Robert Soucy

A major Example of such fluidity in Italian fascism occurred when Benito Mussolini, once a leading member of the Italian Socialist Party, turned sharply to the political Right after his national "syndicalist" Fascio suffered a huge defeat in the Italian elections of 1919.

Although Soucy points out the obvious—that not all French conservatives in the 1920s and 30's were attracted to fascism (especially members of the Alliance démocratique and the Parti démocratique populaire in the 1930s)—he regards the most successful French fascisms of the era, that is, those with the largest party memberships, as "variants" or "extensions" of social conservatism in crisis, movements that benefited from the right-wing backlash to the elections of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924 and the Popular Front in 1936.

Hitler made the same calculation after the Munich putsch of 1923 and came to power "legally" a decade later.

Soucy emphasizes that the "fluidity" of fascist ideology and tactics defies historians who insist on imposing static taxonomies on "fascism in motion."

Soucy disagrees with arguments that fascism in France in the late 1930s was primarily a synthesis of nationalism and socialism ("neither right nor left"), that French fascist movements of the period were "marginal", and that Colonel François de La Rocque's Croix-de-Feu/Parti Social Français (CF/PSF) was too socially, economically and culturally conservative to be fascist.

Soucy maintains that in the 1930s the more that non-fascist authoritarian conservatives (and even many previously democratic conservatives) felt threatened by the political Left, the greater was their susceptibility to fascism.

For French conservatives who chose a fascist alternative, no serious assault on the economic interests of traditional elites was required.

A recurring theme in fascist writings from Valois, Taittinger and Coty to La Rocque, Marcel Bucard and Doriot—as well as from Mussolini to Hitler—was that class conflict (especially workers' strikes) should be replaced with nationalistic class conciliation (on conservative terms).

In a number of cases during the Great Depression, differences between fascist and non-fascist conservatives gave way to "fusion"—with ideological interpenetration taking place in both directions as a result of common interest.

According to Soucy, when French fascist intellectuals like Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle employed "anti-bourgeois" rhetoric, they were referring to "decadent" bourgeois (secular, liberal, democratic, hedonistic, soft-on-Marxism bourgeois), not "virile" bourgeois.

Robert Soucy (born June 25, 1933) is an American historian, specializing in French fascist movements between 1924 and 1939, French fascist intellectuals Maurice Barrès and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, European fascism, twentieth-century European intellectual history, and Marcel Proust's aesthetics of reading.

Robert J. Soucy was born in Topeka, Kansas.

His father was a fruit and vegetables peddler and his mother a former farm girl.

After 1936, in response to the rise of the Popular Front, many previous French fascists and others who were counterrevolutionary, Catholic, traditionalist and reactionary crossed over to La Rocque's PSF.

This was also true of some democratic conservatives who had previously viewed La Rocque with repugnance but who were now willing to overlook the many anti-democratic statements and paramilitary threats to overthrow the government that he had made before 1936.

When the new Popular Front government banned the paramilitary CF in the summer of 1936, La Rocque replaced it with the PSF, claiming that he was now a political democrat (an alleged conversion that was quickly forgotten in 1941 when he became a strong supporter of the Vichy regime).

To historians who claim that his democratic pronouncements between 1936 and 1939 prove that he was not fascist (and that those who supported him, including former members of the CF, believed this as well), Soucy notes that La Rocque was not the only European fascist of the era who chose to pursue a democratic path to power when a paramilitary coup was unrealistic.

The importance of the CF/PSF to the debate over French fascism derives from the fact that CF/PSF was the largest political movement on the French Right in 1937 with a party membership greater than those of the French Communist and Socialist parties combined.

Soucy acknowledges that some French fascist movements (such as Gaston Bergery's Front Commun and Marcel Déat's "Neo-Socialists") were more left than right (if only for short periods).

But he maintains that the largest French fascist movements of the interwar period—Georges Valois' Faisceau, Pierre Taittinger's Jeunesses Patriotes, Solidarité française, Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français and La Rocque's CF/PSF—were strong defenders of social conservatism and upper class economic interests.

Soucy contends that former leftists who joined these movements soon became ex-leftists, that the actual social-economic goals of these fascisms ran from conservative to reactionary (including Doriot's movement after 1937), that their major financial backers were from the business world (both Doriot and La Rocque received funds from the steel trust), and that—with the exception of Doriot's PPF before 1937—none of these movements had any significant working class support (while Doriot's shrank after he turned rightward in 1937).

Too many historians, Soucy argues, have taken the "socialist" rhetoric—or Orwellian "double-talk"—of some of these movements at face value, ignoring how it was repeatedly contradicted by their specific positions on social, economic and political issues.

For Soucy, these organizations were far more nationalist than socialist, as was also one of their precursors, the Cercle Proudhon, which honored not the early "property is theft" Pierre-Joseph Proudhon but the later much more socially conservative Proudhon.

He contends that one of these variants was La Rocque's CF/PSF, a movement that had close to a million party members by 1937.

Soucy describes a number of characteristics that the CF/PSF shared with other European fascisms of the era and elaborates a similarly multi-faceted definition of fascism itself.

Whereas some historians who consider upper class conservatives who supported fascism as "allies" or "accomplices" of fascism but not fascists themselves, Soucy objects that such "selective essentialism" spares traditional elites, but not those beneath them, from being regarded as fascists.

For Soucy, the differences between non-fascist authoritarian conservatives and fascist authoritarian conservatives were often more a matter of degree (which could increase when threatened by leftists) than of fixed or irreconcilable essences.

Compared to non-fascist authoritarian conservatives, fascists had a greater hatred of "decadence", a greater desire to create large numbers of anti-decadent "new men", a greater appeal to the young (paramilitary "virility" was the ideal), and were more fiercely nationalistic.

They also indulged in a more virulent demonology than many conservatives, blaming more harshly or "extremely" Communists, Socialists, freemasons, internationalists and (though not always) Jews for most of the nation's ills.

Fascists had a greater taste for repressing "unpatriotic" souls.

They were more willing to engage in paramilitary politics and sought to apply military values (discipline, obedience, anti-hedonism) to society at large.

Whereas traditional conservatives were wary of even right-wing populism, fascists were eager to mobilize the masses—but for socially reactionary not socially radical ends (Gustave Le Bon was a precursor here).

In doing so, fascists echoed an ideal that traditional conservatives also promoted: that material differences between the upper and lower classes were unimportant compared to "spiritual" values and the unity of the nation.

French fascists urged their followers to revive the "spirit of the trenches" of the First World War where workers and bourgeois, peasants and aristocrats fought side by side against the nation's enemies, including domestic enemies.

Soucy believes that at various times La Rocque's movement displayed all of the above features.

Soucy graduated from Washburn University in 1955, was a Fulbright scholar in Dijon, France in 1956–57, received his M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1957 and was an Intelligence Officer in the United States Air Force 1957–1960.

He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1963, was an instructor at Harvard University 1963–1964, an assistant professor at Kent State University 1964–65, and an Assistant and Full Professor at Oberlin College 1966–1998.

He has served on the editorial board of the journal French Historical Studies.

He is a professor emeritus of History at Oberlin College.

Soucy has been a controversial figure in the scholarly debate over French fascism, several of his interpretations differing from those of most French historians who have written on the subject.