How to Make a Fascist

The 19th century was new, scary, fast-moving, chaotic. Electrification, engines, telegraph, telephone, cars, cinema, radio — a second industrial revolution. There was atomisation, a fear of decadence, of materialism over godliness.

• Industrial revolution displaced traditional crafts and communities
• Cities grew rapidly; rural life seemed threatened
• Science and technology felt alien, abstract, terrifying to most
• Nostalgia for a simpler, more "rooted" past intensified

Bismarck ruled Germany's Second Reich (1871–1890). He was competent, authoritative, forward-looking but conservative. He united Germany, hated parliaments, and was a revolutionary conservative — using the past to strongarm the future.

• Key difference from fascists: Bismarck distrusted the masses
• Hitler & Mussolini's innovation was to accept, shape, and USE them
• In the 1920s, many alive had lived under Bismarck — they remembered stability
• Bismarck's memory was distorted into a "jackbooted politician of violence"

Romanticism contrasted the abstract (science, reason, data) with the rooted (bodies, emotion, community, tradition). In Germany it went deeper and lasted longer than anywhere, inspiring the Völkisch movement.

• Friedrich Ratzel coined Lebensraum ("living space") from animal territory studies
• Völkisch novels were the most popular of the period
• Brothers Grimm: folk tales as the soul of a people
• The swastika = a visual representation of the turning sun

Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) + Koch's bacteria discovery (1876) = an obsession with purity, hygiene, struggle. Scientific language about race and blood penetrated politics.

• Herbert Spencer coined "survival of the fittest" — it became almost a religion
• Bacteria discovery → invisible threats → obsession with cleanliness and purity
• Mussolini spoke of "socialist antibodies"
• Hitler: Jews were "a pestilence, worse than the Black Death"
• Some called Nazism "applied biology"

Antisemitism was Europe-wide — probably worst in France. The "new" antisemitism was based on race and pseudo-science, not religion. In a system defining belonging by soil and blood, the rootless became the perfect scapegoat.

• Jews banned from guilds → became financiers → scapegoated in crashes
• Germans "live in the forest — deep and mysterious." Jews "come from the desert — rootless"
• By 1899: "A Jew at the same table with a Gentile excites notoriety"
• The Dreyfus Affair in France: a Jewish officer wrongfully accused of treason
• The key shift: you can't convert your way out of racial antisemitism

Georges Sorel was a French syndicalist who hated intellectuals, parliaments, and liberals. He asked: why aren't revolutions happening? His answer: the proletariat needed a great motivating myth — the general strike.

• Marx underappreciated the power of ideas, psychology, symbols, stories
• National solidarity was clearly more powerful than class solidarity
• Followers declared: "Democracy is the greatest error of the past century"
• This was the turning point: elites seeking to "mobilize the masses by means of myths"

The Futurists, led by Marinetti, declared a racing car "more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." They glorified speed, technology, violence. Add Nietzsche's will to power and the Übermensch forging his own moral path.

• Futurists were fierce northern Italian industrialists — young poet-engineers
• Marinetti (1913): "The future needs blood. Blood is the wine of strong peoples"
• Nietzsche: herd morality left behind by an Übermensch forging his own path
• Nietzsche himself opposed antisemitism — but his ideas were co-opted

The most violent event in human history. Poison gas, flamethrowers, tanks, aerial bombing. The war created a "violent generation" — a sacrificial generation who found meaning in horror.

• Trenches stretched 475 miles — a new world of mud, death, and brotherhood
• Italy: 1 advance of 25 miles cost 200,000 lives
• Over a million military trials in Italy alone
• Both Hitler (gas) and Mussolini (shrapnel) were wounded — the "sacrificial generation"

The Italian Arditi ("the daring ones") were elite shock troops trained in dagger combat. They brought wartime camaraderie home — becoming the kernel of the fascist Squadristi.

• Jünger: nationalist who hated democracy but produced great, authentic art
• He flirted with Nazism but stopped short — the ambiguity is the point
• The move from bands of brothers at war → bands of brothers at home
• Remember: arditi and squadristi — war to streets

Veterans came home to find liberal and socialist revolutionaries attacking them. They organised. In Germany: Steel Helmets (1 million members), Free Corps (500,000), and eventually the SA Brownshirts (4 million — larger than the army).

• Fascism emerged from paramilitary violence on the streets
• These groups often had natural affinity with Völkisch movements
• One historian called it "quasi-guerrilla warfare"
• Richard Evans: the Free Corps were "the vanguard of Nazism"

In 1918–19, Europe looked like it could go communist. Bavarian Soviet Republic. Hungarian Soviet Republic. Italy's Biennio Rosso ("two red years") — thousands of strikes, factory occupations, street battles.

• Workers flew socialist flags over seized factories — revolution seemed imminent
• Germany: communist uprisings in Berlin, Hamburg, Bavaria — all violently crushed
• The middle and upper classes became terrified of revolution
• Communists and fascists fought for control of neighbourhoods

Wages collected in wheelbarrows. Food prices rose while you ate. Gangs roamed the countryside stealing crops. Then, with hyperinflation still fresh, the Great Depression hit: 1 in 3 Germans unemployed.

• France occupied the Ruhr — a national humiliation
• Prisons bursting: 60 of 100 new inmates had no shoes
• The irony: the more people need help, the less the state can provide
• 1932: 13 million unemployed (including families)

The Weimar Republic was despised by everyone: communists on the left, monarchists and nationalists on the right. The Army, Police, and Judiciary prosecuted the left and ignored the right.

• Article 48: the president could bypass parliament by "emergency" decree
• The very first president used it 136 times
• The Reichstag couldn't sit for 6 months in 1931
• If you remembered Bismarck's stability... surely, we should go back?

The key: national identity. He grew sceptical of the proletariat and saw nationalism as a more powerful mobilising force than class solidarity. "It is faith which moves mountains because it gives the illusion that the mountains move."

• Oct 1914: Steps down from Avanti!
• Nov 1914: Expelled from the Socialist Party
• 1915: Accepts the draft, wounded by shrapnel
• 1918: His paper drops "socialist," replaces it with "producers"
• March 1919: Founds the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento

Groups of 30–50 militarily trained men roaming the countryside, looking for fights. By 1921, fascists controlled the streets in much of northern Italy. The March on Rome (Oct 1922): the army could have stopped it. The King stood down.

• Fascists could not win power without conservative support
• Police ignored fascist violence; courts gave light sentences
• Socialist leader Matteotti was stabbed and dumped outside Rome
• John Foot: "A militia party" — a novel form of political activity

Jan 1933: Hindenburg appoints Hitler, hoping to control him. Feb: the Reichstag burns — 10,000 arrested. Mar: the Enabling Act passes — Hitler rules by decree. Democracy is dead.

• Conservatives hoped to "make Hitler squeak" — they failed catastrophically
• Communists banned, centrists intimidated → two-thirds majority to change constitution
• The Conservative Enabler Pattern: fear of crisis → enable fascists → lose control
• In both Italy and Germany, fascists needed conservative complicity