Eugène Deloncle

Who was Eugène Deloncle?

Eugène Deloncle was a French engineer and Fascist leader, and the adoptive father of Jacques Corrèze.

A graduate of the École Polytechnique, Deloncle worked for the French Navy, and enrolled in World War I as an artillery officer. Wounded on the Champagne frontline, he was awarded the Legion of Honor.

Initially supportive of the integralist Action Française, he left the movement in 1935, in order to found his own group - the Comité Secret d'Action Révolutionnaire, usually known as La Cagoule. Cagoule kept the Orleanist and strongly anti-republican line of the Action Française, but added the rhetoric of Fascism.

With World War II, the Fall of France, and the German period of occupation, Deloncle created a movement backing Vichy France and Philippe Pétain, the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire. MSR, a more radical form of the Cagoule, strongly supported Pétain's traditionalism, as well as the political experiment engineered in Southern France. Afterwards, he approached the National Popular Rally of Marcel Déat, but conflicts with the latter got him expelled in May 1942, when he was succeeded as leader by Jean Fontenoy.