The Birth of Fascist Ideology, by Zeev Sternhell

...In 1906 he published his landmark Reflections on Violence...

...In a surreal denouement, Raymond Aron collapsed and died on the courthouse steps immediately after testifying on de Jouvenel's behalf...

...For the first time in the postwar period, neofascists have been brought into the government of a major European power...

...For Sternhell, it is this all-important historical conjuncture—and not the post—World War I years emphasized in most other accounts—that represents the definitive gestation period for fascist ideology...

...It is also true that Mussolini was an avowed Sorel enthusiast, an avid reader of his texts and admirer of his principles...

...more radical political demands ceased to interest them...

...It was under these circumstances that Sorel undertook his revision of Marxism...

...When it comes to probing the intellectual origins of fascism, Sternhell is hardly a newcomer...

...In Germany, the misleadingly named neofascist Republican party, headed by former SS man Franz Schönhuber, has over the course of the last five years regularly garnered from 5 percent to 15 percent of the vote in local elections...

...A resurgence of myth would provide the proletariat with an undying faith in their appointed historical mission in a way that a strictly rational Marxist orthodoxy— "scientific socialism" —never could...

...For in many respects, The Birth of Fascist Ideology deepens and refines the interpretive perspective developed in the earlier work...

...Sorel of course was one of the most influential figures for Italian syndicalism...

...Sternhell's insinuation that French political culture was significantly marked by the "fascist impregnation" provoked a welter of refutations among historians of the "franco-French" stripe...

...Sternhell has an answer for this discrepancy between "movement" and "regime," but it is not an entirely satisfactory one...

...Further substance to Sternhell's claims is provided by the cases of Jacques Doriot, Marcel Dêat, and Gaston Bergery...

...Until recently, the question of the origins of fascist ideology seemed a fairly academic affair...

...The virtue of great myths was that, because they were irrational, they could not be refuted by reality...

...Turning to Vichy, Main and others may have succeeded, with considerable German help, in abrogating the liberal system...

...There is something unreal and slightly Platonic about the attempt to hold up an ideologically pristine fascism in opposition to its real political manifestations...

...The idea of an anti-Marxist "national socialism" was pervasive among early twentiethcentury "conservative revolutionaries" (who should be contrasted with restorationoriented traditional conservatives...

...In conclusion, it is worth returning to the question of what light an analysis such as Sternhell's can shed on the contemporary resurgence of European fascism or so-called neofascism...

...In the wake of the Dreyfus affair, there emerged a crucial alliance of Sorelians and Maurrassians—that is, of left and right—in the form of a short-lived publication known as the Cahiers Proudhon (1911...

...Such was the first stage of the revision of Marxism proffered by Sorel, who was politically allied with revolutionary syndicalism...

...Both parties were firmly convinced that the inferior political legacy of the nineteenth century, parliamentary democracy, must be eliminated at all cost...

...Development of the Sorel-Mussolini connection is one of the keys to Sternhell's argument concerning the Gallic origins of fascist ideology...

...De Man was an admirer of Mussolini, with whom he corresponded in the 1930s...

...But when the "epoch of fascism" is mentioned, one thinks of the dictatorships of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini...

...In it, not only did he break definitively with the parliamentary mentality of Jean Jaures and the French socialists...

...Sternhell also notes the case of the influential Belgian socialist Henri de Man (uncle of the recently defrocked deconstructionist critic Paul), who, in the 1920s, called for an ethical revision of Marxism that a decade later would feed readily into fascist currents...

...Like the maitre himself, the future Duce came to the conclusion during the war that it was not class struggle but the glories of combat that offered the best means of inciting the populace toward the revolutionary destruction of the democratic system...

...Those on the right felt that, with his claims concerning the originality and virulence of French fascism, Sternhell, an Israeli historian writing in French, had committed a type of lese-nation, sullying the national patrimony...

...borrowing generously from the doctrines of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, he also developed his "myth" of the proletarian general strike...

...In the mid-1920s, former socialist Georges Valois founded the avowedly national socialist Faisceau, though, as with the Cahiers Proudhon, its influence and impact were fairly limited...

...To those familiar with Sternhell's earlier work, the point of departure of The Birth of Fascist Ideology will come as little surprise: the peculiar alliance of revolutionary ideologues on the left and right in post—Dreyfus Affair, pre—World War I France...

...Second International theoreticians such as Eduard Bernstein pronounced a revolutionary break with the capitalist system superfluous...

...Also of interest is the case of Emmanuel Mounier, philosopher of "personalism" and founder of the left-Catholic review Esprit...

...Ephemeral though they may have been, in Sternhell's view the Cahiers Proudhon were a harbinger of things to come...

...this was the common ground between the revolutionaries, who had come from a Marxism divested of its materialistic and rationalistic essence, and the integral nationalists, promoters of a nationalism likewise divested of its materialistic and rationalistic essence—that is, its liberalism, its individualism, and its conception of society as an aggregate of individuals...

...Its program would be well captured in Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's felicitously titled 1934 work, Socialisme fasciste...

...This is to say nothing of the situation in Croatia, the Ukraine, or elsewhere in Eastern Europe...

