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FASCISM
A READER'S GUIDE
Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography

Edited by Walter Laqueur

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

Fascist Ideology

ZEEV STERNHELL

While in our political vocabulary there are not many terms that have enjoyed such a considerable
vogue as the word fascism, there are equally not many concepts in contemporary political
terminology so notoriously blurred and imprecise in outline.

It would seem, in fact, that the study of fascism is still in its infancy, and that there are too few
scholars anxious to avail themselves of a thorough understanding of this phenomenon. Such
researches as are made are hampered, too, by the way fascism, which was supremely
nationalistic and therefore above all exclusive, flourished in markedly different backgrounds - in
the great industrial centres of Western Europe, as in the underdeveloped countries of Eastern
Europe-and from its very beginnings appealed as much to the intellectual elite of the day as to
unread peasants. Fascism has no sound and obvious footing in any particular social class, and its
intellectual origins are in themselves confusing. In its most restricted sense 'the word fascism
applies simply to the political regime in Italy in the period between the two world wars; at the
other end of the scale, the 'fascist' epithet is used, and particularly by left wingers of various hue,
as the term of abuse par excellence, conclusive and unanswerable.

The emotional content of this word has for a long time contributed to obscuring a political
concept that was never in the first place very clear. When Mussolini and Lion Blum, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Franco and Joss Antonio, Codreanu, Pilsudski, Henri de Man, Joseph McCarthy, and
Charles de Gaulle have each and all in their turn been labelled fascists, what then could fascism
signify? And for as long as socialists were known as social fascists to the communists, while the
Prussian Junkers, the Italian Conservatives, or the French Croix-de-Feu movement were
designated as fascist by the very people whom Togliatti, Thorez, and Thilmann denounced as
fascists, how could it be possible, even for the majority of politically sophisticated people, to
discern what fascism really meant?

Though the 1960s' have seen a breakthrough, in that the first overall investigations of the subject
have enabled us to block out the shape of fascism in a way which only a few years ago would not
have been possible, yet it is clear that it is still no easy matter to pinpoint fascism precisely, and
that there still exists no definition of fascism acceptable to all, or recognised as universally valid.
We may with some justice feel more optimistic than Professor Hugh Seton-Watson, whose opinion
it is that scientific pre- [315]

316 ZEEV STERNHELL

cision is not at present obtainable and one may doubt whether it ever will be," but we cannot for
that reason overlook the difficulties.

We should remember, however, that it is no easier to define democracy: the concepts are too
broad for the words. It is highly probable that no single historical example can meet the exacting
requirement of a carefully constructed 'model' of fascism or of democracy. That is what Professor
N. Kogan may have had in mind when, after having carefully constructed a six-point model of
fascism, and after drawing many of his examples of fascist thought and practice from the Italian
regime, he concludes rather surprisingly that in actual practice Italy under fascism was not a
fascist state." This is indeed true, if Kogan is suggesting that Italy under fascism was not an ideal
fascist state, and the identical demonstration could be applied to democracy or to communism:
what is the ideal model of democracy or of communism, what. exactly, are its component-parts.

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and where is it put into practice?

The task becomes more complex still when we narrow the field of inquiry to the ideology of
fascism. For many years, after all, it was common form to see fascism either as completely
wanting in ideological concepts or as having gotten itself up for the sake of the cause in a few
rags of doctrine, which therefore need not be taken seriously, nor allowed even the minimal
importance that is attached as a rule to the ideas professed by a political movement. This attitude
was almost certainly bound up with a fundamental refusal to view fascism as anything other than
a horrid lapsus in European history: in conceding to fascism a theoretical dimension one might
have granted it a place and a significance in the history of our times, which many people, both of
the right and of the left, and often for reasons that are at one and the same time similar and
conflicting, were reluctant to do.

Furthermore, the official Marxist interpretation of fascism, which conceives of it as the creature
of monopoly or finance capitalism and its ideology - a crude rationalization of capitalist interests -
has also helped to keep the study of fascist ideology at a standstill. There was a long period when
the very suggestion that fascism could be a mass movement, sustained by an ideology well suited
to the necessities of modern politics and of mass society, ran contra bona mores, and throughout
the war years the man who took this line was suspected - sometimes with good reason - if not of
collaborating with fascism or nazism, then at least of evincing toward them a favourable attitude.

There were other interpretations of fascism which chose to argue, not that fascism or national
socialism were lacking an ideology, but that the ideology was purely incidental and unimportant.
They held that Mussolini and Hitler had come to power without stressing the nature of their
doctrine, or once in power had not put doctrine into practice, and could therefore be
characterized as nothing more than adventurers and opportunists

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 317

with neither creed nor principle. It bears saying that this kind of reasoning is not often brought
into play in the analysis of communism; and yet no one could pretend to discern in the October
Revolution or in the seizure of power by other communist parties a meticulous putting into
practice of the ideas propounded by Marx or Lenin, or any one of their disciples. It would be hard
indeed to claim that the proceedings of the Soviet state are governed by an unfailing concern to
see that policy conforms to the requirements of Marxist philosophy. Who would be capable, for
that matter, of determining from day to day what those requirements were? and who would be
recognised as competent to do so?

And yet, communist ideology is widely studied in order to obtain insights into communist
behaviour; it is generally considered essential to our under standing of communism as a general
system of social and political organisation. There is no reason why an identical method should not
be applied to fascism. Moreover, as Professor Eugen Weber has pointed out, even when fascist or
national-socialist manifestoes were not really carried out, or even if they had not been carried out
at all, we could still learn a good deal by examining them, especially if we compare them to
similar programmes or doctrines evolved in other countries, and perhaps in other circumstances.
Politicians as well as political scientists know very well that platforms and ideologies are
significant, partly because they do tell us something about what the candidate and his party think
(would like to think, or would like the public to think they think), and partly because they reflect a
public: the issues this public is likely to be affected by, to vote for, or in some way to support.4

This paper deals with fascism: it is confined to fascism and it deliberately omits nazism for
reasons of space and division of labour between contributors, as well as for reasons of substance.
A discussion of nazism would have widened its scope far beyond what can reasonably be
contained within the framework of this volume, for nazism cannot, as I see it, be treated as a
mere variant of fascism: its emphasis on biological determinism rules out all efforts to deal with it
as such. The question is already a highly complicated one, and an examination of the specific
characteristics of nazism, over and above what it has in common with fascism, would require not
so much a study of fascism as a comparative analysis of fascism and nazism. This holds true even
if one regards nazism as an exacerbated form of fascism: the exacerbation of a political
phenomenon being in itself a new and different phenomenon. This is not to say that in certain
strains of fascism there was no racialist factor: there was a school of fascism in France, for
example, which in this respect resembled nazism more closely than it did Italian fascism. All in
all, however, the evidence obliges us to concede that there comes a point when the degree of
extremism in a political movement radically alters the very nature of that movement.

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Furthermore, this article will confine itself to the study of fascist ideol-

318 ZEEV STERNHELL

ogy. The term ideology, as Professor Martin Seliger has put it, is used to refer to a conceptual
frame of reference which provides criteria for choice and decision by virtue of which the major
activities of an organized community are governed. Therefore, the sets of ideas by which men
explain and justify the ends and means of organized social action, with the aim of preserving or
reconstructing a given reality, are ideologies. Two dimensions of ideological argumentation,
however, can be observed in day-to-day politics. All action-oriented thought, from political
philosophy down to party ideology, contains pragmatic considerations from the outset. For a party
or movement holding power or engaged in the contest for power, the need inevitably arises for a
more or less frank restatement of immediate goals. In shaping specific policies to deal with
prevailing circumstances, no party has ever been able to avoid committing itself to lines of action
which are irreconcilable with, or at least doubtfully related to, the basic principles and goals set
out in its ideology. A conflict results not simply between ideology and action, but within ideology
itself. The problem of preserving the movement's doctrinal purity exists in the parties of all
political systems, and its existence attests to the fact of two-dimensional argumentation,

Therefore the first crucial distinction in a discussion of fascist ideology is that between fascism in
power and fascism in opposition, between movements and regimes, between origins and maturity.
Fascism in power was something to which fascist parties made remarkably different
contributions, depending on the country concerned. Every country where there was a fascist
party had peculiarities duly reflected in its local political organizations; nevertheless, where a
so-called fascist regime came into being, these national features usually became even more
exaggerated. Thus movements have much more in common than regimes. They have indeed a
great deal in common, and it is from this that a clear notion of what fascist ideology amounted to
can be derived.6

Mussolini and the other fascist leaders were quite correct in arguing that the basic doctrinal
postulates of fascist regimes had something of a universal character; but until the mid-sixties,
strangely enough, the universalistic aspect of fascist doctrine was almost completely overlooked.
And yet fascist ideologues never tired of announcing that fascism was, in the words of Sir Oswald
Mosley, 'a worldwide creed. Each of the great political faiths in its turn has been a universal
movement: conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism are common to nearly every country.... In this
respect, fascism occupies precisely the same position." Mussolini had already argued that
'Fascism as an idea, a doctrine, a realisation, is universal,' because 'never before have the peoples
thirsted for authority, direction, order, as they do now. If each age has its doctrine, the
innumerable symptoms indicate that the doctrine of our age is the Fascist one.",

The second distinction to be borne in mind is between what, like Seliger, we may call the
fundamental -and the operative dimensions of ideology: the

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 319

fundamental principles determining the final goals, and the operative ideology whose purpose it
is to justify the policies actually devised or executed by a party. Deviations from the fundamentals
are a universal phenomenon:9 fascist movements and fascist regimes cannot be considered more
unprincipled than any other movement or regime, especially where these are revolutionary.
Writing on this issue in The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London, 1960), Leonard
Shapiro points out that he has ,as yet not discovered a single instance in which the party was
prepared to risk its own survival in power for considerations of doctrine.' This does not mean that
the clash between theory and practice never caused serious difficulties, of the same kind indeed
as occurred in Italy and Germany, or within any one of the other fascist parties. Much of fascist
opportunism, its practice of legitimizing intermediate goals no matter how much they conflicted
with fundamental principles, is inherent in the nature of every ideology called upon to shape a
new society. There is no denying though that as the gap widens between the final objectives and
the initial blueprint for the remodelling of society, the discrepancy between ideology and practice
becomes more important and thus encourages the tendency to accuse the regime of opportunism,
or to disregard completely the ideology on which it claims to rely.

The adaption of ideologies to changing conditions, be it falsely evaluated facts or unforeseen

consequences of the realization of principles, is as general a phenomenon as the fact that no
major piece of organization remains for long without ideological cover, even supposing it can

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come into existence without it in the first place.

In this respect therefore fascist ideology, far from being exceptional, rather proved the rule. Yet it
is also true that here was an ideology which in fact aimed to be pragmatic as well as
revolutionary and keep a firm grasp on everyday realities. Mussolini made it a political principle
that fascist ideology be adaptable to the necessities of real life: ideology 'must not be a shirt of
Nessus clinging to us for all eternity, for tomorrow is something mysterious and unforeseen.'
Equally he was well aware that ideological argumentation existed on two different levels. Writing
forty years ago, Mussolini anticipated some of the latest achievements of modern political
science, and made a clear-cut division between 'the modest tables of our laws and programmes
-the theoretical and practical guidance of fascism' and 'the fundamentals of doctrine,'
commenting that the former 'should be revised, corrected, enlarged, developed, because already
in places they have suffered injury at the hand of time. "O

In promulgating an ideology that would be closely linked to action, both by inspiring action and
by reflecting it, II and in developing the theory of the unity of thought and action, Mussolini
clearly enunciated, and took to himself, a principle which other ideologies might cry down, but
which they yet were obliged to put into practice on their own account. The difference

320 ZEEV STERNHELL

between fascists and socialists or communists came down to this: for the latter, as stern
guardians of an unalterable doctrine, were compelled to endless rigmaroles and pretexts and a
myriad of explanations to justify the process of development, which for the fascists was in the
nature of things political, since they insisted not only on the continual adaptation of ideologies to
meet practical necessities, and the constant evolution of ideology insofar as the realities changed,
but also on the importance of supplying ideological cover to such sectors of political reality as
were lacking in it.

Fascism in its various forms was confined in the main to the role of a political movement: only in
two countries did it go on to the actual seizure of power - and in Germany, at that, in a
particularly exacerbated form so that the fascist era may be said to have been an era of political
movements rather than of regimes. In any case where the history of ideas is concerned, it is the
political movement which is of greater interest. It can be traced with advantage back to its
origins, to the source which, being more pure, illustrates an outline as yet unmuddied. Fascist
ideology in all its essentials is best perceived in its origins, and fascist movements can be seen for
what they really are before they have acceded to power and been transformed by compromise
and pressure into yet another governmental party. The true nature of doctrines, and the
differences between them, are always more clearly seen in the shape of their aspirations than
when put into practice.

THE INTELLECTUAL CRISIS OF THE 1890s

In February 1936 the French review Combat, which was sympathetic to the fascists, published an
article entitled Fascisme 1913,12 by Pierre Andreu, one of the most faithful and authentic of
George Sorel's disciples, in which he remarked on the curious synthesis of syndicalists and
nationalists centered around the author of Reflections on Violence, and in nationalist circles
connected with Action Francaise, immediately before the outbreak of the first world war. At about
the same time, a similar comment came from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who a few months later
-and in company with Bertrand de jouvenel, a young economist of the left -became one of the
leading intellectuals in the PPF, the largest of the French fascist parties. He observed that,
'looking back on that period, we can see how by 1913 certain elements of the fascist atmosphere
had already come together in France, before they did in other countries. There were young men
from all classes of society, fired by a love of heroism and violence, who dreamed of fighting what
they termed the evil on two fronts -capitalism and parliamentary socialism -while culling from
each what to them seemed good. Already the marriage between nationalism and socialism was on
the cards.¹13

The selfsame formula had already been used in 1925 by George Valois,

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 321

the founder of the first non-Italian fascist movement, Le Faisceau, to define the idea in which the
substance of the phenomenon was contained: 'Nationalism + socialism = fascism.'14 Some ten

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years later Sir Oswald Mosley picked it up in his turn: 'If you love our country you are nationals
and if you love our people you are socialist.'15 It was a powerfully clear and simple idea,
possessing immense attraction, and by the time the former Labour minister came to found the
British Union of Fascists it was already shared by all the European fascist movements.

The shock of the war and its immediate consequences no doubt precipitated the birth of fascism
as a political movement, but its ideological roots in fact go back to the years 1880-1890, when an
alliance sprang lip between theories deriving from one or another type of socialism-whether
non-Marxist, anti-Marxist, or indeed post-Marxist-and from nationalism. Those were the
incubation years of fascism, as is attested to by Valois or Drieu, and equally by Gentile or by
Mussolini. For on the eve of the first world war the essentials of fascist ideology were already
well defined. The word did not exist yet, but the phenomenon it would eventually designate had
its own autonomous existence, and thenceforward awaited only a favourable combination of
circumstances in which to hatch into a political force. Fascist ideology is seen therefore as the
immediate product of a crisis that had overtaken democracy and liberalism, and bourgeois society
in all its fundamental values: the break-away was so disruptive as to take on the dimensions of a
crisis in civilization itself.

Fascism was not a reflection of Marxism, nor did it come into existence simply as a reaction to
organized Marxism; it had the same degree of autonomy that Marxism had, in that both were
products of bourgeois society and reacted against that society, compared to which they each
presented a radical alternative; both were agreed in that they put forward a new pattern of
civilization. The growth of fascism therefore cannot be understood, or fully explained, unless it is
seen in the intellectual, moral, and cultural context which prevailed in Europe at the end of the
nineteenth century.

The changes that took place at this time, within the space of a single generation, were so
profound that it would be no exaggeration to speak of them as constituting an intellectual
revolution, "I which in its themes and style was to pave the way for the mass politics of our own
century. For the vast movement of thought of the 1890s was above all a movement of revolt:
revolt against the world of matter and reason, against materialism and positivism, against the
mediocrity of bourgeois society, and against the muddle of liberal democracy. To the fin-de-siecle
mind, civilization was in crisis, and if a solution were possible it would have to be a total one.

The generation of 1890-which included among others, d'Annunzio and Corradini in Italy, Barres,
Drumont, and Sorel in France, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Arthur Moeller van den
Bruck in Germany 3

22 ZEEV STERNHELL

-took as its point of departure not the individual, who as such had no importance in himself, but
the social and political collectivity, which, moreover, was not to be thought of as the numerical
sum of the individuals under its aegis. The 'new' intellectuals therefore inveighed violently
against the rationalistic individualism of liberal society and against the dissolution of social links
in bourgeois society. In identical terms sometimes, they one and all deplored the mediocrity and
materialism of modern society, its instability and corruption. They decried the life of the great
cities, which was dominated by routine with no room for heroism, and to the claims of the
individual's powers of reason they preferred the merits of instinct, sometimes even of animality.
Such is the soil to which Giovanni Gentile traces the root-origins of fascism, which he defines as a
'revolt against positivism"' and against the way of life fostered by industrial society, which revolt
broke out at a time when the intellectual atmosphere was saturated with Darwinian biology and
Wagnerian aesthetics, Gobineau's racialism, Le Bon's psychology, as well as the black prophecies
of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, and, later, the philosophy of Bergson.

Of course neither Bergson's philosophy nor Nietzsche's are to be confused with the use to which
they have been put at the hands of the 'dread simplificators' and other exponents, any more than
we attribute to Darwin the social Darwinism touted by the generation that came after him. And
yet, though philosophers and scientists cannot be held responsible for the uses made of their
teachings, for the way they are interpreted and the meaning read into their thoughts, it was
nevertheless their teachings which, when put into the hands of a thousand minor intellectuals
who frequently had little aptitude for careful philosophical reasoning, shaped a new intellectual
climate. In the aftermath of the dreadful shock of the war, the Soviet revolution, and the
economic crisis, that intellectual climate allowed fascism to burgeon and grow into a powerful
mass movement. For the masses were by then well conditioned to accept a new interpretation of

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the world and of human realities, and even a new morality, as the foundations of a new order.

The contributions made by scientists and pseudo-scientists to this new vision of the world were in
point of fact legion. As the notion of social Darwinism gained widespread acceptance, it stripped
the human personality of its sacramental dignity. It made no distinction between the physical life
and the social life, and conceived of the human condition in terms of an unceasing struggle,
whose natural outcome was the survival of the fittest. Positivism also felt the impact of social
Darwinism, and underwent a profound change. In the latter half of the century its emphasis on
deliberate and rational choice as the determining factor in human behaviour gave way to new
notions of heredity, race, and environment. 18 Thus, social Darwinism played a large part in the
evolution of nationalism and the growth of modem racialism. So too its influence is clearly to be
seen in the

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 323

interest taken by the generation of 1890 in the study of psychology and the discovery of the
unconscious. For the new theories of social and political psychology rejected out of hand the
traditional mechanistic concept of man, which asserted that human behaviour is governed by
rational choice. Opinion now dictated that sentiment and feeling count for more in politi- cal
questions than reasoning, and fostered contempt for democracy and its institutions and workings.

