I.

Between 1871 and 1945 France and Germany alternated possession of the region four times. As a border region, Alsace had a high symbolic value after World War I for both French and German nationalists, including fascists. At the same time, Alsace had its own long and distinguished regional history and identity. Linguistically, culturally and economically, Alsace served as a bridge between France and Germany. In the inter-war era of nationalism, Alsatians struggled to reconcile the three identities.

When France reclaimed Alsace from Germany in 1918, General Joseph Joffre promised Alsatians ‘respect for your Alsatian liberties, for your traditions, for your beliefs, and for your customs’.Footnote ⁶ Crowds cheering French soldiers quickly gave way to uncertainty and anxiety in the face of an aggressive French policy of assimilation. The French immediately established triage commissions designed to separate the French and the Alsatians from the nearly 500,000 Germans who had settled in the region.Footnote ⁷ Another irritant was the imposition of the ‘méthode directe’ or full immersion in French in the schools, which adversely affected the educational trajectory of many students who were already in school.Footnote ⁸ Less obvious was the economic strain of shifting from being part of the German economy to integrating with French markets. As a result of these factors, Alsatians were somewhat ambivalent about France. What tipped the region from ambivalence to outright hostility was the 1924 election, which ushered in the Cartel des Gauches. The new prime minister, Edouard Herriot, promised to introduce into Alsace and Lorraine the entire republican legislation.Footnote ⁹ Alsace, like Germany, still did not separate church and state, as France had done since 1905, so Herriot's threat to end the funding of the churches seemed like a direct attack on religious education (confessional schools) and local culture. Alsatians reacted strongly in what came to be called the ‘Alsatian malaise’.Footnote ¹⁰ Massive public protests took place and almost all the Alsatian deputies to the National Assembly objected.

Regional dissatisfaction with French rule coalesced primarily around the issue of how to promote Alsatian rights. The autonomists on the one side sought separation from France and possibly reunion with Germany. A new political party was founded in 1927, the Independent Regional Party for Alsace-Lorraine (Unabhängige Landespartei für Elsaß-Lothringen), that overtly advocated separation from France. The pro-French factions, commonly referred to as assimilationists, supported regionalism within France. The Action Française, for example, subtitled its local newspaper La Province d'Alsace: Organe du regionalisme français and expended considerable energy trying to reconcile regionalism with French nationalism.Footnote ¹¹ Apparently unnatural electoral alliances emerged when the communists and the clerical conservatives in the Popular Republican Union (Union Populaire Républicaine, UPR) joined forces in favour of autonomism. Each political party split on the issue of Alsatian regional or national identity. Hoping to resolve the issue, in 1928 the French government chose to put twenty-two autonomists on trial for working with Germans to separate Alsace from France. This manoeuvre only made things worse. Two of the defendants were elected to the National Assembly, and when they were found guilty and their mandates invalidated, the Alsatians obstinately elected two other defendants.Footnote ¹²

In this identity-charged political climate multiple varieties of fascism competed in the same space, often for the same constituency. As it turned out, German and French fascists had a strong presence as the most assertive exponents of national identity. Alsace was also home to a strong regional fascist movement, the Alsatian Bauernbund, which applied fascist ideology on a more regional basis.Footnote ¹³ By 1938 fascist parties of all stripes in Alsace comprised around forty thousand activists.Footnote ¹⁴ The German Nazi movement channelled its influence through several local movements, the Alsatian communists, the Landespartei, the Jungmannschaft, the Bauernbund, and, more moderately, the autonomist wing of the UPR. By the 1930s, a number of French fascist groups clamoured for attention. These included the Francistes, the Parti Populaire Français, the Solidarité Française, and the Croix de Feu/Parti Social Français.Footnote ¹⁵ To understand the significance of these numbers, bear in mind that half of the population of 1.2 million were women and did not vote. The region's largest mainstream party, the UPR, only had about 14,000 members.

During the 1930s Alsace hosted a heightened and more pointed discussion of the role of fascism, and the issue of autonomism, although still present, tailed off. Fascist groups such as the Légions and the Faisceau had admittedly earlier discussed the application of Italian fascism to France and Alsace. The rise of Nazism, however, shifted the terms of the debate in a more radical direction and, for Alsace, represented a far more immediate problem because of its geographical and cultural proximity to Germany. For Alsatians the 1930s were more about the role of fascism/Nazism and the deep cultural and political divide between those who were for and those who were against. The question of fascism incorporated the earlier issue of autonomism, particularly influencing how local fascists articulated fascist ideology by asking how deeply committed Alsatians were to Germany, even a Nazi Germany.