...but, as a national authoritarian regime, there was certainly little that was revolutionary—let alone "Sorelian" — about its program...

...Thus, faced with the challenges of governing, Mussolini proceeded to compromise with social forces—monarchy, church, and industry—for which he as a revolutionist had shown nothing but contempt...

...In droves socialists accustomed themselves to the requirements of bourgeois electoral party politics...

...In this way, the ideal becomes more "real" than what is really real...

...He claims that it is fascism as a movement that is the real McCoy or fascism in its pure state...

...Were the Italian instance an aberration, it could be written off without further concern...

...This was the era of the celebrated "crisis of Marxism": decades after Marx's prophecies concerning capitalism's imminent demise, the proletarian revolution had failed to materialize...

...To be sure, once in power, few traces remained of Mussolini's socialist roots...

...The stage was thus set for the bizarre partnership he would establish with the Maurrassians...

...2) when its origins are closely studied, fascism appears as the historical heir to a certain left-wing or 120 • DISSENT Books revolutionary socialist critique of capitalist civilization...

...Socialist goals could instead be attained via evolutionary means...

...But this is far from the case...

...In 1919 Oswald Spengler published his influential Prussianism and Socialism, suggesting that a postmonarchist German conservatism would need to incorporate the antiplutocratic demands of the working classes if it wished to succeed in an age of mass politics...

...In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front has performed even better, threatening to pass the beleaguered Socialists in recent electoral contests...

...In essence, by donning a guise of parliamentary legality and feigning allegiance to the constitution, the rejuvenated extreme right seeks to call into question as far as possible the civil liberties of the democratic order...

...once it attains power, sclerosis sets in and it ceases to be pure...

...but a glorious myth, sanctified through great acts of heroism and violence, could reverse the situation instantaneously...

...Perhaps at least as significant, in many instances they have compelled Europe's traditional right-wing parties to adopt xenophobic positions in order to tap into the growing electoral constituency of the new right parties...

...In many ways, the latter resulted from a fateful merger of tendencies drawn from revolutionary syndicalism, integral nationalism, and anti-Semitism, as well as from impulses fed by disillusioned monarchists and socialists...

...Following the purges of June 30, 1934, many of Hitler's supporters were also convinced that he had abandoned the movement's revolutionary dynamism and turned conservative...

...It is easy to see why Sternhell's claims have been so vigorously contested—above all, in France, where the myth that fascism, instead of having indigenous roots, was something foisted upon an unwilling nation by brutal German conquerors has been a point d'honneur of long standing among nationalistically inclined French historians...

...The entire affair took a bizarre turn when the WINTER • 1995 • 121 Books economist Bertrand de Jouvenel, accused by Sternhell in Neither Right Nor Left of pro-Nazi leanings, sued the historian for libel and won a token judgment of one franc...

...Following Belgium's defeat in 1940, he became a leading collaborator and was sentenced to death in absentia after the war...

...The gains of the imperialist era seemed to prolong indefinitely capitalism's life span...

...Throughout the inter-war period, which was the heyday of European fascism, droves of disillusioned leftists made their way rightward...

...A "labor aristocracy" had emerged, allowing a privileged stratum of the working class to identify with an otherwise exploitative system...

...Under the influence of the Maurrassians, Sorel would soon conclude that, faced with a nonrevolutionary proletariat, the myth of "the nation" could mobilize the masses more effectively than that of the general strike...

...Sorel soon concluded that the embourgeoisement of the proletariat had progressed so far that it was no longer susceptible to being inspired by great myths...

...The resurgence of the extreme right in Europe today demonstrates that the ideological forces analyzed by Sternhell, though vanquished in 1945, are far from extinct...

...Sorel rapidly lost faith in the working class's revolutionary potential...

...In general, workers seemed capable of aspiring only to a "trade union consciousness...

...At the time the ideals of revolutionary socialism may have been moribund...

...There existed an important difference between Mussolini the revolutionary leader and Mussolini the fascist head of state...

...All of which underlines the timeliness and importance of Zeev Sternhell's newly translated study of the ideological basis of fascist rule...

...This was especially true after the party's left wing, associated with Ernst Riihm and Gregor Strasser, was purged in the "night of the long knives" on June 30, 1934...

...And of course, as Sternhell shows well, Mussolini was a leading figure of the Italian Socialist party until he, too, partly under the influence of Sorel, arrived at the conclusion that it was the myth of the nation, and not the proletariat, that held the key to the overthrow of the liberal system...

...The two groups shared a boundless contempt for French Republicanism and all it stood for: compromise, plutocracy, philosemitism, parliamentarianism, materialism, lack of patriotism, and so forth...

...Neofascist parties have even made inroads in the low countries...

...For Georges Sorel—who is the pivotal figure of Neither Right Nor Left as well as The Birth of Fascist Ideology—it was the Dreyfus affair that demonstrated the pro-parliamentary, nonrevolutionary essence of French socialism...

...Marxism's revolutionary thrust seemed but a distant memory...

...The most central and contested aspects of Sternhell's thesis concern the following points: (1) in its purest form fascist ideology emerged first in France rather than in Italy or Germany, where it subsequently migrated and entrenched itself...

