The Invention of Fascism

Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain. The other major currents of modern Western political culture—conservatism, liberalism, socialism—all reached mature form between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. Fascism, however, was still unimagined as late as the 1890s. Friedrich Engels, writing a preface in 1895 for his new edition of Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, clearly believed that wider suffrage would inexorably deliver more votes to the Left. Both time and numbers, Engels was certain, were on the socialists’ side. “If it [the growing socialist vote] continues in this fashion, by the end of this [nineteenth] century we [socialists] shall conquer the major part of the middle strata of society, petty bourgeois and peasants, and grow into the decisive power in the land.” Conservatives, Engels wrote, had noticed that legality was working against them. By contrast, “we [socialists], under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal. There is nothing for them [the conservatives] to do but break through this legality themselves.”¹ While Engels thus expected that the Left’s enemies would launch a preemptive attack, he could not imagine in 1895 that this might win mass approval. Dictatorship against the Left amidst popular enthusiasm—that was the unexpected combination that fascism would manage to put together one short generation later.

There were only a few glimmers of premonition. One came from an inquisitive young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville. Although Tocqueville found much to admire on his visit to the United States in 1831, he was troubled by the majority’s power in a democracy to impose conformity by social pressure, in the absence of an independent social elite.

The kind of oppression with which democratic peoples are threatened will resemble nothing that had preceded it in the world; our contemporaries would not find its image in their memories. I myself seek in vain an expression that exactly reproduces the idea that I form of it for myself and that contains it; the old words despotism and tyranny are not suitable. The thing is new, therefore I must try to define it, since I can not name it.²

Another premonition came at the eleventh hour from a French engineer turned social commentator, Georges Sorel. In 1908 Sorel criticized Marx for failing to notice that “a revolution accomplished in times of decadence” could “take a return to the past or even social conservation as its ideal.”³

The word fascism⁴ has its root in the Italian fascio, literally a bundle or sheaf. More remotely, the word recalled the Latin fasces, an axe encased in a bundle of rods that was carried before the magistrates in Roman public processions to signify the authority and unity of the state. Before 1914, the symbolism of the Roman fasces was usually appropriated by the Left. Marianne, symbol of the French Republic, was often portrayed in the nineteenth century carrying the fasces to represent the force of Republican solidarity against her aristocratic and clerical enemies.⁵ Fasces are prominently displayed on Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theater (1664–69) at Oxford University. They appeared on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington (1922) and on the United States quarter minted in 1932.⁶

Italian revolutionaries used the term fascio in the late nineteenth century to evoke the solidarity of committed militants. The peasants who rose against their landlords in Sicily in 1893–94 called themselves the Fasci Siciliani. When in late 1914 a group of left-wing nationalists, soon joined by the socialist outcast Benito Mussolini,⁷ sought to bring Italy into World War I on the Allied side, they chose a name designed to communicate both the fervor and the solidarity of their campaign: the Fascio Rivoluzionario d’Azione Interventista (Revolutionary League for Interventionist Action).⁸ At the end of World War I, Mussolini coined the term fascismo to describe the mood of the little band of nationalist ex-soldiers and pro-war syndicalist⁹ revolutionaries that he was gathering around himself. Even then, he had no monopoly on the word fascio, which remained in general use for activist groups of various political hues.¹⁰

Officially, Fascism was born in Milan on Sunday, March 23, 1919. That morning, somewhat more than a hundred persons,¹¹ including war veterans, syndicalists who had supported the war, and Futurist¹² intellectuals, plus some reporters and the merely curious, gathered in the meeting room of the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance, overlooking the Piazza San Sepolcro, to “declare war against socialism … because it has opposed nationalism.”¹³ Now Mussolini called his movement the Fasci di Combattimento, which means, very approximately, “fraternities of combat.”