The newspaper culture in the inter-war era was extensive and was a powerful vehicle for the transmission of ideas. For news and information its only competitors were radio and movie news shorts. Alsace's population of 1,204,968 million in 1930 sustained thirty-one dailies and a raft of weeklies and monthlies.Footnote ¹⁶ Papers or journals were either oriented around a theme or hobby such as sports, serviced a local community, or had an explicit connection with a political party. Sometimes a paper did all three. Few, if any, papers took the neutral position that their role was simply to report the facts without bias. As a result, individual reading of the news was generally mediated by political editors, who almost always cast events in politically charged terms.

The Alsatian press had unique characteristics that contributed to the transnational distribution of fascist ideas. Perhaps most significant is the fact that much of the Alsatian press was in German or at least bilingual, not French. Even some of the most pro-French papers were published in German. Thus the Action Française paper, La Province d'Alsace, the Croix de Feu paper, Le Flambeau, and Le Franciste were published locally in German, despite their strong French nationalism. The Dernières Nouvelles, a moderate daily affiliated with the radicals, even produced a French and a German edition, giving it the largest circulation of any local paper. Editors reasoned that the only way to reach the Alsatian audience was to use German—a sound conclusion given that only about one sixth of the population used French regularly.Footnote ¹⁷ Most in the region spoke Alsatian dialect, a variant of German, and for nearly fifty years, of course, Alsatians had been educated in German.

As mentioned earlier, a specifically separatist movement, the Unabhängige Landespartei, held its first meeting in 1927. The Landespartei tilted towards separatism, which assumed that Alsace would never be free under French rule and was often a code word for rejoining Germany. Direct espousal of a return to Germany would have led to the party's prohibition. Over the course of the 1930s, the Landespartei embraced Nazism. Beginning in 1929, the Landespartei published its own paper, the Elsaß-Lothringer Zeitung (ELZ), which played a key role not only in advocating German culture, but also in shaping and defining fascism in the region. It began publication in 1929, just at the time that the Nazi party in Germany started its rise.

For many, the ELZ was clearly fascist, even Nazi. The conservative pro-French Catholic paper, Elsässer Bote, told its readers that it ‘openly adopts Hitler's ideas’.Footnote ¹⁸ Several police reports describe meetings with Germans and speculate about the finances of the paper.Footnote ¹⁹ The police strongly suspected that the Germans were directly subsidising the publication of the ELZ and carefully monitored the paper's views. Clearly elements of the Landespartei were pro-Nazi from the beginning, but this did not mean, however, that unanimity reigned within the party. A few founding members opposed Nazism, and those who did support Nazism did not all do so for the same reasons or with the same degree of commitment.Footnote ²⁰

Not surprisingly, the paper expressed a favourable view of fascism. It cited Benito Mussolini's statement that fascism is ‘Italian in its particular form—universalist in spirit’. Nor did the editors seem opposed to Mussolini's hope for a ‘fascist Europe . . . that would solve the modern problems of the state of the twentieth century in a fascist way’. Instead they described this as one of ‘the most important speeches that the Duce has ever given’.Footnote ²¹ The ELZ's emphasis reveals the editors’ interest in seeing themselves as part of a European-wide movement. Another article, written by an Italian fascist, explained approvingly that Italian ‘fascism had done away with parties’, which for the ELZ implied that the struggle for Alsatian autonomy was also part of a wider movement for a new political system.Footnote ²² The editors of the ELZ considered the elimination of parties positive, since they saw political parties as responsible for the corruption and dislocation of modern society. For the autonomists, fascism's universality gave them additional authority to oppose France. The French government was not only imposing a sort of colonial hegemony on Alsace, it was, at its very core, contaminated and corrupted. Alsace could claim to be German not just for standard cultural reasons, but because it was part of a broader universal movement. More generally, the ELZ's emphasis on the universality of fascism presented it as the powerful and inevitable political ideology of the future. Alsatians should understand that fascism was their destiny and they should be prepared to participate. Significantly, as the Nazi movement waxed in Germany, the implication was clear that Germany held the brightest future.

When it came to explaining the Nazis to the Alsatian public, the ELZ was pro-Nazi from the beginning. Following the September 1930 election in Germany, which saw the NSDAP vote jump considerably, Paul Schall, the editor and future Nazi, wrote an apparently neutral article on Hitler. The National Socialists merely ‘wanted the national and social renewal of Germany’, Schall wrote.Footnote ²³ In the same vein, contributors later complained about those who wanted Germany to be a ‘second-class nation’.Footnote ²⁴ Stated in this way, even the nationalist French could or should be able to empathise with the Nazis for having the same general goals. It is also worth noting that Schall never used the term ‘Nazi’, preferring instead the more formal and respectful term ‘National Socialist’. This article went well beyond advocating that Alsace should be part of Germany. It suggested that liberal democratic ideology, such as dominated France's government, was weak. By contrast, Schall argued that Germany was stronger with Hitler on the rise and the Landespartei ‘should march with progress and adopt the new ideas which have uplifted Germany and which, even in France, are beginning to have followers among certain milieus’, referring to the proliferation of French fascist groups.Footnote ²⁵ At the same time, it presented the renewal of national strength in Germany as the future. If someone shared their view (and not everyone did) that fascism was the future, that liberal democracy was corrupt, and that Alsace needed to be part of a stronger nation, then the Landespartei was for them. To a significant extent, the idea of fascism was tailored to fit the needs of the party, not the other way around.

