Sometimes the devil comes as a serpent. Sometimes he comes as a cleft-footed beast. Sometimes, Bob Dylan sings, he comes as a man of peace. And sometimes he comes as a clown.

The horrors wrought by the despots of the last century are such that it seems more than a little tasteless to point out just what preposterous figures most of them were. The swishing Hitler in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, a film that offended so many when it was released in 1967, is probably closer to the original impression Germans had of him after the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 than we can appreciate now that we know what followed. Newspaper cartoonists and satirical magazines like Simplicissimus mocked him joyfully as a puerile loser; Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Great Dictator was near beer by comparison. But then, Hitler was only imitating the great Stanislavski of despotic buffoonery, Benito Mussolini.

Were there any such figures on the gray Central Committees of the USSR and its satellites? Only the archives know. But the postcolonial era provided a packed clown car of monsters, most spectacularly the Ugandan butcher Idi Amin, who strutted around in a kilt claiming to be the uncrowned King of Scotland, when he was not fulfilling his duties as Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. Even Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, who had his imagined enemies tortured and murdered without compunction, was beset by a nest of phobias, including flying over water in an airplane and climbing more than thirty-five steps. Inexplicably, his own home contained many more.

The line between the Rabelaisian and the Sadean is blurrier than we would like to think. Why does that matter? For one thing, it shows how futile the quest for the “authoritarian personality,” that Golden Fleece of social scientists from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to the present, has been. Oscar Wilde once said of Wordsworth that “he found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.” The same is true of scholars who think they have accomplished something if they have translated a sound moral instinct into an ostensibly clinical judgment based on highly subjective psychological characteristics. The truth of the matter is that, for all the light that the study of history and social behavior can shed on political evil, sometimes it is just a matter of the right lunatic being in the right place at the right time. Imperial Rome should have taught us that.

Consider Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, known, if he is known at all, as the Marquis de Morès. He is the subject of a jaw-dropping new biography by the University of Connecticut historian Sergio Luzzatto. It is quite simply the strangest, most surprising, most picaresque modern political life I have ever read, and Luzzatto recounts it with remarkable skill and even more remarkable sangfroid. The book is billed as an account of the “firstfascist,” which is unfortunate, and the claim eventually loses air. Morès was a protofascist to be sure, but there is no real significance in being the first raindrop in a rapidly approaching hurricane. The strength of the book is rather Luzzatto’s psychological acuity and attention to detail, which leave readers with an almost pointillistic portrait of the sort of political saltimbanque who can wreak havoc at important historical junctures. It is an instructive tale for our time.

The marquis was born in 1858 into a family of French and Sardinian aristocrats and grew up in châteaux on the Riviera and just west of Paris. He was sent to conservative Catholic schools as a boy and then, in the aftermath of the country’s bitter loss in the Franco-Prussian War, to the prestigious military academy at Saint-Cyr, where his classmates included Philippe Pétain. By all accounts he was a mediocre student given to running up unconscionable debts with parties and prostitutes. But in his mid-twenties, as if in a story cowritten by Henry James and Edith Wharton, he met a Staten Island–born American heiress in Cannes, Medora von Hoffmann, who after their marriage expanded both his fortune and his horizons to the New World.

Medora was the daughter of an heiress from the American South, Athenais Grymes, and the German-born Baron Louis von Hoffman, who had immigrated to the US at midcentury and become a Wall Street financier with homes and interests in France as well. Despite his title he was the subject of persistent false rumors that he was Jewish. (This will matter.) Both families were outwardly delighted when Morès and Medora were engaged in 1881 and married the following year, though the marquis’s father, the Duke of Vallombrosa, knew him to be a bounder and wanted to protect his own fortune against encroachment. He assumed his son’s debts—an astonishing 800,000 francs, more than ten times Medora’s dowry—and settled an allowance on the couple, with the understanding that he would not advance more. This understanding the marquis never understood.

Six months after the wedding the couple joined the von Hoffmans on a trip to New York, where the father introduced his son-in-law to his business associates and Wall Street colleagues. The visit happened to coincide with a great expansion of the American railroad system into the plains states and beyond, opening up business opportunities and attracting speculators and dreamers, particularly in the livestock trade. The marquis instantly joined their company. He intuited that with the new railroads and the invention of grain elevators for storing feed and refrigerated railroad cars for hauling meat, the entire business was about to change: it should now be possible to butcher cattle where they grazed and ship their carcasses directly across the country without having them pass through the oligarchically controlled Chicago stockyards. And so, only six months into his New York stay, Morès made a spontaneous decision to take his family out to the Badlands of western North Dakota.

At this point, James and Wharton hand the story over to Zane Grey.

