The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

  Several notorious mass-based populist nationalist movements arose in Europe during the 1880s. France, precocious in so many political experiments, was also a pioneer in this one. The glamorous General Boulanger, made minister of war in January 1886 by the moderately Left-leaning government of Charles de Freycinet, was idolized in Paris because he had stood up to the Germans and had treated his soldiers considerately, and because his blond beard and black horse looked splendid in patriotic parades. The general was dismissed as minister of war in May 1887, however, for excessively bellicose language during a period of tension with Germany. His departure for a provincial reassignment triggered a gigantic popular demonstration as his Parisian fans lay down on the rails to block his train. Boulanger had originally been close to the anticlerical moderate Left (“Radicals," in the French political terminology of the day), but he now allowed himself to become the center of a political agitation that drew from both Left and Right. While he continued to support Radical proposals such as the abolition of the indirectly elected senate, his advocacy of sweeping constitutional changes now acquired an odor of conspiracy by a providential man.

  When the alarmed government dismissed Boulanger from the army, the ex-general was now free to indulge his newfound political ambitions. His strategy was to run in every by-election that occurred whenever a parliamentary seat became vacant through death or resignation. Boulanger turned out to have wide popular appeal in working-class districts. Monarchists as well as Bonapartists gave him money because his success seemed more likely to damage the Republic than to reform it. In January 1889, after he had won a by-election in Paris by a considerable majority, Boulanger’s supporters urged him to carry out a coup d’état against a French Republic already reeling under financial scandals and economic depression. At the climactic moment, however, the providential man faltered. Threatened with government prosecution, he fled to Belgium on April 1, where he later committed suicide on the grave of his mistress. Boulangism turned out to be a flash in the pan.71 But for the first time in Europe the ingredients had been assembled for a mass-based, populist nationalist gathering around a charismatic figure.

  Similar ingredients mingled in the popular emotions aroused in France after 1896 against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish staff officer wrongly accused of spying for Germany. The case convulsed France until 1906. The anti-Dreyfus camp enlisted in defense of the authority of the state and the honor of the army both conservatives and some Leftists influenced by traditional anticapitalist anti-Semitism and Jacobin forms of nationalism. The pro-Dreyfus camp, mostly from Left and center, defended a universal standard of the rights of man. The nation took precedence over any universal value, proclaimed the anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras, whose Action Française movement is sometimes considered the first authentic fascism.72 When a document used to incriminate Dreyfus turned out to have been faked, Maurras was undaunted. It was, he said, a “patriotic forgery," a faux patriotique.

  Austria-Hungary was another setting where forerunner movements successfully pioneered in the terrain of populist nationalism. Georg von Schönerer (1842–1921), a wealthy landowner and apostle of pan-Germanism from the Sudetenland, along the western fringes of Bohemia, urged the German speakers of the Habsburg empire to work for union with the German empire and to fight Catholic and Jewish influence.73 We have already noted how Karl Lueger was elected mayor of Vienna in 1897, over the opposition of the emperor and traditional liberals, and governed invincibly until his death in 1910 with a path-breaking mixture of “municipal socialism" (public gas, water, electricity, hospitals, schools, and parks) and anti-Semitism. 74

  German politicians, too, experimented in the 1880s with the appeal of anti-Semitism. The Protestant court pastor Adolf Stöcker used it in his Christian Social Party in an attempt to draw voters from the working and lower middle classes to conservatism. A new generation of liberals drawn from outside the old circles of aristocrats and big planters, lacking the old mechanisms of social deference, used it as a new way to manage mass politics.75 But these tests of overtly anti-Semitic politics in Germany had shrunk to insignificance by the early twentieth century. Such forerunner movements showed that while many elements of later fascism already existed, conditions were not ripe to put them together and gain a substantial following.76

  Arguably the first concrete example of “national socialism" in practice was the Cercle Proudhon in France in 1911, a study group designed to “unite nationalists and left-wing anti-democrats" around an offensive against “Jewish capitalism."77 It was the creation of Georges Valois, a former militant of Charles Maurras’s Action Française who broke away from his master in order to concentrate more actively on converting the working class from Marxist internationalism to the nation. It proved too early, however, to rally more than a few intellectuals and journalists to Valois’s “triumph of heroic values over the ignoble bourgeois materialism in which Europe is now stifling . . . [and] . . . the awakening of Force and Blood against Gold."78

