The "New Man" in Radical Right Ideology and Practice 9781474281102, 1474281109

Citation preview

 i

The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–​45

ii

 iii

The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–​45 Edited by Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

iv

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, Paul Stocker, and Contributors, 2018 Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8109-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8110-2 eBook: 978-1-4742-8111-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover image: The Fascist Youth movement performs group exercises, Italy, ca. 1936 © Corbis Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

 v

Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Building Illiberal Subjects: The New Man in the Radical Right Universe, 1919–​45  Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

vii viii

1

Part 1  Inaugurating the Radical Right “New Man” in Fascist Italy 1

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth  Luca La Rovere

19

2

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy  Francesco Cassata

39

3

The Aviator as New Man  Fernando Esposito

65

Part 2  The New Man in Axis Europe 4

Eugenic Art: Hitler’s Utopian Aesthetic  Gregory Maertz

5

Army Educators and the Making of a “Total Man” in Late Fascist Croatia  Rory Yeomans

105

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State during the Fascist Era  Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

131

6

87

Part 3  The New Man in Radical Right Regimes beyond Europe 7

Peronism: The Consumerist Revolution and the New Argentinean Alberto Spektorowski

151

8

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil  Aristotle Kallis

169

9

Japan’s Perennial New Man: The Liberal and Fascist Incarnations of Masamichi Rōyama  Roy Starrs

193

vi

vi

Contents

Part 4  The “New Man” in European Fascist Movements 10 The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain  David Alegre Lorenz

215

11 Portraits of the New British Fascist Man  Jeannette Baxter

231

12 The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–​45  Joan Tumblety

253

13 The Salience of “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements, 1922–​44  Roland Clark

275

Index

297

 vii

Illustrations 2.1 Gianni Baldi, “I grandi medici italiani. Pende.” L’Europeo 20, no. 31 (1964): 30.

40

2.2 Nicola Pende, Trattato sintetico di patologia e clinica medica. Messina: Manfredi Principato, v. 1, 1927, tab. IV.

43

4.1 Adolf Wissel, Jungbäuerinnen (1937) (Young women farmers), oil on canvas. Reproduction from Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart (1937).

90

4.2 Johann Schult, Aktbild einer jungen Tänzerin (GDK 1941) (Nude portrait of a young dancer), oil on canvas. Reproduction from Kunst dem Volk (August 1941).

90

4.3 Robert Schwarz, Badende Mädchen (GDK 1943) (Bathing girls), oil on canvas. Reproduction from Kunst dem Volk (August 1943).

91

11.1 Fascist Week, illustration by John Gilmour (January 1934). 11.2 Fascist Week, illustration by John Gilmour (February 1934). 11.3 Wyndham Lewis, Sir Oswald Mosley, London Mercury 1934. Pen

232

and ink and watercolor on paper. Copyright the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis. By permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

237

242

11.4 Wyndham Lewis, Sir Stafford Cripps, London Mercury 1934. Pen and ink and watercolor on paper. Copyright the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis. By permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

12.1 Insignia of the Jeunesses Patriotes, Le Populaire, January 1, 1935. 12.2 The decidedly bourgeois Jean-​Charles Legrand in his office, 1934.

243 261 262

viii

newgenprepdf

Contributors David Alegre Lorenz is a research and teaching fellow at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Rita Almeida de Carvalho is a researcher in contemporary history at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Jeannette Baxter is a senior lecturer in modern and contemporary English at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. Francesco Cassata is an associate professor in contemporary history at the University of Genoa, Italy. Roland Clark is a lecturer in modern European history at Liverpool University, UK. António Costa Pinto is a research professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal. Jorge Dagnino is an assistant professor of modern European history at Universidad de los Andes, Chile. Fernando Esposito is a lecturer in history at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Matthew Feldman is professor in the modern history of ideas at Teesside University, UK, where he codirects the Centre for Fascist, Anti-​Fascist and Post-​Fascist Studies. Aristotle Kallis is a professor of history at Keele University, UK. Luca La Rovere is an associate professor of contemporary history at the University of Perugia, Italy. Gregory Maertz is a professor of English at St. John’s University, New York, USA. Alberto Spektorowski is an associate professor at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Roy Starrs is an associate professor of history at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Paul Stocker is a lecturer at Richmond, the American International University in London, UK. Joan Tumblety is an associate professor of history at the University of Southampton, UK. Rory Yeomans is a research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Austria.

 1

Building Illiberal Subjects The New Man in the Radical Right Universe, 1919–​45* Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

This is the first in-​depth, comparative Anglophone volume dedicated to radical right conceptions of a New Man between 1919 and 1945 in Europe and beyond. Building upon several valuable non-​English volumes as well as a plethora of academic chapters and articles, the present collection approaches this vital area from a plurality of perspectives.1 In doing so, it eschews the temptation of dealing with the topic solely from the lens of masculinity studies, which, although genuinely valuable, cannot account for the complexity of the New Man in radical right thinking. It has become commonplace to view attempts to create “New Men” as a spasm of virility, in order to compensate for fin de siècle male anxieties—​provoked by the processes of modernization that challenged traditional structures of patriarchal society from the end of the nineteenth century. Some scholars, such as Barbara Spackman, have identified virility as an essential feature of fascist ideology.2 Others, like Christopher E.  Forth and George L.  Mosse, while acknowledging the importance of the subject and emphasizing some of its most visible aspects, such as the glorification of the Great War and the cult of youth and action, nevertheless conclude that fascism largely replicated, albeit in extreme forms, the normative ideals of masculinity of modern Western civilization.3 In a 2016 volume, David D. Roberts invited a loosening of these teleological mental structures so as to better probe the universe of radical right politics and the place of fascist ideology within it. Similarly, Aristotle Kallis has urged a reconsideration of the fluidity, hybridization, and cross-​fertilization of highly volatile ideological–​political processes in the process of “fascistization” before 1945, which underscores the contribution of Fascist Italy and, later, Nazi Germany to a myriad of radical right and authoritarian departures—​which were not necessarily fascist revolutionaries so much as fellow travelers or copycats—​alongside the open-​endedness and the destructive dynamic that ensued.4 It is in this spirit that the country-​focused chapters in this volume address the complex history of the New Man in radical right thinking and action.

2

2

Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

It bears noting that the term “radical right” is intended as an umbrella term, encompassing both fascist and nonfascist authoritarian regimes. The two are examined together as they both occupy common ideological terrain, ranging from shared enemies (above all, Jews, left-​wingers, and other social “undesirables” like gays or Freemasons) to extreme forms of nationalism and, especially before 1945, overt paramilitarism. Yet it is stressed here that the two differ on the crucial issue of constitutionalism. Revolutionary fascists seek to overthrow the existing order and install a new totalitarianism community of the “elect,” whereas the more reactionary radical right err toward advocating a status quo ante while keeping the previous constitutional order more or less intact. Roger Griffin further distinguishes between the “nonfascist radical right” and more fellow traveling in his seminal The Nature of Fascism. The former were groups who, “although undoubtedly anti-​liberal and anti-​communist, sought to fulfil goals which were insufficiently palingenetic or ultranationalist in their inspiration.”5 These include anticommunist right-​wing movements suffusing the interwar period in Europe and abroad as well as regimes that contained several important components of fascism (such as charismatic leadership) but that, as in the decades-​long dictatorships in the Iberian peninsula, ultimately lacked a revolutionary drive. Griffin refers to such regimes as “para-​fascist” in the sense that they adopted many of the symbols, features, and components of fascist regimes but lacked fascism’s revolutionary aims.6 The nature of these “hybrid” regimes, several of which are discussed in this monograph, including key examples from Latin America, melded fascist tendencies with nonfascist ones—​a concept explored more fully in Antonio Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis’s important edited collection from 2014, Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe. Yet the New Man is not a gendered hybrid in this volume, nor does “man” simply imply “person,” as was common interwar usage. Put another way, this is a volume on fascism’s chauvinistic construction of a “new man,” rather than containing contributions on the “new woman” or the “new person.” While not the object of this collection, there were indeed some attempts at diverse radical right movements and regimes to enable the creation of a “new woman.” Of course, there was a plurality of visions of womanhood within Europe and beyond—​including among fascist movements and regimes—​to build a “new woman” who, in theory at least, would reach beyond the private sphere traditionally reserved for her within the structures of patriarchal society. It was no longer enough for woman to be an exemplary mother and spouse. Like her male counterpart, the “new woman” had to be continually mobilized in order to become a militant citizen and an active political agent in the building of diverse national projects. Already in 1987, Claudia Koonz, in a commendable effort to recover the history of women in Nazi Germany, argued that many women had used the idealization made by the Nazis of the family to empower themselves as indispensable historical agents in the construction of the Third Reich’s envisioned Volksgemeinschaft.7 Similarly, Julie V.  Gottlieb has identified the efforts of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) to offer a revised image of femininity, one capable of transcending the limits of liberal–​ bourgeois notions of womanhood, while, at the same time, offering women remedies to the exploitation of cheap female labor, a return to family, spiritual regeneration, and a new political representation in the BUF’s idealized corporate state of the fascist future.8

 3

Building Illiberal Subjects

3

Similarly, some may wonder why we have excluded from this collection of essays the communist New Man.” After all, communism also shared in the project of radically altering human nature and men in particular. However, the editors have considered that the inclusion would too greatly muddy the waters, diluting the groundbreaking contributions here on fascism’s attempt to create a New Man. While especially fascist movements shared with Bolshevism an ideal of creating a new and collectively organized human being, communists in general shared a vision of humankind that was heir to the Enlightenment and that radically rejected fascism. The former, always in theory at least, presupposed an egalitarian conception of society, which was in sharp contrast to fascism’s cult of elites. Additionally, the latter viewed in violence and war an end in itself, whereas communism, while not rejecting violence in principle, viewed them as part of a larger project to create a new society.9 As such the New Man espoused by communism was aimed at a self-​transformation in accord with the very different the communist utopia, revealingly often characterized as a human machine or untiring worker for the cause.10 In turning now to some of the analyses to ensue, this introduction reviews some of the most visible developmental and historiographical contributions to Western conceptions of the New Man, prior to turning to a brief overview of ensuing national case studies. Suggestive of just how embedded the concept has been, let alone the metaphysical importance attached to the idea of a “second birth,” or a “reborn existence,” more than a dozen New Testament biblical verses speak to, in words attributed to a letter by St. Paul, “a new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him.”11 For millennia, this was symbolized by water baptism and a conversion to Christianity. The importance of this tradition is exemplified by the title of an anonymous 1846 study in London, Bible Searchings, the Water of Life: On the New Man, but there are many other texts touching upon this theme. That the spiritual well of becoming a New Man runs deep there can be no doubt. Yet in modern times it has acquired rather more secular currency. The watershed event in this sense was undoubtedly the French Revolution and its inauguration of a new epoch, characterized by its new sense of politics and the rise of the masses; the introduction of a new calendar; and rites, ceremonies, and symbols. This extended to the creating of a New Man, who would leave behind the vestiges of an old and seemingly immutable order to face up to the changing rhythm of life.12 The project of fashioning a New Man in modern Europe outlived the French Revolution and was to find a fertile terrain in the radical right universe during the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most salient aspects of this endeavor was the counter-​ Enlightenment conviction that men and women were not defined by nature or reason and thus were basically alike. However, this transition did not prove easy for a vast number of people. On this subject, Griffin has constructed an ideal type of modernism as a “revolt against decadence,” in which the years from circa 1850 were increasingly experienced, by a large number of writers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians as an era of regression in terms of the loss of beauty, meaning, and health. The effect of Western secularization produced a variety of palingenetic reactions seeking to establish a healthier social and moral order for society—​and, thus, to produce a new kind of man.13

4

4

Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

In Italy, for example, following the Risorgimento, elites of diverse provenance were convinced of the urgent need to refashion the populace and redeem it from the perceived degeneration and vices that affected the moral and civic conscience of Italians, thus impeding the nation’s achievement of modernity.14 Western modernity was widely perceived as an attack upon the most intimate fiber of humanity, a disembedding and alienating project that needed to be countervailed by a healthier alternative. It was this demand that would be supplied by totalitarianisms of both the left and the right emerging from the wake of the Great War.15 For all the New Man rhetoric by the radical left and right in the twentieth century, however, it would be a mistake to treat the topic as merely an empty slogan or sheer propaganda. In some cases, it was a deadly experiment to reshape the individual in mind, body, and soul. Indeed, for Richard Shorten, the concept of the New Man held together totalitarian politics as a composite of intellectual elements, forming its ideational coherence.16 In terms of Europe’s radical right, Kallis has argued that the “cleansing” project in diverse fascist movements and regimes was to be the midwife of a New Man, and of the racialized ideal of national community.17 In this sense, the utopia of building a New Man entailed a process of rupture with an avowedly decadent past, which, during the years considered in this volume, was represented, above all, in the perceived materialism of liberal democracies and the looming threat of communism. In this respect, the caesura of the Great War seemed to many to signal the end of the liberal democratic era. Although chilling and atrocious in many respects, from the First World War stemmed a hubristic spirit, a novel sense of possibility that paved the way to previously unchartered territories. For millions who had fought in the Great War, doubtless including both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, the war had been welcomed as a baptism of fire, a therapeutic and regenerative experience that would change men’s psyche and body. For the future duce of Italian fascism, the war had seen the emergence of a true and proper “trenchocracy.” Its members were the aristocrats of the future, whose task was to dismantle the existing social, political, and cultural order and to replace it with a wholly new body politic able to transform men into revolutionary-​minded citizens.18 In Germany too, the experiences of the First World War and the catastrophic defeat in 1918 served as a powerful inspiration to a whole generation with regard to visions of a New Man. Hard, resolute, young, and with a hint of Nietzschean vitalism, the soldier was the promise for a reborn nation, a figure who rejected the failed past and embraced an aggressive modernity to fulfill his duty to the future of the nation, an expectation that the traditional parties of the Weimar Republic seemed utterly unable to meet.19 Aviators, in particular, symbolized this emerging New World, as they seemed particularly suited to face up to a new modernity filled with unprecedented challenges and promises.20 For the radical right, the New Man was to be a collectively organized human being, as Emilio Gentile has insightfully argued.21 The First World War had signaled an emergent supremacy of the national collectivity. It was in its midst that the New Man was to realize his subjectivity and bring to fruition the modern notion of the development of the self. For many in the diverse radical right movements, parties, and regimes, man—​for this was clearly a gendered understanding at the time—​found his ultimate destiny and fulfillment of freedom within the national collectivity. Through sacrifice,

