King’s Camelots – Wikipedia

I King’s Camelots They were a far-right youth organization, linked to the monarchical, nationalist and Catholic-Interesting movement of the Action Française of Charles Maurras and activates in France in the first thirty years of the twentieth century.

The name of the group, despite what one might first look after, did not allude to the legendary court of the Arturian sagas, but had a much more prosaic origin. The term camelot , in ancient French, in fact it simply meant fabric, mostly of little value, of goat or camel hair ( camel , in Latin) and had moved on to indicate, over time, not only the leather merchants, but all those who, like them, sold their merchandise on the streets. Hence a further semantic passage, which brought the word jackets to indicate the screams, or those who were in charge of the news of the newspapers of the newspapers. The name Camelots du Roi, therefore, meant literally the “squeezes of the king” ^[first] . The first Camelots, in fact, were the young monarchical students and Antidreyfusardi who had made themselves available to the drafting of the French Action (the newspaper of the Maurras movement of the same name), to sell the copies of the publication in the streets of the cities. They, only in a second half, gave themselves a real organizational structure for Maurice Pujo impulse, member of the management committee of the Action Française, who assumed the actual direction of the “Chrums of the King” leaving the sculptor Maxime Real del Sarte and a Henri de Lyons (one of the components of the original association) the positions, somewhat formal, of president and secretary general. Recruited above all among young university students, to the point that the Latin neighborhood of Paris was considered their stronghold, the Camelots soon took on an inter -professional and interclassist physiognomy, noding among their files, in addition to the students of the founding nucleus, also employees and workers (“[…] fraternally united for the great task that was proposed to them, an order of knights without and scrubbed and without fear”, as he had imaginatively to call them Pujo), not to even count the adhesion to the group of famous intellectuals such as the writer Catholic Georges Bernanos or members of the entourage legitimist such as Jean de Barrau, particular secretary of the Duke of Orléans (1869-1926), in turn the son of the Orleanist Count of Paris (1838–1894) and therefore heir to the throne of France.

The organizational structure and actions of the ten years [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

In the framework of the complex and articulated structure of the Action Française (which counted a sort of party school: the Action Française Institut; a publishing house: Nouvelle Librai Nationale; sectoral or gender organizations, such as Action Etudiants Française, the Dames Royalistes and the Jeunes Filles Royalistes; even an organ of organ connecting the union world: the Cerchle Proudhon), the Camelots presented themselves as a sort of “action team” Before the letter , hierarchically organized, which served as “assault troops in the acts of violence of the” Holy War “conducted by the Action Française against the Republic”, and this despite the absence, indeed indeed to the whole Maurrassian organization, of those characteristics (such as, for example, the use of uniforms) which would instead have been typical of the properly fascist movements between the two world conflicts ^[2] . Risent, unscrupulous and turbulent, to the point of attracting the criticisms of the most legalist and conservative monarchical circles, the young Maurrassians, who among other things did not hide the anti -Semitic beliefs borrowed from leader of the Action Française, they distinguished themselves for the habit of contesting loudly, with whistles and cackles, the judgments of the magistrates who tried their companions involved in judicial events (” These are people who don’t care about the laws, live the king’s camelots! “Recited one of their songs), nor did they never pull back on the frequent opportunities of physical confrontation with the rivals of the left (between 1908 and 1912 they promoted, in Paris and in the departments, demonstrations and processions in honor of Giovanna d’Arco that often They resulted in zest and clashes in the square with the political opponents and caused the intervention of the police with arrests and related processes and convictions), to the point that they were able to adorn a headquarters of the Action Française with the flags and banners torn from the antagonists defeated in the clashes of the square ^[2] . Famous for the taste of the striking action, halfway between the squadristic act and the goliardic provocation ^[3] , in 1908 the Camelots organized a sensational demonstration of protest at the Sorbona in Paris against the free course Professor Amédée Thalamas, a high school teacher of history and geography who had denigrated the memory of Giovanna d’Arco (“at the first lesson [of Thalamas], a group of the Camelots de Roi […]; the professor is whistled , made the object of launches of different types of bullets, until one of the Camelots jumps on the chair and brutally slapped the helpless professor “), after which, despite the intervention of the police to ensure the regular course of the course, due to of further intemperances of the group the lessons were interrupted by the academic authorities ^[2] . Another episode that aroused a certain sensation occurred shortly after, when Real del Sarte, during a hearing of the Court of Cassation, accused the judges of the Court of Partiality in favor of Alfred Dreyfus and was consequently sentenced to a few months in prison .. the Camelots also pointed out in Parisian theaters, protesting against anti -religious or anti -acticactic productions, of which they managed in several cases to prevent representation (as happened in 1911, when they organized a protest against one piece Theatrical of Henri Bernstein, a Jewish playwright who accused of desertion during military service). Also to the Maurrassian activists, in those stormy years, the protests (in June 1908) against the transfer to the Pantheon of the Dreyfusardo Émile Zola (outside the temple “were also ascribed in those stormy years (the screams of the Camelots du Roi and the nationalist groups that invested were heard [compartment] against Zola and Dreyfus ” ^[4] ); Lucien Lacour’s action, a militant who slapped even the Prime Minister Aristide Briand in public in 1910; The harsh contrast, in 1913, to the events promoted by the left parties on the occasion of the debate in Parliament on the bill of Jean-Louis Barthou who intended to restore three-year military service.

After the First World War, to which the Camelots offered a conspicuous blood tribute, the group reconstituted on new bases, however remaining involved, between the mid -1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, in the gradual decline of the Maurrassian movement, to which the condemnation of Pope Pius XI (December 1926) had reduced “the influx of new elements from the files of the Catholic youth” ” ^[2] And the dissatisfaction with political immobility and the antiquated conservatism of the ruling class began to subtract consents and adhesions to the advantage of new and more dynamic organizations of purely fascist imprint. To fill the void created with the crisis of the Action Française, “which in fact accepts [VA] the rules of the game of liberal democracy”, in fact movements such as the Faisceau, founded in November 1925 by George Valois and “work of the most elements, contributed militants […] of the Action Française and of the other national alloys “, towards which he affected a considerable number of subscribers and paintings escaped from the Maurrassian organization (and his youth arm) ^[5] . For some time, the Camelots did not lack the strength to implement other sensational initiatives such as those of the pre -war period, which was, in 1927, the liberation of the journalist and writer Léon Daudet, held at Santé for a printing crime and released (and then repaired in Belgium) following some mysterious calls (probably the work of the information service activated by Camelots themselves) to the director of the prison and passed by calls from the Ministry of the Interior ^[2] . The Camelots then participated, together with other right -wing associations, in the 1934 disorders in Paris and, after the aggression suffered by leader of the popular front Léon Blum to nationalist militants, were dissolved by decree, together with other similar organizations, in February 1936.

• King’s Camelots: Italian Encyclopedia .
• J.-F. Condette, The translation of Emile Zola’s ashes in the Pantheon , The difficult and posthumous revenge of the intellectual Dreyfusard , in Historical Review , July/September 2000, Presses Universitaires de France.
• M. FRAQUELLI, Other Duci. European fascisms between the two wars , Mursia, 2014.
• E. Nolte, Fascism in its time. The three faces of fascism , Sugarco, 1993.
• Z. Sternhell, Neither right nor left. Fascist ideology in France , Baldini & Castoldi, 1997.