), agreed on a common manifesto under the Front Populaire banner in January 1936 in preparation for the April-May 1936 General Elections, which the Front Populaire won, 57% vs 43% for the right.

                                  Parts of what I’ve just written are well explained in this wiki: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_...e_et_formation

                                  The Mediapart article below (in French) also explains the situation well (it also mentions that the impetus for this radical change of direction in Moscow came from the Bulgarian Georges Dimitrov who managed to soften Moscow’s position on alliances in spring 1934 by foregrounding the need for a concerted anti-fascist alliance with the left, and to hell with the proletarian revolution for the time being!).

                                  https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/l...ar-jean-vigreu

                                  Comment


                                    [Part 3 of 4]

                                    TIMELINE

                                    October 1934. Mitterrand, 18, moves to Paris to study law. He’s a staunch Catholic and his student digs are in a religious institute run by Roman Catholic fathers. Goes to mass a lot and helps the poor in his spare time. The Mitterrands were what you’d call now “Catholiques intégristes” (traditionalist, or “Cathos tradis” for short), real “grenouilles de bénitier”, a derogatory humorous phrase used to gently mock religious zealots, literally “a frog (who loves bathing) in a holy water font“.



                                    The close ideological links between radical Catholicism and the hard right help to understand how Mitterrand’s beliefs were shaped. He was interviewed on this issue in 1994 and replied: “Being right-wing was a family tradition, I was the product of this environment”. A bit of a cop-out to explain this controversial period in his life but there’s truth in that.

                                    Autumn 1934. Joins the youth branch of the far right nationalist and catholic Croix-de-Feu created in 1927.



                                    Croix-de-Feu is very successful: 400,000 members in 1936, the year of its dissolution (new law banning paramilitary movements). Replaced by the more moderate Parti Social Français (1936-1941) which became France’s first mass right-wing party (1 million members at its peak).

                                    Croix-de-Feu is very patriotic, Catholic (but not particularly anti-Semitic) and is led by ex army officer François de la Rocque who, once the recession struck in the early 1930s, padded out the movement’s ideology with pro working class, anti-capitalist fluff to make it more respectable and widen its appeal. It is possible that a young, impressionable Mitterrand was swayed by this bogus socialist stuff. (Marine Le Pen adopted that strategy on taking over in 2010 when the FN was tanking (10% and 4% in the 2007 Presidentials and 2007 GE respectively), i.e faux social left-wing-ish manifesto, with protectionism, low taxation for workers etc.)

                                    Beg. of 1935. Joins Action Française.

                                    February 1935. Takes part in far right demonstrations that month. Footage + photos found in the 1990s show him in the major 1st of Feb. 1935 demo against “l’invasion métèque” in French society and universities (derogatory term for foreigner, lots of foreign students then, see link below). Among the slogans: “France to the French” (also the Front National’s main slogan when it emerged in the early 1980s). This website analyses the events of February 1935.




                                    (2nd on the left)

                                    In 1994, those pictures and other documents were made public via Pierre Péan’s seminal book on Mitterrand’s past (A French Youth: Francois Mitterrand 1934-1947). When French journalist J-P Elkabbach asked Mitterrand on TV why he was in this racist demonstration, Mitterrand denied knowing the purpose of the demonstration – not credible at all.

                                    This social unrest was part of a larger (inter)national movement of protest and industrial action taking place against the backdrop of an economic & identity crisis and involved right-wing and left-wing movements. The left-wing Front Populaire as we’ve seen in Part 2, an alliance of all left-wing parties formed to fight the rise of fascism and advance workers’ rights, was created and won the 1936 GE, electing as President of the Council (= Head of gvt, the current title of “Président de la République” didn't exist yet) the socialist and (non practising) Jew Léon Blum who is a celebrated figure of the French left.

                                    Excerpt from the Front Populaire wiki: […] general strike in May–June 1936, resulting in the negotiation of the Matignon agreements, one of the cornerstone of social rights in France. All employees were assured a two-week paid vacation, and the rights of unions were strengthened.

