The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  17. Gregory M. Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), offers the most sustained comparative analysis of some of these different outcomes, which depend, in Luebbert’s view, on whether family farmers allied with the middle class (producing liberalism or fascism) or with socialists (producing social democracy).

  18. Mussolini wanted Italy ruled after the war by a trincerocrazia, or “trenchocracy," a government of front-line veterans. Il Popolo d’Italia, December 15, 1917, quoted in Emilio Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, 1919–1922: Movimento e milizia (Bari: Laterza, 1989), p. 19. See also Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 16–17. Angry veterans turned Left as well as Right, of course. See bibliographical essay for bibliography.

  19. Giorgio Rochat, Italo Balbo (Turin: UTET, 1986), p. 23.

  20. Claudio Segrè, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 28–34, 41–47.

  21. Arno J. Mayer underscored that contest in The Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), and The Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles,

  1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967).

  22. Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoch (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1963), trans. into English as Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).

  23. For this British-born apostle of a racially purer, less-materialist Germany, Wagner’s son-in-law, see Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

  24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), p. 126.

  25. Steven E. Aschheim, “Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism, and Mass Murder," in Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 71. This lucid account of the successive Nietzsches, from the proto-Nazi of 1945 to Walter Kaufmann’s free-spirited Nietzsche of the 1960s to the deconstructionist Nietzsche of today, is expanded in Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

  26. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 159.

  27. Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznayder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), is thorough on Mussolini’s use of Sorel. Sorel’s favorable comments on Fascism have been reduced by recent scholarship to fleeting references in 1920–21. See J. R. Jennings, Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of His Thought (London: Macmillan, 1985); Jacques Julliard and Shlomo Sand, eds., Georges Sorel en son temps (Paris: Seuil, 1985); Marco Gervasoni, Georges Sorel: Una biografia intellettuale (Milan: Unicopli, 1997).

  28. Suzanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-CenturyFrance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

  29. The classic account of this shift is H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reconstruction of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Random House, 1961).

  30. Biological struggle as the key to human history, central to Hitler’s worldview, was weaker in Italy, though some Italian nationalists arrived at a parallel culturally based ideal of competing national wills via Hegel and Nietzsche. See Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 285–89.

  31. Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985). Galton did not himself advocate preventing the “inferior" from reproducing.

  32. Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. from the French by Edmund Howard (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The cultural-historical razza of Italian nationalist rhetoric was no less aggressively competitive.

  33. The Italian poet-aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio strove to “exalt and glorify above all things Beauty, and the power of the pugnacious, dominating male." Anthony Rhodes, The Poet as Superman: A Life of Gabriele D’Annunzio (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1959), pp. 62–63. See also the Marquis de Morès, cited on p. 48. On the Left, anarchist proponents of propaganda of the deed also valued action for itself. The anarchist poet Laurent Tailhade responded to the bombing of the French Chamber of Deputies in December 1893 by saying, “What do these vague beings [the wounded] matter, if the gesture is beautiful?" Teilhade later lost an eye in the anarchist bombing of a Parisian café. James Joll, The Anarchists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), p. 169.

  34. Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1929), trans. into English as Storm of Steel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), famously exalted the ennobling effects of combat following World War I. Pro-war literature was far less common than its opposite, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s evocation of the horror of trench combat in All Quiet on the Western Front (1927). Nazi gangs broke up showings of the film made from Remarque’s novel. Jünger (1895–1998) had a strained relationship with Nazism, but he was never in serious opposition to it—a not uncommon position for intellectual fellow travelers.

  35. According to Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952), Rousseau’s foundation of popular sovereignty upon the “general will," rather than upon a majority of individual wills, makes him an ancestor of fascism.

  36. J. Salwyn Schapiro, “Thomas Carlyle, Prophet of Fascism," Journal of ModernHistory 17:2 (June 1945), p. 103. See more generally Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Carlyle and the Search for Authority (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992).

  37. Theodore Deimel, Carlyle und der Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg, 1937), cited in Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer, and Gerhard Schulz, Die nationalsozialistischeMachtergreifung (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1960), p. 264 and note 9.

  38. See chapter 2, pp. 37, 39. Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Käsler, eds., Sociology Responds to Fascism (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 6, 9, reflect on sociology’s links to fascism.

  39. It was the census of 1891 that revealed to the French that their population was not reproducing itself, making this issue central for the first time in a major European state. It was later a staple fascist concern.

  40. H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New York: Scribner, 1952), republished by Greenwood Press, 1975.

  41. Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), explores the emerging awareness since the 1880s of refugee issues.

  42. Goebbels-Reden, vol. I (1933–39), ed. Helmut Heiber (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971), p. 108.