  The term national socialism seems to have been invented by the French nationalist author Maurice Barrès, who described the aristocratic adventurer the Marquis de Morès in 1896 as the “first national socialist."79 Morès, after failing as a cattle rancher in North Dakota, returned to Paris in the early 1890s and organized a band of anti-Semitic toughs who attacked Jewish shops and offices. As a cattleman, Morès found his recruits among slaughterhouse workers in Paris, to whom he appealed with a mixture of anticapitalism and anti-Semitic nationalism. 80 His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform. Morès killed a popular Jewish officer, Captain Armand Meyer, in a duel early in the Dreyfus Affair, and was himself killed by his Touareg guides in the Sahara in 1896 on an expedition to “unite France to Islam and to Spain." 81 “Life is valuable only through action," he had proclaimed. “So much the worse if the action is mortal."82

  Some Italians were moving in the same direction. Some Italian disciples of Sorel found in the nation the kind of mobilizing myth that the proletarian revolution was failing to provide.83 Those who, like Sorel, wanted to retain the purity of motive and intensity of commitment that socialism had offered when it was a hounded opposition, now joined those who despised the compromises of parliamentary socialism and those who were becoming disillusioned by the failure of general strikes—climaxing in the terrible defeat of “red week" in Milan in June 1914. They thought that productivism 84 and expansionist war for “proletarian" Italy (as in Libya in 1911) might replace the general strike as the most effective mobilizing myth for revolutionary change in Italy. Another foundation stone had been laid for the edifice that fascists would build: the project of winning the socialists’ clientele back to the nation via a heroic antisocialist “national syndicalism."

  Considering these precursors, a debate has arisen about which country spawned the earliest fascist movement. France is a frequent candidate. 85 Russia has been proposed.86 Hardly anyone puts Germany first.87 It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans in 1867 by the Radical Reconstructionists, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in the eyes of the Klan’s founders, no longer defended their community’s legitimate interests. By adopting a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified in the cause of their grou
p’s destiny,88 the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. It should not be surprising, after all, that the most precocious democracies—the United States and France—should have generated precocious backlashes against democracy.

  Today we can perceive these experiments as harbingers of a new kind of politics to come. At the time, however, they seemed to be personal aberrations by individual adventurers. They were not yet perceptible as examples of a new system. They become visible this way only in restrospect, after all the pieces have come together, a space has opened up, and a name has been invented.

  Recruitment

  We have repeatedly encountered embittered war veterans in our account of the founding of the first fascist movements. Fascism would have remained a mere pressure group for veterans and their younger brothers, however, if it had not drawn in many other kinds of recruits.89

  Above all, the early fascists were young. Many of the new generation were convinced that the white-bearded men responsible for the war, who still clung to their places, understood nothing of their concerns, whether they had experienced the front or not. Young people who had never voted before responded enthusiastically to fascism’s brand of antipolitical politics.90

  Several features distinguished the most successful fascisms from previous parties. Unlike the middle-class parties led by “notables" who condescended to contact their publics only at election time, the fascist parties swept their members up into an intense fraternity of emotion and effort.91 Unlike the class parties—socialist or bourgeois—fascist parties managed to realize their claim to bring together citizens from all social classes. These were attractive features for many.92

  Early fascist parties did not recruit from all classes in the same proportions, however. It was soon noticed that fascist parties were largely middle class, to the point where fascism was perceived as the very embodiment of lower-middle-class resentments.93 But, after all, all political parties are largely middle class. On closer inspection, fascism turned out to appeal to upper-class members and voters as well.94

  Early fascism also won more working-class followers than used to be thought, though these were always proportionally fewer than their share in the population.95 The relative scarcity of working-class fascists was not due to some proletarian immunity to appeals of nationalism and ethnic cleansing. It is better explained by “immunization" and “confessionalism": 96 those already deeply engaged, from generation to generation, in the rich subculture of socialism, with its clubs, newspapers, unions, and rallies, were simply not available for another loyalty.

  Workers were more available for fascism if they stood outside the community of socialists. It helped if they had a tradition of direct action, and of hostility to parliamentary socialism: in Italy, blackleg marble workers in traditionally anarchist Carrara,97 for example, or the Genoese seamen organized by Captain Giuseppe Giulietti, who followed first D’Annunzio and then Mussolini. The unemployed, too, had been separated from organized socialism (which, under the harsh and divisive conditions of economic depression, appeared to value employed workers more than the unemployed). The unemployed were more likely to join the communists than the fascists, however, unless they were first-time voters or from the middle class.98 A similar rootedness in the parish community probably explains the smaller proportion of Catholics than Protestants among the Nazi electorate.

