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The Jeunesses Patriotes (Patriotic Youths, JP) were a Fascist-inspired street brawlers group of France, recruited mostly from university students and financed by industrialists founded in 1924 by Pierre Taittinger. 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 willingness to combat the "Red Peril" and the Cartel des Gauches (Left-wing Coalition), and chose to back Raymond Poincaré who came to power after the Cartel des gauches.

The organization retreated in 1926, but made a comeback in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and took part in the February 6, 1934 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.

[edit] See also

• 6 February 1934 crisis

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