The Writings of Scriptor Adorans

Book in the spotlight: The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès by Sergio Luzzatto

The one thing that can be said about fascism with any certainty is that while everyone seems to know when to use the word, nobody can succinctly explain what fascism actually is. Umberto Eco needed a fourteen-point list to clear up the “fuzziness” inherent in the ideology. George L. Mosse, a scholar whose study of fascism garnered him world renown, managed to write an essay called “Toward a General Theory of Fascism” without ever explicitly defining the term. Sebastian Haffner, the author of one of the best biographies of Hitler, did provide one, but his definition of fascism as upper-class rule supported by artificially created mass enthusiasm is so vague as to be virtually meaningless. Robert Paxton, a historian in no need of introduction, proposed a “usable short handle” that takes up a small paragraph. In The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès – one of the latest in a recent spate of books about fascism – Sergio Luzzatto, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, does not make much headway in this regard, perhaps taking the meaning of fascism to be self-evident or expecting readers to have done their own homework. Fortunately, the lack of any definition does not detract from the quality of a book that is both compelling and well researched. Rather unfortunately, it also does not detract from its timeliness. Like Camus’s plague bacillus that might be its very metaphor, fascism has proven to be a permanent part of the landscape, always ready to reemerge from its dormant state and enter the bloodstream. For a number of reasons, the times are once again propitious for the rise of extreme ideologies, and fascism in its modern iterations appears to be in the ascendant. If we are to make sense of it, there is no better place to start than with a man who, according to Luzzatto, was if not an architect of fascism, then certainly “one of its fathers.”

It is not likely you have ever heard of the Marquis de Morès. This is all the more surprising because, far from an obscure ideologue, he was an international celebrity in his own time. Born in Paris in 1858, Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès, came from a dazzlingly illustrious family. He had one of those impossibly long aristocratic names, straight out of the Almanach of Gotha, that take a full minute to read out loud. His mother was known as “Queen of Cannes,” and the garden of the family’s villa in Cannes – one of several residences in France – was listed as a major attraction. As a child, Morès played with the future German emperor, Wilhelm II; years later, a town in North Dakota would be named after his wife, herself the daughter of a wealthy German financier and a newly minted baron. There was nothing about his origins that prefigured Morès’s future notoriety as an anti-Semitic demagogue and rabble-rouser, which should put to rest the notion that fascism was a movement of, and for, the (petit) bourgeois. But then there was nothing about his origins that suggested Morès would become anything other than a creature of French salons. In the event, Morès proved to be a passionarian, to use an anthropological term coined by Lev Gumilev, which is a fancy way of describing someone who can’t stay home for long. After a typically gilded youth and a brief stint in the military, Morès traveled to New York, where his fabulously rich father-in-law introduced him to Wall Street. Convinced he would become the world’s most powerful financier – an irony for someone who would later make a career out of denouncing high finance – Morès plunged headlong into the beef business in the American frontier. Unfortunately for Morès, his taste for adventure was inversely proportional to his business acumen. The enterprise flopped, and he left America in disgrace, having distinguished himself largely by being indicted and subsequently acquitted for the murder of a bison hunter, as well as by nearly challenging a future US president (Theodore Roosevelt) to a duel. Undaunted, he headed east. After bouncing around India hunting tigers, Morès arrived in French Indochina with a great scheme for a railway project. But, despite his status and access to top officials, he fared no better than he had in America, and he was forced to return to France a failure.

