La Cagoule

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This article is about the French right-wing terrorist organization. For the raincoat, see Cagoule.

La Cagoule (The Cowl)
Leader
Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire
Service d'ordre légionnaire

La Cagoule (The

Vichy Regime
.

It opposed the left-wing Popular Front (in office, June 1936 to 1938). La Cagoule was founded by Eugène Deloncle. Among others, the founder of the cosmetics company L'Oréal, Eugène Schueller, bankrolled the clandestine movement.

The group performed assassinations, bombings, sabotage of armaments, and other violent activities, some intended to cast suspicion on communists through

Free French of Charles de Gaulle. It was not until 1948 that the government tried surviving members for the charges of 1937.[2]

Names

It was originally the Secret Organisation for Revolutionary National Action (Osarn or OSAR, Organisation secrète d'action révolutionnaire nationale). Later it was officially the Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action (CSAR, Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire).

Third Republic

Deloncle in 1937

The group was founded in 1936 or 1937 by Eugène Deloncle and enjoyed privileged relations within industrial circles (National Federation of Ratepayers, Lesieur, L'Oréal etc).[3]

An important member was

Henri Charbonneau
was also a member.

Another member was Jean Filiol, who was appointed as the head of the Milice in Limoges. He fled to Spain at the end of World War II and he worked in the Spanish subsidiary of L'Oréal. Gabriel Jeantet was a lover of a sister of François Mitterrand, who later recommended him for the Order of the Francisque.[4] Dr. Henri Martin was a physician suspected of having forged the Pacte synarchique and worked for the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) after World War II.[5]

Mohammed El Maadi, the head of La Cagoule for French Algeria, started the antisemitic newspaper Er Rachid and organised the North-African Brigade, known as SS-Mohammed, in 1944.

The group drew most of its members from

Action française founded by Charles Maurras. It opposed the Popular Front government, created from an alliance of left-wing groups. Historians believe that many low-level members were recruited in the belief that it was an auto-defense organization, which was intended to fight against a communist takeover.[4]

In Nice, new members were initiated in a formal ritual. In the presence of the Grand Master, dressed in red and accompanied by his assesseurs dressed in black, with their faces covered, new members stood before a table draped with a French flag. A sword and torches were placed on it. Each man raised his right arm and swore the oath, Ad majorem Galliæ gloriam ("For the greater glory of France").

Jesuit
motto, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (For the greater glory of God). Disloyalty was punished by death. For instance, the arms suppliers Léon Jean-Baptiste and Maurice Juif were murdered by Cagoulards in October 1936 and February 1937, respectively, for attempting to enrich themselves by lying about the price that they had paid for the arms.

The paramilitary organisation was active in the provinces. In Paris, it organised militias and demonstrations and amassed arms. It attempted to assassinate French Prime Minister Léon Blum, trained men in terrorism, built underground prisons and "ran guns in Belgium, Switzerland and Italy".[4]

Police investigating the murder of Dimitri Navachine in January 1937

La Cagoule directed its members in various actions aimed at creating suspicions of communists to destabilise and to destroy the French Republic. Some argue that in the

Comité des Forges (Ironmasters Association) to create the impression of a communist conspiracy. Although it was widely believed at the time that communists had set the bombs, the government took no official action against the French Communist Party, to the disappointment of the group's members. The Cagoule tried to infiltrate the International Brigades
for the same purpose.

One of the buildings bombed by la Cagoule on 11 September 1937

Organised along military lines, the Cagoule infiltrated parts of the

Louis Franchet d'Esperey
as their future chief of state.

