The Faisceau was a short-lived French Fascist party. It was founded on November 11, 1925 by Georges Valois. It was preceded by its newspaper, Le Nouveau Siècle, which was founded as a weekly on February 26 and became daily after the party's launch. Its contributors to Le Nouveau Siècle originally included Valois, Philippe Barrès, Eugène Mathon, Henri Massis and Xavier Vallat, but after the foundation of the party it was the object of bitter attacks from the Action Française, which considered it a potential rival, and most well-known names were scared off. Philippe Barrès and Eugène Mathon were among those who remained.

The Faisceau had borrowed its name from the Italian Fascists, and also adopted a style from them, with uniforms, staged ceremonies and parades. It also expressed admiration for Mussolini. Many of its ideas, however, were ones already current in France, deriving mostly from the work of Maurice Barrès. Valois claimed that Barrès' Le Cocarde had been the first Fascist newspaper. Even extensive investigations by the French police failed to reveal any links, official or unofficial with the Italian Fascist Party. They included a "national" state (i.e. for the benefit of all social classes, rather than the existing "bourgeois" state or the Socialists' and Communists' proletarian state) with a strong, authoritarian leader. Its stated aims included a coup d'état and a dictatorship, although it never took any concrete steps towards achieving these ends. Nor was it clear who the dictator was to be - Valois himself was no dictator-in-waiting. Maxime Weygand may have been the preferred candidate of some members of the Faisceau.

The Faisceau ran into serious problems almost as soon as it was founded. Valois - a former anarcho-syndicalist who had converted to monarchism and joined the Action Française, then left after the First World War - and the industrialists who financed the party, such as Mathon (the owner of a large textile firm) and the perfume manufacturer François Coty all claimed to favour "corporatism" as the basis for economic organisation. However, it soon became clear that they had rather different ideas about what it meant. For Valois, it meant that the economy should be run by the producers - i.e. everyone involved in manufacturing goods - whereas Mathon interpreted it as meaning that industrialists like himself should be in charge, with no interference by the state. These differences led to Mathon and Coty leaving shortly after the foundation of the party, putting it in a precarious financial situation, not helped by the commercial failure of "Le Nouveau Siècle" following the Action Française's attacks.

Valois considered Fascism to be a revolt against "bourgeois" rule, and as such it had much in common with Marxism - he described them as "brother enemies". The Faisceau never questioned the existence of private property, but nonetheless Valois felt that socialism was not its principle enemy; he stated that Fascism had "exactly the same object as socialism", even if the latter was flawed in its means of achieving that end. The Faisceau tried to place themselves above the left-right division, but this turned out to be a source of further problems. Most of its militants came from the right, particularly the extreme right (this explains the Action Française's hostility. Many Action Française militants who were disillusioned with its lack of dynamism, its monarchism and its very literary nature joined the Faisceau), but it worked hard to recruit people from the left. It had some successes - notably Marcel Delagrange, former Communist mayor of Périgueux and the anarcho-syndicalist and future Vichy Republic minister Hubert Lagardelle - but they were not proportionate to the effort made. Thus it failed to expand at the left's expense, while becoming the enemy of the right, which, unlike in Italy, was strong enough and confident enough not to need Fascist support against the left.

While the Faisceau's aims were radical, its actions did not live up to them. It did form paramilitary "legions" - but principally in self-defence against attacks by the Action Française's Camelots du Roi. They rarely clashed with the forces of order, and their only major engagement with the Communists was at the party's meeting in Rheims on June 27, 1926. Valois was no charismatic leader like Mussolini or Hitler, and did not wish to play that role. Those who had joined hoping for action began to leave. From the end of 1926 the party was losing militants fast.

Its decline was hastened by the formation of a right-wing government under Raymond Poincaré and the stabilisation of the franc. It ceased to exist in 1928. Valois himself, whose politics were becoming more left-wing, was excluded from the party, the remains of which founded the Parti fasciste révolutionnaire.