...Over a period that spans three decades and several important books, he has refined a highly controversial, though far from implausible, interpretation of the roots of European fascism...

...The answer is a shared revulsion toward the liberal democratic order...

...Thereafter, Sorel realized that, given his antidemocratic predilections, he had more in common with Maurras and the Action Francaise crowd than he did with his former allies on the left...

...But anyone who doubts their relevance to the ideology of Italian fascism should examine the program of the Italian Social Republic at Salo (a Nazi puppet state) during the last two years of the war...

...All were leading figures on the French left in the 1930s who, disillusioned with prospects for radical social change, moved in the direction of a national populism that, in retrospect, bears marked affinities with the spirit of Vichy...

...As Sternhell explains, Sorelians and Maurrassians shared a horror of bourgeois democracy, the eighteenth century, the secular spirit, and the French Revolution but also a respect for classical tradition and culture...

...But the limitations of this argument are also clear...

...And although their electoral successes have been sporadic and marginal, they pose several dangers...

...This extreme aversion to liberalism was thus the unifying factor of the otherwise highly syncretic fascist ideology...

...124 • DISSENT...

...But this is merely a convenient way of saving an ideologically pure version of fascism that at times bears little resemblance to WINTER • 1995 • 123 Books historically existing fascist regimes...

...Many syndicalist leaders were convinced Sorelians who, following World War I, made the switch to fascism with remarkable facility...

...In Neither Right Nor Left Sternhell seeks to show that France, instead of remaining impermeable to the political culture of fascism, was its seedbed...

...To appreciate how controversial his interpretation has become, it is worth taking a brief look at the fate of his previous book, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (1983, translated into English in 1986...

...In 122 • DISSENT Books this way the alliance between revolutionary syndicalism and the integral nationalism of the Action Francaise was forged...

...Not only have the events of World War II receded in historical memory, but the collapse of communism made it appear that the "age of totalitarianism" itself had become a thing of the past...

...Be that as it may, one can say with certainty that Sternhell's contribution to our understanding of the ideological origins of European fascism is indispensable...

...Sternhell and his associates' chronicle of Mussolini's transformation from socialist firebrand to integral nationalist demagogue is effective and compelling—it should be required reading for those interested in the genesis and malleability of twentieth-century ideology...

...To be sure, the Iberian fascisms of Franco and Salazar persisted until the late 1970s...

...Thus were the seeds of an indigenous French "national socialism" sown, foreshadowing the more politically potent manifestations that would emerge in the 1920s and 1930s...

...All were convinced that any and every means needed to be employed to rid Europe of this pedestrian and unexalted form of political rule...

...Sorel's vigorous campaign against the philosophy of the Enlightenment explains his attractiveness for the Maurrassians...

...Like so many others of his generation, Mounier viewed the fall of France as a deliverance from the vacillations and corruptions of the Third Republic...

...Sternhell's study shows how widespread, potent, and variegated were the ideological forces that ultimately constituted fascist doctrine...

...For in many European nations (the France of Le Pen's National Front is perhaps the best example) they have succeeded in shifting the terms of political discourse to the point where questions of ethnicity and race occupy center stage...

...What was it that was able to turn this strange intellectual amalgam into veritable ideological bedfellows...

...However, after his review was banned and frictions with the Vichy regime developed, he went on to become a leading figure of the resistance...

...Though it would prove highly influential, this version of Sorel's revision of Marxism ultimately came to grief...

...In the Italian elections of March 1994, the neofascist National Alliance captured 14 percent of the vote...

...Revolutionary syndicalism continually lost ground to the predominant reformist currents of socialism...

...Six weeks later, it gained five ministerial positions in the cabinet of media magnate and newly ordained prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi...

...And one need not subscribe to the "end of history" thesis to appreciate the fact that their time has past...

...For even if previous historians have underestimated the strength and staying power of French fascism, there can be little doubt that, until France's "strange defeat" in 1940, fascism there never possessed the political vitality and influence of its Italian or German variants...

...This means that a historical understanding of the origins of fascism, far from being an academic exercise, remains an urgent intellectual task...

...The debates were so contentious that they gave rise to what has been dubbed the "Sternhell controversy" concerning the extent of native French fascism...

...In almost all cases, the same historical tension can be found between fascism as a revolutionary "movement" and the more conservative bent it displays once in power...

...Despite the plausibility of the "epoch of fascism" thesis, suggesting that it was a one-time, mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, contemporary European politics indicates that one should be wary of closing the book too soon...

...Sternhell himself has perhaps best addressed this question in a short pamphlet on the problem of "Anti-semitism and the Right in France" (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1985...

...For a year or so, he had no compunctions about achieving a lively modus vivendi with France's so-called "national revolution...

...Historians on the left resented the suggestion that it was in fact disenchanted leftists (such as Sorel and others) who were primarily responsible for nurturing the fascist bacillus...

...The various antidemocratic tendencies that earlier in our century crystallized to form fascist ideology might be dormant, but they are not dead...

...Ironically, it was the German National Socialists who maintained the least fidelity to the socialist critique of capitalism...