Throughout Europe the same fears and the same passions began to find expression at the same
moment, and men from very different backgrounds, engaged in fields of study that were often
quite unrelated to one another, each played their part in the formulation of the new ideology. The
onslaught on bourgeois society went hand-in-hand with the wholesale condemnation of liberal
democracy and parliamentary government, for one of the ideological tenets common to this whole
vast protest movement was the reforming of all institutions in the authoritarian mould. The call
for a leader, a saviour embodying all the virtues of the race, was to be heard throughout Europe,
at the turn of the century. When the march of events gainsaid these theories, the setback was
invariably blamed on a plot, and the instigators, also invariably, identified as Jews and
Freemasons hand-in-glove with the international financiers. The men who at the turn of the
century revolted against positivism, and also against liberalism and socialism which they
regarded as a vague form of positivism to be treated in a similar manner, joined forces not merely
to attack certain social structures or the nature of political institutions, but also to impeach
Western civilization itself, which in their eyes was fundamentally corrupt.

It must be stressed too that these rebels were not men relegated to the fringes of contemporary
opinion. Whatever the verdict of the historian of ideas on the intrinsic worth of their individual
writings, it must be said that it is not the historians who fashion the sensibilities of a bygone
generation. The men who put together the ingredients of fascist ideology, as it was on the eve of
the Great War, were well-known interpreters, rendering into common language the work
accomplished by the giants of their own or of the previous generation. They brought within reach
of the general reader a system of ideas which was not easily understood, and which they
themselves from time to time deformed or oversimplified. Such are the writers who in point of
fact inform the everyday reader of newspapers and popular novels, the average university and
high school student, and the people who in the counties and country towns make up a social elite,
and who in their day enjoyed a tremendous success. Julius Langbehn was renowned from the year
1890, when he published Rembrandt aLs Erzieher, the book in which he denounced the
intellectual and scientific bent of German civilization, and sang instead the praises of
irrationalism. The two ensuing decades saw Arthur Moeller van den Bruck steadfastly renewing
the attack on liberalism and democracy, until he came to fame in 1922 with Das Dritte Reich. 19

324 ZEEV STERNHELL

The same is true of the Italian and French writers: d'Annunzio, Barres, and Maurras ranked
among the most important intellectuals of their generation, while Drumont's works went into
more reprints than any other publication of the last century. Their thinking took root throughout
the Latin- and French-oriented regions of Europe: they had an immense influence not only in Italy
and France but in Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, and Eastern Europe, particularly in Romania.
There was a professor at the Sorbonne, by the name of Jules Soury, who in 1902 published a book
called Campagne Nationaliste -along the same lines as Mein Kampf- and was acclaimed as the
equal of Bergson, while Gustave Le Bon was quoted at some length by the father of
psychoanalysis and was sometimes seen as another Freud. Given the number of men writing on
the subject, one may wonder if their prolific output does not account in some measure for the

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inattentive reception accorded to Hitler; for the author of Mein Kampf had nothing to say which
had not already been said, and not by men of the lunatic fringe, but rather by the ranking
intellectuals of the day.

In the years preceding the first world war Europe experienced an extraordinary revival of
nationalism. Well before 1914 V61kisch ideology, the set of ideas which are crucial to the
understanding of nazism, had found a widespread acceptance in German society, notwithstanding
a remarkable flowering of the intellectual disciplines in that country, reminiscent of the classical
period around 1800, over which V61kisch ideology nevertheless gained the upper hand. It must
not be forgotten that, as Professor George Mosse has pointed out, the Nazis found their greatest
support among respectable and educated people. Their ideas were eminently respectable in
Germany after the first world war, and indeed had been current among large segments of the
population even before the war. The essential element here is the linking of the human soul with
its natural surroundings, with the 'essence' of nature, that the real and important truths are to be
found beneath surface appearances. According to many V61kisch theorists, the nature of the soul
of a Volk is determined by the nature of the landscape. Thus, the Jews, being a desert people, are
regarded as shallow and dry people, devoid of profundity and totally lacking in creativity. Because
of the barrenness of the desert landscape, the Jews are a spiritually barren people. 20

The selfsame themes are to be met in the nationalist ideology of France: the Frenchman,
nurtured by his soil and his dead, cannot escape the destiny shaped for him by past generations,
by the landscapes of his childhood, the blood of his forebears. The nation is a living organism, and
nationalism is therefore an ethic, comprising all the criteria of behaviour which the common
interest calls for, and on which the will of the individual has no bearing. The duty both of the
individual and of society is to find out what this ethic may be, yet only those can succeed who
have a

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 325

share in the 'national consciousness,' shaped over the course of the centuries: the Jews, as a
foreign race, cannot enter upon this quest. 21

In Italy, d'Annunzio and Corradini were the best-known spokesmen for a nationalist movement
which reached far and deep, feeding on external defeat, as it had done in France in the aftermath
of 1870. It was this movement indeed which by 1915 had brought Italy into the war, looking to
war for glory. In France the young men of the coming generation were fired by patriotism, by a
zeal for order, authority, and discipline, and were morally at the ready for war, many years before
August 1914.

This resurgence of nationalism accounts, at least in part, for the failure of international socialism,
and explains why the working class set off for war on a wave of patriotism, regardless of their
long-standing tradition of anti-militarism and of countless resolutions adopted at each and every
Socialist Congress. Throughout the years separating the two wars, the workers' movement did
not recover, morally speaking, from this defeat, and it would weigh heavily in the balance when
the fascist movements began to come to a head, and particularly, of course, in Italy.

NATIONALISM, SOCIALISM. AND ANTI-LIBERALISM

During the nineteenth century, nationalism and liberalism had combined to become a force for
liberation and emancipation; nationalism was deeply imbued with democratic and universalist
values, and inherited from the French Revolution and from the philosophy of natural rights. But
then when it came under pressure from new economic conditions and from the bitter competition
these conditions provoked on the world market - as this competition pointed up the divergent
interests of the great European powers; as it was seen how unity in Italy and Germany was born
of fire and blood; and as the impact of social Darwinism, and then of Marxist and internationalist
socialism, made itself felt -nationalism gradually changed its character.

In the shape it had acquired by the beginning of this century the nationalist movement, in France
as in Italy, bore little resemblance to the nationalist aspirations of Michelet or of Mazzini; the
nationalist spirit abroad in 1848 died out, for the French after Sedan, for the Italians after Adowa.
The collapse of the Ethiopian campaign in 1896 was seen by Enrico Corradini, the spiritual and
political leader of the Italian nationalists, as the collapse of the Italian democratic movement and
its supporters on the extreme left. The French nationalists-Diroulide, Barr6s, Maurrasopined that
the defeat of 1870 had been inflicted on a country already undermined by a revolutionary

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ideology, by rationalism and individualism. The Republic's inability to avenge the country's
humiliation and restore to France her lost provinces, or even simply to prepare for war, stemmed
from

326 ZEEV STERNHELL

the fundamental weakness of liberal democracy, its impotence and incoherence. So it was that the
new European nationalism became first and foremost a movement of revolt against democracy
and a violent critique of the regime in all its weakness, incoherence and impersonal character: it
was a party to the general revolt against the values inherited from the French Revolution and the
Enlightenment.

At the same time the new nationalism produced diatribes against the rich and against economic
injustices; it denounced liberal democracy both as a pattern of government and as a
socioeconomic system, it demanded that the State take up authoritarian attitudes, and it attacked
social injustices in the name of group solidarity. The nationalist movements sought to mobilise the
most disadvantaged of the social classes, the people who were threatened by new techniques of
industrial production and new forms of commercialization. This was the background that
promoted the growth of a new variant of socialism-in France during the 1890s, in Italy or in
Austria during the first decade of the twentieth century-which was not Marxist and not
internationalist, but emphatically national. It was then that French nationalists first saw the
possibilities of a synthesis of a certain type of socialism and of the nationalists' political
authoritarianism, which went on to find acceptance in the Italian nationalist circles led by
Corradini, and then among followers of Sorel and Mussolini, and finally gave birth to a fully
structured fascist ideology.

Indeed in May 1898, during the period of violent unrest stirred up by the Dreyfus Affair, it was
Maurice Barris, while standing as the nationalist candidate for Nancy, who first coined the term
'Socialist Nationalism,'12 which owes its origins to the idea that national cohesion would come
about through the solution of the social question. Twenty years later, Enrico Corradini announced
at the Nationalist Convention, 'First and foremost, since it is by definition national in politics,
nationalism cannot be anything other than national in economics also, since the latter is the basis
of the former.'21 As for Maurras, he declared that there was a 'form of socialism which, when
stripped of its democratic and cosmopolitan accretions, would fit in'24 with nationalism just as a
well-made glove fits a beautiful hand, and at his instigation Action Francaise made a considerable
play for the support of the workers, from the moment it was realised how powerful was the
disaffection of the proletariat from the liberal State.

A further experiment, which was nothing less than a trial run for fascism was the founding in
1903 of a National Socialist party, by a former socialist, Pierre Bi6try. It was succeeded a year
later by the F6d6ration Nationale des jaunes de France. Yellow socialism-as opposed to Red
socialism-preached national solidarity in lieu of the class struggle, and advocated the accession to
property rather than expropriation, as well as workers' participation in company profits and a
form of trade unionism in which workers' unions and management unions would exist side by
side,

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 327

which structure would be topped by a strong State, with an assembly of national and regional
representatives sponsored by the trades and corporations. It goes without saying that the Yellow
Movement was violently opposed to Marxism, while at the same time promoting the personality
cult of the leader, who was in effect its mini-dictator; it was equally anti-Semitic. The Federation
des Jaunes de France, which has been described as obsessed with the idea of wresting the
working-class out of its socialist rut,' was undoubtedly the first to try out the whole apparatus of
fascist ideas in practical terms. 211 The French movement played the role of model for the Swiss
and German yellow organizations with which it was closely connected. At the same time Austria
produced the DAP (the German Workers' Party), founded the very year Bietry was launching his
PSN.

National socialism was anti-Semitic, for anti-Semitism-social as well as racial -was the perfect tool
for the integration of the proletariat within the national community and had the advantage of
rallying the petty bourgeoisie in danger of proletarisation. Anti-Semitism gave the new radical
Tight popular foundations and provided it with an instrument with which to appeal to the working
classes and to arouse the masses: the anti-Jewish riots of the closing years of the century2' bear a

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Curious resemblance, by their violence and their scale-, to the riots of the Nazis. The
psychological determinism of someone like Jules Soury was no less influential than the racialism
propagated by Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Alfred Rosenberg.21 What early National-
Socialism lacked was the social backdrop which would transform it into a political force: there
were as yet no huge numbers of unemployed and frightened petty bourgeois, and no
impoverished middle classes; it was fully possessed, however, of a framework of ideas no less
developed than those of any other contemporary political movement.

Where all the European currents of nationalism were agreed of course was in their
anti-parliamentarism. By the end of the 1880s nationalism and anti-parliamentarism had already
coalesced in France. The synthesis of the two, when for the first time translated into political
terms, evolved into boulangisme, the movement that launched on liberal democracy the first of
the attacks to which henceforth it would be subjected. By the end of the decade a pattern of
events had been established which thereafter became the classic gearing- in to fascism -namely,
the shift from far left to far right of people with radical views on social problems and deeply
opposed to liberal democracy. It had also become apparent how easily great sections of the
working people could give their support to a party that took its social values from the left and its
political values from the right, if by so doing they could make clear their dislike for liberal
democracy or bourgeois society. This was where boulangisme broke new ground and opened the
way to fascism.

Within two decades a very similar pattern of events took place in Italy:

328 ZEEV STERNHELL

Italian nationalism was profoundly averse to the democratic movement backed by the extreme
left, and here too the nationalist movement turned to the workers and peasants. Enrico Corradini
began to elaborate on topics that foreshadowed corporatism, complemented by an unambiguous
preference for protectionism and other measures designed to appeal to the nation as a whole,
such as the expansion of Italian industry and commerce abroad, and a colonial solution to the
problems of population and emigration. A political programme relying on colonialism and
protectionism and corporatism might perhaps have the right solution and seemed to hold out
hope and the prospect of betterment to a whole bloc of society, while at the same time taking
great pains not to exacerbate the class struggle. 28

Corradini was vehemently anti-Marxist and yet considered his nationalist doctrine to be socialist:
in December 1910, some twelve years after Barres, he read a paper to the First Congress of
Nationalists, held in Florence, in which he spoke of 'our national socialism.' Already, however, he
gave the phrase a wider meaning, reflecting the latest ideas of the Italian school of political
sociology: 'This is to say that just as socialism taught the proletariat the value of the class
struggle, we must teach Italy the value of the international struggle.'211 Italy was, in the
material as in the moral sense, a proletarian nation 30 and could only survive by taking to heart a
lesson already well known to the working classes, and putting into practice the doctrine of
unremitting struggle. Corradini expressed a fulsome admiration for the results achieved by the
proletariat of Europe, and the way in which the doctrine of class struggle had been put into
practical operation to the benefit of the workers. It was on this very point that nationalism
identified most closely with socialism and at the same time found itself in violent opposition to
socialism. It identified with socialism insofar as 'the basic belief of our essentially dynamic
doctrine is struggle, international struggle, even struggle at home, has produced similar
effects.'31 Socialism and nationalism both insisted on the heroic virtues and the warrior spirit, as
they both despised democracy and abominated liberalism." On the other hand, socialism sought
to impugn the concept of the nation, and in its place preached internationalism: in this and this
only it erred. The nationalist movement, however, by integrating the proletariat into the national
community, and thereby wiping out the identification effected by democracy of the nation with its
bourgeoisie, would restore to the national community its authenticity and integrity and
wholeness. Socialism was transcended in National-Socialism.

It is important too to realize that nationalists such as Corradini or Barris saw the troubles of their
respective countries almost exclusively in political terms: if poverty and social injustice prevailed,
if Italy suffered defeat in her colonies or showed signs of weakness on the international scene, it
could all be laid at the door of a weak and ineffective government and a political philosophy
which envisaged the State as an agent for private and

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 329

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sectarian interests, putting itself at the service of pressure groups and social groups that were
inimical to one another. The country's ailments derived from the State's inability to recognise the
nation's interests, and having indeed lost all national feeling. The reforming of the State along
authoritarian lines was therefore an essential preliminary to any attempt at rehabilitating the
economy or reforming society. The first enemy to be destroyed therefore was the liberal and
bourgeois State, just as it was essential to eradicate the philosophy of natural rights.

It was in Italy that anti-parliamentarism acquired a solidly structured and systematic character,
relying on an analysis which in its day was the last word in social sciences. As early as the 1880s,
it had been thoroughly formulated in the works of Mosca and Pareto. It was rooted in an intensely
elitist and anti-democratic view of society, which according to Pareto is made up of a minority of
very gifted individuals and a huge majority of mediocrities, and which is therefore always
organized in the shape of a great pyramid, with a governing elite at the top, supported by a
passive majority at its base: the State merely embodied the organized control of the majority by
the minority.-13 Pareto's elitism bears all the marks of the powerful influence of social Darwinism:
he does not scruple to compare the social organism with a living organism nor to make out a
parallel between natural selection as it takes place in nature, and what he claims is a process of
natural selection occurring in human society. 34 His theory of the circular movement of elites,
and of constant warfare between sundry aristocracies, by virtue of which they continually
succeeded one another, is a clear pointer to the origins of his sociology, the more so when, in his
Systemes Socialistes, he refers explicitly to Ammon and Vacher de Lapouge while discussing the
anthropological characteristics of these elites, stressing that history is made by the conflict
between one aristocracy and another, and not, as is so often thought, by the struggle of the lower
classes against the aristocracy: 'So far as these lower classes themselves are unarmed, they are
incapable of ruling; ochlocracy has never resulted in anything save disaster.'31

It should be emphasized that this elitist sociology did not confine itself to an analysis of an actual
state of affairs, but went on to postulate a universal law, which had governed human society from
its beginnings and should therefore be recognised as a norm of behaviour, rooted in the natural
order. Not only did this analysis of the structure of society and power play a very influential part
in the formation of fascist ideology but also contributed heavily to the aura of respectability and
seriousness and trustworthiness which anti-democratic and anti-liberal ideas so very quickly
acquired. 36 From the years that had led up to the French Revolution until at least the middle of
the nineteenth century, the ideology of egalitarianism had appeared to be based on science -on
the natural sciences as well as on the humanities. It was in the name of science and reason that
people had

330 ZEEV STERNHELL

battered at the ancient ramparts of privilege and run up the flag of liberty. By the beginning of
the twentieth century things were indeed changed, for now it was the new humanities themselves
that challenged all the assumptions on which liberal democracy was based. An intellectual
climate was thus created that undermined the self-confidence of democracy and did much to
boost the ascendancy of fascism.

If anti-parliamentarism, in the form it assumed under the influence of Italian political sociology,
was allied to nationalism and furnished it with new weapons, it also gave nurture to certain forms
of socialism, and particularly to revolutionary syndicalism. For inasmuch as they were opposed to
liberal democracy and to bourgeois society, syndicalists and nationalists were of one mind; they
evaluated the mechanisms of bourgeois society in much the same terms, and both conceived of
society as being dominated by a powerful minority, with the apparatus of State serving their will.
When material conditions were no longer propitious to one particular minority, then another elite
rose to the top, in accordance with a process of continuous rotation of elite groups, each of which
stirred up the masses to its own purpose. Each minority advanced a sustaining myth, to act as a
goad to rebellion during times of transition from the rule of an established elite to the rule of a
contending elite, and as a legitimizing fiction once the contending elite had established its
dominance. Behind the facade of representative institutions and parliamentary procedures, the
bourgeois government was just such an established elite. 31

This analysis of power made by modern political sociologists had a familiar ring for any Marxist,
which explains how a revolutionary socialist, such as Roberto Michels, took it up and used it to
show that the existence of a. dominating social group is absolutely essential to political and social
life. 'O At the beginning of the century this theory found increasing favour in the militant circles
of socialism, among those who most violently denounced parliamentary and democratic socialism

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and advocated direct action. Over against the school of socialists who preached the conquest of
power by means of universal suffrage and who thereby relegated the revolution to the
unforeseeable future-to the year 3000, their enemies said the radical wing of the movement
insisted on the theory of the avant-garde of the workers who, as a conscious and activist minority,
would lead the proletariat into revolution. Traditional socialism had allowed itself to be tamed
and assimilated into the bourgeois order; it had been lured into ministerial drawing-rooms and
had come to recognise the passwords and play to the rules established by liberal democracy: to
all this, syndicalism preferred the revolutionary violence of a proletarian elite. Roberto Michels
showed how elitist doctrine, which saw in the masses a source of energy who yet had no will to
shape social evolution, in no way conflicted with the materialist interpretation of history or the
concept of class struggle.39 Michels belonged to the revolutionary wing of the German socialists,
which

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 331

came very close to the syndicalism of the French and Italians, and he was bitterly critical of the
German Social-Democratic Party: it was passive and lacked the spirit of combat, it had a
predilection for parliamentary practices, and it was possessed of a bureaucratic and hierarchical
organization, which kept it in a state of paralysis and 'directed it out of the paths of manly
striving, away from all acts of heroism."10 These were the words he used at a conference held in
Paris in April 1907, on the subject of the relations between socialism and syndicalism, which he
attended as the representative of the revolutionary wing among the German socialists, who most
closely approximated the Italian and French syndicalists. Eventually Roberto Michels became a
fascist.

