FORUM on:

Robert O. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgeres Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii + 244 pp. Notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $45.00 US (cl).

Reply by Robert O. Paxton:

I thank the panel for its thoughtful comments.

Perhaps I should explain the Dorgeres project's genesis. While reviewing Zeev Sternhell's Ni Droite ni gauche for the TLS in 1983, I noted with astonishment that studies of generic fascism and of French fascism ignore rural society while some of the most essential works on Italy and Germany make rural society central to the emergence of fascism.

In the late 1980s I decided to try to fill that gap by looking at Dorgeres. I had two other motives. I wanted to escape Vichy at last. And, after studying France largely through German archives for years, I wanted to approach la France profonde. In the end, I did not really escape Vichy. But I certainly learned a lot about departmental archives: I ended up working in fifteen of them.

I consulted so many partly because Dorgeres worked out less easily than expected. I thought an archival "mother lode" would pop up, permitting me to finish a short study right away, and then go on to something more substantial. There was no such luck.

After many summers and a sabbatical year devoted to Dorgeres, I have to confront the question posed directly by some of the forum participants and implicitly by others, and more than once, in dark moments, by myself: was Dorgeres worth a book? In himself, probably not. Indeed I have violated all the rules: don't write about a failure, don't examine a negative proposition. It is also wise never to write about someone you do not admire, but I have been violating that one for forty years.

Another unexpected turn was that the summit of Dorgeres' movement appeared ephemeral, without serious sources. I was driven to a strategy of multiple grassroots case studies. Nobody used that trendy word microhistory, but that is where I was led. Does the subject of microhistory have to be a major personage? Alain Corbin's latest study is about a peasant whose name seems to have been picked at random in a parish register.

Irvine puts it very well: this book is about the Dog That Did Not Bark. Dorgeres and his movement never amounted to as much as he, or the media, claimed. But I believed (and still do) that asking why Dorgeres fizzled might reveal much about French rural society and its response to the fascist temptation at the maximum moment of fascism and of rural depression in the 1930s. That is the only basis for any claim that Dorgeres and his movement were significant or representative (I never claimed the latter).

Of course, it is always possible that personal incompetence explains Dorgeres' failure. But several of his lieutenants were in fact quite competent, and went on to lead reasonably productive lives after the movement died out. I believe the movement failed because of the authority of conservative notables in highly-structured French rural society, and of the order-keeping vigour of the French state in the 1930s.

That leads to Amdur's question, and it is a probing one. Is it not odd for a Vichy specialist to find the Third Republic more resilient than either Weimar Germany or the Italian liberal monarchy? Maybe not. I believe I have always resisted linking the weaknesses of the Third Republic in a determinist fashion to its end. I believe that it took military defeat to destroy the Third Republic, and that only then did the dissidents of the 1930s surge forward to shape the revenge regime that followed. The links between Vichy and the 1930s dissidents are crucial but not linear.

I think I am in sync here with the literature of the last twenty years which takes a less calamitous view of French defensive military planning as the least unfavourable option, and finds France more unified and decisive under Daladier and Reynaud in 1939-40, to the point where French armaments production nearly matched the German. Too late, of course. I strenuously avoid any implication that France was preordained to lose in 1940 because it was decadent and defeatist. That is to buy Vichy's diagnosis. I believe France was defeated in 1940 by the high command's errors (the rash Dyle Plan, the failure to form a strategic reserve, tanks misused). Beyond that, the next proximate cause of defeat was the choice of a deflationist economic policy throughout the Depression (except for a moment under Blum), and consequent low productivity. If the entrenched power of a conservative rural oligarchy left little room for Dorgeres in the crises of the 1930s, that power also helps account for the authoritarian rather than fascist character of the Vichy regime (at least at the beginning).

The other weighty issue raised by almost everyone is the fascism problem. There is no way to engage this issue and emerge intact. Zdatny is right to see connections between my Dorgeres project and a fascism project that has been on my desk for some time. One of its first results is my article in the March 1998 issue of the Journal of Modern History, "The Five Phases of Fascism."

After having taught undergraduate and graduate seminars on fascism for years, I have become weary of the hoary (and unexamined) convention by which fascism is treated like the other "isms," Liberalism, Socialism, and Conservatism. As I see it, the conventional student of fascism examines the fascist creed as one examines J. S. Mill or Karl Marx, and then goes on to assume that the fascists chose it like an item on a menu. I propose in my article that fascism must be treated sui generis. It must be examined in action, and in its setting: the available political space and the elites who aided it. I also suggested that fascism evolves through five stages, each of which requires a somewhat different analysis because each involves different historical processes.

The first stage is the emergence of a fascist intellectual challenge to existing political orthodoxies. In a second stage fascist parties or movements become rooted (or not) in a political system by becoming the bearers of specific political interests (usually, by the way, quietly jettisoning some first- phase ideas). The third stage is coming to power, the fourth is exercising power, and the fifth stage is the "long duree" when fascist regimes either subside into mere authoritarianism (as Mussolini did), or escalate into something demonic (as Hitler did). The aim of all this is to urge scholars to examine the choices and actions involved in the process of fascistization, rather than try to explain everything by reference to some kind of ideological template (as Irvine has done very effectively with La Rocque, for example).

