François de La Rocque

François de La Rocque, 1936

François de La Rocque (born October 6, 1885 in Lorient , Morbihan department , † April 28, 1946 in Paris ) was a French soldier and nationalist politician. 1930-1936 he was the leader of the right-wing veterans' organization Croix de Feu , which he converted in 1936 into the more moderate Parti social français , which became a right-wing mass party and can be seen as a forerunner of Gaullism .

Origin and early years of life

La Rocque was born in the Breton port city of Lorient in Brittany, the son of General Raymond de La Rocque and Anne Sollier. His father Raymond, who originally came from Auvergne, served as artillery commander in the naval base.

La Rocque joined the Saint-Cyr Military Academy in 1905 and graduated from there in 1907 as part of the Promotion la Dernière du Vieux Bahut class . He was transferred to Algeria on the edge of the Sahara and in 1912 to Lunéville . In 1913 he was posted to Morocco by General Lyautey and remained there until 1916 as an officer for questions indigènes, despite the outbreak of the First World War . Although his older brother Raymond had died in 1915, he volunteered on the Western Front and fought in the trenches on the Somme in 1916 .

After the war he was assigned to General Foch's staff and went to Poland in 1921 with General Weygand's military mission . In 1925 he served in Marshal Pétain's campaign in the Rif War against the uprising of Abd el-Krim . In 1927 he retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel .

Croix de Feu and the crisis of February 6, 1934

La Rocque was influenced by a patriotic and social Catholicism , as it was at the end of the 19th century a. a. was represented by Félicité de Lamennais . In 1929, two years after it was founded, he joined the Croix de Feu ("Cross of Fire"), an association of veterans of the First World War, and in 1930 he became its chairman. He rebuilt the organization of the association in a short time, created a paramilitary organization ( les dispos , short for les disponibles , the "ready for action ") and founded a youth organization ( les fils et filles de Croix de Feu ), in addition, the Volontaires nationaux as Apron organization established. Croix de Feu thus became a powerful and influential political actor. Due to the economic crisis , he drafted a protectionist economic program alongside the nationalist ideology, which was primarily directed against the war opponent Germany . This saw u. a. the protection of the French economy against foreign competition, protection of French workers against competition from immigrants, lower taxes, the fight against speculation and a reduced influence of the state on the economy. The program was deliberately kept vague and La Rocque resisted a clearly anti-republican and fascist orientation, as demanded by some members.

Focused on organizing military parades, La Rocque took great pride in the fact that on the eve of February 6, 1934, the Ministry of the Interior was occupied by two units from the Croix de Feu. On that day there was a demonstration in Paris by numerous right-wing groups against the government of Édouard Daladier , which escalated violently and was classified by the left as a fascist coup attempt. Croix de Feu took part in this parade with two delegations, but La Rocque ordered the demonstration to be broken up when the other groups on the Place de la Concorde in front of the Palais Bourbon , the Ministry of the Interior, became violent. That is why other representatives of the extreme right accused him of not being consistent enough and of failing to overthrow the Republican government.

The Parti Social Français and the occupation period

In 1936, like all other veterans' associations , Croix de Feu was dissolved by the left-wing Popular Front government and La Rocque founded the Parti social français , which lasted until 1940. The PSF took a more moderate position until 1940 and tried to move closer to the bourgeois right-wing parties such as the Indépendants radicaux . It was nationalist and anti-parliamentary, but not openly fascist. Among other things, she called for a strong presidential government to overcome the supposed weakness of the parliamentary system, an economic system based on "organized professional groups" ( corporatism or corporate state ) and state social legislation based on Catholic social teaching. In this way it became the first mass right-wing movement in France (around 600,000 members in 1936, 800,000 in 1940) and its breakthrough was expected in the 1940 parliamentary elections.

After France's military defeat by the German Wehrmacht , La Rocque accepted the terms of the armistice of June 1940 "without restrictions" and reorganized the PSF as Progrès Social Français . La Rocque also accepted the “principles of collaboration ” that Pétain presented in December 1940. La Rocque's stance on the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime remained ambiguous. On the other hand, he expressed himself anti-Semitic, among other things, he supported in the article La question juive en métropole et en Afrique du Nord ("The Jewish question in the motherland and in North Africa") in the Le Petit Journal of October 5, 1940, the withdrawal of French citizenship for the Sephardic Jews of North Africa , who owned them since the Décret Crémieux of 1870. However, he rejected the tightening of the racial laws; Radicals even accused him of having founded his newspaper with the help of funds from a “Jewish consortium”.

His basic attitude to the collaboration changed in September 1942 when he declared that the collaboration was "incompatible with the occupation" and came into contact with the Réseau Alibi , which had ties to British intelligence. With that he approached the Resistance and founded the resistance network Réseau Klan . La Rocque rejected the laws on the Service du travail obligatoire , which forced young French people to do labor service in the German Reich and forbade PSF members from membership in the LVF or in the Milice française .

On March 9, 1943, he was arrested in Clermont-Ferrand by units of the security police; At the same time, 152 PSF members were arrested in Paris. He was first brought to Eisenberg and then to Itter Castle , where he a. a. was held prisoner together with the former Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and Generals Maurice Gamelin and Maxime Weygand. Due to illness, he was taken to a hospital in Innsbruck and liberated by US soldiers on May 8, 1945. He returned to France and was briefly detained to keep him away from political activities, especially the negotiations of the Conseil national de la Resistance . After his release he was placed under house arrest and died on April 28, 1946.

While he is seen today by some as a representative of French fascism, others see him as a pioneer of the major post-war parties of the "republican right" such as the Christian Democratic Mouvement républicain populaire or Gaullism.

Web links

• Newspaper article about François de La Rocque in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .