Jean Renaud

Solidarité Française Fascists and Nazis Counter-revolutionary forces 1880–1952 ○ Died

Colonial army officer and novelist who took over Coty’s Solidarité Française and drove it toward fascism

After Coty’s death the men he commanded wore blue shirts, black berets and jackboots and shouted “France for the French”. In September 1937 he at last claimed the label “fascist” for himself

Born in Toulouse in 1880, he served as a colonial artillery officer in Dahomey and Indochina, and from 1910 to 1914 was aide-de-camp to Albert Sarraut, Governor-General of Indochina. He fought in the First World War, and the colonial novels he wrote while in the army, which he left in 1931, won him the grand prize for colonial literature that year. When Coty founded Solidarité Française in 1933 he entrusted its leadership to Renaud, and the league took part in the demonstration of 6 February 1934. Sole leader after Coty’s death that summer, he gave it the blue shirts and Roman salute of Italian Fascism, and in September 1937 claimed the label “fascist”. Dissolved in 1936, it carried on as a party under new names, but with very few members.