From the Popular Front to the Eastern Front: Youth Movements, Travel, and the European Idea in France (1930-1945)

There is no straight line leading from the French Popular Front to Hitler’s Europe. Yet, quite a few Frenchmen followed such a crooked path that led them from one the 20^th century’s great democratic movements to its most exclusionary and destructive ideology. Seeking to uncover the apparent contradictions that frame this political itinerary, this paper looks at the interwar youth hostel movement, a pacifist and left-leaning organization and the drift of some of its members towards Europeanist fascism during the Second World War. I argue that discourses on European civilization on the right and the left coalesced at the end of the 1930s around of critique of industrial modernity and consumerism. In doing so they provided a solid platform for this radical shift of political allegiances and provided common historical narratives to youths of countries under Nazi influence. Looking at the complex articulation between youth politics, travel practices, and French-German relations, my research highlights the significance of generational sentiments in the development of an original pan-European fascist ideology during WWII. In the last instance, I show that the war experience brought about a radical transformation of the spatial imaginary of Nazism, from a hyper-national to a supra-national ideology, and suggest the need to reassess the significance of Hitler’s wartime European project within the larger historical framework of 20th Century Europe.