Jeunesses Patriotes
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The Jeunesses Patriotes (Patriotic Youths) were a far right Fascist-inspired street brawlers group of France, recruited mostly from university students and financed by industrialists, founded by Pierre Taittinger in 1924. Taittinger took inspiration for the group's creation in the Boulangist Ligue des Patriotes and Benito Mussolini's Blackshirts.
According to the police, the Jeunesses Patriotes had 90,000 members in the country and 6,000 in Paris in 1932. Its street fighters were led by a retired general named Desofy, and were organized around Groupes Mobiles, paramilitary mobile squads of fifty men, outfitted in blue raincoats and berets. The group stated its willingnes to combat the "Red Peril" and the Cartel des Gauches, and chose to back Raymond Poincaré and retreat after 1926.
It made a comeback in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and took part in the Stavisky Affair-provoked riots, which were widely interpreted as an attempted coup against the Republic by the far right. In 1936, the Popular Front government outlawed the Jeunesses Patriotes and other extremist groups.
See also
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