Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right in France and Britain

between the Wars

According to the historian of ecology, Anna Bramwell,

‘between the wars German national socialism was alone among

European fascist parties in expressing ecological

concerns.’1 In some way this statement is correct, if we

focus to the letter on ‘fascist parties’, that is, political

parties that defined themselves as ‘fascist’ and contested

elections or mobilised against parliamentary democracy, or

if we see ‘ecological’ as being the intention of reshaping

society on the basis of a holistic understanding of ‘nature’

rather than one, environmentally-focused part of a broader

political programme. Yet on closer inspection, it becomes

obvious that whilst only in Germany did fascism with an

ecological slant to its programme come to power, radical

right groups across Europe engaged to a greater or lesser

extent with ecological questions. Recent research shows

that, like everything the Nazis touched, their programme for

the environment did more harm than good;2 clearly the dream

of a bucolic, united peasant Europe did not apply when the

scorched-earth policy was being applied in Lapland or

Ukraine, and the environmental costs of total war hardly

acted as a break on the Führer’s ambitions. Elsewhere, for

the most part radical right groups did not get the chance to

try out their theories, other than in collaboration with

Nazism. But along with visions of urban reorganization,

often inspired by Le Corbusier, which sought to cleanse

cities and expel from them their decadent, ‘Judaized’

elements,3 almost all fascist movements developed some form

of rural revivalism. Here the concept of ‘reactionary

modernism’ is useful (as long as we bear in mind that

fascism was a broad church that could encompass both

‘reactionaries’ and ‘modernists’ and was not simply an

amalgam of the two): along with the ‘modernist’ element of

fascism that emerged from Futurism, with its stress on

speed, technology and violence, went hand in hand a peasant-

oriented vision of the rootedness of the race in the soil,1 Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1989), p. 162. My thanks to David Bensoussan, SusieByers, Philip Conford and Philippe Vervaecke for helpful comments onearlier drafts.2 Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers,1871-1971 (Bloomington, 1992); Axel Goodbody, ed., The Culture of GermanEnvironmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities (New York, 2003); Thomas Lekan,Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945(Cambridge, MA, 2004); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc, and ThomasZeller, eds., How Green were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich(Athens, OH, 2005); Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller, eds., Germany’s Nature:Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005); DavidBlackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany(London, 2006); Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservationin Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2006). For a useful overview see DavidMotadel, ‘The German Nature Conservation Movement in the TwentiethCentury’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43 (2008), pp. 137-153 and theforum on ‘The Nature of German Environmental History’, German History, 27,1 (2009), pp. 113-130.3 Mark Antliff, ‘La cité française: Georges Valois, Le Corbusier, and FascistTheories of Urbanism’ in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, eds.Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1997), pp. 134-170; cf. Richard A. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

2

with its stress on the paysan, yeoman or smallholder as the

backbone of the nation and the cultivation of the earth as

the best guarantee of the health and vitality of the race.4

Himmler and Darré dreamt about idyllic Germanic villages in

the Reich or in occupied eastern territories; Speer provided

the Autobahnen to get to them.

In the cases that concern us here, however, Britain and

France, we are for the most part not talking about fascism

and fascists. Robert Paxton is correct when, in his study of

Henri Dorgères’s Greenshirt movement, he says: ‘Let us put

the issue of fascism behind us, for it can easily degenerate

into facile name-calling that generates more heat than

light.’ Thus, in this chapter I will not be concerned with

‘outing’ fascists, but showing how what Jean Plumyène and

Raymond Lasierra call ‘un fascisme de sensibilité, un

romantisme’ is evident when one examines the rural

revivalism of right-wing groups between the wars.5 Indeed,

one can go further and say that, when one examines the

cultural politics of the radical right, one sees that

4 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar andthe Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). But noteMark Antliff’s comments in ‘Fascism, Modernism and Modernity’, The ArtBulletin (March 2002), n13, online athttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0422/is_1_84/ai_84721212/print?tag=artBody;col1 (accessed 10 September 2008). See also Michael ThadAllen, ‘How Technology Caused the Holocaust: Martin Heidegger, WestGerman Industrialists, and the Death of Being’ in Lessons and Legacies, Vol.VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 2006), pp. 285-302.5 Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra, Les fascismes français, 1923-1963 (Paris:Le Seuil, 1963), pp. 108-109.

3

fascism is not the master concept. Rather, fascism appears

as just one arm of a generalised anti-modern revolt of the

interwar years, as Marc Simard notes: ‘It seems to us that

fascism, that of the intellectuals at least, ought to be

perceived as one of the forms of the great anti-modern

revolt of the years 1880-1945, the peak of which occurred

during the 1930s. That is to say, it would be but one of the

shoots growing in the fertile land of anti-modern thought.’6

The debate about the definition of fascism and its

intellectual origins is fascinating, but in France – under

the guise of the Sternhell controversy – it has tended to

obscure research into the political circumstances of the

1930s. I will try to combine the two approaches here.

Rural revivalism is my subject because it is more

complex than it might at first appear in this quotation from

Simard. On the face of it, ‘blood and soil’ would appear to

be an obvious component of any radical right organisation,

with its combination of anti-modernism, anti-capitalism and

racial exclusivity. Yet the call to ‘return to the land’

was, at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first

half of the twentieth, as likely to be an arrow in a left-

wing quiver as a right-wing one. The attack on unhealthy

6 Marc Simard, ‘Intellectuels, fascisme et antimodernité dans la Francedes années trente’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, 18 (1988), p. 73. [‘Lefascisme, celui des intellectuels à tout le moins, nous apparaît devoirêtre perçu comme une des modalités de la grande révolte antimoderne desannées 1880-1945, dont l’apogée se situe pendant les années 1930: c’està dire qu’il ne serait qu’une des pousses ayant crû dans le terreaufertile de la pensée antimoderne.’]

4

cities with their foul atmosphere, and the metaphorical

attack on cities as morally and intellectually degenerative

because of their mollesse, was a familiar socialist cry, and

hiking groups, athletics societies and rural work camps held

an appeal that crossed political boundaries. Nevertheless,

when one looks at the early history of the ecological

movement, one sees a decidedly rightist, even radical

rightist sensibility. With respect to youth movements, for

example, the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (a

‘traditionalist’ Catholic organisation rather than a radical

right one) had 65,000 members by the mid-1930s, with its

journal Jeunesse Ouvrière selling 270,000 copies per issue. By

contrast, the Jeunesse Communistes had only 12,000 members

in 1925, whilst the proposed PCF scout group, the Pionniers

Rouges, never got off the ground.7 And even if fascist

parties as such took little interest in agricultural affairs

– the fact that they had agricultural spokesmen does not

necessarily speak to the contrary – one can trace a

widespread interest in rural revivalism (encompassing

ecologism in the strict sense or advocacy of organic

farming) that indicates that we are dealing with a cultural

phenomenon that transcended the political sphere. But we are

also not dealing with a simple rejection of modernity.

