For a century after the 1789 Revolution, France was admired – or feared – as a source of liberal and progressive ideas. John Stuart Mill hailed the revolution as evidence that ‘democracy’ could become ‘the creed of the nation’. As late as 1914, France was Europe’s most advanced liberal democracy. Unlike in Britain, all men in France could vote, and had been able to do so since 1848. Unlike Germany’s, France’s government was answerable to an elected parliament. Apart from the Swiss confederacy, France was Europe’s sole republic. To this day, the French think of their country as the cradle of liberal democracy.
In the 1970s, French democratic smugness came under fire from foreign historians. The most effective blow was dealt by the American Robert Paxton, whose Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (1972) demolished the belief that the Vichy regime was an aberration. Vichy’s policies, Paxton argued, not least the deportation of more than seventy thousand Jews to Nazi extermination camps, were not imposed by the German occupier, but devised by a large fraction of the French elite who had lost faith in democracy. At least initially, Vichy’s révolution nationale enjoyed wide acquiescence. Even the economic and social renovation of France after its liberation in 1944, often attributed to the humanist reformism of the Resistance, owed a great deal to Vichy’s aspiration to technocratic efficiency.
In 1978 the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell went further in his book La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885-1914: les origines françaises du fascisme, arguing that France did not dabble in fascism only during the dark 1940s: in fact, it was where fascism first emerged, as the freakish combination of left-wing anti-capitalism and right-wing nationalism. The two radicalisms found common ground in the hatred of Jews, who simultaneously embodied the mysterious might of capital and the alien within society. Maurice Barrès and other agitators began to promote what they called ‘national socialism’ or ‘social nationalism’. They proposed replacing bourgeois liberalism not with international socialism, but with a corporatist organisation that would soothe class conflicts and rid society of Jewish power. The word Antisemitismus had been coined by a German radical, Wilhelm Marr, in 1879, and arguably the first modern pogrom had taken place in Ukraine in 1881. But the new strand of thought gained ideological prominence with Édouard Drumont’s bestselling La France juive (1886). Its 1200 pages of rancid and libellous accusations against Jews sold sixty thousand copies within a year; by 1914, it had been reprinted dozens of times. From 1892 onwards Drumont further disseminated the new antisemitism as the editor of La Libre Parole, a daily with a circulation of around 100,000 and a masthead proclaiming: ‘France for the French!’
This wave of antisemitism reached its peak during the Dreyfus Affair, especially after Zola proclaimed Dreyfus’s innocence and denounced in January 1898 ‘the odious antisemitism, from which the great liberal France of the rights of man will perish, if she is not cured’. For several weeks, tens of thousands demonstrated and rioted, not only in Paris but in dozens of provincial towns and in French Algeria. Outraged by Zola’s accusations against the leaders of the French army, the protesters shouted ‘Vive l’armée’ and ‘Mort aux Juifs’. Stones were thrown at the windows of shops thought to be owned by Jews and some Jews were physically assaulted.
The surge of antisemitic fury astonished contemporaries because from the 1789 Revolution until the late 19th century, France treated Jews far better than most other European countries did. The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux and Avignon obtained full citizenship in 1790, the German-speaking Jews of Alsace and Lorraine in 1791. Napoleon’s armies devastated Europe, but Napoleonic administrators emancipated Jews in conquered countries, often in the face of resistance from the local nobility and populace. By the time in 1858 Britain allowed a Jew – Lionel de Rothschild – to become an MP, Achille Fould had been French minister of finance almost continuously since 1849. The Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in Paris in 1860 to support Jews throughout the world, was one of the first non-governmental organisations dedicated to the defence of human rights. It promoted education programmes in French for Jews in Morocco, the Ottoman Empire and Persia. In 1870 the newly proclaimed Third Republic extended citizenship to 35,000 indigenous Jews in French Algeria.
