Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945

Philip Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134740284
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 surveys the phenomenon which is still the object of interest and debate over fifty years after its defeat in the Second World War. It introduces the recent scholarship and continuing debates on the nature of fascism as well as the often contentious contributions by foreign historians and political scientists.

From the pre-First World War intellectual origins of Fascism to its demise in 1945, this book examines:

* the two 'waves' of fascism - in the immediate post-war period and in the late 1920s and early 1930s
* whether the European crisis created by the Treaty of Versailles allowed fascism to take root
* why fascism came to power in Italy and Germany, but not anywhere else in Europe
* fascism's own claim to be an international and internationalist movement
* the idea of 'totalitarianism' as the most useful and appropriate way of analyzing the fascist regimes.

1The roots of fascism

Some contemporary observers and historians saw fascism as a kind of bolt from the blue, the extraordinary product or outcome of the impacts of the First World War on European society and politics. The most famous, or notorious, one-word definition of the first fascism in Italy, as a ‘parenthesis’, came from one of Italy's most influential intellectuals, Benedetto Croce.¹ He might have used the word ‘aberration’ in his deliberate attempt to minimise the importance of fascism in Italy and deny that it belonged to Italy's history from the political and territorial unification of the country in 1870. The ‘parenthesis’ view literally puts the fascist period in Italy into brackets, separating it off from what came before and what came after. So, under its liberal political leadership between 1870 and 1915, and particularly under Giovanni Giolitti, Prime Minister of various governments in the early 1900s, Italy was developing into a modern industrial nation with democratic parliamentary institutions, keeping, in other words, to the ‘normal’ pattern of development of West European countries. This development was brutally interrupted by the coming to power of Fascism, the consequence of the impact of the First World War on Italian and European society. Normal service was resumed with the military defeat of Fascism by 1945, when the country was once again enabled to take the road of parliamentary democracy. For Croce and others, then, the Great War was the break in continuity of the political development of Italy and Europe.

Other historians, and this is now the more consensual view, see the origins of fascism in cultural and intellectual changes which occurred in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe, before the First World War, and trace a basic continuity in ideas from the pre-war period, through the war and into the inter-war years. The French historian of ideas, Zeev Sternhell, in his important book on the pre-war ‘revolutionary right’ in France (Sternhell 1978), argues that there was a fully fledged fascist ideology in existence in France by 1914. His view that fascism had a history before it had a name was then trumped by his even more controversial study of fascism in France in the inter-war period (Sternhell 1986). This book, which landed Sternhell in the law courts, saw the ‘fascist’ ideas of the 1890s being replicated in the France of the 1930s, and permeating French inter-war political and intellectual life to such an extent that many intellectuals who went nowhere near actual fascist movements were, nevertheless, because of the ‘fascist’ ideas they professed, ‘fascists’ without realising or admitting it, a view which virtually confined anti-fascism to the orthodox Marxist and socialist left.

This chapter will argue that an understanding of the origins of fascism can come from a synthesis of these two approaches.

The turn-of-the-century ‘counter-culture’

The new ideas circulating among the intellectual and cultural avant-garde in the Europe of the 1890s and early 1900s were a reaction and challenge to what was and remained the dominant and widespread assumption of and belief in ‘progress’. Economically and socially, ‘progress’ in pre-war Europe meant the spread of industrial production and urban living, holding out the prospect of material prosperity for all, as the appliance of science, specifically electricity as an energy source, expanded both industrial manufacturing and its transportation while literally bringing light and communication to an ever widening range of people in their public and private activities. Culturally, ‘progress’ was science, and the application of reason, the scientific method, not only to material production but also to the management of society. The years before the war marked the emergence of modern social scientific studies in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology and criminology. The accepted mode of analysis across the natural and human sciences was positivism which, working from the assumption that everything was knowable through the use of reason, rejected metaphysical speculation and took as true and real only those things which could be tested and proved empirically: ‘facts’ before ‘faith’. Politically, ‘progress’ was the advance of political democracy and representative parliamentary government, the successful working models of which were the French Third Republic and the British ‘constitutional’ monarchy.

