The most up-to-date and comprehensive English-language study of its kind, From victory to Vichy explores the political mobilisation of the two largest French veterans' associations during the interwar years, the Union federale (UF) and the Union nationale des combattants (UNC). Drawing on extensive research into the associations' organisation, policies and tactics, this study argues that French veterans were more of a threat to democracy than previous scholarship has allowed. As France descended into crisis, the UF and the UNC sought to extend their influence into the non-veteran milieu...

France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis is the first English-language book to examine the most significant political event in interwar France: the Paris riots of February 1934. On 6 February 1934, thousands of fascist rioters almost succeeded in bringing down the French democratic regime. The violence prompted the polarisation of French politics as hundreds of thousands of French citizens joined extreme right-wing paramilitary leagues or the left-wing Popular Front coalition. This 'French civil war', the first shots of which were fired in February 1934, would...

The contributions in this collection explore manifestations of political violence in the democracies of interwar Europe. While research in this area usually focuses on the regimes that fell to fascism, Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe, 1918-1940 demonstrates that violence remained a part of political competition in the democratic regimes of Western Europe too. Left-wing and right-wing ideas and uses of violence are examined in countries such as Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, as well as in Italy and Germany. By assembling the latest research in the field it...

Fighting for France is the first book to examine violence between political extremists in interwar France and the ways in which contemporaries understood it. This has important implications for understanding twentieth-century French politics, not least the French experience of collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War.