Soucy acknowledges that some French fascist movements (such as Gaston Bergery's Front Commun and Marcel Déat's "Neo-Socialists") were more left than right (if only for short periods).
But he maintains that the largest French fascist movements of the interwar period—Georges Valois' Faisceau, Pierre Taittinger's Jeunesses Patriotes, Solidarité française, Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français and La Rocque's CF/PSF—were strong defenders of social conservatism and upper class economic interests.
Too many historians, Soucy argues, have taken the "socialist" rhetoric—or Orwellian "double-talk"—of some of these movements at face value, ignoring how it was repeatedly contradicted by their specific positions on social, economic and political issues.
Although Soucy points out the obvious—that not all French conservatives in the 1920s and 30's were attracted to fascism (especially members of the Alliance démocratique and the Parti démocratique populaire in the 1930s)—he regards the most successful French fascisms of the era, that is, those with the largest party memberships, as "variants" or "extensions" of social conservatism in crisis, movements that benefited from the right-wing backlash to the elections of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924 and the Popular Front in 1936.
They also indulged in a more virulent demonology than many conservatives, blaming more harshly or "extremely" Communists, Socialists, freemasons, internationalists and (though not always) Jews for most of the nation's ills.
In doing so, fascists echoed an ideal that traditional conservatives also promoted: that material differences between the upper and lower classes were unimportant compared to "spiritual" values and the unity of the nation.
In a number of cases during the Great Depression, differences between fascist and non-fascist conservatives gave way to "fusion"—with ideological interpenetration taking place in both directions as a result of common interest.
[1] After 1936, in response to the rise of the Popular Front, many previous French fascists and others who were counterrevolutionary, Catholic, traditionalist and reactionary crossed over to La Rocque's PSF.
This was also true of some democratic conservatives who had previously viewed La Rocque with repugnance but who were now willing to overlook the many anti-democratic statements and paramilitary threats to overthrow the government that he had made before 1936.
When the new Popular Front government banned the paramilitary CF in the summer of 1936, La Rocque replaced it with the PSF, claiming that he was now a political democrat (an alleged conversion that was quickly forgotten in 1941 when he became a strong supporter of the Vichy regime).
Soucy emphasizes that the "fluidity" of fascist ideology and tactics defies historians who insist on imposing static taxonomies on "fascism in motion."
For Soucy, too many historians have attempted to white-wash the CF/PSF by defining fascism in such an unhistorical way, taking at face value La Rocque's "democratic" rhetoric after the CF (at least its paramilitary formations) was outlawed in 1936.
[2] In the winter of 1935–1936, La Rocque concluded that circumstances were not favorable for a paramilitary coup and chose to pursue an electoral path to power—despite telling his troops at the time that "even the idea of soliciting a vote nauseates me").
A month later, La Rocque described the violence of his followers at the Parc des Princes as a spontaneous "mass unprising" that had stopped the "rise to power of a Communist plot.
Not only did the large influx of Catholics who poured into the PNF after 1929 leave their mark on subsequent fascist ideology in Italy, but Pope Pius XI thanked Mussolini for implementing the "Social Catholicism" of the Church.
[7] Finally, Soucy takes issue with the assumption that because La Rocque was highly nationalistic and strongly opposed to a German invasion of France in the 1930s he was not fascist.