It opposed the left-wing Popular Front (in office, June 1936 to 1938). La Cagoule was founded by Eugène Deloncle. Among others, the founder of the cosmetics company L'Oréal, Eugène Schueller, bankrolled the clandestine movement.
The group performed assassinations, bombings, sabotage of armaments, and other violent activities, some intended to cast suspicion on communists through false flag operations and to add to political instability. Planning a November 1937 overthrow of the French government, La Cagoule was infiltrated by the police, and the national government arrested and imprisoned about 70 men. At the outbreak of World War II (September 1939), the government released the men to fight in the French Army. Some supported other right-wing organizations and participated in the Vichy government of 1940–1944; others joined the Free French of Charles de Gaulle. It was not until 1948 that the government tried surviving members for the charges of 1937.[2]
Names
It was originally the Secret Organisation for Revolutionary National Action (Osarn or OSAR, Organisation secrète d'action révolutionnaire nationale). Later it was officially the Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action (CSAR, Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire).
Third Republic
Deloncle in 1937
The group was founded in 1936 or 1937 by Eugène Deloncle and enjoyed privileged relations within industrial circles (National Federation of Ratepayers, Lesieur, L'Oréal etc).[3]
Mohammed El Maadi, the head of La Cagoule for French Algeria, started the antisemitic newspaper Er Rachid and organised the North-African Brigade, known as SS-Mohammed, in 1944.
The group drew most of its members from Orléanists disappointed by the lack of action by the Action française founded by Charles Maurras. It opposed the Popular Front government, created from an alliance of left-wing groups. Historians believe that many low-level members were recruited in the belief that it was an auto-defense organization, which was intended to fight against a communist takeover.[4]
In Nice, new members were initiated in a formal ritual. In the presence of the Grand Master, dressed in red and accompanied by his assesseurs dressed in black, with their faces covered, new members stood before a table draped with a French flag. A sword and torches were placed on it. Each man raised his right arm and swore the oath, Ad majorem Galliæ gloriam ("For the greater glory of France").[6] This oath echoed the Jesuit motto, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (For the greater glory of God). Disloyalty was punished by death. For instance, the arms suppliers Léon Jean-Baptiste and Maurice Juif were murdered by Cagoulards in October 1936 and February 1937, respectively, for attempting to enrich themselves by lying about the price that they had paid for the arms.
The paramilitary organisation was active in the provinces. In Paris, it organised militias and demonstrations and amassed arms. It attempted to assassinate French Prime Minister Léon Blum, trained men in terrorism, built underground prisons and "ran guns in Belgium, Switzerland and Italy".[4]
Police investigating the murder of Dimitri Navachine in January 1937
La Cagoule directed its members in various actions aimed at creating suspicions of communists to destabilise and to destroy the French Republic. Some argue that in the Bois de Boulogne on 26 January 1937, Jean Filiol stabbed to death Dimitri Navachine, who was a Soviet national and for several years the respected director of the Paris branch of the Soviet State Bank.[4] Others believed that he had been killed by Joseph Stalin's secret service, the NKVD, as the Great Purge was underway in the Soviet Union.[7] To ease its obtaining arms from Fascist Italy, on 9 June 1937, the group assassinated two Italian antifascists, the Rosselli brothers, who were refugees in France.[8][9] It sabotaged airplanes clandestinely supplied by the French government to the Spanish Republic. On 11 September 1937, the Cagoule blew up two buildings owned by the Comité des Forges (Ironmasters Association) to create the impression of a communist conspiracy. Although it was widely believed at the time that communists had set the bombs, the government took no official action against the French Communist Party, to the disappointment of the group's members. The Cagoule tried to infiltrate the International Brigades for the same purpose.
One of the buildings bombed by la Cagoule on 11 September 1937
Organised along military lines, the Cagoule infiltrated parts of the French military via Georges Loustaunau-Lacau's Corvignolles as a means to acquire weapons.[10] It prepared to overthrow the Popular Front government in November 1937 to install a fascist government. The group initially intended to make Philippe Pétain chief of state, but he refused its overtures. The Cagoule chose Marshal Louis Franchet d'Esperey as their future chief of state.