What makes the eruption of antisemitism even more bizarre is that in the 1890s France’s Jewish community was relatively small. There were fewer than 100,000 Jews in metropolitan France (0.2 per cent of the population), compared to 500,000 in Germany (1 per cent) and five million in the Russian Empire (5 per cent). How was it possible to believe that such a tiny minority had taken control of French society, even if a few Jewish families played an outsize role in high finance? The antisemitism of the late 19th century was born out of economic and social instability. It had little to do with Jews, and even less with the tenets of Judaism. My own great-great-great-great grandfather Simon Lévy, who came from Lorraine and served as rabbi of Bordeaux from 1864 to 1886, missed the point in his response to Drumont, Moïse, Jésus et Mahomet (1887). Lévy’s book stressed the common ethics of the three great monotheistic religions. With his tongue firmly in cheek, he claimed that Christians, too, should be considered ‘Semites’, since they believed, albeit imperfectly, in a single god, and professed obeisance to the Ten Commandments. He aptly described Drumont as ‘neither polite, nor even of good faith’, but failed to perceive that the new anti-Jewish sentiment was no longer grounded in social snobbery or religious bigotry.
Why did the revolutionary right fail to seize power during the Dreyfus Affair? French historians like to stress the heroic alliance forged by socialists and moderate republicans to face down the threat to democracy. After a failed attempt by antisemitic protesters to storm the Élysée in February 1899, a coalition government of ‘republican defence’ arrested Jules Guérin, founder of the Ligue antisémite de France, and other leaders of the seditious movement. New laws designed to curb the influence of militant Catholics, who were rightly perceived as supportive of antisemitic agitation, culminated with the formal separation of church and state in 1905. The following year France’s highest court recognised Dreyfus’s innocence. Yet according to Sternhell, another crucial if contingent cause of failure was the lack of a ‘charismatic leader’. In order to seize power, the antisemitic movement would have needed ‘to become embodied in a man, take a name and have a face’. Sternhell mused that had Antoine de Vallombrosa, marquis de Morès, not died in 1896 aged 37, during an ambush by bandits on the border between the French protectorate of Tunisia and the Ottoman province of Libya, the democratic republic would have been in ‘considerable danger’.
Morès was an extraordinary villain in an epoch crowded with the vile and the louche. After he killed a Jewish officer, Captain Armand Mayer, in a duel in 1892, a prosecutor seeking his conviction for murder drew a portrait that captured Morès’s scrappy life of endless reinvention: ‘Cuirassier in [the elite military school of] Saint-Cyr, meat merchant in Chicago, engineer in Tonkin, reserve second lieutenant in the dragoons, nightstick-major in the streets, marquis in the salons, anarchist in meetings, these are the trappings of … a destroyer of Jews.’ Morès did not, despite his loudly professed Catholic faith, lead a virtuous private life. The expedition into the Sahara during which he lost his life was inspired by an idea of forging an anti-Jewish and anti-British alliance with Muslim Tuaregs, but Morès was also fleeing his creditors. In 1893 his reputation was tarnished by the revelation that he had borrowed twenty thousand francs from a Jewish financier. He also owed one hundred thousand francs to a Madame Leroy, who ran a well-known brothel in Paris.
Contemporaries found Morès enthralling. It took the jury only a few minutes to acquit him of murder, even though Morès had challenged Mayer to a duel because he objected to Jews serving as officers in the French army. (One of the duel’s seconds was the spy Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the real traitor of the Dreyfus Affair.) Morès’s funeral was a grand affair, held at Notre-Dame, with government officials among the thousands in attendance. The crowd listened to speeches by Drumont, Guérin and Barrès. The latter mourned the passing of a ‘national force’ and regretted that the pettiness of parliamentary politics had prevented Morès from becoming the leader France needed.
The media frenzy surrounding the Dreyfus Affair largely dispelled memories of Morès, though Vichy officials later paid occasional homage. In 1942 Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, head of the Commissariat général in charge of ‘Jewish affairs’ and therefore of implementing the Final Solution in France, invoked ‘that great lord of action who was the Marquis de Morès’ as evidence that France had played a pioneering role in ‘the anti-Jewish struggle’.
