A comparison between the extreme right in contemporary France and Britain

Contemporary European History

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 101-116

  Copsey, Nigel ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 16244385339     PISSN: 09607773     EISSN: 14692171     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0960777300004069     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. This paper was originally presented to the workshop on 'Racist Parties in Europe: A New Political Family' at the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions, Bordeaux, 27 April to 2 May 1995. The author would like to thank the workshop participants for their comments. I would also like to thank Roger Eatwell for his comments on an early draft.
2. See, for example, Hans-Georg Betz, 'The New Politics of Resentment: Radical Right-wing Populist Parties in Western Europe', Comparative Politics, Vol. 25, no. 3 (1993), 413-27;
3. idem, Radical Right-wing Populism in Western Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994);
4. and Paul Taggart, 'New Populist Parties in Western Europe', West European Politics, Vol. 18, no. 1 (1995), 34-51.
5. For examples of 'country-specific' accounts, see Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan, eds, The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1995);
6. Paul Hainsworth, ed., The Extreme Right in Europe and the USA (London: Pinter, 1992);
7. and Peter Merkl and Leonard Weinberg, eds, Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993).
8. For an overview of the National Front in the 1980s, see Christopher T. Husbands, 'Extreme Right-wing Politics in Great Britain: The Recent Marginalisation of the National Front', West European Politics, Vol. 11, no. 2 (1988), 65-79;
9. and Roger Eatwell, 'The Esoteric Ideology of the National Front in the 1980s', in Mike Cronin, ed., The Failure of British Fascism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 99-117.
10. See Hainsworth, Extreme Right, 40-4.
11. At the presidential elections of April 1995, Le Pen polled 15% of the vote which surpassed his previous zenith of 14.4% of the vote at the 1988 presidential elections. For coverage of the presidential and municipal elections of 1995, see James G. Shields, 'The Challenge of the Front National: Presidential and Municipal Elections in France', Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 29, no. 4 (1995), 19-30.
12. On ideology and its location outside the individual, see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991), 15-17.
13. On the concept of political space and its application to the far right in Britain see Martin Durham, 'The Conservative Party, the British Extreme Right and the Problem of Political Space, 1967-83' in Cronin, Failure of British Fascism, 81-98
14. and Nigel Copsey, 'Contemporary Fascism in the Local Arena: The British National Party and "Rights for Whites"', in Cronin, Failure of British Fascism, 118-40.
15. See Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (London: Abacus, 1995), 424-32.
16. A useful sociological approach connecting the rise of right-wing radicalism to the advent of post-industrial capitalism is provided by Betz, Radical Right-wing Populism, 22-35.
17. See Malcolm Anderson, Conservative Politics in France (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), 283-4.
18. The point that the FN was intended to be neo-fascist is clear from Ordre Nouveau's literature. See 'Pour un Ordre Nouveau", Special Congress Supplement (1973), 11.
19. See Le Monde, 27 Dec. 1972, 7.
20. Jean-Marie Le Pen was a former Poujadist deputy and campaign manager for Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt's presidential bid in 1965. He was not a member of Ordre Nouveau and consequently had a relatively 'moderate' image on the French extreme right. This enabled Le Pen to rally various far-right strands when he became president of the FN in 1972. For an overview of Le Pen, see Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 27-35.
21. See Jean-Yves Camus and René Monzat, Les Droites Nationales et Radicales en France (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1992).
22. On immigration and the decision-making process in France (and Britain) in the post-war period, see Gary P. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Radical Conflict in Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
23. The Bonnet Law, as the name of the law suggests, was championed by Christian Bonnet, then Minister of the Interior under Giscard. This law provided for the expulsion of foreigners if they had, inter alia, no resident's permit or if the permit was false, if they had entered France illegally and, also, if they constituted 'a threat to public order'. An additional circular was directed towards foreign students. Bonnet had expressed concern at the alleged militancy of foreign students, their numbers and also 'false' students, i.e. those that used and abused the system to stay and work in France. The new measures required among other things that foreign students had to demonstrate that they were of 'good character' and had 'sufficient' financial resources.
24. See Marcus, The National Front, 77-82.
25. See Agnès Hochet, 'L'immigration dans le débat politique français de 1981 à 1988', Pouvoirs, no. 47, 23-30.
26. The 'threshold of tolerance' made the 'scientific' contention that an inescapable racist backlash against immigrants would occur in a locality if the density of the immigrant community reached a certain level (arbitrarily set at anything between 10% and 30%). This concept had been absorbed by central government by the end of the 1960s and had filtered down to local administration by the mid-1970s. On the discourse of immigration in France, see Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992).
27. See Monica Charlot, 'L'emergence du Front National', Revue française de science politique, Vol. 36, no. 1 (1986), 30-45.
28. Jean-Pierre Stirbois alongside Michel Collinot had formed a new camp in the FN in December 1977 known as the solidaristes. Although this faction was regarded as 'neo-fascist', Stirbois and Collinot played an important role in the internal moderation of the FN from 1978. Stirbois became the FN's general secretary and played a key role in the internal development of the FN until his death in 1988. See Peter Fysh and Jim Wolfreys, 'Le Pen, the National Front and the Extreme Right in France', Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 45, no. 3 (1992), 309-36;
29. and David Bell, 'The French National Front', History of European Ideas, Vol. 18, no.2 (1994), 225-40.