So far, so picaresque – except that the experience left him seething with resentment. Morès blamed his financial failures on the Third Republic – namely, on the Jews, whom he believed to be in control of the country. It is unclear when Morès first experienced his “epiphany.” There probably never was one – prejudice does not come about suddenly after a bad dream. As an adolescent, Morès attended several Jesuit institutions that were petri dishes of anti-Semitism, even if the term, Luzzatto tells us, wouldn’t be invented until 1878. Crucially, just as Morès was inculcated with hatred of the Jews, anti-Semitism was in the process of a system upgrade. Whereas traditional anti-Semitism had been a function of religious sentiment, the new brand of anti-Semitism – a product of the secular age – determined identity based on ethnicity and race. Unlike the older variant – which, however odious, at least gave Jews a chance to convert to Christianity and assimilate – the new anti-Semitism precluded any integration into mainstream society. The rector of the last Jesuit institution that Morès attended was a champion of this new anti-Semitism, and perhaps Morès, an unimpressive student in most of his subjects, studied this one all too well. We learn that, as a young officer stationed in a small town, Morès organized an attack on a Jewish loan shark, pelting the man with eggs and champagne. A while later, Morès lost money when a Catholic bank in which he had bought shares had imploded; the failure of the bank was blamed on the Jews. The cherchez-la-femme theme might have also played a role – the first woman Morès decided to marry came from a spectacularly wealthy Jewish family. No giggling, please: it is not terribly uncommon for anti-Semites to fall for Jewish girls at one point or another. Goebbels, for example, became infatuated with a woman of partial Jewish stock in his youth. Unlike Goebbels though, whose infatuation came to an end as soon as he had learned of the girl’s background, Morès did not seem to be put off by the prospect of a Jewish wife. But exogamy was not common among French Jews at the time, and a Gentile suitor did not have much of a chance, even if he happened to be a marquis. Luzzatto drifts into conjecture: while it would be too simplistic to attribute Morès’s anti-Semitism to this matrimonial rejection, it may have magnified in his mind the perceived threat that new money, much of it Jewish, posed to the great aristocratic families of France. If true, Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction – too much money chasing too few levers of power – might go some way to explain Morès’s anti-Semitism. 

Whatever the genesis of his Judeophobia, by the time Morès got back to France, he was sufficiently wedded to the cause to get into a bromance with Édouard Drumont, a formerly struggling scribbler catapulted to success overnight thanks to the publication of a two-volume anti-Semitic work. Morès resolved to embark on a political career to save France. His political program rested on two pillars: anti-Semitism and corporatism. While the first one requires no further elaboration, the second one does. Fancying himself an economist, Morès propounded a “hybrid socialism, which would draw from one or the other of these old plants the sap necessary for life in a new ecosystem: that of the second industrial revolution and of a rampant global capitalism.” In practical terms, this meant the removal of intermediaries in the economic system, along with the empowerment of workers and their eventual transformation into stakeholders. Coupled with the destructive power of anti-Semitism, which implied the removal of Jews from the economy, corporatism – a new republican pact that would do away with parliamentary democracy – was to bring France prosperity and happiness. It was a most peculiar program to adopt for a man who came from one of France’s most privileged families and whose father-in-law was a financier worth an estimated $15 million – more champagne than hybrid socialism. But one should not look for consistency or coherence – while the “people’s d’Artagnan,” as Morès was dubbed by an adoring acolyte for his championship of the little man, ranted about Jewish usurers, he was not above borrowing money from them (more on that later). He even took his own father to court after the latter had tried to deny Morès his annuity – a dispute that would be perfectly at home in a Balzac novel. One should not probe the man’s mind too much, as little in it was of any interest. Photos of Morès, complete with a twirled moustache and his trademark wide-brimmed felt hat known in France as chapeau Morès, show a foppish man about town whose aristocratic deportment fails to conceal the noetic vacuity of his eyes and a mind little given to serious reflection (as Luzzatto remarks deadpan, “The marquis typically did not read many books”). This exercise in physiognomy is not flippancy – Morès apparently financed the distribution of a pamphlet invoking the blood libel, which tells one all one needs to know. 

But intellect is not a prerequisite for political success; it is much more important to be a man of action. Fascism was first and foremost a movement that emphasized action, even if it never suffered from a paucity of intellectuals willing to lend it cerebral weight, and Morès was nothing if not a man of action. Soon he was rubbing elbows with the working class, participating in local elections, and leveraging the burgeoning “yellow journalism” industry as a tool of propaganda. His timing was good; the political weather was quite right for populism. France was still smarting from its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the fall of the Second Empire. Young and fragile, the Third Republic came close to a coup d’état in 1889. The economy was ailing. Paris had experienced an economic crisis in the 1880s, and labor unrest roiled the country. Some areas suffered from elite overproduction – Luzzatto describes a publishing industry that churned out fewer titles and periodicals, leaving a growing number of writers without prospects. Society was polarized, marked by ideological discord and a growing disenchantment with the ruling class. Sporadic violence, especially from anarchist quarters, threatened the state. In many respects, the landscape was similar to our own. 

