Abstract
To what extent was violence a normal part of political life in interwar Western Europe? The authors of this volume seek to relocate our understanding of the scope and significance of political violence between the World Wars, ‘blurring the frontiers between democracy and extremism, and the left and the right’ (p. 6). Although they reject any attempt to relegate that violence to Germany or Italy, an implicit question runs through the chapters: How should Europeans have resisted the rise of fascism? By exploring how violence figured in a range of political battles from Britain to Belgium, the Netherlands to Morocco, the authors explore a wide range of participants, their motivations and practices, in order to wrestle with the question of whether anti-fascists could in fact use violence to oppose their opponents’ ‘spirit of violence’ (p. 38).
This volume emerged from a 2012 conference at Cardiff University and includes 10 chapters plus an introduction by Kevin Passmore. The chapters are organized geographically, all but two focusing on a single European state. While the book often feels like the collection of conference papers it is, it most productively challenges readers when highlighting the extent to which the political significance of violence emerged in moments that were not ‘obviously and overtly political’ (p. 162).
Matthew Bucholtz challenges the iconic image of the German Frontkämpfer, suggesting that after the First World War, those front line soldiers constituted a politically diverse group and should not be relegated to the status of proto-Nazis. Nonetheless, even as he rejects a monolithic Frontkämpfer typology, he makes clear that contemporary battles over the term’s meaning mattered, not least for the establishment of its lasting status as a politically charged icon. Thus, when an August 1933 a legal brief gave Frontkämpfer status to anyone who had fought from 1 August 1914 to 31 December 1918 (p. 49), it retroactively defined the First World War to include the paramilitary battles that helped establish a norm for extra-legal political violence in the Weimar Republic.
In his chapter on meeting hall battles in interwar France, Chris Millington wonders what constitutes a normal level of violence within the rhetorical and physical fights that played out at political gatherings. For authorities keeping track of those public meetings, fistfights between political opponents seemed not to have risen to the level of ‘notable incident’ (p. 117), a turn of phrase that parallels British police critique of bouncers using ‘unnecessary violence’ (p. 175) to eject hecklers from a British Union of Fascists meeting in June 1934. Such language implies a certain level of legitimate or at least tolerable violence, but the connections between participants’ physical acts and their politics is harder to discern. The rhetorical violence impugned to speakers whose words struck listeners ‘like blows’ or lashed out ‘like a whip’ (116) does not explain how listeners moved between metaphor and violent practice, but at least pushes readers to consider how much it mattered when people described what they were doing (or whom they sought to control).
Caroline Campbell takes readers on a fascinating exploration of clashes between the right-wing Croix de Feu and the Popular Front, but on the other side of the Mediterranean, in Morocco. This detailed case locates the Croix de Feu’s ‘provocative violence’ as part of a history of colonial authority that concealed its brutality within a policy of ‘peaceful penetration’ (p. 129). The essay effectively evokes the back and forth of the events of March 1936, racing along the roads between Casablanca, Rabat, and Kénitra and culminating in a pitched battle that injured hundreds of people. Campbell ultimately sees the events as an example of the Croix de Feu’s ability to ‘militarise public spaces’ (p. 139) and thus to provoke its opponents’ violence. However, that summary analysis proves less precise than her compelling narrative of how rhetorical denunciation, physical act, and individual characters interacted in narrow, profoundly local ways.
Shifting attention to Britain and the conflict between Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) and its Jewish opponents, Daniel Tilles more effectively unpacks the relationship between rhetorical claims and violent practices. By assembling a careful timeline of Mosley’s ideological declarations, Tilles repudiates BUF claims that its ‘defensive violence’ (p. 174) came only in response to Jewish assaults, which, in turn, forced the British fascists to adopt an antisemitism that they initially had sought to avoid. Like Bucholtz’s discussion of the Frontkämpfer, Tilles' analysis depends on his critical challenge to the narrative that participants at the time used to make sense of their violence. Or, to put it in terms that Sven Reichardt deploys earlier in the book, violence needs to be understood as a ‘discursive construction and a social practice’ (p. 63). The politics of those violent acts emerge when, as these authors do, those processes are put in closely examined historical context.