30. Bruno Mégret is a defector from the conservative right. In 1988 he became responsible for propaganda, communication and the ideological training of party activists. See Guy Birenbaum, Le Front National en Politique (Paris: Balland, 1992), 74-109.
31. The Groupes Nationalistes Révolutionnaires was headed by François Duprat. Duprat was a former Ordre Nouveau activist and appears to have been used by Le Pen to recruit neo-fascists from the Parti des Forces Nouvelles. However, in 1978 Duprat was assassinated and this paved the way for the ascendancy of Stirbois and Collinot.
32. See for example, Michalina Vaughan, 'The Extreme Right in France: Lépenisme or the Politics of Fear', in Cheles, Ferguson and Vaughan, The Far Right, 215-25. Arguably, Vaughan overstates the role of Le Pen in the rise of the FN. Note how she concludes: 'It could be said of Le Pen . . . that it is the person rather than the programme in which people put their trust.'
33. See Pascal Perrineau, 'Le Front national: 1972-1992', in Michel Winock, ed., Histoire de l'extrême-droite en France (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 243-98;
34. Emmanual Todd, The Making of Modern France. Politics, Ideology and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 192-203;
35. and Pierre Bréchon and Subrata Mitra, 'The National Front in France: The Emergence of an Extreme Right Protest Movement', Comparative Politics, Vol. 25, no. 1 (1992), 63-82.
36. On application of the 'social isolation" hypothesis to electoral support for the Front National between 1989 and 1994, see Nonna Mayer and Patrick Moreau, 'Electoral Support for the German Republikaner and the French National Front 1989-1994', paper presented to the workshop on 'Racist Parties in Europe'.
37. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, 'Hostility and Violence towards Foreigners in Germany', in Tore Björgo and Rob Witte, eds, Racist Violence in Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 25.
38. See Peter Hall, Governing the Economy (Oxford: Polity, 1986), 196.
39. On the crisis of national identity in France, see Brian Jenkins and Nigel Copsey, 'Nation, Nationalism and National Identity in France', in Brian Jenkins and Spyros Sofos, eds, Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (London: Routledge, 1996), esp. 108-21.
40. Mosley created the Union Movement, which was 'Europeanist' in inspiration, following the Second World War. See Anna Poole, 'Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement: Success or Failure?', in Cronin, Failure of British Fascism, 53-80. The elements rejecting this approach in favour of extreme British nationalism can be defined as 'non-Mosleyite'.
41. A. K. Chesterton was a leading figure in the interwar British Union of Fascists. He broke with Mosley in 1938 over Mosley's pro-German policy. In the 1950s he led the League of Empire Loyalists which was more a pressure group than a political party. It engaged in a series of publicity stunts such as infiltrating and disrupting Conservative Party conferences. On Chesterton, see Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995), 264-5.
42. In the 1930s, Arnold Leese was leader of the rabidly anti-semitic Imperial Fascist League which had denounced Mosley as a 'kosher fascist' (!). In the early 1950s, the Imperial Fascist League was reborn as the National Workers Movement Following the death of Leese in 1956, Colin Jordan became heir to the Leese tradition of virulent nazism. In the early 1960s, Jordan was joined by John Tyndall and Martin Webster in the National Socialist Movement. Following the break-up of the National Socialist Movement, and an interlude in the Greater Britain Movement, Tyndall and Webster joined the National Front and proceeded to dominate the NF for much of the 1970s. On the formation of the NF, see Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 275-80.
43. See Candour, no. 469, Oct. 1967, 74.
44. See Robert Miles, 'The Riots of 1958', Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 3, no. 3 (1984), 352-75.
45. In April 1968, Enoch Powell made a dramatic speech which attacked the number of immigrants coming into Britain and forecast a future of racial violence. This 'rivers of blood' speech attracted substantial support and made Powell a figure of national political importance. Powell also played a significant role in opposition to the Ugandan Asians. On Powell and the National Front, see Durham, in Cronin, Failure of British Fascism, 84-98.
46. The Monday Club, an organisation on the ultra-right fringes of the Conservative party, was created in 1961. It had developed a strong anti-immigration position by the early 1970s.
47. On reporting the NF, see Barry Troyna, "The Media and the Electoral Decline of the National Front', Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 14, no. 3 (1980), 25-30.
48. On the local press and the NF, see Nigel Copsey, 'The Extreme Right in Contemporary France and Britain', PhD thesis (University of Portsmouth, 1995), 182-93.
49. Anthony Messina, Race and Party Competition in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 144.
50. Searchlight, When Hate Comes to Town (London: Searchlight Educational Trust, 1995), 2.3-3.
51. See Christopher T. Husbands, Racial Exclusionism and the City (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983).
52. See Martin Harrop, Judith England and Christopher T. Husbands, 'The Bases of National Front Support', Political Studies, Vol. 28, no. 2 (1980), 271-83.
53. See Nationalism Today, no. 23, July/Aug. 1984, 11.
54. Nationalism Today, no. 29, May 1985, 11.
55. Distributism had been a fringe political gathering of the interwar years in Britain grouped around the two leading literary figures of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton (a cousin to A. K. Chesterton). It advocated a rural-orientated 'peasant state'. Anti-modern, anti-urban, its revolutionary alternative was the resurrection of small rural medieval guilds (such was its abhorrence of the modern, atomistic industrial state). It was also strongly imbued with Catholicism and anti-semitism. On the NF's radical ideology in the 1980s, see Eatwell, in Cronin, Failure of British Fascism, 99-117.
56. The 'political soldiers' was a self-designated term used by the National Front. A booklet entitled 'The Political Soldier', setting out the beliefs of the 'political soldier' faction was written by Derek Holland (one of the NF's leaders). On the 'political soldiers', see Searchlight, From Ballots to Bombs. The Inside Story of the National Front's Political Soldiers (London: Searchlight Publishing, 1989).
57. Cited in Searchlight, no. 242, Aug. 1995, 5. However, following the renaming of the party, one faction did remain loyal to the original NF name.