The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  When a constitutional system seizes up in deadlock and democratic institutions cease to function, the “political arena" tends to narrow. The circle of emergency decision-makers may become reduced to a few individuals, perhaps a head of state along with his immediate civil and military advisors. 28 In earlier chapters of this book, we needed to look at very broad contexts in order to understand the founding and rooting of fascism. At the stage when the breakdown of democratic regimes finally opens the way for the fascist leader to make a serious bid for power, the concentration of responsibility in the hands of a few key individuals requires something nearer a biographical perspective—with due caution, of course, about falling into the trap of attributing everything to the fascist leader alone.

  Conservative complicities in the fascism’s arrival in power were of several types. First of all, there was complicity in fascist violence against the Left. One of the most fateful decisions in the German case was von Papen’s removal, on June 16, 1932, of the ban on SA activity. Mussolini’s squadristi would have been powerless without the closed eyes and even the outright aid of the Italian police and army. Another form of complicity was the gift of respectability. We have seen how Giolitti helped make Mussolini respectable by including him in his electoral coalition in May 1921. Alfred Hugenberg, Krupp executive and leader of the party that competed with Hitler most directly, the German National Party (DNVP), alternately attacked the Nazi upstart and appeared at political rallies with him. One at Bad Harzburg in fall 1931 made the public believe the two had formed a “Harzburg Front." But while Hugenberg helped make Hitler look acceptable, his DNVP membership drained away to the more exciting Nazis.

  We saw in chapter 3 that the Nazis received less direct financial help from business than many have assumed. Before the final deal that put Hitler in power, German big business greatly preferred a solid reassuring conservative like von Papen to the unknown Hitler with his crackpot economic advisors. In the final tense months, when Hitler was refusing all lesser offers in an all-or-nothing gamble on becoming chancellor, and when party radicalism resurfaced in the Berlin transport strike, money grew scarcer. The NSDAP was virtually broke after the disappointing election of November 1932. A relatively minor Cologne banker, Kurt von Schröder, served as go-between in negotiations between Hitler and von Papen, but business contributions did not become a major resource for Hitler until after he attained power. Then, of course, the game changed. Businessmen contributed hugely to the new Nazi authorities and set about accommodating themselves to a regime that would reward many of them richly with armaments contracts, and all of them by breaking the back of organized labor in Germany.

  The financing of Italian Fascism has been less studied. When Mussolini broke with the socialists in fall 1914, nationalist newspaper publishers and industrialists and the French government paid for his new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, but their purpose was to bring Italy into the war.29 The subsequent assistance of landowners, the military, and some civil servants to squadrismo seems clear enough.

  The more or less protracted period during which fascists and conservatives hammered out a power-sharing arrangement was a stressful time for both sides, in both Italy and Germany. These negotiations promised at best to produce a less than ideal compromise for both. Considering the alternatives, however—the Left in power, or a military dictatorship likely to exclude both the parliamentary conservatives and the fascists— both sides were willing to make the necessary adjustments and accept second-best.

  The fascist parties were thus tempted into ever deeper complicity with their new allies, which risked dividing the parties and alienating some of the purists. This “normalizing" process, already evident at the earlier stage of taking root, was now intensified by the higher stakes offered as access to power became plausible. The fascist leader, engaged in a promising negotiation with conservative power holders, reshaped his party even more radically than before. He made what Wolfgang Schieder calls a Herrschaftskompromiss, a “compromise for rule," in which areas of agreement are located and bothersome idealists are cast aside.30

  Hitler and Mussolini made their Herrschaftskompromiss from somewhat different positions of strength. The importance of squadrismo to Mussolini’s success, and the relative unimportance of his electoral party, meant that Mussolini was also more beholden to the ras, his regional Fascist chieftains, than Hitler was beholden to the SA. Hitler had a somewhat freer hand in this negotiation, but even he was not free from difficulties with his party militants.

  Negotiating with conservative leaders for entry into power is a time of risk for a fascist leader. While the leader bargains in secret with the political elite, his militant followers wait impatiently outside, reproaching him with sellout. Mussolini, already by late 1920 engaged in secret negotiations with party leaders, disappointed some of his militants by failing to come to the defense of D’Annunzio at Fiume at Christmas, and by joining Giolitti’s electoral coalition in May 1921. In August 1921 he overcame open rebellion over his “pacification pact" with the traditional enemy, the socialists, only by resigning temporarily from the Fascist leadership and by giving up the pact.

  Hitler also aroused conflicts within his party whenever he seemed to be close to striking some deal for power. Former Freikorps captain Walter Stennes, in charge of the SA in Berlin and eastern Germany, objected to Hitler’s pursuit of power by legal means. Stennes’s Storm Troopers were so exasperated by the deferral of gratification, by long hours with low pay, and by their subordination to nonmilitary party cadres that they occupied and wrecked Nazi Party offices in Berlin in September 1930. When they refused to obey Hitler’s order to observe a ban on street violence in February 1931, Hitler kicked Stennes out of the SA. Angry SA militants occupied party headquarters again in April 1931, and it took all of Hitler’s powers of persuasion to end the revolt. Five hundred SA radicals were purged. Hitler came closest to losing control of the Nazi Party at the end of 1932, as we saw earlier, as votes began to slip, money declined, and some lieutenants looked to more promising futures in coalition governments. His will and gambler’s instinct intact despite a weakened bargaining position, Hitler bet all or nothing on the chancellorship.

