The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  The fascisms we have known have come into power with the help of frightened ex-liberals and opportunist technocrats and ex-conservatives, and governed in more or less awkward tandem with them. Following these coalitions vertically through time, as movements turned into regimes, and horizontally in space, as they adapted to the peculiarities of national settings and momentary opportunities, requires something more elaborate than the traditional movement/regime dichotomy. I propose to examine fascism in a cycle of five stages: (1) the creation of movements; (2) their rooting in the political system; (3) their seizure of power; (4) the exercise of power; (5) and, finally, the long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either radicalization or entropy. Though each stage is a prerequisite for the next, nothing requires a fascist movement to complete all of them, or even to move in only one direction. Most fascisms stopped short, some slipped back, and sometimes features of several stages remained operative at once. Whereas most modern societies spawned fascist movements in the twentieth century, only a few had fascist regimes. Only in Nazi Germany did a fascist regime approach the outer horizons of radicalization.

  Separating the five stages of fascism offers several advantages. It permits plausible comparison between movements and regimes at equivalent degrees of development. It helps us see that fascism, far from static, was a succession of processes and choices: seeking a following, forming alliances, bidding for power, then exercising it. That is why the conceptual tools that illuminate one stage may not necessarily work equally well for others. The time has come to examine each of the five stages in turn.

  CHAPTER 2

  Creating Fascist Movements

  If something begins when it acquires a name, we can date the beginnings of fascism precisely. It began on Sunday morning, March 23, 1919, at the meeting on the Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan already described in chapter 1. But Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento were not alone. Something broader was afoot. Quite independently of Mussolini, similar groups were coming together elsewhere in Europe.

  Hungary was another fertile setting for the spontaneous growth— copied from no one—of something that did not yet call itself fascism, but bears a strong family resemblance. Hungary suffered the most calamitous territorial losses from World War I of any participant—worse even than Germany. Before the war, it had been a ruling partner in the mighty Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, or the Habsburg empire. The Hungarian half of the empire—the kingdom of Hungary—had ruled a multilingual world of South Slavs, Romanians, Slovaks, and many others, among whom the Hungarians enjoyed a privileged position. During the closing months of World War I, the Habsburg empire dissolved as its component nationalities claimed independence. Hungary—once the greatest beneficiary of the multinational empire—became the greatest loser in its dissolution. The victorious Allies eventually amputated 70 percent of Hungary’s prewar territory and almost two thirds of its population by the punitive Treaty of the Trianon, signed under protest on June 4, 1920.

  During the chaotic days after the armistice of November 1918, as the subject peoples of the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire— Romanians, South Slavs, Slovaks—began to govern their own territories under Allied protection, a maverick progressive nobleman, Count Michael Károlyi, tried to save the Hungarian state by dramatic reforms. Károlyi gambled that establishing full democracy within a federal Hungary whose subject peoples would enjoy extensive self-government would soften the Allies’ hostility, and win their acceptance of Hungary’s historic borders. Károlyi lost his gamble. French and Serb armies occupied the southern third of Hungary while Romanian armies, supported by the Allies, occupied the wide plains of Transylvania. These annexations looked permanent. Unable to persuade the French authorities to stop them, Count Károlyi abandoned his tenuous grip on power at the end of March 1919.

  A socialist-communist coalition then assumed power in Budapest. Headed by a Jewish revolutionary intellectual, Béla Kun, the new government briefly drew support even from some army officers by his promise that Bolshevik Russia would be a better bet than the Allies to help Hungary survive. Lenin was in no position to assist the Hungarians, however, and although Kun’s government managed to reconquer some Slovak-occupied territories, it simultaneously adopted radical socialist measures. Kun proclaimed a Soviet republic in Budapest in May 1919 and the dictatorship of the proletariat on June 25.

