Mathieu Hikaru Desan (University of Colorado Boulder)

Order, Authority, Nation: Neo-socialism, Fascism, and the Dynamics of Political Conversion

In 1933, a schismatic faction scandalized the French Socialist Party by proposing “order, authority, nation” as new watchwords for socialist propaganda. Ten years later, some of these neo-socialists, as they came to be called, were among the most ideologically committed Nazi collaborators in occupied France. Most accounts of this history have tended to emphasize various supposed affinities between neo-socialist doctrine and fascism. Complicating things, however, is the fact that the neo-socialists had initially defined their politics—including the slogan “order, authority, nation”—in explicit opposition to fascism and in defense of democracy. How then did a group of anti-fascist and democratic socialists become convinced fascists?

Accounts of political conversion tend to rely on tropes of continuity, reducing the task of explanation to the identification of ideological origins, influences, and antecedents. I argue that the fundamental discontinuity which characterizes the phenomenon of political conversion instead requires us to be attentive to what I call the practical logic of political conversion. In terms of the neo-socialists’ trajectory, I argue that their transformation from democratic socialism to fascism was driven not by prior ideological commitments but was instead the culmination of a series of opportunistic reinventions within a rapidly shifting and crisis-ridden political field.