La Cagoule committed assassinations, and undertook 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
Originally the Secret Organisation for Revolutionary National Action (Osarn or OSAR, Organisation secrète d'action révolutionnaire nationale), the group's name was later officially changed to 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]
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.[12]
World War II
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 Marx 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.[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 and the collaborationist Vichy regime 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 lines. The Resistance's men and women came from many 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 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 chemist 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. Later on in the war, Deloncle, now doubtful that Germany would win, went into contact with the German resistance. He was later assassinated for these activities by SD agents.
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.
Vichy France, officially the French State or simply France, was the French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. It was named after its seat of government, the city of Vichy. Officially independent, but with half of its territory occupied under the harsh terms of the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany, it adopted a policy of collaboration. Though Paris was nominally its capital, the government established itself in the resort town of Vichy in the unoccupied "free zone", where it remained responsible for the civil administration of France as well as its colonies. The occupation of France by Nazi Germany at first affected only the northern and western portions of the country, but in November 1942 the Germans and Italians occupied the remainder of Metropolitan France, ending any pretence of independence by the Vichy government.
Pierre Firmin Pucheu was a French industrialist, fascist and member of the Vichy government. After his marriage, he became the son-in-law of the Belgian architect Paul Saintenoy.
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.
On the night of October 2–3, 1941, six synagogues were attacked in Paris and damaged by explosive devices places by their doors between 2:05 and 4:05 am. The perpetrators were identified but not arrested.
Félix Victor Henri Martin, known as Le docteur Martin and le Bib, was a French physician, extreme-right-wing militant activist, resister and soldier in two World wars.
Maurice Duclos, codename Saint-Jacques, was a French soldier, insurance broker, anti-communist militant activist, intelligence agent and founder of the first French resistance network of WWII, also called Saint-Jacques, and two others.
Georges André Groussard, also known as Colonel Groussard, was a French army officer and Resistance leader. He fought in World War I (WWI) and became an active anti-communist associated with the extreme-right-wing organisation La Cagoule. Resigned to the Vichy régime after the surrender of France in World War II (WWII), he ran separate organisations within it, was twice imprisoned and created the reseaux Gilbert [Gilbert resistance networks] with support from the UK and Switzerland.
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.
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