The word “fascist” has become so devalued over the years that it is hard to know what it really means. It is routinely used by progressives to abuse anyone of remotely conservative tendencies but most of them couldn’t begin to define the term with any degree of accuracy.
Most of us can agree that the first fascist government was Mussolini’s, ruling Italy from 1922 to 1943. But was Mussolini the first fascist? Not according to Italian academic Sergio Luzzatto, who awards that title to Antoine-Amadee-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Morès, son and heir of Duke Richard of Vallombrosa, a French aristocrat.
Born in 1858 into a background of wealth and plenty, Morès joined an elite cavalry regiment where he became a crack horseman, marksman and fencer, and embarked on the high life of a typical officer of the era, his gambling debts paid by his father.
He was physically courageous but also a cynical, mendacious and unscrupulous adventurer who left the army to seek his fortune in various far-flung corners of the world. Having married the daughter of a rich American businessman, he travelled to New York and decided there was big money to made in what was still very much the Wild West, the badlands of North Dakota, where he aimed to raise cattle and ship frozen carcasses to the East Coast, bypassing America’s meat centre, Chicago. Spending his father-in-law’s money with abandon, he even established a town, Medora, named after his wife, as his centre of operations.
The venture duly collapsed, though not before Morès was charged with killing a man in a gun battle. He was acquitted after several trials but such court appearances were to become a regular feature in his hectic life.
A project to build a railway in newly French Indo-China also came to nothing, but both failures contributed to what was to become his driving passion: virulent antisemitism. He blamed the Jewish meat barons of Chicago and New York for his America disaster and his Jewish chief engineer for the Asian debacle.
In late 19th-century France he was tapping into a rich vein of growing anti-Jewish prejudice. As Luzzatto notes, the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell pinpointed France as the real birthplace of modern fascism, sparked by the “revolutionary right” among whom Morès was a key figure.
The French fascists sought a “third way” between liberalism and socialism that would impose harmony between capital and labour, saving the West from the Jews who were, as they saw it, driving the new globalisation that threatened working-class jobs. (There are parallels with today.)
Morès fashioned an alliance with the journalist Eduard Drumont, the principal ideologue of French antisemitism, and his colourful reputation did him no harm with the working-class whose support he sought as he fashioned a career in politics, or more accurately, demagoguery. Nor did his propensity to settle arguments by means of the duel: three of his opponents were Jewish, most tragically Captain Armand Mayer, who challenged Morès to defend the honour of fellow Jewish army officers. He was no match for Morès, who ran him through. He was charged with murder but acquitted after a sensational trial.
The outcome of the rising antisemitism vociferously advanced by Morès in newspaper articles and at often violent public meetings was the Dreyfus Affair of 1894-5. It is interesting to learn that two years earlier Captain Alfred Dreyfus had contemplated avenging Mayer’s death by challenging Morès to a duel himself, before being dissuaded by wiser friends.
Although Morès was triumphant at Dreyfus’s conviction, his own political career had collapsed before then when it was revealed that the scourge of the Jews had received a secret loan from Cornélius Herz, a controversial Jewish businessman. His reputation never recovered.
Long since cut off by both father and father-in-law, beset by his creditors, including a debt of 100,000 francs to a Paris brothel, Morès headed for North Africa. In a bizarre attempt to challenge the reach of the British Empire (controlled by Jews, naturally) he led an expedition into deepest Tunisia where he met his end at the hands of a local Arab tribe who were more interested in his belongings than his beliefs. He was 38.
His funeral was held at Notre Dame cathedral and he became a martyred icon for the French far-right. And at the end of this fascinating account of a man whom many will regard as justly forgotten by history, Luzzatto reminds us that during the Second World War the mass expulsions that Morès had long advocated finally took place, with the deportation of 75,000 French Jews to extermination camps. Few of them returned.
The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès
By Sergio Luzzatto
Allen Lane
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.