Review: The Extreme Right in France: From Petain to Le Pen

Roger Griffin's review of:

The Extreme Right in France: From Petain to Le Pen. By James Shields. London, Routledge, 2007. xx + 412 pp. Pb £21.99.

Now in its thirty-sixth year on the French political scene, the National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen has become probably the best documented form of post-war right-wing radicalism in the world. It is thus all the more remarkable that, against all the odds, James Shields has managed to produce a truly original, scholarly and valuable book on the subject which significantly enriches French Studies. It is not just that he organizes the fruits of meticulous research into the vast panoply of the far-right in France over some seventy years with narrative and stylistic clarity, reconstructing the various itineraries with considerable tenacity in the process. He also supplies Anglophone students of France with a truly historical understanding of the Le Pen phenomenon that is denied to conventional political scientists and contemporary historians. Shields has a thesis which he resolutely works through with impressive scholarship, namely that Lepenism cannot be understood without a deep familiarity with the Vichy collaborationist government and its legacy, the significance of Poujadism as a manifestation of populist disillusion with the Fourth Republic, and the bitter reaction of the far-right to the nation’s defeat in the Algerian war. An equally important factor was the disillusionment experienced by many unrepentant fascists whose mindset was forged in the 1950s and 40s in the face of the general consensus for liberal Republicanism in the 1950s and the rise of a powerful youth movement of left-wing radicalism in the 1960s. Some fascists went underground to form shadowy avant-garde groupuscules with national and pan-European linkages, and others abandoned activism altogether to concentrate on the battle for establishing the cultural hegemony of right-wing ideas of pan-European cultural renaissance. However the founding fascist fathers of the FN deliberately set out to create a new form of parliamentary politics which would disseminate radical right ideas in a non-revolutionary, euphemized and electable format. Shields’s complex and fascinating story is mercifully unencumbered by lengthy excursi on the definitional issues raised by his topic. It nevertheless offers lucid, well-informed judgements on the thorny taxonomic problems posed by the various phenomena under discussion which eschew the simplifications of left and right, and demonstrates how well he understands not just European fascism but its remarkably extended family of anti-liberal siblings that thrived throughout twentieth century France. Perhaps an introductory chapter on the far-right in France before Vichy, and a concluding chapter to spell out the radical implications of his history for evaluating its contemporary importance would have made the book more complete. However, they would also have made it alarmingly long for his publishers if not for his readers. As it stands, it still manages to be simultaneously a history textbook and a perceptive interpretation of the Le Pen phenomenon which deserves a wide readership by students and researchers in this area. It would not do some FN voters any harm to read a reconstruction of their movement which exposes in such irrefutable detail its fascist roots and subtext, even if Shields is on the ‘wrong’ side of the ‘English’ Channel. In fact, it is a book not just begging for importation into France, but translation into French.

Roger Griffin
Oxford Brookes University Read more...

Chapter: I am no longer human. I am a Titan. A god!

The first chapter of Roger Griffin's The Fascist Century is available online:

'"I am no longer human. I am a Titan. A god!": The Fascist Quest to Regenerate Time: Modernity under the New Order: The Fascist Project for Managing the Future' (pp. 3-23).

This chapter is based on the written-up version of a talk given in November 1998 at the Institute of Historical Research as part of the seminar series Modern Italian History: 19th and 20th Centuries organized by Carl Levy. Read more...

Chapter: The Evolutions and Convolutions of Political Religion

Roger Griffin's 'Introduction' to The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Professor Stanley G. Payne is available online:

'Introduction: The Evolutions and Convolutions of Political Religion' (pp. 1-18). Read more...

Conference paper: A New "New Consensus" on the Definition of Fascism

The paper presented by Roger Griffin at the conference "Europe's Radical Right and World War II" on 10 July 2009:

A new "new consensus" on the definition of fascism? or is the new consensus getting "old" and are we witnessing "a new wave" in the comparative study of extremism? (PDF)

For more info on the conference, check the web-site of Alfred Krupp Science College. Read more...

Conference paper: Lingua Quarti Imperii

Roger Griffin's paper '"Lingua Quarti Imperii": The Euphemistic Tradition of the Extreme Right', presented at the International Symposium on the Language of Far-right Movements "Speaking with Forked Tongues: The Rhetoric of Right-Wing Extremism Today".

Click here to view or download the paper in PDF.

For more info on the Symposium, check the blog "Speaking With Forked Tongues". Read more...