 5

Building Illiberal Subjects

5

heroism, and donation to the fatherland men would be able to rediscover and unfetter their inner essence after decades of rampant liberal materialism. Under perceived threats coming from various fronts, the New Man envisaged by the different radical right milieux was destined to bring about a veritable spiritual reawakening. According to the British fascist James Strachey Barnes, interwar Europe was witnessing a “new age of faith; and it is fascism which appears to have definitely ushered this new age in.”22 Above all, the New Man had to be an intransigent believer in the cause of the resurrected nation and his own personal identity as reflected in this community of destiny. The sacralization of the nation was common to many radical right activists and movements after the Great War—​in Europe and beyond.23 As the forerunner and example for many fascist (and fascistized) groups to follow, Fascist Italy was at the forefront in the minds of many at the time, and since.24 But there were other cases where the cult of the nation bred a complex web of symbols, myths, rites, and ceremonies. In Spain, for example, Ismael Saz Campos has perceptively traced the presence of a political religion within the Falange even before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Although most of its members rarely lost the opportunity to claim their status as faithful sons of the Catholic Church, they were serious about their intent to create an alternative and innerworldly religiosity to nationalize the masses. In a complex process of selective appropriation and cross-​fertilization with traditional Catholicism, the falangistas elaborated their own religion which sacralized Spain—​where the fascist “martyr” José Antonio Primo de Rivera as well as the later caudillo General Francisco Franco were included in the national pantheon. It was also, according to Campos, an expression of a totalitarian will via a self-​appointed circle of “chosen” people, who were to determine the new orthodoxy and sanctification of nation and party.25 A similar process occurred in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during the Second World War, where the Ustasha movement sought to legitimate its rule through the use of a sacralized imagery and the identification of its ideology as a new, intramundane religion, something of a cross between totalitarian “religious politics” and secular “political religion.”26 Religious characteristics were attributed to political notions such as state, race, nation, party, and leader. This was to be a fanatical faith, in which the fate of the individual and the community were subjected to a higher political entity, the ethnic nation, and transformed into a sacred entity after years of decadent “Yugoslavism.” Since the ultimate aim of the Croatian Ustasha was the purification and regeneration of Croatia, this in itself sanctified violence and terror as legitimate tools in achieving national rebirth and mass mobilization.27 Bearing the marks of its Christian antecedents, to become a true believer in radical right attempts to remake the nation-​state—​and, hence, to become a New Man—​a process of conversion was warranted. Only quasi-​metaphorically, a new life was to be grafted into the old one, providing a decisive and transformative change of self toward a more authentic personality. The postwar scholar of religions Mircea Eliade, a onetime member of the Romanian Iron Guard, for example, explicitly referred to this process of personal rebirth. In December 1937, he identified with the profound belief in the final victory of the Legionaries as follows: “because I believe in the destiny of the Romanian people . . . because I believe in the victory of the Christian spirit . . . because I believe in

6

6

Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

love.”28 In the memorable image of Eugene Ionescu, he was but one Romanian “converted” into a Rhinoceros by fascist mythmaking. In the case of Nazi Germany, the notion of Volksgemeinschaft was pivotal to the process of nurturing and making the New Man. In a provocative essay, Thomas Kuhne has noted how perpetrators and bystanders in the Holocaust built collective identity through committing genocide. In this process, the longing for community and togetherness, the experience of belonging to the Volk, and the ethos of collectivity became the basis of mass murder.29 In this radically racialized worldview, the New Man became the means to realize the new Volk. Correspondingly, the New Man invoked ideals of racial purity, physical strength, alertness, and a ruthless disposition—​all of which were to protect the Volk against the dangers of ethnic degeneration. In this sense, one can better comprehend the enormous human and material resources Nazi Germany invested in inculcating racial discipline and consciousness. The Nazis were well aware that the building of the “New Aryan Man” would take generations. In part to accelerate this process, the Nazis trained the SS, a political and racial elite constituting the racial vanguard, as a promissory note for the fully realized New Man, an “intellectual of action,” as Christian Ingrao has aptly termed it.30 Given this comparatively well-​ traversed area—​at least vis-​à-​vis other radical right movements’ construction of the New Man—​the case of Nazi Germany is represented by only one, offbeat chapter in this collection, a conscious decision aiming to highlight other, more neglected national permutations.31 In light of the emphasis based on “New Men” (re-​)fashioning a radical right nation-​ state in the expected future, a brief signpost is needed regarding the grandiose designs to train and indoctrinate the children and youth of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy. and other national cases discussed in this volume.32 Youth was frequently represented as a marker of purity, vitality, virility, and of sociopolitical change. Above all, the younger generation was seen as uncontaminated by the previous cultural and political traditions, meaning that they offered the illusion of breeding a genuinely and integrally New Man in different national settings. In Croatia, for example, Rory Yeomans has carefully traced the evolution of the myth of the New Man in Ustasha ideology and political practice. For years before the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941, Croat men were depicted as pacifist and all too ready to compromise. Indeed, the passivity of the Croat “old man” was deeply ingrained in Yugoslav national ideology. In this sense, it was precisely this antiheroic stereotype that the Ustasha regime set out to replace. The New Ustasha Man was militaristic, heroic, and endowed with a will of steel and iron discipline. Mijo Bzik, one of the movement’s chief propagandists, was of the profound belief that the Ustasha was a new kind of man for a new world order, a new human being for whom mercilessness and violence were central to his personal identity.33 Like in wartime Croatia, in war-​torn Spain, too, violence was legitimated and often sacralized. As Mary Vincent has observed, the making of the soldier into a crusader also mobilized a set of Catholic ideas about masculinity, “which provided a sense of moral order, an image of heroism against the infidel, and, most importantly, a construction of martyrdom in which the whole idea of the crusade found its ultimate expression.”34 Building upon these insights, The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology

 7

Building Illiberal Subjects

7

and Practice, 1919–​45 hosts a rich array of case studies from a range of national and regional contexts. The final portion of this introduction offers a brief survey of the chapters to follow, with an eye on the connecting thread: an attempted “anthropological revolution,” in the words of Stanley Payne. It is further appreciated by many specialists that the key revolution of fascism was neither political nor socio-​economic but, in the Mossean presentation, cultural or, in Emilio Gentile’s felicitous term, “anthropological.” Here again the insights have rarely been systematized, so that complete studies of the character of fascist revolutionism remain wanting.35

In attending to this gap in the scholarly literature, this collection of essays is divided into four parts. The first part provides a case study on the New Man in Fascist Italy. Considering its inaugural role as both radical right movement and regime, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) has been overly neglected in literature on the topic. The first three chapters therefore unpack decidedly Fascist (and later, generically “fascist”) notions of the New Man and their interaction with the state apparatus in Italy, as opposed to some of the more ideologically varied understandings to come. Thereafter, the second part broadens its horizons to several radical right regimes, including Nazi Germany; the collaborationist Independent State of Croatia; and Oliveira Salazar’s “New State” in Portugal. Part 3 then examines the New Man in radical right regimes beyond Europe: Juan Perón’s in Argentina; that of Brazil under Getúlio Vargas; and Imperial Japan. By looking at how regimes sought to turn the myth of the New Man into a reality, these first three sections place special emphasis upon how conceptions of New Men—​rather than being merely a rhetorical device or ideological feature—​were facilitated (or otherwise) by the state. Finally, Part 4 assesses a diverse range of case studies related specifically to European fascist movements. With examples from fascist movements in Spain, Britain, France, and Romania, it points up how ideological conceptions of the New Man were also nurtured by revolutionary right groups and their interaction in wider national–​political cultures. Individual chapters within this collection demonstrate that the New Man cannot be understood simply as a stand-​alone construction used by interwar fascist movements, but rather as part of a wider constellation of ideas about “New Men”—​an idea with a rich prefascist history. There are clearly convergences between case studies—​ the central role of masculinity being one of them. However, the range of examples on display demonstrates that, to understand the New Man, generic and universal components must be analyzed together with particular traits from specific national contexts. Also central to this collection is the fact that the New Man could be conceived in a number of different arenas. At the broadest level, there is a distinction between a “mythical” New Man, an ideal type primarily in the imagination of intellectuals, and the reality of a New Man’s implementation. It is shown in the first two sections that ambitious regimes seeking to implement the myth of a New Man came across a panoply of limitations. Put another way, there was thus a political as well as an ideological function to the New Man, which often worked in tandem, but often distinctly separately.

8

8

Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

Luca La Rovere’s chapter, commencing Part 1, investigates the Italian Fascist state’s attempts to “fascistize” Italy’s youth and, importantly, the extent to which Mussolini’s PNF was able to translate this ideological myth into a reality. By analyzing fascist youth movements and pedagogy, La Rovere demonstrates that control over the education system and large-​scale participation in youth movements meant that Italy’s young were saturated with ideas of a new, virulent warrior caste. Furthermore, La Rovere concludes that the enthusiasm of huge swathes of Italian youth for the collaborationist Italian Social Republic reflects a need to caution against the idea that the totalitarian project failed in Italy. Francesco Cassata the considers the very literal attempts to create a New Man through the field of eugenics. Cassata trains his attention upon endocrinologist Nicola Pende and the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute. Cassata, in addition to providing an overview of Pende and his interactions with the Fascist regime, demonstrates a “fascistization” of Italian science and a particular convergence between the science of glandular eugenics and fascist population policies aiming to create a virile, biologically sound New Man. Offering a final perspective on the New Man in Fascist Italy, Fernando Esposito provides a novel ideological case study on fascist aviation. Utilizing a joint approach on both the Italian and the German case, Esposito analyzes the importance of flying in conceptions of New Men. Esposito demonstrates that in both Italian Fascist and Nazi cases, aviators were lionized as pioneers of an alternative modernity and technological advancement. The virtues of the aviator—​his heroism, self-​discipline, boldness, and collectivism—​would serve as examples to the population of the archetypal New Man. Part 2 turns to the New Man via the lens of art history, with Gregory Maertz providing an important and underexplored chapter on the “reciprocal relationship” between art and applied eugenics in Nazi Germany. Maertz demonstrates that art was central to Nazi attempts to create a “New Aryan Man.” In particular, the difficulty in mobilizing cultural policy around a definitive vision of Nazi futurism is exemplified by Maertz, who also highlights the relationship between modernist and volkisch art—​ both competing to be recognized as the correct format for expressing a racially purified Volksgemeinschaft. Maertz’s chapter ultimately brings out the tension between art and the totalitarian state and attempts to use art to invoke an aspiration toward the biologically pure New Man of the future. As noted above, this unorthodox approach to the New Man in Nazi Germany is the only chapter dealing squarely with the Third Reich—​and one of four chapters containing supplemental images—​since the area is already relatively well covered in the literature, but still more so, in light of the neglect of other case studies. Turning to the most genocidal of these, the wartime Independent State of Croatia, Rory examines state attempts to inculcate the moral, social, and cultural values that were a core element of the Ustasha New Man. In particular, Yeomans looks at the important part played by army educators, who held a crucial role in training recruits to be transmitters of Ustasha ideology. The creation of the “total” man, Yeoman argues, involved not only militaristic values but also intellectual objectives, which valued spiritual cleansing in an attempt to create a model citizen. The inherent difficulty of creating a New Man in such an unstable environment, however, cannot be seen as surprising. Thus, Yeomans argues that attempts to create a New Man in Croatia was demonstrative

 9

Building Illiberal Subjects

9

of a state that was crumbling from within. Salazar’s “New State” provides the final European regime examined here. Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto argue that the nature of Salazar’s authoritarian and corporatist dictatorship was largely forged to obliterate the liberal state preceding Salazar’s rule. Yet unlike in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or even Croatia’s NDH, the discourse surrounding the New State was inherently traditionalist, fixed around conservative and Catholic values. The New Man in Portugal, then, was one who would integrate himself within the corporatist order, rather than a revolutionary, fully fascist New Man. Commencing Part  3 is the first examination of the New Man in this collection from outside Europe, provided by Alberto Spektorowski’s chapter on Peronism in Argentina—​an often misunderstood political ideology and regime. Spektorowski suggests that the distinction between the fascist New Man and Juan Peron’s vision of a New Man was the way in which the latter channeled a materialist, consumerist nationalism. Furthermore, the myth and aesthetic ideal of the descamisado represented an important function for the regime and reflects the closest thing to an idealized New Man visible in Argentina—​a happy worker who thrived as part of the organic collective. The collection’s other case study from Latin America comes from Kallis. Kallis’s innovative chapter returns to the realm of art, broadly understood, in finding an intimate affiliation between architecture and anthropology in relation to the New Man in Vargas’s authoritarian, corporatist Brazil. In particular, Kallis stresses the importance of modernist artist Oswald de Andrade and his celebration of Brazil’s hybrid, “pamphagous” culture his 1928 “Anthropophagic Manifesto.” From this context, Kallis reflects upon the tension within the dictatorship’s 1930s campaign for “renovation” in Brazil, which celebrated the country’s ethnic and cultural diversity while simultaneously looking toward the aspirational goal of “whiteness.” Roy Starrs then provides an exploration of the New Man in Japan—​a country often neglected in the nonmilitary historiography of fascism. Starrs’s chapter investigates the New Man in interwar Japan via the influential ideologue in the theocratic state Masamichi Rōyama. Starrs demonstrates how the intellectually curious Rōyama, who was part of the politically diverse “New Man Society”—​initially founded in 1918 by student radicals early in the Tennō state—​would go on to become an influential fascist activist for the Japanese government. Between the wars, Rōyama’s expansionist foreign policy, as well as domestic policies, moved in a distinctly fascist direction. The political thought of Rōyama, Starrs argues, is indicative of the wider influence of fascist ideas imported from Europe and fused with traditional mores in a Japan that became increasingly militaristic in the late 1930s under Prime Minister Prince Konoe. The fourth and final section of the collection covering fascist movements across Europe begins with David Alegre Lorenz’s chapter on the New Man in Spain. Lorenz explores the almost essential relationship between fascist “New Men” and war. He argues that for the duration of the Civil War, Spain was transformed into a “vast cultural, political and social laboratory” in which the distinctions between the front and civilian life were blurred. This inescapable fact meant that fascist conceptions of the New Man were guided and crystallized by the experience of total war. The Spanish New Man, as described by Falangist intellectuals, would thus be forged by conflict and glorified as a “Christian knight”—​one whose violent struggle would rise triumphantly

10

10

Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

from the ashes of a nation purified by war. Jeannette Baxter then assesses the fascist New Man in Britain through an investigation of political portraiture. Focusing initially on Britain’s largest but nevertheless abortive fascist movement, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Baxter utilizes BUF propaganda—​namely a newspaper feature called “Men in Fascism”—​in juxtaposing hardened depictions of masculine fascist activists with the soft, flabby, and old political establishment. Baxter then returns to the reality of modern art via the literary and visual work of Wyndham Lewis, whose complicated dalliance with fascism in interwar Britain presents an opportunity to explore intersections with official fascist portrayals of the New Man via Lewis’s understudied engagement with fascist ideology. Moving across the channel, Joan Tumblety provides an investigation of the New Man in France. Tumblety importantly demonstrates that interwar France was “saturated” with ideas of New Men within a variety of political cultures: Catholic, conservative, radical right, and radical left. Thus, our understanding of the fascist New Man can be enhanced by comparatively examining the subject outside the narrower frames of fascism and totalitarianism. Accordingly, Tumblety demonstrates that notions of the New Man as a response to perceived sociopolitical decline were widespread within interwar France. Therefore, the concept of the New Man is just as useful—​and perhaps more useful—​in enhancing our understanding of interwar masculinity no less than that of fascism. This volume’s concluding chapter by Roland Clark looks toward interwar Romania, where rhetoric surrounding the New Man was common in the country’s most prominent fascist movement, the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Nevertheless, Clark highlights the difficulty in pinning down a specific vision of a Romanian New Man, which was subject to change according to both the Legion’s shifting ideological stance as well as the unstable Romanian and international context. Clark ultimately teases out the different ways in which the New Man could act as a rhetorical device in terms of discrediting the political elite as well as an ideological and mobilizing feature. In concluding with an avowedly “Christianist” movement, Clark also offers a final, helpful reminder of just how embedded sacralized politics were in the radical right’s construction and transnational deployment of the New Man between 1919 and 1945.