                                    1936. Mitterrand demonstrates several times alongside far right movements against the human rights and anticolonialist academic Gaston Jèze.

                                    From Gaston Jèze’s wiki:
                                    Jèze thus became the symbol of law and anticolonialism because of his oratory for and his championing of the Ethiopian cause before the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague. His advocacy made him simultaneously became a target of right-wing nationalist organizations in France and abroad. Notably, on March 5, 1936, the French nationalist groups organised their biggest demonstration to date, demanding his resignation. That caused Jèze to hide throughout his stay in The Hague to avoid being the target of an assassination. A notable participant in the demonstrations was François Mitterrand, a future leftwing socialist president of France.
                                    May 1938. Graduates in Public law and Lettres (literature & humanities). Also writes literary articles for right-wing daily Jour-Écho de Paris.

                                    Does his military service.

                                    September 1939. Sent to the front in Eastern France. The Phoney War starts.

                                    June 1940. Wounded near Verdun on June 18th, ironically. Captured by the Germans and sent to a POW camp near Bonn.

                                    June 1940-November 1941. Writes pro-Pétain articles in the Stalag’s gazette.

                                    November 1941. After 2 unsuccessful attempts, manages to escape. 3 weeks later, he’s in Vichy thanks to his parents who’ve got him a job in the Pétain-run Vichy gvt’s administration.

                                    Mitterrand later claimed that, as he’d experienced the horrors of the war, he wanted to work for Vichy to help PoWs and the Resistance. He added that in the Stalag he’d met people he’d never come across before (communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jews, paupers etc.), that it opened his eyes, discovered collectivism etc. Undeniably, the army with its 1.5 million conscripts and the PoW camps were a great social melting-pot and an eye-opener for people like Mitterrand who had led a sheltered life.

                                    But his justifications don’t ring true. He was still an ardent Petainist at that point, eg the pro-Pétain articles he wrote in the Stalag in 1941 and also in 1942 in France. And he cannot not have known what Pétain was actively doing at that point. Granted, the vile Pierre Laval wasn’t yet running the Vichy gvt and Vichy hadn’t yet entered its most sinister phase but the first anti-Semitic measures in France had been taken as early as Oct. 1940, the first mass round-ups of Jews started in spring 1941 and the first France-Auschwitz deportations in March 1942, major transit and internment camps had been opened in France in 1940-41 (there was even a concentration camp in France, the Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace with an “annexe” in Lorraine, lots of communists were sent there). These camps were not just for Jews but for Romani people, communists, trade unionists, gypsies, freemasons etc. and other “Indésirables” as they were called.

                                    And the Vichy people weren’t just “taking orders from Germany”, many Vichyists were very zealous in their hatred of Jews, communists etc. Vichy also had violent security troops, notably the SOL, a bunch of psychopaths led by the fascist Joseph Darnand who had been an activist in the main interwar's far right, nationalistic, paramilitary groups (Croix-de-Feu, La Cagoule etc.) well-known to Mitterrand as he himself was in some of them.


                                    The 21 Points of the SOL.: a list of "fors" and "againsts" beginning with, respectively, the New Order and the Old Regime

                                    In 1994, Mitterrand said that he didn’t know about the Jews either but again it’s hard to believe, he was bound to have known about all that, especially as he was so close to René Bousquet.

                                    Mitterrand did help returning PoWs or evadees + the resistance while at Vichy, but it’s revisionist of him to say he joined Vichy as a do-gooder for PoWs and embedded resistant.

                                    It is all the more troubling that Mitterrand, before the dirt was dug up, always said and wrote (eg in his 1969 book Ma part de vérité written as he was creating the Parti Socialiste on the ashes of the dying SFIO founded by Jean Jaurès in 1905) that he went straight from escaping the PoW camp (Nov. 1941) to the Resistance, which is a blatant lie as he spent 17 months in Vichy in between.