Historians have shown surprisingly little interest in Morès. That is almost certainly because he doesn’t fit with the grand republican narrative of French history. Although most French historians soon came to accept Paxton’s reinterpretation of Vichy, many resisted as hyperbolic Sternhell’s claim that France was the birthplace of fascism. La Droite révolutionnaire and Sternhell’s subsequent Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France (1983) provoked virulent responses calling into question Sternhell’s teleological treatment of the past, the significance he attributed to the writings of minor cranks and his downplaying of the role of the First World War in the brutalisation of European politics. In 1984 Sternhell was even convicted of libel against Bertrand de Jouvenel, a former admirer of Nazi Germany turned liberal philosopher (and co-founder, with Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society). Le Monde was unequivocal: ‘M. Sternhell confuses the history of ideas with history proper. There is no French fascism.’ Sternhell never changed his mind, though he later focused his ire on the emergence, in Israel itself, of a ‘local fascism’, bent on expanding Israeli territory and cleansing it of undesirable aliens.
By framing Morès as ‘the first fascist’, Sergio Luzzatto reopens the debate on the origins of fascism. His book avoids contentious arguments about the nature of fascism, focusing instead on fascist praxis and the way Morès pioneered the methods later made famous by the Blackshirts in Italy and the Brownshirts in Germany. His examples include Morès’s skilful use of provocative statements to gain attention in the new mass media, his incitement of mob violence to intimidate the state authorities, and his flair for new symbols, including the ‘chapeau Morès’ (a cowboy hat) and the blue blouses of his private militia, mostly made up of butchers from the Paris slaughterhouse of La Villette. In his sole attempt at a theoretical tract, published in Algiers in 1894, Morès found the word that encapsulated the social reorganisation he was calling for: ‘The bond has been broken. The faisceau no longer exists. Before the struggle, we must rebuild it, we must suppress the proletariat, we must give these men something to defend, something to conquer.’
The evidence amassed by Luzzatto is convincing, though the symbol of the Roman fasces – a bundle of wooden rods, often with an axe at the centre – had already been revived during the Atlantic revolutions of the 18th century and was frequently used in American and French republican heraldry, as an alternative to aristocratic or monarchical emblems. Morès’s use of the term was unexceptional in itself, but its repurposing to convey an absolute sort of national unity, which would rid society of class struggles and undesirable aliens, must indeed have been fairly novel. Luzzatto’s careful investigation offers what French criminal law calls a faisceau d’indices – converging pieces of evidence – that makes Morès a plausible pioneer of fascism. Stressing that ‘filiation’ does not amount to an explanation of future events, Luzzatto claims carefully that Morès was not ‘the architect’ but ‘one of the fathers’ of 20th-century fascism.
Morès’s strange business ventures in North America and Asia also suggest a connection between the tensions generated by 19th-century globalisation and the emergence of European fascism. After giving up the dull life of an officer in a garrison town, Morès married Medora von Hoffmann, the heiress of a German-American banking family. Changing continent, he became a rancher in North Dakota and launched a company which vainly tried to wrest a share of the fast-growing US meat market from big Chicago firms. During his time in the American Midwest, Morès developed a taste for extra-legal violence – there, too, he was acquitted of murder in dubious circumstances – and for the anti-establishment rhetoric of the nascent Populist Party. He crossed paths with Theodore Roosevelt, another rancher in North Dakota, and future supporter of an imperial role for the US. After the failure of his business ventures in America, Morès and his wife went tiger-hunting in India, and promoted the construction of a railway line between French Indochina and the Pearl River basin in China, but the French government lost interest in the project. Naturally Morès blamed his business failures on the machinations of Jews. As Luzzatto suggests, Morès’s antisemitic fervour may have been rooted in these humiliations, and in another, when his first choice of wife – Louise Fould, a wealthy Jewish heiress – rejected his advances.
Could Morès be a distant forerunner of Donald Trump, another adept of provocation in new media, incitement to mob violence and scapegoating of undesirable aliens, and another businessman who found globalisation harrowing? My own sense is that the analogy has significant analytical value. Fin-de-siècle Europe, which found itself both dominating the world and in the grip of a deep internal malaise, bears a strong resemblance to the situation of the US today. Just as Émile Durkheim in On Suicide (1897) pointed to rising suicide rates as evidence of profound problems in the social fabric of Europe, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have recently pointed to the dramatic increase in ‘deaths of despair’ – a notion encompassing fatal drug overdoses and alcoholic diseases as well as suicides – as a symptom of morbid forces at work in American society. The European political elites of 1900 were also obsessed with remaining or becoming ‘great’.