In the inter-war world the Right believed there was a ‘crisis of democracy’ that required urgent rectification. For many fascists, Germany had an attractive approach. Following the German elections on 5 March 1933, the ELZ declared that the National Socialism movement was ‘now legitimised like Fascism in Italy’.Footnote ²⁶ Germany was not the only country struggling with how to reform government. France, according to the ELZ, also recognised ‘that democracy at this time does not encompass the total life and death interests of the nation’.Footnote ²⁷ This article specifically cited André Tardieu and Georges Valois somewhat favourably as ‘prophets of state reform’, another small example of cross-national bonding.Footnote ²⁸

For the writers of the ELZ, fascism and Nazism had a particular meaning. Alsatians considered themselves to be culturally German, so any political activity had to be measured against the strict yardstick of reunification with Germany. Autonomists such as Paul Schall were no longer the autonomists of the 1920s; they were too extreme and attracted diminishing support. The Landespartei had already begun to lose traction in public support by 1930 when only twenty people attended one of the monthly meetings.Footnote ²⁹ Meanwhile the Alsatian malaise had receded in response to the French government backing away from its persecution of autonomists and its earlier demand to secularise the region. This posed a problem for the autonomists who needed the population to be hostile to the French in order to support a return to Germany. Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 aggravated the loss of support because the Nazis were far from universally popular in Alsace. Additionally, a large number of German socialist, communist and Jewish refugees had arrived in Alsace following the Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung), and had made the unpleasant aspects of Nazism abundantly clear. Nevertheless, or perhaps consequently, the paper presented a moderate view of Nazism as a party that provided better representation and national renewal. The editors did not present Nazism as the party of violence or repression.

Indicative of the radicalisation of the Landespartei and the ELZ was the publication, in 1931, of a supplemental periodical, the Jungmannschaft (Young Men's Organisation), which became the name of a new and more extreme faction, a group within a group, opposed to collaboration with clerical or communist autonomists; it eventually became a youth group outfitted in brown shirts whose members saw themselves as an elite revolutionary group modelled on the Sturm Abteilung (SA) in Germany.Footnote ³⁰ The Jungmannschaft was significantly more orthodox Nazi than the leadership of the Landespartei. Gauleiter Robert Wagner described the Jungmannschaft as ‘nothing more than a camouflaged SA’.Footnote ³¹ Its head, Hermann Bickler, was not only sympathetic to the Nazi cause, he was a member of the party. As soon as Alsace was annexed to Germany in 1940, the Nazis appointed Bickler Kreisleiter (county executive) of Strasbourg with the rank of colonel in the SS.Footnote ³²

The combined experience of the Landespartei and the Jungmannschaft was highly transnational. Hermann Bickler was a French citizen and an Alsatian who believed he was ethnically German and who essentially founded a German Nazi organisation in France. As separatists, virtually all these French citizens wanted to belong to Germany. The Germans probably funded the ELZ, and the Jungmannschaft members attended Hitler Youth rallies across the border in an unofficial capacity.Footnote ³³ Both groups portrayed fascism, and especially Nazism, as supplanting liberalism. The apparent potency of the Nazis supported deep criticism of the French government, which in turn advanced the interests of the autonomists.

Despite their antipathy to Germany, the French fascists shared many of the same views, albeit for different reasons. The Francistes, for example, built a sizeable following in Alsace for a brief period between 1933 and 1936.Footnote ³⁴ They were perhaps the most vigorous proponents of a universal fascist ideal, which was also reflected in their participation in the Montreux international fascist congress.Footnote ³⁵ The leader of the Francistes, Marcel Bucard, was himself an example of the eternal search for the best way to implement the fascist idea. A serial fascist, he belonged to the Légions, the Faisceau, the Parti Social Français and the Croix de Feu, in addition to founding and heading the Francistes in 1933. Under his leadership, the Francistes generally refrained from sharp criticism of Hitler. Indeed, the local socialists were convinced that the Francistes were ‘in the pay of Hitler’.Footnote ³⁶ Such an accusation may have been standard name-calling, but in this case, the Alsatian chapter of the Francistes had members who had been in the autonomist party, and at least one party member was convicted of spying for the Germans.Footnote ³⁷ This sort of personal connection between French fascism and German Nazism might have been unique to a small group of Alsatians, but it nevertheless points to a significant transnational element lurking within the hyper-nationalist movements. Because the Alsatian chapter may well have diverged considerably from the national Franciste party line, it may have served as a transnational vehicle for the party by forcing it to consider uncomfortable and potentially anti-French concepts.

