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).

Second Thoughts by

• William D. Irvine (forum editor),
• Kathryn E. Amdur,
• Sam Goodfellow, and
• Steven Zdatny, for H-France Review of Books, January 1999.

Kathryn E Amdur :

On the issue of France's archives, Professor Paxton has kindly added a clarification regarding his experiences in recent years. As he also previously noted in his Preface to Henry Rousso's and Eric Conan's Vichy, An Ever-Present Past (Hanover, N. H., 1998), despite Rousso's earlier Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), the "myth ... that the French are still 'covering up' Vichy's collaboration" still seems "all but invincible in the United States." The two French authors also take direct issue with the critique of France's archives and archivists made by Sonia Combe (Archives interdites [Paris, 1994]), cited in the Chronicle article noted in my review and dismissed by Rousso and Conan as "an incompetent author, who had never worked on the subject nor on the archives of [the Vichy] period" (p. 274). Even without automatically generalizing from Vichy to fascism, one can rightly acknowledge the progress the French have made in facing up to their past.

William D. Irvine :

In light of Professor Paxton's gracious response to my review of his book, I do not believe that I need give an extended rebuttal. This is the more true given that he and I agree on some important points of substance. We may not be of the same mind as to who, exactly, was a fascist in the 1930s, but I have no quarrel with his very sensible insistence on the functional rather than ideological criteria of fascism. Similarly, I think he is right, in his response to Steve Zdatny's questions about the links between the Third Republic and Vichy to stress the importance of the discontinuities between the two regimes. Let me then limit myself to two more general reflections.

The first, and least important, concerns the question of Paxton's title. It was somewhat mischievous of me to speculate on the provenance of the title: French Peasant Fascism. I was moved to do so, I must now confess, only because I too once permitted a publisher (Oxford, in the event) to substitute a catchier if somewhat misleading title for my own more prosaic if, alas, more accurate, original. Whatever professional scruples I had about the issue fell victim to my sympathy for Oxford's entirely legitimate (if ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to improve the sales figures.

A more salient issue involves the archives, and in particular the French departmental archives. In my review I suggested that the paucity of local archival information on Dorgeres and his movement might speak to the overall importance of the phenomenon under investigation. I am not convinced that I was entirely wrong but it may be that the question of archival silences is rather more complex. Many years ago I consulted some 40 odd departmental archives, roughly three times the number I had intended to visit. I did so--and it is to the point--because of the very slim holdings of all but a handful of them on the subject I was exploring: Boulangism. Nor could I detect any correlation between the volume of archival information and the demonstrable importance of Boulangism in any given department.

To my utter frustration, more than once I came upon departmental archives with five or six thick cartons on anarchists and one slim folder with a title like Evenements politiques covering everything else that had happened in the first twenty years of the republic. I suspect that my frustrations were at times shared by central authorities in Paris. Certainly various Ministers of the Interior were forever sending out circulars complaining that Prefects were not faithfully sending in those famous monthly reports, or worse, were not significantly updating them from one month to the next. I remember wondering if they knew or cared if much that did emerge from the Prefects was entirely plagiarized from their respective sub-prefects. So, did archival silences speak to the inherent importance of the subject under investigation, or to the lack of Prefectorial diligence or, my private suspicion, to a highly developed professional reluctance to seeing the fruit of investigations find their way from the Prefecture to the local archive? I do not know the answer to these questions but they are fundamental ones for those of us who work on the politics of provincial France.

Oh yes, and by way of conclusion, Professor Paxton could be forgiven were he to remark on the fact that archival silences did not lead me to minimize the significance of provincial Boulangism.

Samuel Goodfellow:

The fascist movements do not conform to a single template. There is no holy grail out there which will define fascism, largely because the movement itself does not have a root text, draws from too many sources, and has difficulty transcending the local and national for the universal. At best we can use fascism as a flexible heuristic rapier, rather than a dogmatic bludgeon, with which to attack aspects of the past. The idea of a continuum, or as Paxton calls it, a set of stages, addresses both the issue of diversity and commonality. In any event, it is an advance over the idea of a generic fascism, a fascist minimum, or a universal fascism.

Steven Zdatny :

Professor Paxton wishes that this forum had included an Italian and German historian, to give it a variety of perspectives. He is correct, of course, that the four of us work in closely related fields and that his book and our comments take up only a few of the questions raised by the Dorgeres movement.

Let me therefore suggest another perspective which would place Dorgeres in the historiography, not of fascism, but of rural protest. It is hard, in the marketplace harangues of the Green shirts, not to hear the echoes of jacqueries, ancient and modern. Paxton tells us, after all, that Dorgeres found his entree into peasant politics in the issues of taxes and social payments--just like Pierre Poujade, who burst onto the French political scene in 1953, leading a violent anti-tax action in his hometown of Saint-Cere. "Vive le roi sans taille" had been the slogan which captured the naive program of seventeenth-century peasant rebellions, all directed, as Robin Briggs notes, "against the rising burden of royal taxation"(Briggs, Early Modern France, 1560-1715 [Oxford, 1977], p. 117). It would have been interesting to have the comments of Briggs, or P. M. Jones or Yves- Marie Berce on the Dorgerists.

The seemingly timeless struggle of peasants against more powerful interests also poses a general question: what sorts of politics are available to those who find themselves on the wrong side of dominant historical forces? This was an especially sharp problem for small producers in the twentieth century--artisans and boutiquiers, alongside peasants--whose interests often ran directly opposed to those, not only of les gros, but also of workers, consumers, urbanites. Paxton notes, for example, that Dorgeres was a "fervent corporatist" (p. 127). Corporatism, simply put, was an attempt to find some way around the Darwinian logic of market capitalism without surrendering to the logic of socialism. It became, in one form or another, one of the most popular economic nostrums of the first half of this century and a basic economic principle of most fascisms. Indeed, for many of those who were neither thugs nor anti-communist fanatics, corporatist ideas paved the road to fascism. Corporatist intellectuals could come by way of grand theory; petits proprietaires by way of "economic despair".(I borrow the phrase from Robert Gellately, The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, 1890-1914 [London, 1974]).

As liberal, democratic, capitalist societies seized up in the 1930s, corporatist programs multiplied and became more popular than ever. Invariably they proclaimed their political neutrality and held out the promise of an economic system without class struggle. Not all Corporatisms, it must be said, were conservative in inspiration. The Belgian socialist Henri de Man sought to make corporatism the basis of a more equitable society. In France, the National Economic Council, a broadly corporatist institution, was largely the work of the French left.

In general, however, and Dorgerisme is a good example of this, corporatism's conceptual flaws usually pulled it towards authoritarianism in practice. Politics without class struggle in a society with classes? A relatively free economic system where weaker interests prevail? Rubbish! Neither of these promises, which were the essence of corporatism's appeal, were compatible with the maintenance of open, democratic politics. Thus any attempt to build corporatism inevitably involved lies and repression, as Vichy's National Revolution proved. In the Dorgeres movement, the history of jacqueries joined the history of fascism in the defense of a lost cause.

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