French Social Party

The French Social Party (Parti Social Français, PSF) was a French nationalist political party founded in 1936 by François de La Rocque, following the dissolution of his Croix-de-Feu league by the Popular Front government. France's first right-wing mass party, prefiguring the rise of Gaullism after the Second World War, it experienced considerable initial success but disappeared in the wake of the fall of France in 1940 and was not refounded after the war. Croix-de-Feu and Far-right leagues La Rocque envisioned the PSF as the more explicitly-political successor of the Croix-de-Feu, the World War I veterans' organization that had been founded in 1927 and, by the early 1930s, had emerged as the largest and one of the most influential of interwar France's numerous far-right leagues. Though the Croix-de-Feu had adopted as its slogan "Social d'abord" ("Social First") as a counter to the "Politique d'abord" ("Politics First") of Action Française, it espoused the political goals elaborated by La Rocque in his tract Service Public, including social Catholic corporatism, the institution of a minimum wage and paid vacations (congés payés), women's suffrage and the reform of parliamentary procedure. The party's programme would further develop the same themes by advocating "the association of capital and labour", a traditional platitude of French conservatism, and the reform of France's political institutions along presidential lines to bolster the stability and authority of the state. Though the Croix-de-Feu participated in the demonstrations of 6 February 1934, La Rocque forbade its members from involving themselves in the subsequent riot, thus demonstrating a respect for republican legality that the PSF would also uphold as one of its essential political principles. La Rocque, who had previously maintained a certain mystique with regard to his attitude towards the Republic, explicitly rallied to it and denounced in a speech on 23 May 1936 totalitarianism (both Nazi and Soviet) along with racism (with regard to which he explicitly rejected anti-Semitism) and class struggle, as the principal obstacles to "national reconciliation".