  The stakes were raised for conservatives, too, when an arrangement with a successful fascist party began to look likely: power with a mass base now became an attainable goal for them, too. There was even competition among conservatives seeking to win the support of all or part of the fascist movement (sometimes trying to detach a wing or the base). Schleicher competed with von Papen in Germany for success in harnessing the bucking Nazi horse to his wagon, as did Giolitti with Salandra in Italy.

  There was nothing inevitable about the arrival of either Mussolini and Hitler in office. Looking closely at how fascist leaders became head of government is an exercise in antideterminism. It may well be that a number of factors—the shallowness of liberal traditions, late industrialization, the survival of predemocratic elites, the strength of revolutionary surges, a spasm of revolt against national humiliation—all contributed to the magnitude of the crisis and narrowed the choices available in Italy and Germany. But the conservative leaders rejected other possibilities— governing in coalition with the moderate Left, for instance, or governing under royal or presidential emergency authority (or, in the German case, continuing to do so). They chose the fascist option. The fascist leaders, for their part, accomplished the “normalization" necessary for sharing power. It did not have to turn out that way.

  What Fascists Offered the Establishment

  In a situation of constitutional deadlock and rising revolutionary menace, a successful fascist movement offers precious resources to a faltering elite.

  Fascists could offer a mass following sufficiently numerous to permit conservatives to form parliamentary majorities capable of vigorous decisions, without having to call upon unacceptable Leftist partners. Mussolini’s thirty-five deputies were not a major weight in the balance, but Hitler’s potential contribution was decisive.
He could offer the largest party in Germany to conservatives who had never acquired a knack for the mass politics suddenly introduced into their country by the constitution of 1919. During the 1920s, the only non-Marxist party that had successfully built a mass base in Germany was the Zentrum (Center Party), a Catholic party that enjoyed, through its roots in parish life, an actively engaged membership and multiclass recruitment. The Zentrum reached broadly into the working class through the Catholic trade unions, but, as a confessional party, it could not recruit as broadly as Hitler. Holding in his hands the largest party, Hitler permitted conservative coalition makers to escape from reliance on the president’s emergency powers that had already endured nearly three years, and form a parliamentary majority that excluded the Left.

  The fascists offered more than mere numbers. They offered fresh young faces to a public weary of an aging establishment that had made a mess of things. The two youngest parties in Italy and Germany were the communists and the fascists. Both nations longed for new leaders, and the fascists offered conservatives a fountain of youth. The fascists also offered another way of belonging—deeper commitment and discipline in an era when conservatives feared dissolution of the social bond.

  Fascists had also found a magic formula for weaning workers away from Marxism. Long after Marx asserted that the working class had no home-land, conservatives had been unable to find any way to refute him. None of their nineteenth-century nostrums—deference, religion, schooling—had worked. On the eve of World War I, the Action Française had enjoyed some success recruiting a few industrial workers to nationalism, and the unexpectedly wide acceptance by workers of their patriotic duty to fight for their homelands when World War I began foretold that in the twentieth century Nation was going to be stronger than Class.

  Fascists everywhere have built on that revelation. I mentioned the French Cercle Proudhon earlier among the precursors.31 As for the Nazi Party, its very name proclaimed that it was a workers’ party, an Arbeiterpartei.Mussolini expected to recruit his old socialist colleagues. Their results were not overwhelmingly successful. Every analysis of the social composition of the early fascist parties agrees: although some workers were attracted, their share of party membership was always well below their share in the general population. Perhaps those few fascist workers were enough. If the fascist parties could recruit some workers, then fascist violence would take care of the holdouts. This formula of divide and conquer was far more effective than anything the conservatives could provide on their own.

  Another seductive fascist offer was a way to overcome the climate of disorder that the fascists themselves had helped cause. Having unleashed their militants in order to make democracy unworkable and discredit the constitutional state, the Nazi and Fascist leaders then posed as the only nonsocialist force that could restore order. It was not the last time that the leaders capitalized on that ambiguity: “Being in the center of the movement," Hannah Arendt wrote in one of her penetrating observations, “the leader can act as though he were above it."32 Fascist terms for a deal were not insuperably high. Some German conservatives were uneasy about the anticapitalist rhetoric still flaunted by some Nazi intellectuals, 33 as were Italian conservatives by Fascist labor activists like Edmondo Rossoni. But Mussolini had long come around to “productivism" and admiration for the industrial hero, while Hitler made it clear in his famous speech to the Düsseldorf Industrialists’ Club on January 26, 1932, as well as in in private conversations, that he was a social Darwinist in the economic sphere, too.

