The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  In Germany, by contrast, organized anti-Semitism, vigorous in the 1880s, lost steam as a political tactic in the decades before World War I. 67 After the war, Jewish advancement into posts like university teaching became easier in Weimar Germany than in the United States of Harding and Coolidge. Even Wilhelmian Germany may have been more open to Jewish professional advancement than the United States of Theodore Roosevelt, with important exceptions such as the officer corps. What comparison reveals about Wilhelmian Germany is not that it had more numerous or more powerful anti-Semites and rebels against “modernity" than other European states, but that in a political crisis the German army and bureaucracy were less subject to effective judicial or political oversight.68

  Nevertheless, there are connections between intellectual preparation and the later success of fascism, and we need to be very precise about what they are. The role of intellectuals was crucial at three points already suggested in chapter 1: in discrediting previous liberal regimes; in creating new poles outside the Left around which anger and protest (until recently a monopoly of the Left) could be mobilized; and in making fascist violence respectable. We need also to study the cultural and intellectual preparation of those sectors of the old elites that were ready to cooperate with the fascists (or at least to try to coopt them). The European states resembled each other rather closely in their luxuriant growth of antiliberal criticism as the twentieth century opened. Where they differed was in those political, social, and economic preconditions that seem to distinguish the states where fascism, exceptionally, was able to become established.

  One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order.69 Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism. I hope here to make that vague formulation somewhat more concrete.

  On the eve of World War I the major states of Europe were either governed by liberal regimes or seemed headed that way. Liberal regimes guaranteed freedoms both for individuals and for contending political parties, and allowed citizens to influence the composition of governments, more or less directly, through elections. Liberal government also accorded a large measure of freedom to citizens and to enterprises. Government intervention was expected to be limited to the few functions individuals could not perform for themselves, such as the maintenance of order and the conduct of war and diplomacy. Economic and social matters were supposed to be left to the free play of individual choices in the market, though liberal regimes did not hesitate to protect property from worker protests and from foreign competition. This kind of liberal state ceased to exist during World War I, for total war could be conducted only by massive government coordination and regulation.

  After the war was over, liberals expected governments to return to liberal policies. The strains of war making, however, had created new conflicts, tensions, and malfunctions that required sustained state intervention. At the war’s end, some of the belligerent states had collapsed. In Russia (only partially a liberal state in 1914), power was taken by the Bolsheviks. In Italy, and later Germany, it was taken by fascists. Between the wars parliamentary governments gave way to authoritarian regimes in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Greece, to mention only the European cases. What had gone wrong with the liberal recipe for government?

  We must not view this as exclusively a matter of ideas. What was at stake was a technique of government: rule by notables, where the well-born and well-educated could rely on social prestige and deference to keep them elected. Notable rule, however, came under severe pressure from the “nationalization of the masses."70 After 1918, politicians, including anti-Left politicians, would have to learn to deal with a mass electorate or fail. Where the mass vote was new and unruly, as in Italy (all men received the vote there only in 1912), and in the Prussian state within Germany (where the old three-class voting system in local elections was abolished only in 1918), many old-fashioned politicians, whether liberal or conservative, had not the faintest idea how to appeal to a crowd. Even in France, where conservatives had learned in the nineteenth century to tame at least the rural part of a mass electorate by exploiting social influence and traditions of deference, they had trouble after 1918 understanding that these influences no longer worked. When the nationalist conservative Henri de Kérillis tried to deal with the new challenges of mass politics by setting up a “Propaganda Center for National Republicans" in 1927, hidebound conservatives scoffed that his methods were more appropriate for selling a new brand of chocolate than for politics.71

  Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites.72 Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses," at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two nonnational poles: class and international pacifism.

  One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition," a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. It seems clear that nations that industrialized late faced more social strains than did Britain, the first to industrialize. For one thing, the pace was faster for the latecomers; for another, labor was by then much more powerfully organized. One does not have to be a Marxist to perceive the crisis of the liberal state in terms of a stressful transition to industrialization, unless one injects inevitability into the explanatory model. Marxists, until fairly recently, saw this crisis as an ineluctable stage in capitalist development, where the economic system can no longer function without reinforced discipline of the working class and/or a forceful conquest of external resources and markets. One can argue, much less sweepingly, that the latecomers simply faced higher levels of social turmoil which required new forms of control.