So was Dorgeres fascist or not? I am indeed uncomfortable with that question, as everyone observed. I suppose the question is inevitable, but it produces flabby historical thinking. Asking the question is to assume that fascism is a fixed category to which a political or intellectual figure can be clearly assigned. But as Goodfellow notes, each national case is different, and, I would argue, so is each stage (I could be charged here with loading on complexity until fascism disappears, but that would be another debate).

At any rate, the French extreme Right faced a special cultural obstacle. Although they wanted to replace the Republic with something more muscular, they felt nationalist distaste for foreign models, especially German ones.

So, again: was Dorgeres a fascist? My answer (or my way of evading one) refers implicitly to these five stages (though I did not encumber the book with them). Dorgeres avowedly accepted much of first-stage fascism (the ideas) at the beginning (1933-34), but defending corporate rural interests subsequently drew him toward authoritarianism, a tendency reinforced by his visceral anti-Germanism. Beyond that, Dorgeres' career belongs squarely within a second-stage fascism (rooting). You could hardly lead an anti-parliamentary movement on an avowed mission to overthrow the French Republic in the 1930s without thereby occupying the fascist space, given the salience of Hitler and Mussolini at that moment.

A corollary of my approach to second-stage fascism is that one must spend as much time on the elites who might (or might not) help as on the fascist movement itself. This accounts for what may seem a disconcerting shift of focus away from Dorgeres to his conservative or authoritarian allies, a strategy that fits my approach to fascism as well as adding value to the book (As for the later stages of fascism, of course, they are irrelevant to Dorgeres, although they are what the word usually evokes in the minds of readers).

I should add that I do not agree with Irvine that evoking the fascism-authoritarian distinction is unhelpful. It seems to me important to keep the fascist concept relatively specific, and not confuse it with the other main component of the extreme right in 20th century Europe: rule through traditional elite corporations (army, church, industrialists, landowners, etc), as with Franco, Salazar, Petain, and Admiral Miklos Horthy.

So why, given all these problems with fascism, does it appear so baldly in the title? Those who glimpsed an editor's hand were right. I would have preferred something more cautious (perhaps a qualifying question mark; perhaps a title like "The Problem of Rural Fascism in France"). The editors were adamant, and no doubt they made publishing sense. My more nuanced title would have been clumsy without clarifying much. Similarly, my French editors insisted on "fascisme rural" in the subtitle of the French edition: Le Temps des chemises vertes: revoltes paysannes et fascisme rural, 1929-1939. You should read my blistering mail from old Greenshirts who deny vehemently ever being fascist (Of course they mean they were never fourth- or fifth-stage fascists, but try explaining that).

Now finally on to some lesser issues. Irvine asks why I dismiss the Parti agraire (PA) as a failure when they elected eleven deputies versus barely one for Dorgeres. To be absolutely precise, eleven deputies joined the Parti Agraire caucus, probably along with several other caucuses, as was permitted in the Third Republic. Dorgeres (as Irvine notes) did not seriously try to mount an electoral party. If he had, he might well have done worse than the PA. Of course I consider Dorgeres a failure, too. Fleurant Agricola and his Parti agraire might well be worth a small study (there is a French MA thesis), but it raises very different (and less interesting) general issues: for instance, the lack of space for categorical parties (like a peasant party or a shopkeepers' party) in the French Republics.

A minor problem arises when Irvine states that commodity prices were not involved with rural fascism in the Po Valley. Indeed they were. Paul Corner's classic Fascism in Ferrara makes much of the effect of declining hemp prices after World War I upon the landowners' reduced tolerance for labour militancy. Two periods of commodity price crash made rural Europe susceptible to extremist movements: one immediately after World War I, and a second after the 1929 crash. The Italian liberal monarchy succumbed to the first; Weimar Germany to the second. France of course survived both (We're back to Amdur's question).

I regret that our panel included no Italian and German specialists. My comparisons with the relative weakness of their rural elites and agrarian organizations, and the absence of a republican tradition among them, may be open to debate, of course. A specialist on postwar France might have queried the links I suggest between Dorgeres and present-day peasantist nostalgia.

Finally, the archives. I encountered every possible reaction in the provincial archives, from open arms to overt hostility. Sometimes I suspected my Vichy work influenced both reactions, but at other moments I felt (with relief) that the archivists had never heard of me. The most actively hostile departmental archivist notoriously keeps everyone out. The current Minister of Culture seems determined to open up the 1930s and Vichy; one of my recent PhD students even saw 1950s material on European union. We are approaching an authentic 30-year rule for France.

Robert O. Paxton
Columbia University
rop1@columbia.edu

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