“I do not want the liberty of men, nor their equality; I want only my power over them, I want to make them my property, i.e. material for enjoyment. And, if I do not succeed in that, well, then I call even the power over life and death, which Church and State reserved to themselves—mine.”57 Stirner’s self-liberation would come at the expense of Jews, whose religion he saw as tainted and based on an attempt to haggle and smuggle one’s way into heaven.58
Although he died in middle age, Stirner became a relatively popular figure among intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, including the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas about the “superman” remain controversial to this day. In his later notebooks from 1899, Nietzsche declares that the superman comes about as a countermovement to the increasingly “economical use of men.” This countermovement is the expression of a “secretion of luxurious surplus” that “brings to light a stronger species, a higher type.”59 For Nietzsche, democratic society exists in a state of decay, or “passive nihilism”—a bad equality that rejects transcendence, bringing about the need for an accelerated “higher species” composed of the “strong and noble” Napoleon type who transforms passivity into activity.60
Such “active nihilism” embodied by the superman would reduce modern society to nothing and build a new world on its ruins, overcoming base legalism with the spirit of action.61 Yet such a movement cannot proceed without enforcing another tyranny, he would admit.62 Even the principles of anarchy and complete freedom become unfree, he insisted, finding their ultimate ends in nihilism as the consequence of “the political and economic way of thinking.”63 Napoleon is, then, the embodiment of two kinds of nihilism, active and passive, the cure and the disease—the superman comes as the result of the lack of a “higher species” in modern society, only to find in alienation a repetition of the same crisis of modernity.
A new political configuration was being born: part individualist, part collectivist; part nationalist, part socialist. The only thing that could hold such disparate ideological positions together was a syncretic, overarching narrative of domination. Effectively, fascism emerged from a mutual enmity against the compromised system of liberal democracy and a final decision to collaborate in its ultimate destruction.
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