It was infiltrated by the French police. On 15 November 1937, Marx Dormoy, Minister of the Interior and the highest officer of law enforcement, denounced its plot and ordered wide arrests of members. The French police seized 2 tons of high explosives, several anti-tank or anti-aircraft guns, 500 machine guns, 65 submachine guns, 134 rifles and 17 sawn-off shotguns.[11] Some of the arms were of German or Italian origin, and about 70 men were arrested. Deloncle had boasted that he had 12,000 men under his order in Paris, and 120,000 in the provinces, but it is likely there were no more than 200 men who knew much about the organization and its structure, and another several hundred who were more loosely affiliated with the group.[4]
Socialite masquerade of the Cagoule conspiracy after the revelations by the French government in 1937
Reactions to the plot and the revelations by the French government about the Cagoule varied among the international media. In the United States, the editors of the New York Times were initially suspicious of the accounts.[citation needed]
The journalists of Time magazine likened La Cagoule to the American Ku Klux Klan, a right-wing group that had a widespread revival from 1915 and reached its peak of influence in 1925, with members elected to political office in midwestern cities and states as well as the South.[citation needed]
At the outbreak of World War II, the French government released imprisoned Cagoulards to fight in the French Army. Some entered the Milice, such as Jacques de Bernonville.
During the Occupation of France in 1940, the Vichy government arrested Dormoy, as he had refused to vote for full powers for Pétain, and it eventually interned him under house arrest at Montélimar. He was assassinated on 26 July 1941 by a clockwork bomb set off at the house. It was believed to have been done by Cagoule terrorists in reprisal for Dormoy's arrests in 1937 and his attempt to suppress the organization.[12]
Organization
Premier Bureau: Eugène Deloncle and Jacques Corrèze
Deuxième Bureau (intelligence): Dr. Henri Martin, Alfred Corre (Dagore)
Troisième Bureau (operations): Georges Cachier
Quatrième Bureau (recruits and equipment): Jean Moreau de La Meuse
The Cagoule was organised into cells. Light cells had eight men, armed with submachine guns (typically one per light cell), rifles, semi-automatic pistols and hand grenades. Heavy cells had twelve men, armed with a heavy machine gun and the individual weapons. A group of three cells formed one unit, three units a battalion, three battalions a regiment, two regiments a brigade and two brigades a division. Battalions could be divided into automobile squads of about fifty men. Written communications were avoided as much as possible.
The "street fighting" handbook was titled Secret Rules of the Communist Party to avoid revealing the Cagoule in case the booklet was found by the police.[13]
Gabriel Jeantet and other former cagoulards charged during the trial held in 1948.
The cagoulards arrested for the 1937 conspiracy were not brought to trial for those charges until 1948, after the liberation of France. By then, many had served in the Vichy government or the Resistance, and few of them were brought to trial.[4]
The French Resistance was a collection of groups that fought the Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy régime in France during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women who conducted guerrilla warfare and published underground newspapers. They also provided first-hand intelligence information, and escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind Axis enemy lines. The Resistance's men and women came from many different parts of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists, communists, and some fascists. The proportion of French people who participated in organized resistance has been estimated at from one to three percent of the total population.
Joseph Darnand was a French collaborator with Nazi Germany during World War II. A decorated soldier in the French Army of World War I and early World War II, he went on to become the organizer and de facto leader of the Milice française, or French Militia, the collaborationist Vichy government's paramilitary police force. Darnand also served as an officer in the Waffen-SS. He was tried and executed after the war for treason.
André Bettencourt was a French politician. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He had been a member of La Cagoule, a violent French fascist-leaning and anti-communist group, before and into the Second World War; he then joined the anti-German Resistance late in the war. His earlier affiliation was not known when he later served as a cabinet minister under presidents Pierre Mendès France and Charles de Gaulle, and was awarded for his bravery in the Resistance against the Nazis.
Jacques Corrèze was a French businessman and politician. He was the chief executive officer of the United States-based operation of L'Oréal for the Americas (Cosmair), the world's leading company in cosmetics and beauty products. He was the secretary of Eugène Deloncle.
Eugène Paul Louis Schueller was a French pharmacist and entrepreneur who was the founder of L'Oréal, the world's leading company in cosmetics and beauty.
René Marx Dormoy was a French socialist politician, noted for his opposition to the far right. Under his leadership as Minister of the Interior in the government of Léon Blum, the French police infiltrated La Cagoule, which was planning the overthrow of the French Third Republic, led by the Popular Front government. Dormoy directed the arrest and imprisonment of 70 cagoulards in November 1937. The police recovered 2 tons of armaments from their sites.
Henri d'Astier de La Vigerie was a French soldier, Résistance member, and conservative politician.
The French Popular Party was a French fascist and anti-semitic political party led by Jacques Doriot before and during World War II. It is generally regarded as the most collaborationist party of France.
