Jacques Doriot

Jacques Doriot as a member of the Seine department (1929)

Jacques Doriot (born September 26, 1898 in Bresles , † February 22, 1945 between Mainau and Sigmaringen ) was a French politician before and during the Second World War . He started out politically as a communist , but later turned to the French fascists who supported the Vichy regime .

Life

Early life

Doriot moved to Saint-Denis near Paris at a young age and became a worker. In 1916, in the middle of the First World War , he became a staunch socialist , but his political engagement was interrupted when he was drafted into the army in 1917. In 1918 he was taken prisoner by Germany . For his military service, he received the Croix de guerre .

After the end of his captivity, he returned to France and joined the Parti communiste français (PCF) in 1920 , where he experienced a rapid rise and within a few years became one of the leading members. In 1922 he became a member of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and a year later General Secretary of the youth organization of his party. In 1923 he was arrested for participating in violent demonstrations against the French occupation of the Ruhr . He was released a year later, after which he was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies of the Third Republic in the constituency of Saint-Denis .

fascism

In 1931 Doriot was elected mayor of Saint-Denis. Around this time he began to advocate a Popular Front alliance between the communists and other French socialist parties, with which he sympathized for a number of reasons. Although this later became official Communist party policy, it was viewed as a deviation at the time and Doriot was expelled from the Communist Party in 1934. Doriot, who still held his parliamentary mandate, then founded the right-wing extremist Parti populaire français (PPF) in 1936 . Doriot and his followers became vocal advocates for a France that was to be organized according to the fascist-Italian and Nazi- German models. As a staunch fascist, he became an anti-communist demagogue and bitter opponent of Prime Minister Léon Blum's Popular Front . In pre-war France, the PPF had around 200,000 followers. Doriot and the founder of the Rassemblement national populaire (RNP, National Association of the People ), Marcel Déat , unanimously called for a strong, autonomous executive because they saw it as the most effective strategy to weaken the parliamentarism they hated . Here, however, their similarities ended because Déat raved about an authoritarian republican regime, while Doriot rejected the republican organizational forms and principles in principle and despised Déat as an opportunist . He supported the appeasement policy of the Munich Agreement and spoke out against the confrontation with the Third Reich because he saw in French democracy the more backward political system compared to that of the two neighboring states Germany and Italy, where strong nationalism prevailed and the national community was emphasized.

Dissatisfied with his French activities, Doriot went to Spain and became a supporter of Francisco Franco's insurgent troops in the Spanish Civil War . During his stay in Spain he met the British fascist John Amery and both traveled to fascist countries in Europe: Italy , Germany and Austria .

collaboration

When France declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939, Doriot became a staunch supporter of the Germans and the German occupation of France from 1940. For a short time he moved to the unoccupied southern zone, but found the PPF because the interior minister of the Vichy regime, Pierre Pucheu condemned to inaction that the unoccupied part of France was nowhere near as fascist as he had hoped. The German hatred was among the supporters of Action Française and Charles Maurras still widespread in the South Zone. Doriot returned to occupied Paris , where he carried out pro-German and anti-communist propaganda on Radio Paris. Doriot also directed the weekly Le Cri du Peuple ( The People's Scream ), financed by Germans, Italians and the Vichy regime , which appeared for the first time on October 19, 1940 and for well-known collaborators such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle , Ramon Fernandez and Alain Laubreaux and Robert Brasillach wrote.

Many former communist agitators worked for the PPF who were well trained in propaganda and subversion , it had a complex internal structure and Doriot, as a charismatic speaker, was superior to the intellectual Déat. First, Doriot founded the Rassemblement pour la Révolution National (RRN; collection for the national revolution ). With the support of the German occupiers, he hoped to be able to create a fascist unity with this collaboration party , which would turn the Vichy regime into a one-party state . But with the appointment of the former socialist Otto Abetz as German ambassador to France, who preferred more traditional political types such as Pierre Laval and Déat and distrusted Doriot's "excessive" theses, his ambitions were completely destroyed. What the German occupation authorities had in common was that they did not think of promoting Pétain's goal of a unified France, but did their best to prevent him from building a one-party state based on the German or Italian model, but rather to promote the political, religious, regional and other internal French contradictions so that France can be more easily monitored and exploited.