Notes * This volume forms part of Jorge Dagnino’s FONDECYT project N. 3140039 in Chile, which generously funded the September 26–​27, 2014, “ ‘New Man’ Symposium” hosted by Teesside University’s Centre for Fascist, Anti-​Fascist and Post-​Fascist Studies, from which this collection derives. The editors are grateful for this support. 1 See Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza, eds., L’Homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945) (Paris: Fayard, 2004), which analyzes the national cases of Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, and Spain. Key studies on Italian fascism include Lorenzo Benadusi’s Il Nemico dell’Uomo Nuovo: L’Omosessualità nell’Esperimento Totalitario Fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005) and Francesco Cassata’s Molti, sani e forti: L’eugenetica in Italia (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006). To date, perhaps the best-​known Anglophone work on this subject is J. A. Mangan’s edited Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon-​Global Fascism (London: Frank Cass, 2000). As

 11

Building Illiberal Subjects

11

the title suggests, Mangan’s collection largely focuses on the analysis of the corporeal and aesthetic aspects of the mythic “homo fascismus.” 2 See Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3 Christopher E. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 194–​200, and George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 155–​80. 4 David D. Roberts, Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919–​1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), and Aristotle Kallis, “The ‘Fascist Effect’: On the Dynamics of Political Hybridization in Inter-​War Europe,” in Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, ed. António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 13–​42. 5 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), 117. 6 Ibid., 121. 7 Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 8 Julie V. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 93. There is no scarcity of literature dealing with images of womanhood in radical right movements and regimes, particularly in the case of fascism. See, for example, Kevin Passmore, ed., Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Helga Dittrich-​ Johansen, Le “militi dell’idea”: Storia delle organizzazioni femminili del Partito Nazionale Fascista (Città di Castello: Leo S. Olschki, 2002); and Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women. Italy, 1922–​1945 (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 9 See, for example, Peter Holquist, “State Violence as Technique: The Logic in Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism,” reprinted in David Hoffman, ed., Stalinism: Essential Reading (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 129–​56. 10 For the Stalinist period see the landmark study by Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), particularly 223–​84. 11 Cited in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 4:24. Other biblical references in the New Testament abound; see, for example, www.ucg.org/​bible-​study-​tools/​bible-​questions-​ and-​answers/​what-​does-​the-​bible-​mean-​by-​our-​old-​man-​and-​the-​new (all websites last accessed March 24, 2017). 12 Mona Ozouf, L’homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution francaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 116–​57. 13 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 49–​55 and 116–​17. 14 Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: Il mito della nazione nel XX secolo (Rome: Laterza, 2006), 35–​41. 15 In the context of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, surely the most incisive comparison to date has been provided by Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism. Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 302–​44. 16 Richard Shorten, Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4.

12

12

Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

17 Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 1–​2. 18 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia (Florence: La Fenice, 1963), vol. 10: 140–​1. The article “Trincerocrazia” was first published in Il Popolo d’Italia on December 15, 1917. 19 See, for example, Michael Wildt’s valuable study, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: 2009). 20 Fernando Esposito, Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 21 Emilio Gentile, Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione (Rome: Laterza, 2002), 235–​64. 22 James S. Barnes, Fascism (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), 43. 23 A recent collection on “political religion” containing chapters on Europe, Asia, and the United States is Roger Griffin, Robert Mallett, and John Tortorice, eds., The Sacred in Twentieth Century Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). 24 Still indispensable are Emilio Gentile’s books Il culto del littorio: La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002) and Le religioni della politica: Fra democrazie e totalitarismi (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2001). 25 Ismael Saz Campos, Las caras del franquismo (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2013), 69–​88. 26 Matthew Feldman, “The Holocaust in The Independent State of Croatia: Genocide between Political Religion and Religious Politics,” Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team, online at: www.holocaustresearchproject.org/​essays&editorials/​ croationholocaust.html. 27 Stipe Kljaić, “Apostles, Saints’ Days, and Mass Mobilization: The Sacralization of Politics in the Ustasha State,” in The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia, ed. Rory Yeomans (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 145–​64. 28 Cited in Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 250. 29 See his Belonging and Genocide. Hitler’s Community, 1918–​1945 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010). On the concept and myth of Volksgemeinschaft, see also, for example, Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, eds., Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt, eds., Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Verlag, 2009). 30 See his “La norme implicite: Mythe et pratiques de l’‘intellectuel d’action’ dans le service de sécurité de la SS,” in Matard-​Bonucci and Milza, L’Homme nouveau, 227–​46. 31 Among the many groundbreaking studies on the “New Aryan Man” in the Third Reich, see Klaus Vondung, “Spiritual Revolution and Magic: Speculation and Political Action in National Socialism,” Modern Age 23, no. 4 (1979): 394–​402, and Bernd Huppauf, “Langemark, Verdun and the Myth of a New Man in Germany after the First World War,” War and Society 6, no. 2 (1988): 70–​103, both reprinted in Fascism: Critical Concepts, Vol. 3, Fascism and Culture, ed. Roger Griffin, with Matthew Feldman (London: Routledge, 2004). See also “Hooked Crosses and Forking Paths: The Fascist Dynamics of the Third Reich,” reprinted in Matthew Feldman, ed., A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin (Basingstoke, Palgrave: 2008), ch. 5, and the unpublished doctoral thesis by Todd Richard Ettleson, “The Nazi ‘New Man’: Embodying Masculinity and Regulating Sexuality in the SA and SS, 1930–​1939. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2002.

 13

Building Illiberal Subjects

13

32 Fascist youth pedagogical practices and institutions exercised a strong influence on Nazi Germany. See Alessio Ponzio, Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). 33 Rory Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–​1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 128–​31. 34 See Mary Vincent, “The Martyrs and the Saints: Masculinity and the Construction of the Francoist Crusade,” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 71. 35 Cited in Stanley Payne, foreword to Rethinking the Nature of Fascism, edited by António Costa Pinto (Basingstoke: Palgrave: 2011), ix. According to Gentile, in the much-​replicated case of Italian Fascism, to create this type of so-​called soldier-​citizen, fascism wanted to achieve a complete anthropological revolution, which was to change the character of the Italians. The fascist myth of regenerating the nation paved the way to racism and anti-​Semitism. Important steps of this anthropological revolution were campaigns aimed at reforming customs, anti-​bourgeois struggle, and above all accepting racism and anti-​Semitism as ideologies of the State. Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism and Fascism (London: Praeger, 2011), 8, italics added.

Bibliography Bajohr, Frank, and Wildt, Michael, eds. Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus [Volksgemeinschaft: New Research on National Socialist Society]. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2009. Barnes, James Strachey. Fascism. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931. Benadusi, Lorenzo. Il Nemico dell’Uomo Nuovo: L’Omosessualità nell’Esperimento Totalitario Fascista [The enemy of the New Man. homosexuality in Fascist Italy]. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005. Cassata, Francesco. Molti, sani e forti: L’eugenetica in Italia [Building the New Man: Eugenics, racial science and genetics in twentieth-century Italy]. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006. Clark, Roland. Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2015. De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–​1945. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Dittrich-​Johansen, Helga. Le “militi dell’idea”: Storia delle organizzazioni femminili del Partito Nazionale Fascista [The “militants of the idea”: History of the female organizations of the Fascist National Party]. Città di Castello: Leo S. Olschki, 2002. Esposito, Fernando. Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ettleson, Todd Richard. “The Nazi ‘New Man’: Embodying Masculinity and Regulating Sexuality in the SA and SS, 1930–​1939.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2002. Feldman, Matthew, ed. A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. Feldman, Matthew. “The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia: Genocide between Political Religion and Religious Politics,” Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team, available online at (last accessed on March 24, 2017), www. holocaustresearchproject.org/​essays&editorials/​croationholocaust.html.

14

14

Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker

Forth, Christopher. Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Fritzsche, Peter, and Hellbeck, Jochen. “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.” In Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, edited by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, 302–​44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gentile, Emilio. Le religioni della politica: Fra democrazie e totalitarismi [Politics as religion]. Rome; Bari: Laterza, 2001. Gentile, Emilio. Il culto del littorio: La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista [The sacralization of politics in fascist Italy]. Rome: Laterza, 2002. Gentile, Emilio. Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione [Fascism: History and interpretation]. Rome: Laterza, 2002. Gentile, Emilio. La Grande Italia: Il mito della nazione nel XX secolo [La Grande Italia: The myth of the nation in the twentieth century]. Rome: Laterza, 2006. Gentile, Emilio. The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism and Fascism. London: Praeger, 2011. Gottlieb, Julie V. Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. Abingdon: Routledge, 1993. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Griffin, Roger, with Feldman, Matthew, eds. Fascism: Critical Concepts, 5 volumes. London: Routledge, 2004. Griffin, Roger, Mallett, Robert, and Tortorice, John, eds. The Sacred in Twentieth Century Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. Holquist, Peter. “State Violence as Technique: The Logic in Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism.” In Stalinism: Essential Reading, edited by David Hoffman, 129–​56. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Kallis, Aristotle. Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe. London: Routledge, 2009. Kallis, Aristotle. “The ‘Fascist Effect’: On the Dynamics of Political Hybridization in Inter-​ War Europe.” In Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, edited by António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis, 13–​42. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Kljaić, Stipe. “Apostles, Saints’ Days, and Mass Mobilization: The Sacralization of Politics in the Ustasha State.” In The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia, edited by Rory Yeomans, 145–​64. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Kühne, Thomas. Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–​1945. London: Yale University Press, 2010. Mangan, J. A. Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon-​Global Fascism. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Matard-​Bonucci, Marie-​Anne, and Milza, Pierre. L’Homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945) [The New Man in fascist Europe (1922–1945)]. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Mosse, George. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Ozouf, Mona. L’homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution francais [Man regenerated: Essays on the French Revolution]. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.

 15

Building Illiberal Subjects

15

Passmore, Kevin, ed. Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​45. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Payne, Stanley. Foreword to Rethinking the Nature of Fascism: Comparative Perspectives, edited by António Costa Pinto, viii–​xii. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ponzio, Alessio. Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Roberts, David. Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and its Era, 1919–​1945. Oxford: Berghahn, 2016. Saz Campos, Ismael. Las caras del franquismo [The faces of francoism]. Granada: Editorial Comares, 2013. Shorten, Richard. Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Steber, Martina, and Gotto, Bernhard, eds. Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Vincent, Mary. “The Martyrs and the Saints: Masculinity and the Construction of the Francoist Crusade.” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 68–​98. Wildt, Michael. An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Yeomans, Rory. Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–​1945. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013.

16

 17

Part One

Inaugurating the Radical Right “New Man” in Fascist Italy

18

 19

1

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth Luca La Rovere

The “new fascist man”: Introduction to a never-​ending debate Long considered a propaganda device, the “new man” myth availed of the illusion of man’s rebirth to conceal the reactionary nature of fascist movements and regimes and their inability to transform political and social relations in any meaningful way. Although research into fascism contained references to the fascist idea of man, reports did not acknowledge its impact on guiding regime policies and choices. Only in the last decades have scholars begun to seriously examine the “new man” myth. Roger Griffin recognized the “palingenesis” myth, that is, renewal of society and regeneration of man, was one of the defining elements of fascism.1 Around the same time, German–​American historian George L.  Mosse investigated the “new man” myth as a vehicle for transmitting values such as respectability, honesty, and industriousness, which were the cornerstones of fascism’s “anti-​bourgeois revolution of the bourgeoisie.”2 Even though usefully emphasizing the importance of myths in fascist regimes,3 such studies did not go beyond the culture of the “new man” and/​or the aesthetic of fascist manliness. Emilio Gentile’s research led to a new approach. From his earliest studies on the origins of fascist ideology and the party, Gentile had identified the myth of man’s regeneration through politics as a decisive feature of fascism’s totalitarian nature.4 In his later work, he elucidated the links between myths, ideology, politics, and organization of the masses.5 In 2002, Gentile wrote that the “new man” myth was not simply one of many myths that were used to mobilize the masses, but was rather the totalitarian regime’s main objective as it was essential to its great project of creating a “new fascist civilization.”6 His essay established some key ideas, which, I believe, are worth further examination: 1. Fascism—​unlike Nazism—​did not have one single “new man” model. Perfect fascist prototypes were the soldier in the Great War, the fascist action squad member, and later the citizen–​soldier, citizen–​producer, colonizer, and so forth. They all served to meet the needs of diverse categories of citizens, changing with internal and international politics in different phases of the regime. 2. The modernity of the “new man.” The “new man” myth aimed at creating an alternative road to modernity that was coherent with the fascist vision of society.

