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Fascists on the rampage – then and now

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Thousands of far-right fanatics, many of them armed, gather in front of the seat of government, whipped-up by fake news and racist propaganda, convinced that the political elite is mired in corruption. They battle with the police, who open fire. At least 15 demonstrators and one police officer are killed and about 2,000 people are injured. One important far-right leader marches his troops away from the battle and the rest are forced to retreat.

You may notice that this is not what happened in Washington on Wednesday.

It is a very brief summary of events in Paris on 6 February 1934 when far-right groups collectively known as les ligues (let’s leave aside the debate of how fascist they were) demonstrated against a government that had been hit by a series of corruption scandals and had decided to transfer the right-wing prefect of police, Jean Chiappe, to Morocco.

Corruption, anti-Semitism, xenophobia

Over the preceding weeks, there had been a series of right-wing demonstrations against corruption, fuelled by anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, as well as another French right-wing hobby-horse, anti-freemasonry.  

Veterans’ groups aligned with the Communist Party, at the time still tied to the third period line that dubbed social-democrats “social-fascists”, had also organised their own simultaneous protests.

Far-right demonstrators face police on Paris’s Place de la Concorde

This all culminated in the 6 February demonstrations, during which thousands of far-right street-fighters assembled in various parts of Paris, a large number of them in front of the National Assembly. Many were carrying projectiles, fireworks or fire-arms, as well as ball-bearings to throw under the hooves police horses or poles with razor blades attached to cut their tendons.

Unlike the US authorities, the French government pulled out the police in force. Then as now, nobody would accuse French cops of being woolly-minded liberals but, having already suffered the attentions of the right-wing militias on previous protests, they opened fire in response to explosions that may or may not have been shots, with the results noted above.

The contrast with the failure to mobilise adequate defence for the Capitol and the lack of the police’s customary brio when it comes to crowd control is obvious. Then again, the sitting French president had not incited the mob to demonstrate.

The riot inspired an immediate debate as to whether there had been at attempted putsch. In both cases, the insurgents don’t seem to have had a coherent plan and didn’t know what to do once they had put thousands on the streets, or in the American case, in the seat of government.

Left unites against fascism

So what happened after the 1934 riot?

Its immediate result was a shift to the right in government, which led to the first appearance of Marshall Philippe Pétain in a ministerial position. (According to General Bornet, he revoked the honour awarded to garde mobile who was killed during the riot and the medal was removed from the officer’s coffin in front of his family as they attended his funeral.)

But, coup attempt or not, the presence of thousands of armed far-right activists on the streets shocked the left into action.

The French Communist Party joined the Socialist Party (SFIO) in demonstrations and strikes against fascism and was instrumental in persuading the Communist International to ditch the third period’s sectarianism.

That in turn led to the 1936 election of the popular front government, led by the SFIO with the bourgeois Radical Socialists holding ministerial posts and the Communists supporting from outside.

The popular front government is still remembered for important reforms – the introduction of the first paid holidays and unemployment pay, the reduction of the working week from 48 hours to 40, and the nationalisation of the rail network and other important industries, although it was a massive strike movement that forced this radical turn.

The bad news is that it failed in its initial primary aim, that of preventing fascism.

A significant number of members of the 200 families who notoriously controlled the French economy at the time – the Michelins, Renaults, Cotys, Taittingers (you’ll notice that these names are still around) – continued to finance the far right, sponsoring anti-Semitism, coup plots and reactionary conspiracy theories as an ideological bulwark against the expropriation of their wealth.

They chose Pétain and collaboration with the Nazis when it came to the national humiliation of 1940. And, while a few of the far right took their patriotism seriously and joined the resistance, many of the ligues’ members ended up in the Vichy government’s militias, in the editorial chairs of collaborationist papers or in important political positions.

Post-Trump Republicans and the modern militias

The US today is clearly not the same as France in the 30s.

Trump is on his way out of office and the violent attempts to prevent his departure have fizzled out.