Rather, in some thinkers we see the attempt to harness

7 Samuel Kalman, ‘Faisceau Visions of Physical and Moral Transformationand the Cult of Youth in Inter-war France’, European History Quarterly, 33, 3(2003), p. 347.

5

modernity to create a holistic, organicist vision of the

race reborn, and in all cases it is necessary at the very

least to recognise that rural revivalism was itself a

symptom of modernity: the call to return to the land only

makes sense in a context – i.e. a modern one – when people

for the most part no longer live on the land.

And here we immediately see the first difference between

Britain and France. Whilst in Britain in the interwar period

more people already lived in towns and cities than in the

countryside, France was still to a large extent a peasant,

or at least agricultural country, in which the tentacles of

Parisian centralisation reached far, but not yet into every

corner of the hexagon; only as a result of the exode rural

after World War I did the urban population exceed the rural

one by 1931, and on the outbreak of World War II a third of

the population still worked on the land.8 Nevertheless, the

French urban elite did cultivate a rural nostalgia that can

be seen as a cultural expression of the radical right

(Valois’s Faisceau, especially) as well as a rural radical

right movement in Dorgères’s Greenshirts. In this chapter, I

will explore the similarities and differences of these

French and British ruralist articulations, and argue that,

whilst in formal terms the similarities outweigh the

differences – indeed, both draw on a stock of images that is8 Annie Moulin, Peasantry and Society in France since 1789 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), ch4; Michel Gervais, Marcel Jollivet and YvesTavernier, Histoire de la France rurale. Vol. 4: La fin de la France paysanne de 1914 à nosjours, eds. Georges Duby and Armand Wallon (Paris: Seuil, 1976).

6

common to nationalist appropriations of landscape and

heritage across the modern world – in political terms they

were quite different. This difference did not consist in the

articulations and representations themselves, but in the

socio-political realities of interwar France and Britain; in

the latter, rural revivalism, whilst attractive to the

radical right, was also appropriated by a more moderate

middle-ground associated with Baldwinite one-nation

Conservatism. This was a tradition which trumped the organic

farming methods being developed by some radical-right rural

revivalists, instead allowing bucolic fantasies of the land

(on the part of people with no farming experience) to co-

exist with increasing agricultural technologisation and

state intervention, and ultimately, during and after World

War II, the emergence of ‘productivism’, that is, modern

agri-business.9 After the war, according to A.G. Street,

‘British farmers, by their meek acceptance of the

Agriculture Act [1947], betrayed Britain’s country life for

material security’ and, by sitting on the ‘fascist’

agricultural committees, ‘the yeomen of Britain’ became ‘the

yes-men of Britain’.10 In France, by contrast, the

agricultural crises of the interwar years was on a larger

9 Brian Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages: The County WarAgricultural Committees in England, 1939-45’, Rural History, 18, 2 (2007),pp. 217-244; Brian Short, Charles Watkins and John Martin, ‘“The FrontLine of Freedom”: State-Led Agricultural Revolution in Britain, 1939-1945’ in The Front Line of Freedom: British Farming in the Second World War, eds.Short, Watkins and Martin (Exeter: British Agricultural History Society,2006), pp. 1-15.

7

scale and one sees a ‘last gasp’ of large-scale rural

politics, with parties of the right and the left, including

the Popular Front government, attempting to mobilise the

vote in the countryside, and promoting regionalism.11 The

power of the idealised image of the peasant – ‘a potent and

highly manipulable (and manipulated) symbol of French

culture, one on which a variety of ideas is projected and

legitimized’ – was (and is) quite marked, especially between

the wars.12

It is hardly paradoxical, then, to say that in Britain

one can more easily find radical expressions of racialised

organicism – I hesitate to use the term ‘eco-fascism’ since

10 A.G. Street, Feather-Bedding (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), cited inShort, ‘War in the Fields and Villages’, p. 237.11 Edouard Lynch, ‘La parti socialiste et la paysannerie dans l’Entre-deux-guerres: pour une histoire des doctrines agraires et de l’actionpolitique au village’, Ruralia, 1998-03, online at:http://ruralia.revues.org/document54.html (accessed 10 September 2008);Lynch, Moissons rouges: les socialistes français et la société paysanne durant l’Entre-deux-guerres, 1918-1940 (Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2002);Jean Vigreux, ‘Le Parti communiste français à la campagne, 1920-1964,Ruralia, 1998-03, online at: http://ruralia.revues.org/document55.html(accessed 10 September 2008).12 Susan Carol Rogers, ‘Good to Think: The “Peasant” in ContemporaryFrance’, Anthropological Quarterly, 60 (1987), p. 56, cited in Shanny Peer,‘Peasants in France: Representations of Rural France in the 1937International Exposition’ in Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France, eds. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 19. See also Armand Frémont, ‘The Land’ inRealms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2: Traditions, ed. Pierre Nora(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 3-35; Romy Golan,Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1995), pp. 40-45; Christopher Parsons and NeilMcWilliam, ‘“Le Paysan de Paris”: Alfred Sensier and the Myth of RuralFrance’, Oxford Art Journal, 6, 2 (1983), pp. 38-58. And, for a recentexample, Jean-Luc Mayaud, Gens de la terre: La France rurale 1880-1940 (Paris:Éditions du Chêne, 2002).