20

20

Luca La Rovere

Even when referring to the past—​for instance, through the myths of the Roman legionnaire or a peasant society—​the prototype did not aim at restoring an ideal model of the past. 3 . The “new Italian’s” collective nature. Deriving from fascism’s militarization of politics, this feature emerged from the regime’s determination to project the individual’s existence into the public domain and make him an “organized collective man,” who was imbued with militaristic, bellicose moral principles. 4. The “anthropological revolution” experiment was extremely pervasive. It involved both the party and the state apparatus and attempted to penetrate every area of individual and collective life, so as to reshape the Italian people’s customs, mentality, and moral principles.7 Recognized as fundamental to totalitarian ideologies, the “new man” myth was held in common by the fascist movements and regimes that arose in Europe between the two World Wars.8 Despite this, attitudes to Italian fascism’s “anthropological revolution” experiment are still often influenced by the debate on its “imperfect totalitarianism,” which was ascribed to Benito Mussolini’s regime.9 According to some historians, the goal of “remaking the Italian people” was shared by the most radical fascists and by Mussolini himself. Like building a real totalitarian system, it was, however, destined to remain purely Utopian. It was an ideal that might have been attained but which, in fact, was not. The plan for “totalitarian regeneration” remained unfinished, first, because alternative, competing institutions like the monarchy, the Catholic Church, the armed forces, the school, and the family survived and, second, because society as a whole was reluctant to embrace fascism’s myths and values.10 Attempts by the fascist regime to “regenerate” Italians, particularly young people, are generally considered bankrupt policies. Several hypotheses were put forward to account for their failure. “Regeneration” was carried out “Italian style,” that is, superficially, with no real planning, focusing almost exclusively on outward appearances, with little concern for the real educational outcome.11 According to this view, obsession with “fascist style” and the bureaucratic decline of the Partito nazionale fascista (PNF; National Fascist Party) under the leadership of Achille Starace (1931–​38) were the main causes of failure. The “new men” never appeared because local party branches functioned poorly as they were unable to apply guidance from the center. The widespread corruption of the party’s ruling class caused the “collapse of the popular identification with fascism as early as the mid-​thirties.”12 Even the “national character” was held responsible for subverting fascist aims. Centuries of history resulted in an individualistic, cynical, lazy citizenry that was indifferent to politics and to the interests of the larger community and was suspicious of any form of power. Italians, unlike Germans, were anthropologically incapable of conforming to the model of the “new man.”13 Gentile clearly had no doubts that the “anthropological revolution experiment failed, was overwhelmed by the catastrophe of war and ended up under the ruins of the totalitarian state.” He admitted that, despite its failure, it “was, in fact, initiated and involved millions of Italians of both sexes and several generations for two decades.”14 It is true that fascism’s ambitious project to form new Italians was interrupted by the

 21

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

21

Second World War, which ended in defeat, but this does not answer questions about the effects it had on molding the Italian people’s character. Fascism did not invent the “new Italian” myth. The idea of regenerating the Italians was widespread in Italian culture in the aftermath of Italian Risorgimento (unification) and had become very popular in the years before the First World War. In the changing conditions of postwar politics, fascism reappropriated and reshaped it.15 The fascist “new man” was not a new model of masculinity, given its traditional image of man and the relationships between men and women.16 Fascism promoted instead a new type of citizen, who completely identified with fascist values and was keen to subordinate his individuality to collective interests and the nation’s political–​military goals.17 Far more interesting than the cultural background to the “new man” myth, is the study of how the regime transformed the idea of “regenerating” the Italians from a niche view held by a minority of intellectuals into a myth for the masses. Although some historiographical trends have limited the creation of a “new man” to within the bounds of a utopian experiment, it seems important to try and determine whether—​ and to what extent—​the myth became reality. Assessing the effects of the fascist regime’s totalitarian pedagogy is no easy task. Regeneration of the Italian people was conducted at all levels of society. Since state, the fascist party, labor unions, mass organizations, and cultural institutions were all mobilized to this end, conclusive results can only be obtained through coordinated research into each sector.18 Determining the effects on organizing the mass of Italians is even more arduous, because of difficulties in locating sources for reconstructing the influence of totalitarian pedagogy on the inclinations and thoughts of individuals who were different in age, social, and cultural level. Faced with this, I  have here singled out how the new generations were trained as the preferential terrain for analyzing the relationship between the “anthropological revolution” myth and the functioning of the totalitarian organizational machine.

Monopolizing education: Fascism in schools In the second half of the 1920s, fascism started the most important experiment in mass political pedagogy that has ever been attempted in Italian national history. Millions of young people were subjected to an incessant pedagogic barrage that aimed at inculcating fascist myths and values. They included males and females from every social class and from every corner of the land, with ages ranging from infancy to twenty-​one years, whereupon they became party members. Youth was given a central role in the project to create a “new man” because fascists were convinced the great mass of adults had been hopelessly corrupted by their liberal utilitarian and individualistic upbringing. The regime also felt an urgent need to shape Italian youth into its own ideal of the virile warrior or the fascist woman, born to be a wife and mother, whose duty was to raise healthy citizens to improve the nation’s military prowess.19 In conducting its biopolitical project,20 the party-​state took charge of the bodies of millions of young Italians, to free them of the defects and physical weaknesses that still afflicted older generations. The fascists maintained that only intellectual and physical education from the earliest

22

22

Luca La Rovere

age could create a truly renewed type of human being. School and youth organizations were the educational tools that fascism employed to carry out this ambitious project.21 Fascist conquest of the school system was the logical working out of the task to create new Italians. The 1923 Giovanni Gentile School Reform, with its hallmark of education for an elite class, soon showed it was unsuited to the task of spreading the fascist ideology among the mass of Italian youth.22 Many modifications to the reform aimed at binding teachers ever more closely to fascism and at integrating fascist ideology into the school curriculum and life. The former objective was achieved through the carrot-​and-​ stick approach of coercion and incentives. After Gentile’s purge of administrative and teaching staff in 1923–​24, the selection of teachers in the following years was based only on the political criterion of fidelity to fascism.23 In 1926, preexisting professional associations were absorbed into the Associazione nazionale insegnanti fascisti (National Association of Fascist Teachers ), which became in 1931 the Associazione fascista della scuola (Fascist School Association). By 1939, respectively, 99.6 percent and 53.5 percent of primary and middle school teachers belonged to the Fascist School Association.24 At the same time school curriculums were revised in accordance with the criterion of growing political input into schools. Fascism found its way into subjects like Italian language and literature, history, geography, and even science in some cases.25 In 1929, the study of “fascist culture” was introduced into vocational schools, and “corporate order” was made a compulsory subject in high schools and teacher training schools. History focused on the Risorgimento, the First World War, and fascism. In 1935, “military culture” became part of the national curriculum in secondary schools and universities. From 1937 onward Mussolini’s Dottrina del fascismo (Doctrine of Fascism), the official compendium of fascist ideology, was studied in high school philosophy courses.26 Several committees that were set up to purge texts of any and all “anti-​Italian” content, ended up by ordering primary schools to adopt a state-​sponsored textbook to promote a “purely fascist culture and education” in the school year 1930–​31.27 School textbooks exalting the virtues of a good Italian and a perfect fascist were the main vehicle for imparting the fascist vision to the youth of Italy.28 The main characters in children’s reading books were intrepid patriots, Balilla,29 who were driven by camaraderie, a marked sense of duty, and unquestioning allegiance to the motherland and its leader.30 Reading, dictation, and even art classes served to spread and glorify the fascist regime’s achievements and the genius of Mussolini. Fascism also imposed its vision on the school system through widespread use of its symbols on books, copybooks, report cards, and diplomas. Classrooms were decorated with pictures of regime propaganda.31 Fascism truly colonized the school system. The traditional view of a superficially fascist school was overturned once an exclusively institutional perspective was discarded.32 This judgment had been based on the opinion that education was in itself incompatible with fascism.33 New research into the school system under fascism, using a “microhistory” approach, led to investigations into schools in individual areas and, when pushed to its limit, into single institutions. By appreciating apparently “minor” sources, such as school registries, records of headmasters’ meetings, teachers’ reports, and children’s copybooks, recent studies have reconstructed a picture of daily practices in education and revealed teachers’ real leanings. Such documents depict, much better than Ministry of Education curricula, daily life in a school system where teaching

 23

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

23

appeared to revolve around recurring fascist anniversaries, celebrations, and propaganda campaigns. In January 1936, a teacher in the primary four girls’ section of the Melendugno (Bari) primary school wrote in the class magazine “I got the class to talk about a special event: the conquest of Neghelli by our troops under the command of General Rodolfo Graziani and I read out our Leader’s telegram. . . . The girls displayed keen interest and their little hearts were throbbing with joy.”34 As a Communist Party informant wrote in the early 1930s, the only issue at the time in the Italian Ministry of Education was how to “make the schools fascist”: key words were “model, shape, forge.” Thus, Gentile’s ideal concept of education was sacrificed to the imperative of the school system becoming “a tool for political domination.”35 The fascist takeover of the school system was neither obstacle free nor the same throughout the nation. The difficulties that fascism had in penetrating the margins of society were encountered in schools. A 1923 inquiry into primary school education showed that only 60 percent of children attended school, with large differences emerging between the north and the south of the country and between urban and rural areas. For example, school attendance rates were 95 percent in Piedmont and 57 percent in Calabria.36 Underlying teachers’ biggest headaches of truancy and/​or irregular attendance, particularly in rural areas, were widespread child labor, parental reluctance to send girls to school, poor health, the cold, distance to school, and parents not even knowing that school attendance was compulsory. Schools were often badly organized with overcrowded classes, unequal teacher distribution throughout the country, lack of school buildings, and so forth. The Gentile Reform had attempted to address the dysfunctions in school organization. It raised the school leaving age to fourteen years, set up school authorities in each major town, increased state subsidies for primary schools, opened teacher training colleges, and instituted regular state examinations for access to posts as teachers.37 Many peasant families thought the costs of books and report cards were exorbitant.38 Teachers found cost was also why families strongly resisted paying for children to join youth organizations: “Five lire buys us bread for two days to stop us from starving” was how one mother answered the Melendugno primary school teacher’s request for the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) enrollment fee.39 Given this background, the teacher’s tenacity in insisting that pupils in this little town in Apulia pay the enrollment fee is surprising. She emphasized the advantages of membership-​linked welfare benefits and even promoted fund-​raising to pay for the poorest families.40 By the mid-​1930s fascism had completely taken over the school system. It had gradually extended its culture and youth organizations into schools where regime celebrations had become widespread. Since teachers often held positions in the fascist party’s political organizations (e.g., ONB instructor, party branch secretary, or leader of the local ladies’ fascist group), they became for all intents and purposes the interface between family and regime. The teacher was “the person who set in motion the fascist process and its strategies of propaganda and communication.”41 Far from being a place apart with its own times and rhythms, the school became more and more politicized and inserted into the political life of the nation. The desired outcome (which was partially achieved) was to link reading, writing, and child socialization to fascist myths and rites. Thus schools, particularly primary schools, became the first and most

24

24

Luca La Rovere

efficacious means of imparting fascist ideals and moral principles to Italian youth. The school became the place where they first encountered the fascist regime.

Forging the “new man”: Youth organizations The school was not enough in itself to guarantee full fascist socialization of the new generations of Italians. The ONB was set up in 1926 under the auspices of the prime minister, Mussolini, and was headed by squad leader Renato Ricci. Its aims were to forge boys in Balilla from the ages of eight to fourteen and in Avanguardisti (avant-​ guarde companies) when aged fourteen to eighteen.42 In 1930, the Giovani fascisti (young fascists) were started under party control to organize young people aged eighteen to twenty-​one. Since 1921, university students had been able to avail of Gruppi universitari fascisti (GUF; university fascist groups).43 The technical and disciplinary regulations of the ONB, which were promulgated in January 1927, outlined a wide-​ranging youth program aimed at “modelling the conscience and thoughts of tomorrow’s fascists.”44 As the first tool for dominating, organizing, and monopolizing Italian youth, the ONB developed in basically two directions. On the one hand, it prohibited or limited the activities of non fascist associations. Scouts were suppressed; there were clashes with Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action), and the ONB gradually absorbed preexisting cultural, sporting, and recreational youth associations.45 On the other hand, the ONB made its presence felt throughout the country and gradually engaged in new tasks by extending its influence in schools. The ONB entered the school system in 1927 by taking over physical education classes.46 Once within state schools, it then worked to build an alternative school system that was directly under party control. It took over management of about 9,000 rural schools whose ONB teachers were in charge of primary school education for over 265,000 pupils. The Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL; Italian Youth of the Lictor) was formed in 1937 by uniting the ONB and the Giovani fascisti, and was headed by the party secretary. In 1938, the GIL undertook the job of a school welfare board.47 From 1939 onward, primary schools were opened in fascist party and GIL offices under the pretext of remedying the chronic lack of classrooms, and by 1940 party offices housed 2,475 schools with about 125,000 pupils.48 With the institution of the Ente nazionale per l’insegnamento medio (National Board for Middle School Teaching) the party was able to extend its influence into private schools.49 The prize targets in the party’s ambition to control the Italian educational, political, and military training systems were the GIL boarding schools and academies where over 2,200 young people studied every year. Originally founded to provide high-​level party leaders, they included physical education colleges in Rome and Orvieto,50 navy colleges in Brindisi and Venice, the Air Force College in Forlì, the School for Seamen in Sabaudia, the teacher training college in Udine, GIL women’s leader and commander schools in Florence and Vittorio Veneto, and choir-​master schools in Bergamo and Vicenza.51 During the war years these boarding schools, which were party-​dominated, military-​ type institutions that were immune to external influences, spearheaded the experiment to make young people into a super fascist élite. According to Julius

 25

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

25

Evola, they were modeled on Nazi Germany’s National politische Erziehungsanstalten (Napolas; National-​Political Education Institutes) and the Castles of the Teutonic Order.52 After passing aptitude tests, eight-​year-​olds entered the schools to start studying, as in state schools, the national curriculum. It was, however, “fully illuminated by the light of fascist ideals.”53 Fascist boarding schools aimed at creating citizens for a new type of society that had definitively overcome the conflict between individual and collective needs, with the latter prevailing over the former.54 The Centri di preparazione al lavoro (vocational training centers) had the same function. Founded in 1942 to integrate education and work, a principle sanctioned by the 1939 “School Charter,” the vocational training centers served to prolong youth education beyond the school-​leaving age. They were divided according to age group: the Centri di addestramento al lavoro (work training centers) catered for pupils aged eight to fourteen, while the Centri di lavoro (work centers) were for young people aged fourteen to eighteen. In these centers, education, military training and trade apprenticeships aimed at providing fully integrated education of “citizen-​producers.”55 Within a few months 218 vocational training centers had been opened in sixty-​two provinces.56 Their objective was to orient pupils in their choice of trade, not in accordance with pupil or family’s “egotistical desires” but with national production needs.57 By means of its youth organizations the fascist regime attempted to achieve its ambition of regenerating Italian bodies.58 All members of the organizations had regular medical checkups, which were carried out by a battalion of 20,000 doctors who followed up every stage of the young people’s physical development.59 Sport, mountain, and seaside holiday camps; sunlight exposure as treatment for diseases; prophylaxis for tuberculosis and malaria; campaigns to promote body care and personal hygiene; GIL-​ managed school canteens, all contributed to the fundamental policy of improving the “race.”60 Very little separated physical exaltation of the race and racism.61 Since sport had the task of inculcating young people with the moral and psychological qualities of the “fascist new man,” training sessions were inextricably linked with military training for the future “citizen–​soldier.” From as early as 1933 the ONB focused on spreading the popularity of “combat sports,” especially shooting, boxing, and mountain climbing.62 Sport was not just a means of physical exercise but also of stimulating in the individual the habit of feeling part of the mass.63 In the great sports gatherings, which were made famous in the Istituto Luce propaganda films,64 athletes synchronized their movements under the command of the party secretary, acting out fascism’s ideals of a hierarchical, organized community. Individuals became a mass of people all behaving in the same way, and all used to obeying orders from their leader.65 “Mussolini’s Italian” was supposed to be permanently in uniform and ready to take up arms to defend the “revolution.” Consequently, from 1934 onward, the ONB was entrusted with children’s premilitary training. Familiarity with weapons started in the eight-​to-​fourteen age group (Balilla) who practiced on miniature rifles, continued in the avant-​garde fourteen-​to-​eighteen-​year-​old age group who carried out real military exercises, and ended when the young fascists were licensed in one of several weapon specialties. The aim of the two-​year young fascist arms training course was to create contingents of technicians for compulsory military service in the army, navy, and