At this same colloquy, Italy was represented by the great syndicalist leader Arturo Labriola, who
stigmatized socialism as having become 'nothing more than a piece of parliamentary machinery,
putting itself at the service of a handful of politicians.' He repeatedly castigated the official
socialist movement for having accepted the rules of the game, for having become democratic and,
in place of the class struggle, for preferring collaboration between the classes.41 Some years
later Labriola would discover the idea of the national entity, and end up by going over to militant
nationalism.

France was represented by Hubert Lagardelle, the editor of Le Mouvement Socialiste, which was
the doctrinal organ of orthodox Marxism in all its anti-parliamentary and anti-democratic aspects,
fighting against all compromise and any deviation from the doctrine of class struggle. At socialist
conferences Lagardelle was the very embodiment of doctrinal purity. In April 1907 he acclaimed
'the French workers' disaffection for the Republican State' as 'the culminating event in the history
of these last years.'42 The struggle against liberal democracy was the first and most important
objective of socialism in the eyes of Hubert Lagardelle, who went on to become Marshall P6tain's
Minister of Labour.

The leader of the CGT at this time was Victor Greffuelhes, and he, when debating the prospects
for universal suffrage, concluded that, 'It seems clear to me that it should be relegated to the
accessories shop,'4-1 and proposed instead to implement the syndicalists' plans for direct action.
According to yet another high-ranking syndicalist, Emile Pouget, direct action 'might proceed at a
gentle and peaceable pace or, equally, by force and extreme violence.' Syndicalism and
'democratism' were irreconcilable principally because 'the latter, by means of universal suffrage,
gives control into the hands of the ignorant and the tardigrades... and stifles the minorities who
are the flag-bearers of the future.'44 In this fashion, the extreme leftists in the socialist
movement instilled in their sympathizers a contempt for democracy and parliamentarianism
combined with the ardent desire for violent rebellion led by the minority of informed activists.
Both France and Italy saw the same development of ideas among the far left syndicalists.

332 ZEEV STERNHELL

In 1909 these exact sentiments were being voiced by Angelo Olivetti and the Italian revolutionary
syndicalists; socialism would come into its own only in consequence of action on the part of the
working-class elite.46

Hence the strenuous efforts that were made to price the working class away from parliamentary
democracy, and thus undo the work of the Dreyfus Affair, which had had an extremely important
effect on the workers' movement throughout Europe. For during the Dreyfus Affair the French
socialists had decided to come to the defence of the bourgeois Republic, and put their strength

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and organization at the disposal of liberal democracy, which was then threatened by a coalition of
every possible party of the right, and by so doing they had set a precedent and a norm for every
socialist party operating within a system of parliamentary government. This decision, instigated
by Jaures, no doubt saved the Republic but also had the immediate effect of dampening down the
revolutionary zeal of the proletariat, which thereafter came to stand surety for the supremacy of
the bourgeoisie. By giving support to government ministers and sharing in their counsels, the
French socialists struck a heavy blow at the international solidarity of socialist parties. European
socialists of the extreme left felt it in consequence essential to teach the proletariat to despise
anything that smacked of bourgeois or liberal values, to hold in contempt bourgeois virtues and
morals, and the bourgeois' respect for the law, for legal forms, for democratic government. The
theorists of the syndicalist movement praised rather the warrior virtues, and violence, which
begets morality, and the refining processes of social warfare; and in the writings of George Sorel
syndicalism further discovered a rich seam of anti-intellectual and irrationalist argument.

George Sorel's work is well known today, and yet when in 1908 he published his Reflections on
Violence, he was not saying anything that sounded unusual in syndicalists' ears. His books were
quite simply a systematic reworking of the writings of socialist and syndicalist leaders far better
known than Sorel himself. This was in fact how he acquired his importance and came to play such
a large role, in Italy especially, in the conversion of certain syndicalist groups to the right. For
Sorel and his associates contrived the synthesis of all the ideas and contemporary trends of
thought which had in common the advocacy of revolt against a bourgeois society and all its moral
and political values, revolt against the doctrine of natural rights, and revolt against liberalism and
democracy. Revolutionary syndicalists and nationalists, as well as anti-democrats and anti-liberals
of every colour, had now found common ground; the shift from revolutionary syndicalism to
nationalism, or vice versa, had never in theory been beyond the bounds of possibility, and by the
time the first world war loomed on the horizon it had taken on the appearance of inevitability.

In 1911-12, Sorel - the revolutionary syndicalist - put out a review called L'Indipendance, which
was nationalist and anti-Semitic, at about the

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 333

same time as two other publications were launched that rank among the more interesting and
significant harbingers of fascism: Les Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon in France, and La Lupa in Italy.
The Cercle Proudhon was founded in December 1911 and was presided over by Charles Maurras,
with George Sorel as its moving spirit. It embraced both syndicalists and nationalists belonging to
Action Franqaise. A month later the first edition of Les Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon was
published, and among its promoters two names stand out that are symbolic of the nature of the
enterprise: George Valois, who belonged with the left wing of Action Francaise, who was the
author of La Monarchie et la Classe Ouvriire, and who went on to found the Faisceau in 1925; and
Edouard Berth, a disciple of Sorel's who in the 1920s shifted from the radical right to the extreme
left. Nationalists and syndicalists alike were in agreement that 'democracy was the greatest
mistake of the last century,' that it had allowed the most appalling exploitation of the workers,
and had set up and then substituted 'the law of gold for the law of blood' within the capitalist
system. It followed that 'if we wish to conserve and increase the moral, intellectual and material
capital of civilization, it is absolutely imperative to destroy the institutions of democracy.'46

The convergence of revolutionary syndicalism and nationalism is best illustrated by the

symptomatic development of Sergio Pannunzio, who later went on to expound the theories that
shaped the institutional reforms implemented by the fascists. As a young man, Pannunzio was a
syndicalist, but a syndicalist who from the first found himself in agreement with Mosca, and said
as much; he combined Italian national themes with ideas borrowed from Sorel. He not only
insisted that it was time to leave the outworn traditional liberal State behind but also favoured an
assumption which other syndicalists had made before him, that the long-standing hostility
between two antagonistic social sectors-bourgeoisie and proletariat-was in fact 'schematic.' He
maintained that there existed rather two blocs, one of which was reactionary and conservative,
and the other revolutionary. To the second, only militant syndicalists and anarchists belonged,
and thus the new concept of anarcho-syndicalism, of conflict between the conservative bloc and
the revolutionary bloc, began to gain the upper hand over the socialist concept of class struggle.
Pannunzio ended up by advocating 'the politics of energy,' leading up to 'the decisive act' and the
'supreme daring' of Revolt-Revolt, and not Revolution, as Santarelli acutely remarks.41

As crisis succeeded crisis, first over Libya and then over interventionism, a number of syndicalist
groups took up new stances which made a proven appeal to the nation and the people. More and

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more they leaned toward nationalism, and eventually infiltrated certain circles of traditional
social democracy. This regrouping of syndicalists and nationalists, which already amounted to
fascism - though it as yet lacked the name - took place under

334 ZEEV STERNHELL

the banner of La Lupa, a journal which first appeared the year before the Tripoli expedition. It
was published in Florence and edited by Paolo Orano, a typical representative of the Italian
school of syndicalists, whose goal it was to reconcile economic syndicalism and political
nationalism. Among its contributors, La Lupa numbered Enrico Corradini, Arturo Labriola, and
Roberto Michels, and could count on some help, albeit limited and not very concrete, from Sorel.
The founder of modern Italian nationalism concentrated his endeavours on demonstrating that
nationalism and socialism were well and truly identified with one another insofar as they both
shared in the same specific 'virtuous substance.' 'For syndicalism the only moral imperative is to
struggle. For nationalism the only moral imperative is. . . to wage war.'48 They had a common
adversary - the bourgeoisie.

In 1913 a new review was launched under the title Lacerba, by Giovanni Papini, who in 1904 had
published A Nationalist Programme. Lacerba brought together Papini, Ardengo Soffici, and the
Futurists, led by Marinetti. In a 1913 article, Papini called for 'a bloodbath': he saw war as the
means for bringing about the internal regeneration of Italy and for destroying the false values of
democracy. He and his colleagues combined nationalism with the subversion of established
cultural and moral values. 49 In this we already see the influence of Marinetti and the Futurists:
as early as 1909 the Futurists' Manifesto had set out the essentials of what subsequently became
the moral ideals of fascism, to which the twenties and thirties made no new contribution:

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.

2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

3. . . . we want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the forced march, the
perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist ....

9. We want to glorify war -the only cure for the world -and militarism, patriotism, the destructive
gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for women.

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and
utilitarian cowardice.10

Marinetti remained faithful to fascism to the very end, and became an enthusiastic supporter of
SaI6 Republic.

The shadow of war weighed more and more heavily over Europe, and against that backdrop the
consciousness of each and every nation became gradually more susceptible to the influence of
new trends. In the syndicalist and nationalist camp too, the wind of change was felt and shows
particularly, for instance, in Roberto Michels's analysis of Italian neo-imperialism

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 335

in terms of 'an imperialism of the poor,' in which he enlarged on ideas put forward by Corradini.
The world was divided into wealthy nations and proletarian nations, nations which already had a
place in the sun and nations whom it behoved to win such a place; and this concept too would
become one of the basic tenets of fascism. It entailed the transference of the indispensable
struggle from the theatre of the interior to the exterior, and the elimination, in theory, of the
problem of the proletariat, which would be absorbed into the sphere of the war waged by the
entire nation: the future would be shaped by struggle, not between the proletarian and capitalist
classes, but between the proletarian and plutocratic nations. Instead of a class, it was the nation
now that was going to set the course of history, as the agent of progress and civilization; and this
was the change of ideas which made the shift from left to right so easy, for on every other point
the far left, composed of syndicalists and revolutionary socialists, and the radicals and
nationalists of the new right, had already met and agreed. Anti-liberalism, anti-parliamentarism,
anti-Semitism (except in Italy); the cult of the elite, of youth, of force and violence; the revolt
against the rationalism of the Enlightenment; the advocacy of political authoritarianism-every one
of the elements which went to make up fascism was by now in existence, and not merely in the
shape of raw materials for they already had been elaborated into a relatively coherent system. By

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the time the old world crumbled away in August 1914 fascist ideology had a past history going
back to the 1880s. A few years later, with the numbers of unemployed and terrified peasants and
petty bourgeois growing to immense proportions, the trauma of war and the permanent state of
insecurity induced by the Versailles treaty, the shock of defeat for some, of victory for others, that
resolved none of their difficulties, the success of the Soviet revolution which had an effect-among
others-of making people believe that anything was possible -all combined to create the conditions
which allowed that ideology to become a true political force.

The collapse of the Socialist International on the eve of the war and the inability of the working
classes to prevent the clash, the haste and near unanimity with which they ranged themselves,
physically and morally, behind the established order, and at one blow shattered the solidarity of
the proletariat, were tangible proof that the concept of class carried less weight, as a factor of
solidarity, than the concept of nation. Confronted by the fervour which the idea of the nation
aroused, the idea of class was shown up in all its artificiality: the nation was a reality, which the
International could never aspire to be. In the course of the war the socialists were a legion who
reached this same conclusion, particularly if they belonged among the syndicalists and
revolutionaries of the far left. Among the latter there figured Gustave Herv6, one of the most
popular and most vehemently anti-militarist and anti-patriotic spokesmen for European socialism,
who altered the name of his newspaper from La Guerre Sociale to La Victoire

336 ZEEV STERNHELL

and who, having spent a lifetime preaching hatred of anything that smacked, however faintly, of
nationalism or of collaboration with the bourgeois state, after the war turned fascist.

The most famous of these converts, however, is of course Mussolini. In 1910 he was a young
socialist editing a publication called La Lotta di Classe, but by 1914 he was putting out a daily
newspaper called Il Popolo d¹Italia. Mussolini's change of tack cannot be said to be unique or
particularly extreme, nor was he motivated by political opportunism. He could well have taken on
such a role as was played by L6on Blum, Emile Vandervelde, Otto Bauer, or Ramsay McDonald,
had he so wished. But for Mussolini it was not possible, since the socialism he professed was
revolutionary and adhered strictly to the Marxist analysis of liberal democracy, its morals and
laws, categorising these as the outward signs of the supremacy and self interest of the
bourgeoisie, and not as universal values. Like many others, however, Mussolini saw the notion of
class disintegrate under the impact of war, and immediately became aware of the immense
reservoir of energy contained in the idea of the nation: after half a century of socialism, national
feeling emerged as the moving force of history, and the nation was found to embody the
fundamental values of society. As soon as this change was seen to have working possibilities,
while the fine flame of socialism was all but extinguished, the equation between revolution and
socialism was left with its first term only, and reduced to the will to destroy democracy and
liberalism and in their place set up a new order. So it was that nationalism became the functional
myth of fascism, and from that moment the battle was engaged with Marxism.

Mussolini was far from being the only person to take this path. A quarter of a century later the
same assessment of events was reworked by a number of men who were among the most dynamic
figures in the European socialist movement, and who all had a long record of opposition to
Mussolini's system. The most brilliant of these men was undoubtedly Sir Oswald Mosley, the
youngest minister in McDonald's cabinet, followed by Marcel D6at, who was one of the few
people still contributing to the theory of socialism in Europe in the period between the two wars,
and a socialist minister in a government which had smoothed the way for the Front Populaire.
Likewise, there was Jacques Doriot, a candidate to the General Secretariat of the French
Communist party, who made the mistake of being in the right in advance of the times, and Henri
de Man, the president of the Belgian Workers' party, and one of the most original socialist
philosophers of the twentieth century, who in July 1940 welcomed 'the debacle of the
parliamentary regime and the capitalist plutocracy in the so-called democracies' as the advent of
a new era: 'For the working-classes and for socialism, this collapse of a decrepit world, far from
being a disaster, is a deliverance.' For, 'the Socialist Order will be thereby realized, not at all as
the thing of

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 337

one class or of one party, but as the good of all, in the name of a national solidarity that will soon
be continental, if not world-wide.' 51

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In September of the same year Marcel D6at summed up the essentials of fascism: 'All things
considered, I think it comes down to this one observation: the driving force of Revolution has
ceased to be class interest, and has become instead the general interest; we have moved on from
the notion of class to that of the nation.' He then added a comment which is utterly characteristic
of fascist thinking: 'I shall not try to weigh in the scales the parts played in this undertaking by
what is national and by what is social, nor to discover whether it was a question of socializing the
nation or of nationalising socialism. What I do know is that ... this mixture is, in the best sense of
the word, explosive: rich enough to set all the engine-forces of history backfiring.'52

A NEW CIVILIZATION

In the period immediately after the first world war, as in the years pre-' ceding the second, the
fascists clearly felt they were proclaiming the dawn of a new era, a 'fascist century'
(Mussolini),53 a 'new civilization' (Oswald Mosley). r,4 And indeed, from its earliest beginnings,
fascism presented itself as being nothing less than a counter-civilization, defining itself as a
revolution/of man, a 'total revolution,' a 'spiritual revolution,"' a 'revolution of morals,'16 a
'revolution of souls."' For its ideologists, fascism-to use Valois's expression-was fundamentally a
conception of life, a total conception of national, political, economic and social life. 58 'Total' was
a word of which all fascist writers were extremely fond, and it was one of the key terms in their
vocabulary: fascism was to be the first political system to call itself totalitarian precisely because
it encompassed the whole range of human activity. It was totalitarian because it represented a
way of life, because it would penetrate every sector of social and intellectual activity, because it
meant to create at once a new type of society and a new type of man.

A movement of revolt, fascism drew its dynamism from its 'disruptive powers its total rejection of
bourgeois society with its political and social structures and moral values. None of the elements
that went to make up fascist ideology were new in themselves. What was new was the synthesis
of these elements, a synthesis that only became possible in the aftermath of the war, and, of
course, after the success of the Soviet revolution. In this sense, there is no doubt that fascism was
the child of the post-war crisis: it was a politics of fear and crisis, inseparably bound up with the
new difficulties liberal democracy was encountering.110 But at the level of ideology, in its
maturity, and even when, as in Italy and elsewhere, it had accumulated some years of experience,
fascism still displayed essentially the same

338 ZEEV STERNHELL

features that characterized the movement of revolt of the early years of the century.

In the minds of Gentile and Mussolini, Marcel Diat and Drieu La Rochelle, Jose Antonio and
Codreanu, fascist ideology constituted a comprehensive alternative to liberal bourgeois
civilization, its rationalism and individualism. After the nineteenth century, 'the century of the
individual,' the fascist twentieth century would be the 'collective century, and therefore the
century of the State. 61 Everything sprang from this fundamental principle. Fascist ideology saw
itself as a reaction against the 'materialistic positivism of the nineteenth century,'62 which it
sought to replace by a 'religious and idealistic manner of looking at life.'03 It refused, in the
words of Jose Antonio, 'to accept the materialistic interpretation of history,'64 or, as Mussolini
thought, 'the materialistic conception of happiness.... this means that fascism denies the
equation: well-being = happiness, which sees in men mere animals, content when they can feed
and fatten, thus reducing them to a vegetative existence pure and simple."'

But it was a professional sociologist, Marcel Deat, who put his finger on a more specific cause of
the malady: 'economic liberalism, which is bourgeois materialism, and its counterpart the
working-class materialism of Marxism, both of which are incontestably the daughters of
rationalism,' that 'straitjacketed and calamity-stricken' rationalism which was a 'denial of all
aristocratism, a negation of hierarchy, a negation of the person, a negation of the State as an
instrument of the community. '116 This is the 'old eighteenth-century rationalism, "a philosophy
now two hundred years past its prime,'61 which still forms the basis of official liberal ideology
today, and it was against this world of natural rights, individualism, matter, and reason, a world
threatened by anarchy that fascism rebelled. 'We stand for a new principle in the world, we stand
for sheer categorical definitive antithesis to the world of democracy, plutocracy, free-masonry, to
the world which still abides by the fundamental principles laid down in 1789,' Mussolini said. 611
In the minds of its leaders, fascism was very much a revolt of the younger generation: 'the
present Weltanschauung of fascism may be summed up in one word -youth,' the English fascist
James Bames wrote. 119 The same sentiment was shared by Codreanu, Joss Antonio, Drieu La

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Rochelle, Oswald Mosley, and Georges Valois. For L6on Degrelle, the embodiment of the fascist
revolt was a younger generation which 'would rather have blown everything up than start out on
life following filthy paths, without even the smallest patch of clear sky in view. 'IO For Oswald
Mosley 'the real political division of the past decade has not been one of parties, but a division of
generations."' And Adrien Marquet (a comrade of D6at's), the day neo-socialism was born,
flabbergasted Leon Blum with his shout: 'No one gives their lives for thirty seats in the
Chamber.'12

Fascism, young, new, and modern, was also a revolt against decadence,

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 339-

and here, too, it was echoing one of the main themes of the movement of revolt of the latter years
of the nineteenth century. The thought of Drieu La Rochelle and L6on Degrelle, like that of Barris
before them, was the reaction of a younger generation to a Europe whose 'morals are in decay,
whose faith is debased, and which is sick to the teeth of individualism, fanaticism and
arrogance,"-' a Europe 'slowly going to rack and ruin,' and expiring of manifold ills: country areas
depopulated by the war, alcoholism, syphilis, the great industrial centres; towns full of 'cinemas
and caf6s, brothels, newspapers, stock exchanges, political parties and barracks'; a Paris that had
become a centre of bohemian intellectuals, fast livers and homosexuals; drugs, music-halls,
Catholic writers, Jews, Picasso's paintings. . . . '14 The fascists plumbed the depths of the
sickness. Gilles, a novel which takes decomposition as its theme and is surely the most important
work of fascist literature, abounds with images of death, annihilation and putrefaction. This world
incapable of a virile and involuntary reaction, this rakish, self-satisfied world of heirs and
descendants was, of course, the world of old bourgeois Europe, and the fascist rebelled against it.
He would dig the grave of all the bourgeois virtues and of all the evils bourgeois power had
spawned; he would be the herald of a new morality: 'To the financier, the oil-man and the
pig-farmer who consider themselves the masters of the world and who want to run it according to
the law of money, the needs of the automobile and the philosophy of pigs, and bend the peoples to
the politics of the dividend,' George Valois said, fascism's answer was to 'raise the sword.' To the
bourgeois 'brandishing his contracts and statistics:

- Two plus three makes ...