But, despite all the talk of “moderate” Republicans being forced to distance themselves from him, he has pushed his party even further to the right. Despite all the racism, vulgarity, narcissism and contempt for democratic institutions, the mainstream Republican voter cast his or her ballot for Trump. To really build a worthwhile momentum, the ambitious careerist has to fire up the crazies with just those attributes that shock the rest of us so that is the path many Republicans seem likely to follow over the next few years.

Although the spectre of Bolshevism may not be obviously haunting the West, the US and Europe have entered an era of economic, social, demographic and ideological turmoil. Capitalism is being called into question, especially by young people, in a way it has not been since long before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, capital is increasingly addicted to short-term gains, emptying businesses’ coffers to pay out dividends and enormous salaries to top bosses. Many of the wealthy are deeply committed to defending their right to amass ever vaster fortunes, especially in the US where a kind of neo-Calvinism preaches that the rich are rich because they deserve to be so.

This is now the Republicans’ creed. Combined with white suprematism and a load of other ideological junk, it is the dogma of the Proud Boys and other modern-day ligues and the lumpen bourgeoisie will continue to sponsor them.

Nobody but an idiot would expect the Biden presidency to come up with any reforms as significant as those of the French Popular Front. That means it will be an even less reliable bulwark against the right, once they have caught their breath and launched new political offensives.

Polarisation, turmoil, confusion lie ahead of us. The looming climate catastrophe means that the long-term stakes are even higher than in the 1930s, while those who oppose the solutions remain as ruthless as ever. Let’s hope we have the courage and the means to face them down.

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Coronavirus diary day 79 – Black lives matter in France, too

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Who’d have thought anything could push a global pandemic out of the lead story spot? Well, a nine-minute video of a US cop murdering a black man has and it’s sparked protests around the world. In Paris yesterday an estimated 20,000 people defied a ban on protests to link the killing to French police racism.

But stop! There’s none of that there here! Not according to Paris Préfet de Police Didier Lallement, who is concerned that such an accusation has hurt the feelings of his troops.

The Paris police force “is not violent, nor racist: it acts within the framework of the right to liberty for all”, he claimed in an email to the capital’s 27,500 cops.

The family of Adama Traoré beg to differ. They organised yesterday’s demo four years after his death in police custody.

Three official reports have cleared the three cops who pinned him to the ground. But a counter-inquiry commissioned by the family on Tuesday blamed their robust technique of detention.

Thanks to the family’s persistence, Traoré’s case has become a focus for “accusations of violence and racism, repeated endlessly by social networks and certain activist groups”, as Lallement puts it.

Regular deaths and injuries in the banlieue, along with videos of racial abuse and brutality, tend to bear those accusations out.

Some French people can get a little self-righteous about racism in the US. After all, wasn’t this the country where black GIs found welcome relief from the Jim Crow South at the end of World War II and where artists like Miles Davis and James Baldwin came to breathe freer creative air?

But they had the advantages of not being from former colonies or living on deprived estates in the banlieue.

“I realise that the Algerian is the nigger in Paris,” Baldwin commented after spending some time here.

Traoré’s family came to France from Mali, a former French colony in sub-Saharan Africa.

Back to the virus. Yesterday was the beginning of phase 2 of post-lockdown.

In Champigny the market had already opened, in a depleted form and the shoppers turned out, mostly wearing masks, and met up with friends

.

Some of the cafés had employed a flexible interpretation of the rules by offering drinks “to take away” under phase 1.

In Ile de France, which is the last orange for not-too-good area left in the country, they can now serve en terasse but not Inside.

Schoolkids and the un- or undereployed are sunning themselves on the banks of the Marne, or even on the river itself.

My afternoon walk took me to the former Pathé studios at Joinville-le-Pont, now a collection of workplaces, some apparently still linked to the film industry, and flats.

They were once frequented by Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean Renoir and other luminaries. They drank in the guingettes, the restaurants along the riverside, and added some glamour to this town on the outskirts of Paris.