26

26

Luca La Rovere

air force.66 In 1942, approximately 1.4 million young people attended fifteen thousand GIL-​organized premilitary training courses, which were held all over the country.67 Every year military training culminated in Campi estivi (summer camps), called Campi Dux, in every province, which were started by Ricci in 1929. Provincial camps were then followed by a camp in Rome for representatives from each province. For about three weeks young people lived the life of a fascist community, studying fascist doctrine and military regulations, concentrating on the use of weapons and tactical maneuvers, focusing on physical exercise and choir singing. In May 1938, during Adolf Hitler’s visit to Rome, Mussolini was able to show off the powerful GIL organization of Italian youth to him.68 Younger children experienced fascist community life in GIL-​organized Colonie estive (summer camps), which, in 1942, were attended by over one million children and youths.69 The camps introduced a holiday into their lives, something that had hitherto been reserved for small minority of people, but were planned to further purely political and ideological aims. A typical day was organized along military lines. Flag raising was followed by marching, singing patriotic songs, and talking about war “martyrs” and the “revolution.” The political–​ideological education program also included courses for GIL instructors and noncommissioned officers, which were designed to get young people used to commanding and working as leaders of the organization.70 Overall, the GIL’s pedagogical activities availed of a wide range of activities that tended to encompass the entire spectrum of youth interests: Ludi juveniles (young people’s games) about culture and art, chats about fascist culture, youth press, cinema, theater, choir singing, music, radio programs, trips around Italy and abroad, and so on. In 1938, the GIL started using Il primo libro del fascista (The fascist’s first book), which was a sort of fascist catechism that every young person had to learn by heart, and in 1939 it introduced Il secondo libro del fascista (The fascist’s second book) to strengthen “racial awareness” and antisemitism among its “organized members.”71 Widespread offers of play, recreation, and welfare activities was what most probably induced parents to enroll their children in the ONB and then the GIL. Since fascists considered material well-​being as a tool for forging the new citizen, it would, therefore, be a mistake to consider the task of developing youth organizations as a national, authoritarian variation of the welfare state.72 As a matter of fact, one must not forget that once children were entrusted to fascist organizations, parents ended up losing control of their education. Indeed, fascist “integral pedagogy” was based on the idea of encompassing every part of the individual’s life, managing all sectors of the young person’s activities (study, leisure time, sport, work); steering preferences, behavior, and choices; and eliminating all external influences, even the family’s, because the educational process had to be the party’s exclusive prerogative. In other words, the young person’s life had to march to the rhythm of the organization’s beat.73 Starace was really obsessed with ensuring every free moment in the day was filled up with all kinds of initiatives and activities. Starting Sabato fascista (Fascist Saturday) in 1935 was just another of the many ways seized by fascism to insinuate itself into the lives of the young and the not so young. By the end of the 1930s the National Fascist Party had created, besides the organizations that have been already mentioned, a network of associations that were designed to reach out to educate and control young people living in the remotest parts of the country as well as

 27

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

27

those whose social exclusion precluded school attendance. These included after-​school activities for primary school children, youth clubs, and welcome centers for orphans and children from poor families or from socially precarious family backgrounds.74 For all intents and purposes the integral education experiment culminated by the end of the 1930s in an attempt to guide, if not shrink, the role of the family in their children’s education.75 GIL educators firmly believed that creating the “new man” imposed a “necessary, urgent re-​education of bourgeois families.”. Since families continued to transmit individual and private moral principles they were the greatest obstacle to fascism’s community principles.76 This idea did not just circulate among a small circle of “second revolutionary wave” fanatics. It was expressed by the fascist regime’s top leaders and educationists.77 Special “sections for GIL-​family relations” were opened in 1941 to “flank” the work of family education, declaring their objective was to make the presence of GIL felt within the family’s sphere of activities.78 During the war, boarding schools for war orphans were obviously needed, and they provided fascists with the opportunity to experiment with a new type of education that was finally free of all family interference.79 Fascist inroads into the family sphere were legalized in 1942. Article 147 of the new civil law code, under the threat of losing parental authority, compelled parents to educate their offspring in conformity with “national Fascism’s moral principles and sentiments.”80 With the coming of war, the party relinquished management of some its organizations, like, for example, the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (Workers Leisure Time) to focus on youth education.81 In February 1940, the new party secretary, Ettore Muti, announced in a meeting of all federal secretaries that the decision was dictated by the “will to vigorously accentuate the political profile in youth organization,” as it was considered an essential tool for “reinforcing the moral and political unity of the Italian people.”82 The party line in strengthening the GIL translated into increased funding as the organization received 1.3 billion lire in 1942–​43.83

Conclusion: Such feverish organization for nothing? When the fascist regime collapsed, about nine million young Italians aged from six to twenty-​eight years old were members of its youth organizations, and in the preceding years millions more had been forged in the ONB/​GIL and young fascist groups. Adherence was greatest in the large cities of northern and central Italy where the GIL had recruited 50 percent to 60 percent of young people, with peaks of 70 percent in some cities in Lombardy and Piedmont. The recruitment rate was around 30 percent in the south of the country.84 There were marked differences in membership rates in large towns and rural areas, north and south. For example, in the southern city of Catanzaro GIL issued membership cards for 70 percent of schoolchildren in 1941.85 Membership numbers tended to drop with age as peak enrollment occurred among primary and middle schoolchildren, falling after fourteen years of age. Due to cultural reasons, female members were always fewer in number, particularly in the south of Italy.86 These data, rather than indicating the failure of the totalitarian fascist education program for Italian youth, showed that Italy was, particularly in some areas, still very underdeveloped, socially, culturally, and economically. As has already been stated, school attendance was far from being maximal. Few pupils continued their education

28

28

Luca La Rovere

after primary or middle school, and very few indeed attended university. Since ONB/​ GIL membership was linked to schools, leaving school weakened the connection with the fascist youth organizations. Furthermore, starting work changed the young person’s priorities and worries, as it propelled them into the world of adult responsibilities at a very early age. Students who stayed on at school, continuing their activities in fascist organizations, belonged principally to the urban middle and upper-​middle classes who could afford to pay for further education and viewed fascism as a fundamental stepping-​stone in upward social mobility.87 Consequently, the likelihood of totalitarian pedagogy being successful clearly rose with the length of time the young people were educated within party structures. University students provided the proof of this rather banal observation. They became the custodians of the fascist regime’s revolutionary moral principles and totalitarian projects.88 One must also add that fascism’s populist, revolutionary ideology attracted many of the young urban proletariat and peasantry.89 Even remote local communities that were culturally very distant from the beating heart of national politics felt fascism’s obstinate will to conquer the youth. Parents who refused ONB/​GIL membership cards for their children were subjected to all kinds of pressure by school authorities and local politicians. Thus, the image of a sleepy society, that continued life in its usual manner, in indifference or hostility to the fascist regime, does not really hold true. Indeed, even where the effects of the totalitarian project appeared most limited, conflicting ideas interacted in the local community, and its response to fascism’s social, political, modernizing project was usually to compromise with, if not openly support it, even though minority forms of resistance and refusal did take place.90 Faced with this indisputable reality, some points are worth bearing in mind to avoid the short-​cut temptation of concluding once again that fascism’s youth projects simply failed. The lengths the party went to extend its capacities to forge the youth of the country should not be underestimated. The fascist party used every means possible to increase its chances of reaching out to every single child so as to educate them in fascist principles, the proof being its frenetic, dynamic organizations and the enormous sums of money it spent on funding them. Nor should the progress that was made in achieving its objectives in a bare fifteen years be underestimated. Membership of fascist youth organizations rose from 480,000 in 1926 to 9,000,000 in 1942–​43. As has been noted, the GIL had more members than its brother organization, the Nazi Hitler-​Jugend (Hitler Youth). In Germany, moreover, some forms of juvenile anticonformism and rebellion did occur against the harsh Nazi discipline, but in Italy families and young people looked favorably on membership of fascist youth organizations.91 As Palmiro Togliatti has already noted in his famous Lezioni sul fascismo (Lessons on fascism), which were delivered in Moscow in 1932, the ONB was one of the key organization of the fascist regime’s “popular politics,” crucial for gathering masses in its organizations. Thus, as a result of the party’s strict control on young generations, the ONB members were the most active among the fascists.92 In short, fascism undoubtedly managed to mobilize youth on a scale that had never been seen during the liberal era and that the great popular parties of the Italian Republic never even came close to.93 What were the effects of such committed organization? By means of the school system, aided by ever-​present propaganda and the current political climate, GIL managed

 29

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

29

to inculcate the so-​called fascist culture from the bottom up. Historical investigations into daily life under fascism showed that even in small provincial towns young people socialized exclusively within fascist organizations so that fascism became routine and was the natural background and framework of their lives. This “normality” was not without its effects. In the 1930s the identity of young men and women was constructed by constant comparison with fascist “new man” and “new woman” models.94 The objective of totalitarian pedagogy was to create a new generation of Italians who were able to adapt and conform to the reality of the fascist regime. Essential features of the “new man” were supposed to be obedience and faith. As Ettore Muti stated, fascist education was designed to “form excellent soldiers who, like Roman legionnaires, were strong and resilient, intrepid and disciplined, ready to kill and to lay down their lives should their Leader command it.”95 A small kernel of individuals was destined to be separated out from the mass of members and given the privilege of becoming the future party ruling class. Obedience was the supreme virtue even for these fascist managers as they were expected to transmit orders from leadership to members without questioning anything. Assessing the effects of totalitarian pedagogy on children and adolescents, whose personalities and characters were still developing, is arduous because of the scarcity of primary sources and/​or their inaccuracies. Youth press was edited mainly by educators, and the few articles by young people were conventional and rhetorical. School essays demonstrated that fascist propaganda topics, moral principles, and key code words and expressions had been fully internalized, but, since they had appeared in essay plans, students may have been induced to satisfy the teachers’ expectations. Some later memoirs described membership of fascist youth organizations as either compulsory, that is, an obligation that could not be avoided, or as an opportunity to escape from a narrow family circle but which had no impact on political or ideological mind-​set. Given the pervading antifascist atmosphere in Italy in the years following the war, these memoirs may have been strongly influenced by the need to justify certain behaviors. Faced with these obstacles, the only other sources are to look at the “GIL-​generation’s” deeds and choices and at contemporary observers’ views on the effects of fascist education. The first significant piece of information lies with the war volunteers. University students and young fascists enthusiastically took part in all the wars of the regime—​ from the Ethiopian campaign to the Second World War.96 When Italy declared it was at war on June 10, 1940, the GIL immediately launched a drive for voluntary enlistment by young people who had been born in 1922, and set up twenty battalions, with a total of twenty-​four thousand young fascists, under the command of 500 officers.97 They took part in the “Youth March,” whose objective was to show off to the Italian people the fascist regime’s achievements in creating the “new Italian” and the “citizen–​soldier.” On their “Youth March” young fascists set out from diverse towns in the center-​north of Italy on August 26 and marched for about 350 km, reaching Padova. On October 10, they paraded in front of their leader, Mussolini, and authorities of the regime and their foreign guests.98 One participant recalled the general elation: “as young students we were expecting the call to arms! . . . We were ready, more than ready, and keen to answer that call. . . . And even before the official call for enlistment was announced, we had, us 18-​year-​olds—​the class of 1922—​we had already given our solemn commitment.”99 The

30

30

Luca La Rovere

young men’s support of fascist wars cannot be interpreted only as patriotism because fascism was closely identified with the nation, and the objectives of national strength were linked to the triumph of fascism worldwide. Another participant remembers, Well, yes, we have to admit it. We loved Mussolini. We were mad about him just like the vast majority of Italians . . . . We didn’t even feel the need to ask what Fascism was. We just accepted it as an obvious way of life. . . . We weren’t troubled by any doubts or problems because they only arise from a legitimate and free exchange of ideas. For us Liberty meant the right to navigate our sea (mare nostrum—​the Mediterranean) and Justice meant conquering living space where we could try and find the solution to our social and economic difficulties . . . Ultimately we were the children of our times and we meant to take part in the appalling tragedy that was inevitably destined to change the face of the world.100

Demobilization of the battalions that had taken part in the “Youth March” elicited disappointment and protests among the young men who had thus manifested their desire to fight.101 Although about 15,000 young fascists volunteered to enlist, army chiefs’ distrust of volunteer units meant that only 3,000 actually joined up.102 During the Libyan desert war, the deeds of the Young Fascist Battalion, who halted an Indian brigade at Bir el Gobi, bolstered the myth of warrior youth.103 Indeed, despite the general tendency to uphold the view that Italian soldiers fought for fascism without much conviction, recent studies have emphasized that Italian soldiers, especially the younger ones, hoped for victory and fought wholeheartedly to achieve it.104 Young people were convinced that fascism was the most advanced solution to the crisis of modern man. They believed it was a genuine revolutionary movement that was dedicated to creating a “new civilization.” Many of them continued to believe in Mussolini even after the fall of fascism on July 25, 1943, and the Italian Social Republic, the new fascist state founded by Mussolini under the aegis of the Nazis, was known to be overwhelmingly supported by the youth of the country.105 Less attention has been paid to the episode of “fascist resistance” in the south of Italy after the armistice was signed on September 8.106 Once again, the main protagonists were men of the “old guard” and members of the youth organizations, proving that the fascist regime had successfully passed on its moral principles and political projects from one generation to the next. An important testimonial about the effects of fascist pedagogy emerged from postwar reflections on the fascist legacy. After the fall of fascism, the question of miseducation of Italian youth was a major worry for the antifascist political and cultural forces. The issue and “reeducation” modalities were long debated from 1943 to 1948.107 Alcide De Gasperi, Christian Democrat leader and future prime minister, was hardly exaggerating or expressing a superficial knowledge of the matter when he privately wrote in 1943 that fascism was “a congenital mindset in the younger generation.”108 What clearly emerged from postwar testimonials was that the fascist regime had ruptured parent-​child culture and that the break had made it impossible to shield young people from its influence. Fascism had even lured in the children of families that opposed it. A long-​time socialist remembered with sadness and shame that he had been unable to prevent his children from taking part in GIL-​organized activities. Their

 31

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

31

initial desire to enjoy the benefits of membership was transformed, as they grew from children, into adolescents, and then into adults, into convinced adherence to the fascist regime’s moral principles and myths.109 Young people who had grown up under fascism had a long and difficult road to travel to fit into the postwar political climate. In some cases distaste for antifascism, democracy, and a plurality of ideas mixed in with an erroneous idea of patriotism led them into neofascism. It was hardly surprising that university and high school students were mainly involved in national unrest over Trieste.110 As boys they had worn the GIL uniform. As youths they had fought in the fascist wars or for the Italian Social Republic. Certainly they were a minority, but like others, they provided another sign of the effects of that long period of fascist education, illustrating how deeply it had colonized the minds of its recipients.