  Faced with these combined and unprecedented challenges of territorial dismantlement and social revolution, the Hungarian elites chose to fight the latter more vigorously than the former. They set up a provisional government in the southwestern provincial city of Szeged, then under French and Serb occupation, and stood by while the Romanians advanced in early August 1919 to occupy Budapest, from which Kun had already fled. A bloody counterrevolution followed, and claimed some five to six thousand victims, ten times as many as the Soviet regime had killed.

  The Hungarian counterrevolution had two faces. Its top leadership was composed of the traditional elite, within which the last commander of the Austro-Hungarian navy, Admiral Miklós Horthy, emerged as the dominant figure. A second component was those who believed that traditional authority was no longer sufficient to deal with Hungary’s emergency. A group of young officers headed by Captain Gyula Gömbös founded a movement with many of the characteristics of fascism.

  Gömbös’s officers wanted to mobilize a mass base for a militant movement of nationalist renovation, different from both parliamentary liberalism (for Count Károlyi’s democracy was now as discredited as Kun’s Soviet), and from an old-fashioned dictatorship that ruled from above. Their Anti-Bolshevik Committee was virulently anti-Semitic (not only Béla Kun but thirty-two of his forty-five commissars had been Jewish).1 Gömbös’s officers did not want to restore traditional authority but to replace it with something more dynamic, rooted in popular nationalist and xenophobic passions and expressed in traditional Hungarian symbols and myths.2 For the moment, Admiral Horthy and the conservatives were able to rule without having to call upon the young officers, though Gömbös served as prime minister under Horthy in 1932–35 and built an alliance with Mussolini to counter growing German power.

  In the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy, German nationalists had been alarmed even before World War I by the gains of Czechs and other minorities toward more administrative and linguistic autonomy. Before 1914 they were already developing a virulent strain of working-class nationalism. German-speaking workers came to look upon Czech-speaking workers as national rivals rather than as fellow proletarians. In Habsburg Bohemia, on the eve of World War I, nation already trumped class.

  The German nationalists of the Habsburg empire had since the late nineteenth century built upon the populist pan-Germanism of Georg von Schönerer, whom I will treat in more detail shortly.3 They reached effective political power in the capital, Vienna, when Karl Lueger became mayor in 1897. Lueger built his long mayoralty solidly upon a populist mixture of anti-Semitism, anticorruption, defense of artisans and small shopkeepers, catchy slogans and songs, and efficient municipal services.

  Adolf Hitler, a young drifter and would-be art student from fifty miles upriver in Linz, soaked up the atmosphere of Lueger’s Vienna. 4 He was not the only one. The nationalist German Workers’ Party, led by a Vienna lawyer and a railroad employee, had already earned three seats in the Austrian Diet by 1911. Revived in May 1918 as the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, it began using the Hakenkreuz, or swastika, as its symbol. 5

  Postwar Germany offered particularly fertile soil to popular-based antisocialist movements of national revival. Germans had been shaken to their roots by defeat in 1918. The emotional impact was all the more severe because German leaders had been trumpeting victory until a few weeks before. So unbelievable a calamity was easily blamed on traitors. The plummet in German fortunes from the bold Great Power of 1914 to the stunned, hungry loser of 1918 shattered national pride and selfconfidence. Wilhelm Spannaus later described his feelings upon returnin
g to his hometown in 1921 after years of teaching in a German school in South America:

  It was shortly after the Spartakus uprising in the Rhineland: practically every windowpane was broken on the train in which I reentered Germany, and the inflation was reaching fantastic proportions. I had left Germany at the height of the power and glory of the Wilhelmine Reich. I came back to find the Fatherland in shambles, under a Socialist republic.6

  Spannaus became the first respectable citizen of his town to join the Nazi Party, and, as an intellectual leader (he owned the local bookstore), he carried many other citizens with him.

  Footloose veterans, their units melting away, unable to find work or even food, were available for extremism of either Left or Right. Some turned to Bolshevik Russia for their inspiration, as in the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic of spring 1919. Others clung to the nationalism already spread by the wartime propaganda movement, the Fatherland Front. Some of these nationalist veterans joined mercenary units (Freikorps) formed under the command of regular army officers to fight what they regarded as Germany’s internal enemies. In January 1919 they murdered the socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in revolutionary Berlin. The following spring they crushed socialist regimes in Munich and elsewhere. Other Freikorps units continued battling Soviet and Polish armies along the still-undemarcated Baltic frontier well after the armistice of November 1918.7

  Corporal Adolf Hitler,8 back on active duty with Army Group Command IV in Munich after recovering from the hysterical blindness he suffered upon learning of German defeat, was sent by Army Intelligence in September 1919 to investigate one of the many nationalist movements that were sprouting in the postwar disorder. The German Workers’ Party (DAP) had been created at the end of the war by a patriotic locksmith, Anton Drexler. Finding a handful of artisans and journalists who dreamed of winning workers to the nationalist cause but had no idea of how to go about it, Hitler joined them and received party card No. 555. He soon became one of the movement’s most effective speakers and a member of its directing committee.

  In early 1920 Hitler was put in charge of the DAP’s propaganda. With the help of sympathetic army officers such as Captain Ernst Röhm and some wealthy Munich backers,9 Hitler greatly expanded the party’s audience. Before nearly two thousand people in a big Munich beer cellar, the Hofbräuhaus, on February 24, 1920, Hitler gave the movement a new name—the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, or “Nazi" Party, for short)—and presented a program of twenty-five points mixing nationalism, anti-Semitism, and attacks on department stores and international capital. The following April 1, he left the army to devote himself full-time to the NSDAP. He was increasingly recognized as its leader, its Führer.10

  As the immediate postwar turmoil eased, such activist nationalist sects faced less hospitable conditions in Europe. Governments gradually established a toehold on legitimacy. Borders were set. Bolshevism was contained within its Russian birthplace. Some semblance of peacetime normalcy returned to most parts of Europe. Even so, the Italian Fascists, the Hungarian officers, and the Austrian and German National Socialists persisted. Similar movements arose in France11 and elsewhere. They clearly expressed something more enduring than a momentary nationalist spasm accompanying the final paroxysm of the war.

  The Immediate Background

  A political space12 for mass-based nationalist activism, mobilized against both socialism and liberalism, had been only dimly visible in 1914. It became a yawning gap during World War I. That conflict did not so much create fascism as open up wide cultural, social, and political opportunities for it. Culturally, the war discredited optimistic and progressive views of the future, and cast doubt upon liberal assumptions about natural human harmony. Socially, it spawned armies of restless veterans (and their younger brothers)13 looking for ways to express their anger and disillusion without heed for old-fashioned law or morality. Politically, it generated economic and social strains that exceeded the capacity of existing institutions— whether liberal or conservative—to resolve.

  The experience of World War I was the most decisive immediate precondition for fascism. The successful campaign to bring Italy into the war in May 1915 (the “radiant May" of Fascist mythology) first brought together the founding elements of Italian Fascism. “The right to the political succession belongs to us," proclaimed Mussolini at the founding meeting of the Fasci di Combattimento in March 1919, “because we were the ones who pushed the country into war and led it to victory."14

  The Great War was also, it must be added, at the root of much else that was violent and angry in the postwar world, from Bolshevism to expressionist painting. Indeed, for some authors, the Great War by itself suffices to explain both Fascism and Bolshevism.15 Four years of industrialized slaughter had left little of Europe’s legacy unaltered and nothing of its future certain.

  Before 1914, no living European could have imagined such brutality in what was then considered the most civilized part of the globe. Wars had become rare, localized, and short in Europe in the nineteenth century, fought out by professional armies that impinged little on civilian society. Europe had been spared the likes of the American Civil War or the War of the Triple Alliance (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) against Paraguay, which reduced the Paraguayan population by half between 1864 and 1870. When, in August 1914, a petty Balkan conflict erupted out of control into a total war among the European Great Powers, and when those powers managed to sustain the slaughter of an entire generation of young men over four years, it seemed to many Europeans that their civilization itself, with its promise of peace and progress, had failed.

