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from across the Rhine or over the Alps . Like Belgium, Britain,
Rumania or Spain, France cultivated its own varieties on native soil,
and did so early.
In
fact, increasing numbers of historians and
political scientists are tracing the origins of European fascism, not to
Mussolini, but to the national socialists of the French fin-de-siecle,
crusaders against a Third Republic riddled, they insisted, with
"rapacious" Protestants, Freemasons and Jews.
If
Wagner and
Nietzsche, vulgarized by disciples, helped plant the cultural roots of
Nazism in Germany , their contemporaries, the professional anti–
Semite Edouard Drumont and the novelist of national regeneration
Maurice Barres, prepared the political ground no less effectively in
France. Their defense of a Fatherland threatened by unfettered
liberalism and bourgeois decadence was a blend of intense na–
tionalism and, most timely, socialism. Anticapitalist, anticonser–
vative, and with an appeal to masses suffering the dislocations of
urbanization and industrialization, French fascism, goes this inter–
pretation, was not a movement of right-wing reactionaries; it was
born on the left and it stayed there to flourish and to flounder
through the interwar years.
Robert Soucy is out to revise that view . With other historians
on both sides of the Atlantic, he challenges the notion, best ar–
ticulated by Zeev Sternhell , that fascist movements were " more left–
ist than rightist in nature. " While Sternhell sees fascism as an attack
on the old bourgeois order and defines its history as an "incessant ef–
fort to revise Marxism," Soucy considers many of the extreme
nationalist leagues and parties of the 1880s through the 1930s as fun–
damentally conservative; the tactics and style of the radical and
moderate right differed (one called for quick, often violent "action",
the other for reform) , but they shared some of the same social and
economic goals; they had a similar hierarchical view of French soci–
ety, and , crucial point, they often dipped into the same coffers. Like
the recent round of academic debates over who financed Hitler (was
he a tool of the capitalists or their taskmaster?), Soucy examines the
controversy over who paid the fascists' way in France and concludes
that the bankers who lent to the piper called the tune. To a great ex–
tent, this first of two volumes is written for- and about - present
scholars and their views on the fascist past.
Soucy agrees with Sternhell and others that protofascist
movements emerged at the turn of the century (the royalist
Action
Fran~aise
dates from the Dreyfus Affair), but insists on 1924 as the
year of their dramatic debut.
In
reaction to the victory of a Socialist