The major works of the two key figures in the development of the late nineteenth-century minority counter-culture, the English naturalist Charles Darwin and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietszche, had appeared a generation earlier. Darwin's ground-breaking theory of the evolution of animal, plant and the human species by a process of natural selection, where the fittest survive through successful adaptation to environment, was applied or misapplied to contemporary human societies, as well as to the study of heredity in the new science of genetics. This ‘social Darwinism’ was permeating mainstream European culture by the beginning of the twentieth century, in part because the apparently ‘scientific’ justification it gave to cultural and racial superiority, imperialism and war, corresponded to the reality of the growing global economic, military and imperial rivalry among Europe's and the world's industrial and industrialising powers. All of the turn-of-the-century intellectuals had read in some form or another the works of Nietzsche, writing in the 1870s and 1880s. From him, they took a general anti-establishment and non-conformist stance, a willingness to question and challenge all facets of the conventional bourgeois way of life, the sense of the atrophying of this ‘civilisation’ and of the need for a new rejuvenating morality which might have to be formed and imposed by a new breed of uninhibited supermen.

Besides the common grounding of Darwinism and Nietzsche, the intellectual reaction against the idea and assumption of rationally ordered ‘progress’ drew on the findings of the new social sciences which, in the rational pursuit of knowledge about human society and mentality, were showing up the irrationality of much of human behaviour and actions. One of the most influential of these ‘scientific’ studies was Gustav Le Bon's work on the psychology of crowds, which had a very contemporary resonance at the beginning of the age of mass politics, and was something which most inter-war fascist leaders claimed to have read or heard about. Le Bon's study seemed to show that what drove and inspired people en masse to collective action were their emotions and feelings, not rational discourse and argument. So if a speaker wanted to arouse and excite his listeners, what mattered was not the quality or logic or ‘truth’ of his argument, but his ability to tap into the subconscious will and soul of his audience.

As the example of Le Bon makes clear, the rational revelation of the irrational could be swiftly translated into political thinking and technique. On the left, some revolutionary syndicalists, already rather out of step with Marxist orthodoxy, revised Marxist socialism in the light of these discoveries by the new sciences or pseudo-sciences. Marxism, of course, was a materialist set of ideas, with a materialist conception of historical and social development. What determined changes in society and politics were changes in the economic system of production. Political systems and ideologies, religion, moral values, were ‘topping’, shaped by economic realities, the way things were produced and the relations of domination and subordination which existed between the various people involved in the productive process. In common with his revolutionary syndicalist sympathisers, the French thinker Georges Sorel thought that the Marxist socialist parties and labour movements of late nineteenth-century Europe were in danger of being domesticated, losing their revolutionary élan and becoming part of the system they were committed to overthrowing, through their involvement in democratic parliamentary politics.

Sorel wanted socialism to recover its revolutionary ‘soul’, and so emphasised the need for violence in the revolutionary process, a purgative and regenerative violence smashing the old order. He wanted people to be moved emotionally, inspired by socialism to act, recognising that there was more to human motivation than material concerns. Violence, in itself, was both a sign of the will to take action and a source of motivation. A violent act, for Sorel, was a kind of collective male-bonding session, the shared risk and responsibility helping to forge a sense of togetherness and solidarity which could fuel further action. He thought much the same mobilising functions would be achieved by the use of political ‘myths’, understood as visionary sets of beliefs which could be conveyed by words and images. The efficacy of the ‘myth’ lay in its capacity to evoke a mass response, to inspire political action, not in its objective ‘truth’.

Sorel had a great influence on the pre-war revolutionary syndicalist movements of Italy and France, and on other unconventional socialists, including Benito Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist leader in Italy before the war. Mussolini's pre-war socialism was, in effect, his attempt to combine Marxist class struggle and revolution with the European and Italian critiques of the dominant rational and positivist culture, including Nietzsche and Sorel. So, even as a socialist, Mussolini saw the need for leadership of the masses by a dynamic revolutionary elite, and for the preparation of those masses for revolution by direct action and the pushing of ideals whose value lay in generating popular enthusiasm and commitment to the cause. It was this will to action, and the belief that man could shape his destiny by action, contrasting with the determinism and caution of the orthodox Marxists in the Italian Socialist Party, and marking Mussolini's assimilation of the cultural reaction against reason, which he took into post-war fascism.

