The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  Landowners were not the only ones who helped the Blackshirts of the Po Valley smash socialism. Local police and army commanders lent them arms and trucks, and some of their younger personnel joined the expeditions. Some local prefects, resentful of the pretensions of new socialist mayors and town councils, turned a blind eye to these nightly forays, or even supplied vehicles.

  Although the Po Valley Fascists still advocated some policies—public works for the unemployed, for example—that recalled the movement’s initial radicalism, the squadristi were widely viewed as the strong-arm agents of the big landowners. Some idealistic early Fascists were horrified by this transformation. They appealed to Mussolini and the Milan leadership to stop this drift toward complicity with powerful local interests. Barbato Gatelli, one of the disillusioned, complained bitterly that Fascism had lost its original ideals and had become “the bodyguard of the profiteers." He and his friends tried to organize a rival Fascist movement and a new newspaper (L’Idea Fascista) to recover the old spirit, but Mussolini sided with the squadristi.25 The purists eventually left the party or were pushed out of it. They were replaced by sons of landowners, younger policemen, army officers and NCOs, and other supporters of squadrismo. D’Annunzio, to whom some of the disgruntled idealists looked to replace Mussolini, grumbled that Fascism had come to mean “agrarian slavery."26 That was neither the first nor the last time fascist movements lost part of their first clientele and recruited a new one,27 in the process of positioning themselves to become rooted in a profitable political space.

  As we saw in the previous chapter, the first Fascists had been recruited among radical veterans, national syndicalists, and Futurist intellectuals— young antibourgeois malcontents who wanted social change along with national grandeur. In many cases it was only nationalism that separated them from socialists and the radical wing of the new Catholic party, the Partito Popolare Italiano (“Popolari").28 Indeed, many had come from the Left—like Mussolini himself. Squadrismo altered the movement’s social composition toward the Right. Sons of landowners, even some criminal elements, now joined. But Fascism still retained its youthful quality: the new Fascism remained a generational revolt against the elders.

  Mussolini chose to adapt his movement to opportunity rather than cling to the failed Left-nationalist Fascism of Milan in 1919. We can follow his evolution in the drift of fascist positions rightwards in the speeches and programs of 1920–22.29 The first idea to disappear was the first Fascism’s rejection of war and imperialism—the “pacifism of the trenches" so widespread among veterans when their memory of combat was still fresh. The San Sepolcro program accepted the League of Nations’ “supreme postulate of . . . the integrity of each nation" (though affirming Italy’s right to Fiume and the Dalmatian coast). The league disappeared from the program of June 1919, though the Fascists still called for the replacement of the professional army by a defensive militia, and the nationalization of arms and munitions factories. The program of the transformed Fascist Party in November 1921 attacked the League of Nations for partiality, asserted Italy’s role as a “bulwark of Latin civilization in the Mediterranean" and of italianità in the world, called for the development of Italy’s colonies, and advocated a large standing army.

  Early Fascism’s radical proposals for nationalizations and heavy taxes were watered down by 1920 to the right of workers to defend strictly economic goals, but not “demagogic" ones. The representation of workers in management was limited by 1920 to personnel matters. By 1921, the Fascists rejected “progressive and confiscatory taxation" as “fiscal demagoguery that discourages initiative," and set productivity as the highest goal of the economy. A lifelong atheist, Mussolini had urged in 1919 the confiscation of all properties belonging to religious congregations and the sequestration of all the revenues of episcopal sees. In his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies, however, on June 21, 1921, he said that Catholicism represents “the Latin and imperial tradition of Rome," and called for a settlement of differences with the Vatican. As for the monarchy, Mussolini declared in 1919 that “the present regime in Italy has failed." In 1920 he softened his initial republicanism to an agnostic position in favor of any constitutional regime that best served the moral and material interests of the nation. In a speech on September 20, 1922, Mussolini publicly denied any intention to call into question the monarchy or the ruling House of Savoy. “They ask us what is our program," said Mussolini. “Our program is simple. We want to govern Italy." 30

  Long after his regime had settled into routine, Mussolini still liked to refer to the “Fascist revolution." But he meant a revolution against socialism and flabby liberalism, a new way of uniting and motivating Italians, and a new kind of governmental authority capable of subordinating private liberties to the needs of the national community and of organizing mass assent while leaving property intact. The major point is that the Fascist movement was reshaped in the process of growing into the available space. The antisocialism already present in the initial movement became central, and many antibourgeois idealists left or were pushed out. The radical anticapitalist idealism of early Fascism was watered down, and we must not let its conspicuous presence in early texts confuse us about what Fascism later became in action.

