Red and brown

Tory blogger Matthew Turner observes:

I've not seen much on the blogosphere about the death of French politician Pierre Poujade.

He enterprisingly demonstrates his point by writing nothing else on the subject while linking to The Guardian's obituary. Still, I have something to say about Poujade, the populist, antisemitic demagogue who came to prominence in the French Fourth Republic, and whose movement launched Jean-Marie Le Pen's infamous political career.

The Guardian's obituarist, Douglas Johnson, states, of Poujade's pre-war affiliations:

[H]is political sympathies lay with the extreme right, and he was a follower of the proto-fascist Jacques Doriot.

This is true as far it goes, but - presumably mindful of Guardian readers' sensibilities - Johnson is careful to say nothing else about Poujade's intellectual mentor. Jacques Doriot was in fact a senior figure in the French Communist Party. Having split with the CP (ostensibly, and ironically, because he favoured a 'popular front' with social democrats against fascism) he founded the Parti Populaire Francais, an explicitly pro-Nazi and antisemitic organisation. The PPF claimed a membership of half a million; this was an absurd exaggeration, but the party certainly enjoyed the support of John Amery, the most notorious British traitor after William Joyce ('Lord Haw-Haw'), and who was a noted propagandist for Doriot's programme of the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. (Both Amery and Joyce were hanged after the war for treachery, though it has to be said neither sentence ought to have been carried out - Amery was mentally unbalanced, and Joyce, it turned out, held American rather than British citizenship.)

The PPF was by no means the only pro-Nazi organisation of the revolutionary Left in pre-war France; the Mouvement National Revolutionnaire of Jean Rous provided a distinctive Trotskyite variant. And in Germany, Communist collaboration with Nazism long-predated the Hitler-Stalin pact, going back as far as the Prussian referendum in 1931 and the transport workers' strike in 1932.

It's worth recalling this history because some people still believe that the Nazi-Soviet pact was a historical idiosyncrasy rather than a meeting of minds, and that apart from that episode the revolutionary Left provided heroic resistance to fascism. Such romantic notions are, to say the least, not supported by the historical evidence.

Comments

[James Hamilton]

Matthew Turner did indeed announce recently that he'd joined the Conservative Party. However, I suspect that this had more to do with a jokey interplay between his blog and Peter Cuthbertson's than any real membership being taken out, and Matthew may prefer it to be seen that way. But I could be wrong, and he'll be along in a moment to confirm or deny anyway.

[Francois Brutsch]

You may add green, if a profile of Poujade published 3 years ago in the Spectator (link in my blog) is to be believed: his latest venture was "green petrol".

[Matthew]

Oliver,

That was very interesting. Thanks. I didn't add anything in my post as I couldn't really remember much about him other than what was in the obituary.

James,

Sorry I was late in arriving!

I am in fact a Tory blogger, as my membership came through the week before last -- A72141 is my number. I do consider myself the most left-wing member of the Tory party, but there's nothing I have done which breaches membership rules. But in many ways the Tory party is the best place for me -- free at the point of delivery higher education, more liberal policing and judicial policies, growing scepticism over the government's Iraq policy, etc etc.