  A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms. Certain liberal states, according to this version, were unable to deal with either the “nationalization of the masses" or the “transition to industrial society" because their social structure was too heterogeneous, divided between pre-industrial groups that had not yet disappeared—artisans, great landowners, rentiers—alongside new industrial managerial and working classes. Where the pre-industrial middle class was particularly powerful, according to this reading of the crisis of the liberal state, it could block peaceful settlement of industrial issues, and could provide manpower to fascism in order to save the privileges and prestige of the old social order.73

  Yet another “take" on the crisis of the liberal order focuses on stressful transitions to modernity in cultural terms. According to this reading, universal literacy, cheap mass media, and invasive alien cultures (from within as well as from without) made it harder as the twentieth century opened for the liberal intelligentsia to perpetuate the traditional intellectual and cultural order.74 Fascism offered the defenders of a cultural canon new propaganda skills along with a new shamelessness about using them.

  It may not be absolutely necessary to choose only one among these various diagn
oses of the difficulties faced by the liberal regimes of Europe after the end of World War I. Italy and Germany do indeed seem to fit all four. They were among the last major states in Europe to learn to live with a mass electorate: Italy in 1912, Germany only fully in 1919. Russia, another newcomer to mass politics, fell to the Left as befitted an even less developed society where even the middle class was not yet fully enfranchised. Industrially, Italy, as “the least of the Great Powers,"75 had been engaged in an energetic catching-up sprint since the 1890s. Germany, to be sure, was already a highly industrial nation in 1914, but it had been the last of the Great Powers to industrialize, after the 1860s, and then, after the defeat of 1918, desperately needed repair and reconstruction. In social structure, both Italy and Germany contained large pre-industrial sectors (though so did France and even England).76 Cultural conservatives in both countries felt intensely threatened by artistic experiment and popular culture; Weimar Germany was indeed at the very epicenter of postwar cultural experimentalism.77

  One needs to interject a warning at this point against inevitability. Identifying the crisis of liberal regimes as crucial to the success of fascism suggests that some kind of environmental determinism is at work. If the setting is conducive, according to this way of thinking, one gets fascism. I prefer to leave space for national differences and for human choices in our explanation.

  In the shorter term, the European states had undergone vastly different national experiences since 1914. Most obviously, some countries had won the war while others had lost it. Two maps of Europe help explain where fascism would grow most rankly. Fascist success follows closely but not exactly the map of defeat in World War I. Germany, with its stab-in-the-back legend, was the classic case. Italy, exceptionally, had belonged to the victorious alliance, but it had failed to achieve the national expansion that the Italian nationalists who had led Italy into the war had counted on. The victory was in their eyes a vittoria mutilata. Spain had been neutral in 1914–18, but its loss of empire in the Spanish-American War of 1898 branded the whole generation that followed with national humiliation. The Spanish radical Right grew partly in fear that the new republic founded in 1931 was letting separatist movements get the upper hand in Catalonia and the Basque country. In Spain, however, defeat and fears of decline led to Franco’s military dictatorship rather than to power for the leader of the fascist Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Fascism is never an inevitable outcome.

  Fascist success also followed fairly closely another map: that of attempts at Bolshevik revolution—or fear of it—during the period when communism seemed likely to spread beyond its Russian home base. Germany, Italy, and Hungary had all had particularly close calls with the “red menace" after the war. The fit is not precise here, either, for fascism also flourished in states more threatened by ethnic division than by class conflict—Belgium, for example.

  In settings where a large landless peasantry added massive numbers to a revolutionary movement, and where large portions of the middle class were still struggling for the most elementary rights (rather than defending established privileges), as in Russia in 1917, mass protest gathered on the Left. Communism, not fascism, was the winner. Revolutionary Russia did contain anti-Bolshevik squads that resembled the German Freikorps,78 but a society where landless peasants far outnumbered an insecure middle class offered no mass following to fascism. Russia came close to a military dictatorship in July 1917 when General Lavr Georgyevich Kornilov tried to march on Moscow, and that would have been a likely outcome if Bolshevism had failed in Russia.

  A typology of crises that could give fascism an opening is not enough. An equally important consideration is the capacity of liberal and democratic regimes to respond to these crises. Leon Trotsky’s metaphor of the “least-barricaded gate" works just as well for fascism as it did, in Trotsky’s opinion, for Bolshevism. Trotsky used this metaphor to help explain how Bolshevism made its first breakthrough to power in a relatively unindustrialized country, rather than, as more literal-minded Marxists expected, in highly industrialized countries with powerful working-class organizations such as Germany. 79 Fascism, too, has historically been a phenomenon of weak or failed liberal states and belated or damaged capitalist systems rather than of triumphant ones. The frequent assertion that fascism stems from a crisis of liberalism might well be amended to specify crises in weak or failed liberalisms.