Our late neighbour, Claude, was a house painter. He worked on the site once and told me they had conveyor belts going across it to transport the film and special double doors to prevent light entering the processing laboratories.

The 1946 film Les Portes de la Nuit was partly filmed there. This shot is a reconstruction of the overhead metro at La Chapelle in Paris, the set designed by Alexandre Trauner.

Trauner was a Hungarian who fled the far-right, anti-Semitic Horthy regime in 1929 and left a photographic record of the streets of Paris in the 1930s due to his research for his work. Here’s one of his preparatory sketches for another film, Le Jour se lève.


Asylum-seekers, eh?

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 28,940, 107 in 24 hours. 14,208 people are in hospital, down 260 yesterday, 1,253 patients are in intensive care, down 49, and 68,812 have been discharged, 372 in 24 hours.

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Coronavirus diary day 63 – Schools, slaughterhouses and worrying about America

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As more French pupils go back to school this Monday, 70 new cases of Covid-19 have been identified in infant schools, which partially reopened last week. Several schools, in various parts of the country, have had to close again.

Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer says the kids probably caught the virus before returning to school on 11 May and insists that the closures show that “we are strict”.

Collèges, whose pupils are aged between 11 and 15, partially reopen today in green zones of low infection rates.

Of the 25 clusters found last week, some in green zones, two large ones are in slaughterhouses, reinforcing international concern that abattoirs are particularly prone to infection.

More than 100 workers have tested positive – 63 in a slaughterhouse in Brittany, 34 in another near Orléans.

More cases may be found in the latter, since the 400 employees are to be tested today and tomorrow. Officials say that the required precautions – hand gel, temperature taken on entry – seem to have been observed.

There have been a number of cases in meat-packing plants in the US and Germany, leading to concerns that they are particularly vulnerable to the virus.

The authorities in the two French regions have launched investigations.

In general the signs a week after lockdown are relatively good.

Although the number of deaths went over 28,000 on Sunday, there have been no more than 700 new cases recorded on any given day, way below the 3,000 that Prime Minister Edouard Phlippe said would lead to him confining us to our homes again.

The number of people infected by a carrier is 0.6, below the one per carrier that indicates epidemic, and testing has become more widespread over the last week with only 2% proving positive.

But the virus’s incubation period is seven to 14 days, so the experts say we have to wait a week before breathing a sigh of relief (through our face-masks, of course).

Is anybody else worried about a Trump coup after the US presidential election?

Here’s the scenario: Assuming the election isn’t called off because of a second wave of Covid-19 and assuming Biden wins, despite being a terrible candidate and despite the possibility that the economy will pick up if the virus subsides, will Trump accept the result?

Isn’t he likely to declare there was fraud and that he actually won? Neither he nor his hard-core supporters are constrained by the requirement of proof for an assertion they want to believe, so hundreds of thousands of hard-right fanatics could be mobilised to support his claim.

As we have seen in the anti-lockdown demos, those die-hards come largely from the enraged petite bourgeoisie, the classic base of fascist movements, with the all-American ideology of an SUV-driving Calvinist elect, entitled to unlimited consumption, but convinced of their own victimhood.

Some of them are armed and able to march into seats of government unhindered.

What would the Democrats do if they did so across the country in the aftermath of the election results?

What would the police and the army do? Would generals and police chiefs order the dispersal of these militias, using arms if necessary?

Would the ranks obey those orders if they came? Would they split more or less on racial lines?

So what would happen? Civil war? A coup, followed by pogroms and purges?                                                                                                                                       

The US is showing the symptoms of an empire in decline. But none of its leaders show any sign of accepting the loss of world hegemony, Trump least of all. How would he face up to China’s rise if he returned to power?

Back to France. The official Covid-19 death toll now stands at 28,108, 483 in the past 24 hours. 19,361 people are in hospital, 71 down yesterday, and 2,087 in intensive care, down 45. 61,213 people have been discharged from hospital, 147 yesterday.