  Special local conditions could draw proletarians to fascism. A third of the members of the British Union of Fascists in rundown East London were unskilled or semiskilled workers, recruited through resentment at recent Jewish immigrants, disillusion with the feckless Labour Party, or anger at communist and Jewish assaults upon BUF parades.99 The Hungarian Arrow Cross won a third of the votes in heavily industrial central Budapest (Csepel Island), and had success in some rural mining areas, in the absence of a plausible Left alternative for an antigovernment protest vote.100

  Whether fascism recruited more by an appeal to reason than to the emotions is hotly debated.101 The evident power of emotions within fascism has tempted many to believe that fascism recruited the emotionally disturbed or the sexually deviant. I will consider some of the pitfalls of psychohistory in chapter 8. It needs to be reemphasized that Hitler himself, while driven by hatreds and abnormal obsessions, was capable of pragmatic decision-making and rational choices, especially before 1942. To conclude that Nazism or other forms of fascism are forms of mental disturbance is doubly dangerous: it offers an alibi to the multitude of “normal" fascists, and it ill prepares us to recognize the utter normality of authentic fascism. Most fascist leaders and militants were quite ordinary people thrust into positions of extraordinary power and responsibility by processes that are perfectly comprehensible in rational terms. Putting fascism on the couch can lead us astray. Suspicions about Hitler’s own perverse sexuality rest on no firm evidence,102 though he was notoriously no conventional family man. Both homosexuals (such as Ernst Röhm and Edmund Heines of the SA) and violent homophobes (Himmler, for example) were prominent in the masculine fraternity that was Nazism. But there is no evidence that the proportion of homosexuals was higher among Nazis than in the general population. The issue has not risen for Italian Fascism.

  The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights).

  But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens.

  Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders.103 Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini104 or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile 105 or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini.106 What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

  Someone has said that a political party is like a bus: people are always getting on and off. We will see as we go along how fascist clientele altered over time, from early radicals to later careerists. Here, too, we cannot see the fascist phenomenon in full by looking only at its beginnings.

  Understanding Fascism by Its Origins

  In this chapter we have looked at the times, the places, the clientele, and the rhetoric of the first fledgling fascist movements. Now we are forced to admit that the first movements do not tell the whole story. The first fascisms were going to be transformed by the very enterprise of trying to be more than a marginal voice. Wherever they became more active claimants for power, that effort was to turn them into something strikingly different from the radical early days. Understanding the first movements gives us only a partial and incomplete understan
ding of the whole phenomenon.

  It is curious what a disproportionate amount of historical attention has been lavished on the beginnings of fascism. There are several reasons for this. One is the latent (but misleading) Darwinian convention that if we study the origins of something we grasp its inner blueprint. Another is the availability of a profusion of fascist words and cultural artifacts from the early stages which are grist for historians’ mills; the subtler, more secretive, and more sordid business of negotiating deals to reach or exercise power somehow seems a less alluring subject (erroneously so!).

  A solid pragmatic reason why so many works about fascism concentrate on the early movements is that most fascist movements never got any further. To write of fascism in Scandinavia, Britain, the Low Countries, or even France is necessarily to write of movements that never developed beyond founding a newspaper, staging some demonstrations, speaking on street corners. José Antonio Primo de Rivera in Spain, Mosley in Britain, and the most outspokenly fascist movements in France never even participated in the electoral process. 107

  Looking mainly at early fascism starts us down several false trails. It puts intellectuals at the center of an enterprise whose major decisions were made by power-seeking men of action. The intellectual fellow travelers had diminishing influence in the rooting and regime stages of the fascist cycle, although certain ideas reasserted themselves in the radicalization stage (see chapter 6). Further, concentrating on origins puts misleading emphasis on early fascism’s antibourgeois rhetoric and its critique of capitalism. It privileges the “poetic movement" of José Antonio Primo de Rivera that would impose “hard and just sacrifices . . . on many of our own class," and “reach the humble as well as the powerful with its benefits,"108 and the “great red fascism of our youth," as Robert Brasillach remembered it with fond nostalgia shortly before his execution for treason in Paris in February 1945.109