  There are several false trails in the common understanding of why fascism took root in some places and not in others. Looking for assets for fascism in national character or in the hereditary predilections of a particular people comes perilously close to a reverse racism. 80 It is nonetheless true that democracy and human rights were less solidly implanted in some national traditions than in others. While democracy, the rights of citizens, and the rule of law were associated historically with national greatness in France and Britain, they seemed foreign imports to many Germans. The Weimar Republic’s association with defeat and national humiliation, coupled with its political and economic inefficacy and cultural libertinism, destroyed its legitimacy for many old-fashioned Germans.

  It is legitimate to ask why the clamors of the post-1918 world could not be expressed within one of the great nineteenth-century political ideological families—conservatism, liberalism, socialism—which until so recently had offered a full gamut of political choices. The exhaustion of older political options, now apparently incapable of offering satisfying expression to all the postwar feelings, is an important part of the story.

  Conservatives would have preferred a traditional solution to the stresses of the post-1918 world: tranquilize the overexcited crowd and return public affairs to a gentlemanly elite. That solution was unthinkable, however, after so much emotional engagement in wartime propaganda and in the rejection of it. The immediate postwar world was a moment of intense public engagement, and conservatives, unable to abolish mass society and mass politics, would have to learn to manage them.

  Liberals, too, as we have seen, had their solution: return to the nineteenth-century doctrine of the omnipotent market. Unregulated markets functioned so badly in economies distorted by war making and revolutionary pressures that even liberals wanted some regulation—but not enough to satisfy all their own followers. We saw earlier how the Italian liberal state lost its legitimacy among the landowners of the Po Valley by failing to protect them against the Left. Convinced that public order was absent, the landowners enlisted a private vigilante force in the form of squadrismo. Liberals offered Mill’s pallid “marketplace of ideas" to people whose ears were ringing with nationalist and revolutionary propaganda. But it was liberal Europe itself that had violated all its own principles by letting itself be swept into the barbarity of a long war that it was then incapable of managing.

  As for the Left, a new era was opening in the history of dissidence in Europe. In the nineteenth century, whenever anger and protest arose, the Left more or less automatically spoke for them. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Left was still a capacious family: it could include nationalists and anti-Semites, artisans and industrial workers, middle-class democrats and advocates of collective ownership. It was the coalition of virtually all the discontented. The Left could no longer play that role in 1919. As its organizations became disciplined and domesticated by Marxism after the 1880s, it tried to expel the old working-class xenophobia it had once tolerated. Especially in 1920, reacting against the patriotic brainwashing of the war and awaiting world revolution expectantly, the Left had no room for the Nation within the international revolutionary cause.

  Noncommunist socialists, somewhat tarnished by having participated in war government and by appearing to have missed the revolutionary boat in 1917, were now less frequently able to stir young people in the pit of their stomachs. In the nineteenth century, the angry and the discontented had normally looked to the Left, and so had those intoxicated with the kind of insurrectionary ecstasy once expressed in Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude, Wordsworth’s “Bliss was it in th
at dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,"81 or Delacroix’s Revolution Leading the Peo ple.As the twentieth century opened, the Left no longer had a monopoly on youths who wanted to change the world. Following World War I, what the French author Robert Brasillach recalled as the “great red fascism" of his youth82 could compete with communism in offering a haven for the angry, an ecstatic experience on the barricades, the lure of untried possibility. Those young people and intellectuals who were heated by insurrectionary fevers but still clung to the Nation found a new home in fascism.

  Before fascism could become a serious contender, one chief would have to emerge as the “gatherer"—the one able to shove his rivals aside and assemble in one tent all the (nonsocialist) discontented. For the problem at first was not a lack of would-be Führers but a plethora of them. Both Hitler and Mussolini faced rivals at the beginning. D’Annunzio, as we saw, understood how to dramatize a coup but not how to forge a coalition; Hitler’s competitors in post-defeat Germany did not know how to arouse a crowd or build a catch-all party.

  A successful “chief" was able to reject “purity" and engage in the compromises and deals needed to fit into the space available. The Italian Fascist Party, having discovered that in its first identity as a Left-nationalist movement the space it coveted was already occupied by the Left, underwent the necessary transformations to become a local power in the Po Valley. The Nazi Party broadened its appeal after 1928 to court farmers desperate over going broke and losing their farms. Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit.