The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  The high point of fascism in France before 1940 was the attack on the Chamber of Deputies of February 6, 1934, which many observers (notably Trotsky in Whither France [New York: Pioneer, 1936]) considered the beginning of a fascist “March on Paris." The best-informed account is Serge Berstein, Le 6 février 1934 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). In English, the illustrated article of Geoffrey Warner in History Today (June 1958) is evocative; see also Max Beloff, “The Sixth of February," in James Joll, ed., The Decline of the Third Republic, St. Antony’s Papers No. 5 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959).

  The strength of fascism in interwar France has been the subject of an important debate. The classic work of René Rémond, The Right Wing in France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969) (most recent version only in French: Les Droites en France [Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982]), argued that fascism was a foreign import without much impact in France. This view was supported more recently by Serge Berstein in “La France allergique au fascisme," in Vingtième siècle: revue d’histoire 2 (April 1984), pp. 84–94, a response to Sternhell.

  On the other side, Soucy (see above) found fascism was highly developed in France. Zeev Sternhell makes the largest claims for the importance of France for the history of fascism: it was in France, he argues, that fascism received its earliest and purest intellectual expression. See La droite révolutionaire, 1885–1914: Les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978); Maurice Barrès et le nationalismefrançais (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1985); and Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

  The critical storm stirred up by Sternhell’s claim in Neither Right nor Left that France was “impregnated"4 with Fascism in the 1930s, a claim advanced by assigning a broad range of nationalist and conservative authors to the fascist camp, may be reviewed in Antonio Costa Pinto, “Fascist Ideology Revisited: Zeev Sternhell and His Critics," European History Quarterly 4 (1986). Philippe Burrin arrives at a subtle analysis of “impregnation différentielle" in “La France dans le champ magnétique des fascismes," Le Débat 32 (November 1984), pp. 52–72.

  The crucial issue was whether the largest of the interwar militantly nationalist movements, Colonel François de La Rocque’s Croix de Feu, transformed after its dissolution by the government in June 1936 into the more moderate electoral Parti Social Français, was fascist or not. The positive case is made for both the league and the party by Soucy and Sternhell (see above) and William D. Irvine, “Fascism in France and the Strange Case of the Croix de Feu," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991), pp. 271–95. Kevin Passmore, “Boy Scoutism for Grown-ups? Paramilitarism in the Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français," French Historical Studies 19 (1995), pp. 527–57, sensibly judges the league fascist, more on behavioral than ideological grounds, but not the party. Serge Berstein portrays the ambiguous position of La Rocque’s PSF as a conflict between unruly militants and their more cautious leader (“La ligue," in Jean-François Sirinelli, Histoire des droites en France [Paris: Gallimard, 1992], vol. II, p. 100). Jacques Nobécourt, Le Colonel de La Rocque, 1885–1946, ou les pièges du nationalisme chrétien (Paris: Fayard, 1996), an exhaustive sympathetic biography, portrays La Rocque as a conservative victimized by false accusations and personal rivalries, more accurately understood as a predecessor of Charles de Gaulle’s presidential Fifth Republic. The PSF’s resort to the ballot box, of course, in no way by itself makes it nonfascist, for elections were essential to the Nazis and Fascists in the stages of taking root and coming to power. For the occupation years, see Sean Kennedy, “Accompanying the Marshal: La Rocque and the Parti Social Français under Vichy," French History 15:2 (2001), pp. 186–213.

  The most enlightening treatment of other French fascist leaders is Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery: 1933–1945 (Paris: Seuil, 1986). One can find additional detail on Doriot and his role in the French Légion des Volontaires Contre le Bolshevisme in Jean-Paul Brunet, Jacques Doriot du communisme au fascisme (Paris: Balland, 1986), and in Dieter Wolf, Die Doriot Bewegung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1967), also translated into French.

  Whether Vichy France (1940–44) should be considered fascist or authoritarian is taken up by Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 251–57; Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–44 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 144, 157–61, 213–14, 261; Michèle Cointet, Vichy et le fascisme: Les hommes, les structures, et les pouvoirs (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1987). An interesting evaluation of Vichy’s propaganda efforts as a failed fascist experiment is Denis Peschanski, “Vichy au singulier, Vichy au pluriel: Une tentative avortée d’encadrement de la société (1941–1942)," Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 43 (1988), pp. 639–62. One may ask, with Philippe Burrin (La Dérive fasciste, p. 414), whether an authentic fascism is compatible with foreign occupation.

  Greece: Jon V. Kofas, Authoritarianism in Greece: The Metaxas Regime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

  Hungary: Basic readings in English are C. A. Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1956–57), and the lucid essay by Istvan Deák, “Hungary," in Rogger and Weber, The European Right, cited above, pp. 364–407. The fullest work on the Arrow Cross is Margit Szöllösi-Janze, Die Pfeilkreuzlerbewegung in Ungarn: Historischer Kontext, Entwicklung und Herrschaft (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989). See in English Miklós Lackó, Arrow Cross Men, National Socialists (Budapest: Studia Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae No. 61, 1969), and the two articles on Hungary in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists: Lacko, “The Social Roots of Hungarian Fascism: The Arrow Cross," and György Ranki, “The Fascist Vote in Budapest in 1939." Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania, 2nd ed. (Portland, OR: Center for Romanian Studies, 2001), is a lively narrative.

  Ireland: Maurice Manning, The Blueshirts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). For the poet William Butler Yeats’s passing interest in Irish fascism, see Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism (New York: New York University Press, 1981), and Gratton Fryer, William Butler Yeats and the Anti-Democratic Tradition (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981).

  Norway: Oddvar K. Hoidal, Quisling: A Study in Treason (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1989), is the most detailed biography, but Hans Fredrick Dahl, Quisling: A Study in Treachery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), has used some additional personal archives. The most thorough studies in English on Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling are the chapters by Larsen, Myklebust, and Hagtvet in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists, pp. 595–650.

  Poland: Edward D. Wynot, Polish Politics in Transition: The Camp of National Unity and the Struggle for Power, 1935–1939 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1974).

  Portugal: Stimulating discussions of the special conditions of Portugal are found in A. H. Oliveira Marques, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Portugal: Problems of Portuguese History, 1900–1930," in Manfred Kossok, ed., Studien über die Revolution (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1969); Herminio Martins, “Portugal," in Stuart J. Woolf, ed., European Fascism (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 302–36; and Phillip Schmitter, “The Social Origins, Economic Bases and Political Imperatives of Authoritarian Rule in Portugal," in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists. For Salazar’s dictatorship and Portuguese fascism see Antonio Costa Pinto, Salazar’s Dictatorship and European Fascism (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1995), and The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascists and the New State (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2000).

  Romania: The most interesting discussion of the Legion of the Archangel Michael in English is Eugen Weber, “The Men of the Archangel," Journal of ContemporaryHistory 1:1 (April 1966), pp. 101–26, also published in Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, ed., International Fascism (New York: Harper, 1966). We
ber sees the legion as truly revolutionary, since it introduced popular political mobilization to Romania, where socialism barely existed and the bourgeois parties ruled by oligarchy. The legion aroused peasant solidarity with patriotism, religion, and anti-Semitism, however, and rejected the Western Left’s values of individual citizens’ rights within a state of law. The most thorough account now is Armin Heinen, Die Legion “Erzengel Michael” in Rumanien (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986).

  Accounts of the conflict between fascists and authoritarians in Romania include the brief survey in Stephen Fischer-Galati, Twentieth Century Rumania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 46–69; the more analytical Keith Hitchens, Rumania, 1866–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 416–25, 451–71; the dramatic narrative of Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others (listed under Hungary), and the essential article by Eugen Weber: “Romania," in Rogger and Weber, The European Right (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 501–74, first published in the Journal of Contemporary History 1:1 (1966).

  Scandinavia: Ulf Lindström, Fascism in Scandinavia (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1985). Marvin Rintala, Three Generations: The Extreme Right Wing in Finnish Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), explores the Lapua movement and its successor after 1932, the People’s Patriotic Movement (IKL). Lena Berggren, “Swedish Fascism: Why Bother?" Journal of Contemporary History 37:3 (July 2002), pp. 395–417, is a lively critique of the literature.

  Slovakia: The Jelinek article cited under Croatia; and Jörg K. Hoensch, “Slovakia: “One God, One People, One Party," in Richard J. Wolff and Jörg K. Hoensch, eds., Catholics, the State, and the Radical Right, 1919–1945 (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1987), pp. 158–81.

  Spain: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Fascism from Above: The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain, 1923–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), and Carolyn P. Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), treat the “dictatorship" of the 1920s. For the Falange, see Selected Writings of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, ed. Hugh Thomas (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972); Stanley Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Sheelagh M. Ellwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era: Falange Española de las JONS, 1936–76 (St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Paul Preston, The Politics of Revenge: Fascismand the Military in 20th Century Spain (London: Routledge, 1995), compares Spain with Germany and Italy and finds it fascist. Paul Preston has written the fullest and most recent biography of Franco, severely critical. The case for Franco’s regime as fascist is made powerfully by Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco-Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), at least for the period up to 1945.

  Fascism Outside Europe For a skeptical discussion of the applicability (or not) of the fascist concept outside Europe, see Payne, History, chap. 10 and pages 512–17. Stein U. Larsen adopts a broad-church approach in his own wide-ranging contribution to Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe: The European Impulse against Domestic Conditionsin the Diffusion of Global Fascism (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2001), with much material on Asia.

  Argentina: The Argentine Right has been most recently examined in Sandra McGee Deutsch and Ronald H. Dolkart, eds., The Argentine Right: Its History and Intellectual Origins, 1910 to the Present (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1993), and in Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History, and Its Impact (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), finds the Argentine nationalists more reactionary than fascist. Rock explores the “failure of the first [Argentine] experiment in popular democracy" (p. 273) in Politics in Argentina, 1890–1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Carlos H. Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and Their StructuralConsquences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), is a stimulating essay assigning blame for the impoverishment of Argentina to the elite’s choices of economic and political reaction between 1930 and 1945. Daniel James gives a stimulating account of the ambiguous relationship between the labor movement and Perón in Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Gino Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism and National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1978), treats Peronism as a case of crisis generated within an oligarchy by a “primary mobilization" of masses of new participants in politics. Robert D. Crassweller, Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina (New York: Norton, 1987), is a spirited narrative, with much attention to U.S. reactions to Perón. Frederick C. Turner and José Enrique Miguens collect a useful series of articles in Juan Perón and the Shaping of Argentina (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983). Joseph R. Barager, ed., Why Perón Came to Power (New York: Knopf, 1968), is a classic attempt to place Peronism within Argentine history. One of the most suggestive of many works on Eva Perón is J. M. Taylor, Eva Perón: The Myths of a Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

  Brazil: The place to begin is Thomas E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Politics in Brazil, 1930–1964: An Experiment in Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). The most detailed studies of Vargas and the Integralistas are the Deutsch work mentioned under Argentina and Robert M. Levine, The Vargas Regime: The Critical Years, 1934–1938 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Levine reviews these issues more briefly in Father of the Poor?: Vargas and His Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Hélgio Trindade, “Fascism and Authoritarianism in Brazil under Vargas (1930–1945)," in Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe, pp. 469–528, assesses Integralismo.

  China: Fred Wakeman, Jr., “A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism," China Quarterly 150 (June 1997), pp. 395–430, says that the Blueshirts (1927–37) were not fascist. See Marcia H. Chang, The Chinese Blue Shirt Society: Fascismand Developmental Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). William C. Kirby, “Images and Realities of Chinese Fascism," in Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe, pp. 233–68, ranges more widely.

  Japan: An authoritative review of the issue of fascism in Japan is Gregory J. Kasza, “Fascism from Above? Japan’s Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective," in Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe, pp. 183–232. Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), is the classic exposition of “emperor-style fascism." William M. Fletcher, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), is a basic English source for intellectuals influenced by fascism. Peter Duus and Daniel I. Okimoto, “Fascism and the History of Prewar Japan: The Failure of a Concept," Journal of Asian Studies 39:1 (November 1979), pp. 65–76; George Macklin Wilson, “A New Look at the Problem of Japanese Fascism," Comparative Studies in Society and History (1968), pp. 401–12; and Tetsuo Furuya, “Naissance et développement de fascisme japonais," Revue d’histoire de la 2è guerre mondiale 86 (April 1972), pp. 1–16, doubt that movements that looked to the army and the emperor for change can be called fascist. Paul Brooker, The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany,Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), argues that Japan was the most effective of the three in mobilizing mass support for militant nationalism on a traditionalist base.

  Latin America: Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas (listed under Argentina), gives an excellent overview of the extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The essential works for Bolivia are Herbert Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), and Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Pres
s, 1992), pp. 199–216. For a Brazilian point of view, see Hélgio Trindade, “La Question du fascisme en Amérique Latine," Revue française de Science Politique 33:2 (April 1983), pp. 281–312.

  South Africa: Patrick J. Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), and Jeff J. Guy, “Fascism, Nazism, Nationalism and the Foundation of Apartheid Ideology," in Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe, pp. 427–66.

  United States: Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab present a well-informed bestiary of extremist groups on the American Right in The Politics of Unreason: Right-WingExtremism in America, 1790–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Alan Brinkley scrutinizes some of them elegantly in Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982), and discusses the appropriateness of the fascist label on pp. 269–83. Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), explores correspondences between the Klan as it was in the early twentieth century and fascism, on pp. 179–88. Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), provides the fullest treatment of William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, Gerald L. K. Smith, and other homegrown fascists. Donald I. Warren, “Depression-Era Fascism and Nazism in the United States and Canada: Threat to Democracy or Theater of the Absurd?" in Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe, pp. 635–701, surveys the interwar years broadly, while Michael Cox and Martin Durham, “The Politics of Anger: The Extreme Right in the United States," in Paul Hainsworth, ed., The Politics of the Extreme Right (London: Pinter, 2000), pp. 287–311, update the postwar period. El Salvador as a case of United States support for something very like fascism overseas is explored by Thomas Sheehan, “Friendly Fascism: Business as Usual in America’s Backyard," in Richard J. Golsan, ed., Fascism’s Return (Lincoln: Univesity of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 260–300.