The First Fascist

A vivid biography of the nineteenth-century French-Italian aristocrat Marquis de Morès, the first political leader to master the blend of racialized hatred, cross-class solidarity, and paramilitary violence that Benito Mussolini would call “fascism.”

The Marquis de Morès was the first populist, white supremacist, and openly antisemitic leader in the Western world. A key figure behind the Dreyfus affair, he took France by storm with his inflammatory rhetoric, media savvy, and violent stunts. Decades before Mussolini, Morès invoked the fasces—the ancient Roman bundle of wooden rods—to symbolize the society he wished to create: a union of all social classes against their enemy, the Jews.

Animated from his early years by personal ambition and the loss of aristocratic status in modern, democratic France, Morès embarked on an extraordinary career spanning four continents. He ventured to the American frontier and became a cattle rancher in the Dakotas; he set out to build a railway in the jungles of Indochina. But his efforts were dogged by failure—and he blamed Jewish machinations for his defeats. Embittered, he returned to France to pursue what he saw as the mission of an upper-class Frenchman: to fight Jews and other minorities on behalf of the white proletariat. Soon he controlled a large, violent militia of disgruntled workers.

As Sergio Luzzatto makes clear, Morès both anticipated and propelled the fascist politics that erupted in the twentieth century and still resonate powerfully in our own time. Morès’s rapid political rise was halted by financial scandal, but his shadow continued to loom. In Vichy France, as Jews were being deported to Auschwitz, officials would gather to celebrate Morès’s memory.