Even by aristocratic standards, the Marquis de Morès led a life of impressive dissipation. He was born in 1858 in the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Paris, in a grand eighteenth-century hôtel that serves today as the residence of the Russian ambassador. As a young man, he cut a rakish path through high society, racking up debts from gambling, womanizing, and consuming inordinate quantities of champagne and foie gras. He borrowed so heavily from wealthy relatives that his father eventually obtained a court order placing him under financial guardianship.
A failson of the fin-de-siècle, Morès moved to the Bad Lands of Dakota Territory at age 24 to start a cattle ranch. He poured money into a planned network of slaughterhouses and refrigerated railcars, only to be outmaneuvered by Chicago stockyard bosses and New York butchers. He had more success in achieving tabloid notoriety, by shooting a desperado and standing trial for his murder, but this did not improve his financial situation. He made another move across the world, to French colonial Indochina, and reinvented himself as the champion of a new rail system that he promised would penetrate the elusive Chinese market. This time, his grandiose ambitions fell victim to local unrest, bureaucratic foot-dragging, and sniping between political factions. He returned to France empty-handed.
It is not an inspiring tale, and might not even be an interesting one if Morès had not found a way to channel his humiliations into a political program. The politics of resentment was thriving in late nineteenth-century France, and Morès seized upon it when he stood as a candidate in the Paris municipal election of 1890. While this turned out to be another failure, the campaign cemented his habit of contrasting the goodness of the people with the corruption of the ruling class—an especially potent formula, he learned, when laced with a vicious and conspiratorial antisemitism. In the years that followed his electoral defeat, he fought two highly publicized duels—one by pistol and one by sword—against Jewish compatriots who found his insults intolerable. His relentless smear campaign against Jewish army officers played a part in the frenzied atmosphere of the Dreyfus affair which erupted in 1894.
In many ways, it is hard to imagine a more quintessentially nineteenth-century figure than Morès, the gentleman adventurer with a handlebar moustache and an unreconstructed code of honor. But in the new biography The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès, historian Sergio Luzzatto portrays him less as an aristocratic holdover than as the progenitor of something new. The Marquis de Morès dreamed of forging the masses into a national community that would exclude only the Jews. He had at his disposal an entourage of hard men, mostly butchers, who flanked him when he made public appearances in Paris. He cast himself as the leader of a revolution destined to transcend divisions between capital and labor. He even proposed a classical Roman symbol, the bundle of rods known as the fasces, to represent the cohesive social order of the future. All this, Luzzatto argues, is enough to make Morès “a father of fascism.”
As Luzzatto acknowledges, previous historians have also glimpsed fascist origins in the dark underbelly of the belle époque. The best-known, if controversial, version of this argument was made by Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, who found an ideology of “national socialism” taking shape from the 1880s among French thinkers equally disillusioned by bourgeois individualism and proletarian militancy. Luzzatto shifts the focus from ideas to practices—from the theoretical critique of liberal democracy to the political action aimed at bringing the system down—while defending the same contentious timeline as Sternhell. Is it really possible to speak of fascism before the abyss of World War I and its consequences: before the militarization of everyday life, the collapse of empires and monarchies, and the threat of revolutionary socialism?
How far into the past can we see fascism? This is the counterpart to a more familiar question today: Can (or should) we describe the ascendant right-wing politics of the present as “fascist”? Luzzatto, who embraces a capacious understanding of the concept, sees fascism traveling easily across time, and argues that Morès’s career anticipates “so much of the twentieth century, and even—unfortunately for us—more than a few developments of the twenty-first century.” Such bold leaps are unlikely to resolve debates about where to draw the boundaries, chronological or definitional, around fascism. Where The First Fascist does succeed, however, is in challenging the complacent assumption that fascism could only have emerged from an apocalyptic crisis. This is the uneasy lesson of the Morès saga: It didn’t take a world war for unscrupulous men to try amassing power by exploiting features of the mass democracy they claimed to despise.
Even in the interwar period, which saw explicitly fascist movements seize control of governments in Europe, there was something amorphous about the ideology they proclaimed. Benito Mussolini, who led the first self-described fascist movement and the first fascist regime in power, unleashed a flood of verbiage over the course of decades while struggling to settle on a definition of the term. While Italian fascism had obvious affinities with the Nazi regime in Germany, there were differences too: south of the Alps, a greater emphasis on the corporatist model of state economic coordination, derived from the Catholic social doctrine that also inspired Morès; to the north, a far more ruthless institutionalization of state violence and racial fanaticism. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, fascist and anti-fascist sympathizers everywhere rallied to the side they saw as their own. Yet historians still debate whether Francisco Franco’s counterrevolution should be deemed fascist at all, given its distinctly anti-modern, clerical, and monarchist elements.