  The de facto power of Fascism in rural northeastern Italy—especially Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany—had become by 1921 too substantial for national politicians to ignore. When Prime Minister Giolitti prepared new parliamentary elections in May 1921, grasping at any resource to roll back the large vote earned in November 1919 by the socialists and the Popolari, he included Mussolini’s Fascists in his electoral coalition alongside liberals and nationalists. Thanks to this arrangement, thirty-five PNF candidates were elected to the Italian chamber on Giolitti’s list, including Mussolini himself. This number was not large, and many contemporaries thought that Mussolini’s movement was too incoherent and contradictory to last.31 Nevertheless, it showed that Mussolini had become a vital part of the Italian antisocialist coalition on a national level. It was the first step in that advance toward national power that was now Mussolini’s one guiding principle.

  The transformation of Italian Fascism set in motion by success in the Po Valley in 1920–22 shows us why it is so hard to find a fixed “essence" in early Fascist programs or in the movement’s first young antibourgeois rebels, and why one must follow the movement’s trajectory as it found a political space and adapted to fit it. Without the Po Valley transformation (paralleled in other regions where Fascism won local landowner support like Tuscany and Apulia),32 Mussolini would have remained an obscure Milan agitator who failed.

  (2) Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, 1928–33

  Schleswig-Holstein was the only German state (Land) to give the Nazis an outright majority in any free election: it voted 51 percent Nazi in the parliamentary election of July 31, 1932. Hence it offers us an obvious second example of a fascist movement successfully becoming a major political actor.

  The German fascist movement had failed to establish itself during the first postwar crisis of 1918–23, when the Freikorps’s bloody repression of the Munich soviet and other socialist risings offered an opening. The next opportunity arrived with the Depression. Having done very poorly with an urban strategy in the elections of 1924 and 1928, the Nazi Party turned to the farmers.33 They chose well. Agriculture had prospered nowhere in the 1920s, because world markets were flooded by new producers in the United States, Argentina, Canada, and Australia. Agricultural prices tumbled further in the late 1920s, even before the 1929 crash; that was only the final blow to the world’s farmers.

  In the sandy cattle-raising country of interior Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish frontier, farmers had traditionally supported the conservative nationalist party (DNVP).34 At the end of the 1920s, they lost faith in the capacity of traditional parties and of the national government to help them. The Weimar Republic was triply damned in their eyes: dominated by distant Prussia, by sinful and decadent Berlin, and by “reds" who thought on
ly of cheap food for urban workers. As the collapse of farm prices after 1928 forced many of them into debt and foreclosure, desperate Schleswig-Holstein cattle farmers abandoned the DNVP and turned to the Landbund, a violent peasant self-help league. Its localized tax strikes and protests against banks and middlemen were ineffective, for lack of any nationally organized support. So in July 1932, 64 percent of the rural vote in Schleswig-Holstein went to the Nazis. The cattle farmers would likely have switched again to some newer nostrum (their commitment to Nazism was already beginning to fade in the November 1932 election) if Hitler’s appointment to the office of chancellor in January 1933 had not frozen things in place.

  The first process one observes at work here is the humiliation of existing political leaders and organizations in the crisis of the world Depression of 1929. Space was opened up by their helplessness in the face of collapsed prices, glutted markets, and farms seized and sold by banks for debt.