                                    The reality is probably that Mitterrand knew that his murky past would only be firmly established after he’d become president (1981), a lifetime ambition of his, he even got to the 2nd round of the Presidentials in 1965 but was beaten by De Gaulle. He probably reasoned that if he admitted to his Vichy past, even as a Vichysto-resistant (s.o who went from collaboration to resistance partly out of opportunism), this would have been exploited by the opposition (along the lines of “Mitterrand was a collaborator and not a resistant!”) and this could could have destroyed him politically.

                                    Also, in the 1960s, all of this was still very raw and controversial, there was still national unity to preserve for everybody’s sake so discussions about these things in the mainstream media were taboo. Mitterrand also knew that many WWII archives would be kept confidential for a long time, in accordance with “Secret Défense” rules and restrictions placed on accessing public records, what’s sometimes called by French historians “les délais de sérénité”… More on this archives issue in the final Part 4.
                                    Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 15-11-2018, 21:28.

                                    Comment


                                      [Part 4/5]

                                      Mitterrand also knew that the bulk of WWII archives would be kept confidential for decades, in accordance with “Secret Défense” rules and restrictions placed on accessing public records, what French historians sometimes call “les délais de sérénité” i.e the period of time it takes for a nation to become sufficiently “serene” for such highly sensitive information to be released without risking reprisals or civil unrest (it was traumatic enough in the aftermath of WWII in France with, for instance, the 300,000 cases investigated during the Legal purge trials).

                                      A lot of these archives, surrounding the role of the collaboration, the Resistance etc. were open up in theory to all citizens relatively early in fact (particularly thanks to the 1979 & 1983 laws – many books on the more sombre period of WWII were written pre 1990s, although it’s worth pointing out that Robert Paxton used mostly American archives + diplomatic records and German archives seized by the US army for his seminal book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1972) BUT most weren’t and practically speaking it was very hard to consult them, even as a historian/researcher you had to fill in lots of forms, obtain special authorisations etc. making it a very onerous undertaking (especially in the absence of a National Register of Archives so access procedures had to be repeated many times, for each Archives & Records administration, in each department etc.).



                                      The first big batches of legislation re the relaxation of the consultation of archives (including a large chunk of the “denunciation letters”) came in October 1997 under the President Chirac-Prime Minister Jospin cohabitation, and the Internet & digitalisation as well as a surge in appetite for exploring the past have certainly helped in this respect.

                                      However, many documents still needed to be “declassified” and in 2015 François Hollande opened up all legal and police archives, about 200,000 documents (mostly Vichy gvt-related docs + detailed police reports and justice records – civil & military courts), in his words to “lutter contre ces fléaux qui nous menacent : le révisionnisme, l'altération de la mémoire, l'oubli, l'effacement” (= to guard against these evils which threaten us: revisionism, the altering of history and forgetfulness). At long last one could say, all French WWII archives (bar some documents classified as national defence or very private) were fully released to all without any restriction.

                                      https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/681517845159768069

                                      Re the denunciation letters, these 2 articles (from Libération and the Nouvel Obs-Rue89) on the forensic study of these letters are very interesting as they officially debunk the widely-held belief of French citizens denouncing Jews en masse, a false belief mainly based not on a thorough study but on assumptions derived from a small sample of documents examined in the 1980s at a time when this was a very understudied topic due to the difficulty/impossibility of accessing whole categories of archives (with André Halimi’s 1983 book La délation sous l’Occupation acting as a central reference for this myth:

                                      Selon Antoine Prost, « les chercheurs qui ont travaillé sur ces paquets de lettres, effectivement très nombreuses [entre 150 000 et 500 000 dans toute la France, ndlr], ont trouvé une minorité de dénonciation de juifs : on dénonce les trafiquants du marché noir, des voisins qu'on n'aime pas et qui écoutent la radio de Londres, des femmes de prisonniers qui trompent leur mari, etc... Et bien sûr aussi des juifs. »

                                      […]

                                      Romans, films et surtout le livre du journaliste André Halimi, La délation sous l’Occupation (1983), ouvrage jusqu’alors référentiel sur ce thème, ont fait de la délation un phénomène massif, dirigé principalement contre les Juifs. Or il apparaît que la réalité fut autrement complexe.

