Social Monarchism and the Early Radical Right
Known as the “Nietzsche of France,” the Marquis de Mòres’s friend Maurice Barrès advocated a quasi-spiritual “cult of myself,” which took the shape of the “sentimental Anarchist with a rebel’s brain and a voluptuary’s nerves.”64 Putting the self forward as “an enemy of the laws,” Barrès preached ancestor-worship and faith in la terre et les morts (the soil and the dead).65 He mourned les deracinés, the people uprooted by modern life, and hoped for the creation of a new community based on traditional Amitiés Françaises (French friendships). Such right-wing “anarchism” became fashionable among a set of nobles of the epoch, like the writer Sibylle Riqueti de Mirabeau (writing under the pen name Gyp), who saw their love of tradition failing as “progress” steamed ahead past the fin-de-siècle with great vitality but toward a questionable destiny. Resigning themselves to the perhaps temporary end of monarchy, these reactionaries pursued an occult notion of aristocracy through which their innate nobility would always elevate them above the plebian drives of democracy.
Among the most important contributors to the reactionary milieu was the bushy-bearded and bespectacled figure of Édouard Drumont, whose self-published, two-volume work in 1886, La France juive (Jewish France), went through more than two hundred editions before its last publication in 1941. Drumont despised both capitalism and Marxism as the workings of Jewish overlords who divorced Europeans from their natural order through a despiritualized materialism advocated first by Adam Smith. As Drumont’s tome made the rounds, illustrated editions appeared depicting the leading anti-Semite as a knight fighting off the new Saracens. Anti-Semitism took on the character of a new crusade, where the enemy within “made the press the servant of capital, so that it is unable to speak.”66 By liquidating “Jewish France” and returning to France profonde, the spiritual depths of which lay in the souls of forefathers, rural French families would again be able to speak through a mighty and sacred sovereign. However, the sovereign would rule legitimately as a “people’s tribune,” presiding over an orderly state by fulfilling social needs. Such a state could only come to pass through a socialist revolution against the bourgeois conservative and liberal class. Drumont insisted, “Ces vaincus de la Bougeoisie seront bientôt à l’avant-garde de l’armée socialiste” (“The victims of the bourgeoisie will soon be the vanguard of the socialist army”).67 These victims were not mere proletarian slum dwellers, but rather the lower middle class, the small shopkeepers and skilled workers challenged by proletarian advancement and ruined by the early gentrification of imperial city-planning and department stores produced under Emperor Napoleon III’s regime.
Drumont’s ideas would feed into the radical-right, populist politics of Georges Boulanger, a prominent military figure who played a role in the suppression of the Paris Commune, and then received the blessing of its former right-wing participants and supporters—perhaps most notably the former communard Victor Henri Rochefort and his publication L’Intransigeant. The radical right’s support for a socially responsible monarchy or empire grounded in the national community resonated with Catholic Church doctrine, later made explicit in Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, which called for the transformation of capitalist production into a new corporatist system that included the input of labor syndicates under the state’s patronage (and control).
At this turning point, anti-Semitism stood as the “providential” position of reaction that could destroy ideals of human rights and return Europe to the sovereignty of a futuristic ancien régime. So, as establishment anti-Semitic politicians like Lueger and Boulanger proposed ethnocentric social welfare systems for the petite bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church moved to the left to maintain relevance, a popular strain of revolutionary movements and critical liberals edged toward a “new age” led by the “new man” who could recreate old national myths that guided the world toward a future organized by science and nature together.
Left Authoritarianism
The revolutionary tendencies of the nineteenth century grew in tangled patterns out of conflicting interests. From its partial foundations in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s volonté générale to Maximilien Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, revolutionary Jacobinism held its own potential for dictatorship, ritualized political religion, and terror.68 The ensuing development of utopian socialism, most commonly associated with Henri de Saint-Simon, openly professed the need for a kind of natural hierarchy of producers carrying forward the light of scientific management of society, from the Revolution through Napoleon and into the modern era via industrial development and grand projects that would mold France into an “organic nation.” Saint-Simonianism came to influence leading economists in power like Adolphe Blanqui and his supervisor, Finance Minister François Guizot, whose slogan was Enrichissez-vous! Nevertheless, it also influenced revolutionaries like Adolphe’s brother Auguste Blanqui, who forwarded a conspiratorial strategy of insurrectionary communism while maintaining a chauvinist disdain for other nations like Belgium, indicating a path of nationalism that would be taken by some of his followers.69
Auguste Blanqui joined and formed secret societies that proliferated and often collaborated throughout Europe during the early nineteenth century. Another architect of these was Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian national-liberal who strove to unite Italy under a single republican system.70 Although the chauvinist tendencies of Blanqui and the nationalism of Mazzini would be rejected by revolutionaries like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, other problems like anti-Semitism would not.71
New syntheses that mixed agrarian populism, urban workers’ movements, and elite conspiratorialism began to develop among revolutionaries. On the most fundamental level, the grand populist theories of left- and right-wing collectivism, aggregated into nationalism and socialism, met head-on with individualist theories of the vanguard—the conspiratorial elite and the superman. Russian revolutionaries like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergey Nechayev began to fuse Narodnik populism (similar in some respects to the völkisch movement), Blanquism, Bakuninism, and Marxism into a vanguardist doctrine of the seizure of state power through violent acts, including terror and assassination. After Italy’s “War of Unification,” known as the Risorgimento, revolutionary workers’ associations like Bologna’s Fascio Operaio emerged, which fused Bakuninism with Mazzini’s nationalism.72
Three elements would join to create fascism, then: vanguardist revolutionism, the emergent radical right of Lueger and Boulanger, and a more virulent form of reactionary politics aligned with revolution against liberal democracy. Perhaps the earliest iterations of the fusion of revolutionary left and revolutionary right took place in Barrès’s journal La Cocarde, in print from 1894 to 1895. Among the journal’s contributors were revolutionary syndicalists like Eugéne Fournière, Pierre Denis, and Fernand Pelloutier. The intended audience of Barrès’s newspaper was the educated and underemployed: “We know to whom we speak,” Barrès stated. “To the proletariat of bacheliers, to those youths whom society has given a diploma and nothing else, at the risk of turning them into an urban mass of déclassés. We know we are in agreement with their reflections and, in any case, with their instinct, clamoring for the resurrection of their native lands where they might be gainfully employed.”73 Barrès’s La Cocarde appealed to the young “superfluous man,” the overeducated college graduate who remained alienated from the economic system despite his credentials and ambition. This new disenfranchised elite, thinking “beyond” the opposition between left and right, would set the stage for a revolt of the intellectuals that found two new voices emerging from revolutionary syndicalism and ultranationalism: Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras.
Left and Right
Linking the “vitalism” of scientist Henri Bergson to the revolutionary violence in the form of the general strike, Sorel connected ancient national myths to workers’ solidarity, eventually finding an intellectual ally in Maurras, who had also participated in La Cocarde. Sorel wrote that “the defense of French