As René Rémond recognised, the Croix de Feu is the key to the problem of fascism in France. For over two years the league was at the centre of political debate, providing the justification for the formation of the antifascist Popular Front. It was incontestably a mass movement, with somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 members by the time of its dissolution in June 1936. So if the Croix de Feu was fascist, then no longer can fascism be seen as the concern of marginal intellectuals or a product of Nazi occupation. Broadly speaking the league has been seen in three ways.

K.-J. Müller hesitates between seeing the Croix de Feu as an example of ‘circumstantial fascism’ or Bonapartism, but is ultimately less concerned with classification than with explaining its origins in a crisis specific to France. In his view the league was a response to demands for representation on the part of emergent groups such as modern business and white-collar workers. Once the Radicals had met these claims in 1937–8 by shifting to the right, the Croix de Feu/PSF declined. Müller's approach has the advantage of placing the leagues in their socioeconomic context. But problems arise from his reliance on concepts derived from functionalist sociology. Social conflict is seen as an adjustment of the system to changed circumstances, so the extent to which the leagues sought actively and self-consciously to transform French society is obscured. Furthermore, although we shall see that in the Rhône the Croix de Feu recruited from ‘emergent’ groups, it did not ‘represent’ them unproblematically.