Cagoule

La Cagoule (French "the hood", "the mask") is the nickname given by the press to the French secret society Organization secrète d'action révolutionnaire nationale (OSARN, as the group was called by its founders, shortly afterwards only OSAR) , later renamed Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire (CSAR), a right-wing extremist group that was active between 1935 and 1937 and whose main leader was Eugène Deloncle .

The journalist Maurice Pujo of the Action Française used the term in his magazine with condescension and contempt for the group. Pujo, next to Charles Maurras, the most famous employee of the Action Française , could not have foreseen at this time that his royalist organization would one day be associated with this right-wing extremist and openly terrorist organization.

history

When the members of the Action Française learned of the existence of the Cagoule , the great majority of their leaders switched to the new organization out of disappointment at the lack of terrorist (so-called "direct") actions. Among them were:

• Eugène Deloncle, engineer
• Aristide Corre , writer
• Joseph Pozzo di Borgo , Corsican nobleman
• Henri Martin, doctor
• Jean Filliol , called "the killer"
• Eugène Schueller , founder of L'Oréal , some of the first meetings of the cagoule took place at L'Oréal headquarters and some of the cagoulards were later employed as directors of L'Oréal
• André Bettencourt , President of L'Oréal and husband of Schueller's daughter, Liliane Bettencourt
• Jacques Corrèze , President of L'Oréal USA, Inc.

Unless they were forced to meet at the Action Française , they shared the violent vision of the Parisian royalists: Charles Maurras was a great defender of the Camelots du roi , those young armed royalists who had previously fought with their communist opponents. But some members of the Action Française were tired of the wait-and-see attitude of Pujo and Maurras and saw the time for action had come. In January 1935, Deloncle resigned and in 1936 founded the secret organization la Cagoule in absolute secrecy .

Since 1935 this group carried out actions to destabilize the Third Republic (attack on the Italian anti-fascists, the Rosselli brothers on June 9, 1937). At the same time, they tried to infiltrate the army, primarily to get weapons, and planned to put a coup against the Popular Front government .

After the failure of a coup on the night of November 15-16, 1937, the plot was exposed. By the end of the month, the group was fully exposed by the French Interior Ministry, led by Interior Minister Marx Dormoy . Arms caches have been dug across the country. In 1938 more than 120 members of the Cagoule were arrested. Nevertheless, after the occupation of France, on the night of July 26, 1941, former members of the group succeeded in murdering Dormoy in his hotel room in Montélimar .

Post-history

Some members later joined the Vichy regime :

• Schueller and Deloncle founded the Mouvement social révolutionnaire (MSR), which carried out countless actions in occupied France, including bombings on seven synagogues in Paris in October 1941
• Joseph Darnand , who founded the Légion française des combattants , the war veterans' legion, from which he later formed the Milice française , became Obersturmbannführer of the SS and State Secretary for Security and Public Order of the Vichy regime
• Jean Védrine , who became the head of the private secretariat of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and recipient of the Orden la francisque , in 1943 and was a close confidante of François Mitterrand in the post-war years
• Gabriel Jeantet , editor of the Revue de l'État of the Vichy regime
• Simon Arbellot

Others joined the Resistance , such as:

• François Mitterrand (who worked temporarily as a young civil servant for the Vichy regime, but at the same time was active in the resistance and provided information to Great Britain).

literature

About the connections between la Cagoule and L'Oréal:

• Michael Bar-Zohar: Bitter Scent: The Case of L'Oréal, Nazis, and the Arab Boycott. Dutton Books, London 1996, p. 264.
• Michel Ferracci-Porri: Beaux Ténèbres. Normant 2008.

About a murder attributed to Cagoule:

• Gayle K. Brunelle / Annette Finley-Croswhite: Murder in the métro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France. Baton Rouge 2010.

Web links

Commons : Cagoule  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography Marx Dormoy and details of la Cagoule (English)
• François Mitterrand and La Cagoule ( Memento of July 10, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) (French)