- Nought, the Barbarian replies, smashing his head in."75 The Barbarian, the fascist, thus saw
himself as liberating the world from the bourgeois spirit and awakening a desire for reaction and
regeneration that were simultaneously spiritual and physical, moral, social, and political.
Fascism, for its ideologists, was a revolution of both the body and the mind, since for them the
two were inseparable. This was where in the fascists' own view the originality of their movement
lay: as an alternative to the economic man of liberal and Marxist materialism, they offered a
brand of neo-idealism that put the spiritual above the material; in place of the liberal and pacific
bourgeois and the city shop-keeper they offered the barbarian and the knight of the Middle Ages;
as an alternative to the product of European rationalism they offered the cult of feeling, emotion,
and violence; and in place of the degenerate man of a stay-at-home civilization to which physical
effort had become repugnant, they offered the cult of the body, health, and the outdoor life.

The fascist rebellion thus took on the appeal of a new human adventure, for, in the words of L6on
Degrelle, 'the great revolutions are not political or economic,. . the true revolution... [is] the one
that overhauls not the

340 ZEEV STERNHELL

engine of the State, but the secret life of each soul.'76 Fascism was a 'poetic movement' for Jos6
Antonio;"' a 'state of mind,' 'something spiritual and mystical' for the Belgian Rexist Joss Streel.78
For the fascist-type life, to quote Gentile, was a mission, and the militant was a crusader who had
to be prepared to make any sacrifice.79

Within fascism, therefore, we find the cult of duty, sacrifice, and the heroic virtues. Mussolini,
required to sum up fascism in a few words, said, 'We are against the easy life.' For the fascist, life
meant 'duty, elevation, conquest,' it was 'serious, austere, religious.'80 In the midst of the
indescribable mediocrity that today surrounds us,' Degrelle wrote, 'we represent fearlessness,
initiative, self-sacrifice and discipline. . . .'81 Life for the fascist 'is a continuous, ceaseless fight,'
and his creed is 'a doctrine which is not merely political: it is evidence of a fighting spirit which
accepts all risks.'82 This is why the new type of human being, the fascist man, would be a man

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who 'liked taking risks, [had] self-confidence, group-sense and a taste for collective enthusiasm';
'the politics of ink, saliva and ideology he will counter with the politics of soil, flesh and blood.'83
Fascism meant strength, willingness to serve, obedience, authority, self-denial, and for Henri de
Man, as much as for the killer Joseph Damand, it meant a new world which would be built by 'an
elite preferring a lively and dangerous life to a torpid and easy one.'84 For the head of the Milice,
the French version of the Gestapo, 'the bourgeois way of life is over': Fascism meant 'living
dangerously';85 it was, in Oswald Mosley's phrase, 'a great and hazardous adventure² 86 This
fascist adventure, adventure for adventure's sake, would produce the type of man who was
always willing to 'try his luck,' who liked to go for 'all or nothing,"' and it did in fact ultimately
produce the Mussolinian killer whose notorious motto, 'me ne frego,' epitomizes the spirit of
fascism.88

Fascist ideology thus offered ' a new, vigorous, brutal explanation of the world, of the kind men
have always needed and will always need.¹89 Incorporated in it was the cult of physical strength -
Oswald Mosley wanted men 'to live like athletes'- and of life, health, and blood, combined with an
obsession with virility and a contempt for intellectuals. None of these various manifestations of
what amounted to an apologia of the instincts were original contributions on the part of the
fascists and, in fact, apart from the experience of the war, it would be difficult to find in their
thought a single idea not already developed by Barres, Marinetti, d'Annunzio, Corradini, or
Langbehn. What fascism represented was the full flowering of the movement of revolt of the end
of the nineteenth century. The generation that had lived through the trenches brought only a
further dimension to the nostalgia for the front and for danger: war was where men were put to
the test, it brought out men's primal virtues and basic instincts. 'War is my fatherland,"90 Gilles
said, his words an echo not only of the 'glorification of war"" of the Futurist Manifesto, written at
the turn of the century,

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 341

but also of Jules Soury's claim that war was 'the source of all superior life, the cause of all
progress.'91

The corollaries of the cult of war and physical danger were the cult of brutality, strength, and
sexuality and, of course, contempt for anyone who believed in reasoned argument and the validity
of statistics. In this connection, Drieu La Rochelle, attempting to define what divided the fascist
from the traditionalist, established a distinction which is vital to a proper understanding of the
deeper nature of fascism: 'A monarchist is never a true fascist ... because a monarchist is never a
modem: he has none of the brutality or the barbaric simplism of the modern.'93 Here we have the
essence of fascism, and Dricu's words also reveal what makes of fascism a true counter-
civilization: rejecting the sophisticated rationalist humanism of Old Europe, fascism sets up as its
ideal the primitive instincts and primal emotions of the barbarian. Had not Marinetti, in 1909,
said his response to the high culture of Europe was to 'destroy the museums, libraries and all the
academies' and 'free this country of the fetid gangrene of its professors, archeologists, cicerones
and antiquaries'?94

Fascism was intent on changing man, but that was not all. Revolting against the big city and the
great centres of industry, it wanted to alter man's environment and create for him a setting where
he could lead a new life. The fascist revolution saw itself as a counter-revolution against an
industrial revolution which had uprooted man from the open country and cooped him up in the
city, and it proclaimed the superiority of the twentieth century, the country and the sports
stadium over the nineteenth century, the urban hovel and the pub. In its desire to reconcile man
with nature, save him from a lingering death and physical decrepitude and safeguard his
primitive virtues and his natural environment, fascism was possibly the first environmentalist
ideology of this century, combining the pursuit of technical progress and industrial growth with
the protection of nature as the environment in which a civilization of leisure and sport could
flourish. 91

The 'great moral revolution' which was what Robert Brasillach understood by fascism, that
revolution of the senses directed against the prevailing political philosophy, was to be a
revolution of the body and of sexuality. Fascism would create a 'new life' of 'camping, sport,
dancing, travel and communal hikes' which would sweep away the fusty world of 'aperitifs, smoky
rooms, congresses and [bad] digestions.'116 This world would be a virile world, and it is worth
remembering in this context what a preference fascist satirists showed for sexual imagery and
vocabulary. It was the virility of the fascist, his healthiness and bounding energy which finally
distinguished him from the impotent bourgeois, liberals, and socialists.91

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But for all that fascism advocated a return to nature and the soil, it was not anti-modem. The
fascist always showed a predilection for new industries and technical innovations, for aeroplanes
and cars: d'Annunzio, Mus-

342 ZEEV STERNHELL

solini, and Hitler are familiar examples. 'We are the party of speed,' Drieu said.98 Power, speed,
vigour, toughness, solidity, and effectiveness are the essential fascist qualities, and they are also
those of the modern motor, the car engine and sophisticated machinery. This taste extended to
vocabulary. To convey the activist spirit of the fascist movement, Mussolini chose the phrase:
'Fascism is a dynamo.'

This movement which saw itself as one of new men was undoubtedly one of young men -those
who had little vested interest in the established order, who felt strongly about the discrepancy
between principles and practice, to whom rebellion came more naturally than to the rest of the
population, and for whom ideology was something to be taken seriously. Belgian and Romanian
fascisms both originated in student movements, and in France, Spain, Italy, and England, the
young-the oldest of them had just returned from the trenches-predominated.

Both at the level of ideology and for purposes of recruitment, the fascists were able to use the
fact that their movement was associated with the younger generation to present their ideology as
the only twentieth century system of thought. Were not liberalism, socialism, communism, and
nationalism all products of the preceding century? And had they not all aged very badly? This
youthfulness of a movement whose leaders were still in their twenties and thirties when they
achieved notoriety or came to power goes some way towards explaining its dynamic, activist and,
ultimately, revolutionary character.

Since they regarded their ideology as an ideology of life and movement, all the various fascisms
chose to describe themselves as 'movements' rather than 'parties.' They all considered
themselves 'anti-parties,' because they challenged the inertia and dogmatism of the traditional
political structures, declined to work out programmes or political manifestoes -refused, in other
words, to play the game of traditional politics or accept its conventions.99 They had, by contrast,
an immense thirst for action, and not just action aimed at overthrowing the established order, but
action for action's sake, since, in Mussolini's phrase, 'inactivity is death."100 The action the
fascists glorified was not so much action with a specific end in view as action for its own sake: to
act with blind passion, to think in terms of fistfights and bursts of machine-gun fire was to
rediscover the very principle of life itself. 'No man goes very far who knows where he is going¹
10l was the principle Mosley adopted for himself, and Mussolini expressed the same sentiment in
these terms. 'I am all for motion. I am one who marches on. . . .'102 And for Joss Streel, 'you must
come on board, let yourself be carried by the torrent; in other words, you must act. The rest will
take care of itself.¹ 103

The war, in which the great proportion of fascists had had direct experience, furnished them with
a criterion of behaviour: the Bergsonian elan total,' reduced to the simple elan of the battlefield,
was reinterpreted in

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 343

terms of activism at home. Ex-servicemen played an extremely important part in the maturing of
fascism. As depositories of the national heritage and guardians of the nation's greatness, they
considered themselves the bearers of a special mission-to see that their own sufferings and the
sacrifice of their comrades had not been in vain, and to refashion society as a fighting unit,
inculcating in it the fighting soldier's heroic virtues of discipline, sacrifice, self-denial, and
brotherhood. The ex-servicemen wanted to convey their unique experience to society as a whole
and reshape and transform it in the light of that experience; they had a profound sense of being
'outside and above preceding generations¹ 104 and placed themselves 'above party and class [as
we were] during the war.¹ 105 Society, however, being a class society, and politics being party
politics, a politics of factions and interest-groups, it is not difficult to see how the ex-serviceman
became the enemy of the established order, of political pluralism and pacifist and humanitarian
values. Since he wanted the salvation of his country and wished to regenerate the state and
refashion the world in his own heroic image, the ex-serviceman 'wants the government of the
country"06 but was not prepared to work his way up in the traditional way through the
committees and antechambers of democracy. Consequently, he became a rebel.

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The ex-serviceman thus came to occupy a position alongside a multiplicity of maladjusted and
dissatisfied elements who would see in fascism a promise of solutions that the traditional right
and left were unable to offer. Fascist ideology was without doubt that best qualified to attract the
malcontents who found no place in the World as it was, despised the conformism of left and right,
and yet felt much closer to their enemies the communists - as the communists did to the rebels -
than to the bourgeoisie which, however, at the critical moment, and under the pressure of events,
was to become their ally. 101

With their thirst for action for action's sake and struggle for struggle's sake, the fascists appeared
to be the only authentically revolutionary political organizations, the only movements
unconditionally opposed to the established order, the only people whose revolutionary credibility
-unlike that of the parties of the left, including the communist parties -had not been damaged by
compromise. After its accession to power, Italian fascism should certainly be regarded as a
regime, and that it formed a regime makes it a special case, but it, too, goes to prove the rule: the
generation of fascists of 1935 went into opposition against the regime, dreaming of a fascist
utopia, a fascism purged, authenticated, renewed. However puerile this revolt may have been-and
of its futility there can be no doubt-it nonetheless represented a rebellion against the
compromises, betrayals, and abandoned ideals of an aging regime.108 We may well wonder
whether, had there been no war, similar difficulties would not have arisen in Germany. Certainly,
in the cases of General Franco, Marshal Pitain,

344 , ZEEV STERNHELL

and Admiral Horthy, no sooner had they come to Power at the head of what were fundamentally
reactionary regimes, than they set about disbanding, muzzling, or neutralizing the fascist
movements. Fascism did not take kindly to reaction.

The fascist elite, those for whom life was sacrifice, devotion, and selfdenial, liked to imagine
themselves as a kind of religious order, as Croisis, 'the handful of heroes and saints who will
undertake the Reconquest."119 Drieu rhapsodized about the age of epics, cathedrals, and
crusades, 110 and Marcel D6at proclaimed that 'Nietzsche's idea of the selection of "good
Europeans" is now being realized on the battlefield, by the LFV and the Waffen SS. An aristocracy,
a knighthood is being created by the war which will be the hard, pure nucleus of the Europe of
the future."" But it was L6on Degrelle, himself an SS officer back from the front, whose language
best conveys the character of that new man that the fascist revolution would produce: 'The true
elites are formed at the front, a chivalry is created there, young leaders are born. That is where
you find the true elite of tomorrow... and there between us a complete fraternity grows up, for
since the war everything has changed. When we look to our own country and see some fat,
stupefied bourgeois, we do not feel this man to be a member of our race; but when we see a
young revolutionary, from Germany or elsewhere, we feel that he is one of ours, for we are one
with revolution and youth. We are political soldiers, the badge of the SS shows Europe where
political and social truth are to be found ... we prepare the political cadres of the postwar world.
Tomorrow, Europe will have elites such as it has never known. An army of young apostles, of
young mystics, carried by a faith that nothing can check, will emerge one day from the great
seminary of the front.'112

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COMMUNITY

Fascist ideology was born of a political tradition that considered the individual a function of group
life. The various currents of which fascism was the confluence-nationalism, revolutionary
syndicalism, anti-parliamentarism, and anti-liberalism of every hue-all shared a view of man as a
social animal. Even the nationalists of the latter years of the nineteenth century had seen man as
nothing more than the vehicle of forces generated by the community, and their ethic was both
unconditionally anti-individualist and violently antagonistic to the theory of natural rights and the
rights of man. Fascist ideology thus appropriated to itself a view of man which in its most recent
form was already a good fifty years old, and which in its earliest form was as old as the
fundamental ideas of anti-revolutionary thought themselves. Such, then, is the genealogy of
fascism's rejection of the 'individualistic' or 'atomistic' conception of man central to the world
view of classical liberalism: the 'human individual is not an atom. Imma-

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 345

nent in the concept of an individual is the concept of society.... Man is, in an absolute sense, a
political animal,' wrote Gentile. I Is According to him, the notion that man exists in perfect

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freedom anterior or exterior to society is simply a fiction. However much fascist thinkers may
have differed on other questions, on this point they were all agreed. From Joss Streel, who
asserted that 'the individual does not exist in the pure state'114 to Jose Antonio in his polemic
against Rousseau, I'll it was the 'mechanistic' view of society as nothing more than an aggregate
of individuals that was attacked.

This view of man as an integral part of an organic whole is the basis of fascism¹s political
philosophy. Fascism developed a conception of society to the collectivity, its traditions, and
particularly its juridical embodiment in the state, as against the empirical and transient
individuals which constituted - its membership at any particular time. According to Gregor, this
was founded on the idea-most fully elaborated by Gentile -that insofar as man is outside the
organization of society with its system of reciprocal rules and obligations, he has no significant
freedom. Outside of society, man would be the subject of nature, not its master. He would be the
enemy of all and friend of none. He would be threatened by persons and things alike. He would
be in a state of abject dependence. There would be no freedom, no security, for each man would
be exposed to the open wrongs of every enemy. There would be no assurance of life, much less of
liberty. The freedom that man is supposed to barter away in part on entering society, in order to
secure the remainder, has no real existence. It is, according to Gentile, an imaginary possession
which then, by an imaginary transfer, is conveyed to society.

Man as a spiritual agent is an essentially social animal who finds freedom only in a rule-governed
association with other men.116 Ultimately, for Gentile, man has existence only insofar as he is
sustained and determined by the community: 'for at the root of the "I" there is a "we".117 The
Italian philosopher was here restating an argument that had been relatively common at the end
of the nineteenth century, the main contention of which had been that the individual had no
autonomy and only achieved the status of human being as a member of a community. In
Mussolini's words: 'In the fascist conception of history, man is only man by virtue of the spiritual
process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in
function of history to which all nations bring their contributions. Hence, the great value of
tradition in records, in language, in customs, in the rules of social life. Outside history, man is a
nonentity. Fascism therefore opposed to all individualistic abstractions based o n eighteenth
century materialism.¹118

In this sense, Mussolini, Gentile, and all the other fascist thinkers were traditionalist and
conservative: man commences his rational and moral life as the denizen of a specific historical
community. He rejects aspects of that community's prescriptions and proscriptions only when
armed with suffi-

346 ZEEV STERNHELL

cient reason. Man in the mythical state of nature, devoid of the rule-system governing human
association, is a man devoid of human contacts, devoid of language, thought, and morality, devoid
of humanity itself. 119

Fascist thought did not stop there, however, but went on to develop a conception of liberty and an
ideal of an organic society that went far beyond anything postulated by the first counter-
revolution. Liberty, in Mussolini's terminology, was 'the liberty of the State and of the individual
within the State.' This definition of liberty, which 'is to be the attribute of living men and not of
abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism,' derived from one axiomatic tenet: 'the
fascist view of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as
his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal
will of man as an historic entity.... Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual,
fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.'120
Mussolini's assertion is of fundamental importance for the understanding of fascism: this
identification of the individual with the collective will was the very cornerstone of fascist social
and political thought.

