Draft:French National Committee (far-right group)
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The Comité National Français (CNF; French for 'French National Committee') was a far-right umbrella organisation active in France in the early 1950s. It federated a number of small neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups, most of them led by former collaborators released during or after the post-Liberation purge. The organisation was meant to represent in France the interests of the European Social Movement (ESM), the neo-fascist international founded at Malmö, Sweden, in May 1951.[1][2][3]
| Abbreviation | CNF |
|---|---|
| Formation | Around 1950 |
| Type | Federation of political groups |
| Headquarters | Paris, France |
Leaders | Maurice Bardèche, René Binet |
| Affiliations | European Social Movement |
The committee was first headed by the writer Maurice Bardèche, who had been given the task of federating the small French nationalist groups.[1][3] He and René Binet quarrelled over whether racial purity should be written into the ESM programme, and the dispute produced the first open rupture inside that international. Bardèche left the committee and set up a rival body, the Comité de Coordination des Forces Nationales ('Coordinating Committee for National Forces').[4][5][2] French counter-espionage regarded the CNF as a front for foreign intelligence. Binet and the committee's card-index manager Maurice Achart were charged in 1954 over their contacts with neo-Nazi organisations abroad and with collaborators who had fled French justice.[6]
Background
At the Liberation of France in 1944, the provisional government arrested the leading figures of the collaboration in large numbers. Some far-right militants escaped prosecution or were released early, and the violent post-war French far-right was rebuilt from this milieu.[6]
Two men were at the head of the French nationalist milieu in this period. Maurice Bardèche was a professor of literature and a specialist of Balzac and Stendhal. He was proscribed during the purge because his brother-in-law was the fascist writer Robert Brasillach, although he had himself published only a few literary articles in the collaborationist paper Je suis partout. René Binet organised small groups and international bodies. He had been in turn a Stalinist militant, a follower of Jacques Doriot and a leading Trotskyist cadre before joining the Waffen-SS, for which he served six months in prison. He wrote Théorie du racisme (1950) and edited the paper La Sentinelle.[7][4]
The initiative for a new fascist international came from the Italian Social Movement (MSI). A first discussion was held in Rome in March 1950. It brought together representatives of the MSI and the Spanish Falange, Oswald Mosley, associates of the Swiss Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, members of the German order Bruderschaft, and the French figures Georges Albertini and Guy Lemonnier. The meeting resolved to call a conference of west European nationalist organisations, which met in Rome in October 1950. Delegates came from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, with representatives from Albania, Belgium, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland.[8][9] A second congress was organised by Per Engdahl at Malmö in May 1951 and gathered sixty delegates, among them Bardèche and Mosley. It adopted the name Europäische Soziale Bewegung ('European Social Movement') and decided that the movement's highest executive organ would consist of one representative each from Scandinavia, Germany and France, together with the secretary-general of the MSI.[10][9] According to the French intelligence services, the ESM was funded by the Portuguese government, the Banque Worms and Christian Wolf, a French industrialist who financed the post-1945 Pétainist press.[9]
Formation and membership
Bardèche accepted the mission of federating the small French groups and had others formally launch the CNF. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg place its launch after the founding of the ESM, in the context of the mandate Bardèche had received.[1][3] Frédéric Charpier records the CNF as already operating in November 1950.[6]
According to Charpier, the committee initially attracted the supporters of direct action. Since the departure of the communist ministers from the government in May 1947, these militants had been wrecking the premises of left-wing parties and assaulting members of the French Communist Party. The groups the CNF brought together included Nouveau Prométhée, La Sentinelle, the Cercle Jacques Bainville, Napoléon Europe, Jeune Nation and La Citadelle. All were led by former collaborators.[6]
Camus and Lebourg list among its components the Phalange Française and the Mouvement Populaire Européen (MPE; 'European People's Movement').[1][a] The MPE was founded in 1951 by Frédéric G. Becker, a professor at a Strasbourg agricultural college, and drew much of its substance from the Alsatian autonomist movement. Its honorary presidency later passed to Otto Strasser.[11][1] Its contact in France was the Phalange Française, led by Charles Luca, a nephew of Marcel Déat and a founding member of the ESM. The Phalange's secretary-general, Henri Roques, was at the same time secretary-general of the MPE's French section. Dissolved by the French authorities in 1958, the Phalange was renamed the Mouvement Populaire Français.[1][12]