On the right, straddling politics and culture, were the Italian Futurists, a movement of cultural iconoclasts who promoted an art and a politics, or politics-as-art, which celebrated the dynamism, speed and excitement of the modern machine age, and condemned everything that was old, established and traditional. Their taste for violence and the idea of the ‘beauty’ of war as the supreme measure of personal and national worth, were shared by the rather more sedate intellectuals writing for the pre-war Florentine journal, La Voce, another of Mussolini's stopping-off places. It looked to a national spiritual and cultural transformation built on a renewed sense of national consciousness among Italians, to be achieved by war for the conquest of empire. La Voce’s concerns had a personal form in the self-dramatising nationalist poet, Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Nietzschean hero incarnate, who lent his name, his poetry and his presence to nationalistic campaigns, including, famously, that for Italian intervention in the First World War in 1914–15, and became Mussolini's only serious rival for leadership of the nationalist camp after the war.

These ideas took a more coherent political form in the nationalist movement founded in 1910, the Associazione Nazionale Italiana (ANI), which wanted a monarchist–authoritarian and corporatist political and economic system, capable of pushing through the industrial development and modernisation of the country, providing the resources for, and uniting the nation around, imperialistic war. The French equivalents and predecessors were Action Française, founded in 1898, which was more like a salon of the writers for and readers of the journal of the same name than an organised political movement, and the rather more active and sometimes insurrectionary patriotic and anti-Semitic leagues.

Certainly for the Italian Nationalists and Futurists, there was a wholehearted embracing and adaptation of modern industrial society, a recognition that in the modern world, national unity, power and expansion depended on the economic muscle provided by industrial development. In other areas of the pre-war European right touched by the late nineteenthcentury counter-culture, especially in Germany and the Austrian empire, a völkisch nationalism celebrating a ‘superior’ and distinctive ethnic German ‘folk’ culture and way of life, was developed as a rejection of what was taken to be the soulless materialism and rootless individualism and anonymity of mass urban industrial society, no more than an aggregate of isolated individuals without any sense of belonging to a community. This kind of socalled ‘organic’ or ‘integral’ nationalism saw the ethnic nation as a ‘living’ and developing ‘natural’ community, with a ‘life’ course and trajectory of its own, which was a way of connecting the nation's history and traditions with its present and future existence, and of saying that the nation was a society which functioned like the human body, a co-ordinated and integrated whole, rather more than the sum of its parts. Völkisch nationalism was often racist, with Germanic ‘blood’ seen by Julius Langbehn, one of its most widely-read exponents, as quite literally the carrier and transmitter of the German people's moral virtues and qualities.

In pre-war Germany and ‘Austria’, völkisch ideas were expressed in a finished form in any number of popular academic books, and passed on in the secondary schools and universities by a generation of teachers and lecturers. Politically, völkisch nationalism had a place in various anti-Semitic movements and parties in the German-speaking areas of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and in Germany itself, where the Pan-German League, an umbrella organisation for a variety of racist and middle-class special interest and pressure groups, was the rough edge to a conservative political bloc increasingly alarmed at the electoral advances of the German socialist party from the 1890s.

The late nineteenth-century cultural reaction against ‘reason’, while not replacing the dominant positivistic viewpoint, developed furthest and spread widest in France, Italy, Germany and German ‘Austria’, but its presence was felt in practically all European countries before the war. In ways which shocked at least some of the theorists and practitioners of the new social sciences, the ‘scientific’ discovery of the irrational forces behind human actions fed the justification in politics of elitism, racism, violence and war, and connected these to nationalism, since national feeling and identity, what people felt themselves to be, was the kind of powerful and unreasonable sentiment capable of getting people to act collectively.

Fascism before the war?

Now Sternhell argues that all the ingredients of fascist ideology were present in this end-of-century intellectual swamp, and there was a natural fusion between ideas circulating on the radical right in a movement like Action Française, and ideas of those on the left who, like Sorel, were revising Marxism in the light of the culture of ‘unreason’. The meeting ground was the common rejection, on both right and left, of a purely materialist reading of modern industrial society, and of democratic parliamentary systems of government. For Sternhell, the ideological synthesis of nationalism and a revamped socialism, which was ‘fascism’, was realised in France before the First World War. Above all, there was Maurice Barrès, the novelist and militant ‘organic’ nationalist, who fought an election campaign in 1898 on a platform of what he called ‘socialist nationalism’. Later, there was the Cercle Proudhon, what we would now call a think tank, which in 1911–12 brought together men associated with Action Française and some of Sorel's syndicalist protégés, a liaison which was so short-lived that it raises doubts as to whether the marriage of ideas had really been consummated.