It was infiltrated by the French police. On 15 November 1937, Marx Dormoy, Minister of the Interior and the highest officer of law enforcement, denounced its plot and ordered wide arrests of members. The French police seized 2 tons of high explosives, several anti-tank or anti-aircraft guns, 500 machine guns, 65 submachine guns, 134 rifles and 17 sawn-off shotguns.[11] Some of the arms were of German or Italian origin, and about 70 men were arrested. Deloncle had boasted that he had 12,000 men under his order in Paris, and 120,000 in the provinces, but it is likely there were no more than 200 men who knew much about the organization and its structure, and another several hundred who were more loosely affiliated with the group.[4]

Socialite masquerade of the Cagoule conspiracy after the revelations by the French government in 1937

Reactions to the plot and the revelations by the French government about the Cagoule varied among the international media. In the United States, the editors of the

New York Times were initially suspicious of the accounts.[citation needed
]

The journalists of

Time magazine likened La Cagoule to the American Ku Klux Klan, a right-wing group that had a widespread revival from 1915 and reached its peak of influence in 1925, with members elected to political office in midwestern cities and states as well as the South.[citation needed
]

At the outbreak of World War II, the French government released imprisoned Cagoulards to fight in the French Army. Some entered the Milice, such as Jacques de Bernonville.

During the

Occupation of France in 1940, the Vichy government arrested Dormoy, as he had refused to vote for full powers for Pétain, and it eventually interned him under house arrest at Montélimar. He was assassinated on 26 July 1941 by a clockwork bomb set off at the house. It was believed to have been done by Cagoule terrorists in reprisal for Dormoy's arrests in 1937 and his attempt to suppress the organization.[12]

Organization

The Cagoule was organised into cells. Light cells had eight men, armed with

hand grenades. Heavy cells had twelve men, armed with a heavy machine gun
and the individual weapons. A group of three cells formed one unit, three units a battalion, three battalions a regiment, two regiments a brigade and two brigades a division. Battalions could be divided into automobile squads of about fifty men. Written communications were avoided as much as possible.

The "street fighting" handbook was titled Secret Rules of the Communist Party to avoid revealing the Cagoule in case the booklet was found by the police.[13]

World War II

During

Waffen SS
rank.

Other cagoulards sided against the Germans, either as members of the Resistance (such as

Colonel Passy. After the war, the politician and writer Henri de Kérillis accused de Gaulle of having been a member of La Cagoule and said that de Gaulle had been ready to install a fascist government if the Allies let him become France's chief of state.[14]

Postwar

Gabriel Jeantet and other former cagoulards charged during the trial held in 1948.

The cagoulards arrested for the 1937 conspiracy were not brought to trial for those charges until 1948, after the liberation of France. By then, many had served in the Vichy government or the Resistance, and few of them were brought to trial.[4]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Press nickname coined by the Action Française nationalist Maurice Pujo

References

  1. ^ Cullen, S. (2018) World War II Vichy French Security Troops, Osprey Pub.
  2. ^ Geoffrey Warner, "The Cagoulard Conspiracy" History Today (July 1960) 10#0 pp. 443–450.
  3. ISBN 2020232006
  4. ^ a b c d e f Finley-Croswhite, Annette; Brunelle, Gayle K. (Winter 2006). "Murder in the Metro". Quest. 9 (1). Old Dominion University. Archived from the original on 30 May 2014.
  5. ^ Péan, Pierre (1993) Le Mystérieux docteur Martin, 1895–1969. Fayard
  6. ^ Kauffer, Rémi (1 July 2007). "La Cagoule tombe le masque". Historia. 108. Archived from the original on 3 October 2008.
  7. ^ "Foreign News: Stalin, Navachine & Blum", Time, 8 February 1937, accessed 24 July 2012
  8. S2CID 154546885
    .
  9. JSTOR 20028925
    .
  10. ^ "Monstrous Conspiracy", Time Magazine, 6 December 1937
  11. ^ "Terrible Gravity", Time Magazine, 29 November 1937
  12. ^ "Death by bomb", Time, 4 August 1941
  13. ^ Spivak, John L. (1939). "Ch. III. Secret Armies, the new tactics of Nazi warfare". France's Secret Fascist Army. New York: Modern Age Books. p. 31. Archived from the original on 27 June 2009. Retrieved 28 May 2008.
  14. ^ de Kérillis, Henri (1946) I Accuse De Gaulle Harcourt, Brace & Co.

External links

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