The individual was only seen in terms of the social function he fulfilled and his place in the
community. For Gentile 'the only individual who can ever be found' is 'the individual who exists as
a specialized productive force,'121 and for Oswald Mosley 'real freedom' was 'economic freedom.'
The English fascist leader defined freedom in language that is not unreminiscent of the language
of a certain brand of popular Marxism: 'Real freedom means good wages, short hours, security in
employment, good houses, opportunity for leisure and recreation with family and friends.' From
this it followed that 'economic freedom cannot come until economic chaos ends; and it cannot end

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until a Government has power to act,"22 until, in Joss Antonio's words, man's freedom was given
'a framework of authority, hierarchy and order.'123

In the fascist view, democracy, whose function was to guarantee and preserve the rights of the
individual and which saw the individual as the supreme end of society, was to be replaced by a
'people acting organically on both the social and political planes,'124 for nations and societies
were living organic totalities which were an end in themselves and which possessed their own
hierarchy and articulation. 'These totalities,' wrote Marcel D6at, 'both came before, and
transcended, their parts -individuals and secondary groups.' This conception of nation and society
of course went directly against the French rationalist view, according to which these totalities
either came into being under the pressure of circumstances or were created through the artifice
of a contract. It was from this fascist view of the individual and the society that the highly
romantic notion of the Volksgeist arose. 123

It was, then, in subordinating himself to the group that the individual

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 347

found his raison d¹etre, and integrating himself into the community that he found fulfilment. In
the words of Mussolini's Minister of justice: 'Instead of the liberal-democratic formula "society for
the individual" we have "individuals for society.". . . For fascism, society is the end, individuals the
means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends....
Individual rights are only recognized insofar as they are implied in the rights of the State.'1211 It
was in this way, Gentile claimed, that fascism had resolved the famous 'paradox of liberty and
authority. The authority of the State is absolute' and 'freedom can only exist within the State, and
the State means authority.'121 In the same vein, Joss Antonio maintained that 'to be really free is
to be part of a strong and free nation.'1211

In thus championing the state and the nation, 'this community of communities, " 29 fascism
extolled the values of the group, of the collectivity, of the national community, producing a 'new
conception of a living community, where abstract brotherhood is replaced by a relationship of the
blood,"30 and also providing a solution to alienation, to 'the frightening isolation of modern man,
who, in the factory, the office and at home finds himself reduced to an orphan.'131

It was by way of such arguments that fascism arrived at that new man and new society so
admirably characterized by Marcel Deat: 'the total man in the total society, with no clashes, no
prostration, no anarchy.'112 There can be no doubt that fascism's successes were in part due to
man's longing to be merged with the collective soul and his exaltation at feeling, living, and
acting in harmony with the whole. Fascism was a vision of a coherent and reunited people, and it
was for this reason that it placed such great emphasis on march-pasts, parades, and uniforms-on
a whole communal liturgy, in fact-and that it waged an implacable war against anything tending
to divide or differentiate, or which stood for diversity or pluralism: liberalism, democracy,
parliamentarism, multi-party system. This unity finds its most perfect expression in the quasi-
sacred figure of the leader. The cult of a leader who embodied the spirit, will, and virtues of the
people, and who was identified with the nation, was the keystone of the fascist liturgy.

For this romantic and mystic conception of life, fascism is a great adventure, an adventure one
lives with all his being, a 'fever,' Robert Brasillach used to say. But long before him, d'Annunzio
had written about the heightening of the meaning of life attained through sacred objects, the
symbols of a secular religion: instruments of a cult around which human thought and imagination
revolve, and which lift these to idealistic heights. 133 This new religion was a product of the
change in the nature of politics which had taken place at the end of the nineteenth century.

Both fascist ideology and fascism's political style were obvious products of the new mass society:
fascist politics were a reflection of the enormous

348 ZEEV STERNHELL

difficulties which political structures that had been inherited from the nineteenth century would
have to overcome if they were to survive into the twentieth. Eugen Weber has pointed out that
the liberal politics of the nineteenth century were representative and parliamentary. But the
representative system of which parliament is the symbol functioned adequately only in a
deferential society, where distinction of achievement and wealth had replaced distinction of birth,
but where the concept of distinction as such survived and the elector, who respected his

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representative, trusted him to serve his interests. The parliamentary representative system had
been worked out by and for an elitist society not much more inclusive than the aristocratic
society it replaced. In the mass society that took over at the end of the nineteenth century, with
its democratic structure and its egalitarian ideology, parliament either did not, or was no longer
felt to, work properly. Its shortcomings stood out, the bargains of everyday give-and-take became
evidence of corruption, and compromise acquired a pejorative meaning, for mass society spoke in
high-flown generalities and could not allow anything less than integral fulfilment.

The mass electorate might have been more tolerant had it felt better represented. But the petite
bourgeoisie on the one hand, the newly significant industrial workers on the other, did not
recognize either the pattern or the language of parliamentary politics as their own. The latter
reflected the psychology of nineteenth-century elitist politics, which had been rationalistic and
utilitarian: liberalism and Marxism both argued that, in the end, men will understand their
interests and act in consequence. But the psychology of a mass electorate, as John Stuart Mill
discovered before Gustave Le Bon, is irrationalistic, and politicians learned to appeal not to mind,
but to emotion, seeking less to persuade than to manipulate. 134

'Man is not only a rational being,' Jose Streel said, 'to make a people happy, it is not sufficient to
bequeath it perfect laws: it also requires a climate." 31 For Mussolini, who was frequently
criticized by his peers for what they considered to be excessive rationalism, and even for Gentile,
feeling 'was prior to thought and the basis of it.'136 These appeals to feeling as opposed to the
dry and grey argumentation of liberal politics were an essential part of great campaigns to
conquer souls and hold them. Power had to be attained, national unity forged, the collective will
asserted, by all available-means. Essentially democratic, in its propaganda if not in its essence,
fascism addressed itself to sentiments, deeply rooted prejudices, and intuitions-not to intellect.
Rational appeals are accessible to few; they are also subject to criticism. Reasoning invites
examination, speculation and disagreement. Feelings can be shared, arguments seldom, and then
by few: 131 intellectual argument is by definition an agent of division, destruction, and moral
death.

Fascism was clearly the spiritual heir to that nationalism of rebellion and adventure which since
the end of the nineteenth century had been advo-

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 349

cating the rejection of industrial society and liberal and bourgeois values. The malaise that led
the generation of 1890 to rebel against the status quo reappears in near identical form with
fascism, at least at the level of ideology. The violence of the earlier rebellion was modified to suit
the changed conditions of an age of mass movements, and fascism was to be a mass ideology par
excellence, belonging as it did to that current of thought which since the turn of the century had
sought to replace the tentative and uncertain analytical procedures of the intellect by the
infallible instinct of the masses. It propagated the cult of impulsive feeling and glorified both
impatient instinct and emotion, which it considered superior to reason. In isolation, reason was
doomed to sterility; too cultivated an inclination towards intellectual analysis debilitated the will,
blunted vitality and stifled the voice of one's ancestors. Moreover, it enfeebled the individual's
instinctive self-confidence and could lead him to doubt the truths of the nation. Intellectualism
bred individualism, and frustrated man's primal impulses. 138

Fascist ideology thus took on the character of an anti-intellectual reaction which pitted the
powers of feeling and emotion, and irrational forces of every kind, against the rationality of
democracy. It was the rediscovery of instinct, the cult of physical strength, violence, and brutality.
This is, of course, what explains the attention paid to scenarios, the care lavished on d6cor, the
great ceremonies, the parades -taken together, they made up a new liturgy where deliberation
and discussion were supplanted by song, torches, and march-pasts. Viewed in this way, fascism
appears as the direct descendant of the neo-romanticism of the 1880s and 1890s, only now the
revolt had taken on dimensions commensurate with a mass society whose advent the fin-de-siecle
generation had Scarcely even foreseen.

This mystical, romantic, anti-rationalist fascism was as much a moral and aesthetic system as a
political philosophy: it constituted a complete vision of man and the community. Usurping the
place occupied by revealed religion, its aims were to create a world of fixed criteria, a world freed
from doubt and purged of all foreign accretions; to give back their authenticity to man and the
community; and reestablish the compromised unity of the nation. Once all this had been
achieved, all the members of the national community, being of one body with it and existing

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through it alone, would react as one man and respond identically to the problems confronting it;
and once this unanimity had been forged, political and social problems would be reduced to
matters of detail. Moreover, the proletariat would now be an integral part of a nation which had
become a community governed by a unified system of values, a purified and disciplined unit
sufficiently well armed to compete with hostile communities in the struggle for existence. The
nation's decline into decadence would be halted, action and heroism would become the respected
virtues, and in consequence the vitality of the nation, which would now have a foundation

350 ZEEV STERNHELL

of organic solidarity, would be free to flourishes, In this sense, fascism represented a desire to
transcend the banality of the bourgeois world, the materialism of industrial society, and the
platitude of liberal democracy: behind it lay the desire to give life a new meaning.: This is why, in
the final analysis, fascism bore the character of a new religion which was complete with its own
mysticism and which rejected in its totality the world as it was.

A NEW'SOCIALISM'

This mystical and irrational aspect of fascism, with its romanticism and emotionalism, was,
however, only one side of the coin. The other was the fascism of'planning'1311-technocratic and
managerial fascism, one might call it. Essentially socialist in origin, this fascism rejected
Marxism, on the one hand, in the name of a modernized, national, and authoritarian socialism,
and liberal democracy and bourgeois society on the other, in the first place in the name of social
justice, but above all in the name of efficiency and technical and economic progress, which were
the two aims that had to be given priority if the community was to survive the crisis that had
come upon the world. For their realization these aims required first and foremost a powerful
decision-making apparatus, in other words, a State free of the inherent weaknesses of the
parliamentary system. In this respect, this second fascism owes its origin far more directly to the
great economic crisis of the twenties and the inability of traditional structure to adapt to new
problems and new needs than does the other, romantic fascism. It was the defective functioning
of the democratic institutions and the clumsy and futile efforts that were made to adjust
institutions and doctrines created by and for the nineteenth century to quite different
circumstances and situations which stimulated ideas about 'planning.' The failure of the Social
Democratic and Labour Parties, and indeed of Marxist thought in general, in the period between
the two wars, was a factor that greatly influenced the rise of fascism: the fascists' search for
answers to the new problems and the solutions they recommended must be said to be an
essential aspect of fascist thought. This form of fascism was, then, the result of a revision of
Marxism and an expression of the attempt to adapt socialism to modern conditions on both the
ideological and tactical planes. That this tendency should have manifested itself most clearly in
the three industrial countries of Western Europe, and at a time when their respective
working-class movements were either just reaching or had already passed the pinnacle of their
power, was certainly no accident. There is clearly a close connection between Oswald Mosley's
actions as a young Labour Minister and those of Henri de Man and Marcel D6at, and his thinking
was the result of the same ideological shift and the same political analysis as theirs. Their
development into fascists differed according to local circumstances: whereas Mosley was the first
to bum his bridges and openly launch

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 351

a fascist movement, claiming his kinship with Hitler and Mussolini as he did so, de Man and D6at
would not identify themselves with the fascist revolution until the debacle of 1940. Nevertheless,
from the middle thirties onwards, the new socialism they were promulgating bore the essential
characteristics of fascism, although it must be added that this fact did not prevent them from
exercising ministerial powers on behalf of socialist parties, nor hinder the one from becoming
president of the Belgian Workers party or the other the leader of the Parti Socialiste de France
when it was a member of the Front Populaire government. 5or at that time there were no clear
ideological boundaries, since the phenomenon was a new one and nobody knew how to diagnose
it.

The criticisms the 'planners' and neo-socialists levelled at Marxism revolved around two
fundamental questions: the problems of the class struggle, and the recognition of le fait national,
that is to say, the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the national framework and the necessity
of taking action within it. 'I believe, to sum up,' de Man wrote, 'that the socialism of the
generation to come will be, under penalty of total collapse, as different from that of our fathers as

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[that] was from the socialism that preceded the communist manifesto. '140

According to Dodge, this new socialism took as its starting point, 'the entirely changed
significance of the class struggle in the contemporary world.' Indeed, with regard to class
structure, not only did it now appear that the proletariat would never constitute even the majority
of the society, but social identification could not be predicted on the basis of an interestanalysis
alone. Thus there was an ineluctable distinction between two social groups, the proletariat and
the new middle classes, both of which shared essentially the same relationship -the exclusion
from ownership to the means of production. 141 Drawing his own conclusions from this, de Man
proposed the formation of a 'Labour Front' which would include all those elements which found
themselves at the mercy of finance capitalism. When, after 1930, Marcel D6at began suggesting
that the socialists should head a vast 'anti-capitalist' alliance, he was in effect putting forward the
very same idea, and one which, incidentally, implied the extinction of socialist Specificity. 142
Planisme was consonant with, and an expression of, the more general socialist ideology
developed by de Man, notably in that this ideology explicitly maintained that the removal of a
given enterprise from the private sector of the economy was a decision to be taken on pragmatic
grounds and not a question of doctrine. In the same way, de Man pointed out how unrealistic
were the Marxist propositions on agriculture in countries where the small farmer flourished, and
he also argued that direct socialization should only be applied to those sectors of the economy
where the processes of manufacture had in themselves already in fact been coIlectivized, that is,
large-scale industry. 143

The Plan was a product of the crisis, an answer to the crisis, and, finally,

352 ZEEV STERNHELL

a bid to rescue the middle classes, the stratum of society which the crisis had hit hardest. In the
long term, the Plan was a substitute for the abandoned socialist aim of restructuring society:
since the structures of the national economy remained untouched, it became in the event the
life-belt of capitalism.

The true significance of the Plan and of Henri de Man's thought can be perceived most clearly in
their political corollaries: the author of Au-dela du Marxisme was in fact advocating a
far-reaching reform of the system. Dodge tells us that he spoke of the necessity of establishing a
strong state capable of withstanding the attacks of the money powers: the classical division of
powers would have to be reapportioned in favour of a division of functions by which the
Legislative would be reduced to a supervisory role; and under beneficent guidance the mixed
economy of the nation would be organized to as large a degree as possible under corporatist
inspiration. In a series of articles in Le Peuple entitled 'Corporatisme et Socialisme,' de Man
undertook to demonstrate that it would be a mistake to let the Fascists monopolize the appeal of
corporatism, which he defined as ". . . autonomous grouping and action in virtue of interests
which derive from the practice of a trade or profession." On the contrary, such a principle of
organization was exactly what was necessary if socialism were to avoid those evils of
bureaucratization and centralization with which its opponents charged it .... A systematic
corporatist organization of society would allow the peaceful resolution of conflict. 144

In spite of the provocation his proposals represented and the opposition to him that had arisen
within the Belgian Workers' party, on the death of Emil Vandervelde, Henri de Man became its
President. It was in his capacity as leader of Belgian socialism that in June 1940 he announced
the dissolution of his party as a gesture of welcome to the new world the Nazi victory had
brought. In his view, the collapse of the parliamentary parties had cleared the way for the
construction of a true and authoritarian socialism which, in its essential aspects, would be based
on the Nazi model. 145 The necessity of 'taking nationalism into account' and of rooting 'the
national economy in the nation's Soil'145 constitute - along with the defence of the middle
classes-one of the two pillars of neo-socialist ideology, which rapidly developed into a true fascist
ideology. By moving 'onto the plane of a national reality, 'by' falling back into their national
framework,' the peoples had abruptly created a totally new situation: 'they have forced us,'
Marquet said, 'to follow them.'141 In other words, just as they were on the point of leaving the
SFIO to set up the Parti Socialiste de France, the neo-socialists arrived at conclusions which not
only recapitulated those reached by Michels, Sorel, and Mussolini fifteen or twenty years earlier,
but were, moreover, essentially the same as those reached by Barres at the end of the preceding
century, to wit: the allegiance of the masses could only be mobilized in the name of a more urgent
and compelling reality -

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FASCIST IDEOLOGY 353

the nation. The concept of the nation would be the key concept of political organization in the
twentieth century. 14$

In essence what D6at and his companions were saying was that the traditional Marxist
conception of class had lost its relevance: 'Marxism is the socialist answer to the capitalism of
1850.'14' The middle classes were as gravely affected by the economic crisis as anyone, and since
they were harder hit than the proletariat and were threatened with proletarianization, they had
come out in revolt against the capitalist system and the liberal state. It was up to socialism to
harness the revolutionary dynamism of this social stratum that had been crushed by the
development of capitalism. It was up to socialism to harness the rebellion of the 'middle classes'
who 'in their attempt to liberate themselves' were calling for 'the restoration of the State and the
protection of the nation."60 L6on Blum was correct in speaking of a fascist contagion: in their
efforts to combat fascism, his former companions were adopting fascist methods; as Blum
realized, the primacy of the idea of the nation, the denial of the proletariat's special status and
the denial of its revolutionary capability in a world in crisis could not but result in the denial of
the very idea of class in the Marxist sense of the term.

This line of reasoning made it possible for Drieu La Rochelle to speak of 'bourgeois workers,'
whom the 'Third Party'- the fascists -did not want to see destroyed but classed with the peasantry
and the proletariat. I'll Mosley, Joss Antonio, and Belgian Rexism assessed the situation in very
similar terms: the opposition was no longer between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but
between the 'workers of all classes' and 'banking capitalism, or hypercapitalism¹ 153 This
approach enabled economic parasitism and social exploitation to be eliminated without
prejudicing the unity of the nation, which was compromised by the idea of the class struggle, and
allowed the preservation of the realities of nation, family, and profession, which the artificial
concept of class had threatened."-' Twenty years earlier, it had been the abandonment of the idea
of the class struggle, the pillar of his socialist doctrine, which had made Mussolini swing to
fascism: with the socialist ministers de Man, D6at, and Mosley; with the communist leaders
Doriot and Marion; and with the thousands of socialist and communist militants who committed
themselves to fascism, we see the same process taking place. Thus this desire to bring socialism
up to date and adapt it to the modem world ultimately resulted in fascism.

The national socialism of the end of the preceding century had taken the same path, its objective
having been to unite the social and the national, incorporate both nationalism and socialism
within one movement, and merge the right and the left. This legacy was inherited by that form of
fascism that wished to be neither 'of the right nor of the left; because basically the right stands
for the maintenance of an economic structure, albeit an unjust one, while the left stands for the
attempt to subvert that

354 ZEFV STERNHELL

economic structure, even though the subversion thereof would entail the destruction of much that
was worthwhile .... Our movement will on no account tether its destiny to the vested interests of
groups or classes which underlie the superficial division into right and left.'1114 This idea returns
time and again, with only slight variation, in the writings of all fascist thinkers. Mussolini, for
instance, six months after the Fasci di Combattimento was formed, indicated that it was 'a little
difficult to define fascists. They are not republicans, socialists, democrats, conservatives, nor
nationalists. They represent a synthesis of all the negations and all the affirmations.... While they
renounce all the parties, they are their fulfilment.' In the minds of its promoters, fascism, being
highly nationalistic and socially concerned, thus achieved a harmonious synthesis between the
forces of the past and the demands of the future, between the weight of tradition on the one hand
and revolutionary enthusiasm on the other. It borrowed from both the right and the left. In
practice, of course, fascism's insistence on the cooperation of all social classes and their
reconciliation within the corporative regime threw it irrevocably to the right.

Nationalism and -socialism work to mutual advantage. Nationalism is to some extent fed from the
social concern, and the social concern gains considerable impetus from the enhanced value
acquired by all citizens in conditions of community euphoria. The desire to be a party above and
far superior to all others is invariably there; very often much of the motive force behind it derives
from a profound conviction that the society needs remaking from top to bottom. The nation must
be renewed through idealistic energy largely generated from national solidarity. 155 Fascist
ideology is part of attempts to cut out new political avenues, to forge doctrines fitted to the

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changing realities. The old right and the old left were not equal to the task because, according to
Mosley, 'both are instruments for preventing things being done, and the first requisite of the
modern age is that things should be done."56 'We must dismantle the unwieldy machine of
capitalism, which leads to social revolution, to Russian-style dictatorship,' Joss Antonio said; 'we
must dismantle it, but with what will we replace it?""

