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Fascism(s) and Some Harbingers

"Nous avons fait a Vincennes un travail collectif sur, c'est a dire, contre le fascisme...." Thus opens a two-volume account of a year's course at the University of Paris VIII: a study of fascism is, naturally, against fascism.' But the very study of fascism is a snare: "Le fascisme ne s'etudie pas, ga s'efface," affirms another professor at Vincennes.2 The attempt to fill in its historical background or provide a social or ideological analysis, however hostile one's premises, remains a form of propaganda. Fascism is a plague from outer space, to be stamped out, not placed in human context. This radical approach, inspired by late-night exposure to "The Invasion of the Killer-Tomatoes," is encountered more rarely than the simplistic approach in which all oppression, authoritarianism, or reaction is tarred with the fascist brush. One is not surprised to find Macciocchi, who has already described Bonapartism as preindustrial fascism (you can see her point), referring to Petain's "[fascist] national revolution."3 One is less prepared to find an essay on Greece in a scholarly and otherwise serious volume trotting out notions that illustrate the persistence of stereotypes untroubled by sober analysis: the terrorist mob (of royalists), the people (who reject their pretensions), the army, security forces, and administrators (who comprise the social basis of Greek fascism).4 Purcell's book, presumably aimed at high school readers, is equally uncluttered by attempts to discriminate or analyze: Maurras is a French fascist, Georg Hegel (sic) is the archpriest of totalitarianism, both Hegel (whose views are similar to Nietzsche's) and Nietzsche "adored power," the right "stands for conserving the present," reactionaries "want to bring back the past," the left "to bring in the future."5 And so on. Hugh Purcell's account of fascism, whose front cover characteristically carries a picture of Hitler, is well illustrated and sensible enough most of the time within the limits of the need for swift generalization about a subject long plagued by just that. The qualification "crudely speaking" that Purcell uses to show what he is doing might appear more often at the beginning of other authors' paragraphs. But the writings noticed below are free from that particular vice. They reflect, rather, the swelling tide of studies which, beginning in the 1960s, has looked at the varieties of fascism not as exceptional evil incarnate, or as temporary aberrations, but as political and ideological phenomena to be examined and situated