From Vichy to the FN: Legacies of WWII on Support for the Far Right in France

• In Event: Democracy under Stress: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Recent studies have examined the historical sources of support for far-right parties in Europe. These studies have primarily focused on how variation in the intensity of repression shaped voting behavior in the long run. This paper contributes to that literature by focusing, instead, on the identity of the perpetrator, arguing that whether repression was carried out by domestic far right actors or by a foreign regime matters for the long-term success of the far right. Specifically, we investigate how the legacy of the collapse of the French Third Republic during World War II and the division of the country between the German occupied zone and the Vichy regime affects far-right electoral support.
Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we show that voters in communes that were close to the occupation line under German control are systematically more likely to vote for the Front National and other far-right parties than are voters in communes that were just on the other side of the line under the Vichy regime. These differences are persistent across presidential, legislative, and European elections from at least 1986 to 2022. Moreover, these differences are substantial in size (around 1.5 to 2 percentage points) and robust to several different model specifications.
We argue that these differences are due to a “tainted political brand” effect. Voters in communes that experienced repression by domestic far right actors under Vichy are more likely today to associate far-right parties, and especially the FN, with those events. Consequently, those areas are, ceteris paribus, less likely to vote for the far right. This association is weaker in communes that were north of the Demarcation Line under direct German occupation, since their experience of far-right repression was related to a foreign oppressor rather than domestic political groups.
We explore this mechanism through computational text analyses of newspapers during electoral campaigns and legislative debates in the Senate and the National Assembly, as well as through additional analyses of electoral results.

Authors

• Per Fredrik Andersson, Stockholm University

• Agustin Alonso Goenaga Orrego, Lund University

• Andrea Papadia, University of York