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La CagouleLa Cagoule ("The Cowl"), was a violent French fascist-leaning and anti-communist group active in the 1930s; the group attempted to overthrow the republican government. The official name of the group was Comit secret d'action rvolutionnaire (committee for revolutionary action); La Cagoule was the nickname given by the press and coined by Action Franaise nationalist Maurice Pujo. Its leader was Eugne Deloncle. The group was founded in 1935, drawing its troops mostly from royalists disappointed by the lack of action from Maurras' Action Franaise. and undertook various actions aimed at destabilizing the French Third Republic, including the assassination of Italian antifascists, the Rosselli brothers. The group, organized along military lines, infiltrated parts of the French military, especially in order to get weapons, and prepared the overthrowing of the Popular Front government. However, they were themselves infiltrated by the police, and in November 1937, Marx Dormoy, Minister of the Interior (and thus in charge of law enforcement) denounced the plot and ordered their arrest. During the Second World War, members of the Cagoule were divided. - Some of them joined various fascist movements; Schueller and Deloncle founded the Mouvement Social Rvolutionnaire which conducted various pro-Nazi Germany activities in occupied France, including the October 1941 bombing of seven synagogues in Paris.
- Some were prominent members of Marshall Ptain's Vichy Regime.
- Some of them, joined the interior Resistance
- Some joined Charles de Gaulle's Free French.
Prominent members of the Cagoule included: - Eugne Schueller, the founder of L'Oral, the French cosmetics giant, who funded the group. Some of the early meetings of the Cagoule took place at l'Oral headquarters, and some former Cagoulards, such as Jacques Corrze, were later hired as executives.
- Franois Mitterrand, who was a junior minister under Vichy, but worked for the Resistance; he later enter left-wing politics, obtained ministerial positions in the 1950s, and was elected President of France in 1981.
- Joseph Darnand: became the leader of the Milice, the paramilitary group of Vichy France who fought the Resistance and enforced antisemitic policies. He took an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and had a Waffen SS rank.
External links References - about the links between the Cagoule and l'Oral:
** Michael Bar-Zohar, "Bitter Scent: The Case of L'Oral, Nazis, and the Arab Boycott" (London, Dutton Books: 1996) pp. 264.
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