The Fascist Riot of 6 February 1934

Stavisky's body and a parliament nobody believed

The Depression reached France late. Exports collapsed and unemployment climbed from 1931, but governments were tied to the gold standard and to balanced budgets. The left won the 1932 elections and still the Radicals would not govern with the Socialists; five cabinets came and went in two years. Parliament began to look like a body incapable of deciding anything.

In December 1933 a scandal landed on top of that. Alexandre Stavisky, a financier, had raised hundreds of millions of francs on poorly secured bonds issued through the municipal pawnshop of Bayonne. He had been indicted repeatedly and had walked free while his trial was postponed nineteen times, protected by connections among Radical politicians and in the judiciary: the public prosecutor in Paris who sat on the case was the prime minister's brother-in-law. On 8 January 1934 he was found in a chalet at Chamonix with a gunshot wound, and the police called it suicide. 'The police shot him from very close range' became a headline joke on the right. Action Française, the Jeunesses Patriotes founded by Pierre Taittinger, Solidarité Française created and funded by the perfume magnate François Coty, and the Croix-de-Feu grown out of a veterans' association, took the affair as proof of a rotten republic and went into the streets almost nightly.

'The Jewish swindler': a scandal translated into racial agitation

Stavisky was born into a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, came to France as a child with his parents and was naturalised later. To the far-right press this was not an incidental detail of the affair but its meaning. Action Française carried 'France for the French' beside its masthead, and Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet took the scandal as the latest proof of an old story in which foreigners and Jews eat away at French institutions from within. Gringoire and Je suis partout repeated the tune, and within weeks 'the Judeo-Masonic republic' was a commonplace of the right-wing page.

The anger at corruption was not baseless. Bonds with poor security had been issued in the name of a municipal institution, and behind nineteen postponements of a trial stood connections among politicians and in the judiciary. What the far right did was to move that anger from a question of institutions to a question of blood. The problem became not corrupt deputies but 'people who are not of this country', and the remedy became not audits and trials but the liquidation of parliament itself. A good part of the columns that reached the square on 6 February carried this story with them, and 'throw out the thieves' and the antisemitic slogans came from the same mouths that night.

The agitation did not end with the night. In February 1936 the royalist Camelots du Roi dragged Léon Blum from a car and beat him nearly to death; in June, when he stood in the Chamber as prime minister, the right-wing deputy Xavier Vallat said that this old Gallo-Roman country would for the first time be governed by a Jew. In 1941 Vallat became Vichy's Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs, administering the registration of Jews and the seizure of their property. Where the language grown on the pages of that winter went is legible in that one appointment.

The night on the Concorde

Camille Chautemps's cabinet fell on 27 January and Édouard Daladier formed a government on the 30th. On 3 February he removed Jean Chiappe, the Paris prefect of police widely thought indulgent toward the leagues. Chiappe was offered the residency in Morocco and refused, and the right read the affair as the republic striking down its own policeman.

On the evening of 6 February, while Daladier faced a confidence vote in the Chamber, the leagues and the 900,000-strong veterans' Union Nationale des Combattants converged by different routes on the Place de la Concorde, one bridge away from the Palais Bourbon. The crowd burned buses and tore up railings; the police holding the bridge fired several times. By the end of the night fifteen were dead, seventeen by the counts that include those who died later of their wounds. More than 1,500 were injured, most of them demonstrators, and several hundred police were hurt as well.

Daladier won his confidence vote. He resigned the next day all the same, explaining that calling in the army would mean far worse bloodshed. It was the first time under the Third Republic that a government with a parliamentary majority was pushed out by the street. His successor was Gaston Doumergue, a former president recalled from retirement, whose government of national union included Marshal Philippe Pétain as minister of war. To the left, street violence had just chosen a cabinet.

Riot or coup

The night was named twice over. The left called it the fascist riot of 6 February; the right called it a day of patriots. This entry uses the first name because it takes as its measure how the night was read and what it produced. Historians no longer read 6 February as an organised coup. As Serge Berstein and others established, the leagues had no joint command and no plan for the morning after seizing the Chamber. Colonel François de La Rocque held his Croix-de-Feu columns on the far side of the building and then dispersed them, a caution for which the far right later called him a traitor. Nor did the crowds share one purpose: veterans whose pensions had been cut marched alongside shopkeepers protesting taxes.

