I tre volti del fascismo

by Ernst Nolte

Magistrale esempio di storiografia filosofica I tre volti del fascismo costituisce un contributo essenziale alla ricostruzione della genesi e dello sviluppo dei movimenti reazionari che caratterizzarono il periodo fra le due guerre: L’Action française di Charles Maurras, il fascismo italiano, il nazionalsocialismo tedesco. In una vasta analisi che unisce all’impegno storico e al penetrante giudizio critico un’eccezionale ricchezza di informazioni, Nolte illustra e approfondisce la dottrina e la prassi di quei movimenti, considerati quali stadi successivi di uno stesso fenomeno evolutivo. Un fenomeno che, già riconoscibile in forma embrionale nell’Action française, si dilata poi e assume connotati distinti nel fascismo e nel nazismo. E’ un esame quello di Nolte largamente improntato al metodo comparativo, e proprio il continuo confronto di tesi e di risultati getta piena luce sulle matrici comuni e sugli sbocchi che contraddistinguono i tre movimenti. Corredato da un ampio apparato di note bibliografiche, da un indice dei nomi e da uno degli argomenti, I tre volti del fascismo è un libro fondamentale, una guida sicura per chi voglia approfondire tutti gli aspetti di un’epoca fra le più tormentate della recente storia d’Europa

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Italy, France, Political Science

736 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

German historian and philosopher with a major interest is the comparative studies of Fascism and Communism

Originally trained in philosophy, he is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a Professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973.

He is best known for his seminal work Fascism In Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963.

Nolte has been a prominent conservative academic since the early 1960s, and involved in many controversies related to the interpretation of the history of fascism and communism.

In recent years, Nolte has focused on Islamism and "Islamic fascism". He is the father of legal scholar Georg Nolte.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long before he became a central figure in the famed "Historikerstreit," (historian's dispute) about the significance of the Holocaust, Ernst Nolte was a controversial figure, challenging accepted notions of the National Socialist past in Germany, and exploring fascism's meaning as an international phenomenon. If this book seems dated now, it is because the influence it has had on historians and political scientists causes much of its argument to seem "obvious," and because so many following in Nolte's footsteps have pushed his case for a "generic" model of fascism so far in the intervening years.
For these reasons, _Three Faces_ does not really make a good introductory text any longer. Students interested in discussions of generic fascism would be better to turn to more recent commentators such as Roger Griffin, A, James Gregor and Felix Carsten, while those interested specifically in French, Italian, or German models of fascism have an array of other authors to choose from. Nolte is useful, however, in understanding how such concepts were framed, and in how they challenged the notion of the German "Sonderweg" (special path) by which a doomed nation supposedly marched toward ultimate evil from its very earliest history. Nolte is also notable for having introduced heretofore sheltered German historians to the philosophical roots of Mussolini and Maurras, who are covered in considerable primary-source depth. This reader particularly benefited from the extensive quotes from Mussolini's "Opera Omnia," which trace his development from a rather advanced Marxist thinker to the first Fascist leader.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book, little referenced, but immensely valuable. Many have heard of Ernst Nolte as having been naughty in the "Historians Debate" in the 1980s and 90s, where his remarks have been interpreted as suggesting that Hitler was preferable to Stalin, or something worse. I hate that game, and was glad when Furet rose in his defence, even doing a book together. Still, it was a shock to find that in this much earlier book (1969, written for American college students, who would have been stupefied by the recherche detail and depth of reference), Nolte proposes a comparison between the two villains,says that some might think them to be comparable, but declares firmly that his opinion is that the Holocaust is a much worse crime than the horrors of Communism.
But that's a side issue. Here is a book by a late student of Heidegger which attempts to envision fascism in faintly Heideggerian terms (with the difference between master and pupil that the master loved fascism and the pupil Nolte does not). Each third of the book - on Maurras and Action Francais, on Mussolini and on Hitler - ends with a discussion of transcendence that seems genuine - because I could undertand perfectly as I read it, and can't in the least reproduce it in memory or remember anything of it except my own transient sense of complete comprehension. But the book is not pervaded by this Heideggerian fog: the chapters on the development of Mussolini's belief are the best I've ever read on him; the chapters on Maurras as good an attempt to eff the ineffable as I've seen - and the sections on Hitler are brilliant, precisely because Nolte shows that Hitler was a much less interesting figure -and a complete madman - than his forerunners in France and Italy in the anti-bourgeois-revolution business. Nolte thinks that Hitler added a Communist-hate and Jew-hate dimension to fascism that had been elements of the earlier movements, but as expressed in the Nazi regime, were more expressions of Hitler's individual madness than part of fascism itself.
I will add some detail from his observations when I get some time.

[Brook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely a book I will have to one day read again. Although very dense and expects a great deal of prior knowledge about European history during the World Wars era, there's a ton of insight and analysis as to what fascism _is_, how it develops, and how it functions, which are things you can only understand by looking at the phenomenon historically, not just slapping together a few of its typical features and defining it. Nolte begins as early as the French Revolution and an in-depth survey of the various right-wing currents of liberalism and conservative that emerged from it and travels all the way from there to the fall of National Socialism in World War 2.

To me, the most important takeaway is just the demystifying fascism as "the bad guys who did the bad things" or as just a series of megalomaniacs who cynically "tricked" the population into giving them power. These people had theory, analysis, debates, serious accusations about the nature of modern society. I disagree with all of them, obviously, but to regard fascism as merely irrationality or fear I think is a tactical blunder which will do little to combat its manifestations today.