Roger Griffin, who generally takes on board Sternhell's thesis, prefers to use the term ‘proto-fascism’ to describe these projects, which suggests that they were ancestors, some early primitive forms of fascism. Sternhell himself sometimes adopts the same terminology, regarding Les Jaunes, a pre-war movement of pro-employer ‘yellow’ unions, as an earlier version of the Parti Populaire Français (PPF), the fascist movement founded in 1936 by the excommunist leader, Jacques Doriot. With Sternhell, you are never quite sure whether he sees the pre-war ‘revolutionary right’ in France as the real thing, ‘fascism’, or as precursors opening up the ideological path to fascism. Sometimes, the same personalities and groups appear in both guises.

Sternhell's ‘history of ideas’ approach carries with it the risk of a logical fallacy. He seems to assume that because some ideas in post-war Europe resembled ideas which emerged before the war, there must be a logical connection between the two sets of ideas, to the extent that they amount to the same thing.

Now many of the post-war fascists were young men in the decade before the First World War, who might well have been exposed and susceptible to the avant-garde intellectual climate of the early 1900s. Many of those who were critical of the ‘culture’ of conventional society before 1914 became fascists after 1918. But plenty of them did not. Their opposition and nonconformity took them in other directions to fascism. The radical republicans in post-unification Italy bemoaned the lack of national civic consciousness among most Italians and the low level of popular participation in the political affairs of the country, which they blamed on the workings of an oligarchic liberal parliamentary system. They joined the anti-democratic Nationalists in the 1914–15 interventionist campaign, because they shared with them the belief that participation in the war would ‘make’ Italians. Both the republicans and Nationalists were critical of Italy's pre-war political system, and thought that the war would make possible its transformation. But their critiques had different outcomes. The republicans looked to the installation of a fully democratic system after the war. Their answer to the lack of popular involvement in national affairs was more democracy not, as with the Nationalists, its elimination. In other words, you cannot assume the connection between pre-war and post-war ideas; you have to demonstrate them.

It is possible to find concrete direct links between pre-war cultural and political developments and post-war fascism. For one thing, there was a crossover of organisations and personnel. Many of the first members of Le Faisceau, the French fascist movement formed in 1925, defected from Action Française, as did the founder and leader, Georges Valois, who as Action Française’s economic expert, had helped to set up the Cercle Proudhon, that intended meeting place for ‘organic’ nationalism and Sorelian syndicalism. In Italy, the ANI, partners of Mussolini's group of ex-socialists and revolutionary syndicalists in the miscellaneous coalition of political forces which campaigned for intervention in the war, eventually merged with the Fascist Party in 1923, shortly after Mussolini had become Prime Minister. The Nationalists provided the Fascist government with intellectual weight and coherence, and key ministers, especially Alfredo Rocco, the Minister of Justice, who played a significant role in setting up the institutions of the Fascist totalitarian state in the mid to late 1920s. In Germany, leaders and members of some of the anti-Semitic and nationalist leagues under the prewar umbrella of the Pan-German League, joined the NSDAP in the early 1920s. In Austria, some of the early core members of the Austrian Nazi Party came from the post-war German National Socialist Workers Party (DNSAP), the successor to the pre-war German Workers Party (DAP), which organised among German workers in the ethnically mixed region of Bohemia, then part of the Austrian empire, and was a racist and pan-German movement by the outbreak of the war.

It is also possible to chart the political and intellectual influences on postwar fascist leaders. We know that Mussolini had read Nietzsche, Sorel, Le Bon, and incorporated some of their ideas into his own idiosyncratic version of revolutionary socialism before 1914. Oswald Mosley, the founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists, was influenced by Nietzsche, filtered through George Bernard Shaw, and portrayed himself and his movement as the heroic elite arresting the decline of the British empire and of Western civilisation: he had also read Spengler. Adolf Hitler's racist and anti-Semitic ‘world view’ was probably determined or confirmed by his experience of life and idleness in cosmopolitan, multi-racial pre-war Vienna. He was impressed by what he knew of the programme and policies o...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Introduction: the historical problem of fascism
• 1 The roots of fascism
• 2 Fascist movements: the first wave, 1919–29
• 3 Fascist movements: the second wave, 1929–40
• 4 The fascist regimes in Italy and Germany
• 5 Fascist internationalism
• 6 The phenomenon of fascism
• Glossary
• Notes
• Guide to further reading
• Bibliography
• Index