ABSTRACT
Fascism in France attracted more intellectuals, writers, and theorists than in any other country, leaving the history of French fascist ideology especially rich in source materials. In one sense, of course, this is fortunate. In the late 1960s, however, a new generation of French historians, forced to come to terms with the postwar national myths of its parents, began questioning the orthodoxy of a French national "allergy" to movements of the extreme right. Intense public interest in their debates resulted in a virtual media industry devoted to French fascism in which abstruse historical points of contention were fought out in the popular press. Just as historians' analyses of fascism have been shaped by memories of occupation, collaboration, and holocaust, so many of the concepts used to define and describe fascism have moved a corresponding distance from their interwar French context and, in the process, lost the finer shades of historical experience.