Symposium: Speaking with Forked Tongues

School of Social Sciences (the University of Northampton) presents:

A one-day International Symposium on the Language of Far-right Movements "Speaking with Forked Tongues: The Rhetoric of Right-Wing Extremism Today" that will be held at the University of Northampton, Park Campus (Northampton, UK) on 26 June 2009.

Keynote Speakers: Professor Roger Griffin, Professor Janet Wilson, Mr. Michael Ellis.

From Holocaust "revisionism" in places like Central Europe to "white nationalist" parties in Britain and France to veiled anti-Semitic conspiricism by the American ideologue, Lyndon LaRouche, the recourse to language as a political veil, rather than a transparent means of communication, has been a key feature of radical right-wing movements since 1945. This daylong event promises to uncover salient techniques and relevant practices employed in far-right rhetoric, for the benefit of contemporary researchers, policy-makers and the wider public.

Registration and lunch £25 (£10 unwaged).

For further information, or to register, please contact the organizers:

Dr. Matthew Feldman (matthew.feldman@northampton.ac.uk) and Dr. Paul Jackson (paul.jackson@northampton.ac.uk). Read more...

Article: Modernity, modernism, and fascism. A "mazeway resynthesis"

'Modernity, modernism, and fascism. A "mazeway resynthesis"', published in Modernism/Modernity 15/1 (2007), available online: HTML | PDF. Read more...

Conference: Europe's Radical Right and World War II

Roger Griffin will participate in the conference "Europe's Radical Right and World War II" (original title - Europas radikale Rechte und der Zweite Weltkrieg) to take place on 8-10 July 2009 at Alfred Krupp Science College (Greifswald, Germany).

Academic convenors:
Claudia Globisch (Leipzig), Dr. Agnieszka Pufelska (Berlin), Volker Weiß (Hamburg) .

Other participants:
Zeev Sternhell (Jerusalem), Andreas Umland (Eichstätt), Wolfgang Wippermann (Berlin), Michael Minkenberg (New York), and others.

For more information:
tagungsbuero@wiko-greifswald.de Read more...

Introduction

Roger Griffin is Professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, England. His recent efforts have focused on a definition and examination of fascism.

Griffin's theory of fascism, first elaborated in The Nature of Fascism (Palgrave MacMillan, 1991), suggests that a heuristically useful ideal type of its definitional core is that it is a palingenetic and populist form of ultranationalism. In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the nation from its present decadence, whether the nation is conceived as a historically formed nation-state or a racially determined 'ethnos'. Conceived in these terms, fascism is an ideology that has assumed a large number of specific national permutations and several distinct organizational forms. Moreover, it is a political project that continues to evolve to this day throughout the Europeanized world, though it remains highly marginalized compared with the central place it occupied in inter-war Europe.

This approach became the basis of Fascism (Oxford University Press, 1995), a documentary reader of primary sources relating to fascism; International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (Hodder Arnold, 1998), a secondary source documentary reader; and the 5 volumes of secondary sources of Fascism (Routledge, 2003), which Griffin edited with Matthew Feldman and which were published in Routledge's acclaimed series 'Critical Concepts in Political Science'. This is the largest collection of secondary sources in fascism so far published in any language in a single edition.

Griffin's approach has had an enduring impact on the comparative fascist literature of the last 18 years, and builds on the work of George Mosse, Stanley G. Payne, and Emilio Gentile in highlighting the revolutionary and totalizing politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution (in marked contrast with Marxist approaches). His latest book, Modernism and Fascism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), locates the mainspring of the fascist drive for national rebirth in the modernist bid to achieve an alternative modernity, which is driven by a rejection of the decadence of 'actually existing modernity' under liberal democracy or tradition. The fascist attempt to institute a different civilization and a new temporality in the West found its most comprehensive expression in the 'modernist states' of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which also revealed the destructive and self-destructive nature of all fascist political projects to 'regenerate' the nation or achieving cultural renewal.

His latest book, A Fascist Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), edited by Matthew Feldman, contains 10 essays on the evolution of fascism since 1919, covering a range of key case-studies and historiographical themes. The book also includes contextual preface by Stanley G. Payne, introduction by Matthew Feldman and concluding interview with the author.

Together with Matthew Feldman (University of Northampton), Paul Jackson (Oxford Brookes University), and Tudor Georgescu (Oxford Brookes University) Griffin has created a Political Religions section of the Blackwell-Wiley on-line journal Religion Compass which they are determined to turn into a significant site for the dissemination of accurate and stimulating articles on political religion written by scholars from every corner of the international community and accessible throughut the world.

Roger Griffin has been Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2003. Read more...