Exhibition Talk – The French Extreme Right in the age of Fascism and Nazism

Join us for an evening talk to accompany to our upcoming exhibition J’accuse! Press, Polemic and the Dreyfus Affair, with Dr Kevin Passmore. In this evening talk, Dr Passmore will explore the complex rivalries and alliances between the French and foreign extreme-right movements. For French political movements, Fascism and Nazism were only two of many, often conflicting, reference points and transnational circuits. They included, with differing degrees of importance, White Russian organisations, Catholic networks which included Action Française, Hispanism, Lusitanianism, and, increasingly, Fascism, and Nazism.Rather than cataloguing mutual transnational ‘influences’ on the French extreme right, Dr Passmore will explain how references to foreign ideologies were used tactically in struggles within the extreme right and against the global antifascist movement during the period. About the Speaker Kevin Passmore has recently retired from Cardiff University. He is a specialist on the right and far right, especially in France. His publications include The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford UP, 2013), ‘Les Croix de Feu et le PSF. Une perspective transnationale’, in Zeev Sternhell (ed) L’histoire refoulée. La Rocque, les Croix de feu, et le fascisme français (Cerf, 2019). He recently published The Maginot Line (Yale UP, 2025). The third revised edition of Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP) will be published in 2027.