Parti populaire français
The Parti populaire français ( French People's Party ) was a fascist party in the Third French Republic . The anti-Semitic organization existed from 1936 to 1945 and was best known for its collaboration with the National Socialists during the occupation.
history
In 1936 Jacques Doriot , a former executive member of the Parti communiste français and until 1934 mayor of Saint-Denis , founded the Parti populaire français . He wanted to oppose the Communist Party , which in his opinion was controlled by the Soviet Union , with a new nationalist and populist force, which from the beginning also had a strongly anti-Semitic orientation. The anti-communist PPF was funded by large corporations , but its membership structure was primarily a working class party . Despite anti-capitalist rhetoric , the PPF was more geared towards moderate corporatism in economic policy .
Although the Parti populaire français did not call itself decidedly “fascist”, it increasingly adopted fascist symbolism and self-expression at its events . The creation of a “new man” and a “new Europe” were propagated without, however, aiming at a military expansion of France . Doriot wanted to gain leadership over a broad national popular movement through the PPF, but this was an illusion.
After the German invasion of France in 1940, the PPF approached ideologically strongly to the Nazism of. Doriot's party became the most important collaborator in occupied France, supported the deportation of French Jews and put together a volunteer association for the German war in the east . From 1942 representatives of the PPF took over the civil government in occupied Tunisia . After the liberation of France by the Western Allies , Jacques Doriot and some of his supporters settled in Sigmaringen , Germany, where, with the support of the SS , they founded a “French Liberation Committee” in January 1945 to prepare for a guerrilla war in liberated France. Doriot's death in an Allied air raid on February 22, 1945 also marked the end of the PPF.
literature
- Stanley Payne: History of Fascism. The rise and fall of a European movement. From the American by Ewald Gramlich. Propylaea, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-549-07148-5 .
