Gustave Hervé's Transition from Socialism to National Socialism: Another Example of French Fascism?

Abstract

In 1901, Gustave Hervé attained notoriety by creating an image of the tricolour planted in a dungheap. Soon he formed a prominent anti-militarist movement called Hervéism. When France's socialist parties united in 1905, Hervé led the most extreme faction. Soon Hervéists started a weekly newspaper, La Guerre sociale, which attempted to unite the French extreme left. Six years of sensational and provocative campaigns and organizations failed to implement his ideas. Despite his dedication, the quixotic Hervé became frustrated by continuing leftist divisions. His disillusionment was connected to a rather naive reading of the increasingly anachronistic revolutionary tradition. Despite his sincerity, Hervé's romantic and eclectic socialism exhibited atavistic features. His gradual transition to blatant chauvinism by 1914 culminated in a form of national socialism after 1919, which sought to recruit workers and former militants in a crusade for French renewal. Hervé's activist socialism had included an anti-materialistic critique of society; his interwar national socialism looked to the nation and its religious traditions to remedy social divisions and decadence. His renamed newspaper, La Victoire, and its associated groups offered authoritarian panaceas to end French disorder. Despite Hervé's marginalized status during the interwar era and his general reluctance to engage in violence, his neo-Bonapartist views and admiration for Mussolini must inescapably be included within what Philippe Burrin has called ‘the fascist drift’. Striking shifts such as Hervé's, from one extreme to the other, have often been tied to the origins of fascism. But the two chief interpretations of French fascism, the ‘consensus’ approach associated with Zeev Sternhell and Eugen Weber as well as the ‘neo-traditionalist’ approach associated with Robert J. Soucy and William D. Irvine, sometimes use the case of Hervé to buttress their contrasting arguments. Such a paradoxical situation demands a thorough exploration of the life and political career of Gustave Hervé.