‘The First Fascist’: A biography of the French aristocrat who pioneered antisemitic populism

Every country likes to feel different from others. In reality, they’d rather say “better,” unless they’ve chosen victimhood, but it’s frowned upon to say so openly. That’s why it’s much more convenient to proclaim that they are immune to the worst phenomena in history, from extractive colonialism to religious fanaticism, including political totalitarianism, especially fascism.

Thus, not long ago, in the United States it was claimed that their system of checks and balances made it impossible for them to fall into this type of authoritarianism, although writers like Philip Roth were already sounding the alarm in works like The Plot Against America. But if one nation had considered itself safe from the beast, it was France, the homeland of revolution and the rights of man, and therefore free from the fascist virus except by imposition through a foreign occupier.

It took an American researcher, Robert O. Paxton, to warn that France was naked and that the nature of the Vichy regime was unequivocally French, while another historian, the Israeli Zeev Sternhell, went even further, arguing that, in his view, it was in France that the intellectual seed of fascism had been sown. Less well-known in Spain, Sternhell is also worth remembering because he was one of the first to warn that having suffered a genocide did not automatically immunize one from becoming a perpetrator.

Following in the footsteps of these two great masters, as well as Professor Victoria de Grazia, with whom he coordinated a remarkable Dictionary of Fascism (2002-2003), the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto has now authored a biography of the Marquis de Morès, a 19th-century Parisian aristocrat who became a man of action and one of the main precursors of the ideology, praxis, and even the esthetics — both his own and that of others — of the fascist movements.

With the skill of the great storytellers, Luzzatto follows in Morès’ footsteps across no less than four continents, for the nobleman turned out to be a scoundrel and, after sharing training at the Saint-Cyr military school with Philippe Pétain, embarked on successive adventures in the plains of North Dakota as an intensive cattle breeder, which led him to challenge the big names in the Chicago meat industry, and in French Indochina as a railway promoter, in both cases with resounding failure.

Upon his return to Europe, he blamed Jews for all evils and fueled a growing taste for street violence, converting the Parisian butchers’ and slaughterers’ guild into his own personal shock troops, easily recognizable by their blood-stained blue aprons, while he always wore a wide-brimmed hat — the chapeau Morès — which he only removed to duel with journalists and officers of Jewish descent, such as Captain Armand Mayer, whom he killed in 1892 in an interesting precursor to the Dreyfus affair, which led Hannah Arendt to cite him in The Origins of Totalitarianism as one of those responsible for the wave of antisemitism that made the treason case against Captain Alfred Dreyfus possible.

Hounded by his financial scandals and determined to gain new allies for his anti-Jewish crusade, Morès then set out to traverse the sands of France’s colonial empire in North Africa — a true equivalent to the conquest of the American West — where he met his death when his caravan was attacked by a group of Tuaregs and local Arab tribes.

Although it may seem like it, this is not the plot of a Martin Scorsese film, but the true story of a populist pioneer that Luzzatto documents with precision throughout a volume of more than 600 pages, bravely published by the publisher Pasado & Presente in a magnificent translation by Marc Figueras, and which can be read in one sitting.

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