It is almost too easy to list the characteristics of fascism because its prolific ideologues claimed so many. There is the litany of “antis”: anti-liberalism, anti-parliamentarianism, anti-individualism, and anti-socialism, as well as antisemitism and (less consistently) anti-capitalism. Fascists borrowed elements from the leftist playbook of revolution—the mobilization of the masses, the regenerative promise of violence, the utopian reimagination of the future—then subordinated them all to the ideal of a racially unified nation. At the same time, they challenged the old conservative elite of church and king with the cult of the charismatic leader. But even more than a philosophical synthesis of left and right, fascist movements were always relentlessly oriented toward the acquisition of power. As they evolved from outsiders into insiders, fascists maintained a permanent state of militarized politics: from brutal vigilantism that challenged established authority; to the police states that enforced discipline and repressed enemies; and finally to the expansionist frenzy of war and conquest. How closely does Morès fit the bill?
The Marquis began with a politics of grievance but honed it into something distinctly sharper and nastier. As a series of corruption scandals tainted the legitimacy of the Third Republic in the 1880s, the standard of living for many French people worsened. In the cities, the capitalist consolidation of distribution networks and the rise of department stores threatened to put shopkeepers and artisans out of business. In the countryside, farmers were squeezed by a worldwide agricultural depression. General Georges Boulanger nearly succeeded in toppling the state in the late 1880s by fusing the diverse grievances of the moment into a quintessentially populist campaign. In Boulangist rhetoric, the “little people,” the modest and the ordinary, represented the true and virtuous nation; they had been betrayed by their rulers, a self-serving and parasitic elite.
Morès entered politics as the backer of a Boulangist candidate who ran unsuccessfully for the Chamber of Deputies in 1889. It was around the same time that he joined forces with one of the most prominent antisemitic campaigners in France, Édouard Drumont. Morès had always been quick to blame Jews for the fiascos of his early career; he claimed, implausibly, that they predominated among the retail butchers of New York and later fixated on a colonial engineering official in Indochina who was Jewish. But the roots of his antisemitism went deeper than these grudges. His education as a young man was dominated by Jesuits who updated the ancient, sectarian tradition of Christian anti-Judaism with a new brand of “social Catholicism” that stigmatized the most assimilated and successful Jews as the bearers of a destructive global capitalism. In the press and in rallies across northern France, Morès and Drumont warned that a Jewish “plutocracy” led by the Rothschilds was crushing the working class through control of the banking system.
In Morès, the lower-born Drumont saw a promisingly charismatic frontman for a movement and employed his skills as a publicist to burnish Morès’s image. Morès, aided by his commanding physique and noble birth, could be presented as “a soldier and a Catholic,” a protector of the nation and a defender of the faith. At the same time, Morès’s commercial and political failures allowed him to pose as a victim of the same malignant forces that he claimed were afflicting humbler Frenchmen. His overseas adventures as a gunslinger, hunter, and empire-builder, meanwhile, gave him a rugged mystique that helped to close the social distance between the aristocrat and the masses. Satirical cartoons portrayed him as a towering, broad-shouldered figure, in one case wrestling Alphonse de Rothschild to the ground while shaking his fist in righteous anger. And he honed his self-presentation as a rough-and-ready man of the people with his unconventional choice of headwear: a wide-brimmed hat that became known as the chapeau Morès, a subtle homage to his cowboy days and a conspicuous renunciation of the genteel top hat.
But the case for Morès as a harbinger of fascism goes beyond his artful image-making as a populist antisemite. He was determined to divert the grievances of artisans and laborers from class conflict to ethnonationalist solidarity. He embraced the nascent ideology of corporatism, urging the extension of public credit to cooperatively owned and operated “workingmen’s companies” while emphasizing his aim of eliminating dependence on Jewish capital. He bankrolled a major strike of coachmen, and tried to jump onto the bandwagon of other labor actions, before cementing an alliance with Parisian butchers through wild accusations that Jewish suppliers were selling tainted meat. Perhaps most significant, he chipped away at the legitimacy of republican institutions by alternating between electoralism and violence. Provoking Jewish army officers into duels by leveling libelous attacks in the press, Morès orchestrated a rising tide of chaos that strained the authority of the state.