The Francistes deliberately profiled fascist leaders in other countries. Closer to hagiography than critical analysis, these profiles represented the values the party leaders thought were important. The implicit message was a common transnational agenda with fascists of all nations. In an article titled ‘Faszismus überall!’ the editors of Le Franciste argued that ‘national authoritarian government forms’ existed in countries as diverse as Germany, Yugoslavia, Greece and Brazil.Footnote ³⁸ Some were not ‘ideal fascist governments’, nevertheless they were moving in the right direction. Genuine fascist movements existed ‘world-wide in all countries’ and they all shared the fundamental goals of ‘Peace, Justice and Order’. This theme recurs with some frequency. ‘Poland, Austria, and Hungary are also organised along fascist lines’, another article declares, although not perhaps as pure as they could be.Footnote ³⁹ In a brief overview of Romania, the paper characterises its government as an ‘authoritarian regime’ or a transitional step towards a more fascist government. Cornelius Codreanu, however, was the model fascist.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Francistes openly acknowledged a strong connection between right-wing and authoritarian governments and fascism, while at the same time distinguishing them from each other. The Francistes, vague about details, revealed as much through what they did not mention as through what they did. In this case, the Francistes made no mention of the religious elements of Codreanu's Iron Guard, instead dwelling on his arrest and torture on behalf of the cause.Footnote ⁴¹ In the same issue, readers of the Franciste learned that Canada also had a movement that participated in the world-wide struggle against ‘putrid democracy’ and ‘parliamentarianism, freemasonry, big capital, and Marxism, which cannot be separated from Judaism’.Footnote ⁴² The Canadian National Socialist Party, led by Adrien Arcand and depicted as a ‘strong fascist movement’, represented the power of fascism as an international movement, present even in English-speaking countries. The greater the scope of fascism, the more persuasive it would be for individual Alsatians. The British fascist Oswald Mosley contributed an article on Bolshevism lauding the Germans for demonstrating that communism could be stopped.Footnote ⁴³ Collectively, these articles suggested that joining the Francistes would place the average Alsatian in the centre of the most powerful current of contemporary history.

Bucard advocated an alliance between France, Italy and Germany.Footnote ⁴⁴ Unlike the ELZ, the Francistes did not focus on the Nazi movement so much as the international movement. This reflected the national party's pro-French attitude without compromising their generally positive view of what the Nazi party represented. Furthermore, the idea of a triple alliance of France, Germany and Italy would constrain the extremes of Hitler's foreign policy. The idea of a peace enforced by strong nation states appealed to Alsatians who feared the return of war. Bucard, however, was unrealistic in thinking that the Germans might favour an international approach to fascism; they were interested in hegemony. The Nazi party generally had the view that it was the leader and could force fascist movements from around the world to conform to its model.Footnote ⁴⁵ The gap between the reality of the Nazi party and its goals, and Bucard's depiction of a peaceful three-way alliance, reveals a great deal about how Bucard hoped to co-opt elements of the fascist matrix.

Another fascist organisation, the Alsatian Bauernbund, also epitomised the transnational relationships in the region. The Bauernbund, led by Joseph Bilger, started in the 1920s as a peasants’ interest group/farmers’ co-operative, but evolved into an unusual fascist organisation by the 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁶ Connected to the autonomists, the French fascists, and eventually to the German Nazis, the Bauernbund was, among other things, a transnational nexus. Acutely concerned with the Alsatian Heimat while at the same time a convert to fascism, Bilger comfortably mixed and matched allegiances with a wide range of fascist movements. His contemporaries found it difficult to catagorise Bilger and the Bauernbund. One paper described the movement as oriented towards Joan of Arc, but evocative of the swastika.Footnote ⁴⁷ The strongly French nationalist and germanophobic Action Française labelled the Bauernbund's programme as ‘the exact copy of that of Walther Darré, the [Nazi] minister of Agriculture’, around the same time that it hosted him at a Strasbourg banquet.Footnote ⁴⁸ At one demonstration held together with the autonomists, Bilger was arrested. As he was led off, the autonomists sang German songs, and the peasants sang the ‘Marseillaise’ and chanted ‘France for the French’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Symbolic of the mixed identity of the Bauernbund was the heading of its newspaper, the Elsäss-Lothringishe Bauernblatt (ELBB), which featured a drawing of the cross of Lorraine, a traditionally French nationalist image, next to a Bundshuh, an emblem taken from the local sixteenth-century peasant revolt.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Bundschuh also appeared on party banners as a red shoe with a streaming lace on a green background. Whereas the cross of Lorraine evoked a conservative French nationalism with undertones of Joan of Arc, the Bundschuh was a singularly regional icon that also implied a cultural and religious connection with Germany. The Bundschuh, furthermore, tapped into a deeply traditional sensibility that was also revolutionary. Taken together the cross of Lorraine and the Bundschuh describe a local identity transnationally connected to both France and Germany. The Bauernbund, although locally successful, encountered limitations as a peasant movement and never quite fitted in with French organisations such as Henri Dorgères's Green Shirts and Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français. Much of Bilger's ideology, particularly his anti-Semitism, was lifted from the Nazis, and during the war he worked officially with the Germans. By 1942, however, he had grown disillusioned with the prospects of regional autonomy under the Nazis, but had nowhere to turn. In the end, the Bauernbund was a regional fascist movement with about six thousand activists.Footnote ⁵¹