When the marquis located the spot where he wanted to set up his ranch, he founded a town there and named it after his wife. Never one to look before he leaped, he hired 150 cowboys and as many butchers, then bought 250 prime horses that the US government had recently confiscated from Sitting Bull. He also spared no expense on “authentic” western duds and guns. Less than a year into his American adventure he had all the pretensions of a New York City real estate baron and a western gunslinger (a distinction without a difference, perhaps).

The marquis’s business idea, to send frozen meat directly to the East Coast, was not stupid and was eventually accomplished by others. But he was a disaster at what we now call scalability, vastly overextending his network, overpromising to his customers, and raising scrawny cows that made for tough meat. He was also an arrogant neighbor. On arrival he fenced off his land like any self-respecting European aristocrat would, inconveniencing ranchers who were used to their grazing herds passing through. Resentments built up, threats were made, and eventually he and his men engaged in a public gunfight with local hunters and cowboys, leaving one of the “desperadoes” dead.

Morès was at first jailed as the shooter, then exonerated. This made him an instant hero back home. Pictures of the photogenic cowboy-marquis started appearing in conservative newspapers, and he built up a right-wing fanbase as a counterrevolutionary standing up to modern cultural and military decline. In an article titled “La Grande Vie dans le Far-West” the conservative Le Gaulois extolled Morès as a new kind of Frenchman “in our century of rickets,” not an effete aristocrat making polite bows in a Cannes drawing room but a real man capable of surviving in a world where “fur-hunting tricks, wild guerrilla warfare against Indians and outlaws, swift lynchings,…and rifle duels on the immense plains with only buffaloes for witnesses” were everyday occurrences.^*

Who cared if no one wanted his meat? Who cared if his subsequent idea, to set up proprietary Morès butcher shops in Manhattan, failed? Who cared if his even loopier scheme, to buy every single butcher shop in the city, made him a target of ridicule, even by the august National Live-Stock Journal, which ironically remarked that “for boldness and enterprise, [the scheme] is unparalleled in the history of the cleaver.” No, what mattered was that Morès was that rare thing at the time: a French “winner.” He wrote to his father in 1887 after his three-year fiasco ended, “A man without ambition is good for nothing. You need a goal, always higher…. I am as strong as a horse, I want to win, I am ready to start again.” He was only twenty-eight years old.

And true to his word, that same year he was off to shoot tigers in India with his wife, whose aspiration, newspapers reported, was to be the first woman to kill a rhinoceros. On one expedition, as in an old Hollywood movie of the sort we now frown upon, they traveled with a great retinue: 571 local men, 63 elephants, 230 oxen, 115 wagons, and 12,000 cartridges. After a few months the couple tired of the slaughter and returned to their children in Paris, though the marquis had hardly unpacked before he was off to Indochina. The French presence there was growing, and a shady figure he met drew him into another get-rich scheme: to extend the French colonial rail system all the way to the Chinese border. Again, this was not a bad idea and for once was realistically proportioned. Unfortunately it required approval from the notoriously bribe-friendly and rivalrous French bureaucracy, which decided in the end not to back it. This entire Indochina escapade took place in a whirlwind of 180 days.

It was this second failure that proved most decisive for Morès and, as Luzzatto convincingly shows, for France. He returned to Paris in 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution, to find the country an angry mess. France’s Belle Époque was, politically speaking, anything but. The country’s Third Republic, a relatively liberal parliamentary democracy, instituted significant reforms, particularly in public education. But the defeat of French forces by the Prussians and the mortifying capture of Emperor Napoleon III at the Battle of Sedan in 1870, followed by the violent repression of the Paris Commune the next year, had set off dynamics that kept the new Third Republic perpetually off balance. A depression triggered by German war reparations and financial scandals didn’t help, and as banks collapsed, farmers and workers across the country felt the effects.

It was also a time, like our own, when a multisided crisis prevented any single coherent political force from developing a convincing account of how to move forward. Then as now ideological alchemy replaced systematic thinking. Little bottles labeled republicanism, syndicalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, nationalism, and neo-Catholicism were emptied into the political cauldron in different proportions by little fanatical groups and luftmensch scribblers, all appealing to those among the French who felt that the country had lost its way and that the revolution had to be either completed or reversed—immediately.

Send in the clowns. The first picaresque figure to fill this vacuum, though bearing himself with great dignity, was General Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger. The short-lived frenzy of Boulangism in late-nineteenth-century France is as difficult to capture and make sense of as an instant of crystallization in the natural world. Like Morès, Boulanger was a graduate of Saint-Cyr, though unlike him he had had a highly successful military career, beginning with the war against Prussia and culminating with his brutal tactics in putting down the Paris Commune. In 1886 he had been appointed minister of war. Yet soon his Make France Great Again demands for revenge against Germany and the recapture of Alsace-Lorraine made him so popular with the public that he easily outshone the Third Republic politicians who had appointed him. When Boulanger received tens of thousands of votes in a local election the following year without even being an official candidate, the nervous cabinet, worried he might stage a popular coup d’état, removed him from office.