For Morès, the situation was excellent. He must have been particularly emboldened by the specter of violence. Luzzatto writes: “For a combination of cultural, social, and ideological reasons, Morès had become increasingly convinced that in a mass society, seizing political power would require a targeted use of violence rather than powerful consensus building.” This would become part of the fascist playbook, even if Morès wasn’t sure about the exact nature of the targeted violence required. It wasn’t for want of trying. He had his own corps, composed mostly of meat butchers, whom he professed to represent, and other blue-collar workers who didn’t mind getting into a street brawl or throwing stink bombs at a newly married Rothschild couple on behalf of the “people’s d’Artagnan.” To be fair, the marquis did not shirk from violence himself, even if he wasn’t going to stoop to alleyway skirmishes. To generate maximum publicity, he challenged three Jews of some prominence to a duel. The first was a journalist (whose name was, ominously, Dreyfus), the second a former senior-ranking fonctionnaire, and the third an army officer. While the first two duels were uneventful, the third one brought Morès all the publicity he wanted and then some. The marquis had taken to baiting Jewish officers in the French army, putting them in an impossible situation, since to ignore such insults was tantamount to bringing dishonor to the entire army. The Jewish officers had to respond, and this was how a French captain by the name of Armand Mayer, who came from a distinguished Lorraine family, found himself fighting Morès in a Parisian suburb. Mayer was fatally wounded, and the autopsy indicated that Morès had thrust his sword with the intention to kill. Following a well-publicized trial, he was acquitted – the second time he had been acquitted for murder. While the tragedy resulted in an outpouring of sympathy for Mayer and his fellow Jews, it also fanned the flames of anti-Semitism. According to Luzzatto, the story set the stage for the Dreyfus Affair some two and half years later; and indeed, the authorship of the handwritten document containing confidential information about the French artillery used to implicate Dreyfus belonged to the officer by the name of Esterhazy, a sometime associate of both Morès and Drumont. By then, though, Morès was a finished man. He had engineered his own fall when, emboldened by his acquittal, he’d decided to topple the republican government amid the Panama Affair, a major financial scandal implicating the country’s elites. But he overplayed his hand, and his attempt to out the corrupt French elites backfired spectacularly when it was revealed that the “people’s d’Artagnan” had borrowed money from one of the central figures in the scandal, a businessman of Jewish origins. The revelations destroyed Morès’s credibility and put paid to his political career.

His audience in Paris more or less reduced to a madam who ran a brothel he frequented and to occultist circles that retailed in pseudoscientific bunkum, the restless Morès accepted the invitation of a retired French colonel and fellow anti-Semite to travel to Algeria. The French colony was presently a hotbed of anti-Semitism that had a very particular context. Algerian Jews, who represented no more than one percent of Algeria’s population, had received French citizenship a few decades before, drawing the ire of both Muslim Algerians, who had not been granted the same privilege, and French settlers, who resented having to compete with Algerian Jews. Curiously, Morès took up the cause not only of French settlers but also of the disenfranchised Algerian Muslims. Inspired by an essay written by said colonel, he had come to believe in a Franco-Islamic alliance that would secure France’s position among the colonial powers – naturally, at the expense of the Jews. There was nothing especially original about any of this – as early as the 1880s, Drumont had already proposed that Arab Muslims were the best allies of “Aryan Catholics” to fight the Sephardic Jews – but it is a testament to the strange and metaphysical nature of anti-Semitism that Morès felt more kinship with a member of a Berber tribe than with an assimilated Jewish army officer from Lorraine. Not that the Berber tribes were interested in any alliances with Morès. Scouring North Africa’s hinterland for prospects of his incipient Franco-Islamic union, he was brutally murdered by Tuareg tribesmen who had ambushed his party. Thus ended the life of a man Luzzatto describes as “the first leader in the West to emerge on the political stage as a populist, an antisemite, and (though the word did not yet exist) a fascist militiaman, all at once.” He had not yet turned forty. His ideas, however, would enjoy a different kind of longevity. 