                                      André Halimi évoquait de trois à cinq millions de lettres de dénonciation, il semble qu’il n’y en ait eu «que» 150 000 à 500 000. Les dénonciations de Juifs ont été loin d’être majoritaires dans les mouchardages aux autorités allemandes.

                                      Par contre les règlements de comptes familiaux ont souvent été moteurs : une fille qui dénonce son père, un beau-père qui balance sa belle-fille, etc. Le tout sous les motifs les plus divers. Les femmes ne sont pas plus délatrices que les hommes ; les lettres étaient souvent signées : pas mal d’idées reçues tombent.
                                      So, out of the 150,000-500,000 letters sent to the Vichy or local police, Kommandanturs etc. (and not 3 million as Halimi has written - an extrapolation?- without much evidence as many archives related to that area hadn't been made public then) few were about Jews in reality, the vast majority of denunciators were grassing on people involved in the thriving black market, on neighbours accused of listening to Radio Londres (Free French), on women cheating on their husband, grudges between relatives etc.

                                      With this caveat: “Les sources documentaires sont le plus souvent les dossiers judiciaires de l’épuration, dans lesquelles les plaintes pour délation comptent parfois jusqu’à 40 % des cas examinés. Gare évidemment aux «effets de source» : tous les cas de délation n’ont pas abouti devant les tribunaux, loin de là, et les Juifs dénoncés puis déportés sont rarement revenus porter plainte.”

                                      December 1941. Mitterrand's first job in the Vichy administration is to write up lists on political opponents, particularly communists.

                                      This worshipping of Pétain may sound odd now but we must remember that after the total and sudden collapse of France in June 1940, Pétain was very popular and represented for everyone The Hero of WWI, a prestigious France etc.



                                      In 1940, he embodied the only hope of improvement in this utter chaos: by mid-June 1940, 100,000 French soldiers had already been killed and over 200,000 wounded in the Battle of France May-June 1940 (so much for the French army surrendering without a fight…), 2 million French soldiers made prisoner and sent to Germany – Mitterrand among them –, German armed forces invading Northern France and particularly the Paris area created a mass exodus,
                                      sending about 8 million people onto the road for 2-3 weeks, including Belgian and Dutch refugees, heading south towards the Unoccupied Zone; there was panic, desolation, no army, France was a rudderless mostly occupied country with a sum of 400 million francs to be paid daily as “compensation” to the German occupier (“The terms of the armistice were harsh. [...] France was to pay occupation costs of 20 million marks a day, which at the artificially inflated rate of 20 francs per mark meant 400 million francs a day.”) etc. hence the attraction for Pétain and the hope he generated in the second part of 1940.


                                      Civilians fleeing the war in June 1940, by bike, car, bus, train, horse-drawn cart, on foot… Or, as fuel was in short supply, by “vélo-taxi”:



                                      From the website Transportation during the Exodus:

                                      […] As a result, modes of transport that did not rely on fuel became popular. Bikes, already popular since the late 1800s, became even more useful but were also very likely to be stolen. In at least one instance, when rubber was in high demand for military uses, bicycle tires were replaced with corks.

                                      An enterprising young man, Fidele Outterick, invented the velo-taxi in June 1940. Essentially the French version of the rickshaw, they became very popular during and after the Exodus as a cheap and efficient means of transport in the crowded cities and on roads. Even by 1940, France was still a largely rural country; it was also very common to see wagons, as well as horses traveling on the roads. Imagine watching a country cart pulled by horses, piled high with hay and old peasant women, racing down the cosmopolitan streets of Paris. Additionally, if unfortunate enough to not have any wheeled-transport, people walked. Many tried to catch rides with motorists, but more often they were able to catch a ride with a team of soldiers on a supply truck.
                                      That Pétain hope was fast fading by December 1941 as a totally different phase was well under way (Third Republic had been abolished since July 1940, collaboration with the Nazis had been officialised since October 1940, first anti-Semitic decrees had been in place for a year, communists were being hunted down etc.) although the darker years had not yet started, the extremist Pierre Laval for instance, much younger and more radical than Pétain, wasn’t yet Head of the Vich gvt. However, for many, Pétain, at that December 1941 stage, was still the best bulwark again Nazism.