Boulanger seized his opportunity, though awkwardly and seemingly half-heartedly. He adopted classic right-wing positions opposing the Third Republic and calling for the restoration of the monarchy, but his aura extended beyond aristocrats and the clergy. His empty campaign slogans—“Boulanger is the people”—somehow inspired populist enthusiasm. There were Boulangist farmers, Boulangist workers, Boulangist syndicalists, Boulangist intellectuals, and Boulangist Bonapartists. When he won a seat representing Paris in the National Assembly in January 1889, the nation steeled itself that night for a military takeover. But the general blinked and reportedly spent the evening with his mistress instead. When the government then tried to arrest him on treason charges, he went into exile, ending up on the island of Jersey, as Victor Hugo had decades earlier. He did not remain long: two years later he shot himself at the mistress’s grave in Brussels.

Boulangism was the marquis’s populist political baptism. Until then he had been known to the public as a colorful adventurer and publicity hound who belonged to all the right clubs and attended all the right balls. Amusing, nothing more. But Boulanger captured his imagination, and soon he was involved in local elections and street fights during the general’s exile; he was arrested for brandishing a revolver in one altercation. Not that he knew what he wanted to accomplish politically. A police report at the time called him “a hothead, and an adventurer with all the qualities to reach very high or to fall very low,” someone who “entered politics only by chance.” If he were to have any effect, he needed someone to give him a sense of direction, which in his case meant a guide for his bravado, his illusions of foresight, and his resentments over past failures. He found all that in Édouard Drumont, the leading French antisemite of the time and author of the hugely influential La France juive (1886).

One can imagine little synapses spontaneously forming in the marquis’s head as he read the infamous two-volume screed. When, nearly a decade earlier, he lost 100,000 francs in the collapse of a Catholic bank, hadn’t it been brought down by rival Jewish bankers? And who made big loans to those Chicago stockyard fat cats who had helped squeeze him out of business? Jewish financiers. And come to think of it, that dubious-looking engineer who helped draw up the report on his Indochina train scheme, wasn’t his name Louis Lion? And isn’t that a Jewish name? Voilà! That’s all someone like Morès needed to set off on his next doomed crusade.

In the period leading up to the Dreyfus Affair and well after, antisemitism worked as a useful binding agent for the numerous unstable syncretic ideologies that were circulating in Europe. Morès and Drumont alike saw in it a way of appealing to workers to join the nationalist right by casting the Jews as foreign capitalistic manipulators who stole bread from workers’ families. Their aspiration was to turn those workers away from the proletarian internationalism of the communists and socialists and toward a conservative Catholic socialism rooted in the French terroir, an idea that would later become the ideological core of Vichy.

The marquis quickly put these ideas into action by organizing the butchers of Paris, who ever since the restructuring of the city by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s worked in the massive, inhumane new abattoirs of La Villette in the nineteenth arrondissement. He was immediately embraced as an aristocrat who understood their business and spoke their language. He also gave them a simple explanation for their distress: the Jewish meat wholesalers from Germany were flooding France with cheap products, and some were even rumored to have sold meat from diseased steers for the soldiers at Verdun. Morès soon managed to put together his own paramilitary force drawn from these butchers, who sported their blue, often bloody aprons and carried enormous staffs at Drumont’s packed antisemitic rallies, ostensibly serving as “security.” The two formed an unlikely team—the suave, manly aristocrat with the upturned mustache and the slope-shouldered, disheveled journalist—and they traveled up and down the country spreading their hateful gospel.

In 1890 socialists, syndicalists, and communists collectively proclaimed the first International Workers’ Day for that May, when workers would participate in enormous rallies rather than show up for work. Agitators on the right wanted to prevent this, among them Morès, who had the idea of drumming up antisemitic counterdemonstrations with the help of his gang of butchers. He stockpiled weapons, organized his troops, and put up posters across Paris spreading the blood libel that on May Day Jews would be hunting for Christian children to kill for their religious ceremonies. At the last minute he was arrested by the Paris police for incitement to murder and spent two months in prison. He emerged to the warm welcome of his now numerous followers and spent the evening at the Moulin Rouge.

Over the next few years Morès also kept himself in the public eye by provoking duels with Jewish public figures over contrived slights. The first was against a member of the National Assembly who claimed in print that the marquis’s wife was, as rumored, Jewish. He was fortunate and returned home with only a bullet wound. The second duel was fought with swords against a widely hated Jewish official who had been blamed for carrying out orders to violently suppress a strike; Morès wounded him as well. But the last duel was against a brave and popular army officer named Mayer who was determined to defend the honor of his coreligionists in the military and whom Morès had smeared in print. Morès killed him, plunging his sword all the way through his lung and into the spinal column. The marquis’s sole public comment after the act was that “we are only at the beginning of a civil war.” In the antisemitic fever of the moment a jury unanimously acquitted him of murder, and the jubilant butchers of La Villette presented him with a gilded sword for his efforts.