It was in his Algerian period that Morès produced a booklet in which he used the word “fasces.” The symbol itself, an axe in a bundle of rods, was not new; it went all the way back to Ancient Rome and was meant to symbolize unity. Though it is not likely Morès was aware of it (he didn’t read much, remember?), recently it had been in circulation in republican and libertarian currents. A couple of years before, in fact, Sicilian peasants inspired by socialist ideals had called themselves fasci. The ideological connotations fascism would eventually acquire were not evident at the time. In the interregnum between the death of Morès and the rise of Mussolini, the fasces was, ideologically speaking, in the public domain. Even as late as the 1930s, fascism was articulated in an Italian encyclopedia signed by Mussolini as a “union of forces, more or less homogeneous, but held strongly together by ideal and disciplinary bonds, with a view to achieving common goals.” As this can serve as a description of any society that seeks a high level of cohesiveness, everything hinges on the nature of the common goals. Morès was always very vocal when it came to the common goals he had in mind. His fasces was a bond between diverse social classes and even ethnic groups meant to transcend their differences in the struggle against, and destruction of, the Jews. This was the “third way” that presented itself as a political alternative to both capitalism and socialism: a deeply authoritarian, anti-democratic, strongly nationalist ideology that would animate various movements in Europe and beyond. Although Morès, whom the French nationalist writer Maurice Barrès called the “first national socialist,” met his end in the sands of North Africa, other men of action would make good use of his ideological patrimony. Luzzatto conveys the price of Morès’s legacy in the last sentence of his biography: “Seventy-five thousand [French] Jews – women, men, children, and the elderly – were deported to extermination camps, and 97 percent of them did not return.” 

One of the questions Luzzatto asks concerns France’s responsibility for the emergence of fascism. Luzzatto’s introduction mentions the historian Zeev Sternhell, who believed that fascism was a French product. Luzzatto himself is more circumspect. While acknowledging both the complexity of France’s past and its unwillingness – in some quarters – to reckon with it, he warns against taking Sternhell’s thesis for granted: fascism “has functioned less as a system of thought than as a system of action,” and so its praxes are more important than its ideological underpinnings. Other historians have been less cautious. Commenting on the pogroms and other anti-Semitic excesses in tsarist Russia in his magnificent Out of Revolution, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy notes that Jews represented 4.2% of the Russian population circa 1900; while they represented only 0.22% of the population around the same time in France, the simple Dreyfus affair took more than a dozen years to settle and came close to precipitating a civil war. These proportions must be taken into account when comparing the virulence of anti-Semitism in various European countries. What might have happened if the Jewish population of France had been not 0.22% but five percent? Luzzatto does not answer the question, but his biography does little to exculpate France. He even traces the ancestry of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion to France – the tsarist secret agents who put together the anti-Semitic tract were habitués of a salon that also welcomed Drumont. There was, of course, no shortage of collabos in Vichy France, nor was France able to purge its history of these demons after the war. Luzzatto reminds his readers that François Mitterrand, a socialist president, had flirtations with the extreme right as a young man; one might also add that the National Front had become a strong political force by the end of the 20th century, and that its controversial founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, made it into the second round of the presidential elections in 2002. 

Yet this argument must not be pushed too far. Luzzatto admits that “historians have identified fin de siècle Vienna as the birthplace of a new ‘postrational politics’, which they described as a collage of fragments of modernity, glimpses of futurity, and resurrected shreds of a half-forgotten past.” It was, after all, in the Vienna of Karl Lueger that the young Hitler bummed around, imbibing the toxic fumes of ethnic hatred. By the time Morès arrived in America in the early 1880s, the German economist Eugen Dühring had already published a book considered to be a masterclass in racial anti-Semitism. The First International Anti-Semitic Congress, fictionalized in a thought-provoking novella I will mention in more detail later, took place in Dresden in 1882. It matters little whether Morès truly was the first fascist; Hitler and the Holocaust would have happened without him. And probably without French anti-Semitism, too. As others have noted, attributing fascism to elements supposedly particular to a given country or culture gives a false sense of security to onlookers who would like to believe something like that cannot arise in their own lands. Anti-Semitism was not a French or German phenomenon but a modern one. Fascism should not be seen as a movement against modernity but rather a movement presenting itself as a mechanism to cope with fears of modernity. Mosse writes: “Already by mid-century we hear complaints that railroad travel had destroyed nature as the landscape performed a wild dance before the trains’ windows. Just so, the invention of the telephone, the motor car, or the cinema introduced a new speed of time which menaced the unhurried pace of life of an earlier age. Such concerns were reflected in the heightened quest for order against nervousness and instability” (see The Fascist Revolution). Mosse points out that “Hitler himself boasted that with his seizure of power ‘the nervous nineteenth century’ had finally come to an end.” 

