The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  92. Melitta Maschman, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (London: Abelard Schuman, 1965), pp. 4, 10, 12, 18, 35–36, and 175, recalled the joy of escaping from her stifling bourgeois household into the cross-class community of the Bund deutscher Mädel.

  93. The classic statement of fascism as “extremism of the middle" is Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (see chapter 8, p. 210 and note 28).

  94. Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 90, 112, 198, 228, 413–18.

  95. Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 108–12, 185–88, 253–57; Jürgen Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991), pp. 198–230. The SA was composed largely of working-class unemployed (see the bibliographical essay). In 1921 the Fascist Party claimed that 15.4 percent of its members were workers. Salvatore Lupo, Il fascismo: La politica in un regime totalitario (Rome: Donzelli, 2000), p. 89.

  96. W. D. Burnham, “Political Immunization and Political Confessionalism: The United States and Weimar Germany," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972), pp. 1–30; Michaela W. Richter, “Resource Mobilization and Legal Revolution: National Socialist Tactics in Franconia," in Thomas Childers, ed., The Formation of the Nazi Constituency (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), pp. 104–30.

  97. Workers, often unemployed, were the largest social category in the Carrara fascio. The local ras, Renato Ricci, though close to the quarry owners, supported a forty-day strike in late 1924, not a unique case early in the Fascist regime. Lupo, Il fascismo, pp. 89, 201; Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), pp. 70–71, 168, 170; Sandro Setta, Renato Ricci: Dallo squadrismo all Repubblica Sociale Italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), pp. 28, 81–100.

  98. Childers, The Nazi Voter, p. 185; R. I. McKibbin, “The Myth of the Unemployed: Who Did Vote for the Nazis?" Australian Journal of Politics and History (August 1969).

  99. Thomas Linehan, East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascistsin East London and Southwest Essex, 1933–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1996), pp. 210, 237–97. The BUF received its biggest influx in a backlash against communist and Jewish counterattacks in the Battle of Cable Street (p. 200) (see chapter 3, p. 75).

  100. Miklós Lackó, Arrow Cross Men, National Socialists (Budapest: Studia Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae No. 61, 1969); György Ránki, “The Fascist Vote in Budapest in 1939," in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists, pp. 401–16.

  101. William Brustein, The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), is the strongest advocate of rational choice among Nazi recruits who joined, Brustein argues, because they believed the Nazis’ program offered better solutions to Germany’s problems. This work’s methods and data have been questioned.

  102. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p. 46, finds no convincing proof of homosexuality. Frederick C. Redlich, M.D., Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (New York: Oxford, 1998), considers Hitler a victim of strong repressions, possibly based on a genital deformity, and possibly a latent homosexual though he “talked a good [heterosexual] game." Lothar Machtan scoured the records for proof of Hitler’s homosexuality and found suggestive traces (but less confirmation than he thought) in The Hidden Hitler, trans. from the German by John Brownjohn (Oxford: Perseus Books, 2001).

  103. See Michael Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 194–98. Kater may overestimate the Nazi leaders’ social solidity in Depression Germany.

  104. The supposed killer of Matteotti. 105. Giovanni Gentile, a prestigious idealist philosopher obsessed by the need for national unity via a strong state, served as Mussolini’s first education minister and applied reforms that were simultaneously elitist and statist. He was executed by partisans in 1944. The latest biography is Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile: Une biografia (Florence: Giunti, 1995).

  106. Toscanini, a candidate on the Fascist list in Milan in 1919, broke quickly with the party. In 1931, after being attacked in a Fascist journal as a “pure aesthete who soars above politics in the name of . . . a decadent aestheticism," he accepted a position in New York. Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 216.

  107. See chapter 3, pp. 56–57. 108. Speech of October 29, 1933, in Hugh Thomas, ed., José Antonio Primo de Rivera: Selected Writings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), pp. 56, 57.

  109. See chapter 3, note 82. Alice Kaplan notes in The Collaborator (Chicago:

  University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 13, that Brasillach’s fascism “relied on the reference points and vocabulary of a literary critic—images, poetry, myths—with barely a reference to politics, economics, or ethics."

  110. See chapter 3, notes 46 and 47.

  111. Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, p. 57.

  Chapter 3: Taking Root

  1. A. Gudmundsson, “Nazism in Iceland," in Stein U. Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust, eds., Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1980), pp. 743–51. Its membership peaked at three hundred in 1936.

  2. Keith Amos, The New Guard Movement, 1931–1935 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976).

  3. See chapter 2, note 12.

  4. Speech of June 10, 1940, in Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. II: Lo stato totalitario, 1936–1940 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 841–42. An English version is in Charles F. Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 213–15.

  5. See chapter 1, p. 10.

  6. Sternhell considers the distinction between producers and social parasites “an essential element in the emergence of the Fascist synthesis." Zeev Sternhell et al., The Birth of the Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 106.