8

it has been so much abused – whereas in France one finds the

sentiments expressed no less radically, but a greater

political effect being achieved by genuinely rural radical

(if not fascist) movements. As with all things associated

with the triumph of the anti-Dreyfusards and anti-

republicans that was the Vichy regime, the rural politics of

Vichy – ‘le triomphe de l’idéologie agrarienne’ – were an

attempt to promote the ‘traditional’ French smallholder over

‘capitalist’ farming, and to show that the policies

associated with Vichy had their roots in the Third

Republic.13 As Kevin Passmore and others who question the

‘immunity thesis’, that is, the notion of the inherent

stability of French democratic institutions between the wars

have shown,14 the volatility of the French situation was a

result of the fact that urban-based rural nostalgia (like in

Britain) coexisted with radical movements that emerged in

the countryside. The failure of these French movements can

to a large extent be explained by two facts: first, the

agricultural movements were unable to expand their appeal

beyond their rural constituencies and, second, because urban

elites were ultimately only interested in making use of

idealised images of the land to promote their own agendas –

those that came to power in 1940 – and did not take a great

deal of interest in the substance of the peasants’

ambitions.15 We are in other words dealing with Anna

9

Bramwell’s well-made distinction between ecological and

peasant-oriented movements.16

Let us then turn to examining the evidence to counter

Bramwell’s assertion that fascist parties outside Germany

did not concern themselves with ecology. I will look first

at several radical right thinkers who made rural revivalism

central to their concerns, and will then assess the

differences between the French and British examples by

looking at the policies and ideas of several radical right

groups.

From the foundation of the Third Republic, a connection

between antisemitism and ruralism was quite prevalent in

French political culture. Stephen Wilson notes that ruralism

formed ‘a crucial component of the ideology of antisemites

who were neither country dwellers nor noble, For them, the

rural world with its roots in the past, its relative

resistance to change, signified a set of stable values

posited in the face of an urbanized world of confusion and

flux. This idealization of rural society,’ he adds, ‘was a

theme of very general provenance, and was lent new strength

by the agricultural depression.’ Wilson notes that

politicians from all parties sang the praises of ‘our dear

French peasant’, but that ‘the theme enjoyed particular

flavour on the political Right.’ Charles Jacquier, for

example, stated that ‘The land tempers the soul and is the

great preserver of the race.’ And the Marquis de Morès, the

10

leader of the Ligue Anti-Sémitique, who represented the

aristocracy’s version of this position, claimed that

‘Castles and forests are passing into the hands of

financiers, children of Israel, whose hands are not always

pure. The proletariat and the old aristocracy, equally

unfortunate, [are being] dispossessed of the soil of France,

and between these two classes a parasitic growth [is]13 Gervais, Jollivet and Tavernier, La fin de la France paysanne, p. 442;Moulin, Peasantry and Society, pp. 151-158; Peer, ‘Peasants in France’, p.43. See also Michael Heffernan, ‘Geography, Empire and NationalRevolution in Vichy France’, Political Geography, 24, 6 (2005), pp. 731-758.The reality was of course somewhat different, with behaviour in certainareas, such as the Cévennes, being ‘diametrically opposed to theattitudes and behaviour that Vichy expected of its rural populations.’See H. R. Kedward, ‘Rural France and Resistance’ in France at War: Vichy andthe Historians, eds. Sarah Fishman, Laura Lee Downs, Ioannis Sinanoglou,Leonard V. Smith and Robert Zaretsky (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 126. AsKedward notes (pp. 129 and 136-7), by the time Vichy was espousing its‘return to the land’ ideas, they were ‘already a cliché’, but so toowere the almost identical images of the peasantry as the ‘fundamentalembodiments of France’ being promoted by the London-based La France Libre.14 On the ‘immunity thesis’ – the claim that France was ‘allergique aufascisme’ – see Brian Jenkins, ‘The Right-Wing Leagues and ElectoralPolitics in Interwar France’, History Compass, 5, 4 (2007), pp. 1359-1381;Jenkins, ed., France in the Era of Fascism: Essays on the French Authoritarian Right (NewYork: Berghahn Books, 2005); also Robert J. Soucy, ‘The Debate overFrench Fascism’ in Fascism’s Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980, ed.Richard J. Golsan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp.130-151; Kevin Passmore, ‘The Croix de Feu and Fascism: A Foreign ThesisObstinately Maintained’ in The Development of the Radical Right in France: FromBoulanger to Le Pen, ed. Edward J. Arnold (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press,2000), pp. 100-118; John Bingham, ‘Defining French Fascism, FindingFascists in France’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 29, 3(1994), pp. 525-543. For a modern example of the French Right’s lookingto neo-fascists in Italy, and vice-versa, see Andrea Mammone, ‘TheTransnational Reaction to 1968: Neo-fascist Fronts and PoliticalCultures in France and Italy’, Contemporary European History, 17, 2 (2008),pp. 213-236.15 Bertram M. Gordon, ‘The Countryside and the City: Some Notes on the Collaboration Model during the Vichy Period’ in France at War, eds. Fishman et al, pp. 145-160.16 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 162.

