Political Belief in France, 1927–1945: Gender, Empire and Fascism in the Croix de feu and Parti social français by Caroline Campbell (review)

In this work, the first monograph study of the role of women within the Croix de feu/ Parti social français (PSF), Caroline Campbell makes an important contribution to the field. Extending the analysis beyond the boundaries of the metropole to incorporate the organization's development in France's North African empire, Campbell's analysis engages with a wide range of themes. In addition to an in-depth analysis of the significant role played by women acting within France's largest far-right organization, Campbell also provides important insights into the history of empire, gender, and social welfare in late Third Republic and Vichy France. Founded in 1927 as a political movement for war veterans, the Croix de feu/PSF was transformed from March 1934 onwards by a major growth in female membership. This was a process that reduced male veterans' membership in the organization to just a third of the overall total. From 1934 until the Vichy period, some 300,000 women joined the Croix de feu/PSF, a level of women's participation that, Campbell underlines, was 'unprecedented in a mixed-sex political movement' (p. 22). Alongside this considerable influx of female members emerged a formidable social welfare programme dominated by middle-class women, which quickly came to play a central role in the Croix de feu/PSF's platform. Indeed, so significant was this transformation from the mid-1930s that Campbell identifies it as a 'fundamental redefinition of the movement's path to power' (p. 49). The strategic shift within the Croix de feu/PSF from para-militarism to social action is one that has already been explored by scholars, notably Laura Lee Downs ('"And So We Transform a People": Women's Social Action and the Reconfiguration of Politics on the Right in France, 1934–1947', Past and Present, 225 (2014), 187–225), Sean Kennedy (Reconciling France Against Democracy: The Croix de feu and the Parti social français, 1927–1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press: 2007)), and Kevin Passmore ('"Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism": Women's Social Action in the Croix de feu and Parti social français', Journal of Modern History, 71 (1999), 814–51). Among Campbell's important contributions in this work, however, is her emphasis on the signal role of women in effecting this change, both in the leadership and at the grass-roots level of the organization. Stressing the agency and autonomy that women gained within the metropolitan movement, Campbell demonstrates how middle-class Catholic women were able to find within the Croix de feu/PSF's 'Social First!' programme a space for independent action largely denied them within 1930s France. Such agency was in large part absent from the colonial Croix de feu/PSF. Here, as Campbell effectively demonstrates, a hyper-masculine and violent colonial setting marginalized women, thereby severely curtailing any equivalent development of a social action programme which had proved so successful in extending the movement's appeal within metropolitan France. Thus, argues Campbell, the metropolitan and North African movements moved apart decisively through the 1930s and 1940s. While the French sections became increasingly feminized (a process that accelerated under Vichy) and embraced social action, in the Maghreb political violence and paramilitarism only intensified. A richly documented and wide-ranging study, Campbell's book will appeal broadly to scholars across a number of fields. The author makes significant contributions to the history of gender and of the far right in France and the empire, and to debates regarding social action and reform during the final years of the Third Republic and under Vichy.