In addition, the German occupation authorities were by no means unanimous, as they had three interfaces to the French collaborators: the military commander for occupied France (MBF), the almost 1,000-strong staff of Wehrmacht personnel and civilian experts in uniform Paris Hotel Majestic resided, subordinated to the commander-in-chief of the army, who was responsible for military, but also for economic and, for a long time, for security issues. Mainly political issues were dealt with by Ambassador Otto Abetz , who was subordinate to the German Foreign Office and thus to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop . In addition to bureaucrats and lawyers of all levels, the embassy also increasingly included scientists, especially Romanists, who figured out their intended careers in the fascist whole of Europe ( SS-Europe ). The third sphere of influence on the German side consisted of the security police ( Gestapo , Jewish and Resistance hunters) and the security service (SD), who, together with the SS, were subordinate to Heinrich Himmler . There was a certain rivalry between all three German spheres of power, in particular between the embassy and the SS, which was promoted by a lack of delimitation of the precise responsibilities. Abetz and the embassy favored Laval and Déat, while the SS sponsored Doriot. So it was no wonder that the PPF only achieved an authorized status in the northern zone from October 1941 , which the RNP had already achieved in February 1941.

Through the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , the PPF was only able to fully develop its support for collaboration in the sense of a crusade against communism after the start of the German war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, when the communists joined the Resistance . Together with the collaborators Déat and Eugène Deloncle , Doriot founded the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme (LVF, French Volunteer Legion against Bolshevism), in which French volunteers in Wehrmacht uniforms took part in the fight against the Soviet Union. With the LVF, Doriot actively participated in the struggle on the Eastern Front at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 ( Operation Barbarossa ). When the LVF was dissolved, Doriot continued to fight in the Wehrmacht until August 1944 and was awarded the Iron Cross in 1943.

When Déats, a comparatively small RNP with around 20,000 followers, was only supported with financial means after Laval's return, without receiving the government participation he had hoped for, he tried to establish the Front Révolutionnaire national (FRN) again, ignoring the actual balance of power To form a unity party with the involvement of Doriot's PPF in order to be able to jointly exert pressure on the Vichy regime. Doriot's PPF, however, systematically attempted to establish the unity of all collaborators at the base , ostensibly to prepare the possible invasion of France for Allied troops. In order to prevent infiltration by German or Vichy-French agencies, the local units of the PPF were redesigned in groups of four based on the model of communist cells with a fifth member as the section's commander. When the Allies landed in Tunisia ( Operation Torch ) in November 1942, the PPF sections briefly played a decisive role in the opposition to the landing. Since then, Doriot's PPF has only served the occupiers as a permanent threat to Laval in order to make the prime minister submissive.

In December 1943 Doriot traveled to Sigmaringen , where he became a member of the Vichy regime that had fled here. After the Allies had successfully landed in Normandy , Doriot and Déat held another large demonstration in Paris in July 1944, during which they reaffirmed their plan de redressement (= redevelopment plan). On September 1, 1944, Hitler mentioned his intention to make Doriot leader of the French government-in-exile , while Darnand and Déat were continually plotting against each other in Sigmaringen. During a trip from Mainau to Sigmaringen in February 1945, he was killed when his car was shot at by an Allied low-flying aircraft. He was buried en masse.

The leaders of the collaboration were executed or sentenced to long prison terms. Déat was able to hide with his wife in a French-run Catholic monastery near Turin until his natural death in 1955.

literature

• Dieter Wolf: The Doriot Movement. A contribution to the history of French fascism (sources and representations on contemporary history; 15). German publishing house DVA, Stuttgart 1967
• Jean-Paul Brunet: Jacques Doriot. You communisme au fascisme . Balland, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-7158-0561-6 .
• Philippe Burrin: La derive fasciste. Doriot, Deat, Bergery. 1933-1945 . Edition du Seuil, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-02-058923-0 (reprint of the Paris 1986 edition).
• Robert Soucy: French Fascism. The Second Wave; 1933-1939 . Yale University Press , New Haven, Conn. 2009, ISBN 0-300-07043-8 .

Web links

• Paradoxical Biographies - Confused Political Shifts in France in the 1930s by Alexander Emanuely , Context XXI, 7/2002
• Newspaper article about Jacques Doriot in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Julian Jackson: The Popular Front in France. Defending Democracy, 1934-38 , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. a. 1988, p. 29, ISBN 0-521-32088-7 .
2. ↑ Arnulf Moser: From the Organization Todt to the French government in exile . In: Wochenblatt. The local weekly newspaper for Singen, Randolfszell, Stockack and the surrounding area . 1999.