Like the Francistes, the Bauernbund highlighted international fascists, although it was more selective. The Bauernbund had a particular affection for Léon Degrelle, leader of the Belgian Rex party. Part of this was a consequence of the geographical connection provided by the Rhine. In any event, Degrelle contributed several articles to the ELBB, including a commentary on the Spanish Civil War.Footnote ⁵² Bilger also foresaw a ‘new Europe’ that would ‘be formed from the national awakening’, citing Franco's success in Spain and the prospects for Rex in Belgium.Footnote ⁵³ The Romanian Iron Guard represented the cutting edge of ‘national renewal’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Bilger's selectivity about who he publicised emphasised regional and peasant values over other issues. Unlike the Francistes, who saw Codreanu as a model for universal fascism, the Bauernbund found the Romanian movement attractive because its rural component mirrored the Bauernbund's own agricultural dissatisfaction.

When discussing the Nazis, Bilger focused on the relationship between Hitler and the German peasants. German farmers supported Hitler, Bilger wrote, because ‘National Socialism wanted to build the Third Reich on the foundation of a completely healthy peasantry’.Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘The national-socialist revolution was above all a peasant revolution’, the ELBB trumpeted.Footnote ⁵⁶ As such, it was worthy of emulation. If only France would ‘free itself from all party considerations’, it too could become healthier and restore the cultural primacy of the farmer.Footnote ⁵⁷ Clearly, whether one supported the Germans or not, the Nazi system was on the right track, and its example of peasant revolution should be extended to France. ‘We . . . see before our very eyes the development of an experiment, the result of which will be in every respect interesting’, Bilger explained as he applauded Walther Darré's organisation and the Nazi notion of corporatist representation.Footnote ⁵⁸ Inspired by Germany, Bilger called for a spontaneous uprising of the Volk in favour of a ‘corporatist [berufständige] seizure of power’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet while frequently lauding the policies of the Nazis, the Bauernblatt explicitly encouraged them to be applied in France. The Bauernbund sought the ultimate unity of a French Volksgemeinschaft that could only be achieved by imitating the political co-ordination that was taking place in Germany.Footnote ⁶⁰

As was the case with the Francistes and the Landespartei, Bilger interpreted fascism through the lens of regionalism. In this way, fascism in Alsace, whether Francophile or Germanophile, took a direction different from that wanted by the centralising national parties. His touchstone was always rural Alsace. He admired the Nazis for their anti-Semitism and their elevation of the status of peasants, but he also found common cause with the French fascists. As a result, he never fully conformed to either French or German models. Furthermore, the Bauernbund almost always measured fascism by what it did for peasants. Although fascist parties often genuflected towards the agricultural community, they almost always found support from other social groups.

One other group merits attention. The communist autonomists, under the direction of Charles Hueber, drifted in the 1930s towards embracing Nazism.Footnote ⁶¹ Arriving at fascism via a circuitous left-wing path, by the 1930s the communist autonomists presented yet another local interpretation of fascism and Nazism. At the end of World War I Hueber affiliated himself with the French communists, after a brief attempt to mimic the abortive revolutions in Germany. The Alsatian socialist and communist movement had evolved out of the German socialist movement, which had a much stronger political profile than the French socialist movement. This German connection drove the communist autonomists to split from the French communist party, creating the Kommunistische Partei Opposition (KPO) and, then in the mid-1930s, to refuse any collaboration with the left.