What moved politics, though, was not what the night was but how it was read. Hitler had been chancellor for a year, and the memory was fresh of a German Social Democratic Party and Communist Party calling each other the main enemy until both were destroyed. The French left read the Concorde as a dress rehearsal for a French fascism, and acted on that reading. The distinction between what happened and what was believed to be at stake is the key to everything that followed.

12 February: two columns meet

On 9 February a demonstration called by the French Communist Party fought the police around the Place de la République, and nine people were killed. Three days later, on 12 February, the CGT called a 24-hour general strike in defence of the republic, and the breakaway Communist-led CGTU and the party joined it under their own banners. Strikes and meetings were held across the country. In Paris the Socialist and Communist columns marched toward the Place de la Nation by separate routes, and nobody could promise what would happen where they met: for six years they had called each other 'social fascists' and 'splitters'. The columns did not clash. The workers embraced, shouting 'Unity!'.

That scene became the ground of French left politics for months afterward. The decision did not come from the parties and move the base; the base tied the parties' hands. Jacques Doriot, mayor of Saint-Denis and a member of the Communist leadership, demanded joint action with the Socialists publicly from February, refused a summons to Moscow, and was expelled on 27 June. That he would go on to found the fascist Parti Populaire Français is the standing irony of the period. The one who carried the same demand out in the party's name was Maurice Thorez, who had expelled him.

How Moscow came to change the line

Since the Sixth Comintern Congress of 1928, official policy had been the theory of social fascism, which cast social democracy as the moderate wing of fascism. What that had produced in Germany was plain by 1933, yet the Comintern kept the line, reading Hitler's rise as the harbinger of capitalism's collapse.

The man of the turn was Georgi Dimitrov. Tried at Leipzig for the Reichstag fire, he had cross-examined Göring from the dock and won an acquittal; three weeks after the night on the Concorde, on 27 February 1934, he arrived in Moscow. From that spring he began writing notes questioning whether a line that treated social-democratic workers as the main enemy could be right, and France supplied the concrete evidence for the question. The decision was not his. The line moved only once Stalin approved it, and that approval carried the needs of Soviet diplomacy with it: against the German threat the USSR needed France, and no such alliance was possible while the French Communists worked to bring French governments down.

On 27 July the Socialists and Communists signed their pact of unity of action. At Nantes in October, Thorez first proposed the name, a 'popular front of labour, liberty and peace', and proposed widening the alliance to the Radicals. The Franco-Soviet treaty of mutual assistance was signed in May 1935, and at the Seventh Comintern Congress, held from 25 July to 20 August 1935, Dimitrov's report of 2 August made the turn the official line of the world communist movement. Its definition of fascism became the movement's standard formula for the next half century: 'Fascism in power is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.' By defining fascism as the rule of a particular faction of the ruling class rather than as another name for capitalism in general, the formula made an alliance with the remaining bourgeois forces theoretically possible. The door that social fascism had held shut opened exactly there.

Two memories

In France, 6 February survived as two memories. For the left it was the starting point of the Popular Front: a line runs from the junction of 12 February to the oath of the Rassemblement populaire sworn by half a million people on 14 July 1935, and on to the election of May 1936 and Blum's government. Paid holidays and the 40-hour week stand at the end of that line.

For the right it was a day of martyrs. The fifteen dead were honoured as 'patriots shot down by the republic', and commemorations were held on the Concorde every year. After the defeat of 1940 a striking number of Vichy's men described that night as the origin of their politics. One event became the starting point of an antifascist alliance for one side and the case for ending the parliamentary republic for the other.

The historiographical argument is about the direction of causation: did the turn rise from the streets of Paris, or descend from the needs of Soviet foreign policy? Work done since the Comintern archives opened tends to point at the place where the two met. The French section moved first, under pressure from below and before Moscow's permission arrived; Moscow ratified the movement late and shaped it to its own diplomatic needs. Neither force alone would have changed the line.

What the Popular Front promised, and what it postponed

The Seventh Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow from 25 July to 20 August 1935, gathered 513 delegates representing 65 affiliated parties and 19 sympathizing parties. Its turn was not simply a change of vocabulary from “social fascism” to “popular front.” After the Nazis had crushed the trade unions, the Communist Party, and the Social Democratic movement in succession, it had become clear that a strategy waiting for uncontested Communist leadership inside the working class could not match the speed of fascist mobilization. The joint action of 12 February 1934 in France and the armed struggle in Austria that February offered the same lesson in different forms. While workers’ organizations remained competitors, they were defeated; only united action could defend the streets and workplaces.