What was to take the place of the dictatorship of money, what middle road could be taken
between 'hypercapitalism and state socialism'?158, The answer was a controlled economy and
corporative organization topped by a strong State, a powerful decision-making apparatus. It was
a pragmatic system which did not set out to impose one property regime or another: however, it
seemed to those fascist economists who came from the left that, as economic organization
progressed, the active economic function of private capital would diminish until, its social utility
extinguished, the significance and power of capital would disappear. De Man's Plan du Travail,
which became the official policy of the Belgian Workers' party, envisaged a mixed economy in
which 'political power would be used to create the eco-

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 355

nomic conditions in which the country's productive and consumption capacities would be adapted
to each other. This objective implies a double change in the doctrine of socialization: in the first
place, the carrying into effect of a plan on the national plane is no longer subject to the
international plane but takes precedence, which means that nationalization must be the present
state of socialism; in the second place, the crux of nationalization is not the transfer of property
but the transfer of authority -which means that the problem of management takes precedence
over that of ownership."19

These views were endorsed by official socialist bodies: by the Belgian Socialist party and by the
French CGT. And it is not by accident that British fascism was born of well-founded reformist
impatience among bona fide socialists: nevertheless, in their majority, European socialists did
understand that these views came dangerously close to those expressed by corporatist
economists, and which Italy and Germany were beginning to put into practice.

It was the Great Depression of 1929 that led socialists like Mosley, de Man, and Deat to take a
public stand in favour of protectionism and national exclusivism. The economic crisis turned the
socialists' gaze inwards towards the nation and towards the idea of a strong, powerful state,
efficient and authoritarian, which would be capable of ensuring order and reconciling the
divergent interests within the community; which would be 'the master of its money and capable
of controlling the economy and finance'; and which would also, in the words of the neo-socialists
themselves, be able to 'impose certain rules of conduct on the large capitalists' and 'prepare the
ground for the controlled economy that is in the logic of things.' The present crisis, 'a crisis of
democracy in general,' was a crisis of 'a State that is too weak.¹160 In de Man's case, the need to
modernize the policy-making structures led to the idea of 'authoritarian democracy"," as a
replacement for the old parliamentary democracy. For Joss Antonio, the new world would be one
of authority, hierarchy, and order;16* order, authority, and decision, according to Sir Oswald; 161
and order, authority, and the nation for the French neo-socialists. 164 Thus all three formulations
contain the terms order and authority; the third varies in accordance with particular local
circumstances. The reform of the relations of power and its structures, as we can see from these
concerns, was the cornerstone of the fascist revolution.

TOTALITARIANISM

'Ours will be a totalitarian state in the service of the fatherland's integrity,' said Jose Antonio, 'all
Spaniards will play a part therein through the membership of families, municipalities and trade
unions. None shall play a part

356 ZEEV STERNHELL

therein through a political party. The system of political parties will be resolutely abolished,
together with all its corollaries: inorganic suffrage, representation by conflicting factions and the
Cortes as we know it.¹165

Innumerable passages in an identical vein are to be found throughout fascist literature.

Totalitarianism is the very essence of fascism, and fascism is without question the purest example
of a totalitarian ideology. Setting out as it did to create a new civilization, a new type of human

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being and a totally new way of life, fascism could not conceive of any sphere of human activity
remaining immune from intervention by the State. 'We are, in other words, a state which controls
all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control
economic forces,. . Mussolini wrote, 'everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing
outside the State.'166 For him, the fascist state was not only a living being, an organism, but 'a
spiritual and moral entity: 'The fascist state is wide awake and has a will of its own. For this
reason, it can be described as "ethical."""' Not only does the existence of the State imply the
denial of the individual's rights -'the individual exists only insofar as he is within the State and
subjected to the requirements of the State'- but the State asserts the right to be'a State which
necessarily transforms the people even in their physical aspect.¹168 Outside the State, 'no human
or spiritual values can exist, much less have value': 'no individuals or groups (political parties,
cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State.'169 The concrete
consequences of such a conception of political power and the physical and moral repression it
would engender are not hard to imagine. Here again we see how the communist and fascist
totalitarianisms differ: whereas the Stalinist dictatorship could never be described as an
application of the Marxist theory of the State, fascist terror was doctrine put into practice in the
most methodical way. In fascism we have the perfect realization of the unity of thought and
action.

Italian fascism took its glorification of the State so far as to identify it with the nation. For
Gentile, the State - and the nation - was not 'a datum of nature' but a creation of the mind; for
Mussolini 'it is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic
concept which afforded a basis for nineteenth-century publicity in favour of national
governments. Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore
real life on a people made aware of their moral unity."70 This view of the State is a perfect
illustration of the difference between the Italian-one is tempted to say Western-version of fascism
and nazism, which saw the State as the emanation of the Volk and the servant of the community
and the race. It also explains why racialism was originally alien to Italian fascism: 'Racism or the
principle of racial selfdetermination as it has been called in recent years,' the English fascist
Bames wrote in a resume of Mussolinian ideology, 'is a materialistic illusion, contrary to natural
law and destructive of civilization. It is the reduc- 357

FASCIST IDEOLOGY

tio ad absurdum of Nationalism; any truly logical application of it is farcical and impracticable.""
Only in Central and Eastern Europe did racialism form an integral part of fascist ideology; in
Western Europe, it was very often a foreign import, as the various fascisms developed in the late
thirties under the shadow of nazism and rapidly organized themselves on its lines. Although the
key-stone of Nazi doctrine, biological racialism cannot therefore automatically be considered
integral to fascism at all times and in all places.

The fascist state, creator of all political and social life and of all spiritual values, would of course
be the undisputed master of the economy and social relations. Political power was regarded as an
instrument for reconciling and harmonizing the conflicting interests that existed within the
community. The State would, therefore, take control of the levers of the economy, without
however being obliged by this to mount an attack on private property. Fascist supporters of
left-wing persuasions saw this as the weakness of the fascist case, since the retention of
traditional economic structures, seemed scarcely compatible with the establishment of a new
social and human order. In the view of fascist thinkers, however, the primacy of the State and the
subordination of economics to politics would be sufficient guarantee against the return of the old
order of things: the novelty and originality of the system consisted in its making capitalism serve
the community. Fascism, while doing away with the most sordid aspects of capitalism, would
simultaneously benefit from its technical achievements and from the deep-rooted psychological
motivations that underlay it. The pursuit of profit remained the moving force behind economic
activity, and on this point there was nothing to distinguish fascism from liberalism; what did
distinguish it, radically, from both liberalism and socialism was its assertion of the primacy of
politics. For Oswald Mosley, 'capitalism is the system by which capital uses the nation for its, own
purposes. Fascism is the system by which the nation uses capital for its', own purposes. Private
enterprise is permitted and encouraged so long as it coincides with the national interests. Private
enterprise is not permitted when it conflicts with national interests.' 112 And in Sir Oswald's
view, 'This implies that every interest, whether right or left, industrial, financial, trade union
banking, or banking system is subordinated to the welfare of the community as a whole, and to
the overriding authority of the organized State. No state within the State can be admitted. "All
within the state, none outside the state, none against the state." "Is Hence it was capitalism, not

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private property, that the fascists attacked, and a clear distinction was drawn between the two:
'property is the direct projection of the individual on matter, it is a basic human attribute,' whilst
capitalism, which 'has gradually replaced this property of the individual with the property of
capital ... ultimately ... reduces bosses and workers, employees and employers, to the selfsame
state of anxiety, to the same subhuman condi-

358 ZEEV STERNHELL

tion of the man deprived of all his attributes, whose life is stripped of all meaning."14 just as the
corporative system worked to the advantage not of the proletariat, but of the employers, so the
capitalist system was not destroyed but rather perpetuated and, finally, saved by fascism. Even so
it cannot be denied that at the ideological level, the level of desiderata, fascism did aim to
eliminate exploitation by bringing economic interests to heel. If an organic society is by nature
inimical to political pluralism, it is no less antagonistic to the most flagrant forms of social
injustice, and indeed this had to be so if the proletariat was to be integrated into the community
and if social relations were to be fundamentally changed. For Mussolini, the very word
'corporation' was to be understood in its etymological sense of 'fashioning into a body,' a
'fashioning' which was the- essential function of the State and the one that would insure its unity
and its continued existence. If the community is an organic whole, deviation is corrupting and
cannot be tolerated. All must act as one, shunning dissension as intrinsically harmful and seeking
that unity which alone can save in the providential person of one man. It was this unitary life, the
life of the nation, which led fascists to speak of an identity of interest uniting workers and
employers. This organic view of the nation led naturally towards collectivism and to an emphasis
on the most neglected and the most productive sections of the national community. Herein lay the
socialism of national socialism, the inspiration behind its anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist
orientation. If we remember the embourgeoisement and governmentalization of contemporary
socialists during the twenties and thirties, it is easier to understand why fascists attacked them
not only for dividing the nation but also for forgetting their revolutionary spirit. 115

To be sure, once in power the fascists themselves proved singularly modest in their reformist
ambitions; there was little of their revolutionary zeal to be seen in the way of structural reform.
Admittedly, the only fascism not to come to power in war-time was the Italian, but in its case, too,
the fascist revolution found itself caught up in a process to which those parties of the left which
joined capitalist regimes fell victim: like the French and Belgian socialists, like the British Labour
party, the fascists proved content to do no more than manage capitalism. It is also true that the
fascists were to a large extent neutralized by the forces of reaction, whom they could not afford
to ignore. But had L6on Blum's Front Populaire not come up against exactly the same problems?
If fascism rejected Marxism and Bolshevism, it also rejected conservatism and the 'reactionary'
label, and adopted a revolutionary ideology. On this all fascists were agreed: for some, fascism
was the successor of the Jacobin dictatorship; for others, it had, in Italy, carried through a
revolution as far-reaching as any, barring the French."" But if we leave aside for a moment its
revolutionary aspirations, fascism is seen as representing a movement whose cardinal aim was

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 359

to re-create that unity' of the nation which had been ruptured by liberalism and individualism,
and reintegrate into the nation the class most Profoundly alienated from it -the proletariat. As the
successor of national, anti-Marxist socialism, fascism constituted an extremely violent attempt to
return to the social body its unity, integrity, and totality. And here we find the great internal
contradiction which fascism was never able to escape: it wanted to be a movement of
reunification, yet it became an agent of civil war. But, we may well ask, is that not the fate of any
revolutionary movement?

Finally, thrown to the right by their hatred of class politics, which their organic nationalism
rejected, the fascists found themselves, as a logical consequence of the conflicts with the left,
driven into opportunist alliances which distorted their image, diluted their radicalism, and
reinforced their anti-Marxism to the detriment of their nationalist collectivism. The revolutionary
potential of the fascist movements was thus largely nullified by the workings of the left-right
dichotomy in which they were trapped: at the ,critical moments, the only alliances open to them
were with conservative and reactionary elements; ultimately, the fascists' greatest enemy was the
left. Yet these alliances came about only where a left actually existed. As Eugen Weber has
shown, in countries where there was no left, fascism was the revolutionary movement par
excellence. I"

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Unlike those historians whose judgement seems rather to have been impaired than improved by
'detachment' and 'perspective,' the fascists and revolutionaries of Bucharest and London, Oslo
and Madrid knew full well what divided them from the reactionary right, and they were not taken
in by propagandist attempts to tar them with the same brush. Admiral Horthy, General
Antonescu, Colonel Count de La Rocque, Marshal P6tain, General Franco, King Victor Emmanuel,
and the Belgian and British Conservatives were well aware that it was only pressure of
circumstances that had brought them into favour with the movements of Szilasi, Codreanu, D6at
and Doriot, Joss Antonio and Mussolini, Degrelle and Oswald Mosley, and they discarded them as
soon as they could.

The European conservatives, whether dictators or liberals-including reactionaries like

Maurras-felt little sympathy with a movement which was essentially national socialist, in the
fullest sense of that term, and which, while it attacked Marxism, itself wanted to put social
relations on an entirely new footing and considered the established order the relic of an outdated
world. In this sense, fascist ideology was a revolutionary ideology, since its principles represented
a distinct threat to the old order of things. Dynamic, activist, and imbued with a spirit of rebellion
that was visibly repugnant to the partisans of the established order, fascism practised a populist
elitism which felt nothing but abhorrence for the old European aristocracy. Fascism promoted the
cult of youth, brutality, and violence, and aimed to create both a new type of man and a new
civilization in which

360 ZEEV STERNHELL

a modern knighthood would have supremacy over the liberal bourgeois and the decadent,
conservative aristocrat. Crowning all would be the totalitarian State, which in the hands of the
leader would become the most perfect instrument ever conceived for the creation of a new order.
These objectives were not ones to which the classic right could subscribe, nor indeed could such
objectives, in the long term, serve its own interests.

It was where the right was too weak to hold its own ground that fascism achieved its most
marked successes. In times of acute crisis, the right turned to the new revolutionary movement
-the only one capable of confronting communism-for assistance, but never treated it with
anything less than the deepest suspicion. By contrast, where the right was sufficiently confident
to face the Marxist left itself, where its positions were not unduly threatened and it had a solid
social base, it did everything in its power to prevent the fascist phenomenon getting out of hand.
It concentrated above all on manipulating fascist troops and spending money to safeguard its own
interests. Western Europe, Spain included, is a good case in point. It was not the strength of the
right but its relative weakness, its fears, and its fits of panic, which created one of the essential
conditions of fascist success.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This short bibliographical study does not, of course, claim to exhaust its subject. The books and
articles discussed are ones that have a direct bearing on the specific questions dealt with in this
paper.

Paradoxical as it may seem, until about ten years ago there were scarcely any scholarly studies of
fascist ideology available. It was not until the beginning of the sixties that works of a general
nature, comparative studies which tried to go beyond specifically national frameworks, began to
appear. The first were Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Franqaise, Italian Fascism,
National Socialism (London, 1965) (the English translation of Der Faschismus in Seiner Epoche
[Munich, 1963]) and Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (New York, 1964). These were rapidly
followed by Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right: A Historical Profile
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, eds., 'International
Fascism 1920-1945,'Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1 (1966), Francis L. Carsten, The Rise of
Fascism (London, 1967), John Weiss, The Fascist Tradition (New York, 1967), S. J. Woolf, ed.,
European Fascism (London, 1968), and The Nature of Fascism (London, 1968) and, finally, A.
James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York, 1969). Most
recently, we have Paul Hayes, Fascism (London, 1973), and Adrian Lyttelton's brilliant Seizure of
Power: Fascism in Italy 1919-1929 (London, 1973). The sixties also saw the appearance of works
which traced the immediate intellectual origins of fascism, thus enabling us to turn away at last
from

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 361

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the search for possible 'ancestors' of fascism, from Plato to Fichte, and concentrate on the
contemporary intellectual climate and cultural environment. In 1961 Fritz Stern's The Politics of
Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles),
appeared, and was an immediate success. This study of Paul Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck is'a study in the pathology of cultural criticism'(XI): it brings out
clearly the nature of the revolt which rumbled beneath the surface of Germany from 1850
onwards: 'Their despair over the condition of Germany reflected and heightened the despair of
their countrymen, and through these men we see the current of disaffection rising until it merged
with the nihilistic tide of national-socialism. Above all, these men loathed liberalism ... they
attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modem society;
everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it: the bourgeois life, Manchesterism,
materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership' (Xli).

Professor Stern uses the term conservative revolution to denote the ideological attack on
modemity, on the complex of ideas and institutions that characterize liberal, secular, industrial
civilization: 'our liberal and industrial society leaves many people dissatisfied-spiritually and
materially. The spiritually alienated have often turned to the ideology of the conservative
revolution' (XVI).

Fritz Stern's work should be read together with George L. Mosse's Crisis of German Ideology:
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964). Mosse shows how deeply the Nazi ideas
were embedded in German history. They were current-indeed, eminently respectable-among
several generations of Germans prior to Hitler's rise. Professor Mosse provides evidence of how
these ideas became institutionalized in schools, youth movements, veterans' groups, and political
parties. His work reveals the uniqueness of German fascism. Mosse is making a point of vital
importance for the study and interpretation of fascism when he demonstrates that though fascism
spread throughout Europe, the German variety came to be unique. 'It was unique not only in the
way it managed to displace the revolutionary impetus, but also in the primacy of the ideology of
the Volk, nature, and race. The revolutionary impetus produced an ideological reaction
throughout the continent, but the German crisis was sui generis, besides being more deeply
rooted in the national fabric. Nowhere else was the ideology planted so deep or for such a long
time. Nowhere else was the fascist dynamic embedded in such an effective ideology. Deeply
rooted as it was in a specific German heritage, it could hardly serve as an aid to the fascist
movement in other countries' (315).

The same subject is studied from a different angle in Walter Z. Laqueur's Young Germany-A
History of the German Youth Movement (London, 1962). Laqueur gives a clear picture of the
strength, vitality, and

362 ZEEV STERNHELL

depth of v6lkisch ideology, which was based on the overriding importance of the idea of race as
opposed to those of nation or State. Laqueur provides further evidence of the uniqueness of the
German experience. Nazism's biological racialism makes it a case apart, and that it does so forces
us to the conclusion that, however much an ideology may retain elements that link it to a wider
family of ideas, its degree of extremism will give it the status of a separate phenomenon. Such a
conclusion would not seem to conflict with that reached by Eugen Weber at the end of a work
which still remains the best introduction to a comparative study of fascism: 'Fascism is
pragmatically activist, National-Socialism theoretically motivated, or at least expressed'( Varieties
of Fascism, 143). Although his whole book takes the form of a rigorous comparative analysis,
Weber cautions his reader at the very outset against falling into a trap which nowadays is
carefully avoided by students of socialism and communism. Which caution, however, does not
prevent the author of the most recent of the works of synthesis (Paul Hayes, Fascism) from
declaring at a very early stage in his book that 'the concept of racial superiority was a constituent
part of fascist ideology' (20).

The success of nazism very often obscures the specific characters of the various fascisms. Even as
shrewd an observer as H. R. Trevor-Roper has written that "'International fascism" is unthinkable
without Germany' ('The Phenomenon of Fascism,' in S. J. Woolf, ed., European Fascisht, 37).
Trevor-Roper's over-emphasis on the Nazi experience is a direct consequence of his fundamental
conception of fascism. For him, 'the public appearance of fascism as a dominant force in Europe
is the phenomenon of a few years only. It can be precisely dated. It began in 1922-23 ... it came of
age in the 1930s and it ended in 1945' ('Phenomenon of Fascism,' 18). Trevor-Roper is a
representative of that school of modem scholarship which sees fascism as a phenomenon

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extremely limited in both time and place, and as the product of one unique historical situation.
Ernst Nolte's monumental Three Faces of Fascism also inclines towards this school of thought.
For Trevor-Roper, the precursors of fascism are no more than 'parochial figures' who 'in the
public history of that time [before 19221 had no place and a historian writing in 1920 would
probably not even have noticed them' (18). Is not Trevor-Roper yet one more illustrious victim of
that much vaunted 'historical perspective'? Not only does the view of contemporaries frequently
differ from ours; it may often be more accurate. Contemporaries knew perfectly well who were
fascism's precursors, and they were quite able to identify pre-fascism. Here is what Julien Benda,
writing in 1927, said in La Trahison des Clercs (Neuchatel, 1946), 234: 'About 1890, the men of
letters, especially in France and Italy, realized with astonishing astuteness that the doctrines of
arbitrary authority, discipline, tradition, contempt for the spirit of liberty, assertion of the morality
of war and slavery, were opportunities for haughty and rigid poses

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 363

infinitely more likely to strike the imagination of simple souls than the sentimentalities of
liberalism and humanitarianism.' His entire book is nothing more nor less than an indictment,
written after the first world war, of the fascist thinking that preceded political fascism by several
decades. It is no accident that it has been the scholars who do not see fascism as a phenomenon
limited to the period between the two wars who have paid the greatest attention to pre-fascism.