[Skip Unger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a tough read, one of the most difficult books I've read lately. But it was a fascinating academic investigation of the philosophical roots of fascism through the examination of three cases: Action Francaise, Italian fascism under Mussolini and National Socialism (Nazism) under Hitler. I don't know if it was partly due to the translation of the author's original German (the author was the first serious German historian to address this issue when we wrote this book in 1963), but I often found the it difficult to follow the flow of discussion and thought, requiring re-reading passages many times. The bottom line is the author shows that fascism isn't unique to individuals and that these movements can occur anytime given fertile ground (i.e., economic alienation, a demagogue who blames a scapegoat for all the nation's problems, fear of socialism or Communism, etc.). I recommend this for those who already have a base knowledge of historic events in Europe since World War I and those interested in political philosophy. This topic is certainly more germane than ever given events in the United States and other nations this year

[Marcel Patulacci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a complex work !

A prior refreshing of your philosophical knowledges (especially authors like Marx, Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel) would be necessary. As I am not that knowledgeable in philosophy, I sometimes faced terrible difficulties to follow up with Nolte's argumentation !

Anyway, explaining "fascism" is not an easy task, as the definition of this term will substantly fluctuate, depending on one's political/philosophical views. Nolte proposes to consider fascism as a trans-european phenomenon (in its hegelian understanding) stretching from the end of the First World War to the fall of National-Socialist Germany in 1945. Therefore, Nolte divides his work in three parts, which corresponding of a different evolutionary step of fascism in different contexts.

The first part deals with the french "Action Française" of Charles Maurras, which Nolte considers as a pre-fascism. Action Francaise, unlike her italian and german counterparts, never reached the power, however emerged a few decades before them. Nolte explains this through the fact, french society got confronted with the situation (the defeat in the franco-prussian war in 1871, economic difficulties etc) Germany would face at the end of the WW1. Even though the action francaise never attempted to reach the power, this organization prefigures the future german NSDAP and the italian PNF: the reject of bourgeois society, reject of socialism, idealization of one's history and the first street militia ("camelots du roi").

The second part deal with the italian fascism, which seals the birth of fascism. Even though italian fascism and action francaise might share many similiarities, they did not influence each others and were not in contact. Unlike Maurras who came from a conservative, catholic background, Mussolini was politically educated in the socialist ranks. His political path will bring him always more on the right of the political spectrum, which will become a caracteristic of fascism: its flexibility. Depending on their needs, italian fascists will regularly switch their approaches from left to right and contrariwise. Nolte ends this part concluding that Mussolini, while being certainly less intellectualized (in comparison with Maurras and Hitler), had the brightest and richest (even though often contradictory) intellectual background.

The third and last part deals with the german National-Socialism. which is without any doubt the most known emanation of fascism. Nolte considers it as the maturity of the fascist phenomenon but also its end. Even though, Hitler never ceased to admire Mussolini, and thus until the very end, his thoughts demonstrated in fact more similarities with Maurras from "Action Francaise". Nolte considers NS-Germany as the most radical version of fascism.

This structure in three parts not only emphasize the evolution of fascism through time, but also in different context. Just as liberalism or communism, fascism took different forms in the different countries it came to power. Those are the two axes of this work and I found Nolte's argumentation quite convincing. However the philosophical complexity can be troublesome (it supposes you are familiar with the authors I mentioned at the begining of this review) and this emphasis on philosophy is made at the expense of social and/or of economic analyses. After all, Nolte was first a philsoph before becoming historian and you could easily find economic approach in other authors works.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

THREE FACES OF FASCISM is a brilliant tome put to the service of a bogus and even dangerous idea. German historian Ernest Nolte tries to convince you that Nazism was not peculiar to Germany but must be viewed in the context of an all-European drive towards fascism which began in Italy with Mussolini in 1919, Mussolini taking power in 1922, spread to Germany, 1923-33, and nearly came to power in France in the 1930s. (Nolte's claim that the monarchist party Action Francaise was a fascist organization will come as quite a surprise to most Frenchmen, along with my old UCLA colleague Eugene Weber, an expert on French fascism.) Why is Nolte dangerous? He lets the Germans off the hook by imagining a black and brown disease that pervaded the whole continent. Nazism: Coming to a theater near you! In fact, National Socialism, with its exterminationist anti-semitism, was original to Germany, though Hitler copied the trappings of Mussolini's totalitarian state. If Nolte meant to provoke readers, he succeeded. Be prepared to refute him.

[uncatastrophe · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably the best analysis and subsequent CRITIQUE of fascism im familiar of, does not resort to cliches such as "totalitarianism bad" (and rightly recognizes the totalitarian imprint of any encompassing system), and actually defines fascism and its causes at three different levels... i think the argument that the idolatry of culture itself negates the conditions wherein the production of culture is even possible is quite possibly one of the trickiest paradoxes in historical thought

my only critique of the critique is that by far the most interesting aspect of the book is its abstract analysis of historical conditions around the "epoch of world wars", yet this is mostly at the very end of sections which leaves you paging through often quite dry/moralistic history lessons in order to get to "the good stuff"

[Cristiana Facchini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un tomo di notevole spessore e abbastanza difficile da leggere,
sia per le continue citazioni filosofiche spesso non spiegate
a dovere, sia per la traduzione a tratti davvero
poco precisa sia nel lessico che ne termini
(voglio dire, il trattato di Versailles che diventa
trattato di Versaglia...).

Resta un testo da leggere per capire certi meccanismi
che hanno portato al potere il fascismo e il nazismo,
e che invece in Francia hanno portato da
tutt'altra parte.

[Moritz Piller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schon gut aber auch zach oder ich bin zu doof

[Fred R · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book opens up several worthwhile lines of investigation, but what was most interesting to me was how interdependent Communism and Fascism were. In a very real sense, their political successes were the result of mutual coordination, even if the actual actors had no idea how the game they were playing worked.