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An open letter to AOC from some guy nobody’s heard of

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The Democratic Socialist Congresswoman’s answer to well-heeled Republicans who claim that environmental concerns are “elitist” was inspiring. But …

Dear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes,

You probably won’t read this, which is fair enough, given that I’m an OWM living in France who has never set foot in the US.

What’s more, not only do I have zero influence on American politics, my influence over the politics of the country where I was born (the UK) and the one where I now live is pretty much zero, too. But then I have that in common with most citizens of those countries.

Nevertheless, as a lifelong left-winger, I would like to say how encouraging it is to see a professed socialist elected to the US Congress and how impressed I was by your takedown of Republican sneers that concern over climate change is “elitist”.

But – you knew there was going to be a “but”, didn’t you? – I must take issue with your statement that climate change “should not be a partisan issue”.

Of course many US politicians, and practitioners of other equally respectable professions, are “more concerned about helping oil companies than helping their own families”. Not only are they corrupted by lobbies, as you showed so effectively in another gone-viral speech, but defending the rich and powerful is actually what their politics is about.

True, in the long term climate change will threaten all human civilisation but capitalism is all about the short-term. Increasingly so, as Thomas Piketty has shown, with companies frittering away their own future by paying out bigger and bigger dividends to shareholders.

Furthermore, interests that will in the long-run endanger the whole kit and caboodle of humanity have become so entrenched they can dictate current policy.

And, let’s be honest, politics, like human consciousness, is formed by the past, which is a handicap when it comes to planning for the future.

I was tempted to describe Sean Duffy’s remarks as “stupid crap” but it’s not, it’s cunning and disingenuous crap designed to convince middle-class and working-class people that their interests converge with those of big business and its political, legal and media courtesans.

That’s what their politics is about.

So climate change, like everything else of any importance, is a partisan issue, although the partisan divide may also appear within the Democratic Party.

This may seem like nitpicking but in France we have an illustration of why it is important to be clear about what are left-wing values and what are right-wing ones.

That’s the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement.

Yellow Vests campaign on a market near Paris. Photo: Tony Cross

Starting as a reaction to a decree from on high that adversely affects the vulnerable, the kind of action your Green New Deal warns against, it has become a mass protest that is diffuse and difficult to define but essentially against inequality.

That’s a left-wing concern, right? Fighting inequality and eventually establishing a classless society is what socialism is all about, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, not for many Gilets Jaunes. As one young activist told me the other day, the experience of France’s Socialist Party in government, carrying out a pro-business programme that has increased inequality and left many feeling ignored or despised, has emptied the idea of socialism of its meaning for a large number of the people it is supposed to be fighting for.

So, at the same time as that young man outlined what seems to me a very clear-sighted analysis, an older woman was declaring that the fight against inequality is “above politics”.

In France today the chattering classes have a tendency to throw around the terms left and right without any reference to actual policies, as if they were tribal loyalties. The disillusionment with that sort of politics is such that both candidates in the final round of the last presidential election – one a far-right hate-monger, the other a social liberal with a right-wing economic programme – declared themselves to be neither on the left or right. (They are also both millionaires, by the way.)

We on the radical left used to think that after attempts to reform capitalism had failed the masses would turn to us. It’s proved a little more complicated than that. Various experiences of “socialists” and “communists” in office, as well as the arrogance and callous indifference of EU bureaucrats and traditional politicians, have led to a kind of anti-political demagogy that exploits disillusion and has allowed xenophobic, far-right movements to grow in several European countries.

So I don’t think we should make any concessions to the idea that because something’s important it is non-partisan or not political.

Socialist politics are about serving the interests of the majority and protecting the future of all humanity.

I imagine that’s why you took up the political cudgels.

We owe it to our adversaries to refrain from distorting what they stand for. But we owe it to humanity not to give them credit where credit is not due.

Yours in solidarity,

Tony Cross

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