11

extending its tentacles monstrously everywhere.’ Drumont

attacked the aristocracy for failing to play its traditional

role in society and for abandoning the grandeur of noblesse

oblige and leadership in favour of identifying with ‘the

Jews, the bankers and the exploiters’, much like writers

like Arnold White and Anthony M. Ludovici did in Britain.17

Thus, from the publication of René Bazin’s La terre qui mort in

1899, which testifies to the equation of rural defence with

a rejection of modernity, and which constitutes a

condemnation of the aristocracy’s betrayal of its historical

obligations towards the soil,18 the tendency of rural

revivalism towards the radical right was well established by

the time of the Dreyfus Affair and firmly embedded by the

end of the Great War. Typical of the interwar fascists is

Robert Brasillach’s Le Marchand d’oiseaux (1931), which

contrasted the rootedness of peasant life with the shifting

nature of city-living. That is not to say that the right-

wing groups that emerged in the 1930s such as the Jeunesse

Patriotes or the Croix de Feu/PSF were simply inheritors of

the ‘bonapartist’ tradition;19 rather, they were part of a

pan-European post-Great War phenomenon. The difference

between French fascism and its Italian or German counterpart

was, as Jenkins notes, a question of organisation rather

than ideology, the fact that the French version failed to

enter the mainstream political arena (and, of course, the

fact that the Radical Party chose to keep them out).20 But

12

the French cultural traditions on which they built had a

rich history, although one must not overstate the importance

of rural imagery; the ‘fathers’ of the French radical right,

like Paul Déroulède (the founder of the Ligue des

Patriotes), Edouard Drumont, Charles Maurras and Maurice

Barrès, and political movements like Boulangism, actually

had less to say about rural issues than on their main focus,

i.e., reconciling the urban proletariat with the controllers

of capital.21

In Britain, one finds an equally strong native tradition

of ‘rural defence’ extending from the late nineteenth

century through to World War II. As in France, the broad

‘back-to-the-land’ movement appealed to the socialist left,

with its vision of a healthy working class enjoying its

rights to use the land, as much as to the right. But, also

as in France, the overall thrust of the early ecological

movement tended to be rightward, as Richard Griffiths,

Philip Conford and others have shown. A ‘rural nostalgic and

usually organicist theme’, writes Richard Moore-Colyer,

‘formed a common thread woven into the policies of most

ultra-Right groupings of the 1920s and 1930s.’22 As Alex

Potts notes in his study of ‘Constable Country’, ‘it was

only in the interwar period that a nationalist ideology of

pure landscape came into its own. Theories of racial

identity were transferred to the inanimate landscape, a kind

of reification in which the people still living and working

13

in the countryside were assimilated, not just pictorially

and aesthetically, but also ideologically, to the

landscape.’23 The fact that the environmentalist tradition

in Britain – in particular, the organic farming movement –

was so bound up with the radical right makes the British

case especially striking. Among the founders of the Soil

Association in 1946 – the body that today gives commercial

certification to organic farms – were some of the most

radical thinkers of the interwar period, including the Earl

of Portsmouth (until 1943 Viscount Lymington), Rolf Gardiner

and Jorian Jenks. As with most of the French thinkers, it is

insufficient to label such people ‘fascists’; first, most of

them objected to the label (though that is in itself hardly

conclusive); but second, most, although they admired Fascist

Italy and, especially, Nazi Germany, ultimately turned

against Nazism, even if they only did so once their ultra-

patriotism required it, i.e., with the declaration of war in

1939 (or, in a few cases, with the end of the Phoney War in

1940).

Individuals as examples of similarities

A good starting point here is Barrès, the ‘poet’ of the new

right of the late nineteenth century, ‘whose works on

Alsace-Lorraine and Gallic deracination schooled a

generation of young Frenchmen in the redemptive concepts of

14

the soil and the dead’24: in a work published two years

after his death, he wrote:

In order to allow the consciousness of a country

such as France to free itself, each person must be

rooted in the soil and in the earth. This may seem

too material an idea to anyone who thinks he has

attained an ideal whose loftiness he judges

according to the degree to which he has succeeded in

suppressing the voice of his blood and the instincts

of the earth. … The view that we have of the soil

compels us to envisage an organization of the

country by regions. The soil speaks to us and works

with the nation’s consciousness quite as much as it

cooperates with the dead. The soil gives the active

life of the dead its efficacy. Our ancestors pass on

as a whole the heritage accumulated in their souls

only by the immutable vital activity of the soil. …

It is only by drawing your attention to the

resources of French soil, the efforts it demands of

17 Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of theDreyfus Affair (London: Associated University Presses/Littman Library ofJewish Civilization, 1982), pp. 277-278. On White and Ludovici see myBreeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), esp. ch2.18 David Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale: Les droitesbretonnes dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 2006), p. 223.19 Jenkins, ‘The Right-Wing Leagues’, p. 1363.21 See George L. Mosse, ‘The French Right and the Working Classes: LesJaunes’, Journal of Contemporary History, 7, 3-4 (1972), pp. 185-208.

15

us, the services it renders, the conditions, in

short, in which our race of foresters, farmers and

winegrowers has developed, that you will come to

understand our national traditions as realities and

not mere words. … The administrator and the

legislator might well take this grand principle as

their inspiration: the spirit of our country is

stronger in the soul of a man who has roots than in

the soul of one who is rootless.’25

In these writings of Barrès, as well as those of Valois and

Edouard Berth, Sternhell detects, at least according to

Winock, a ‘pre-fascism’; irrespective of the later changes

of mind these writers underwent, ‘France experienced the

real signs and formulated some of the first theories of a

fascism before the fact.’26 Indeed, Valois himself

recognised this fact when he lauded Barrès in Le fascisme

(1927) as the person who foreshadowed fascism.27

20 Jenkins, ‘The Right-Wing Leagues’, p. 1367.22 Richard Moore-Colyer, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”: Jorian Jenks,Organicism, the Right and the British Union of Fascists’, Journal ofContemporary History, 39, 3 (2004), p. 353.23 Alex Potts, ‘“Constable Country” Between the Wars’ in Patriotism: TheMaking and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 2: National Fictions, ed. RaphaelSamuel (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 166. See also Christine Berberich,‘“I Was Meditating about England”: The Importance of Rural England forthe Construction of “Englishness”’ in History, Nationhood and the Question ofBritain, eds. Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 375-385.24 Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, trans. JaneMarie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 196 (‘poet’);Kalman, ‘Faisceau Visions’, pp. 345-346 (‘redemptive concepts’).

16

Now, the point of Winock’s criticism of Sternhell’s

history of ideas approach is to claim that Sternhell

teleologically telescopes fifty years of rightist thought

into the capitulation of 1940, and pays insufficient

attention to the ways in which events influenced ideas.

Attending to the social and political context, Winock

argues, tempers the tendency of history of ideas to isolate

extreme statements and to set them up as more important than

they really were. Not every anti-democratic statement made,

say, in the 1920s, is evidence of a fascism to come. And one

must grant that Winock makes a good point, though one could

accuse him of pushing the argument too far the other way, by

suggesting that ‘since antiparliamentarianism was the

response to a “real” malfunction in the system, fixing the

problem was a neutral (and necessary) technical matter.’28

As Jenkins points out, ‘the tendency to measure French

extreme Right movements against fully-fledged fascist

regimes infringes one of the most elementary principles of

the comparative method.’29

25 Maurice Barrès, ‘Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme’ in The French Rightfrom de Maistre to Maurras, ed. J. S. McClelland (New York: Harper & Row,1971), pp. 192-193 (orig. Paris: Plon, 1925).26 Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, p. 197.27 Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, p. 198. In these quotations, Winock isrehearsing the arguments put forward by Sternhell.28 Kevin Passmore, ‘The Construction of Crisis in Interwar France’ inFrance in the Era of Fascism, ed. Jenkins, p. 162.29 Jenkins, ‘Conclusion: Beyond the “Fascism Debate”?’ in France in the Era ofFascism, ed. Jenkins, p. 203.