Notes 1 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 32–​3. 2 George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3 Karel Plessini, The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 60. 4 Emilio Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, 1919–​1922: Movimento e milizia (Rome-​ Bari: Laterza, 1989), 524. 5 See: Emilio Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo stato nel regime fascista (1995; Rome: Carocci, 2008). 6 Emilio Gentile, “L’‘uomo nuovo’ del fascismo: Riflessioni su un esperimento totalitario di rivoluzione antropologica,” in Emilio Gentile, Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione (Rome-​Bari: Laterza, 2002), 235. 7 Ibid., 237–​41. 8 Luca La Rovere, “‘Rifare gli italiani’: l’esperimento di creazione dell’‘uomo nuovo’ nel regime fascista,” Annali di Storia dell’educazione e delle istituzioni scolastiche 9 (2002), 51–​77; Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza, eds., L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945) (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Luca La Rovere, “Miti e politica per la gioventù fascista,” in Dalla trincea alla piazza: L’irruzione dei giovani nel Novecento, ed. Marco De Nicolò (Rome: Viella, 2011), 205–​20; Alessio Ponzio, Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015); Jorge Dagnino, “The Myth of the New Man in Italian Fascist Ideology,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies. no. 5 (2016): 130–​148. 9 For a discussion of this point, see Emilio Gentile, Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione (Rome-​Bari: Laterza, 2002), 63–​71. 10 As is well known, this hypothesis was expressed in one of the first studies on Italian fascism: Alberto Aquarone, La costruzione dello stato totalitario (Turin: Einaudi, 1965). For more recent examples, see: Alberto De Bernardi, Una dittatura moderna (Milan: B. Mondadori, 2001); Paul Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Paul Ginsborg, Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–​1959 (London: Yale University Press, 2014). 11 Carmen Betti, L’Opera nazionale balilla e l’educazione della gioventù (Florence: la Nuova Italia, 1984), 177.

32

32

Luca La Rovere

12 Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion, 19 and 23–​4. 13 Gigliola Gori, “Model of Masculinity: Mussolini, the ‘New Italian’ of the Fascist Era,” International Journal of History of Sport 16, no. 4 (1999): 55. 14 Gentile, “L’‘uomo nuovo’ del fascismo”, 235. 15 Luciano Pazzaglia, “La formazione dell’uomo nuovo nella strategia pedagogica del fascismo,” Annali di Storia dell’educazione e delle istituzioni scolastiche 10 (2003): 105–​6. 16 See: Mosse, The Image of Man; Sandro Bellassai, La mascolinità contemporanea (Rome: Carocci, 2004); Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (1995; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 17 Luca La Rovere, “ ‘Rifare gli italiani’ ”, 61–​5. 18 Marco Palla, “Le Parti national fasciste et les organisation de masse »   and Didier Musiedlak, “Stratégies institutionelles et création de l’homme nouveau dans l’état fasciste” in L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste, 173–​88 and 189–​208. 19 See: Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–​1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 20 The reference is to Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France (1978–​1979), ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); translated in English as Society Must Be Defended, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003). 21 The connection between the myth of the “new man” and education in twenty century totalitarian regimes is highlighted in the monographic issue “Il mito dell’uomo nuovo nel Novecento: l’uso politico dell’educazione.” Annali di Storia dell’educazione e delle istituzioni scolastiche 9 (2002). 22 Jürgen Charnitzky, Die Schulpolitik des Faschistischen Regimes in Italien (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 130. For fascist criticism of the Gentile Reform, see: Alessandra Tarquini, Il Gentile dei fascisti: Gentiliani e antigentiliani nel regime fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), 44–​69. 23 Charnitzky, Die Schulpolitik, 127–​8. 24 Ibid., 108 and 127. 25 Monica Galfré, Il regime e gli editori: Libri, scuola e fascismo (Rome-​Bari: Laterza, 2005), 94–​5. 26 Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo (1932); Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1932/​1936). 27 Galfré, Il regime e gli editori, 14 and 25–​6 and Francesca dello Preite, “Per una prima educazione attraverso il testo unico di Stato,” in La formazione della gioventù italiana durante il ventennio fascista, ed. Hervé A. Cavallera (Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 2006), 1:141–​3. 28 See: Adolfo Scotto di Luzio, L’appropriazione imperfetta: Editori, biblioteche e libri per ragazzi durante il fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996) and Davide Montino, Le parole educate: Libri e quaderni tra fascismo e Repubblica (Milan: Selene, 2005). 29 Balilla was Gian Battista Perasso’s nickname. According to legend, as a young man in 1746 his stone throwing triggered an insurrection against the Austrian occupiers in Genoa. He became a symbol of patriotism. “Balilla” was the name fascists gave to members of their youth movement, which was in fact called Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB; National Balilla Organization). 30 Antonio Gibelli, Il popolo bambino: Infanzia e nazione dalla grande guerra a Salò (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 265–​76. 31 See: Luigi Marrella, I quaderni del duce: Tra immagine e parola (Manduria: Barbieri, 1995) and Gianluca Gabrielli and Davide Montino, eds., La scuola fascista: Istituzioni, parole d’ordine e luoghi dell’immaginario (Verona: Ombre corte, 2009).

 33

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

33

32 Gianluca Gabrielli and Davide Montino, “Scuola e fascismo: Una storia ancora da scrivere?”, Zapruder 20, no. 5 (2009): 136–​9. 33 As an example of such a trend, see Giovanni Genovesi, “Scuola e fascismo nel pistoiese: Il problema della fascistizzazione attraverso i diari di classe (1928–​1929),” in Il quaderno umile segno di scuola, ed. Giovanni Genovesi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2008), 10 and 34–​5. 34 Quoted in Anna Maria Colaci, “Analisi della prassi educativa del fascism: Una rilettura dei registri scolastici della scuola di Melendugno,” in La formazione, ed. Cavallera, 2:125. 35 Quoted in Pazzaglia, “La formazione dell’uomo nuovo,” 117. 36 Patrizia Dogliani, Il fascismo degli italiani: Una storia sociale (Turin: Utet, 2008), 187. 37 Ibid., 188. 38 Galfré, Il regime, 51. 39 Colaci, “Analisi della prassi educativa del fascismo,” 42. 40 Ibid., 36. See also Mirella Chiaranda, “Analisi comparata di alcune esperienze scolastiche nel Veneto durante il fascismo,” in Storia comparata dell’educazione: Problemi ed esperienze tra Ottocento e Novecento, ed. Mirella Chiaranda (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2010); Francesca Dello Preite, Il fascismo e l’educazione primaria: L’esempio di Campi Salentina (Lecce: Pensa multimedia, 2006). 41 Giancarlo Costabile, “Processi educativi e scolastici nella Calabria fascista: appunti per una storia della scuola calabrese,” in La formazione, ed. Cavallera, 2:348. 42 Niccolo Zapponi, “Il partito della gioventù: Le organizzazioni giovanili del fascismo 1926–​1943,” Storia contemporanea 13, no. 4–​5 (1982): 569–​633; See also: Betti, L’Opera nazionale balilla; Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922–​1943 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Luca La Rovere, Giovinezza in Marcia: Le organizzazioni giovanili del regime fascista (Novara: Editoriale Nuova, 2004). 43 Luca La Rovere, Storia dei Guf: Organizzazione, politica e miti della gioventù universitaria fascista, 1919–​1943 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 45. 44 Ministero dell’Interno, Opera nazionale Balilla per l’assistenza e l’educazione fisica e morale della gioventù: Norme legislative e regolamentari (Rome: Provveditorato generale dello Stato, 1927), 39 and 45. See also: Ornella Stellavato, “La nascita dell’Opera nazionale Balilla,” Mondo contemporaneo, no. 2 (2009): 5–​81. 45 Zapponi, “Il partito,” 613. See also Richard J. Wolff, Between Pope and Duce: Catholic Students in Fascist Italy (New York: Lang, 1990), 75. 46 Regio Decreto Legge (R. D. L.), November 20, 1927, n. 2341. 47 Cfr. Ester De Fort, La scuola elementare dall’Unità alla caduta del fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), 442–​3 and Zapponi, “Il partito,” 600. 48 Foglio di disposizioni del Pnf, December 5, 1939 and January 17, 1939. 49 R. D. L. June 3, 1938, n. 928. 50 See: Lucia Motti and Marilena Rossi, eds., Accademiste ad Orvieto: Donne ed educazione fisica nell’Italia fascista 1932–​1943 (Perugia: Quattroemme, 1996); Alessio Ponzio, La palestra del littorio: L’Accademia della Farnesina: un esperimento di pedagogia totalitaria nell’Italia fascista (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2009). 51 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1940–​43, b. 2667, f. 1.1.15/​3.500, s. f. 13, doc. ‘2.200 posti nelle Accademie e nei Collegi della Gil’. 52 Julius Evola, “L’esperimento dei castelli dell’Ordine” and “Iniziative di educazione ‘qualitativa’ in Germania: le Napolas,” Insegnare, March, 15, 1940 and September 1–​15, 1940 and Evola, “Le Napolas,” Regime fascista, May 27, 1941. See: Helen Roche, Sparta’s German Children: The Ideal of Ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet

34

34

Luca La Rovere

Corps, 1818–​1920, and in National Socialist Elite Schools (the Napolas), 1933–​1945 (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2013) and Roche, The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press), forthcoming. 53 M. Giovannucci, “Funzione politica e culturale dei collegi della Gil,” Gioventù del littorio, March 1, 1942. 54 Vittorio Zincone, “Spirito dei collegi della Gil,” Il lavoro fascista, December 6, 1940. 55 “Le istituzioni del lavoro nella Gil,” Gioventù del littorio, April 15, 1942. 56 A. Merola, “Formare i quadri delle maestranze di domani,” ibid., May 1, 1942. 57 G. Ajello, “Compiti sanitari dei centri di lavoro della Gil,” ibid., March 15, 1942. 58 See: James A. Mangan, ed., Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon (London: Routledge, 2000); Georges Bensoussan, ed., Sport, corps et societé de masse: Le projet d’un homme nouveau (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012). 59 M. Pignatari, “La Gil per la salute della razza,” Gioventù del littorio, April 15, 1941. 60 See: Claudia Mantovani, Rigenerare la società: L’eugenetica in Italia dalle origini ottocentesche agli anni trenta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004); Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-​Century Italy (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). 61 Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci, “Profil racial de l’homme nouveau sous le fascisme italien,” in L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste, 152. 62 Atti del Partito nazionale fascista (Rome: F.lli Palombi, 1933), 485. 63 Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 169. 64 See: Ernesto G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’aquila: Storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Istituto Luce, 2001). 65 Achille Starace, Gioventù italiana del Littorio (Milan: Mondadori, 1939), 51. 66 M. Pignatari, “La formazione del cittadino soldato,” Gioventù del littorio, March 15, 1941. 67 Ibid., January 1, 1943. 68 “I due condottieri al III Campo Roma,” Libro e moschetto, May 15, 1938. 69 Gioventù del littorio, January 1, 1943. 70 E. Natoli, “I graduati e gli aspiranti della Gil,” ibid., November 15, 1941. 71 Both are reproduced in Carlo Galeotti, Credere, obbedire, combattere: I catechismi del fascismo (Viterbo: Stampa alternativa, 1996). 72 See: Dogliani, Il fascismo, 179. 73 See the calendar of the GIL’s activities for 1939 in Bollettino del Comando Generale, November 15, 1938. 74 La Rovere, “Rifare gli italiani,” 69. 75 Ibid., 70–​2. 76 “Educazione nuova,” Problemi della gioventù, October 29–​November 15, 1941. 77 See, for example, Camillo Pellizzi, “Educazione fascista e classe dirigente,” Critica fascista, June 15, 1937, and Luigi Volpicelli, “Scuola e famiglia,” Tempo di scuola, April 15, 1941. 78 M. Bovini, “Gil e famiglia,” Problemi della gioventù, September 15, 1941. 79 La Rovere, “Rifare gli italiani,” 74. 80 Comando generale della Gil and Ufficio studi e legislazione del Pnf, ed., La gioventù fascista nella legislazione (Rome, 1942): 16 and 19. 81 About Opera nazionale dopolavoro, see: Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization in Fascist Italy (1981; Cambridge; London: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 82 Foglio di disposizioni del Pnf, February 9, 1940.

 35

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

35

83 Zapponi, “Il partito della gioventù,” 572. Corresponding to 394,551,916 euros of 2008. See: http://​www3.istat.it/​dati/​catalogo/​20100728_​00/​valore_​moneta_​1861_​2008.pdf. 84 Koon, Believe, 179 and 182. The author refers to the figures of an inquiry carried out in May 1939. 85 Costabile, “Processi educativi,” 356. 86 Koon, Believe, 172–​3. See Andrea Rapini, “I giovani nella crisi di regime del fascismo,” in Estados Autoritários e Totalitários e suas rapresentações, ed. Luís R. Torgal and Heloísa Paulo (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2008), 333–​45. 87 Koon, Believe, 172. 88 See: La Rovere, Storia dei Guf, 387–​98. 89 Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, vol. 2, Gli anni della clandestinità (1969; Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 343–​4. 90 Tommaso Baris, “Il mito della giovinezza tra realtà e retorica nel regime fascista,” in Dalla trincea alla piazza, 204. 91 Dogliani, Il fascismo degli italiani, 178–​9. 92 Palmiro Togliatti, Corso sugli avversari: Le lezioni sul fascismo, ed. Francesco M. Biscione (Turin: Einaudi, 2010), 35 and 63. 93 See: Angelo Ventrone, La cittadinanza repubblicana: Forma-​partito e identità nazionale alle origini della democrazia italiana,1943–​1948 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996). 94 See Roberto Volpe, Lettere dagli anni difficili: Dal fascismo alla guerra, 1937–​1944, ed. Maria Teresa Volpe (Salerno: Edizioni Marte, 2007) and Patrizia Salvetti, L’amore al tempo del fascio: Un carteggio, 1932–​1939 (Cava de’ Tirreni: Marlin, 2014). 95 Foglio di disposizioni del Pnf, February 9, 1940. 96 See La Rovere, Storia dei Guf, passim. 97 Bollettino del Comando generale della Gil, August 15, 1940. 98 Ibid., September 1, 1940. 99 Francesco Musio, La marcia della giovinezza: I ragazzi di Mussolini (Taranto: Talmus-​ Art, 2011), 10–​11. 100 Alberto Pagin, I ragazzi di Mussolini: La battaglia di Bir-​el-​Gobi, 2–​7 dicembre 1941 (Milan: Mursia, 2001), 20–​1. 101 Ibid., 28–​31 and Musio, La marcia della giovinezza, 66. 102 Edoardo Scala, Storia delle fanterie italiane, vol. 9, I volontari di guerra (Rome: Stato maggiore dell’Esercito, Ispettorato di Fanteria, 1955), 665. 103 See the 1942 propaganda poster by Gino Boccasile, http://​www.wolfsonian.org/​ explore/​collections/​giovani-​fascisti-​eroi-​di-​bir-​el-​gobi-​young-​fascists-​heroes-​bir-​el-​ gobi# (accessed: September 5, 2016). See also: Giuseppe Mugnone, I ragazzi di Bir el Gobi (Padova: Stediv-​Aquila, 1968). 104 See: Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri, Vincere e vinceremo! Gli italiani al fronte, 1940–​1943 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014). 105 See Carlo Mazzantini, I balilla andarono a Salò: L’armata degli adolescenti che pagò il conto con la storia (Venice: Marsilio, 1995). 106 Giuseppe Parlato, Fascisti senza Mussolini: Le origini del neofascismo in Italia, 1943–​ 1948 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006), 37. 107 See Luca La Rovere, L’eredità del fascism: Gli intellettuali, i giovani e la transizione al postfascismo, 1943–​1948 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). 108 Maria Romana Catti De Gasperi, ed., De Gasperi scrive: Corrispondenza con capi di Stato cardinali uomini politici giornalisti diplomatici (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1974), vol. 1, 341–​2. 109 “Un compito: i giovani,” Avanti!, February 26, 1944 (Bologna). 110 See: Antonio Carioti, Gli orfani di Salò: Il sessantotto neo dei giovani neofascisti nel dopoguerra, 1945–​1951 (Milan: Mursia, 2008).