It’s notable that later French fascists claimed Morès as one of their own. In the dark years of the German occupation and the Vichy regime, the French collaborators who saw themselves as protagonists in a long-running ideological civil war held Morès up as a prophet and a warrior for the cause. In 1942, the municipal council of Cannes named a public garden after Morès, with a resolution that honored him as a determined foe of “Anglo-Saxon and Jewish hoarding, the coalition that runs the whole game of world politics.” That same year, as the murderous deportation of Jews from French territory was getting under way, a high-ranking Vichy official, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, noted that France had been attacking “the Jewish problem” at least since the days of “that great lord of action who was the Marquis de Morès.”
While these continuities are undoubtedly striking, other elements of the fascist claim fall short. For one thing, Morès had no ambition to supplant his beloved church with an all-powerful state. For another, dueling is a far cry from the high-tech violence celebrated by fascist aesthetics, and even Luzzatto concedes that the blue-shirted butchers of La Villette in Paris did not amount to a paramilitary force. The biggest problem with casting Morès’s life as an origin story for fascism is that it risks exoticizing what were, in their time, fairly commonplace commitments. Caesarist mass movements with authoritarian potential—notably Bonapartism, the plebiscitary dictatorship established by Napoleon III in 1851, and later Boulangism—were commonplace in this period of French history. Where exactly these phenomena end and fascism begins is not spelled out in the book.
Morès’s influence peaked in the early 1890s after a Parisian jury refused to convict him for the killing of a Jewish officer. Capitalizing on discontent with the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants driven to France from pogroms in Eastern Europe, he spoke openly of his desire to emulate the tsar and “expel the Jews.” Adding to his influence, Morès had the leading politicians of the Third Republic on the ropes because of corruption charges associated with the collapse of a canal-building venture in Central America, the Compagnie du Panama. A trio of fixers revealed to have distributed bribes to legislators were all of Jewish descent—a fact that Morès and Drumont let no one forget.
But Morès overreached. In his zeal to implicate republican leaders, he joined forces with an amateurish forger and found himself embroiled in an embarrassing fraud case. Worse still, one of his political targets, the wily Georges Clemenceau, fought back with an extraordinary revelation: Morès himself, perpetually indebted, had sought and received a loan from one of the fixers at the heart of the scandal. In short: the would-be savior of the nation was tainted by the Jewish corruption he made a cause of condemning. His reputation never recovered.
Rather than accepting or rejecting the “first fascist” label wholesale, it might be more useful to ask: What is gained by casting Morès as a forefather of fascism? Like Hannah Arendt, who made the Dreyfus affair a pivotal event in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Luzzatto reminds us that the preconditions for fascism’s emergence were deeply and widely rooted in European history. Though details of authorship remain murky, the urtext of antisemitic conspiracism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was also a product of 1890s Paris, emerging from a salon where Drumont rubbed shoulders with intelligence agents of the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles away in Vienna, a figure not so different than Morès, Georg Ritter von Schönerer, blended charismatic authoritarianism and hostility to Jews to appeal to a mass electorate, and achieved far more success than Morès did. A young Adolf Hitler was among those watching closely.
After World War I, freshly minted democratic electorates were at once empowered by the extension of the franchise, aggrieved by the consolidation of economic power, and buffeted by the sensationalism of popular media. This was the context in which radicalizing ideas and practices—corporatism, eugenics, leadership cults, cults of violence, and above all, antisemitism—traveled across borders and gained new adherents.
One of the strengths of Luzzatto’s book is the attention it pays to another of those radicalizing forces: imperial expansionism. As Morès bounced from the North American frontier to India to Indochina and finally to Algeria, he achieved nothing of consequence. But he did cultivate a paranoid view of global plutocracy weaving webs around the world, which strengthened his belief in the urgency of conquest and settlement to stop it. Visiting Algiers in 1894, he absorbed a view circulating in pied noir circles that the way to thwart a supposedly imminent Anglo-Judeo takeover of Africa was for France to forge alliances with the Islamic peoples of the continent. Two years later, on a quixotic unofficial mission to do just that, he met his death in the Saharan interior of Tunisia, murdered in an ambush by Arab and Berber warriors.
This final chapter of the Morès story—the muscular adventurer seeking out new worlds for his people—underscores how much the fascism of the twentieth century drew on the imperialist hero worship of an earlier era. Both adulated the man of destiny who rewrote history by spilling blood and claiming territory. Even Morès’s fairly senseless demise added a sheen of martyrdom to his image that would figure in the Vichy-era revival. In death, as in life, Morès blended racism, violence, and egoism to dramatize the weakness of liberal democracy. As the fascist dictators who came later also knew, this was not an infallible combination. But it had the advantage of serving a double purpose: destabilizing the nation from within while pushing its boundaries outward.