In 1935, the KPO became the Elsäßische Arbeiter- und Bauernpartei (EABP), and finally in 1939 the remnants of the EABP joined the Landespartei, which by then was completely nazified. Driving the transformation of the party was the ongoing tension over the optimal way to effect revolution. Should the traditional Marxian view that class was the essential driving force prevail, or, in the case of Alsace, was the opportunity for identity politics likely to yield more results? In the 1920s, the French communist party supported the autonomists, and compromise between Hueber and the French communists was possible on the basis of a formula that embraced both class and identity. At the end of the 1920s, however, the preeminence of autonomism drove Hueber to ally himself with clerical conservative autonomists and form the KPO. As one party official pointed out, ‘What would have happened if . . . we had followed to the letter the watchword: “class against class” imposed during the last world communist congress?’Footnote ⁶² In the short term, Hueber's strategy was successful and he became mayor of Strasbourg. Unfortunately, in the longer run, autonomism ceased to dominate Alsatian politics as it had earlier, causing a hemorrhaging of grass roots support. Another probable factor driving the turn towards Nazi Germany was financing, as Hueber received a great deal of funding from the Germans. Further, the large number of German left-wing refugees after 1933 created a tension within the KPO over the issue of Nazism. The Alsatians wanted to be part of Germany, while the refugees, many of them Jewish, emphasised the horror of the Nazi regime. For his trouble, the Nazis reinstalled Hueber as mayor of Strasbourg until his death in 1943.

The EABP's construction of fascism was somewhat different from that of the other parties under discussion. Reluctant to embrace fascism because of its communist roots, the EABP was unable to avoid embracing it because of its pro–Germany stance. Thus the Francophile assimilationists were fascist by virtue of their imperialistic policies towards Alsace. French fascism was bad, not ‘because it is fascism, but because it is French fascism’.Footnote ⁶³ Anyone from any part of the political spectrum who advocated continued inclusion of Alsace into France was fascist. The stock communist view of fascism as a stage in the collapse of the bourgeois class did not show up in the EABP's literature. Nevertheless Die Neue Welt depicted fascism as bad, especially in the first half of the 1930s.Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact, the editors argued that autonomism was a defence against fascism.Footnote ⁶⁵

The German Nazis, however, got a pass. Reporting on a meeting of the Landespartei, Die Neue Welt described the panel of speakers, which included Paul Schall and Hermann Bickler, as ‘opposed to all fascist efforts’.Footnote ⁶⁶ At a time (1934) when the Landespartei was becoming deeply entangled with the Nazis, this selective blindness clearly indicated a passivity towards Nazism. Tension within the KPO bubbled over in 1934 when it was expelled from the Internationale Vereinigung Kommunistische Opposition (IVKO), an umbrella organisation linking independent international left-wing organisations. Fascism was still not viewed favourably at this time, as was the case with the ELZ, the Francistes and the Bauernbund. Die Neue Welt repeatedly characterised French fascists such as Marcel Bucard as fascist. One headline even accused the Francistes of working ‘hand in hand with Hitler’.Footnote ⁶⁷

After the KPO had morphed into the EABP in 1935, the paper continued to present fascism negatively. Now the measuring stick was war; if a political organisation enabled war, then it was fascist. ‘Fascism is War!’ read one headline.Footnote ⁶⁸ Like the Francistes, EABP argued that fascism and Nazism represented peace. If it was against war, then it was anti-fascist. Significantly, the Nazis were not, in Die Neue Welt's view, a threat to world peace. The real warmongers were none other than the same French nationalists who had always threatened Alsatian traditions. Autonomists were not ‘Hitler agents’, but the socialists, communists and radicals were, because they aggressively opposed Nazism.Footnote ⁶⁹ Repeatedly, the EABP denied any ideological connection to Nazism. At the same time however, the paper printed a lengthy synopsis of Hitler's Reichstag speech in February 1938 and reported favourably on the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Germany.Footnote ⁷⁰ The contradictions are staggering and reflect the needs of Hueber and the EABP. Hueber was trying to hold on to his old communist constituency by painting fascism negatively, but he also was trying to accommodate Nazism. Unable to escape the consequences of deciding for identity politics over class analysis, Hueber continued to try to reconcile the irreconcilable.

Despite its negative rhetoric, the EABP clearly embraced real practising fascism, but it had a peculiar construction of the term. Hueber's alliance with the Landespartei is unequivocal evidence of his turn to Nazism. Essentially, Hueber, like his more right-wing comrades in the Landespartei and the Jungmannschaft, wanted to return to Germany at all costs. He had an interesting time squaring the choice to join Nazi Germany with his Marxist background. His Nazism was idiosyncratic in that he embraced Nazism for the practical reasons of political finance and as the only route to retaining Alsace's German identity. Hence the formulation that identified all those opposed to Alsatian autonomism as fascist. Hueber's interpretation of fascism was a consequence of regional circumstances.

II.

Transnational fascism explains the ways in which fascist groups absorbed, reinterpreted and refined the fascist idea. Alsace is a particular case linking fascism groups across national borders and showing how, despite the variety of fascist organisations, the fascists found common cause with each other. Yet they themselves were not always clear about exactly what they shared with each other. Their general sense of commonality created, in a sense, the evolution of changes and variations as specific groups defined fascism as it applied to them. Thus, a sense of commonality and differentiation were simultaneously present. In the process of affirming the universality of fascism, fascists created differences. Arguably, the collapse of definitional clarity for fascism starts here.

