French Social Party - Wartime Activities (1940–45)

Wartime Activities (1940–45)

The Danzig crisis of 1939 deprived the PSF of the chance to make serious inroads in parliament: on 30 July, prime minister Daladier, fearing that the imminent electoral campaign would distract the Chamber of Deputies from the business of national defense, used the decree powers granted him by the Chamber to extend its term until May 1942.

Following the fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime, which La Rocque denounced as defeatist and antisemitic — while still proclaiming his personal loyalty to Marshal Pétain — the PSF was renamed Progrès Social Français (French Social Progress) and took on the form of a social aid organization due to the occupation authorities' prohibition of organized political activities. La Rocque's attitude towards the Vichy government was initially ambiguous. As stated, he continued to affirm his loyalty to Pétain and was amenable to certain of the more moderate aspects of Vichy's reactionary program, the Révolution Nationale, notably its corporatism and social policies. The PSF further refused to recognize De Gaulle's Free French, along with the National Council of the Resistance, as the legitimate French authorities in opposition to Vichy, which also claimed constitutional legitimacy (although some members of the PSF, among them Charles Vallin, did join the Free French). However, La Rocque was hostile to Vichy's enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, and forbid PSF members from participating in Vichy-sponsored organizations such as the Service d'Ordre Légionnaire, the Milice, and the Legion of French Volunteers.

In August 1940 La Rocque began actively to participate in the Resistance, transmitting information to the British Secret Intelligence Service via Georges Charaudeau's Réseau Alibi ("Alibi Network"), and forming the Réseau Klan ("Klan Network") in 1942 as a means of coordinating intelligence-gathering activities among PSF members. Nevertheless, he continued to believe that he could convince Pétain to abandon his collaborationist line, to which end he requested, and was granted, three meetings with the Marshal in early 1943. Two days after their last meeting, on 9 March, La Rocque was arrested by the Gestapo during a nationwide roundup of over one hundred PSF leaders. Deported first to Czechoslovakia and later to Austria, he returned to France only in May 1945.

As with nearly all political parties that had existed under the Third Republic, the PSF produced both collaborators with and resisters of the Vichy regime. In most cases, individual circumstances dictated more ambiguous loyalties and actions: although former PSF deputy Jean Ybarnegaray, for instance, served in the first Vichy government under Pétain as Minister for Veterans and the Family; he resigned his post in 1940 and was in 1943 arrested and deported due to his efforts in helping Resistance members to cross the Pyrenees into Spain.