One wonders what role in French history Morès might have played had he been able to fully exploit the Dreyfus Affair, which struck like lightning in 1894 when he was only thirty-six years old. Instead, in the summer of 1893, his dream work collapsed. Over four years of intense political activity he had continued spending on his causes and on the publicity machine that kept him in the news while having no discernible source of income. To pay his debts he decided to sue his father for part of an inheritance he claimed as his own, but the result was that in July he was placed under court receivership, which meant that from then on he required his family’s written permission for any nontrivial financial transactions. Without easy access to cash, he could no longer finance the publications and public spectacles that brought him notoriety.

The final blow came only a few weeks later and from an unexpected direction. In 1889, when a French company that was to build the Panama Canal went bankrupt, a vast system of bribery involving Third Republic officials and some Jewish financiers was exposed, thanks in part to the efforts of Drumont. It was a major scandal at the time, and Morès became active in publicizing the involvement of the Jews in it. But he also got wrapped up in an effort to use forged documents to smear major political figures like the future prime minister Georges Clemenceau. A trial resulted from the forgeries, and in a sweltering courtroom in August 1893 Clemenceau revealed what was surely the most outlandish episode in the marquis’s outlandish life. It turned out that years earlier Drumont had helped Morès secure a loan of 20,000 francs from the Jewish financier Cornélius Herz, who had recently fled the country to escape prosecution for his part in the Panama Scandal. Though Morès had quickly paid back the loan when the scandal broke, he was immediately disgraced by the revelation that he had taken “Jewish money” and was driven from the antisemitic fold, and indeed from French public life.

The last chapter in the marquis’s short life reads like it was written by Joseph Conrad. Unwelcome now in French political circles and strapped for cash, he impulsively headed to Algiers at the invitation of a French prince, Ludovic de Polignac, who had retired from the military and had just written a pamphlet arguing that France must align itself with Islam if it was to ward off the threat of British-Jewish imperial domination in Africa. Morès was immediately taken with this idea, and over the next few years, while the Dreyfus Affair raged, he began shuttling to North Africa to visit the prince and make his own inquiries. Among his “discoveries” was the falsehood that the Tuareg Berbers of the northern Sahara were in fact Aryans, not Semites. What more did a man of honor need to appeal to racial brothers in a new crusade against the Jews?

So in May 1896, without getting approval from French authorities, Morès set off from the Tunisian coast with a caravan of forty camels on a confused, private colonial adventure to make contact with what he hoped would be France’s future allies, who might allow him to return to Paris in triumph. A few weeks into the journey his caravan was ambushed, and he and his party were killed, with the exception of a young Arab attendant and the black servants. Morès was shot and stabbed multiple times, his skull and other bones were smashed, and when his putrid body was finally returned to France it could only be identified by teeth in remaining fragments of the jaw. One legend has it that Medora Morès conceived a plan to bring cowboys from the Badlands to seek out her husband’s Tuareg killers in the Sahara and bring vengeance down upon them.

The marquis was given a grand funeral at Notre-Dame Cathedral that July before progressively slipping into obscurity. There was a brief revival of interest in him during the Vichy years, but today he is virtually forgotten in France except among scholars of fascism. The town of Medora, however, still stands in the Badlands of North Dakota, and the Morès home—Chateau de Mores, as locals call it—remains a popular attraction for American tourists.

In writing this review I have learned how difficult it is to find the right tone in the face of picaresque evil. And isn’t it difficult for us all right now? The twin temptations are to settle into a comic mode or a dark prophetic one. So I appreciate all the more Luzzatto’s achievement. If the Marquis de Morès was not the “first fascist,” Luzzatto is completely right to see parallels between the period of his activity and our own, times of economic and geographic dislocation, pauperization of the unskilled, political-financial scandals involving the superrich, increased international trade threatening domestic industries, vast movements of populations, and the liberalization of cultural mores and the religious reaction against it. Those factors combine to produce ideal environments for demagogues and their mutant ideologies, which appeal simultaneously to “the forgotten man” of the working classes and to national greatness.

Even more, they open up opportunities for theatrical figures who are not driven by ideas at all, let alone principles, only by an insatiable need for attention and approbation and an instinctive sense of what will capture the public’s ephemeral imagination. These are the jokers in the pack each age gives us. They have no serious ideological lineage to trace, only the wreckage of things they have corrupted or destroyed trailing behind them. Stories like those of the Marquis de Morès or of our Joker in Chief should teach us that to understand the political opportunities and threats of the present it is never enough to read the right books or follow the most intelligent commentators. By all means subscribe to TheNew York Review of Books, but keep an eye on Entertainment Tonight.