Luzzatto corroborates this: fin-de-siècle Paris had to contend with “incipient globalization,” and those who were “destabilized by the advent of new production and distribution systems, worried about the impact of new technologies, threatened by the increasingly rapid developments of financial capitalism” were a perfect target market for political demagoguery. Much like our own society, fin-de-siècle society had to contend with rapid technological change and the economic displacement that such change engendered. It had to contend with the modern age spawned by the economic paradigm of the Industrial Revolution and the ideals of the French one. The Jews, who had been emancipated in Western Europe by the late 19th century, were associated with modernity. The ideals of the French Revolution that had laid the groundwork for their emancipation also created the (Mosse again) “politicization of the masses, which, for the first time in modern history, functioned as a pressure group and not just through episodic uprisings or short-lived riots.” Morès was able to tap into that politicization of the masses and the angst they felt. 

Since anti-Semitism was a feature of modernity, fascism did not hold a monopoly on it. In the 1970s, Friedrich Gorenstein, an unjustly neglected master of Russian prose, wrote a novella that, as mentioned earlier, gives a fictionalized account of the First International Anti-Semitic Congress. Dresden Passions – which, as far as I know, has not been rendered into English – is interesting not as a work of historical fiction but as a platform for the author’s own views that are interspersed throughout the text. One of Gorenstein’s startling conclusions is that modern socialism and anti-Semitism are close siblings. The logic goes something like this. The Bible – the Old Testament specifically – represents individualism and, by virtue of their minority status everywhere, the Jews are also exponents of individualism. Modern socialism always represents the masses and is bound to converge with anti-Semitism sooner or later, particularly as Jews are often well represented among the wealthy; it was not a coincidence that the First International Anti-Semitic Congress took place under socialist banners. Gorenstein recognizes the prominence of Jews in socialist movements but considers them little more than wayward children unaware that they are playing with fire. If this does not sound entirely convincing, consider this quote by Ulrike Meinhof, the German 1970s militant of the Red Army Faction fame (and not someone with whom Gorenstein shared any affinities): “Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.” Luzzatto’s biography seems to echo Gorenstein’s thesis. By the dawn of the 20th century, Luzzatto writes, anti-Semitism had contaminated the right as well as the left in France, a country with an “atavistic distrust of capitalism.” Morès himself was a “hybrid socialist” who sought to expropriate everything the Jews possessed and implement a corporatist economy. The first deputy to present a bill with overtly anti-Semitic content in the wake of Morès’s duel with Mayer was a socialist, who would also put forth anti-Semitic legislation during the Dreyfus saga. We learn that a socialist deputy in Algeria was struck by the anti-Semitism he witnessed while attending a socialist party congress – a sentiment, Luzzatto adds, he himself shared. Another socialist railroader who became mayor of an Algerian town adored Morès and wrote an anti-Semitic poem in his honor. Nor should we forget that Mussolini started as a socialist or that “socialism” is the second word in “national socialism.” It is worthy of note that Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (as her father’s party had been rechristened), was present at a march against anti-Semitism that took place in Paris following the October terrorist attack in Israel, while France’s most prominent left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon was not. But here, too, one should not belabor the point, if only because conflation of anti-Semitism and socialism risks stifling legitimate criticism of market-based economic frameworks. In the end, what socialism and fascism have in common is not their anti-Semitism but their reliance on the politicization of the masses. 

