If you want to play up the "Hitler equivalent" bit, make him a Walloon who fought for France, and later makes an (what's Anschluss in French?) of Belgium.
Leon Degrelle would certainly make a better looking leader than Jacques Doriot, and his charisma certainly matched Hitler. But he is a tad too young, and I don't know how likely it is for there to be any pro-Annexation sentiment amongst the Wallons, even among the Rexists who were very much copy-cats of French Integralism before they became copycats of Nazism.
You don't really need to speculate what French National Socialism/Fascism would have looked like, because it already existed in OTL, albeit out of power. It consisted of a variety of different currents, ranging from National Catholic Monarchism to National Syndicalism, but they all fall roughly under the label Integralism. French Fascism ("Integralism") was essentially opposed in every possible sense to the motto of the French revolution, hoping to return France to it's pre-revolution glory. Thus it's highly likely that French Fascism will be monarchist in sentiment but like Spanish Fascism it may delay or procrastinate about a Restoration, Pro-Catholic (but not necessarily "Clerical", as the Church itself was hostile to Integralism), classicist (as opposed to enlightenment thinking) and "National Syndicalist" in the Spanish sense. It will also be violently anti-Semeitic, unlike Italian Fascism, but like Italian Fascism not entirely thrilled with Nazi Biological Racism. It's main theorists would be Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras.
The character of French Fascism can roughly be summed up in this quotation:
The founders -republicans, federalists, integral nationalists, and syndicalists - having resolved the political problem or dismissed it from their minds, are all enthusiastically in favour of an organisation of French society in accordance with principles taken from the French tradition which they find in Proudhon's works and in the contemporary syndicalist movement, and they are all completely in agreement on the following points:
Democracy is the greatest error of the past century. If one wishes to live, if one wishes to work, if one wishes in social life to possess the greatest human guarantees for production and culture, if one wishes to preserve and increase the moral, intellectual and material capital of civilisation, it is absolutely necessary to destroy all democratic institutions.
-The
Déclaration of the
Cercle Proudhon
What you'd need in order to make this a ideology capable of taking power is to unite the various right-wing factions in France together, possibly involving the Rexists as well if we think that's realistic, into a single French Integralist Party with
Action Française playing the role of the
Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei and the
Croix-de-Feu playing the role of the
Deutschnationale Volkspartei. You have the
Cercle Proudhon types as the equalivent of the Strasser-Rohem faction.