The analogy’s most obvious limitation is the role played by antisemitism in spurring the emergence of European fascism in the early 20th century. Today the radical right, in the US and elsewhere, often flaunts its love of Jews, in particular proclaiming its commitment to Israel and its right ‘to defend itself’, the latest euphemism for mass murder. Yet this difference shouldn’t preclude comparisons with earlier incarnations of the radical right. Freud stressed that the intensity of an attachment is more important than whether the feelings involved are positive or negative. The hard right hates or loves Jews, but this ambivalence conceals the fundamental continuity of its obsession with them. Original fascism and the modern revolutionary right share the conviction that Jews are somehow different; both have used Jews to legitimise extraordinary violence, as its victims or as its instruments.
This is not what Luzzatto’s coy and cautious book argues. Insofar as The First Fascist addresses the present, it upholds a more conventional centrist view that blames fascism on a combination of left and right extremism. Like Sternhell, Luzzatto recalls that socialist writers, especially in France, were prone to use Jews as a concrete incarnation of their abstract adversary, capitalism. ‘The demon of antisemitism’, Luzzatto says, echoing accusations often levelled today at the radical left, became ‘an essential ingredient of a critique of capitalism’ and ‘penetrated the ranks of the socialist movement’. Luzzatto’s stance on the Jewish question is nonetheless complex, since he also speaks of Theodor Herzl, the future author of The Jewish State (1896), as ‘not yet … seduced by the demon of Zionism’.
Sternhell identified another ingredient of antisemitic fascism: the growth of anti-rationalism in European intellectual life, from conservative elites’ fascination with Nietzsche’s aphorisms to Gustave Le Bon’s indictment of mass democracy in The Crowd (1895). Instead, Luzzatto points to the antisemitic agitation orchestrated by reactionary Catholics as the real right-wing contribution to the emergence of fascism. In his view, the ‘new, formidable machine of hate’ drew not only on ‘the scattered weeds of socialist antisemitism’, but also on ‘the old strain of Christian anti-Judaism’. La Croix, a Catholic daily paper still in existence, boasted in 1890 of being ‘the most anti-Jewish newspaper in France’. Luzzatto’s attack on Catholicism continues his earlier denunciation of Catholic sympathies for Mussolini’s regime and what he called ‘clerico-fascism’, most notably in Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, an exploration of 20th-century popular Catholic piety first published in Italian in 2007.
Although I’ve remained loyal to my own anticlerical upbringing (banal on the French left), I don’t find Luzzatto’s denunciation of Catholicism as a root cause of fascism persuasive. His dislike of Catholics leads him to make factual errors: the work he cites to claim that La Libre Parole was ‘lavishly financed by a company of wealthy Jesuit friends’ doesn’t say that at all. Seeing the hand of Jesuits everywhere is also a conspiracy theory. Most puzzling is Luzzatto’s lionisation of the 19th-century Orientalist and historian of religion Ernest Renan as a slayer of antisemitism: he describes him as ‘one of the most respected intellectuals in Europe’ and praises ‘his cultural contempt towards the Jew-haters’. Renan certainly despised the vulgar antisemitism that flourished in the 1890s, but it is disingenuous not to take into consideration his boast that he was ‘the first to recognise that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, really represents an inferior combination of [the elements of] human nature’.
Perhaps Luzzatto misrepresents Renan’s complex views out of sympathy for his attempt to historicise the Gospels, which scandalised Catholics in the 1860s. But more important seems to be that Renan was ‘an intellectual … a scholar of antiquity, a linguist and a historian’; only ‘thugs’, Luzzatto believes, wallow in antisemitism. Here it is his own prose that oozes with cultural contempt. It is inaccurate and unfair to blame fascism chiefly on the uneducated. The more uncomfortable reality is that fascism tends to emerge in advanced democracies with a dynamic elite culture. This was true of fin-de-siècle France and Weimar Germany and it may be what we are seeing in Trump’s America. France may well have been the cradle of both democracy and fascism.