17

Thus, comparing France with Nazi Germany or Fascist

Italy will inevitably lead to the conclusion that fascism

was less threatening in France. But a comparison with

Britain reveals that – putting aside the debate about

‘fascism’ – radical right movements existed in both

countries that spoke vehemently against the perceived ills

of liberal democracy and the threat posed by the left. Both

shared many assumptions, including a turn towards the land

as the basis of national life and hence of ‘national

revival’, remarkably at a time when the ‘real’ peasantry was

almost extinct. It is thus surprising, as Alun Howkins

notes, that there exists no sustained comparative work in

English on fascism and the rural areas.30

For example, a comparison of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

and Rolf Gardiner shows that both were radical right

intellectuals who were generally ‘suspicious of movements

that could elide individuality and impede the progress of

the elite.’31 This anti-populism tends to mean that both

avoided the mainstream of the interwar fascist movements

(although Drieu, a member of the PPF, was more closely

30 Alun Howkins, ‘Fascism and the Rural World in Inter-war Europe’,unpublished paper delivered at the ‘Rethinking the Rural: Land and theNation in the 1920s and 1930s’ conference, Royal Holloway, University ofLondon, 4-6 January 2007. My thanks to Alun Howkins for a copy of thispaper. See also Theodor Bergmann, ‘Agrarian Movements and TheirContexts’, Sociologia Ruralis, 17, 1 (1977), pp. 167-190, esp. p. 183 on theradical right.31 Susie Byers, ‘“I am not a force of nature”: Ecology and Humanity inthe Fascism of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’, unpublished MA essay(University of Western Australia, 2008), p. 8. My thanks to Susie Byersfor a copy of this essay.

18

connected than Gardiner, who disdained all such movements as

‘middle-class’). As Susie Byers writes, ‘Drieu was not

fundamentally a collectivist, not, as Bramwell suggests,

because he was uninterested in nature but because his

understanding of the non-human realm was based on elitism

and individualism informed by a social Darwinist emphasis on

struggle and violence.’32 And both stressed the role of

masculine youth in overturning the flabby, decadent world of

bourgeois democracy.

Drieu, for example, wrote in 1936 that youth was

everywhere bringing about the demise of the ‘irresponsible

bourgeoisie’, which was being replaced by communism or the

extreme right, and that in France only the latter could

protect French vigour: ‘In light of this, Europe from North

to South, and from West to East (Except in England), lives

under regimes which have become more numerous and dedicated

to authority and discipline – communism or fascism – the

most admirable and formidable effort to reawaken the human

race.’33 Drieu saw in fascism the ideal of the Männerbund34

and – despite the ill-developed nature of his ‘socialism’ or

his ‘nationalism’ – hoped that fascism would provide a kind

of Aufhebung (Hegelian sublation) of the two. ‘The

opposition between nationalism and socialism’, wrote Drieu,32 Byers, ‘“I am not a force of nature”’, p. 11.33 Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, ‘Pour sauver le peau des français’, Leflambeau (27 June 1936), cited in Kalman, ‘Faisceau Visions’, p. 352.34 Mosse, ‘On Homosexuality and French Fascism’ in The Fascist Revolution:Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), pp. 179-180.

19

‘appeared irreducible in the parliamentary regime. The

rescue operation of fascism consisted in negating the

irreducible character of that opposition.’35

What Drieu objected to was that the ‘third force’

between liberalism and communism had itself become a mass

party ‘which stifled creativity in the name of its truth and

showed a willingness to assimilate the values of the

bourgeois age which those advocating a “Third Force” could

not readily accept.’ So, although he joined Doriot’s PPF in

1936, Drieu left it two years later, only rejoining after

the fall of France. Drieu’s suicide at the end of the war,

Mosse argues, ‘was not merely the result of despair in the

face of the Allied victory, but to a still greater extent

despair at what fascism had made of itself.’36 This

allegiance to an ‘authentic’ ideology of ‘national renewal’

is what connects Drieu to Rolf Gardiner, and is also, I

suggest, one of the explanations of their devotion to the

land, contrary to the main thrust of populist fascism (which

extolled the land in rhetoric only).

Gardiner, inspirational youth leader and organic farmer,

was the most significant of the English back-to-the-landers,

and his reputation remains fiercely contested today.

Gardiner looked to Germany and the Baltic countries to form

a northern federation which, he hoped, would enable Britain

35 Le Nouveau Siècle, 25 January 1926, cited in Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, p. 255.36 Mosse, ‘Fascism and the Intellectuals’ in The Fascist Revolution, p. 116.

20

to climb out of the materialist, cosmopolitan morass into

which it had long been sinking. ‘The English have now

reached a point in their history where they must seek a new

focus’, wrote Gardiner. ‘The old urge and spirit of

adventure which came to young manhood with the Tudors and

which colonised the Empire is exhausted and can kindle our

hearts no more.’37 Gardiner’s position was unusual amongst

British cultural pessimists for the strength of his advocacy

of union with Germany: ‘I say we have got to choose between

subservience to America, and free allegiance to a greater

Germanic Reich’, he wrote to a colleague in 1930. A few

years earlier he had written: ‘Between the Adriatic and the

Arctic, the Vistula and the Atlantic, there is a hidden

kingdom to which we all, Scandinavians, Germans and English

belong in our blood and our souls. This is a positive,

organic kinship, slumbering within us, not an abstract

brotherhood imposed by the ideal will.’38 This pro-Germanism

led him to an initial burst of enthusiasm for Nazism, then

disillusion as the revolution turned out not to fulfill his

expectations.

At the height of his praise for Nazism in the spring of

1934, he recommended exchanges between the Hitler Youth and

37 Rolf Gardiner, ‘Meditations on the Future of Northern Europe’ inBritain and Germany: A Frank Discussion Instigated by Members of the Younger Generation,eds. Rolf Gardiner and Heinz Rocholl (London: Williams and Norgate,1928), p. 123.38 Gardiner to Alan (surname unknown), 17 November 1930. Rolf GardinerPapers (RGP), University of Cambridge, A2/6; Gardiner, ‘Wisdom andAction in Northern Europe’ (n.d., c.1926-27), RGP, A3/1/10(b).

21

English work camps; enthused about the Deutsche Arbeitsfront; and

lauded Darré’s attempt ‘to recreate a vigorous German

peasantry through which a new and potent aristocracy might

spring.’39 In general, while there were in this piece

aspects of the regime that he chose not to touch on, he

found that ‘nowhere but in Germany to-day is an attempt

being made deliberately and courageously to stem the

universal world tide of urbanisation and industrialism.’40

Yet Gardiner soon lost some of this enthusiasm, as he began

to suspect that Nazism, like the other ‘isms’, was not the

vital expression of personality he wanted it to be, but was

yet another movement of the soulless (sub)urban middle

classes that would only perpetuate their enslavement to

conformism.41 Indeed, this is where Gardiner gets

interesting, for his writings after 1934 show that his sense

of disillusion with Nazism did not alter his beliefs in the

need for a return to the land and a rejection of materialist

values in the name of national renewal. In fact, his

rejection of Nazism appears to have strengthened this belief

(along with a desire for Anglo-German federation), to which

he clung tenaciously until his death in 1971.42

39 Rolf Gardiner, ‘A Survey of Constructive Aspects of the New Germany.With Some Notes and Suggestions as to the Methods of Projection’ (June1934), pp. 27, 37, 44; RGP, M3/7.40 Ibid., p. 43.41 See, for example, Rolf Gardiner, World Without End: British Politics and theYounger Generation (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1932), pp. 33-34.42 For more detail on Gardiner see my ‘Rolf Gardiner: An Honorary Nazi?’in Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain, eds. Matthew Jefferiesand Michael Tyldesley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 151-168.

