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Foreign News: Blue-Shirted

2 minute read
TIME

At Paris 6,000 Frenchmen donned “horizon blue shirts, dark blue collars, navy blue ties, light gray suits and blue-ribboned felt hats.” Then, swaggering 6,000 canes, they proceeded to assemble and lay the foundations of “blue-shirted French Fascism.”

One of their number, M. Jacques Arthuys, harangued the gathering as follows: “Salvation is in Fascism! Certainly not in disciplined and formalized black-shirted Italian Fascism, but in Fascism adapted to the thoughtful and measured French temperament—less of words than of action.”

M. Philippe Barrès, son of Maurice Barrès (late author-orator) then defined the spirit of the new Fascism as “Faith in France . . . and a deep disgust with parliamentarianism.” Declared M. Georges Valois, Nationalist economist: “Our work will be . . . to suppress parliament and give a leader to the national state. . . . In replacing the parliamentary form of government, only one of two new forms is possible—Communism or Fascism. Can there be any choice? . . . The financial recovery of France can be accomplished only by a dictator of finances, who, it is easy to perceive, must be necessarily a political dictator.”

The “President” of the assemblage, one Pierre Taittinger, keynoted as follows: “To the violence of Communism we will oppose our force. Our aspirations are not those of the Facism of Benito Mussolini in Italy, nor of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain. What we want is another Clemenceau, as Clemenceau was and did in 1917. We want a leader who is real, in whom we can have confidence, and whose word will have authority and power!”

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