The Fascist program, issued two months later, was a curious mixture of veterans’ patriotism and radical social experiment, a kind of “national socialism.” On the national side, it called for fulfilling Italian expansionist aims in the Balkans and around the Mediterranean that had just been frustrated a few months before at the Paris Peace Conference. On the radical side, it proposed women’s suffrage and the vote at eighteen, abolition of the upper house, convocation of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for Italy (presumably without the monarchy), the eight-hour workday, worker participation in “the technical management of industry,” the “partial expropriation of all kinds of wealth” by a heavy and progressive tax on capital, the seizure of certain Church properties, and the confiscation of 85 percent of war profits.¹⁴

Mussolini’s movement was not limited to nationalism and assaults on property. It boiled with the readiness for violent action, anti-intellectualism, rejection of compromise, and contempt for established society that marked the three groups who made up the bulk of his first followers—demobilized war veterans, pro-war syndicalists, and Futurist intellectuals.

Mussolini—himself an ex-soldier who boasted of his forty wounds¹⁵—hoped to make his political comeback as a veterans’ leader. A solid core of his followers came from the Arditi—select commando units hardened by front-line experience who felt entitled to rule the country they had saved.

The pro-war syndicalists had been Mussolini’s closest associates during the struggle to bring Italy into the war in May 1915. Syndicalism was the main working-class rival to parliamentary socialism in Europe before World War I. While most socialists by 1914 were organized in electoral parties that competed for parliamentary seats, syndicalists were rooted in trade unions (“syndicates”). Whereas parliamentary socialists worked for piecemeal reforms while awaiting the historical development that Marxists predicted would make capitalism obsolete, syndicalists, scornful of the compromises required by parliamentary action and of most socialists’ commitment to gradual evolution, believed they could overthrow capitalism by the force of their will. By concentrating on their ultimate revolutionary goal rather than on each trade’s petty workplace concerns, they could form “one big union” and bring down capitalism all at once in one momentous general strike. After capitalism’s collapse, workers organized within their “syndicates” would remain as the sole functioning units of production and exchange in a free collectivist society.¹⁶ By May 1915, while all Italian parliamentary socialists and most Italian syndicalists adamantly opposed Italian entry into World War I, a few ardent spirits around Mussolini concluded that warfare would drive Italy further toward social revolution than would remaining neutral. They had become “national syndicalists.”¹⁷

The third component of Mussolini’s first Fascists were young antibourgeois intellectuals and aesthetes such as the Futurists. The Futurists were a loose association of artists and writers who espoused Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifestos,” the first of which had been published in Paris in 1909. Marinetti’s followers dismissed the cultural legacy of the past collected in museums and libraries and praised the liberating and vitalizing qualities of speed and violence. “A racing automobile … is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”¹⁸ They had been eager for the adventure of war in 1914, and they continued to follow Mussolini in 1919.

Another intellectual current that provided recruits for Mussolini consisted of critics of the tawdry compromises of Italian parliamentarism who dreamed of a “second Risorgimento.”¹⁹ The first Risorgimento, in their view, had left Italy in the hands of a narrow oligarchy whose soulless political games were inappropriate for Italian cultural prestige and Great Power ambitions. It was time to complete the “national revolution” and give Italy a “new state” capable of summoning up the energetic leadership, motivated citizenry, and united national community that Italy deserved. Many of these advocates of a “second Risorgimento” wrote for the Florentine cultural review La Voce, to which the young Mussolini subscribed and with whose editor, Giuseppe Prezzolini, he corresponded. After the war, their approval gave respectability to the rising Fascist movement and spread acceptance of a radical “national revolution” among middle-class nationalists.²⁰

On April 15,1919, soon after Fascism’s founding meeting at the Piazza San Sepolcro, a band of Mussolini’s friends including Marinetti and the chief of the Arditi, Ferruccio Vecchi, invaded the Milan offices of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti, of which Mussolini himself had been editor from 1912 to 1914. They smashed its presses and equipment. Four people were killed, including one soldier, and thirty-nine were injured.²¹ Italian Fascism thus burst into history with an act of violence against both socialism and bourgeois legality, in the name of a claimed higher national good.

Fascism received its name and took its first steps in Italy. Mussolini was no solitary adventurer, however. Similar movements were springing up in postwar Europe independently of Mussolini’s Fascism but expressing the same mixture of nationalism, anti-capitalism, voluntarism, and active violence against both bourgeois and socialist enemies. (I will deal more fully with the wide array of early fascisms in chapter 2.)