  The Schleswig-Holstein cattle raisers comprised only one part—the most successful part—of the broad stream of particular and sometimes incompatible grievances that Hitler and the Nazis managed to assemble into an electoral tidal wave between 1929 and July 1932. The growth of the Nazi vote from the ninth party in Germany in 1928 to the first in 1932 showed how successfully Hitler and his strategists profited from the discredit of the traditional parties by devising new electoral techniques and directing appeals to specific constituencies.35

  Hitler knew how to work a mass electorate. He played skillfully upon the resentments and fears of ordinary Germans, in incessant public meetings spiced up by uniformed strong-arm squads, the physical intimidation of enemies, the exhilaration of excited crowds and fevered harangues, and dramatic arrivals by airplane and fast, open Mercedeses. The traditional parties stuck doggedly to the long bookish speeches appropriate for a small educated electorate. The German Left did adopt salutes and shirts,36 but it could not recruit far outside the working class. While the other parties were firmly identified with one interest, one class, or one political approach, the Nazis managed to promise something for everyone. They were the first party in Germany to target different occupations with tailor-made appeals, paying little heed if one contradicted another. 37

  All of this cost a lot of money, and it has often been alleged that German businessmen paid the bills. The orthodox Marxist version of this view holds that Hitler was virtually created by businessmen as a kind of private anticommunist army. It is indeed possible to discover German businessmen (usually from small business) who were attracted by Hitler’s expansionist nationalism and antisocialism and deceived by his carefully tailored addresses to business audiences which downplayed antiSemitism and suppressed any reference to the radical clauses in the 25 Points. The steel manufacturer Fritz Thyssen, whose ghostwritten book I Paid Hitler (1941) provided ammunition for the Marxist case, turns out to be exceptional, both in his early support for Nazism and in his break with Hitler and exile after 1939.38 Another famous businessman, the aged coal magnate Emil Kirdorf, joined the Nazi Party in 1927 but left it angrily in 1928 over Nazi attacks on the coal syndicate, and he supported the conservative DNVP in 1933.39

  Close scrutiny of business archives shows that most German businessmen hedged their bets, contributing to all the nonsocialist electoral formations that showed any signs of success at keeping the Marxists out of power. Though some German firms contributed some money to the Nazis, they always contributed more to traditional conservatives. Their favorite was Franz von Papen. When Hitler grew too important to ignore, they were alarmed by the anticapitalist tone of some of his radical associates such as the interest-rate crank Gottfried Feder, the “salon bolshevik" Otto Strasser (as an irritated Hitler once called him), and a violence-prone organization of anti-Semitic shopkeepers, the Fighting League of the Commercial Middle Class. Even the head of the Nazi Party administrative apparatus, Gregor Strasser, though more moderate than his brother Otto, proposed radical job-creation measures.40 Nazi radicalism actually increased in late 1932, when the party sponsored legislation to abolish all trusts and cooperated with the communists in a transport workers’ strike in Berlin. Some important firms, such as I. G. Farben, contributed almost nothing to the Nazis before 1933. 41 An important share of Nazi funds came instead from entry fees at mass rallies, the sale of Nazi pamphlets and memorabilia, and small contributions. 42

  Hitler thus built Nazism by July 1932 into the first catch-all party in German history and the largest party so far seen there. His Storm Troopers aroused both fear and admiration by their readiness to beat up socialists, communists, pacifists, and foreigners. Direct action and electioneering were complementary, not contradictory, tactics. Violence—selective violence against “antinational" enemies who were perceived by many Germans as outside the fold—helped win the votes that allowed Hitler to pretend that he was working for power by legal means.

  One reason why the Nazis succeeded in supplanting the liberal middle-class parties was the liberals’ perceived failure to deal with the twin crises Germany faced in the late 1920s. One crisis was many Germans’ sense of national humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles. The contentious issue of treaty fulfillment became acute again in January 1929 when an international commission under the American banker Owen D. Young began another attempt to settle the problem of German payment of reparations for World War I. When the German government signed the Young Plan in June, German nationalists attacked it bitterly for its continued recognition of Germany’s duty to pay something, even though the sums had been reduced. The second crisis was the Depression that began in 1929. The German economic collapse was the most catastrophic of any major country, depriving a quarter of the population of work. All the antisystem parties joined in blaming the Weimar Republic for its failure to cope with either crisis.