22

Thus, ‘fascism’ may not be the most helpful term for

understanding either Drieu or Gardiner, but nor does it

suffice to say that both were simply responding to real

problems in the liberal parliamentary system. Both, but

particularly Gardiner, held themselves aloof from mass

politics, at least once they realized that fascism was no

‘spiritual’ movement, though neither abandoned their

‘national socialist’ aspirations as a result. Fascist rural

policy, as Moore-Colyer notes, faced the ‘fundamental

conundrum’ of having to reconcile ‘the promotion of a

peasant-based rural revival with the philosophical keystone

of state corporatism’43; for Drieu and Gardiner, it failed

the test. Finally, it is revealing in terms of the Anglo-

French comparison that it was Gardiner in Britain, where

rural politics was less prominent, who had a more developed

rural revivalism and who devoted himself to the land more

directly and actively than Drieu.

Groups as examples of differences

Precisely because its palingenetic44 vision was not easily

compatible with a statist, technocratic, populist form of

fascism, the English Mistery is one of the more interesting

of the fringe groups on the British radical right. Its

attack on populism and devotion to aristocracy are reasons

43 Moore-Colyer, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”’, p. 355.

23

why Gardiner, for one, was more comfortable with Viscount

Lymington, Anthony M. Ludovici, and the other men in the

English Mistery/English Array/New Pioneer circle: men who

espoused friendship with Germany and the avoidance of war at

all costs; a rural revival based on the recreation of a

sturdy yeomanry, the fount of a healthy English race; the

elimination of ‘non-productive’ (i.e. Jewish) money

interests; and the rejection of American culture, especially

‘racy’ jazz and Hollywood films; but also the rebuilding of

a ‘real’ aristocracy, that is, a class who believed in

‘service’ and the meaningfulness of noblesse oblige; and the

re-establishment of a powerful monarchy, designed to sit at

the head of a corporatist state where all the estates were

bound together by their common purpose of serving the crown,

the soil and the race.45

This ideological affiliation is the reason why Gardiner

founded the Kinship in Husbandry in 1941. Among its members

were, Gardiner, Lymington, H. J. Massingham, Edmund Blunden

and Arthur Bryant, and the group is noted as one of the

first circles of men ‘interested in agriculture’ to discuss

seriously the use of organic farming methods.46 It is

important to remember that most of the members were not

fantasists dreaming of a ‘picturesque countryside’ in the

Baldwinite tradition, but men with considerable experience

of running farms and estates in Britain and abroad.47 Their

prescience has been lauded as a forerunner of today’s

24

organicism, which indeed it was, but their emphasis on

correct farming methods was inseparable from a wider

Zivilisationskritik that saw the strength of the race threatened

by mongrelisation, erosion, nomadism, pasteurization and

standardisation. The rejuvenation of the soil, for the

Kinship in Husbandry, was conceived as a key contribution to

national survival conceived in terms of the revivification

of the race and its freedom from ‘money interests’. For

example, one of the most influential associates of the group

(he was not actually a member), Sir George Stapledon, a

leading agricultural scientist and a man in many ways in

favour of ‘progressive’, modern agriculture,48 argued in

1935 that ‘unless rural England is provided with the

amenities and facilities necessary rural England and rural

psychology are doomed – and then the driving force behind

the English character would be lost.’ Stapledon believed

that it was almost too late to stop this demise, and that

‘only heroic endeavour will suffice’ to reverse the

44 I use the word popularised by Roger Griffin in order to suggest thatthe English Mistery was not as distant from fascism as it claimed. SeeGriffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991) and his manypublications since, especially the essay collection A Fascist Century(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). This is not meant to be anunequivocal endorsement of Griffin’s claim that there now exists a‘consensus’ in the study of fascism; for discussion see, for example,R.J.B. Bosworth’s introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1-7 and David D. Roberts, ‘Fascism,Modernism and the Quest for an Alternative Modernity’, Patterns of Prejudice,43, 1 (2009), pp. 91-102.45 On the English Mistery/English Array and its relationship to the BUF,see my ‘The English Mistery, the BUF, and the Dilemmas of BritishFascism’, Journal of Modern History, 75, 2 (2003), pp. 336-358.

25

situation.49 And the Earl of Portsmouth, in a famous book of

1943 entitled Alternative to Death, the dust jacket of which

shows an image of a starving English family on their parched

farmland, put forward a ruralist philosophy that strongly

attacked ‘Manchesterism’ and defended eugenicist-organicism:

‘the survival of the fittest, if it means the survival of

the type which flourishes where our civilization has gone

astray, is no easy excuse for degeneration’, wrote

Portsmouth. ‘Like the husbandman’, he concluded, ‘we must

distinguish between the weed and the desirable plant.’50

Malcolm Chase is thus right to say that ‘The writings of

Massingham on rural crafts, of Blunden on cricket or of the

Kinship in Husbandry on farming came closer to German völkisch

critiques of modernity than any other strand in British

intellectual life.’51 The Kinship in Husbandry provides the

best example of a British articulation of an aristocratic

blood and soil philosophy.52

By contrast with the Kinship in Husbandry, the BUF had

no real major agricultural policy that can be understood as

rural revivalism. Rather, it suggested that food supply

should be ensured by control over the empire with Imperial

Preference, not British self-sufficiency. Centralisation of

control over land use was envisaged in BUF policy, but no

major agricultural settlement in the manner of Nazi

Germany.53 ‘In the BUF’s pre-war writings, the emphasis was

on the ideal technocratic future: the garden city on stilts,

26

walkways in the sky, and silent, clean, rapid public

transport.’54 Certainly the BUF had nothing comparable to

the Centre rural at the 1937 Paris Exposition, with its utopian

depiction of French village life which sought to combine

romanticism and modernity.55 Nevertheless, it is not quite

right to claim, as Bramwell does, that the writings of the

BUF’s agricultural spokesman (and associate of the Kinship

in Husbandry) Jorian Jenks lacked a blood and soil

component. His weekly column in the BUF’s paper, Action, ran

from 1937 until it folded in June 1940, when he was

interned. In one of his columns he wrote that ‘In every land

where the Fascist banner has been carried to triumph the men

on the land have regained the rights stolen from them in an

era of national degeneration. It will be the same in

Britain.’56 After the war he edited the Soil Association’s

journal Mother Earth, even though he was still sitting on

Mosley’s Union Movement Agricultural Council. As Philip

Conford notes of Jenks, ‘in his person Fascism and organic

husbandry merged most completely.’57 Still, Bramwell is

right to note that within the ranks of the BUF Jenks was

exceptional for his devotion to rural revivalism; besides,

as Howkins notes, whilst there was considerable intellectual

interest in agriculture on the British right, ‘what is46 On Massingham, see, R. J. Moore-Colyer, ‘A Voice Clamouring in theWilderness: H. J. Massingham (1888-1952) and Rural England’, Rural History,13, 2 (2002), pp. 199-224; Clare Palmer, ‘Christianity, Englishness andthe Southern English Countryside: A Study of the Work of H. J.Massingham’, Social and Cultural Geography, 3 (2002), pp. 25-38.47 My thanks to Philip Conford for this point.

27

striking is the almost total lack of success in practical

political terms. … the importance of the political

mobilisation around Gardiner, Lymington or even

Williamson/Mosley was infinitesimal.’58

As with the similarities and differences between Drieu

and Gardiner, the similarities and differences of British

and French radical right responses to rural issues can be

seen when one compares the English Mistery, the Kinship in

Husbandry and the BUF with Valois’s Faisceau and Dorgères’s

Greenshirts. What is most immediately striking is the

difference between elite and elitist groups and populist

agricultural movements, reflecting the different place held

by agriculture in the lives of the two countries. With

respect to the Faisceau, as indeed with other French fascist

organisations such as Solidarité Française, Francisme, the

PPF, La Cagoule or even the Croix de Feu, one is struck by

the lack of attention to rural issues; the land is mentioned48 Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages’, p. 219.49 George Stapledon, The Way of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1943),pp. 92, 94.50 Earl of Portsmouth, Alternative to Death: The Relationship between Soil, Family andCommunity (London: The Right Book Club, 1945 [1943]), p. 30.51 Malcolm Chase, ‘“North Sea and Baltic”: Historical Conceptions in theYouth Movement and the Transfer of Ideas from Germany to England in the1920s and 1930s’ in Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750-2000, eds. Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert andPeter Schumann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), p. 329.52 For more on Kinship in Husbandry see my Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933-1939: Before War and Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), ch5;R. J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Back to Basics: Rolf Gardiner, H. J. Massingham and“A Kinship in Husbandry”’, Rural History, 12, 1 (2001), pp. 85-108; RichardMoore-Colyer and Philip Conford, ‘A “Secret Society”? The Internal andExternal Relations of the Kinship in Husbandry, 1941-52’, Rural History,15, 2 (2004), pp. 189-206.

28

in rhetorical fashion in the manner of Barrès cited above,

but there is no real policy of rural revival. But the

Greenshirts are a different matter. Again, whether or not

the movement was ‘fascist’ is not the point59 so much as the

fact that it shows how in France a party devoted

specifically to rural issues which was decidedly on the

right could gain a mass following, especially in the West,

North, the Paris region, the Nice region and Algeria.

Perhaps the clearest example of the difference between

British and French rural movements is provided by the case

of Brittany, a region in which large-scale traditionalist

movements enjoyed considerable success. There was nothing

comparable to the Breton agricultural political movements in

Britain, for all the strength of the National Farmers Union

(NFU). For Breton agricultural movements, ‘In effect, the

apology for the rural world only functioned in counterpoint

to a negative portrayal of the town and of urban life,

charged with all evils and accused of putting individuals

and, even more so, whole societies at peril.’60 As le

chanoine (canon) Lemoine put it in a Nantes Catholic

journal, those who were attracted to the cities were soon

disillusioned:

Stuck in vulgar or coarse pleasures, they [elles]

are unable to use their wings and wallow in the

53 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, pp. 164-165.

29

debilitatingly commonplace or the fetid dregs;

seduced by subversive theories, they plunge into the

pernicious quagmire of provocative agitation and

sterile hatreds; driven into the gloom of

indifference or of impiety, they can only weaken and

perish.61

By contrast, ‘Intimately participating in the divine scheme,

for Catholic traditionalist elites the peasantry therefore

embodies the vital generational link, and through it the

history of the country: “perpetuating ancestral traditions,

rural values and the blood of the race.”’62 According to

Bensoussan, in Brittany this long-developed glorification of

the peasantry as the basis of social order enjoyed renewed

vigour during the interwar period [224]. Brittany was one of

the strongholds of Dorgèrism and, as Bensoussan rightly

notes, it is thus a good case study of the limits and

obstacles faced by all such enterprises in the French rural

world (455). Bensoussan writes that ‘it seems clear that

Dorgèrism did not become a fascist movement above all

because it was unable, historically, to become one.’ Since

54 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 167.55 Peer, ‘Peasants in France’.56 Jenks, ‘Kommissars for Agriculture’, Action, LI (6 February 1937), p.11, cited in David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: ReaktionBooks, 1998), p. 120.57 Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh: Floris Books,2001), p. 146.58 Howkins, p. 11. See also Philip Conford, ‘The Organic Challenge’ inThe Front Line of Freedom, eds. Short, Watkins and Martin, pp. 67-76.