                                      February 1942. Mitterrand is put in charge of the Service for the orientation of released POWs.

                                      Accuses the French Marxist left “of speaking a version of French translated from German”.
                                      Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 18-11-2018, 19:15.

                                      Comment


                                        [Part 5/5]


                                        February 1942. Mitterrand is put in charge of the Service for the orientation of released POWs.

                                        Accuses French Marxists “of speaking a version of French translated from German”.

                                        Among his favourite authors: the notorious fascists Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (the former was executed for treason by a firing squad in February 1945 and the latter committed suicide in March 1945 as the same fate awaited him). Brasillach was the editor-in-chief of the very pro-Nazi and collaborationnist weekly Je suis partout which had a circulation of 300,000 at its peak.



                                        From this point onwards, and to explain this controversial and dark chapter of his life, Mitterrand claims that he changed and decided to use his Vichy position as a cover to enter the Resistance. Said he set up a network of contacts to help resistants on the ground, that he sent fake papers to PoWs via the Red Cross to facilitate their escape, provided contacts to evadees for them to hide etc. This has been checked by historians and while it looks boastful, they have indeed found evidence, and testimonies, of Mitterrand becoming a Vichysto-resistant some time in 1942 although ascertaining when exactly and the degree of his involvement in the Resistance in that particular 1942 year has proved hard.

                                        August 1942.

                                        Only 2 weeks after the Vel D’Hiv’ round-up, Mitterrand is still a fervent Petainist and even writes an article in praise of the vile SOL (Service d’Ordre Légionnaire), a paramilitary group in charge of hunting down Vichy enemies and the forerunner of the Milice which was created 2 months after the German and Italian armies invaded the Free Zone (Nov. 1942) and largely took over the running of Vichy.




                                        November 1942. The German and Italian armies invade the French Free Zone. Mitterrand’s commitment to the Vichy regime is softening. Still admires Pétain but he seems also to have become very anti-German.

                                        December 1942. Anti-German but still part of Pétain’s Légion Française des Combattants... (a military organisation set up to propagate Vichy's “Révolution nationale” values of "Travail, Famille, Patrie"). And still writing pro-Vichy, anti-Republican articles in Petainist publications, eg in France, revue de l’État nouveau.

                                        At that point, this Pétain shtick as saviour of the nation born out of the WWI Hero cult of personality and the feelings of hope that he’d raised in 1940 were starting to seriously fade away, so propaganda was intensified (publications, posters, leaflets etc.)


                                        Propaganda poster for the Vichy Regime's 'Revolution Nationale' programme


                                        April 1943. Receives the Francisque, the Vichy regime’s equivalent of today’s Legion of Honour which was only awarded to the most ardent admirers of Pétain. To receive the award, Mitterrand was sponsored by 2 “Cagoulards” (members of the fascist militia La Cagoule, comparable in spirit to Mussolini’s Blackshirts but much smaller), one of them being Gabriel Jeantet, a close associate of Pétain, see below.



                                        Spring 1943. Enters the Resistance but doesn’t completely sever links with Vichy as, for another few months, he continues to work with Vichy organisations who help PoWs.

                                        Did Mitterrand try to keep his options open purely out of opportunism? Impossible to say but he must have sensed that Feb/March 1943 marked a turning point in WWII: it’s when the Germans started to lose ground (the Battle of Stalingrad – defeat of the German army – had just ended). It’s possible that Mitterrand saw the tide turning and decided to jump ship while keeping a minor “just in case” role in Vichy.

                                        July 1943. Burns all his bridges with Vichy and officially joins the Resistance (on the right-wing side, cf part 1). Rapidly leads a small Resistance movement made up of ex PoWs.

                                        December 1943. Meets Charles De Gaulle in Algiers who says to him: “I know of your sympathies for Vichy but I will put this down on an error of youth”.

                                        De Gaulle forgave Mitterrand on this one but then again he needed him to help coordinate and unite the various resistant cells affiliated to the PoWs as this particularly network recruited their members specifically in the ranks of ex PoWs/deportees/evadees.