Georgi Dimitrov’s main report of 2 August turned that experience into theory. He defined fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” but also insisted that it did not begin as a secret decision by capitalists. Fascism built a mass base by offering the crisis-stricken petty bourgeoisie, and sections of the workers, a demagogic promise of anti-capitalism and national salvation. The answer therefore could not end with a Communist proclamation. Dimitrov’s starting point was a united front of Communist and Social-Democratic workers, extended into an anti-fascist Popular Front that also brought in peasants, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and non-Communist parties prepared to defend democracy. He presented this alliance not as the abandonment of revolution, but as a concrete struggle to block fascism and organize the majority of the people.

That promise carried costs and tensions. The Comintern recognized the difference between bourgeois democracy and fascist dictatorship as a question of actual survival, yet Communist parties entering Popular Fronts had to postpone radical demands and the question of power in order to build immediate defence. The Franco-Soviet mutual-assistance treaty of May 1935 showed that the turn could not be separated from international politics. Maxim Litvinov’s collective-security diplomacy required cooperation even with capitalist states such as France to contain German rearmament, and the Comintern’s new line gave that diplomacy a political form inside the labour movement. Some revolutionaries therefore criticized the Popular Front as class collaboration that tied the workers’ movement to bourgeois politics rather than as defensive unity. The criticism returned when the French Popular Front government had to decide how far it would accept factory occupations and workers’ demands. The Seventh Congress made a broad alliance against fascism possible, but it left unanswered what direction society would take after that alliance won.

The government fell, but the Republic remained

What 6 February settled was not the label of a single “fascist coup,” but the fact that street violence could make a parliamentary government leave office. Édouard Daladier possessed a majority in the Chamber, yet resigned on 7 February and was replaced by Gaston Doumergue’s government of national union. The crisis therefore did not abolish the constitutional order, but it exposed how fragile governmental authority became when armed mass organisations and the parliamentary right pressed together. The workers’ movement produced a different result on 12 February, through the general strike and the joint encounter of the Socialist and Communist columns. Defending the Republic did not simply mean trusting the existing parliament. It meant that the parties and confederations of labour, after years of fighting one another, had to defend the space in which they could organise before the fascist leagues destroyed it. In that sense, the event established not the inevitability of the Popular Front, but the necessity of united action. The July 1934 pact and Georgi Dimitrov’s 1935 report generalised that necessity into a Comintern line, but they did not erase the strategic conflict between Socialists and Communists. In Whither France?, Lev Trotsky argued that an alliance reaching the Radicals would tie workers to bourgeois politics, and called instead for workers’ militias and independent organs of power. Dimitrov’s 1935 report answered that without a broad alliance the mass base of fascism could not be broken. Both claimed the lesson of February, but one read it as an opening for revolutionary advance, the other as the condition for a class alliance in defence.

The historiographical dispute remains at this point. The present consensus, as Joel Colton summarised it, is that the leagues had no unified plan to seize the Chamber, and that their division and lack of leadership made a coup impossible. François de La Rocque’s Croix-de-Feu ordering its followers to disperse rather than storm the Chamber is central evidence for that conclusion. But the conclusion does not mean that there was no danger. Sections of Action Française and the Jeunesses Patriotes wanted to destroy the Republic, while police fire and Daladier’s resignation were material political results of the pressure they exerted. Serge Berstein therefore treated February as a violent political crisis exploited by the right to remove a left government, rather than as an organised coup. Brian Jenkins and Eric Millington, by contrast, stress that the crisis forces historians to reconsider explanations based on a presumed French “immunity” to fascism. Six February was neither proof that France had already become a fascist state nor an insignificant disturbance. It was a boundary crisis showing that the Republic could not be secured by parliamentary numbers alone, and that without organised working-class resistance reaction could alter the form of government itself. What ended was clear: the social-fascism line could not explain the shared reality of the crisis. What remained unresolved was equally clear: the Popular Front never finally decided how to combine workers’ unity with the defence of a bourgeois republic, or where that combination should stop.