36

36

Luca La Rovere

Bibliography Atti del Partito nazionale fascista [Documents of the National Fascist Party], Rome: F.lli Palombi, 1933. Avagliano, Mario, and Palmieri, Marco. Vincere e vinceremo! Gli italiani al fronte, 1940–​ 1943 [Win and we will win! Italians to the front, 1940–1943]. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014. Baris, Tommaso. “Il mito della giovinezza tra realtà e retorica nel regime fascista.” [The myth of youth between reality and rethoric in fascist regime] In Dalla trincea alla piazza: L’irruzione dei giovani nel Novecento [From trenches to squares: The outbreaking of youth in twentieth century], edited by Marco De Nicolò, 185–​205. Roma: Viella, 2011, 185–​204. Bellassai, Sandro. La mascolinità contemporanea [Contemporary masculinity]. Rome: Carocci, 2004. Bensoussan, Georges, ed. Sport, corps et societé de masse: Le projet d’un homme nouveau [Sport, bodies and mass society: The project of a New Man]. Paris: Armand Colin, 2012. Betti, Carmen. L’Opera nazionale balilla e l’educazione della gioventù [The opera Nazionale Balilla and the education of the youth]. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1984. Carioti, Antonio. Gli orfani di Salò: Il sessantotto neo dei giovani neofascisti nel dopoguerra, 1945–​1951 [Orphans of Salò. The “Black” 1968 of young neo-fascists in postwar Italy, 1945–1951]. Milan: Mursia, 2008. Cassata, Francesco. Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-​Century Italy. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011. Cavallera, Hervé A., ed. La formazione della gioventù italiana durante il ventennio fascista [The education of Italian youth during the fascist regime]. Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 2006. Charnitzky, Jürgen. Die Schulpolitik des faschistischen Regimes in Italien [School policy of fascist regime in Italy]. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994. Chiaranda, Mirella, ed. Storia comparata dell’educazione: Problemi ed esperienze tra Ottocento e Novecento [Comparative history of education: Problems and experiences between nineteenth and twentieth century]. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2010. Connell, Raewyn W. Masculinities. 1995. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Dagnino, Jorge. “The Myth of the New Man in Italian Fascist Ideology.” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, no. 5 (2016): 130–​48. De Fort, Ester. La scuola elementare dall’Unità alla caduta del fascismo [Italian primary school from unification to the fall of fascism]. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. Dello Preite, Francesca. Il fascismo e l’educazione primaria: L’esempio di Campi Salentina [Fascism and primary education. The case of Campi Salentina]. Lecce: Pensa multimedia, 2006. Dogliani, Patrizia. Il fascismo degli italiani: Una storia sociale [Italians’ fascism. A social history]. Turin: Utet, 2008. Gabrielli, Gianluca, and Montino, Davide, eds. La scuola fascista: Istituzioni, parole d’ordine e luoghi dell’immaginario [Fascist school: Institutions, key-words and imaginary]. Verona: Ombre corte, 2009. Galeotti, Carlo. Credere, obbedire, combattere: I catechismi del fascismo [Believe, obey, fight: The fascist Cathechisms]. Viterbo: Stampa alternativa, 1996. Galfré, Monica. Il regime e gli editori: Libri, scuola e fascismo [The regime and the publishers: Books, school and fascism]. Rome-​Bari: Laterza, 2005. Genovesi, Giovanni, ed. Il quaderno umile segno di scuola [The exercise-book humble sign of school]. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2008. Gentile, Emilio. The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

 37

Totalitarian Pedagogy and the Italian Youth

37

Gentile, Emilio. “L’‘uomo nuovo’ del fascismo: Riflessioni su un esperimento totalitario di rivoluzione antropologica” [The “New Man” of fascism. reflections on a totalitarian experiment of anthropological revolution]. In Gentile Emilio, Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione [Fascism: History and interpretation], 235–​64. Rome-​Bari: Laterza, 2002. Gentile, Emilio. La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo stato nel regime fascista [The Italian road to totalitarianism: Party and state in fascist regime]. 1995. Rome: Carocci, 2008. Gibelli, Antonio. Il popolo bambino: Infanzia e nazione dalla grande guerra a Salò [The boy-people: Infancy and nation from great war to Salò]. Turin: Einaudi, 2005. Gori, Gigliola. “Model of Masculinity: Mussolini, the ‘New Italian’ of the Fascist Era,” International Journal of History of Sport 16, no. 4 (1999): 27–​61. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Koon, Tracy H. Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922–​ 1943. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. La Rovere, Luca. “ ‘Rifare gli italiani’: l’esperimento di creazione dell’‘uomo nuovo’ nel regime fascista” [Remaking Italians. The experiment of creation of the “New Man” in the fascist regime]. Annali di Storia dell’educazione e delle istituzioni scolastiche [Annals of the history of education and of scholastic institutions] 9 (2002): 51–​78. La Rovere, Luca. Storia dei Guf: Organizzazione, politica e miti della gioventù universitaria fascista, 1919–​1943 [History of Guf: Organization, politics and myths of fascist university youth]. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. La Rovere, Luca. Giovinezza in Marcia: Le organizzazioni giovanili del regime fascista [Marching youth: The youth organizations in fascist regime]. Novara: Editoriale Nuova, 2004. La Rovere, Luca. L’eredità del fascismo: Gli intellettuali, i giovani e la transizione al postfascismo, 1943–​1948 [The legacy of fascism: Intellectuals, youth and the transition to post-fascism]. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008. La Rovere, Luca. “Miti e politica per la gioventù fascista” [Myths and politics for fascist youth] In Dalla trincea alla piazza. L’irruzione dei giovani nel Novecento [From trenches to squares: The outbreaking of youth in twentieth century], edited by Marco De Nicolò, 205–​20. Rome: Viella, 2011. Mangan, James A., ed. Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon. London: Routledge, 2000. Mantovani, Claudia. Rigenerare la società: L’eugenetica in Italia dalle origini ottocentesche agli anni trenta [Regenerating society: Eugenethics in Italy from nineteenth-century roots to the thirties]. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004. Marrella, Luigi. I quaderni del duce: Tra immagine e parola [The Duce’s exercise books: Between image and word]. Manduria: Barbieri, 1995. Matard-​Bonucci, Marie-​Anne, and Milza, Pierre, eds. L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945) [The New Man in Fascist Europe, 1922–1945]. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Mazzantini, Carlo. I balilla andarono a Salò: L’armata degli adolescenti che pagò il conto con la storia [The Balilla went to Salò. The adolescent army who paid the bill with history]. Venice: Marsilio, 1995. Ministero dell’Interno, Opera nazionale Balilla per l’assistenza e l’educazione fisica e morale della gioventù: Norme legislative e regolamentari [Opera Nazionale Balilla for youth assistance and physical education: Legislation and regulamentation], Rome: Provveditorato generale dello Stato, 1927. “Il mito dell’uomo nuovo nel Novecento: l’uso politico dell’educazione.” [The New Man myth in twentieth century: The political use of education]. Monograph. Annali di Storia dell’educazione e delle istituzioni scolastiche [Annals of the history of education and of scholastic institutions] 9 (2002).

38

38

Luca La Rovere

Montino, Davide. Le parole educate: Libri e quaderni tra fascismo e Repubblica [Educated words: Books and exercise-books between fascism and republic]. Milan: Selene, 2005. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Motti, Lucia, and Rossi, Marilena, eds. Accademiste ad Orvieto: Donne ed educazione fisica nell’Italia fascista 1932–​1943 [Cadets in Orvieto. Women and phisical education in fascist Italy, 1932–1943]. Perugia: Quattroemme, 1996. Musio, Francesco. La marcia della giovinezza: I ragazzi di Mussolini [The March of youth: The Mussolini’s boys]. Taranto: Talmus-​Art, 2011. Pagin, Alberto. I ragazzi di Mussolini: La battaglia di Bir-​el-​Gobi, 2–​7 dicembre 1941 [The Mussolini’s boys. The Bir-el-Gobi battle]. Milan: Mursia, 2001. Parlato, Giuseppe. Fascisti senza Mussolini: Le origini del neofascismo in Italia, 1943–​ 1948 [Fascists without Mussolini: The origins of neo-fascism in Italy, 1943–1948]. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006. Ponzio, Alessio. La palestra del littorio: L’Accademia della Farnesina; un esperimento di pedagogia totalitaria nell’Italia fascista [The gymnasium of the lictor. The Farnesina academy: An experiment of totalitarian pedagogy in fascist Italy]. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2009. Ponzio, Alessio. Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Rapini, Andrea. “I giovani nella crisi di regime del fascismo” [The young people in the crisis of fascist regime]. In Estados Autoritários e Totalitários e suas rapresentações [Authoritarian states and their representations], edited by Luís R. Torgal and Heloísa Paulo, 333–​45. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2008. Roche, Helene. Sparta’s German Children: The Ideal of Ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps, 1818–​1920, and in National Socialist Elite Schools (the Napolas), 1933–​ 1945. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2013. Roche, Helene. The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press), forthcoming Salvetti, Patrizia. L’amore al tempo del fascio: Un carteggio, 1932–​1939 [Love in fascist times. A correspondence, 1932–1939]. Cava de’ Tirreni: Marlin, 2014. Scotto di Luzio, Adolfo. L’appropriazione imperfetta: Editori, biblioteche e libri per ragazzi durante il fascismo [Imperfect appropriation: Publishers, libraries and children’s books during fascism]. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. Stellavato, Ornella. “La nascita dell’Opera nazionale Balilla” [The birth of the opera Nazionale Balilla]. Mondo contemporaneo 2 (2009): 5–​81. Togliatti, Palmiro. Corso sugli avversari: Le lezioni sul fascismo [Course on enemies: Lessons on fascism], edited by Francesco M. Biscione. Turin: Einaudi, 2010. Ventrone, Angelo. La cittadinanza repubblicana: Forma-​partito e identità nazionale alle origini della democrazia italiana,1943–​1948 [Republican citizenship: Party and national identity at the beginning of Italian democracy, 1943–1948]. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. Volpe, Roberto. Lettere dagli anni difficili: Dal fascismo alla guerra, 1937–​1944 [Letters from hard times: From fascism to War, 1937–1944], edited by Maria Teresa Volpe. Salerno: Edizioni Marte, 2007. Wolff, Richard J., Between Pope and Duce: Catholic Students in Fascist Italy. New York: Lang, 1990. Zapponi, Niccolò. “Il partito della gioventù: Le organizzazioni giovanili del fascismo 1926–​1943” [The youth party: Fascist youth organizations, 1926–1943]. Storia contemporanea 13, nos. 4–​5 (1982): 569–​633.

 39

2

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy Francesco Cassata

Introduction The political rise of Benito Mussolini was followed with enthusiasm and trepidation by many admiring foreign eugenicists. At the Eighth Meeting of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO), held in Rome in 1929, the German eugenicist Eugen Fischer praised Mussolini as “the great statesman who, in the Eternal City, shows more than any other leader today, both in deed and word, how much he has the eugenic problems of his people at heart.” Through Fischer, the IFEO asked Mussolini to interest himself not just in the quantity of the population but also in its quality: We pray that what was denied to earlier cultures may here be achieved in grasping fortune’s wheel and controlling and turning it! Quality as well as quantity! The urgency brooks no delay: the danger is imminent. Videat consul!1

The IFEO’s hopes were soon to be disappointed. Far from adopting the “Nordic,” hereditarian eugenic model, since the late 1920s Italian Fascism promoted a Catholic-​ oriented, neo-​Lamarckian, and “quantitative” eugenics, based largely on two different scientific paradigms:  Corrado Gini’s pronatalist “regenerative” eugenics and Nicola Pende’s constitutional biotypology.2 In the last two decades a conspicuous international historiography has investigated the connection between Italian eugenics and the fascist quest for the New Man, thoroughly exploring a number of complex and interrelated issues, such as political and ideological discourses, population and public health programs, educational agendas, and propaganda campaigns.3 Drawing on this vast literature, the aim of this chapter is to shed light not on the “spiritual,” but on the “material”—​endocrine-​oriented—​ construction of the fascist New Man, by focusing in particular on the role of the physician Nicola Pende and his relevant biotypological program. A world-​renowned endocrinologist in the interwar period and one of the most prominent eugenicists of Fascist Italy, Nicola Pende (1880–​1970) (Figure  2.1) still

40

40

Francesco Cassata

Figure 2.1  Gianni Baldi, “I grandi medici italiani. Pende.” L’Europeo 20, no. 31 (1964): 30.

triggers vivid political and ideological controversies in the Italian context. On the one hand, a rich apologetic literature celebrates Pende as the “founder of endocrinology,” the missing Nobel laureate, the scienziato di Puglia (scientist from Puglia);4 on the other, superficial historical reconstructions stigmatize Pende as a mere pseudo-​ scientist, a fanatic, and a racist physician as well as the most relevant author of the July 1938 Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti, the Race Manifesto.5 In this incandescent public debate, Italian historiography drew attention to the political and ideological implications of Pende’s biotypology, while showing rather marginal interest on the connections between constitutional medicine, endocrinology, and fascist “alternative modernity.”6 Furthermore, compared to the variegated historical literature concerning the relationship between endocrinology and the cultural and political projects of national regeneration that characterized the interwar period,7 the history of biotypology in Fascist Italy has attracted relatively little scholarly attention and has never inspired an in-​depth analysis. In Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz’s seminal book on holism in biomedicine between 1920 and 1950, Greater than the Parts, the Italian case is scarcely mentioned, despite its crucial resonance on the international context.8 Similarly, fascist regenerative projects of creating a “New Man” for the envisaged “age of Fascism” have often been examined as rhetorical discourses, ideological utopias, or unfulfilled theories, while their impact in terms of medical practices still remains an uncharted territory. As a very preliminary attempt to bridge this gap, this chapter analyzes Pende’s crucial role in the development of a biotypological and endocrine-​oriented eugenics,

 41

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

41

which found concrete implementation, between 1926 and 1943, in the activities of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute, initially established in Genoa and then transferred to Rome. The chapter is divided into three parts. I first explore the connection between Pende’s eugenics and his medical holism, as well as his synthesis of endocrinology and constitutional pathology. Then, I give a general overview of the structure and activities of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute, focusing in particular on the convergence between Pende’s glandular eugenics and the population policies of the fascist regime. Finally, I investigate the flexible dimension of so-​called Latin eugenics, by charting the different meanings and uses that the concept of Latinity underwent in Pende’s biotypology and constitutional medicine.