  43. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany, c. 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  44. See the bibliographical essay, p. 239.

  45. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964); Fritz Stern, The Politics of CulturalDespair (New York: Doubleday, 1961).

  46. See chapter 1, note 20.

  47. Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism," in Henry Hardy, ed., The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 91–174 (quotations from pp. 112 and 174). A short preliminary sketch for this essay appears in Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 131–54.

  48. Sternhell, Birth.

  49. Sternhell, Birth, p. 3. Sternhell is speaking here of Italian Fascism only; he explicitly excludes Nazism from his analysis. In a different register, Mark Mazower’s brilliant Dark Continent (New York: Knopf, 1999) argues that nondemocratic values were “no more foreign to [European] tradition" than democratic ones (pp. 4–5, 396).

  50. Han
nah Arendt, “Approaches to the German Problem," in Essays in Understanding(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994 [orig. pub. 1945]), p. 109. I thank Michael Burleigh for this citation.

  51. Hughes, Spengler, p. 156.

  52. Herman Lebovics, Social Conservatism and the Middle Classes in Germany, 1914–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 86, 107.

  53. Ibid., 136.

  54. Chapter 1, p. 6.

  55. Sternhell, Birth, p. 231: “Mussolini came to terms with the existing social forces"; Emilio Gentile, Le origini, dell’ ideologia fascista (1918–1925), 2nd ed. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), p. 323.

  56. Romke Visser, “Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of Romanità," Journal of ContemporaryHistory 27:1 (1992), pp. 5–22. The two thousandth anniversary of the Emperor Augustus was Mussolini’s riposte to the Thousand-Year Reich. See Friedemann Scriba, Augustus im Schwarzhemd? Die Mostra Augustea della Romanità in Rom 1937/38 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995), summarized in Scriba, “Die Mostra Augustea della Romanità in Rom 1937/38," in Jens Petersen and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Faschismus und Gesellschaft in Italien: Staat, Wirtschaft, Kultur (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 1998), pp. 133–57.

  57. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).

  58. Letter to Ernest Collings, January 17, 1913, in The Portable D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1947), p. 563.

  59. Mosse, Crisis, p. 6. Cf. Emilio Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, 1919–1921: Movimento e milizia (Bari: Laterza, 1989), p. 518: “More than an idea or a doctrine," Fascism represents “a new state of mind" (stato d’animo).

  60. A rare study of the way the “victim trope" may generate a desire to exterminate enemies is Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews and the Holocaust," American Historical Review 103:3 (June 1998), pp. 771–816, with replies in 103:4 (October 1998). Victimhood may be authentic, of course.

  61. Linz, “Political Space and Fascism."

  62. During the French Revolution of 1789–1815, all males had the right to vote in only one election: that for the Convention, on August 26, 1792. Even then the citizens chose primary assemblies that, in a second stage, actually chose the deputies. The Constitution of 1793 provided for direct manhood suffrage, but it was never applied. Manhood suffrage really begins in 1848 in Europe, though earlier in most of the American states.

  63. A recent reexamination of the emperor’s self-dramatization is David Baguley, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

  64. During the high era of fascism, several authors detected fascist elements in Napoleon III’s Second Empire, e.g., J. Salwyn Shapiro, in Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), pp. 308–31. That spreads the definition too wide, although Louis Napoleon’s political strategies following the revolutions of 1848—mass electoral propaganda, state-sponsored economic growth, foreign adventure—form a significant precursor to later forms of popularly based dictatorship. Louis Napoleon’s triumphant election as French president in December 1848 caused problems for Karl Marx, who had expected a different result from the economic development and class polarization of 1840s France. In The EighteenthBrumaire of Louis Napoleon (1850), Marx came up with the explanation that a momentary deadlock between two evenly balanced classes—bourgeoisie and proletariat—gave exceptional leeway to an individual leader, even one of mediocre personal qualities (Marx used some of his richest invective on the despised Louis Napoleon, the “farce" who followed “tragedy"), to govern independently of class interests. This analysis was taken up in the 1920s by the Austrian August Thalheimer and other Marxist thinkers to explain the unexpected success of popular dictatorships after World War I. See Jost Düllfer, “Bonapartism, Fascism, and National Socialism," Journal of Contemporary History 11:4 (October 1976), pp. 109–28.

  65. Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (London: Croom Helm, 1975), republished 2001; Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 30, 36–38. For other works, see the bibliographical essay.

