Georges Valois

Georges Valois (1925)

Georges Valois (born October 7, 1878 in Paris as Alfred-Georges Gressent , † February 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp ) was a French journalist and politician .

life and career

He went to Singapore at the age of 17 and returned to Paris in 1898 . In his younger years he was an anarcho-syndicalist . He found work as secretary of the newspaper L'Humanité Nouvelle , where he met Georges Sorel . After a stay in Tsarist Russia in 1903, he worked as a secretary at the Armand Colin publishing house .

Valois met the French monarchist and nationalist Charles Maurras and became a member of Action française , in whose program he tried to anchor the problems of the working class. Since his employment was in jeopardy if his relationship with political extremism became known, he began using his pseudonym . In 1911 he founded the Cercle Proudhon with Edouard Berth , a group that sought a convergence of syndicalists and nationalists, but was unsuccessful. The Cercle mixed Sorel's syndical revolutionary ideas with the integrism of Charles Maurras, which was centered around anti-Semitism . The historian Zeev Sternhell counts this policy as the prototype of Italian fascism . A year later he took a course for the publishing house Nouvelle librairie nationale der Action française, a post that he would hold until 1925.

In 1925 he founded the first openly fascist party outside Italy, the Faisceau , for which he was able to win two large entrepreneurs as donors who hoped that fascism would effectively fight the Parti communiste français (PCF, French Communist Party): the perfume manufacturer François Coty and the Cognac producer Jean Hennessy . After certain initial successes, which consisted in the accession of right-wing extremists such as Hubert Lagardelle and Marcel Bucard , it disappeared again in 1928, when Valois himself had already been expelled from the party. The party failed to win over the middle class for fascist ideas, which had to do with the position of the Roman Catholic Church , which in 1926 put parts of Maurras' works on the index of the Holy Office and excommunicated the members of the Action française . As a result, part of the group decided to infiltrate the republican institutions , while the more militant part later came together in the terrorist Cagoule .

After losing financial support and the Faisceau was dissolved in 1928, he founded the Parti républicain syndicaliste (PRS, republican trade union party). After the crisis of February 6, 1934 (when riots broke out in front of the Palais Bourbon in protest against the Stavisky affair and probably planned as a coup on the model of Mussolini's march on Rome ), Valois founded the left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Age , the circulated in non-conformist circles in the 1930s . Both his party and his magazine unquestionably identified themselves as corporatist , and fascist roots followed. In 1935, despite the support of Marceau Pivert , Valois tried unsuccessfully to join the SFIO .

During the German occupation in World War II , he joined the Resistance and was arrested by the German occupiers. He died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945 .

Works

• Basile ou la politique de la calomnie (= Basile or the politics of defamation), 1927
• L'Homme contre l'argent (= man for money), 1928
• Un Nouvel âge de l'humanité (= a new age of humanity), 1929
• Finances Italiennes (= Italian finances), 1930
• Économique (= economy), 1931
• Guerre ou révolution (= war or revolution), 1931
• Journée d'Europe (= European diary), 1932
• 1917–1941: fin du bolchevisme, conséquences européennes de l'événement (= end of Bolshevism, European consequences of the event), 1941
• L'Homme devant l'éternel (= man before eternity; published after death), 1947

literature

• Walter Benjamin : For the dictatorship. Interview with Georges Valois. In: Gesammelte Schriften IV / 1,2, pp. 487–492

Web links

Commons : Georges Valois  - Collection of images, videos and audio files