  Even if one had to admit these uncouth outsiders to high office in order to make a bargain, conservatives were convinced that they would still control the state. It was unheard-of for such upstarts to run European governments. It was still normal in Europe, even after World War I, even in democracies, for ministers and heads of state to be educated members of the upper classes with long experience in diplomacy or administration. The first lower-class prime minister in Britain was Ramsay MacDonald, in 1924, and he soon came to look, speak, and act like a patrician, to the disgust of Labour militants, who ridiculed him as “Gentleman Mac." President Friedrich Ebert of Germany (1919–25), a saddlemaker by trade, had acquired standing in a long career as Socialist Party functionary and deputy. Hitler and Mussolini were the first lower-class adventurers to reach power in major European countries. Even to this day the French Republic has had no head of state and only a handful of prime ministers who were social outsiders of the ilk of, say, Harry Truman. But circumstances were far from normal in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933. A central ingredient in the conservatives’ calculation was that the Austrian corporal and the greenhorn Italian ex-socialist rabble-rouser would not have the faintest idea what to do with high office. They would be incapable of governing without the cultivated and experienced conservative leaders’ savoir faire.

  In sum, fascists offered a new recipe for governing with popular support but without any sharing of power with the Left, and without any threat to conservative social and economic privileges and political dominance. The conservatives, for their part, held the keys to the doors of power.

  The Prefascist Crisis

  Even though the two crises within which the two fascist leaders achieved office—World War I’s aftershocks and the Great Depression—were different, they had common elements. Both confronted governments with problems of economic dislocation and foreign humiliation that seemed insoluble by traditional party politics; a deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by political polarization that fascists helped abet); a militant Left growing rapidly and threatening to be the chief beneficiary of the crisis; and conservative leaders who refused to work with even the reformist elements of the Left, and who felt threatened in their capacity to continue to govern against the Left without fresh reinforcements.

  It is essential to recall how real the possibility of communist revolution seemed in Italy in 1921 and Germany in 1932. Italy had just experienced the biennio rosso, the two “red years" following the first postwar election of November 1919, in which the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) tripled its pre-war vote to capture nearly a third of the seats in parliament and experienced a wave of “maximalist" fervor. The establishment of socialist mayors in numerous localities was accompanied by massive land seizures and strikes, culminating in a spectacular occupation of factories in Turin in September 1920. In the background loomed the example of Russia, where the world’s first successful socialist revolution gave every sign of spawning others. We now know that the Italian socialist “maximalists" and the new Italian Communist Party founded in 1921 had not the slightest idea what to do next. Fear of an imagined communist revolution could mobilize conservatives as powerfully as the real thing, however. As Federico Chabod observed, middle-class fear of communism peaked in Italy after the “maximalist" wave had already subsided.34

  In Germany after 1930 only the communists, along with the Nazis, were increasing their vote.35 Like the Nazis, the German communists thrived on unemployment and a widespread perception that the traditional parties and constitutional system had failed. We know from Nazi Party documents captured by the German police in 1931—the “Boxheim papers"—that Nazi strategists, like many other Germans, expected a communist revolution and planned direct action against it. The Nazi leaders seemed convinced in 1931 that forceful opposition to a communist revolution was their best route to broad national acceptance.

  Under all these circumstances, democratic government functioned poorly. Although the Italian parliament was never as completely deadlocked as the German one, the incapacity of the political leadership of both countries to resolve the difficulties at hand offered fascism its indispensable opening.

  Both Italian and German fascists had done their best to make democracy work badly. But the deadlock of liberal constitutions was not something the fascists alone had brought about. “The collapse of the Liberal state," says Roberto Vivarelli, “occurred independently of fascism."36 At the time it was tempting to see the malfunc
tion of democratic government after 1918 as a systemic crisis marking the historic terminus of liberalism. Since the revival of constitutional democracy since World War II, it has seemed more plausible to see it as a circumstantial crisis growing out of the strains of World War I, a sudden enlargement of democracy, and the Bolshevik Revolution. However we interpret the deadlock of democratic government, no fascist movement is likely to reach office without it.

  Revolutions after Power: Germany and Italy

  The conservatives brought Hitler and Mussolini into office quasiconstitutionally, within coalition governments that the fascist leaders did not totally control. Having achieved office quasilegally, Mussolini and Hitler had been entrusted only with the powers granted a head of government under the constitution. In more practical terms, their power was limited during their first days in office by having to govern in coalition with their conservative allies. Although the fascist parties held some vital posts in these governments, they had only a small minority of the cabinet positions.37

  Soon, both fascist chiefs turned that toehold into outright dictatorship. Completing their grasp on the state by transforming a quasiconstitutional office into unlimited personal authority: that was the real “seizure of power." It was a different story from gaining office; its main plotline was massive illegal action by the fascist leaders. Allies were still crucial, but now they needed only to acquiesce.