                                        However, here too, there’s controversy. After the war, many movements sought official recognition and committees were set up to examine everyone’s role in the Resistance. The umbrella Resistance movement that Mitterrand federated from 3 smaller ones (called the National Movement of Prisoners of War and Deportees, MNPGD in French) was twice refused the official title of Resistance movement in 1949 and 1951. When Mitterrand became president in 1981, he had the MNPGD officially recognised as a Resistance movement by decree in 1986. Except that the State Council annulled the decree in 1991… (cf this wiki).

                                        However, there is no doubt that by spring/summer 1943 Mitterrand was a real resistant: he was actively hunted down by the Gestapo, narrowly escaped arrest/several assassination attempts, had to change identity many times etc.

                                        June 1944. Mitterrand, only 27, serves in the De Gaulle's interim government as Minister for war veterans.

                                        1945. Mitterrand defends the L’Oréal founder Eugène Schueller who bankrolled La Cagoule. Mitterrand is subsequently rewarded with a high-up position in one of Schueller’s businesses in the press.

                                        February 1946. Mitterrand joins the newly-formed centrist party UDSR and is elected MP in Burgundy in Nov. 1946 (will fall out with De Gaulle in 1947 and the two will be political rivals until De Gaulle’s death in 1970).





                                        In Oct/Nov. 1948 as part of the Legal purge (~300,000 cases investigated), 64 members of La Cagoule (Cagoulards) were put on trial together for murder, terrorism, collaborationism/treason. The criminal charge sheet alone is 400 pages long. Most received medium-length prison sentences (2-10 years).

                                        Mitterrand was close to a number of Cagoulards and maintained a lifelong friendship with the Jeantet brothers (two key Cagoulards) until their death in 1978 and 1982 respectively (Gabriel and Claude Jeantet – the latter was sentenced to hard labour for life but released after only 3 years, after one of three amnesty laws was enacted).

                                        http://www.lefigaro.fr/histoire/arch...-le-figaro.php

                                        From the wiki on La Cagoule, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cagoule:

                                        World War II and after

                                        During World War II, members of the Cagoule were divided. Some of them joined various Fascist movements; Schueller and Deloncle founded the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire, which conducted various pro-Nazi Germany activities in occupied France. It bombed seven synagogues in Paris in October 1941. Others became prominent members of Philippe Pétain's Vichy Regime.

                                        Darnand was the leader of the Milice, the Vichy paramilitary group who fought the French Resistance, and enforced anti-semitic policies. He took an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler after accepting a Waffen SS rank.

                                        Other cagoulards sided against the Germans, either as members of the Resistance (such as Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Pierre Guillain de Bénouville or Georges Loustaunau-Lacau in the Maquis), or as members of Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces, such as General Henri Giraud or Colonel Passy. After the war, the writer Henri de Kérillis accused de Gaulle of having been a member of La Cagoule; he said that De Gaulle was ready to install a fascist government if the Allies let him become France's chief of state.[13]

                                        The cagoulards arrested for the 1937 conspiracy were not brought to trial for those charges until 1948, after the liberation of France. By then many had served in the Vichy government or the Resistance, and few were brought to trial.

                                        Comment


                                          This is fascinating stuff, PF. I never knew Giraud was in La Cagoule for instance.

                                          Comment


                                            Oh dear, another gem from the Macronie...

                                            '€100 per head': Minister's taste in Paris restaurants gives the French indigestion

                                            There are few worse gaffes for a French politician than making a ill-judged remark about food and one minister might be about to learn the lesson, having apparently revealed his rather expensive taste in restaurants during a speech at the Sorbonne university.

                                            French Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin, 36, was trying to urge his audience to show compassion for protesters across France who have been blocking roads since last weekend to protest rising fuel costs and low living standards.

                                            The protests have been led by mostly rural or small-town voters wearing high-visibility "yellow vests" who are fed up with rising fuel prices and the policies of unpopular President Emmanuel Macron.