  For the moment, I leave this story in July 1932, with the Nazi Party the largest in Germany, with 37 percent of the vote. The Nazis had not gained a majority at the ballot box—they never would—but they had made themselves indispensable to any nonsocialist coalition that wished to govern with a popular majority rather than through presidential emergency-decree powers, as had been the case since the last normal government fell in March 1930 (we will examine this matter more closely in the next chapter).

  Fascism was not yet in power in Germany, however. In November 1932, the Nazi vote slipped in further parliamentary elections. The Nazi Party was losing its most precious asset: momentum. Money was running out. Hitler, gambling all or nothing on the position of chancellor, refused all lesser offers to become vice-chancellor in a coalition government. The Nazi rank and file grew restive as the chances for jobs and places seemed to be slipping away. Gregor Strasser, head of the party organization and a leader of the movement’s anticapitalist wing, was expelled for independent negotiations with the new chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher. The movement might have ended as a footnote to history had it not been saved in the opening days of 1933 by conservative politicians who wanted to pilfer its following and use its political muscle for their own purposes. The specific path by which the fascists arrived in power in both Italy and Germany is the subject of the next chapter. But not until we have examined a third case, the failure of fascism in France.

  An Unsuccessful Fascism: France, 1924–40

  Not even the victor nations were immune to the fascist virus after World War I. Outside Italy and Germany, however, although fascists could be noisy or troublesome, they did not get close to power. That does not mean we should ignore these other cases. Failed fascist movements may tell us as much about what was needed for taking root as successful ones.

  France offers an ideal example. Though France seems typified for many by the fall of the Bastille, the Rights of Man, and the “Marseillaise," numerous French monarchists and authoritarian nationalists had never been reconciled to a parliamentary republic as appropriate for la grande nation. When the republic coped badly between the wars with the triple crisis of revolutionary threat, economic depressio
n, and German menace, that discontent hardened into outright disaffection.

  The extreme Right expanded in interwar France in reaction to electoral successes by the Left. When a center-Left coalition, the Cartel des Gauches, won the 1924 parliamentary election, Georges Valois, whom we encountered in chapter 2 as the founder of the Cercle Proudhon for nationalist workers in 1911,43 founded the Faisceau, whose name and behavior were borrowed straight from Mussolini. Pierre Taittinger, a champagne magnate, formed the more traditionally nationalist Jeunesses Patriotes. And the new Fédération Nationale Catholique took on a passionately antirepublican tone under General Noël Currières de Castelnau.

  In the 1930s, as the Depression bit, as Nazi Germany dismantled the safeguards of the 1918 peace settlement, and as the Third Republic’s center-Left majority (renewed in 1932) became tarnished by political corruption, a new crop of radical Right “leagues" (they rejected the word party) blossomed. In massive street demonstrations on February 6, 1934, before the Chamber of Deputies in which sixteen people were killed, they proved that they were strong enough to topple a French government but not strong enough to install another one in its place.

  In the period of intense polarization that followed, it was the Left that drew more votes. The Popular Front coalition of socialists, Radicals, and communists won the elections of May 1936, and Prime Minister Léon Blum banned paramilitary leagues in June, something German chancellor Heinrich Brüning had failed to do in Germany four years earlier.

  The Popular Front’s victory had been narrow, however, and the presence of a Jew supported by communists in the prime minister’s office raised the extreme Right to a paroxysm of indignation. Its true strength in 1930s France has been the subject of a particularly intense debate.44 Some scholars have argued that France had no indigenous fascism, but, at most, a little “whitewash" splashed from foreign examples onto a homegrown Bonapartist tradition.45 At the opposite extreme are those who consider that France was the “true cradle of fascism."46 Contemplating this undeniably noisy and vigorous far Right and the ease with which democracy was overthrown after French defeat in June 1940, Zeev Sternhell concluded that fascism had “impregnated" by then the language and attitudes of French public life. He supported his case by labeling as fascist a broad range of criticisms of the way democracy was working in France in the 1930s made by a wide spectrum of French commentators, some of whom expressed some sympathy for Mussolini but almost none for Hitler.47 Most French and some foreign scholars thought Sternhell’s “fascist" category was far too loose and his conclusions excessive.48