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Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right in France and Britain between the Wars

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The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory

Abstract

According to the historian of ecology Anna Bramwell, ‘between the wars German national socialism was alone among European fascist parties in expressing ecological concerns’.1 In some way this statement is correct, if we focus to the letter on ‘fascist parties’, that is, political parties that defined themselves as ‘fascist’ and contested elections or mobilised against parliamentary democracy, or if we see ‘ecological’ as being the intention of reshaping society on the basis of a holistic understanding of ‘nature’ rather than one, environmentally focused part of a broader political programme. Yet on closer inspection, it becomes obvious that whilst only in Germany did fascism with an ecological slant to its programme come to power, radical right groups across Europe engaged to a greater or lesser extent with ecological questions. Recent research shows that, like everything the Nazis touched, their programme for the environment did more harm than good2; clearly the dream of a bucolic, united peasant Europe did not apply when the scorched-earth policy was being applied in Lapland or Ukraine, and the environmental costs of total war hardly acted as a break on the Führer’s ambitions. Elsewhere, for the most part radical right groups did not get the chance to try out their theories, other than in collaboration with Nazism. But along with visions of urban reorganisation, often inspired by Le Corbusier, which sought to cleanse cities and expel from them their decadent, ‘Judaized’ elements,3 almost all fascist movements developed some form of rural revivalism.

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Notes

  1. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 162. My thanks to David Bensoussan, Susie Byers, Philip Conford and Philippe Vervaecke for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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  1. Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

    Dan Stone (Professor of Modern History)

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Stone, D. (2013). Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right in France and Britain between the Wars. In: The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029539_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029539_9

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44018-4

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