  The Great War had also lasted far longer than most people had imagined possible for urbanized industrial countries. Most Europeans had assumed that highly differentiated populations packed into cities, dependent upon massive exchanges of consumer goods, would be simply incapable of enduring years of massive destruction. Only primitive societies, they thought, could support long wars. Contrary to expectations, Europeans discovered, beginning in 1914, how to mobilize industrial productivity and human wills for long years of sacrifice. As trench warfare approached the limits of human endurance, so war governments approached the limits of regimentation of life and thought. 16

  All the belligerent governments had experimented with the manipulation of public opinion. Germany’s attempt to motivate the entire civilian population in the Fatherland Front was one of the most coercive examples, but all of them worked to shape their citizens’ knowledge and opinions. The economies and societies of all the belligerent countries, too, had been deeply transformed. European peoples had endured their first prolonged experience of universal national service, rationing of food, energy, and clothing, and full-scale economic management. Despite these unprecedented efforts, however, none of the belligerents had achieved its goals. Instead of a short war with clear results, this long and labor-intensive carnage had ended in mutual exhaustion and disillusion.

  The war posed such a redoubtable challenge that even the best-integrated and best-governed countries barely managed to meet its strains. Badly integrated and governed countries failed altogether to meet them. Britain and France allocated materiel, assigned people to duties, distributed sacrifice, and manipulated the news just successfully enough to retain the allegiance of most of their citizens. The recently unified German empire and Italian monarchy did less well. The Habsburg empire broke apart into its constituent nationalities. Tsarist Russia collapsed into chaos. Those dislocated countries where a landless peasantry was still numerous and where a disfranchised middle class still lacked basic liberties polarized to the Left (as in Russia). Those with a large but threatened middle class, including family farmers, polarized against the Left and looked for new solutions.17

  At the end of the war, Europeans were torn between an old world that could not be revived and a new world about which they disagreed bitterly. As war economies were dismantled too quickly, wartime inflation spun out of control, making a mockery of
the bourgeois virtues of thrift and savings. A population that had come to expect public solutions to economic problems was thrown into uncertainty.

  Compounding these social and economic strains, the war also deepened political divisions. Because trench warfare had been a brutalizing experience beyond previous imagining, even the most equitable apportionment of the burdens of war making had divided civilians from soldiers, battlefront from home front. Those who had survived the trenches could not forgive those who had sent them there. Veterans inured to violence asserted what they regarded as their well-earned right to rule the countries they had bled for.18 “When I returned from the war," wrote Italo Balbo, “just like so many others, I hated politics and politicians who, in my opinion, had betrayed the hopes of soldiers, reducing Italy to a shameful peace and to a systematic humiliation Italians who maintained the cult of heroes. To struggle, to fight in order to return to the land of Giolitti, who made a merchandise of every ideal? No. Rather deny everything, destroy everything, in order to renew everything from the foundations."19 Balbo, a twenty-three-year-old demobilized veteran in 1919 of antisocialist but Mazzinian convictions, who had needed four attempts to pass his law exams and had worked for a while editing a weekly soldiers’ newspaper, L’Alpino, had few prospects until he was hired in January 1921 as the paid secretary of the Ferrara fascio.20 He was on his way to becoming one of Mussolini’s right-hand men and potential rivals.

  Three grand principles of world order contended for influence as postwar Europe bandaged its wounds: liberalism, conservatism, and communism. Liberals (joined by some democratic socialists) wanted to organize the postwar world by the principle of the self-determination of nations. Satisfied nationalities, each with its own state, would coexist in such natural harmony, according to liberal doctrine, that no external force would be needed to keep the peace. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic but ill-conceived Fourteen Points of January 1918 was its most concrete expression.