One of the main outcomes of transnational fascism in this case was the depth and variety of connections across national borders and ethnic identities. Where one would expect only hostility between French and German fascist groups one often finds grudging respect, imitation and even acceptance. For most, national enmity was paramount, but to a surprising extent Alsatian fascists celebrated the fascist idea over national affiliation. The Bauernbund perhaps best exemplified this in the way that Bilger drew together Nazi, French fascist and autonomist strands to create a unique amalgamation. Joseph Bilger, however, was not an isolated example. The local chapter of the Francistes had ties with the pro-Nazi autonomists and both they and the Parti Social Français (PSF), a nationally based radical right-wing French party, displayed a radical form of racial anti-Semitism more reminiscent of the Nazis than the French versions. At another level, even when the Francistes were discussing the fascism of a national enemy, the rhetoric was generally favourable, often consisting of implicit or explicit statements that fascism as practised by others should be applied to Alsace or to France. All of these fascist groups perceived fascism as the zeitgeist of the future, as not restricted to one country, and as something it was desirable to emulate.

They did not all share precisely the same vision of fascism. In Alsace fascist movements supported Germany, France or Alsace. Some had a predominantly peasant constituency, others an urban working class membership. Some movements were more radical than others and some were closely allied with conservative right-wing organisations. Some local fascist organisations were virtually single-issue movements (for example, small anti-Semitic groups), while others such as the PSF sought to become a mass party. That these groups saw any sort of connection is amazing. In fact, although they believed they shared a basic world-view (Weltanschauung), each of these movements internalised fascism differently. Their interpretations of fascism hinged largely on the local context as well as on the particular context of each movement's constituency and goals. As we have seen, each group subtly differentiated itself from the others. The pro-Nazi autonomists presented Nazism as a form of ethnic belonging. For some of them, Nazism was the means to the end of returning to Germany. Joseph Bilger clearly took a more traditionalist view of fascism as a means of elevating the status of peasants. The Francistes stressed the universal aspects of fascism, perhaps a way of countering the success of Hitler. For them, fascism was a universal movement that was locally and nationally flexible – a view not shared by the Nazis. The Alsatian communists around Hueber portrayed anything that constrained their German identity as fascist, simultaneously trying to deny it as a positive movement while functionally supporting the Nazis.

The barrage of articles from the fascist press defining what fascism meant influenced the non-fascist public as well as the initiated. Few Alsatians could avoid the concept that fascism was the wave of the future. Fewer still could ignore its presence in Germany. Within the broad parameters of the fascist movement, individuals had many alternatives. Fascism could be attractive in the eye of the beholder because the beholder could see it in the way he or she wanted. The different parties provided a plethora of options. Few ‘fascists’ agreed with every characteristic to be found on a generic list of fascist principles (a list that did not exist at the time). Even if they did, they did not endorse each point in equal measure. Individuals could be, and were, attracted to specific ideological points even if they were repelled by others. Dairy farmers, for example, might join the Bauernbund because of its connection to issues that mattered to them, even if they did not care one whit whether there was a fascist international. Arguably many people who joined or flirted with fascist movements were not necessarily fascist, but were persuaded that their particular issue or interest could best be dealt with through fascism.

This essay has focused on the transnational expression of fascist ideas, particularly the perception of international fascist groups, in the regional media. All of the groups had a concept of fascism as something that was international – that transcended national borders. Other more concrete transnational factors also played a role in Alsace and were significant in verifying the transnational nature of fascism in Alsace. Considerable interaction, for example, took place between the autonomists and the Germans during the 1930s. This took the form of funding, actual participation in Nazi party rallies by the Jungmannschaft, and informal contacts with friends, relatives, colleagues and supporters on the other side of the Rhine. Judging from the language and tone of his writings, Joseph Bilger was probably a regular reader of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher's anti-Semitic paper. Shared language facilitated the flow of ideas. Even the French fascists operating in Alsace knew German and seemed to have more immediate contact with German culture and politics than their Parisian comrades. Transnational ideas flowed through people, money and shared experiences. The focus on ideas, however, illuminates how the transnational interaction led to a shifting representation of fascism.

Border regions such as Alsace are inherently transnational, blurring as they do the line between nations. That does not make Alsace an exception; the transmission of ideas does not stop at the Vosges instead of the Rhine. The chapters of the French fascist groups were vocal and often expressed ideas that were at odds with their national leadership and more resonant with Nazism. The Francistes in Alsace, for example, were far more engaged with anti-Semitism than their national leader Bucard was. Their more radical position on such issues pressured the national leadership and helped shape the ideology. If nothing else, the local members established the idea of continuity with international fascism. For many French fascists, the invasion of France in 1940 alienated them from the Nazi-led fascist New World Order, but allegiances before the war were not so clear-cut.