Eugène Deloncle was a French politician and fascist leader who founded the organisation “Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action" (CSAR), better known as La Cagoule. He became a prominent Nazi collaborator during World War II.
The far-right tradition in France finds its origins in the Third Republic with Boulangism and the Dreyfus affair. The modern "far right" or radical right grew out of two separate events of 1889: the splitting off in the Socialist International of those who chose the nation and the culmination of the "Boulanger Affair", which championed the demands of the former Minister of War General Georges Boulanger. The Dreyfus affair provided one of the political division lines of France. Nationalism, which had been before the Dreyfus affair a left-wing and Republican ideology, turned after that to be a main trait of the right-wing and, moreover, of the far right. A new right emerged, and nationalism was reappropriated by the far-right who turned it into a form of ethnic nationalism, itself blended with anti-Semitism, xenophobia, anti-Protestantism and anti-Masonry. The Action française, first founded as a review, was the matrix of a new type of counter-revolutionary right-wing, and continues to exist today. During the interwar period, the Action française (AF) and its youth militia, the Camelots du Roi, were very active. Far right leagues organized riots.
The National Popular Rally was a French political party and one of the main collaborationist parties under the Vichy regime of World War II.
The Revolutionary Social Movement was a fascist movement founded in France in September 1940. Its founders were Eugène Deloncle, who was previously associated with La Cagoule, and Eugène Schueller, owner of the L'Oréal company.
Jean Paul Robert Filiol was a French militant, who was active in La Cagoule before the Second World War. After the war, he fled to Spain, where he worked for the local office of L'Oréal.
Richard Henry Heslop, DSO, code named Xavier, was an agent in France of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by Nazi Germany or other Axis powers. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.
Henry Charbonneau was a French far right politician and writer.
Gabriel Jeantet was a French far-right activist, journalist and polemicist. Active before, during and after the Second World War, Jeantet's links to François Mitterrand became a source of controversy during the latter's Presidency. His brother Claude Jeantet was also a far right activist.
Henri Calloc'h de Kérillis was a French aviator, reporter, writer and politician. A hero of World War I, he traveled widely in the 1920s, and wrote several books about his adventures. He became a journalist, then entered politics as an independent Republican. He was right-wing, conservative and profoundly nationalist. He was hostile to the parties that favored appeasement of Germany in the lead-up to World War II, and went into exile rather than be arrested after the armistice of July 1940. At first a strong supporter of Charles de Gaulle and his Free French, he later fell out with de Gaulle too. He spent the last years of his life in voluntary exile in the United States.
Paris started mobilizing for war in September 1939, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union attacked Poland, but the war seemed far away until 10 May, 1940, when the Germans attacked France and quickly defeated the French army. The French government departed Paris on 10 June, and the Germans occupied the city on 14 June. During the occupation, the French government moved to Vichy, and Paris was governed by the German military and by French officials approved by the Germans. For Parisians, the occupation was a series of frustrations, shortages and humiliations. A curfew was in effect from nine in the evening until five in the morning; at night, the city went dark. Rationing of food, tobacco, coal and clothing was imposed from September 1940. Every year the supplies grew more scarce and the prices higher. A million Parisians left the city for the provinces, where there was more food and fewer Germans. The French press and radio contained only German propaganda.
The Government of Vichy France was the collaborationist ruling regime or government in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. Of contested legitimacy, it was headquartered in the town of Vichy in occupied France, but it initially took shape in Paris under Marshal Philippe Pétain as the successor to the French Third Republic in June 1940. The government remained in Vichy for four years, and fled into exile to Germany in September 1944 after the Allied invasion of France. It operated as a government-in-exile until April 1945, when the Sigmaringen enclave was taken by Free French forces. Pétain was brought back to France, by then under control of the Provisional French Republic, and put on trial for treason.
On the night of October 2–3, 1941, six Paris synagogues were attacked and damaged by explosive devices places by their doors between 2:05 and 4:05 am. The perpetrators were identified but not arrested.
References
↑ Cullen, S. (2018) World War II Vichy French Security Troops, Osprey Pub.
↑ Geoffrey Warner, "The Cagoulard Conspiracy" History Today (July 1960) 10#0 pp. 443–450.
↑ Winock, Michel (1993) Histoire de l'extrême droite en France. ISBN2020232006
↑ Spivak, John L. (1939). "Ch. III. Secret Armies, the new tactics of Nazi warfare". France's Secret Fascist Army. New York: Modern Age Books. p.31. Archived from the original on 27 June 2009. Retrieved 28 May 2008.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
French Third Republic 
