The Red-Brown Bloc comes to Paris

Charles Maurras 

"The Action Francaise and Revolutionary Syndicalism" is an extremely interesting study about the complex interface between two seemingly opposite movements in pre-war France: the revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT and the proto-fascism of the royalist Action Francaise. The author, Paul Mazgaj, has made extensive use of declassified reports from police agents informing on the two movements, both of which militantly fought the French Republic. From these and other sources, Mazgaj concludes that some leading syndicalists and other leftists in France secretly collaborated with the anti-democratic "neo-royalists". An early example of what we would today call a "Red-Brown Bloc"!

The initiative came from the right. Before World War I, Action Francaise (henceforth called AF) attempted to broaden its support base by appeals to the working class, specifically the leftist revolutionary forces in the labor federation CGT, many of whom came out of anarchism. The rationale was simple: both the far left and the far right wanted to bring down the democratic republic by force. The AF activists hoped that workers would rally behind their nationalist, anti-Semitic attacks on "the plutocracy", the Jews or the Freemasons. When striking workers at a railway line owned by the Rothschilds were attacked by government troops, AF launched a support campaign. For a few years, AF's somewhat idiosyncratic brand of "royalism" was the dominant far right position, and even enjoyed quasi-official sanction from the Duke of Orléans, the pretender to the (abolished) French throne. The attempts to create a Red-Brown bloc against democracy had strong support in the most militant section of the AF, the Camelots de roi, who acted as the storm troopers of the movement. By contrast, AF leader Charles Maurras took a more cautious position, and seems to have accepted the pseudo-socialist line mostly as a temporary expedient or tactical ploy. Shortly before the war, Maurras engineered expulsions of the Red-Browns (some of whom had formed the "national socialist" Cercle Proudhon). After the war, the AF moved towards more traditional conservative positions. Yet, I think it's obvious that the early AF was in many ways a precursor to interwar fascism, with its populist and pseudo-socialist appeals, its street fighters and its cult of violence and the deed.

The main conduits of AF influence among the syndicalists were Georges Valois, a former anarchist, and Edouard Berth, a disciple and friend of Georges Sorel, a pro-syndicalist intellectual who would later turn towards nationalism. Surprisingly, Sorel himself plays only a minor role in the story. Despite repeated attempts by the AF to recruit him, Sorel remained mostly aloof from the Action Francaise. Yet, his curious blend of revolutionary syndicalism, conservative morality and historic pessimism, coupled with his later turn towards right-wing patriotism, obviously forms the ideological backdrop to the developments detailed by Mazgaj.

The AF never managed to reach the blue collar working class. However, they certainly did try. They *did* establish close relations with a number of leftist leaders and publishers, some of them syndicalist. One of them was Emile Janvion, a prominent supporter of the "ultra" faction within the CGT, i.e. the most anarchistic, ultra-left grouping within the unruly labor federation. Another was Emile Pataud, the leader of the electrical workers' syndicat in Paris and a prominent person on the French left-wing. Pataud was also the co-author of the popular syndicalist book "How we shall bring about the revolution". Outside CGT ranks, the AF cultivated Gustave Hervé and his magazine La Guerre Sociale. At the time, Hervé was an anarchist, anti-militarist firebrand. The AF also had influence agents at the editorial board of Bataille Syndicaliste, a leading CGT publication. For a time, Bataille received secret funds from the AF, funds which originally came from the Duke of Orléans! However, the main editors (who opposed the royalists) weren't informed where the money came from...

AF used their leftist contacts in various ways. The most obvious was to spread anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and crypto-royalist ideas among radical workers through meetings featuring AF's syndicalist contacts as prominent speakers. The AF's ultimate goal was to saw dissension within the left, thereby breaking apart the "Dreyfusard coalition" of leftists and "bourgeois" Republicans. (The Dreyfusards were the leftist and centrist supporters of the Republic, named after Alfred Dreyfus, the French army captain of Jewish descent framed for treason by an anti-Semitic tribunal. The right-wingers were known as the Anti-Dreyfusards. The Dreyfus Affair was easily the most notorious political scandal in pre-war France.) Sowing dissension between the parliamentary socialists and the direct action-oriented syndicalists was probably pretty easy. The AF was also interested in internal factional struggles inside the syndicalist CGT itself, where they backed the "ultras" (ultra-lefts) against the more pragmatic "politiques". Are we to believe the police informers, the AF had more ulterior motives, too. A secret source within the CGT informed the AF about a certain bakery in Paris, which would be used by the government to provide the city with food in the event of a crisis. Had a revolutionary situation developed, the AF would presumably have tried to cut off this vital link with the help of syndicalist militants!

A political crisis, the "Bernstein affair", did develop in 1911, when the AF and its thugs took over the streets of Paris, demanding the cancellation of a Jewish theatre play. The police was forced to instruct the theatre to actually do so. Meanwhile, AF's leftist assets were trying to whip up anti-Semitic sentiments among workers. However, these dramatic events proved to be the high point of the Red-Brown bloc against the Republic. Unexpectedly, Hervé and his supporters got cold feet, and in a dramatic turnaround called on the left to preserve the Dreyfusard alliance. The Hervéists also organized their own, leftist street fighters to challenge the Camelots du roi! It was pretty much downhill from there. The bulk of the left, including the CGT, rejected the anti-Semitism of Janvion and Pataud. Meanwhile, CGT secretary-general Leon Jouhaux gradually steered the CGT away from revolutionary syndicalism towards more reformist positions. The approaching world war created a rift between the anti-militarist "ultras" and the militarist, pro-nationalist Action Francaise. Despite its anti-Republicanism, the AF decided to support the Republic against Germany (a monarchy). In a final ironic twist, Hervé and the CGT also fell in line behind the French fatherland during World War I, thereby creating an unexpected "bloc" with the royalists, their political opponents...

Mazgaj's book raises disturbing questions. Is the extreme left the natural bedfellow of the extreme right? Can fascists appeal to labor unions or militant segments of the working class? And where *does* the money come from? Janvion, Pataud and Hervé seems to have been Machiavellian opportunists, rather than sincere believers in a leftist-monarchist ideological convergence. However, the AF militants who took the initiative in creating a Red-Brown bloc did believe that a synthesis of right-wing nationalism and socialism was possible. The Cercle Proudhon, where Valois and Berth rubbed shoulders with the young savages from the Camelots, is sometimes seen as the inventor of fascist ideology. Indeed, fascism - with its blend of "integral" nationalism and pseudo-socialist populist appeals - can be seen as "Red-Brown" in itself.

Personally, I don't think a fully-formed Red-Brown bloc between the CGT and the AF was ever possible. Fascism, after all, strives to smash the independent labor movement. It also believes in a strict (and traditional) social hierarchy. However, if leftism is declutched from the independent labor movement, becoming a freely floating satellite in search of a new social base (or easy money), anything can happen. It's probably not a co-incidence that the most successful Red-Brown Bloc is the one in Russia, where "the left" is really the old, hierarchic, Greater Russian bureaucracy of the Soviet period and thus can easily blend with royalists and outright fascists. I predict more left/fascist combinations in the future, involving leftists with little or no support within the organized working class...

As for Paul Mazgaj's book, I recommend it as an intriguing study of a little known episode in the history of both revolutionary syndicalism and far right politics.