A little more than three years after the Piazza San Sepolcro meeting, Mussolini’s Fascist Party was in power in Italy. Eleven years after that, another fascist party took power in Germany.²² Soon Europe and even other parts of the world were resounding with aspiring dictators and marching squads who thought they were on the same path to power as Mussolini and Hitler. In another six years Hitler had plunged Europe into a war that ultimately engulfed much of the world. Before it was over, mankind had suffered not only the habitual barbarities of war, raised to unprecedented scale by technology and passion, but also an effort to extinguish by industrialized slaughter an entire people, their culture, and their very memory.

Contemplating Mussolini, ex-schoolteacher, bohemian minor novelist, and erstwhile socialist orator and editor, and Hitler, former corporal and failed art student, along with their shirted ruffians, in charge of European Great Powers, many educated and sensitive people supposed simply that “a horde of barbarians … have pitched their tents within the nation.”²³ The novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary on March 27, 1933, two months after Hitler had become German chancellor, that he had witnessed a revolution of a kind never seen before, “without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice.” The “common scum” had taken power, “accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses.”²⁴

In internal exile in Naples, the eminent liberal Italian philosopher-historian Benedetto Croce observed disdainfully that Mussolini had added a fourth type of misgovernment—“onagrocracy,” government by braying asses—to Aristotle’s famous three: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.²⁵ Croce later concluded that Fascism was only a “parenthesis” in Italian history, the temporary result of moral decline magnified by the dislocations of World War I. The liberal German historian Friedrich Meinecke judged, similarly, after Hitler had brought Germany to catastrophe, that Nazism had emerged from a moral degeneration in which ignorant and shallow technicians, Machtmenschen, supported by a mass society thirsty for excitement, had triumphed over balanced and rational humanitarians, Kulturmenschen.²⁶ The way out, both men thought, was to restore a society where “the best” ruled.

Other observers knew, from the beginning, that something deeper was at stake than the happenstance ascent of thugs, and something more precise than the decay of the old moral order. Marxists, fascism’s first victims, were accustomed to thinking of history as the grand unfolding of deep processes through the clash of economic systems. Even before Mussolini had fully consolidated his power, they were ready with a definition of fascism as “the instrument of the big bourgeoisie for fighting the proletariat when the legal means available to the state proved insufficient to subdue them.”²⁷ In Stalin’s day, this hardened into an iron-bound formula that became communist orthodoxy for half a century: “Fascism is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”²⁸

Though many more interpretations and definitions were to be proposed over the years, even now, more than eighty years after the San Sepolcro meeting, none of them has obtained universal assent as a completely satisfactory account of a phenomenon that seemed to come from nowhere, took on multiple and varied forms, exalted hatred and violence in the name of national prowess, and yet managed to appeal to prestigious and well-educated statesmen, entrepreneurs, professionals, artists, and intellectuals. I will reconsider those many interpretations in chapter 8, after we have fuller knowledge of our subject.

Fascist movements varied so conspicuously from one national setting to another, moreover, that some even doubt that the term fascism has any meaning other than as a smear word. The epithet has been so loosely used that practically everyone who either holds or shakes authority has been someone’s fascist. Perhaps, the doubters suggest, it would be better just to scrap the term.²⁹

It is the purpose of this book to propose a fresh way of looking at fascism that may rescue the concept for meaningful use and account more fully for its attractiveness, its complex historical path, and its ultimate horror.

Images of Fascism

Everyone is sure they know what fascism is. The most self-consciously visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid primary images: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic crowd; disciplined ranks of marching youths; colored-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority; surprise invasions at dawn; and fit soldiers parading through a captured city.

Examined more closely, however, some of these familiar images induce facile errors. The image of the all-powerful dictator personalizes fascism, and creates the false impression that we can understand it fully by scrutinizing the leader alone. This image, whose power lingers today, is the last triumph of fascist propagandists. It offers an alibi to nations that approved or tolerated fascist leaders, and diverts attention from the persons, groups, and institutions who helped him. We need a subtler model of fascism that explores the interaction between Leader and Nation, and between Party and civil society.