Weber's -Varieties of Fascism is illuminating in this connection, since it shows how far fascist
ideology had its roots in the European intellectual climate of the end of the nineteenth century;
this is also the approach adopted by George L. Mosse, the last chapter of whose Crisis of German
Ideology already anticipates the first of International Fascism 1920-1945. This short essay, in
which Mosse depicts fascism not just in terms of a revolt but also in terms of the taming of that
revolt, offers some important insights into the nature of fascism and pre-fascism. The same can
be said of his study of d'Annunzio, The Poet and the Exercise of Political Power (Yearbook of
Comparative and General Literature), no. 22 (1973), which is a study in the emergence of the
fascist political style, the new political style which worked within the framework of myth, symbol,
and public festivals. As a result of the rise of nationalism accompanied by the growth of a secular
religion of the nation in the nineteenth century, and the changed nature of politics, politics
became a drama, expressed through secular liturgical rites and symbols closely linked to
concepts of beauty in which poetry felt at home (32-33). D'Annunzio excelled in this domain, and
he did indeed create an entirely new political style. The romantic and mystical element
represented by d'Annunzio was also present in futurism and its violent revolt, and in his
Intellectuals in Politics (New York, 1960), James Joll gives an intellectual biography of Marinetti
which is essential for an understanding of the intellectual climate from which fascism emerged.
In two countries, Italy and France, a true literary avant-garde was involved in the development of
fascist and pre-fascist ideology: besides d'Annunzio and Marinetti, there was Barrés, to whom two
recent books have been devoted, Robert Soucy's Fascism in France: the Case of Maurice Barrés
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1972) and my Maurice Barrés et le Nationalisme Francais (Paris,
1972). In this context George Mosse's latest book will be extremely useful: The NationaUzation of
the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars
through the Third Reich (New York, 1975).

Studies of the socialist-national aspect of pre-fascism are rather restricted in number. The first to
tackle the subject were Robert F. Byrnes, 'Morés the first national-socialist,' The Review of
Politics, XII (July 1950), and Eugen Weber, 'Nationalism, Socialism and National-Socialism'
French Historical Studies (Spring 1962). Three recent articles deal with the same subject: Enzo
Santarelli, 'Le Socialisme national en Italie: Pricidents 364 ZEEV STERNHELL

et Origines,' Le Mouvement Social oanvier-mars 1965), my 'NationalSocialism and Anti-Semitism:

The Case of Maurice Barrés,'Joumal of Contemporary History, 8, 4 (1973), and George L. Mosse,
'The French Right and the Working-Classes: Lesjaunes,'Journal of Contemporary History, 7, 3-4
Uuly-October 1972). For Austro-Hungary, one would do well to consult Andrew Whiteside,
Austrian National-Socialism before 1918 (The Hague, 1962). Pre-fascist ideology appears in these
studies as a genuine mass ideology and the movements it inspired as mass movements. The
fascist explosion is thus examined in depth, and it is explained as the result of a very profound
wave of opinion.

A work of the same orientation is the highly controversial book by A. James Gregor, which in my
view is the most thorough, lucid, and erudite study of Italian proto-fascism. As a parallel study of
Italian syndicalism and the Italian school of political sociology on the one hand, and of the

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evolution of Mussolini's political thought on the other, it is, in my opinion, absolutely necessary.

Of the numerous studies of anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth, I consider the following to be indispensable: Robert F. Byrnes, Anti-Semitism in
Modern France (New Brunswick, NJ., 1950); Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A
Study of the Frenchjewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971); Norman
Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion (London, 1967); Peter G. J. Pulzer is excellent on The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism
in Germany and Austria (New York, 1964). The subject is also discussed in Hannah Arendt's
famous book The Origins of Totalitarianism, where it is examined within the context of an analysis
of the concept of totalitarianism. The intellectual origins of fascism and some basic trends in
European history which made fascism possible are masterly examined by J. L. Talmon, The
Unique and the Universal (London, 1965) and 'The Legacy of Georges Sorel,' Encounter
(February 1970), 117-60.

Indeed, the true dimensions of fascism can only be understood in the context of the intellectual
revolution that took place at the end of the nineteenth century, and in this field the best works to
consult are James Joll's brilliant Europe Since 1870 (London, 1973), the most recent work to date;
Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York, 1941); H. Stuart Hughes,
Consciousness and Society (I 96 1); John Weiss, ed., The Origins of Modern Consciousness (1965);
Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday (1961), and W. Warren Wagar, ed., European Intellectual
H@tory since Darwin and Marx (1966). But to be properly understood, fascism must also be seen
in its relation to the right, and here we come up against a crucial problem of interpretation: Was
fascism a phenomenon of the right, essentially reactionary in character, or was it a far more
complex phenomenon, as the fascists themselves believed? To obtain an impression of the
ideologi-

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 365

cal context of fascism and of its position vis-a-vis the right, one would do well to refer to The
European Right: A Historical Profile. The value of this collection of essays lies in its attempt,
taking the latter decades of the nineteenth century as its starting-point, to establish a distinction
between the old and the new right. Admittedly, the contributors disagree about what kinds of
groups are to be labelled 'right'- old or new. Also, they come up against objective difficulties
inherent in comparative studies, which apply especially to a comparative study that ranges over
eleven countries, from Finland to England and has as its subject movements of the extreme right,
since these have none of the social homogeneity or doctrinal clarity of the extreme left, and
variations from region to region are far more pronounced. It is, however, in the very fact that the
book undertakes such a study, and shows what possibilities it holds, that its importance lies. The
distinction between the traditionalist and modern 'rights,' between classical conservatism and
'right-wing radicalism' is, it must be said, not always made clear, and the standard of the
contributions varies. Nevertheless, thanks in great part to the masterly General Introduction by
Eugen Weber, which gives the whole work its meaning, and his two chapters on France and
Romania, the book succeeds in throwing light on how the radicalism of the new right prepared
the way for fascism, and thus provides a basis for establishing a clearer distinction between
fascism and conservatism, fascism and reaction. From the viewpoint of the history of ideas,
however, this volume has one serious defect: little attention is paid to the function of ideology in
social agitation and politics.

A number of other works need to be consulted to help clarify the problem of distinguishing
fascism from the 'right' and the factors that specifically characterize the fascist movements. The
Rise of Fascism, by F. L. Carsten, is a very useful synthesis, and serves as a good introduction to a
difficult subject. The Nature of Fascism, edited by S. J. Woolf, is quite different in character. It is
the outcome of a conference held at the University of Reading in the spring of 1967, the purpose
of which was to analyze fascism from the different standpoints of the historian and the social
scientist. This comparative study is of considerable interest to the historian of ideas, even though
the book contains only three papers on the problem of fascist ideology: N. Kogan's'Fascism as a
Political System,' and two contributions on 'Fascism and the Intellectuals' from George L. Mosse
and P. Vita-Finzi. This multi-disciplinary undertaking follows an earlier collective volume edited by
Stuart Woolf, also prepared at the University of Reading, European Fascism (I 968), in the
introductory chapter of which Professor Woolf offers some remarkable insights into what specific
attributes distinguish fascism from the right.

This problem, of major importance to the study of fascism, and crucial to a thorough

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understanding of the fascist phenomenon, is further elucidated in a number of studies devoted to

more specific subjects. Eugen

366 ZFEV STERNHELL

Weber's Action Franqaise (I 962), which is in fact an analysis of the whole of the French right, is
indispensable for a deeper understanding of the general European thrust to the right. If we take
Eugen Weber's book together with Ren6 Rimond's The Right Wing in France from 1815 to De
Gaulle, expanded and revised in 1966, and Robert J. Soucy's 'The Nature of Fascism in France,' in
International Fascism, we have three works which contain observations whose relevance
transcends French politics. Stanley Hoffman's works on Vichy, 'Aspects du R6gime de Vichy,'
Reme Franqaise de Science Politique, 1, I Oanvier-mars 1956), and 'ColIaborationism in France
during World War ll,'Journal of Modern History, 40, 3 (September 1968), are illuminating on what
divides fascism from the right, and the observations, insights, and theoretical reflections
contained in these articles make one look forward with impatience to the appearance of the
forthcoming Vichy 1940-1944: La Demiire Contre-Rivolution Franqaise. The work done by Weber,
Hoffman, and R6mond, to which should be added Raoul Girardet's 'Notes sur I'Esprit d'un
Fascisme Francais,' in Revue Franqaise de Science Politique, V, 3 (1955), demonstrates clearly
how misleading it is to identify fascism with the right. Further evidence for this is provided in a
number of works devoted to other countries: Stanley Payne's Falange: A History of Spanish
Fascism and Hugh Thomas's Introduction to Joss Antonio's Selected Writings for Spain; Weber's
'The Men of the Archangel,' in International Fascism and his chapter on Romania in The
European Right; for Italy, Adrian Lyttelton's 'Fascism in Italy: The Second Wave,' in International
Fascism and the chapters on Ideology and Culture in his Seizure of Power. Lyttelton's book, the
most recent to be published on Italian fascism, is the best book on the subject, and is absolutely
essential for any serious study of fascism.

In 'The Men of the Archangel,' in many respects a pioneering work, Weber strongly challenges
the view that fascism was necessarily a reactionary middle-class movement. His argument
constitutes the beginning of a comparative study of fascist sociology and fascist appeal, and at
the same time takes issue with the view that fascism was the ideology of a declining bourgeois
society. Weber draws our attention not only to the differences between Western and Eastern
Europe-something Mosse and Woolf also do -but also to the general problem of underdeveloped
countries, the role of fascism in non-Western societies where significant movements of the
revolutionary left did not exist, where the working-classes were not organized, where the
socialists were inaudible and the communists invisible. Here, fascism faced no radical
competition, and the fascists' own radicalism was able to develop free of the need either to
defend itself on the left or compromise too much with the forces of moderation (104-105).

Weber's conception of the nature of fascism is challenged in John Weiss' Fascist Tradition (1967),
which is written in support of the view that fascism can unambiguously be classified as a
right-wing conservative

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 367

movement. John Weiss charges Eugen Weber with being too ready to take fascists' ideological
statements at their face value. According to Weirs, Eugen Weber takes their 'leftism' far more
seriously than he should (136).

To give such short shrift to a work as solidly documented as Weber's would require a book more
solid, less hurried, and considerably more convincing than this. Moreover-though Weiss could not
have known this Max H. Kele, in his Nazi, and Workers (1972), has implicitly confirmed what
Weber said about fascist recruitment and fascism's appeal to workers. The book is a study of
nazism, but has more general implications, since it throws serious doubt on the famous view of
fascism as an 'extremism of the centre' which we find developed in Martin Seymour Lipset's
Political Man (1960).

The criticisms that Weiss makes of Weber are also those Dante Germino makes of A. James
Gregor. Germino, himself the author of a well-known work, The Italian Fascist Party in Power, and
an important article, 'Italian Fascism in the History of Political Thought,' Midwest Journal of
Political Science, VII I, 2 (May 1964), criticizes the author of Ideology of Fascism for taking
literally some patently ridiculous and self-serving statements made by fascist propagandists, and
for drawing a portrait of fascism which is unrecognizable because of the deep scars that have
been omitted (American Political Science Review, no. 64 Uune 1970], 165). The arguments put

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forward carry some weight: it is indeed difficult to subscribe to a definition of fascism as a

'humanism of labour,' or to agree that the fascist idea of the community should be defined in
terms of the 'Kantian kingdom of ends' (20-21 of Gregor's work). Gregor's pursuit of scientific
objectivity and intellectual detachment has led him a little too far. Nevertheless, his book cannot
be fairly dismissed on the strength of this kind of shortcoming, since Gregor's scholarship is
exemplary. His study of proto-fascism and of Mussolini's and Gentile's thought, and his analysis of
Sorel, Pareto, Mosca, Michels and, of course, Gumplowicz, who is a veritable discovery on
Gregor's part, are of an exceptionally high standard. Gregor gives a clear account of the genesis
and maturation of fascist ideology, and his work is also invaluable in shedding light on the
contribution of some minor intellectuals whom one can, if one wishes, treat as propagandists, but
whose role in fascist Italy was considerable. Gregor deserves great credit for stressing that a Gini
or a Papini are no less significant for an understanding of fascist ideology than a Gentile. These
views, of course, place him in a totally opposed camp to such scholars as Ernst Nolte, for whom
fascism can be summed up as Maurras, Mussolini, and Hitler, and yet it is the minor intellectuals
who are read, and it is their thought that is most widely disseminated.

But Gregor's work is not solely a study of fascist ideology in Italy. It is the work of a social
scientist who wishes not only to 'provide an historically accurate and objective account of the
ideology of Mussolini's fascism,' but

368 ZEEV STERNHELL

also 'to suggest a general typology of revolutionary mass movements that reflects contemporary
thinking with respect to the description and analysis of totalitarian movements' (IX). This leads
the author to consider fascism as 'a developmental dictatorship appropriate to partially developed
or underdeveloped, and consequently status-deprived, national communities in a period of intense
international competition for place and status' (XIII). What this approach finally leads to is not
entirely unforeseeable: Leninism, Stalinism, the African socialisms, and Maoism are so many
fascisms that are either unaware of, or do not acknowledge, their true names. The concluding
part of the book should certainly be read with great circumspection, although the concept of
'developmental dictatorship' as a definition of fascism offers wide scope for future research.
Nevertheless, it seems odd that Gregor should have thought an analysis of one model-the Italian-
sufficient to justify the elaboration of such vast theories: surely, before tackling the
underdeveloped countries and/or before presenting conclusions intended to be universal in their
application, the author should have cast a brief glance in the direction of the other European
fascisms. All in all, however, this highly controversial book, although written in a language at
times far from transparent, is extremely stimulating and original and should be required reading
for every student of fascism.

But it is Ernst Nolte who has set himself the most ambitious task. Three Faces of Fascism is an
attempt to give a comprehensive explanation of fascism. The book is based on the most
meticulous scholarship, the command of the material is impressive, and the methodological
rigour is admirable. The work has been translated into. English and French, and was acclaimed
an immediate success. In reviews by, among others, Klaus Epstein, Hajo Holborn, James Joll,
Walter Laqueur, George Mosse, Wolfgang Sauer, Fritz Stern, and Eugen Weber, this masterly
work was hailed as a very great book.

Professor Nolte's work contains such a wealth of observations, infonnation, insight, and
throwaway ideas that are well worth keeping that inevitably one takes issue with some. First, his
method. A philosopher by training, and of the school of Heidegger, Nolte is writing history within
a philosophical framework. Thus it is that, having rejected the historical and typological
approaches, he opts for the phenomenological approach, which he conceives as an attempt to
return to Hegel's integration of philosophy and history (539-40). It is this method that permits
Nolte to consider it legitimate to claim universal validity for his conclusions in spite of the fact
that he limits his study to an analysis of the political ideas of three leaders-Maurras, Mussolini,
and Hitler-and disregards not only their own movements and all the other European fascist
movements, but also the socioeconomic dimension of fascism. Nolte's analysis belongs strictly to
the history of ideas, an approach perfectly legitimate in itself providing one is

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 369

aware of the limitations and providing one reminds oneself that such broad generalizations as are
found here cannot be put forward on the basis of such a narrow approach. Nolte is clearly
floundering in problems of methodology, which explains how Action Francaise is elevated to the

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status of a fascism equivalent to nazism. The importance for Nolte of Action Franqaise is clear: it
provides him with the link he needs between the French and Soviet revolutions, testifies to the
continuity of counterrevolutionary thought, and offers proof-positive of the very general character
of that wave of revolt which swept nazism to power. In some ways, Ernst Nolte's approach recalls
that of Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke: Thomas More, for Ritter, Machiavelli, for
Meinecke, and now Maurras, for Nolte, are so many proofs of the universality of evil, so many
proofs that it was almost by accident, by a mere conjunction of political circumstances, that the
Nazis arose in Germany.

This impression is considerably reinforced by the overriding importance Nolte attributes to the
leaders of the movements, and by an observation he makes in this context which George Mosse,
reviewing Three Faces of Fascism Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 [1966], 624) has not failed to
draw attention to. After the Filhrer's death, the Nazi leadership is said to have snapped back to
its 'original position,' becoming once more 'a body of well-meaning and cultured Europeans.' This
sort of statement casts doubt on Nolte's understanding of Nazi ideology as well as on his analysis
of bourgeois society. Moreover, nazism is by implication reduced to something very minor: it
arrives in this world, and disappears from it, with the Fiihrer, and the concentration camp
commandant quietly returns home to become again what he has never really ceased to be-an
exemplary citizen and a lover of high culture. But if this is true, is nazism, as Nolte thinks, really
dead? Surely it cannot be, if all it needs is the reappearance of a Hitler to turn a good, cultivated,
and law-abiding European into a Nazi?

Nolte's definition of fascism has a dual aspect: fascism, in his view, is to be seen as a revolt
against the universal process of secularization, democratization, and international integration in
the modern era; in its final stage, fascism takes on the form of a resistance to 'transcendence.
"That Maurras' whole thought represents a resistance to transcendence and unconditional
defence of the autarkic-sovereign, martial, aristocratic state of the ancien regime as a paradigm
for France for all time, can hardly be doubted' (530; all quotations from the 1969 Mentor edition).
A page earlier, the argument reaches its conclusion: 'The power of "antinature" fills Hitler with
dread: it is this "going beyond" in human nature which is capable of transforming the essence of
human order and relations- transcendence. What Hitler- and not only Hitler-feels to be
threatened are certain basic structures of social existence. He too - like Maurras - is afraid of man
for man. But he did not only think, he acted. And in his actions, he carried his principle to its
irrevocable end. Hence it is possible to define Hitler's

370 ZEEV STERNHELL

radical fascism, which called itself "National Socialism," as follows: NATIONAL SOCIALISM WAS
THE DEATH THROES OF THE SOVEREIGN, MARTIAL, INWARDLY ANTAGONISTIC GROUP. IT
WAS THE PRACTICAL AND VIOLENT RESISTANCE TO TRANSCENDENCE' (529).

What Nolte does not tell us, as Wolfgang Sauer has already pointed out, is why this revolt was
most radical in Germany? If the modernization process was universal, was fascist revolt also
universal? If it was, why does Nolte deal only with France, Italy, and Germany? If it was not, why
did the fascist revolt occur only in these (and some other) countries? (Wolfgang Sauer, 'National
Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism,' American Historical Review, LXXIII, 2 [December 1967],
413). Anyone familiar with the fascist movements will find a large number of questions left
unanswered, although it is true that these questions are easier to ask than to answer.
Nevertheless, it is impossible, when one has come to the end of this exceptional work, not to be
left with a feeling of unreality and to wonder whether nazism has not been reduced to the level of
an abstraction, an intellectual exercise.

