Le Faisceau
르 페소
A short-lived French fascist party founded on 11 November 1925 as a far-right league by Georges Valois. It took its name from the Italian Fasci and the National Fascist Party and adopted their paramilitary style of uniforms, staged ceremonies and parades, and it called for a "national" state for all social classes under a strong authoritarian leader. It broke up in 1928 amid internal dissension.
In depth
The party was preceded by its newspaper, Le Nouveau Siècle, founded as a weekly on 26 February 1925, which became a daily after the party's creation. The Action Française regarded the new party as a rival and attacked it bitterly; some 1,800 Paris members of the Action Française reportedly joined it between December 1925 and April 1926. Its stated aims included a coup d'état and a dictatorship, but it never took concrete steps towards them, nor was it clear who the dictator would be.
Valois, a former anarcho-syndicalist who had converted to Orléanism and then left the Action Française, and the industrialists who financed the party, the textile owner Eugène Mathon and the perfume manufacturer François Coty, all claimed to favour corporatism but meant different things by it: for Valois an economy run by the producers, for Mathon a capitalism led by businessmen without state interference. These differences led Mathon and Coty to leave shortly after the party's foundation, leaving it in financial difficulty. Valois saw fascism as a revolt against "bourgeois rule" and called it and Marxism "brother enemies", and the party recruited some figures from the left, notably Marcel Delagrange, the former Communist mayor of Périgueux, and the anarcho-syndicalist Hubert Lagardelle. Marcel Bucard, later founder of the Mouvement Franciste, was also a member.
Its paramilitary "Légions" served mostly as self-defence against the Action Française's Camelots du Roi, and its only major clash with the Communists came at their meeting in Rheims on 27 June 1926. On 14 November 1926 it raided the Action Française offices, and shots were exchanged. Members who had hoped for revolutionary action began to leave, and the decline quickened at the end of 1926 with the formation of Raymond Poincaré's right-wing government and the stabilisation of the franc. The party broke up in 1928: Valois, whose politics were moving to the left, was excluded and founded the Republican Syndicalist Party on 10 June 1928, while those who remained loyal to Italian Fascism formed the Revolutionary Fascist Party.