The image of chanting crowds feeds the assumption that some European peoples were by nature predisposed to fascism, and responded enthusiastically to it because of national character. The corollary of this image is a condescending belief that the defective history of certain nations spawned fascism.³⁰ This turns easily into an alibi for onlooker nations: It couldn’t happen here. Beyond these familiar images, on closer inspection, fascist reality becomes more complicated still. For example, the regime that invented the word fascism—Mussolini’s Italy—showed few signs of anti-Semitism until sixteen years after coming to power. Indeed, Mussolini had Jewish backers among the industrialists and big landowners who helped finance him at the beginning.³¹ He had close Jewish cronies such as the Fascist Party militant Aldo Finzi, and a Jewish mistress, the writer Margherita Sarfatti, author of his first authorized biography.³² About two hundred Jews took part in the March on Rome.³³ By contrast, Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist French government at Vichy(1940–44) was aggressively anti-Semitic, while on other scores it is better considered authoritarian³⁴ than fascist, as we will see in chapter 8. So it becomes problematical to consider an exacerbated anti-Semitism the essence of fascism.³⁵

Another supposed essential character of fascism is its anticapitalist, antibourgeois animus. Early fascist movements flaunted their contempt for bourgeois values and for those who wanted only “to earn money, money, filthy money.”³⁶ They attacked “international finance capitalism” almost as loudly as they attacked socialists. They even promised to expropriate department-store owners in favor of patriotic artisans, and large landowners in favor of peasants.³⁷

Whenever fascist parties acquired power, however, they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats. By contrast, they enforced with the utmost violence and thoroughness their threats against socialism. Street fights over turf with young communists were among their most powerful propaganda images.³⁸ Once in power, fascist regimes banned strikes, dissolved independent labor unions, lowered wage earners’ purchasing power, and showered money on armaments industries, to the immense satisfaction of employers. Faced with these conflicts between words and actions concerning capitalism, scholars have drawn opposite conclusions. Some, taking the words literally, consider fascism a form of radical anticapitalism.³⁹ Others, and not only Marxists, take the diametrically opposite position that fascists came to the aid of capitalism in trouble, and propped up by emergency means the existing system of property distribution and social hierarchy.

This book takes the position that what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said. What they said cannot be ignored, of course, for it helps explain their appeal. Even at its most radical, however, fascists’ anticapitalist rhetoric was selective. While they denounced speculative international finance (along with all other forms of internationalism, cosmopolitanism, or globalization—capitalist as well as socialist), they respected the property of national producers, who were to form the social base of the reinvigorated nation.⁴⁰ When they denounced the bourgeoisie, it was for being too flabby and individualistic to make a nation strong, not for robbing workers of the value they added. What they criticized in capitalism was not its exploitation but its materialism, its indifference to the nation, its inability to stir souls.⁴¹ More deeply, fascists rejected the notion that economic forces are the prime movers of history. For fascists, the dysfunctional capitalism of the interwar period did not need fundamental reordering; its ills could be cured simply by applying sufficient political will to the creation of full employment and productivity.⁴² Once in power, fascist regimes confiscated property only from political opponents, foreigners, or Jews. None altered the social hierarchy, except to catapult a few adventurers into high places. At most, they replaced market forces with state economic management, but, in the trough of the Great Depression, most businessmen initially approved of that. If fascism was “revolutionary,” it was so in a special sense, far removed from the word’s meaning as usually understood from 1789 to 1917, as a profound overturning of the social order and the redistribution of social, political, and economic power.