  7. See chapter 2, p. 54.

  8. “Socialism . . . was a legitimate reaction against liberal enslavement," José Antonio said in the founding speech of the Falange on October 29, 1933. But socialism was flawed by materialism, the spirit of revenge, and class war, and must be replaced by a higher idealism “neither of the Right nor of the Left," around the nation and the Church. English text in Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, pp. 259–66.

  9. The energetic electoral activity of Hitler and Mussolini disproves the contention of some that this suffices to make La Rocque nonfascist. See the bibliographical essay, p. 243.

  10. The proclamation that Fascism had become a party, contained in the New Program of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, November 7–10, 1921, is published in Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, pp. 26–27. For internal opposition, see Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), pp. 44, 72–75, and Emilio Gentile, “The Problem of the Party in Italian Fascism," Journal of Contemporary History 19:2 (April 1984), pp. 251–74.

  11. Emilio Gentile, Le origine dell’ideologia fascista (1918–1925), 2nd ed. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), pp. 128–33: “L’antipartito."

  12. Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, p. 263.

  13. E.g., Adrian Anton Mussert’s National Socialist Movement (Nationaal Socialistische Beweging) in the Netherlands.

  14. E.g., the Polish Camp of National Unity.

  15. E.g., the Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond of Flemish-speaking Belgium and the Verband van Dietsche Nationaal-Solidaristen (Verdinaso) of the Netherlands.

  16. E.g., Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement National Populaire, in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941–44, and Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling in Norway. General de Gaulle raised eyebrows in 1947 by calling his new movement the Rassemblement du peuple français.

  17. See chapter 2, note 91.

  18. See chapter 1, pp. 6–7.

  19. For D’Annunzio’s comic-opera but deadly serious “Republic of Carnaro,
" see Michael A. Ledeen, The First Duce (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard, 1999), pp. 242–50, and Michel Ostenc, Intellectuels italiens et fascisme (Paris: Payot, 1983), p. 122, among others, show how D’Annunzio’s fame outshone Mussolini in late 1919 and early 1920.

  20. After World War II, defeated Italy was powerless to prevent Yugoslavia from reclaiming Fiume. Renamed Rijeka, it is today the principal port of the post-Yugoslav Republic of Croatia.

  21. Monte Nevoso, a mountain near Fiume which went to Italy by the 1920 settlement, could be claimed as D’Annunzio’s conquest. His castle, Il Vittoriale, is today a nationalist pilgrimage site.

  22. The principal authorities are listed in the bibliographical essay.

  23. A. Rossi [Angelo Tasca], The Rise of Italian Fascism, trans. Peter and Dorothy Waite (New York: Howard Fertig, 1966), pp. 119–20 (orig. pub. 1938), figures taken from Fascist Party sources.

  24. Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 572, n. 2.

  25. Paul Corner, Fascism in Ferrara (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), pp. 123, 223.

  26. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, p. 616.

  27. See chapter 3, p. 57.

  28. See chapter 4, p. 88.

  29. English translations of these texts are available in Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism,pp. 7–40.

  30. Ibid., p. 39.

  31. Many contemporary observers expressed such doubts. Renzo De Felice, ed., Il fascismo: Le interpretazioni dei contemporanei et degli storici, rev. ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1998).

  32. Frank Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Fascism and Great Estates in the South of Italy: Apulia 1900–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Simona Colarizi, Dopoguerra e fascismo in Puglia (1919–1926) (Bari: Laterza, 1971).

  33. See works cited in the bibliographical essay.

  34. The classic study of Schleswig-Holstein’s turn to Nazism was done for a doctorate in political science by Rudolf Heberle just as the Nazis were coming to power. Soon forced into exile, Heberle published his thesis in abbreviated form as From Democracy to Nazism: A Regional Case Study on Political Parties in Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1945). The full text was finally published in Germany as Landbevölkerung und Nationalsozialismus: Eine soziologische Untersuchungder politischen Willensbildung in Schleswig-Holstein, 1918 bis 1932 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1963).

  35. For works on Nazi voters and party members, see the bibliographical essay.

  36. Philippe Burrin, “Poings levés et bras tendus," in Fascisme, nazisme, autoritarisme (Paris: Seuil, 2000), pp. 183–209, shows that the German Left was first in this domain.

  37. Thomas Childers, “The Social Language of Politics," American Historical Review 95:2 (April 1990), p. 342.

  38. Henry A. Turner, Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 54, 339, 350. Turner’s work is authoritative not only because of his unmatched command of German business archives but because he understood that the Nazi share of business contributions can be accurately assessed only in comparison with other political groups.

  39. Turner, German Big Business, pp. 95, 312.

  40. Reinhard Kühnl, Die nationalsozialistische Linke 1925 bis 1930, Marburger Abhandlungen zur Politischen Wissenschaft, Band 6 (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1966); Peter D. Stachura, Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983). For Otto Wagener, see chapter 1, p. 10, chapter 5, pp. 146–47, and corresponding notes.

