The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  Another cycle of radicalization and normalization followed the murder of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti.13 Mussolini’s first response to the ensuing firestorm of criticism was further “normalization": He gave the crucial Ministry of the Interior, with its supervision over the police, to Luigi Federzoni, head of the Nationalist Party, which had merged with the Fascist Party in 1923. After hunkering down for six months against attacks not only from the democratic opposition but from some of his conservative allies, seemingly paralyzed by uncertainty, the Duce was forced by pressure from party radicals—as we saw in chapter 4—to carry out what amounted to a preemptive coup d’état on January 3, 1925, and to begin the long process that, by fits and starts, replaced the parliamentary regime with what he called (with some exaggeration) a “totalitarian" state. His appointment of one of the most intransigent Fascist militants, Roberto Farinacci, as secretary of the Fascist Party seemed to confirm his intention to let the party set the pace, infiltrate the bureaucracy, and dominate national policy-making.

  When Mussolini sacked Farinacci a little more than a year later, however, in April 1926,14 and replaced him with the less headstrong Augusto Turati (1926–29), he was again strengthening the normative state at the expense of the party. It was at this point, most significantly, that he entrusted the Italian police to a professional civil servant, Arturo Bocchini, rather than to a party zealot on the Himmler model. Operating the all-important police force on bureaucratic principles (promotion of trained professionals by seniority, respect for legal procedures at least in nonpolitical cases) rather than as part of a prerogative state of unlimited arbitrary power was Italian Fascism’s most important divergence from Nazi practice.

  In 1928, Mussolini removed the old syndicalist militant Edmondo Rossoni from leadership of the Fascist trade unions, putting an end to Rossoni’s efforts to give them a real share in economic policy and equal representation alongside management in a single set of corporatist organizations. After Rossoni’s departure, the Fascist unions’ monopoly of labor representation was all that remained of “Fascist syndicalism." Labor and management faced each other in separate organizations, and union representatives were banished from the shop floor. The form in which Mussolini’s much-vaunted “Corporate State" developed henceforth amounted, in effect, to the reinforcement under state authority of employers’ “private power."15

  Mussolini’s most decisive step toward normalization was the 1929 Lateran Pact with the papacy.16 Though this treaty had forbidden any Catholic political activity in Italy, its long-term effects were favorable to the Church. Pope Pius XI, no democrat, had little taste for Catholic political parties anyway, much preferring to nurture schools and Catholic Action—the network of youth and worker associations that would transform society from within.17 Thereafter (despite a bout with Fascist zealots who harassed Catholic youth programs in 1931), the Church’s grassroots organizations were to outlast Fascism and sustain the long postwar rule of the Christian Democratic Party.18 Mussolini had retreated far toward traditional authoritarian rule, in which the monarchy, organized business, the army, and the Catholic Church possessed large spheres of autonomous responsibility independent of either the Fascist Party or the Italian state.

  Mussolini probably preferred to rule that way as he grew older, but he knew the younger generation was impatient with his aging regime. “We were spiritually equipped to be assault squads," complained the young Fascist Indro Montanelli in 1933, “but fate has given us the role of Swiss Guards of the constituted order."19 That was one reason why in 1935 he took the classic way “forward" for a Fascist regime: a war of aggression in Ethiopia. I will examine in more detail below20 the downward spiral of radicalizing adventure that followed: the “cultural revolution" of 1936–38, European war in 1940, and the puppet republic of Salò under Nazi occupation in 1943–45.

  What Drives Radicalization?

  This brief review of Mussolini’s vacillation between normalization and radicalization suggests that the leader alone drives things along, a position that came to be known and debated in the 1980s as “intentionalism." 21 Obviously, however, the leader’s intentions mean little unless police officers, army commanders, magistrates, and civil servants are willing to obey his orders. Contemplating the notoriously indolent Hitler, some scholars were led to propose that the impulses to radicalization must have erupted from below, in the initiatives taken by underlings frustrated by local emergencies and confident that the Führer would cover their excesses, as he had done with the Potempa murderers. This position was known in the debates of the 1980s as “structuralism."

  We do not need to accept the absurdity of pure “structuralism" to recognize that, in addition to the leader’s actions or words, fascist regimes embrace radicalizing impulses from below that distinguish them sharply from traditional authoritarian dictatorships. I have already alluded to the deliberate arousal of expectations of dynamism, excitement, momentum, and risk that were inherent to fascism’s appeal, and which it was dangerous to abandon completely for fear of undermining the leader’s principal source of power independent of the old elites.

  The party and its militants were themselves a powerful force for continued radicalization. No regime was authentically fascist without a popular movement that helped it achieve power, monopolized political activity, and played a major role in public life after power with its parallel organizations. We know already what serious problems the party could pose for the leader. Its battle-scarred militants thirsted after immediate rewards—jobs, power, money—in ways that troubled the leader’s necessary cooperation with the Establishment. Old party comrades could easily turn into rivals for the supreme role if the leader falters.

  No fascist leader, not even Hitler, failed to have problems with his party, as we saw in the previous chapter. He needed to keep it in line, but he could hardly dispense with it, for it was his chief weapon in his permanent rivalry with the old elites. Hitler solved his conflicts with the Nazi Party with characteristic speed and brutality—but it must not be imagined that even he did so without strain, or that he was always entirely in perfect control.

  Mussolini, too, was not unwilling to shed blood, as the murders of the Rosselli brothers and Matteotti witnessed. But he dared execute his unruly party lieutenants only under the German boot in 1944.22 Sometimes he gave in to them (for example, when he abandoned his proposed pact of pacification with the socialists, after four months of raucous party debate, in November 1921, and when he assumed dictatorial power in January 1925). Often he tried to channel them, as when he named Farinacci party secretary in 1925, or when he diverted the energies of another powerful ras, Italo Balbo, into the air force and the African empire.

  Not unlike Mussolini in his early laissez-faire period with Alberto De Stefani, Hitler named as his first minister of finance the conservative Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk.23 For a time, the Führer left foreign policy in the hands of professional diplomats (with the aristocratic Constantin von Neurath as foreign minister) and the army in the hands of professional soldiers. But Hitler’s drive to shrink the normative state and expand the prerogative state was much more sustained than Mussolini’s. Total master of his party, Hitler exploited its radical impulses for his own aggrandizement against the old elites and rarely (after the exemplary bloodbath of June 1934) needed to rein it in. Another suggested key to radicalization is the chaotic nature of fascist rule. Contrary to wartime propaganda and to an enduring popular image, Nazi Germany was not a purring, well-oiled machine. Hitler allowed party agencies to compete with more traditional state offices, and he named loyal lieutenants to overlapping jobs that pitted them against each other. The ensuing “feudal"24 struggles for supremacy within and between party and state shocked those Germans proud of their country’s traditional superbly trained and independent civil service. Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg, a young Prussian official initially attracted to Nazism, lamented in 1937 that “the formerly unified State power has been split into a number
of separate authorities; Party and professional organizations work in the same areas and overlap with no clear divisions of responsibility." He feared “the end of a true Civil Service and the emergence of a subservient bureaucracy."25

  We saw in the previous chapter how the self-indulgently bohemian Hitler spent as little time as possible on the labors of government, at least until the war. He proclaimed his visions and hatreds in speeches and ceremonies, and allowed his ambitious underlings to search for the most radical way to fulfill them in a Darwinian competition for attention and reward. His lieutenants, fully aware of his fanatical views, “worked toward the Führer," 26 who needed mainly to arbitrate among them. Mussolini, quite unlike Hitler in his commitment to the drudgery of government, refused to delegate and remained suspicious of competent associates—a governing style that produced more inertia than radicalization.

  War provided fascism’s clearest radicalizing impulse. It would be more accurate to say that war played a circular role in fascist regimes. Early fascist movements were rooted in an exaltation of violence sharpened by World War I, and war making proved essential to the cohesion, discipline, and explosive energy of fascist regimes. Once undertaken, war generated both the need for more extreme measures, and popular acceptance of them. It seems a general rule that war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone (and, in the cases we know, the occasion for its demise).

  It seems clear that both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes. They wanted to use war to harden internal society as well as to conquer vital space. Hitler told Goebbels, “the war . . . made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times."27

  Hitler deliberately sought confrontation. Did he want war? A. J. P. Taylor argued in 1962 that Hitler stumbled into a war he did not want in September 1939, and that it was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who made the fatal decision for war by extending a military guarantee to Poland in March 1939.28 Taylor’s revisionism was useful, for it forced a closer look at the archives. The most convincing conclusion, however, is that while Hitler may indeed not have wanted the long war of attrition on two fronts that he eventually got, he probably did want a local, short, victorious war in Poland—or at least the public impression of having got his way by a show of force. Every fiber of the Nazi regime had been bent to the business of preparing Germany materially and psychologically for war, and not to use that force, sooner or later, would produce a potentially fatal loss of credibility.

  Mussolini was no less clearly drawn to war. “When Spain is finished, I will think of something else," he told his son-in-law and Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano. “The character of the Italian people must be molded by fighting."29 He acclaimed war as the sole source of human advance. “War is to men as maternity is to women."30

  Less than a year after becoming prime minister, in August 1923, Mussolini made his foreign policy debut with the Corfu incident, a spectacular piece of Fascist bravado. After an Italian general and other members of an Italian commission trying to settle a border dispute between Albania and Greece were murdered, apparently by Greek bandits, Mussolini sent the Greek government a list of exorbitant demands. When the Greek authorities hesitated, Italian forces bombarded and occupied the island of Corfu.

  The Duce began preparations to invade Ethiopia in 1933–34. That fateful decision—it aligned him irrevocably with Hitler against Britain and France—grew as much out of a need to revive Fascist dynamism as out of traditional nationalist imperial dreams and vengeance for Italy’s defeat by Ethiopia at Adwa in 1896. In the early 1930s, the Italian Fascist regime faced a crisis of identity. It had been in power for a decade. The Blackshirts were growing complacent, and party ranks had been opened up to all comers. Many young people were coming of age unaware of Fascism’s heroic early days, perceiving Fascists only as comfortable careerists. Later, when European war approached, although Mussolini (unlike Hitler) clearly wanted a negotiated settlement of the Czech crisis in 1938 and the Polish crisis in August 1939, he could not afford to stand aside forever. When Germany appeared to be on the point of definitive victory, he rushed into war against France, on June 10, 1940, despite the poor state of his armed forces. Possibly sharing some of his radical lieutenants’ conviction that war would restore Fascism’s original spirit,31 he may also have thought it would strengthen his control. Above all, he had preached the martial virtues too long to stand aside without ridicule from an apparently easy victory.32 Mussolini’s attacks on Albania and Greece in the fall of 1940, similarly, were necessary for reasons of prestige and to maintain the fiction that he was waging his own war “parallel" to Hitler’s. No vital economic or strategic stakes were involved in any of these campaigns.

  Even nonradicalized authoritarian regimes glorified the military. For all his desire to stay out of the war, Franco seized the opportunity offered by the defeat of France in 1940 to occupy Tangiers, as we saw earlier. Military parades were a major form of public ritual for Franquist Spain. Defeated France, under the Vichy regime of World War I hero Marshal Pétain, put much energy into military pomp and patriotic display. It never stopped asking the Nazi occupation authorities to allow the tiny Vichy Armistice Army to play a greater role in the defense of French soil from an Allied invasion.33 Even the quietist Portuguese dictator Salazar could not neglect the African empire that provided major emotional and economic support for his authoritarian state.

  But there is a difference between authoritarian dictatorships’ glorification of the military and the emotional commitment of fascist regimes to war. Authoritarians used military pomp, but little actual fighting, to help prop up regimes dedicated to preserving the status quo. Fascist regimes could not survive without the active acquisition of new territory for their “race"—Lebensraum, spazio vitale—and they deliberately chose aggressive war to achieve it, clearly intending to wind the spring of their people to still higher tension.

  Fascist radicalization was not simply war government, moreover. Making war radicalizes all regimes, fascist or not, of course. All states demand more of their citizens in wartime, and citizens become more willing, if they believe the war is a legitimate one, to make exceptional sacrifices for the community, and even to set aside some of their liberties. Increased state authority seems legitimate when the enemy is at the gate. During World War II, citizens of the democracies accepted not only material sacrifices, like rationing and the draft, but also major limitations on freedom, such as censorship. In the United States during the cold war an insistent current of opinion wanted to limit liberties again, in the interest of defeating the communist enemy.

  War government under fascism is not the same as the democracies’ willing and temporary suspension of liberties, however. In fascist regimes at war, a fanatical minority within the party or movement may find itself freed to express a furor far beyond any rational calculation of interest. In this way, we return to Hannah Arendt’s idea that fascist regimes build on the fragmentation of their societies and the atomization of their populations. Arendt has been sharply criticized for making atomization one of the prerequisites for Nazi success.34 But her Origins of Totalitarianism, though cast in historical terms, is more a philosophical meditation on fascism’s ultimate radicalization than a history of origins. Even if the fragmentation and atomization of society work poorly as explanations for fascism’s taking root and arriving in power, the fragmentation and atomization of government were characteristic of the last phase of fascism, the radicalization process. In the newly conquered territories, ordinary civil servants, agents of the normative state, were replaced by party radicals, agents of the prerogative state. The orderly procedures of bureaucracy gave way to the wild unstructured improvisations of inexperienced party militants thrust into ill-defined positions of authority over conquered peoples.

  Trying to Account for the Holocaust

  The outermost reach of fascist radical
ization was the Nazi murder of the Jews. No mere prose can do justice to the Holocaust, but the most convincing accounts have two qualities. For one, they take into account not only Hitler’s obsessive hatred of Jews but also the thousands of subordinates whose participation in the increasingly harsh actions against them that made the mechanism function. Without them, Hitler’s murderous fantasy would have remained only a fantasy.

  The other quality is the recognition that the Holocaust developed step by step, from lesser acts to more heinous ones.35 Most scholars accept today that the Nazi assault upon the Jews developed incrementally. It grew neither entirely out of the disorderly local violence of a popular pogrom, nor entirely from the imposition from above of a murderous state policy. Both impulses ratcheted each other up in an ascending spiral, in a way appropriate to a “dual state." Local eruptions of vigilantism by party militants were encouraged by the language of Nazi leaders and the climate of toleration for violence they established. The Nazi state, in turn, kept channeling the undisciplined initiatives of party militants into official policies applied in an orderly fashion.

  The first phase was segregation: marking the internal enemies, setting them apart from the nation, and suppressing their rights as citizens. This began in spring 1933 as street actions by party militants, the so-called revolution from below that followed immediately upon Hitler’s assumption of office. The new regime tried to channel and control these chaotic incidents of marking and smashing Jewish shops with an official one-day boycott on April 1, 1933. The Nuremberg laws of September 15, 1935, prohibiting intermarriage and annulling Jewish citizenship elevated segregation into state policy.36 A pause followed, partly motivated by the regime’s desire to present a positive face during the Berlin Olympics of 1936.