  66. In the French government formed by the moderate democrat Waldeck-Rousseau in September 1899 to undo the legal wrong done to Dreyfus and to defend the Republic against enraged nationalists, the moderate socialist Alexandre Millerand accepted the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Postal Services. He found himself seated in the cabinet’s official photograph next to the minister of war, General Gallifet, who had crushed the Parisian revolutionaries in 1871. Some socialists, already reluctant to defend Dreyfus because he was a rich man and a Jew, thought that the purity of the socialist movement came first, while others, around Jean Jaurès, put the defense of human rights first.

  67. See chapter 2, pp. 28–30.

  68. Carl Schorske’s term for the German nationalist movement of Georg von Schönerer in the borderlands of Bohemia during the 1880s. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1980), chap. 3.

  69. The classic analysis of this development is Max Weber’s “Politik als Beruf" (1918). Parliamentarians began to be paid in France in 1848, in Germany in 1906, and, latest among European Great Powers, in Great Britain in 1910. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 established pay for senators and congressmen (Article 1, Section 6).

  70. An excellent account of this generational shift in the German Liberal Party in the 1880s is Dan White, A Splintered Party: National Liberalism in Hessen and the Reich, 1867–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). For France, see Michel Winock, Nationalism, Antisemitism, and Fascism in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), and Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques(Paris: Seuil, 1990).

  71. Odile Rudelle, La République absolue, 1870–1889 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982), pp. 164–75, 182–90, 196–223, 228–34, 247–56, 262–78; Christophe Prochasson, “Les années 1880: Au temps du boulangisme," in Michel Winock, ed., His toirede l’extrême droite en France (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 51–82; and William D. Irvine, The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  72. Ernst Nolte considers the Action Française the “first face" in his The Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966). Supporting his case are the nationalism, anti-Semitism, antiparliamentarism, and occasional anticapitalism of the movement, together with its cults of youth and action. Weakening the case for fascism is Maurras’s advocacy of a restored monarchy and Catholic Church as the solution to French “decline."

  73. In addition to the Schorske work referred to in note 68, see John W. Boyer,

  Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1849–1897 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  74. John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  75. White, Splintered Party.

  76. Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

  77. Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914: Les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978), pp. 391–98. See also Sternhell, Birth, pp. 86, 96, 123–27.

  78. Valois, quoted in Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, p. 394.

  79. Maurice Barrès’s funeral oration for the Marquis de Morès, in Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: F. Juven, 1902), pp. 324–28.

  80. For Morès’s outlandish adventures, see Robert F. Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1950), pp. 225–50, and Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, pp. 67, 69, 178, 180–84, 197–220.

  81. Sternhell, La Droite, p. 218.

  82. Byrnes, Antisemitism, p. 249.

  83. Sternhell, Birth, pp. 131–59. David D. Roberts, “How Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual
Antecedents, and Historical Meaning," Journal of Contemporary History 35:2 (April 2002), gives the Italians more intellectual autonomy than Sternhell.

  84. Sternhell shows that Mussolini, drawing on both nationalist and syndicalist authors, had arrived at a pro-productivist position by January 1914. Birth, pp. 12, 160, 167, 175, 179, 182, 193, 219, 221.

  85. See chapter 3, note 46.

  86. Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 213, calls the Union of the Russian People that emerged in reaction to the revolution of 1905 “the first European fascism."

  87. George L. Mosse points to “particularly German values and ideas" and “uniquely German developments" “prepared long beforehand" in his study of Nazism’s cultural precursors The Crisis of German Ideology, pp. 2, 6, 8, but he does not claim priority for them.

  88. David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965, 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke Univerity Press, 1987), chap. 1. Similarities between the rabidly anti-Semitic revived Klan of the 1920s and fascism are explored by Nancy Maclean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 179–88.

  89. In fact, many veterans turned to the Left, and veterans formed only a quarter of SA membership. Peter H. Merkl, “Approaches to Political Violence: The Stormtroopers, 1925–1933," in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld, eds.,

  Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe (New

  York: St. Martin’s Press, for the German Historical Institute of London, 1982), p. 379. Many were younger, as we noted above.

  90. Bruno Wanrooij, “The Rise and Fall of Fascism as a Generational Revolt," Journal of Contemporary History 22:3 (1987).

  91. In a seminal article, “The Transformation of the Western European Party System," in Joseph La Palombara and Myron Weiner, eds., Political Parties and PoliticalDevelopment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 177–210, Otto Kircheimer invented the useful distinction among “parties of individual representation," which existed only to elect a “notable" deputy; “parties of integration," which enlisted their members in active participation; and “catch-all parties," which recruited across class lines. Socialists created the first parties of integration. Fascist parties were the first to be simultaneously parties of integration and catch-all parties.