30

it originally developed as ‘an expression of profound

peasant discontent in the face of … a worsening economic

situation’, Dorgèrism acquired a consistently supportive

social base but one which, in the last analysis, ‘was too

restrictive to secure a political dynamic capable of

destabilising the regime’ (457).63 In other words, Dorgèrism

was circumscribed to the rural world and was thus unable to

break out on to the political scene as a national political

movement (as Sternhell also notes). In particular, in

Brittany, dominated by Catholic institutions, a specifically

fascist ‘liturgy’ could not compete with traditional

religion (458). Besides, although it was an authentic59 One should note Sternhell’s strong criticism of Paxton’s findings inthe new preface to the 3rd edition of Ni droite ni gauche (2000) and hisstraightforward assertion that ‘what Dorgères led was a mass fascistmovement.’ For Sternhell, ‘the only important element which separatedDorgères from the ideal type of fascism was his defence of thecountryside against the town. This political divide prevented him fromtranscending class interests and appealing to the whole nation.’Sternhell, ‘Morphology of Fascism in France’ in France in the Era of Fascism,ed. Jenkins, pp. 52, 53. Indeed, as Gordon notes, (‘The Countryside andthe City’, p. 152), ‘There was no collaborationist follow-up after 1940to the Green Shirt movement, most of whose supporters looked to MarshalPétain and official Vichy after 1940.’60 Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale, pp. 223-224.[‘L’apologie du monde rural ne fonctionne, en effet, qu’en contrepointd’une évocation négative de la ville et de la vie urbaine, chargées detous les maux et accusées de mener les individus et, plus encore, lessociétés à leur perte.’]61 ‘Le but d’un groupe rural d’ACJF [Association catholique de lajeunesse francaise]’, Semaine religieuse du diocèse de Nantes, 17 June 1922,cited in Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale, p. 224.[‘Engluées en des jouissances vulgaires ou grossières, elles ne peuventdéployer leurs ailes et croupissent dans le déprimant terre-à-terre oules fétides bas-fonds; séduites par des théories subversives, elles seplongent au bourbier malsain des agitations troublantes et des hainesstériles; enfoncées dans les ténèbres de l’indifférence ou de l’impiété,elles ne peuvent que s’anémier et périr.’]

31

peasant movement, Dorgèrism, ‘the first large popular

peasant movement against the effects of capitalism, was

nevertheless manipulated by those against whom it claimed to

fight.’64 The Greenshirts did not generally appeal to the

farm workers; in fact, they were involved in breaking farm

workers’ strikes in the Paris basin in 1936 and 1937 and in

the Pays de Caux in 1937, and in Brittany Dorgèrism only

attempted to set up a workers’ group in 1936 when the CGT

moved into Finisterre.65 In Brittany one sees something more

akin to Poujadism avant la lettre than rural fascism (458).66

Conclusion

There appears to be a paradox: I have argued that rural

revivalism emerged from a middle-class conservative milieu

and not from the countryside itself, and thus that one would

expect to see it more strongly articulated in Britain. The

writings of Gardiner, Lymington and their colleagues,

whether on the radical right or not, testify to the truth of

this assertion. Yet it was in France that agricultural

politics was of greater importance. This is actually not

paradoxical: a focus on the countryside by parties of all

political hues in France should not be equated with the

blood and soil philosophy of eco-fascism. Rural revivalism

was the product of urban elites, but agricultural politics

was a topic that needed to be taken far more seriously in

32

France than in Britain. Hence the need to differentiate

ecological and peasant movements, as Bramwell suggests.

Thus, when it comes to ruralism and the fortunes of the

radical right, we should not be surprised that in France

there was insufficient support either for a rural fascism or

for a fully-fledged back-to-the-land movement, even though

there were more peasants than in Britain (where the term

‘yeoman’ was used partly to disguise the fact that there

were no longer any peasants). Where in Germany and Italy

fascism initially took root in the countryside, in France

(and Britain) the crisis of agriculture was not dire enough

either to form the basis of or to sustain a nationwide

62 Roger Grand, extrait du discours prononcé lors des journées ruralesde Nantes, le 12 mars 1927. Reproduit dans le bulletin mensuel de l’ACCF[Association catholique des chefs de famille] du diocèse de Nantes,avril 1927, cited in Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale,p. 224. [‘Participant de près a l’oeuvre divine, la paysannerie incarneaussi pour les élites catholiques traditionalistes le lien générationnelvital et à travers lui l’histoire du pays, “perpétuant les traditionsancestrales, les vertus champêtres et le sang de la race.”’]63 [‘il semble bien que le dorgèrisme ne soit pas devenu un mouvementfasciste tout d’abord parce qu’il n’a pas pu, historiquement, ledevenir. Il reste ainsi à mettre l’accent sur les contraintes qui ontpesé sur une telle dynamique. Expression, à l’origine, d’un profondmécontentement paysan face aux Assurances sociales puis devant unesituation économique dégradée, le dorgèrisme s’est d’abord développéautour de revendications essentiellement catégorielles etprofessionelles. Si cela lui permet de s’assurer une base socialeconséquente, celle-ci s’avère au final trop restrictive pour assurer unedynamique politique capable de déstabiliser le regime.’]64 Gervais, Jollivet and Tavernier, La fin de la France paysanne, p. 437.[‘Premier grand mouvement populaire paysan contre les effets ducapitalisme, il est cependant manipulé par ceux qu’il prétendcombattre.’]65 Howkins, p. 9; Suzanne Berger, Peasants Against Politics: Rural Organization inBrittany, 1911-67 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 73.66 See also Moulin, Peasantry and Society, p. 149.

33

fascist movement. Nor was there, as Paxton indicates (and

Bensoussan’s work confirms), enough ‘space’ in rural social

structures in France for the Greenshirts,67 or in Britain –

where the NFU was extremely strong and willingly worked with

the government – for the BUF.68 Rather, in France rural

nostalgia became part of the authoritarian Vichy consensus

that at first kept more radical versions of fascism at bay

and that absorbed peasants into an authoritarian,

corporatist structure (which many disliked or resisted), and

in Britain it became channeled into the war effort and,

after 1945, into the organic movement on the one hand and

the heritage industry on the other. Rural revivalism was

part of the radical right’s philosophy but was never enough

on its own to sustain a political programme, as the failure

of Valois and Dorgères proves. But that is a different story

– the failure of fascism in Britain has been discussed in

great detail elsewhere as has fascism’s channeling in France

into the collaborationist Vichy regime. ‘In many parts of

Europe’, Howkins notes, ‘the peasantry were “included” in

essentially urban movements like Rex [in Belgium], NSB [in

the Netherlands] or the NS [Germany]. It was an urban

politics which used the peasant voice and the peasant

strength, such as it was, to achieve ends which seemed

unlikely in the long run to much benefit the peasantry.’69

The success of rural revivalism was in mobilising support

for a broader programme; on its own rural fascism had too

34

small a constituency to threaten the established order, and

it even alienated the very urbanites whose fantasies about

the relationship between race and soil gave it a theoretical

basis in the first place.

Notes

67 Paxton, French Peasant Fascism, p. 14.68 See, for example, Michael Winter, ‘Corporatism and Agriculture in theU.K.: The Case of the Milk Marketing Board’, Sociologia Ruralis, 24, 2(1984), pp. 106-119.69 Howkins, p. 19.

35