Roger Cazy

File:Cazy, Roger Martin (Rome 1936).jpg

Roger Cazy (foreground, left) in a fascist uniform during a ceremony at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Rome (February 6, 1936)

Roger-Martin Cazy (15 June 1898 – 10 March 1970), was a French political journalist and activist.

Biography

Roger Cazy was born at the commune of Fourmies in the Nord department. After having fought at a very young age as a volunteer during the World War I, Cazy worked as a draughtsman in the technical services of the French National Railway Company, alongside his son Jean.

Cazy settled in Arras and soon became known for his political militancy, as president of the local section of the French Solidarity League, and for methods that sometimes went beyond the legal framework. In 1934, for example, he was accused of smearing tar on several public buildings. In 1938, he joined the Front Franc, a right-wing group created by Jean Boissel, a war veteran who also founded a Rassemblement International Fasciste (R.I.F). Cazy soon became the regional delegate of these two organizations for the north of France.

As a sympathizer of Fascist Italy — where he participated in a demonstration of veterans on February 6, 1936 — and of National Socialist theses, he came into contact with Heinrich Kessemeier's German Fichte Federation. This organization, which relayed German propaganda abroad, provided Cazy with numerous leaflets. These were written in several languages because they were intended for both the French and the immigrant workforce in the region.

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Cazy (right) in June 1939

Alerted by the distribution of these documents and by the discovery of inscriptions (swastikas and initials of the R.I.F.) in and around Arras during the spring of 1939, the police raided Cazy's home on June 12 and seized some 40 kilos of leaflets as well as a list of personalities who were to be put "out of harm's way", including the prefect of Pas-de-Calais, the radical-socialist city councilor Jules Mathon and the radical-socialist mayor of Arras Fernand Lobbedez. On June 20, Cazy was arrested by the examining magistrate Deswarte and charged with anti-national propaganda and contacting a foreign agent without notifying the authorities. A few days later, a pointer from the port of Dunkirk, Raymond Geckisch, was arrested for similar reasons. Geckisch, whose father was German, was the regional secretary of the French Popular Party, which he infiltrated on behalf of Eugène-Napoléon Bey's National Proletarian Party (PNP).

Cazy's supporters in Arras demonstrated against his incarceration in the Saint-Nicaise prison by vandalizing the window of the Télégramme de Boulogne-sur-Mer (rue Gambetta) on July 3, by covering several buildings with graffiti and by distributing leaflets, and by sending an anonymous threatening message to the mayor on August 9. On September 10, a few days after the outbreak of World War II, Cazy was handed over to the military authorities in Lille. Transferred to the prison of Loos-lès-Lille, he found Boissel, also arrested for having defended him in his magazine, Le Réveil du Peuple.

Liberated by the German forces, Boissel and Cazy re-launched the Front Franc in 1940 and resumed the publication of the Réveil du Peuple, of which Cazy had become the administrator. Cazy and Auguste Féval (grandson of the novelist Paul Féval) came into conflict with the founder of the Front Franc and his entourage and tried to take over the party's headquarters at 22 rue de la Paix, from which they were brutally chased away on July 1, 1941 by Boissel's supporters. They then tried to pursue their activities within the Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions, but the secretary general of this organization, Captain Paul Sézille, was suspicious of them.

Judged guilty of collaboration after the war, Roger Cazy was sentenced in 1946 to ten years of hard labor and national degradation. He died in 1970, at the age of 71, at Hautefage-la-Tour in Lot-et-Garonne.