The Dark Side of France: A History of the French Far Right from the 1890s to the Present

This extraordinary history of the French far right, from its modern origins in the 1890s to its ebb and flow throughout the twentieth century, could not come at a timelier junction in European politics, when the hard right once again threatens to topple the pillars of democracy that have governed France since the end of World War II.

In thirteen dramatic chapters, beginning with Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s framing by corrupt senior army officers and conviction in a miliary court in 1894 and concluding 130 years later with the rise of Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement national, journalist Enda O’Doherty brings characteristic insight to many of the most notorious events that comprise this fascinating but disturbing narrative.

Post-Revolutionary France attracted political as well as artistic exiles—drawn to its principles of liberty and equality—who made the City of Light a beacon of international culture. But darker currents also emerged from the Revolution in the form of right-wing or counterrevolutionary forces, which despised democracy and sought to install new forms of monarchist or authoritarian power. These groups often embraced anti-Semitic or anti-Socialist themes in order to attract a wide following, resulting in episodes that form the core of The Dark Side of France—be it the 1914 assassination of socialist leader Jean Jaurès by a right-wing fanatic or the repeated attacks in 1936 on Jewish Popular Front leader and then–Prime Minister Léon Blum, who would later end up in Buchenwald. Popular support for the far right would reach its high point in the late 1930s with the Parti social français of Colonel François de La Rocque, before France succumbed to the Nazi invasion and rule by the collaborationist Vichy regime of Philippe Pétain.

Despite the ignominious collapse of Vichy and the execution of the traitor Robert Brasillach following the war, the far right remained unvanquished, as demonstrated by OAS terrorist resistance to Algerian independence and the many assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle. The political inheritors of wartime collaboration and the OAS are alive and well in today’s far-right movements—Islamophobic portrayals of “parasitical” Muslims in addition to endemic anti-Semitism—as France now faces a critical period that will shape its future. As O’Doherty writes in this necessary work of history, “The struggle against prejudice and victimization of the marginalized continues today.”