Viewing fascism as a transnational movement is about changing how we understand fascism from a static ideology to a dynamic and constantly changing one. The greatest frustration for scholars of fascism has consistently been the creation of an acceptable definition. The manifestations of fascism are so varied that no fascist movement conforms completely to a single model, unless the model reflects only the characteristics of one movement. Moreover, the boundaries between fascism and a wide range of conservative movements have been difficult to establish, as have those between fascism and some left-wing movements. The concept of transnational directs our attention to the specific connections between different fascist movements and can perhaps provide some insight into understanding the multitude of ways that fascism interacted with non-fascist ideas and movements. If the goal is ultimately to assess the fascist movement in its totality across borders and over time, then we must move beyond the two dominant explanations of international fascism: fascism as separate manifestations of hypernationalism and a group of explanations that we might lump together as ‘generic fascism’.

As much as anything, the view that fascism was a series of discrete hyper-nationalist movements reflects the way that fascism has been researched. Many of the books dealing with ‘international’ fascism are essentially anthologies in which specialists describe the course of fascism country by country.Footnote ⁷¹ Traditionally, scholars have been limited by language, training and convention to researching national histories. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with this, the inadvertent consequence is a tendency to tilt our understanding of fascism towards seeing it as a series of atomised nationalist movements. Seen in isolation, most fascist movements are indeed hyper-nationalist and unique. Seen collectively, they are less so. Individual manifestations of fascism generally assumed the primacy of national identity. Looked at universally, however, fascism was not about any particular nationalism, but rather about the idiosyncratic way that different nations, political movements and even individuals interpreted the politics of identity in the light of their differing contexts and needs. If one tries to grasp fascism as a whole, it seems insufficient to argue that it is only a series of nationalist movements.

Alternatively, a number of scholars have chosen to step back and focus on the definition of fascism as a single, unchanging phenomenon. Mussolini laid the groundwork by arguing that ‘fascism is a purely Italian phenomenon in its historical expression, but its doctrinal postulates have a universal character’.Footnote ⁷² The quest for an illusory Weberian ‘ideal fascism’ has been a central pursuit for a number of scholars.Footnote ⁷³ Undoubtedly, assembling a working definition of the fascist ideal is useful in terms of providing a guideline or framework with which to debate who is and who is not fascist. Because of the opprobrium attached to fascism, determining who is evil and why has assumed primary importance. The issue is not whether each movement was fascist, or whether each movement fits some generic definition. Allardyce makes the point that ‘there is no such thing as fascism. There are only men and movements that we call by that name’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Most of the literature already deals with definitional issues, and it is not clear that a great deal of progress has been made in that direction. Whether Generalissimo Francisco Franco was a fascist just like Mussolini or Hitler is not the right question. Similarly, the issue of whether countries such as France were ‘allergic’ to fascism is not relevant.Footnote ⁷⁵ Despite an attempted fascist international in the early thirties, and despite the highly dogmatic nature of the various types of fascism, fascists failed to create a template for measuring the acceptability of their ideological confreres—indeed they had little interest in doing so, as their respective imperialist ambitions often collided. What matter are the mechanisms connecting ideologies and practices across borders. Transnationalism also helps answer the question of whether individuals and groups consciously saw some commonality with other fascist movements in other countries—even if they themselves were not what we would consider fascist.

A growing academic consensus diminishes the centrality of an absolute or generic fascism in favour of research on understanding the dynamism of a movement such as fascism. Michel Dobry, for example, attacks the way in which the historians who have argued that France was allergic to fascism have tainted the idea of an ‘authentic fascism’. As a result, they ‘miss what is truly specific’ about fascism. The obsession with definition, in Dobry's view, has obscured the functional ‘blurring of boundaries’ which characterised the French Right in the 1930s.Footnote ⁷⁶ Brian Jenkins notes that ‘the construction of detailed political and ideological typologies’ presents an overly rigid view of processes and movements that were fundamentally dynamic.Footnote ⁷⁷ The articulation of an ideal fascism does not address the variability of interpretation by its proponents or the process of evolution. Beyond comparing and contrasting different national manifestations or recognising common traits, the idea of a fluid movement that evolved internationally has been hinted at, but not fully explored. The literature also fails to address how fascist ideas and strategies trickled into mainstream politics. Rather, the academic obsession with definition has nudged our understanding towards a static sort of fascism, in which general principles are laid out somewhere and adhered to in varying degrees by different nations. The focus should not be based on whether, or how much, a fascist movement adheres to a template. Instead we should emphasise the evolution of differences and how international groups simultaneously drew together and distinguished themselves from each other. If fascism drew from every part of the political spectrum, then perhaps the most important task is to track the subtleties of difference, rather than the banalities of similarity.