There is another thing both socialism and fascism have in common: biopolitics. Although the term is closely associated with Michel Foucault, he was not the one who introduced it, nor was he the first to have identified biopolitics as a paradigm of state governance designed to administer the biological life of the citizenry (writing about the nature of tyranny and Nazism in the early 1940s, for instance, the French intellectual Raymond Aron offered glimpses that prefigured Foucault’s later work). An epiphenomenon of the Industrial Revolution, biopolitics is not an ideology but a model of post-agrarian political administration. It implies a preoccupation with the health of the population that aims to arrive at an optimal level of productivity for each citizen, who is effectively a unit to be managed. Mosse understood it too; he may not have used the term “biopolitics,” but he noted the 19th-century obsession with normality and abnormality, and highlighted the role of the medical profession in defining both. Biopolitics undergirded socialism, fascism, and capitalism. Both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union were biopolitical states par excellence although, as the recent pandemic experience showed, biopolitical tools can also be used by states with strong traditions of liberalism. The racial anti-Semitism that came about in the 19th century was biopolitical. When society was agrarian and religious, it had to contend with God and the concept of the soul; anti-Semitism was anchored in a religious framework. With the advent of the biopolitical age, the hatred of Jews moved from a spiritual plane to a physical one. In the old paradigm, anti-Semites wanted to convert the Jews; in the new one, they wanted them exterminated. Morès was a perfect creature of biopolitics. A Le Figaro news article reporting on Morès’s “ultramodern slaughterhouses” in his American cattle business years seems to recall the trains that would be later used to transport large numbers of people to camps in biopolitical totalitarian states. 

It is important to understand the concept of biopolitics if liberalism is to be defended. The trouble with liberalism is not only that it is susceptible to undesirable ideological mutations that might inspire people to search for alternative political solutions. Liberalism simply can’t compete with populism (I use this word reluctantly, since liberalism can be populist too) when it comes to galvanizing the masses. To paraphrase Renan, the existence of liberalism is a daily plebiscite, but it cannot produce the kind of vitality that movements like fascism can, nor does it command the same power of persuasion. Where fascism appeals to people’s need to act, liberalism appeals to their sense of dignity and desire for freedom. Fascism makes history feel real and promises people that they can participate in it (though it never fully states the price they will pay for this participation upfront); liberalism blurs history’s contours and deadens one’s perception of it. In the end, liberalism is simply too unexciting. I am convinced that the alacrity with which so many responded to restrictive pandemic measures a few years ago cannot be explained by fear of a virus alone, and I am equally convinced that the allure of alternative political solutions today cannot be solely attributed to polarization and economic problems, however significant. In both cases, much can be explained by good old-fashioned ennui. 

But it doesn’t mean liberalism is doomed. As an ideology that appeals to base instincts and reflexes, fascism is a dead end and the ultimate false dawn. Mosse correctly identified the gaping contradiction inherent in fascist ideology: it looks towards a New Man while appealing to the immutability of tradition, promising a new future by glorifying an imaginary golden past. (Luzzatto also puts his finger on this contradiction: “Morès was urging a flight backward in history and, at the same time, a flight forward: a renunciation of class struggle by the workers’ and peasants’ movement in favor of a gentle return to something like the corporatist society of the old regime, while at the same time the mobilization of a ‘fascist’ society . . . around the most vibrant ideologies of full modernity, nationalism, colonialism, and antisemitism.”) Perhaps it is this contradiction, along with the terrible price usually exacted by fascism, that assured its demise historically. Liberalism certainly has a chance. But if it is to succeed, it must persuade people that it is the better option. Aron wrote that one can’t promote liberalism by appeals to freedom; concrete results are more important, and one can successfully advance the liberal cause only by showing it is not synonymous with stagnation and decay. While judicious, this is not very concrete. In the final analysis, like so many liberals, Aron was much too influenced by the age of secularism to admit the value of religion and its compatibility with liberalism. Man does not live by bread alone. Only religion can serve as an antidote to biopolitical structures. If liberalism is to be reinvigorated, it needs to make room for the church – not for the church as an institution but as a custodian of perennial values. It must incorporate tradition and religious belief – things whose timelessness makes them resistant to ideological depreciation and erosion. It must, in short, overcome its Enlightenment complex and make room for God.