Yet fascism in power did carry out some changes profound enough to be called “revolutionary,” if we are willing to give that word a different meaning. At its fullest development, fascism redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had once been untouchably private. It changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity. It reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity, so that an individual had no rights outside community interest. It expanded the powers of the executive—party and state—in a bid for total control. Finally, it unleashed aggressive emotions hitherto known in Europe only during war or social revolution. These transformations often set fascists into conflict with conservatives rooted in families, churches, social rank, and property. We will see below⁴³ when we examine more fully the complex relationship of complicity, accommodation, and occasional opposition that linked capitalists with fascists in power, that one cannot consider fascism simply a more muscular form of conservatism, even if it maintained the existing regime of property and social hierarchy.

It becomes hard to locate fascism on the familiar Right-Left political map. Did the fascist leaders themselves know, at the beginning? When Mussolini called his friends together at the Piazza San Sepolcro in March 1919, it was not entirely clear whether he was trying to compete with his former colleagues in the Italian Socialist Party on the Left or to attack them frontally from the Right. Where on the Italian political spectrum would what he still sometimes called “national syndicalism” find its place?⁴⁴ Indeed, fascism always retained that ambiguity.

Fascists were clear about one thing, however: they were not in the middle. Fascist contempt for the soft, complacent, compromising center was absolute (though fascist parties actively seeking power would need to make common cause with centrist elites, against their common enemies on the Left). Their scorn for liberal parliamentarianism and for slack bourgeois individualism, and the radical tone of their remedies for national weakness and disunity, always jarred with their readiness to conclude practical alliances with national conservatives against the internationalist Left. The ultimate fascist response to the Right-Left political map was to claim that they had made it obsolete by being “neither Right nor Left,” transcending such outdated divisions and uniting the nation.

Another contradiction between fascist rhetoric and fascist practice concerns modernization: the shift from rural to urban, from handwork to industry, the division of labor, secular societies, and technological rationalization. Fascists often cursed faceless cities and materialist secularism, and exalted an agrarian utopia free from the rootlessness, conflict, and immorality of urban life.⁴⁵ Yet fascist leaders adored their fast cars⁴⁶ and planes,⁴⁷ and spread their message by dazzlingly up-to-date techniques of propaganda and stagecraft. Once in power, they forced the industrial pace in order to rearm. Thus it becomes difficult to posit the essence of fascism solely in either antimodernist reaction⁴⁸ or in modernizing dictatorship.⁴⁹

The solution is best found not in setting up binary opposites but in following the relationship between modernity and fascism through its complex historical course. That relationship differed dramatically at different stages. Early fascist movements exploited the protests of the victims of rapid industrialization and globalization—modernization’s losers, using, to be sure, the most modern styles and techniques of propaganda.⁵⁰ At the same time, an astonishing number of “modernist” intellectuals found fascism’s combination of a high-tech “look” with attacks upon modern society, along with its scorn for conventional bourgeois taste, pleasing aesthetically and emotionally.⁵¹ Later, in power, fascist regimes chose resolutely the path of industrial concentration and productivity, superhighways⁵² and weaponry. The urge to rearm and wage expansive war quickly swept aside the dream of a paradise for the struggling artisans and peasants who had formed the early movements’ first mass base, leaving only a few thatched youth hostels, Hitler’s weekend Lederhosen, and photographs of Mussolini bare-chested for the grain harvest as tokens of the initial rural nostalgia.⁵³

It is only in following the entire fascist itinerary that we can resolve the ambiguous relationship between fascism and modernity that so troubles the seekers for a single fascist essence. Some individuals followed the itinerary in their own careers. Albert Speer joined the party in January 1931 as the disciple of Heinrich Tessenow at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Institute of Technology, who was “not modern but in a certain sense more modern than the others” in his belief in simple, organic architecture.⁵⁴ Speer went on after 1933 to become the designer of monumental cityscapes for Hitler, and wound up in 1942–45 marshalling German economic might as minister of armaments. But it was an alternative modernity that Fascist regimes sought: a technically advanced society in which modernity’s strains and divisions had been smothered by fascism’s powers of integration and control.⁵⁵