This feeling is not dispelled by the second aspect of Nolte's definition of fascism, which he
presents in terms of anti-Marxism: 'FASCISM is ANTI-MARXISM WHICH SEEKS TO DESTROY
THE ENEMY BY THE EVOLVEMENT OF A RADICALLY OPPOSED AND YET RELATED IDEOLOGY
AND BY THE USE OF ALMOST IDENTICAL, AND YET TYPICALLY MODIFIED, METHODS,
ALWAYS, HOWEVER, WITHIN THE UNYIELDING FRAMEWORK OF NATIONAL
SELF-ASSERTION AND AUTONOMY.' This definition implies that without Marxism, there is no
fascism, that fascism is at the same time closer to and further from communism than is liberal
anti-communism ... (40). This reads very much like something from the good old totalitarian
analysis, which is itself not very new but dates back to the twenties and thirties: the Italian and
French fascists both spoke at length of the points of similarity between communism and fascism.
For Drieu La Rochelle, Stalinism was 'a red fascism'- which, by the way, would not surprise
Professor Gregor. Here again we have an example of a contemporary arriving at an analysis

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which modern scientific research hails as a revolutionary achievement.

Yet even those fascists who recognized the common ground between themselves and the
Marxists, while simultaneously fighting them to the death-and this goes for Degrelle and
d'Annunzio, Doriot and Valois always considered their real, natural enemy to be liberalism. This is
particularly true as regards the origins of fascist thought. Nor does it seem to be anti-Marxism
that lies at the root of Hitler's thought: is it not rather racialism and anti-Semitism? Was the
enemy not the Jew, rather than the Marxist? Is this not a point of dissimilarity between nazism
and fascism that simply cannot be ignored? Fascism was not, then, as Nolte would have us
believe, simply a shadow of Marxism. It was an entirely separate pheno-

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 371

menon and had a reality of its own which Nolte, transported into other realms by the
phenomenological method, does not always perceive. In sum, however, even when one cannot
agree with Nolte on every point, indeed, even when one is unable to agree with him on the
essential points, it is obvious that this book will serve as a landmark to scholars for many years to
come. NOTES

I am deeply indebted to the Warden and Fellows of St. Antony's College, Oxford, for having
elected me to a Wolfson Visiting Fellowship for the 1973-1974 academic year. It was here, in this
true home of scholarship, that I was able to prepare this study, after the Yom Kippur War.

1. See the bibliographical part of this essay. As far as possible, the quotations refer to the English
translations of the primary sources.

2. Hugh Seton-Watson, 'Fascism, Right and Left,' in joumal of Contemporary History, I, 1 (1966),
188.

3. N. Kogan, 'Fascism as a Political System,' in S. J. Woolf, ed., The Nature of Fascism (London,
1968), 16.

4. Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (New York, 1964), 1 0-1 1.

5. Cf. ibid., 9-10; Martin Seliger,'Fundamental and Operative Ideology: The Two Princi- pal
Dimensions of Political Argumentation.' Policy Sciences, 1 (1970), 325-27.

6. Cf. S. J. Woolf's Introduction in European Fascism (London, 1968), 9, and Michael Hurst, 'What
is Fascism,' in The Historical Journal. XI, 1 (1968), 166 and 183.

7. Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (London, 1932). 14.

8. Benito Mussolini, 'Political and Social Doctrine,' in Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Rome,
1935), 31, 34, n. 2. Among other basic texts of fascist thought and legislation, this volume
contains 'Fundamental Ideas' written for Mussolini by Gentile.

9. Seliger, op. cit., 327-28.

10. Mussolini, 'Political and Social Doctrine,' 33.

I 1. Ibid., 26: 'All doctrines aim at directing the activities of men towards a given objective; but
these activities in their turn react on the doctrine, modifying and adjusting it to new needs, or
outstripping it.'

12. Combat, 2 (February 1936).

13. Quoted in Michel Winock, 'Une parabole fasciste: Gilles de Drieu La Rochelle.' Le Mouvement
Social, 80 (July 1972), 29.

14. Georges Valois, Le Fascisme (Paris 1927), 21.

15. Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow we live (London, 1938), 57.

16. Cf. the recent studies by H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: the Reorienta- tion of
European Social Thought 1890-1930 (New York, 1961); Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday:
Studies in European Culture 1890-1914 (New York, 1966); W. Warren Wagar, ed., European

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Intellectual History since Damin and Marx [Selected Essays] (New York, 1966); John Weiss, ed.,
The Origins of Modem Consciousness (Detroit, 1965).

17. Giovanni Gentile, 'The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,' Foreign Affairs, VI (1927-28), 295-96.

18. H. Stuart Hughes, op. cit., 38-39. Cf. in particular Carlton J. H. Hayes, 4 Generation of
Materialism 1871-1900 (New York, 1963) and Jacques Barzun, Race, a Study in Superstition (New
Y6rk, 1965), 162.

19. Fritz Stem's The Politics of Cultural Despair is the best treatment of Langbehn, Lagarde, and
Moeller van den Bruck. 372 ZEEV STERNHELL

20. George L. Mosse, The C ofgerman Ideology: Intellectual Oligins ofthe Third Reich (New York.
1964), 4-5.

21. Zeev Stemhell, Maurice Barr@s et le nationalismfranlais (Paris, 1972), 263-73.

22. Maurice Ban4s, 'Que faut-il faire?,' Le Courrier de IFit, (2ime sirie) (I 2 May 1898); idem.,
Mes Cahier5, 14 vols. (1929-57), 11, 197; idem., 'Socialisme et Nationalisme,' La Patrie (27
February 1903).

23. Enrico Corradini, 'Nationalism and the Syndicates,' speech made at the Nationalist
Convention, Rome, 16 March 1919, in Adrian Lyttelton's excellent anthology Italian Fasc@msfrom
Pareto to Gentile (London, 1973), 159.

24. Cf. the important article by Tbierry Maulnier, 'Charles Mantras et le Socialisme,' La Revue
Universelle, LXVIII, 19 Uanuary 1937), 169. Maulnier is quoting from Maurras's Dictionnaire
Politique et C@tique.

25. Pierre Biitry, Le Soc@me et lesjaunes (Paris, 1906), and more particularly 99 and passim.

26. Cf. Stephen Wilson, 'The Antisemitic Riots of 1898 in France,' The Historicaijournal, XVI, 4
(1973), 789-806.

27. Jules Soury, Le Systime Nerveux Central (Paris, 1899), 1778; Campagne Nationalisfe
(1894-1901) (Paris, 1902), 65.

28. Enzo Santarelli, 'Le Socialisme National en Italie: Pr@c@dents et origines,' Le Mouvement
Social, 50. Uanuary-March 1965).

29. Corradini, 'The Principles of Nationalism,' in A. Lyttelton, op. cit., 147.

30. Cf. Corradini's'The Proletarian Nations and Nationalism'(1911), in A. Lyttelton, op. cit.,
149-51.

31. Corradini, 'Nationalism and Democracy'(political speech 1913), in A. Lyttelton, op. cit., 152.

32. Corradini, 'The Cult of the Warrior Morality' (December 1913), in A. Lyttelton, op. cit., 155-58.

33. A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: the Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York, 1969).
37-39.

34. Vilfredo Pareto, from Les Systimes Social@es, in A. Lyttelton, op. cit., 72-75.

35. Ibid., 78.

36. Gregor, op. cit., 78-80.

37. Ibid., 52.

38. Roberto Michels, Political Parties (London, n.d.), 395.

39. Ibid., 407. The whole of Chapter 11 of Part VI of this work is of considerable interest.

40. 'Le Syndicalisme et le Socialisme en Allemagne,' in Syndicalisme et Socialisme (Paris, 1908),

25. Speeches made at the conference held in Paris on 3 April 1907.

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41. Arturo Labriola, 'Le Syndicalisme et le Socialisme en Italie,' in ibid., II and 9-13.

42. Hubert Lagardelle, 'Le Syndicalismc et le Socialisme en France,' in ibid., 36.

43. Victor Griffuelhes, LAction Syndicaliste (Paris, 1908), 37.

44. Emile Pouget, La Confidiration G@rale du Travail (Paris, 1909), 35-36.

45. Michels, op. cit., 369.

46. 'Diclaration,' in Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, I Uanuary 1912), 1.

47. Santarelli, op. cit., 50.

48. Ibid., 52-53.

49. Lyttelton, op. cit., 98.

50. Ibid., 211-12.

51. Hendrik de Man, Manifesto to the Members of the POB, quoted in Peter Dodge, Beyond
Marxism: The Faith and Works ofhendrik de Man (The Hague, 1966), 197.

52. Marcel Diat, 'L'Evolution du Socialisme,' in LEffort, (25 September 1940).

53. Mussolini, 'Political and Social Doctrine,' 26.

54. Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions asked and answered (London, 1936), Question 2.

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 373

55. 'What a Legionary believes,' Romanian Fascist Catechism, in Weber, op. cit., 169.

56. Paul Marion, Programme du Parti Populaire Francois (Paris, 1938), 83.

57. L&n Degrelle, Rivolution des ames (Paris, 1938). The term counter-civilization is used in very
much the same sense as Annie Kriegel uses the term counter-society in her wen-known works on
French communism; cf. particularly Les Communistes Franfais: essais dethnographie politique
(Paris, 1970).

58. Georges Valois, Fascisme (Paris, 1927), 15-16.

59. Thierry Maulnier, Mythes Soc@tes (Paris, 1936), 169-70.

60. Michael Hurst, 'What is Fascism,' 184, For the English fascist James Strachey Barnes, fascism
was a result of the failure of'liberal statecraft' (Barnes, The Universal Aspects offascism [London,
1928], 63.)

61. Mussolini, 'Political and Social Doctrine,' 26.

62. Mussolini, 'Fundamental Ideas,' 8.

63. Gentile, 'The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,' 293.

64. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Hugh Thomas (Lon- don.
1972), 65.

65 . Mussolini, 'Political and Social Doctrine,' 21.

66 .Marcel D@at, Pens;e allemande et P-iefranqaise (Paris, 1944), 63 and 99.

67. Pieffe Drieu La Rochelle, Chronique PoUtique 1934-1942 (Paris, 1943), 161. Twentyfive years
earlier, in 1912, Barris had said, 'The eighteenth century, which would like to go on living, is in its
last throes. We have done with asking its advice on how to run our lives.' (Speeches in the
Chamber, June 1912).

68. Mussolini, Fascism, Appendix, 40 (speech before the New National Directory of the Party, 7

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April 1926).

69. James Strachey Barnes, The Universal Aspects of Fascism (London, 1928), 164.

70. Degrelle, op. cit., 145.

71. Mosley, The Greater Britain, 152.

72. @at, Marquet, Montagnon, Nio-SociaUsme, Ordre, Autoriti, Nation (Paris, 1933), 43.

73. Degrelle, op. cit., 151.

74. Drieu La Rochelle, Gilles, 179. 340-42, 384, 455.

75. Georges Valois, Rivolution Nationale (Paris, 1924), 97 and 151.

76. Degrelle, op. cit., 153-54.

77. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 57.

78. lose Streel, Ce quitfaut penser de Rex (Brussells, n.d.), 106-108.

79. Gentile, 'The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,' 291-92.

80. Mussolini, Fascism, Appendix, 9, 19, 36. Cf. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 137: 'Life is a militia and
must be lived in a spirit purified by service and sacrifice.' Cf. also Degrelle, op. cit., 6: 'The easy
life is the death of idealism. Nothing revives it better than the lash of the hard life.'

81. Degrelle, op. cit., 2-3.

82. Mussolini, Fascism, Appendix, 19 and 36.

83. Marion, op. cit., 99 and 104.

84. Hendrik de Man,'Manifesto to the Member-softhe POB,July 1940,'in Dodge, op. cit., 197.

85. Quoted in Michile Cotta, La Collaboration 1940-1944 (Paris, 1964), 128.

86. Mosley, The Greater B?*ain, op. cit., 159.

87. Degrelle, op. cit., 3-4.

88. Mussolini, 'Political and Social Doctrine,' 19.

89. Drieu La Rochelle, Chronique PoUtique, 69.

90. Drieu La Rochelle, quoted in Winock, op. cit., 44.

91. 'The Futurist Manifesto.' in Le Fikaro, February 1909. 374 ZEEV STERNHELL

92. Soury, Campagne Nationaliste, 185.

93. Drieu La Rochelle, 'Verra-t-on un Patti national et socialists?' La Lutte desjeunes, no. · (4
March 1934).

94. 'The Futurist Manifesto.'

95. Cf. Marion, op. cit., 85-95.

96. [bid., 91-94.

97. DTiCu La Rochelle, Chronique PoUtique, 69.

98. Drieu La Rochelle, Avec Dariot (Paris, 1937), 12.

99. Cf. for instance Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 52-54: 'We would be just another party if we were to
formulate a programme of concrete solutions'; or Streel, op. cit., 105.

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100. Mussolini, 'Fundamental Ideas,' in Fascism, 13.

101. Mosley, The Greater Britain, 159.

102. Mussolini, Faicism, Appendix, 38.

103. Streel, op. cit., 105.

104. Drieu La Rochelle, Chronique PoUtique, 15-16.

105. Valois, Rivolution Nafionale, 13.

106. Ibid.

107. Drieu's 'Gilles' never ceased to dream of a union of the 'valiant,' of all the rebels, of young
bourgeois and young workers who together would overthrow the 'freemason dictatorship' (Gillei,
422). For Paul Marion, this alliance would be one of 'all those who have had enough, all those who
want a change' (Programme of the PPF, I 10).

108. Cf. Ruggero Zaiigrandi, Le long voyage a travers le fascisme (French trans. Paris, 1963). Cf.
also George L. Mosse, 'The Genesis of Fascism,' in Journal of Contemporary History, I, 1 (1966),
17.

109. Degrelle, Rgvolution des imes, 146.

110. Cf. Winock, op. cit.. 40.

111. Nat, Pensie allemande et pens@efranqaise, 97-98.

112. Quoted in Weber, op. cit., 41-42.

113. Quoted in Gregor, op. cit. 213.

114. Streel, op. cit.

115. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 49.

116. Gregor, op. cit., 212-13.

117. Ibid., 214.

118. Mussolini, 'Fundamental Ideas,' 9-10; cf. Marion, op. cit., 98: 'A man is not just a certain
number of pounds of organic matter. He is someone who has a long ancestry, a long history,
comes from a particular region, has a particular job.'

119. Gregor, op. cit., 220.

120. Mussolini, 'Fundamental Ideas,' 10-11, cf. also 39.

121. Gentile, 'The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,' 303.

122. Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions, 9 and The Greater Bt*ain, 22.

123. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 55.

124. Streel, op. cit., 113.

125. Nat, Pensie allemande et petugefranfaise, 84-85.

126. A. Rocco, 'The Political Doctrine of Fascism,' in C. Cohen, ed., Communism, Fas- cism and
Democracy (New York, 1964), 341-42; cf. also Mussolini, 'Political and Social Doctrine,' 22-23.

127. Gentile, 'Philosophic Basis of Fascism.' 303-04.

128. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 133.

129. Marion, op. cit., 94.

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130. Nat, Pensie allemande et peruse franqaise, II 0.

131. Marion, op. cit., 93-94.

132. Nat, Pen5ie allemande et pensie franfaise, II 0. Cf. also Ren6 R@mond, Introduc- tion a
1'histoire de notre temps: le XX;me siicle de 1914 a nosjours (Paris, 1974), 126-27.

FASCIST IDEOLOGY 375

133. George L. Mosse, 'The Poet and the Exercise of Political Power: Gabriele d'Annunzio,'
Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 22 (1973), 32-33.

134. Eugen Weber, in Introduction to Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, The European Right: A
Historical Profile (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), 17-18.

135. Streel, op. cit., 106.

136. Quoted in Gregor, op. cit., 225.

137. Cf. Weber, Varieties offascism, 37-38.

138. Cf. J. L. Talmon, Destin disrael: l'Unique et luniversel (Paris, 1967), 75-81.

139. In 1933, Hendrick de Man's'Plan du Travail'was adopted, on his recommendation, by an

overwhelming majority of the Belgian Workers Party. The 'Planing' movement subsequently
developed rapidly throughout Western Europe.

140. Hendrick de Man, 'Clarification,'in Le Peupk, 24 September 1933, quoted in Dodge, op. cit.,
143.

141. Dodge, op. cit., 178.

142. Marcel D@at, Per5pectims Social4tes (Paris, 1930) especially 43-85. D4at himself quotes
Hendrick de Man, Au-deli du Marxi5me, 45, 63.

143. Dodge, op. cit., 144.

144. Ibid., 160.

145. Cf. the address at Charleroi on May Day 1941 which served as the prototype of the speeches
that he subsequently gave to various gatherings within the Labour Movement, Travaille, 6 May
1941, in Dodge, op. cit., 202.

146. D6at, Nio-Socialisme, 90.

147. Adrien Marquet, Nio-Socialisme, 57, 60. It was at this point in Marquet's speech, 'Are not
thenatiorisin the processofmovingontotheplaneofa newreality?'that Blum made his famous'l can
tell you, I am appalled.'

148. Gregor, op. cit., 89.

149. I)iat, reply to an inquiry by the weekly Monde, I February 1930, 10.

150. @at. Nio-Soc@isme, 76, cf. 25-26 and 74 (Montagnon).

151. Drieu La Rochelle, 'Sous Doumergue,' in La Lutte desjeunes (7 May 1934).

152. Streel, op. cit., 143.

153. Cf. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 55, 62; Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions, Question S; Denis,
Principes Rexistes, 17.

154. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 53-64. At the same moment, at the other end of Europe, Codreanu
was offering a doctrine which neither clashed with the nationalistic prejudices of workers and
peasants nor aroused their suspicion of city slickers out to use and discard them (Eugen Weber,
'The Men of Archangel,' in Journal of Contemporary History, I, I [ 1 966], 118-19).

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155. Michael Hurst, 'What is Fascism,' 168-69.

156. Mosley, The Greater Bt*ain, 18-19.

157. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 180.

158. Denis, Princ:)5es Rexistes, 28.

159. Weber, Va@ties offascism, 50-51.

160. EWat-Marquet-Montapon, Nio-SociaUsme, 23-24, 32-33, 53-54, 74, 95-98.

161. Dodge, op. cit., 180; cf. also 182-92.

162. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 65.

163. Mosley, The Greater Britain, 20.

164. The title of Nio-Social4me: Ordre, Autoriti, Nation.

165. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 133.

166. Mussolini, Fascitm, Appendix, 40.

167. Mussolini, 'Political and Social Doctrine,' 27.

168. Mussolini, Fascism, Appendix, 38-39.

169. Mussolini, 'Fundamental Ideas,' 11.

170. Ibid., 12; Gentile, 'The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,' 302.

376 ZEEV STERNHELL

171. Bames, op. cit., 59-60.

172. Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions, Question 35

173. Mosley, The Greater Britain, 27.

174. Primo de Rivera, op. cit., 178.

175. Weber, 'The Men of the Archangel,' 104.

176. Bames, op. cit., 14-15; cf. also a characteristic passage by Robert Brasillach: We do not have
much in common, in spite of appearances, Mr Conservative. We are defending a few truths in the
way we think they ought to be defended, that is violently, passionately, disrespectfully, with our
lives. At times, this has been of some value to us, Mr Conservative. It may be to you, one day. At
moments when you think you can do without those compromising bodyguards, you prefer to talk
of other things and look at them from a long way away. They are running their own risks, aren't
they? That is their affair, not yours. It was you that said it, Mr Conservative. Their own risks. Not
yours. We are not mercenaries. We are not the shocktroops of the bien-pensants. We are not the
SA of conservatism.' (To a conservative, je partout, 23 February 1940).

177. Eugen Weber, 'The Men of Archangel,' 124-25.

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