  41. Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: I. G. Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 61–68. Daimler, by contrast, was a major backer. Bernard Bellon, Mercedes in Peace and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 218, 219, 264. Both profited handsomely from the Nazi regime.

  42. Horst Matzerath and Henry A. Turner, “Die Selbstfinanzierung der NSDAP 1930–1932," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 3:1 (1977), pp. 59–92.

  43. See chapter 2, pp. 47–48.

  44. The most authoritative works are listed and discussed in the bibliographical essay, pp. 241–44.

  45. René Rémond, Les Droites en France, 4th ed. (Paris: Aubier, 1982), pp. 168, 195–230, is the classic statement of this position. The term “Roman whitewash" appears on p. 206. Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra, Les fascismes français (Paris: Seuil, 1963), asserted even more bluntly that “fascism was at first a phenonemon foreign to France" (p. 15), and developed there only a “feeble presence" (réalité dérisoire) (p. 7).

  46. Zeev Sternhell et al., Birth, p. 4. See also Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire: Les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1984). Ernst Nolte made Charles Maurras’s Action Française one of his Three Faces of Fascism (chapter 2, note 66). George Mosse argued in Masses and Man: Nationalist Perceptions of Reality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1980), pp. 119ff, 164, and in Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), p. 157, that by 1900 racism had developed furthest in France and Vienna. Bernard-Henri Lévy, L’Idéologie française (Paris: Grasset, 1981), is polemical.

  47. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

  48. See the bibliographical essay, p. 242. One of the 1930s writers cited by Sternhell successfully sued him in a French court for defamation.

  49. The PPF could be considered rooted in the Paris working-class suburb of Saint-Denis, where the popularity Jacques Doriot had acquired as a young Communist leader survived his shift to the far Right in 1936. It had other local strongholds in Marseille, where the PPF militant Simon Sabiani became mayor (see Paul Jankowski, Communism and Collaboration: Simon Sabiani and Politics in Marseille, 1919–1944 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989]), and in French Algeria.

  50. The Croix de Feu did not wear colored shirts but paraded in berets and medals. I thank Professor Sean Kennedy for help on this point. This debate is considered more fully in the bibliographical essay, pp. 242–43.

  51. See the bibliographical essay, p. 243. Colonel de La Rocque backed Marshal Pétain’s “National Revolution" and neutral collaboration within Hitler’s Europe in 1940–42, without playing the role in the Vichy regime that he thought he merited; some PSF members went immediately to join the Free French in London, and La Rocque was passing information to London after 1942. He was arrested and deported by the Nazis in 1943 and died soon after his liberation in 1945.

  52. Serge Berstein, “La France allergique au fascisme," Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire 2 (April 1984), pp. 84–94.

  53. Robert O. Paxton, Peasant Fascism in France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  54. Richard Cobb, The Peoples’ Armies: The Armées Révolutionnaires, Instrument of the Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to Floréal Year II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

  55. Laird Boswell, Rural Communism in France, 1920–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Gérard Belloin, Renaud Jean: Le tribun des paysans (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 1993).

  56. This produced only 31 parliamentary seats, however, out of 259. Istvan Deák, “Hungary," in Rogger and Weber, European Right, p. 392.

  57. Eugen Weber, “The Men of the Archangel," Journal of Contemporary History 1:1 (1966), pp. 101–26. See chapter 4, p. 97.

  58. J.-M. Etienne, Le mouvement rexiste jusqu’en 1940 (Paris, 1968), pp. 53–58; Danièle Wallef, “The Composition of Christus Rex," in Larsen et al., eds., Who Were the Fascists. p. 517.

  59. Herman Van der Wusten and Ronald E. Smit, “Dynamics of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (the NSB), 1931–35," in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists,p. 531.

  60. Sten Sparre Nilson, “Who Voted for Quisling?" in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fa
scists, p. 657.

  61. Gerry Webber, “Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists," Journal of Contemporary History 19 (1984), pp. 575–600. See the bibliographical essay for other readings.

  62. See notes 45–47 above.

  63. See chapter 3, pp. 68–73.

  64. The fullest account is Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of

  France in 1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002). See also Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982).

  65. Panikos Panayi, ed., Racial Violence in Britain, 1840–1950 , rev. ed. (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1996), pp. 10–11.

  66. Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Antisemitic Affairs—Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  67. Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Antisemitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

  68. This case has usually been fortified by the notorious civil-military clash in 1913 in Zabern (or Saverne), Alsace, though David Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913 (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1982), finds that the final outcome, where the civilians eventually got some measure of justice, did not make Germany really exceptional.

  69. Scholars have paid curiously little attention to the crucial issue of how liberal regimes failed (perhaps because students of fascism tend to make the fascist leader’s actions explain everything). The basic work here is Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).