Many have seen in fascism’s ultimate wartime radicalization—the murder of the Jews—a denial of modern rationality and a return to barbarism.⁵⁶ But it is plausible to perceive it as fascism’s alternate modernity run amok. Nazi “racial cleansing” built upon the purifying impulses of twentieth-century medicine and public health, the eugenicists’ eagerness to weed out the unfit and the unclean,⁵⁷ an aesthetic of the perfect body, and a scientific rationality that rejected moral criteria as irrelevant.⁵⁸ It has been suggested that old-fashioned pogroms would have taken two hundred years to complete what advanced technology wrought in three years of Holocaust.⁵⁹

The complex relationship between fascism and modernity cannot be resolved all at once, and with a simple yes or no. It has to be developed in the unfolding story of fascism’s acquisition and exercise of power.⁶⁰ The most satisfactory work on this matter shows how antimodernizing resentments were channeled and neutralized, step by step, in specific legislation, by more powerful pragmatic and intellectual forces working in the service of an alternate modernity.⁶¹ We need to study the whole fascist itinerary—how fascism worked out its practice in action—before we can understand it clearly.

A further problem with conventional images of fascism is that they focus on moments of high drama in the fascist itinerary—the March on Rome, the Reichstag fire, Kristallnacht—and omit the solid texture of everyday experience and the complicity of ordinary people in the establishment and functioning of fascist regimes. Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people. Fascists could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites—heads of state, party leaders, high government officials—many of whom felt a fastidious distaste for the crudities of fascist militants. The excesses of fascism in power also required wide complicity among members of the establishment: magistrates, police officials, army officers, businessmen. To understand fully how fascist regimes worked, we must dig down to the level of ordinary people and examine the banal choices they made in their daily routines. Making such choices meant accepting an apparent lesser evil or averting the eyes from some excesses that seemed not too damaging in the short term, even acceptable piecemeal, but which cumulatively added up to monstrous end results.

For example, consider the reactions of ordinary Germans to the events of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). During the night of November 9, 1938, incited by an incendiary speech to party leaders by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and in reaction to the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew enraged by the recent expulsion of his immigrant parents from Germany, Nazi Party militants rampaged through the Jewish communities of Germany. They burned hundreds of synagogues, smashed more than seven thousand Jewish shops, deported about twenty thousand Jews to concentration camps, and killed ninety-one Jews outright. A fine of a billion marks was imposed collectively on the Jews of Germany, and their insurance reimbursements were confiscated by the German state, in order to compensate for incidental damage done to non-Jewish property. It is clear now that many ordinary Germans were offended by the brutalities carried out under their windows.⁶² Yet their widespread distaste was transitory and without lasting effect. Why were there no lawsuits or judicial or administrative enquiries, for example? If we can understand the failure of the judicial system, or of religious or civilian authorities, or of citizen opposition to put any brakes on Hitler in November 1938, we have begun to understand the wider circles of individual and institutional acquiescence within which a militant minority was able to free itself sufficiently from constraints to be able to carry out genocide in a heretofore sophisticated and civilized country.

These are difficult questions to answer, and they take us a long way beyond simple images of a solitary leader and cheering crowds. They also reveal some of the difficulties raised by the search for a single essence, the famous “fascist minimum,” which is supposed to allow us to formulate a neat general definition of fascism.

Definitions are inherently limiting. They frame a static picture of something that is better perceived in movement, and they portray as “frozen ‘statuary’ ”⁶³ something that is better understood as a process. They succumb all too often to the intellectual’s temptation to take programmatic statements as constitutive, and to identify fascism more with what it said than with what it did. The quest for the perfect definition, by reducing fascism to one ever more finely honed phrase, seems to shut off questions about the origins and course of fascist development rather than open them up. It is a bit like observing Madame Tussaud’s waxworks instead of living people, or birds mounted in a glass case instead of alive in their habitat.

Of course, fascism should not be discussed without reaching, at some point in the debate, an agreed concept of what it is. This book proposes to arrive at such a concept at the end of its quest, rather than to start with one. I propose to set aside for now the imperative of definition, and examine in action a core set of movements and regimes generally accepted as fascist (with Italy and Germany predominant in our sample). I will examine their historical trajectory as a series of processes working themselves out over time, instead of as the expression of some fixed essence.⁶⁴ We start with a strategy instead of a definition.