The committee first established its offices at the home of Félix Antona, known as Henri de Bonifacio. A former official of the Paris police prefecture, Antona had turned to journalism and written for Marcel Bucard's paper Le Franciste, then served as deputy general delegate for the Francist press in the southern zone. He was recruited by the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst at Marseille. Arrested on 5 May 1945, he was convicted and released almost immediately.[6]
La Citadelle was headed by Charles Gastaut, a nephew of Marcel Déat and one of the first to advocate the creation of armed groups. In January 1949 he founded the Fondation Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a military preparation body for young men that served as cover for forming armed groups; it was dissolved in January 1950. He launched La Citadelle the following year with funding from Christian Wolf. In October 1955 he founded the Phalange française, which was banned in 1958 during the Algerian crisis.[6]
In November 1950 the CNF entrusted the management of its card index to Maurice Achart. A former member of the Propaganda Staffel and of the Francist youth, he had joined Doriot's French Popular Party in 1943 and the services of the Gestapo. He enlisted in the French army in September 1944, then gave himself up to the police at Cherbourg on 14 September 1945 and was transferred to Fresnes. Sentenced to eight years' hard labour, he was released from the Carène camp in October 1948.[6]
Struggle for control
The first open break within the ESM occurred inside the CNF. Binet insisted that racial purity be made a keystone of the international's programme. Bardèche objected on grounds of practical politics in post-war Europe and left the committee.[4] The two men also divided over the colonies, which Bardèche counted as part of a future European empire and which Binet and Amaudruz refused to defend. Bardèche accused Binet of making himself a Soviet agent in the Indochina War through his anti-colonial positions, while Binet portrayed Bardèche as an American agent.[13] For Lebourg the fracture was personal as much as political: Bardèche rejected the racial line Binet wished to impose, while Binet rejected Bardèche's right-wing and legalistic orientation.[2] Binet took control of the committee in July 1952.[5][2] According to Charpier, he allied himself that year with Achart, the manager of the card index, to remove Bardèche from the political bureau. In January 1950 Droit et Liberté, the paper of the MRAP, had described Binet as an obsessive theorist of the use of force.[6][b]
Deprived of the committee, Bardèche formed a replacement body, the Comité de Coordination des Forces Nationales Françaises. It met in Paris in the editorial offices of the paper La Victoire.[5][2][15] The first issue of Bardèche's magazine Défense de l'Occident appeared in December 1952.[16]
The quarrel also cost Binet his place in the international. Tauber writes that he broke with the ESM of his own accord.[17] Müller-Zetzsche records that Bardèche threatened to resign from the ESM presidium in the early summer of 1952, and that the presidium expelled Binet instead in order to keep Bardèche.[18]
International contacts and surveillance
When a new ESM congress was being planned in Paris, the CNF sent out the invitations. It excluded Karl-Heinz Priester, who was close to Bardèche, and invited in his place Karl Meissner, the chairman of the Deutscher Block. Groups outside France contested the committee's right to represent the country.[5][19]
Binet and Achart continued to appear abroad at the head of the leading French groups. In December 1953 the Europäische Verbindungsstelle (EVS), the liaison centre of national forces set up by the New European Order, held a meeting at Lörrach. The two men represented the French contingent, alongside Belgian, German, Austrian and Swiss organisations, the MSI leader Tullio Abelli and a representative of the Spanish Falange.[17]
Binet and Achart also maintained relations with exiles wanted by the French courts, among them Francis Bout de l'An, the former secretary-general of the Milice. The Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST) established these links, and the two men were charged in 1954. French counter-espionage considered the CNF no more than "an intelligence outfit in the service of a foreign power", in close contact with neo-Nazi and neo-fascist organisations such as the Spanish Falange, the MSI and the Deutscher Block.[6]
Aftermath
Seconded by Amaudruz, Binet called a meeting of all who supported a complete racial programme for Europe. The dissidents gathered at Zurich in September 1951 and founded the New European Order, which brought together militants from Belgium, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland.[17][20][21] Binet devoted himself to it until his death in 1957.[22]
According to Camus and Lebourg, neither the ESM nor the New European Order escaped the destructive effects of their rivalry. The failure to build a lasting neo-fascist international led a number of cadres from the 1950s onwards towards what would later be called metapolitics.[23] By 1957 the ESM had become moribund, unable to mobilise any appreciable part of the European extreme right.[24]