                                            "If we don't want a domestic Brexit... we need to take on board and not only explain, but listen and understand, what it's like to live on 950 euros ($1,100) a month when the bill for a Parisian restaurant is around 200 euros when you invite someone out and you don't take wine," Darmanin said.

                                            "Who can believe that we live in the same society?" he added, calling on politicians to "listen and hear the cultural and social distress, which is not just about purchasing power."

                                            [...]

                                            The remark about a meal for two without wine costing 200 euros -- more than double the cost of an average dinner in most Parisian brasseries -- immediately sparked online outrage.

                                            "It's difficult to show more clearly his disconnect with the average French person, even a Parisian" said an article in the Marianne magazine.

                                            Comment


                                              Protest day across France today but particularly Paris, which follows a week of protest actions and unrest across the country initiated by the "gilets jaunes" (hi-viz yellow vests) movement that started last Saturday with 300,000 protesters in 2,000 locations over last weekend, mainly roadblocks. Good-natured first (protest agst rising fuel prices, +20% in one year) but soon morphed into an anti-Macron protest, and very soon degenerated (2 people dead, over 500 injured, vandalism etc. - unofficial movement so plenty of unregistered actions, no planned security, no demonstration marshals/stewards etc. hence the high number of incidents).

                                              France’s ‘gilets jaunes’ leave Macron feeling decidedly off-colour

                                              Fuel tax protest has widened into outburst at inequality and against ruling political class


                                              It's not even midday and the Parisian demo (~50,000 expected) hasn't even officially started (it's meant to kick off early afternoon, in the Champs-de-Mars area, so within a stone's throw of the Eiffel Tower - tourists will be pleased, lots of great photos to take!) but there's already been some incidents on the Champs-Élysées, the CRS have already laid into over 150 violent demonstrators (apparently ultra-rightists with very probably some Black Bloc-type members in there) who have infiltrated the protest, about 4,000 present there (mostly peaceful), they were obviously never meant to be on the Champs-Élysées in the first place (protesters probably trying to get to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré Street area where the Élysée Palace is located in order to serenade Macron, also handy area for them as it has plenty of upmarket boutiques and Haute couture premises to vandalise. That said, plenty of similar boutiques around the Champs-Élysées so that could degenerate over there too, depending on how well the police have closed down the adjacent streets and avenues). Groups now apparently moving towards the Rivoli Street area (so clearly with a view to take over Concorde Square and create mayhem there, also possibly the nearby ultra-posh Vendôme Square).
                                              Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 24-11-2018, 10:54.

                                              Comment


                                                Some serious shit on the Champs-Élysées and generally in the centre of Paris atm with ultra-rightists and other groups creating complete havoc, yellow vests also vandalising bus stops to put up barricades in other areas etc. Water cannons are out in force already (and the official demo hasn't even started... Let's hope it all calms down): https://www.bfmtv.com/mediaplayer/live-video/

                                                Comment


                                                  I was wondering what the ultra-right fascists were doing on the Champs-Élysées vandalising the place and fighting the police at 9 am (there’s never any demo on the Champs, it’s not forbidden as such but the various requests – from unions – to demonstrate there in the past having been turned down nobody bothers asking now, it’s only OK for the big mass celebrations, after football competitions, for New Year’s Eve etc.), I haven’t followed this week-long Yellow Vest protest so I don’t know much about it but I’ve found the answer while listening to French media: Marine Le Pen has fomented it all, she urged protesters to go there, in this tweet for instance:

                                                  https://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/status/1065860422136446976

                                                  Thankfully, only about 100 ultra-rightists turned up according to the police (+ another 100 anarchists-Black Blocists along with 3,000 radical Yellow Vesters). They started very early though, about 8.30 am, the police were reasonably prepared although it still degenerated for a good hour but the situation seems to be contained there now. You can trust a piece of shit like Le Pen to do sthg like that.

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                                                    Clever soundbite from Mélenchon about today’s violence in Paris caused by the fascists (egged on by Marine Le Pen) and a few particularly angry Yellow Vests people: "C'est le résultat de la réunion des fachos et des fachés".

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