Paris: 6 February 1934

"Throw the Deputies in the Seine" 

Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly.

European fascism is a complicated subject, and I think many people make the mistake of focusing on Germany, and particularly Germany after the Nazis rose to power. As I've argued before, the Weimar experience seems to provide more useful lessons for those of us concerned about the direction of American politics. 

I also think that useful, and less inflammatory, parallels to the American experience can be found in other European countries, most notably Italy (see my article Jim Crow Was a Failed State, which goes through the Italian experience in some detail), and also France. 

One striking parallel from the French experience was an assault on the Palais Bourbon, seat of the French National Assembly, in Paris on 6 February 1934. It was in a number of ways different from what happened at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on 6 January 2021, but there are useful parallels that help us build a richer context for what happened to the People's House. One big lesson: Don't make martyrs.

Here's a description of what happened way back in 1934. At that time, the National Assembly was called the Chamber of Deputies. The Palais Bourbon is on the left bank of the Seine directly across from the Place de la Concorde. There's a bridge, called the Pont de la Concorde. 

"Nationalist and veterans groups took matters into their own hands with the street demonstrations of 6 February 1934, the wildest night Paris had seen since 1871. It no longer seems as certain as it did at the time that the organizers of this mass demonstration sought to overthrow the republic. But they coordinated their plans for a mass move on "la maison sans fenetres," the Chamber of Deputies, with slogans like 'throw the deputies in the Seine.' Action Francaise, the largest veterans' organization, the Union Nationale des Combattants, the Croix de Feu, and other middle-class nationalist direct-action groups massed some 40,000 demonstrators in a march on the Chamber. Although the Croix de Feu on the Left Bank didn't try very hard, the Action Francaise and UNC groups crossing the bridge from the Place de la Concorde pressed for hours against police barricades until finally the police fired into the crowd (it is still not clear what orders had been given by Eugene Frot, the minister of the interior), killing 16 and wounding 655. The Chamber was kept inviolate, but Edouard Daladier's government resigned the next day without being voted into a minority."

This is from pages 244-245 of Robert Paxton's 1972 book Vichy France. I've been a Paxton fan for a very long time. 

The dead and the wounded provided the right with an incandescent organizing principle, one they used to good effect for years.

Fascist rage and increasing power elicited a strong response from the left, resulting in a virtual civil war in France between 1934 and 1937.  The splintered parties of the left united in the Popular Front, which came to power in 1936. This period, which I think is instructive for Americans in our current situation, has been overshadowed by the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, and of course World War II, which began in 1939.

There wasn't a lot of shooting, but there were many strikes by workers, and a right-wing group called the Cagoule perpetrated quite a bit of violence, including the courtesy assassinations of two opponents of Mussolini, the brothers Carlo and Nello Roselli, in 1937. The divisions between left and right remained deep and bitter, and undoubtedly contributed to the ease with which Germany conquered France in 1940.

A few days after the sack of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Professor Paxton came back to the Palais Bourbon and, in the process, gave me a present. He had for years been declining to label Donald Trump a fascist, for valid reasons. In Newsweek on January 11, 2021, he wrote, "Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, [2021] removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary." 

I've been calling Trump a fascist for a while, but I must say I feel more comfortable doing so now that Professor Paxton has changed his position.

Photo Credit: Per Wikimedia Commons, 2011.

See also Fascism, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?