French Popular Party
프랑스인민당
A fascist and antisemitic party founded at Saint-Denis on 28 June 1936 by Jacques Doriot after his expulsion from the French Communist Party. Opposing the Popular Front, it gathered former Communists and members of the dissolved far-right leagues; under the German occupation it pressed hardest for military collaboration with Nazi Germany and is generally regarded as the most collaborationist party in France. It did not survive Doriot's death in February 1945.
In depth
The party was founded by Doriot together with Henri Barbé, Paul Marion and other former Communists who had turned to nationalism in opposition to the Popular Front. It rested at first on the working-class population of Saint-Denis, where Doriot had been the Communist mayor from 1930 to 1934, and it drew in members of Action Française, the Jeunesses Patriotes, the Croix-de-Feu and Solidarité Française; when the Popular Front government dissolved those leagues in 1936, many members of Solidarité Française came over to it. Its leadership kept the Communist name Politburo, yet the party was violently anti-Marxist, and its paramilitary Service d'Ordre beat Communist supporters.
When Doriot lost the Saint-Denis mayoral election in 1937 and with it his working-class base, the party moved towards corporatism and took money from French business, including the Banque Worms, and from Mussolini's Italy, buying newspapers such as La Liberté. Ambiguous about antisemitism at first, by 1938 its literature was full of the 'Judeo-masonic-bolshevik' conspiracy.
After the defeat of 1940 the party grew with German support, criticising Pétain's regime as too moderate and calling for troops on the Russian front and for racial policies modelled on Nazi Germany's. In 1941 Doriot urged members to join the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (LVF), and PPF members helped the Gestapo and the Milice round up Jews for deportation. In 1944 Doriot moved to Germany and competed with the Vichy exiles at Sigmaringen for leadership, but he was killed by Allied strafing on 22 February 1945 and the party ended with him.