Constructing biotypology The Italian School of constitutional medicine had its roots in the prestigious medical clinics of the Universities of Padua and Bologna. Its main exponents were respectively Achille De Giovanni (1838–​1916) and Giacinto Viola (1870–​1943). While sharing a number of general principles with other European versions of medical constitutionalism—​the primacy of the clinic, an individualized conception of illness, the celebration of bedside diagnostic skill, the denunciation of mechanization (standardization, specialization)—​a distinctive feature of the Italian School was its focus on the role of anthropometry and statistical biometrics in clinical medicine and medical pathology. In his morphological research, between 1891 and 1909, De Giovanni described three constitutional human types according to the structure of the torso: brevilinear (short and fat), normotype, and longilinear (tall and slim). Viola statistically improved De Giovanni’s taxonomy by elaborating a morphogenetic law based on the inverse ratio between ponderal evolution of the body mass and morphological differentiation. According to this view, the morphological and ponderal evolution followed the Gaussian curve, generating two different biotypes in relation with the deviations from the mean: the excess of body mass over limb proportions would determine the “brevilinear” and “megalosplancnic” type, while the deficiency of body mass, combined with the hyperevolution of the limb proportions, would indicate the “longilinear” and “microsplancnic” type (Viola, 1932).9 Viola’s assistant in Palermo (1909–​19) and Bologna (1919–​23), Pende provided an original contribution to the development of Italian medical constitutionalism by connecting De Giovanni’s and Viola’s statistical and anthropometric approaches with the cutting-​edge field of endocrinology. In 1912, at the Twenty-​Second Congress of Internal Medicine in Rome, Pende established for the first time a correlation between Viola’s morphogenetic law and the inverse relationship, during growth, between anabolism and catabolism.10 This led Pende to define, on endocrinological grounds, two different morphological, physiological, and psychological “constellations”: from one side, the hyperanabolic hormonal constellation, connected with the “vegetative system” (the body mass, torso, internal organs) and the parasympathetic nervous system, which included the thymus, the anterior pituitary, the adrenal cortex, and the

42

42

Francesco Cassata

pancreas; from the other side, the hypercatabolic hormonal constellation, connected with the “system of relation” (limbs, head, morphological differentiation) and the sympathetic nervous system, which included the thyroid, the posterior pituitary, the adrenal medulla, and the testes. These neuroendocrine constellations were at the core of Pende’s morphological, physiological, and psychological classification, based on the distinction between two fundamental endocrine “ectypes”: on one hand, the “hyperanabolic” biotype, correlated with a brevilinear morphology, a bradypragic (sthenic) physiology, a bradypsychic character, and an analytical intelligence, and on the other, the “hypercatabolic” biotype, which presented on the contrary a longilinear morphology, tachypragic (hyposthenic) physiology, tachypsychic character, and synthetic intelligence (Figure 2.2).11 Through this endocrine-​biochemical formula, Pende was able to define an “integral biotypological profile” of the individual—​the so-​called biotype—​geometrically visualized as a quadrangular pyramid. The base represented individual, familial, and racial heredity, and the four sides indicated, respectively, morphological individuality, physiological individuality (endocrine temperament), ethical individuality (psychology, character), and intellectual individuality (intelligence). A plethora of taxonomies (twenty-​four morphological varieties, ten endocrine temperaments, six moral biotypical dimensions) resulted from the combination of metabolic, endocrine, psychological, and physical studies.12 The internal secretions conditioned not only the anatomic, physiological, and psychological variations but also the receptivity toward disease and the character of disease as it developed. The “muscular and sanguine brevilinear type,” for instance, was prevalently exposed to cardiac illnesses, while the opposite longilinear “atonic and asthenic” type would more easily suffer from “tuberculosis of the lungs, pleura, peritoneum and glands.”13 The endocrine constellations and the related biotypological classification paved the way for the “science of orthogenesis,” that is, the possibility of correcting individuals who deviated from the type. According to Pende, the balance between the two neuroendocrine constellations was the general rule to be followed in order to correct the different biotypes. Anomalies in the hyperanabolic hormonal constellation could be endocrinologically managed through the hormones of the hypercatabolic constellation, and vice versa: patients with hypercatabolic metabolism and hypoadrenalism, for instance, would be treated with adrenal cortical opotherapy and injections of insulin, while patients with hyperanabolic metabolism, combined with hypothyroidism and hypopituitarism, would be treated with thyroid and pituitary opotherapy.14 In the context of increasing demand for biological regeneration that accompanied the end of the First World War in Italy, along with the expansion of state functions in public health and welfare policies,15 Pende’s biotypology gained momentum as the quintessential biological instrument for the renewal of the national body. In July 1922, a few months before the fascist March on Rome, in his book Debolezze di costituzione (Constitutional inadequacies),16 Pende called for the establishment of a network of “scientific Institutes for the study and the reclamation of the individual personality.”17 The rise of fascism fueled Pende’s scientific and political career. In 1924, he received honoris causa membership of the National Fascist Party (PNF). In 1924–​25

 43

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

43

Figure 2.2  Nicola Pende, Trattato sintetico di patologia e clinica medica. Messina: Manfredi Principato, v. 1, 1927, tab. IV.

he became rector of the newly founded University in Bari. In 1925, he was appointed as head of the Medical Clinic of the University of Genoa, where the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute was founded in 1926.18 This impressive career was not merely prompted by Pende’s political and ideological opportunism but also reflected the profound coalescence between biotypology

44

44

Francesco Cassata

and fascism. A number of factors encouraged this convergence. First of all, with its cultural holism and its call for “synthesis” as the very mission of medicine, biotypology legitimized the fascist response to the perceived “crisis of modernity.” The biotypological vision of social and biological improvement was perfectly aligned with Mussolini’s fascist projects of technological modernism and organic vitalism. Secondly, as expression of the Italian school of constitutional medicine, biotypology represented a specific national model in the field of eugenics and racial policies. Finally, Pende’s endocrine-​oriented biotypology provided the scientific rationale for knowledge of the biological potential of the Italian population and contributed a therapy for the “correction” of that potential. To policy makers, biotypology held out the promise of maximizing the healthiness, fertility, and productivity of the population.19 In 1933, in a book significantly titled Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica (Rational human reclamation and political biology), Pende gave biotypological form to the fascist project of forging the New Man. Not surprisingly, the volume was dedicated to Mussolini, the leader who “with the sound principles of political biology weaves a new physical, moral and intellectual outlook, for a new, grand Nation.” Pende’s book was filled with organicistic analogies, connecting the neurohormonal constellations to the internal articulations of fascist corporativism. In this framework, the science of orthogenesis was described as a fascist biomedical architecture, structured on different levels of biotypological control. According to Pende, in fact, biotypological and orthogenetic measures had to be systematically applied to the medical classification and rational improvement of the four principal dimensions of the fascist state: children, women, workers, and the race. The school system—​“true workshop of the social personality of the individual”20—​was a crucial field of application of constitutional medicine. The biotypological anamnesis was instrumental in detecting physical, moral, and sexual deviations of the students. Every anomaly would eventually receive a biotypological diagnosis, requiring a “differential” approach in order to normalize any deviation and orient each student to its specific form of scholastic or professional education. With regard to women, Pende envisaged a program of “female bio-​psychological education,” whose main goal was to reinforce the “maternal type,” by favoring the growth of female fat in the lower half of the body as well as improving the constitutional predisposition of women for “realistic and practical” thoughts and activities.21 Biotypology could also serve as fundamental support for the scientific organization of work, allowing the assignment of each worker to the productive function more suitable to its biotype or preventing the emergence of constitutional weaknesses that would cause accidents or workplace illnesses. Finally, in the field of racial studies, the central task of biotypology was to evaluate the different ethnic stocks of the Italian nation, in order to treasure the “ethnic polyvalency” of the national body, the fundamental condition for a “State anthropotechnique” based on the biological differentiation and harmonization of its components.22 Established in Genoa in 1926, the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute, under the direction of Pende, was meant to give concrete realization to this ambitious program.

 45

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

45

A “rational human reclamation”: The Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute The Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute was inaugurated in Genoa in December 1926. In 1935, with the direct involvement of Mussolini, Pende was named director of the Institute of Medical Pathology and Clinical Methodology at the University of Rome, and in January 1936, the Biotypological Institute was also transferred to the capital. Funded mainly by the Ministry of Public Education and the Ministry of Interior, the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute had also institutional connections with the National Fascist Party’s maternity and infancy organization (the Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia; ONMI) and with the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Fascist Party’s youth group.23 Both in Genoa and in Rome, Pende’s Institute screened thousands of primary school pupils and Balilla, selecting children with psychic deficiencies to be sent to the “differential classes” (classi differenziali) and providing training courses for teachers of special education classes. The ministerial primary education official publication popularized the principles and methods of the Institute and praised its contribution to the “realization of that essential postulate of modern social life, which requires the defence of race and the physical and psychic improvement of the new generations who are to be given every care.”24 The Institute was also concerned with psychotechnics and professional orientation, selecting apprentices for the industrial schools in Genoa and providing work orientation for the students of the municipal schools for “abnormal children.”25 The internal structure of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute, both in Genoa and in Rome, was articulated into different sections. The first room was dedicated to the anthropometric study of human morphology.26 Here, the patients were photographed naked, with the photos placed in the Institute’s archive.27 The patients were then weighed on precise scales and measured using different tools: the Viola anthropometer, the Pizzoli craniometer, the Thooris body mass indicator, and the Pende “growth table.” Finally, the morphological exam was completed with an evaluation of the development of the so-​called five fundamental apparatuses: the muscular and ligamentary system, the respiratory apparatus, the hemopoietic apparatus, and the sexual apparatus.28 The second section was the so-​called dynamic-​humoral section, which aimed at identifying the individual endocrine temperament. This section carried out the measurement of the basal metabolism; the “neuromuscular quality” (force, speed, resistance to fatigue, ability); and the “neuroendocrinic and electrolytic profile” (morphological examination of glands, hormone testing).29 The third section was dedicated to psychology. In this section, patients underwent a series of mental tests—​Sante De Sanctis test, Binet-​Simon test, Terman test, Banissoni test—​to evaluate intelligence, memory, character, and imagination.30 Focused on pychotechnics and work orientation, the fourth section provided a series of analogical tests that reproduced the work situations of different professional categories: drivers, construction workers, mechanics, mill workers. The psychotechnics section included aptitude tests (proportional sense,

46

46

Francesco Cassata

combinatorial capacity, activity and motor force, motor skills) and examinations of the organs of sense and sensitivity (sight, hearing, touch, baric and muscular sense, sensitivity to heat and pain).31 All the information on familiar and racial heredity, morphology, psychology, and behavior of the subject was then collected into a “biotypological card,” which Pende defined as a sort of “personality card,” “the revelation . . . of the special type of human factory and special type of performance of the human psychical and physical motor, which every individual represents.”32 Although it was an extremely complex classification system, almost impossible to apply on a large scale, Pende recommended it to the fascist regime as a fundamental tool for the biological monitoring and improvement of the Italian population. In February 1930, at the First Congress of the ONB physicians, Pende proposed the establishment of a “study centre of the forms of growth and biopsychological constitution” in each ONB provincial committee as well as the organization of specific training courses for ONB physicians in the field of medical constitutionalism.33 That same year, the ONB introduced a biotypological card for its members on the Pende model, which was further simplified four years later.34 Following Pende’s suggestions,35 the ONB provincial committees established in 1934 a number of “orthogenetic dispensaries” with the aim of monitoring the somatic and psychical development of the children and adolescents. In Pende’s visionary biology, the biotypological card was meant to be the “individual document of identification, health and evaluation” of “citizens of the Fascist regime,” considered as “productive cells harmonically and consensually engaged in the complex cellular whole of Mussolini’s State.”36 The biotypological card was conceived to record and monitor the biopsychical state of the population as well as to identify symptoms of deviance within individuals, in order to correct them. This orthogenetic correction included the adoption of endocrinological therapies (opotherapy, organotherapy, surgical glandular transplants); radiological therapies (ultraviolet radiation therapy, X-​ray therapy, Marconi therapy); and “natural” therapies (sunshine, mountain air, mineral waters, special diets, etc.). These methods seemed promising for the treatment and improvement of the constitutional inadequacies of male and female bodies, the treatment of infertility, and the correction of genital and hormonal dysfunctions. From this perspective, Pende’s science of orthogenesis may be viewed as a kind of glandular eugenics, profoundly interwoven with fascist population policies. As Yolanda Eraso pointed out, “knowing, recording, and treating the different biotypes that populated the nation would contribute to a better reproduction of the fittest.”37 The analysis of the first 100 clinical cases of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute, published in 1927, shows in detail Pende’s clinical approach to the endocrine “correction” of biotypological anomalies, through glandular interventions aimed at balancing the two fundamental hormonal constellations.38 Yet, more specifically, two orthogenetic methods clearly demonstrate the fundamental interconnection between endocrinology, biotypology, and fascist eugenics:  first, the improvement of the so-​ called maternal type; secondly, the correction of “sexual anomalies.” At the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute, the female body was measured and monitored in order to detect eventual deviations from the “normal” level of fecundity

 47

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

47

and ovarian development. In 1931–​32, Pende and his two assistants, Sellina Gualco and Anna Sarperi, introduced a specific anthropometric measurement—​the calculation of the ratio between the bitrocantheric diameter and bisacromial diameter—​which was instrumental for the definition of the “maternal” type: following this technique, the “maternal” woman was signaled by an excess of the bitrocantheric diameter with regard to the median measurement, and by a deficiency of the bisacromial diameter, while the “nonmaternal” woman showed the opposite ratio.39 This anthropometric measurement was completed with physiological, endocrine, and psychological analyses. Pathological deviations from the normal, maternal type—​respectively, hypo-​ ovarianism and hyperovarianism—​ were then “orthogenetically corrected” at the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute, through a full range of endocrinological therapies: hypo-​ovarianism was treated with pluriglandular opotherapy, including anterior pituitary hormones, total ovarian extracts, and “foliculin.”40 In contrast, pineal or thyroidal opotherapy, and X-​ray irradiation of the ovaries were adopted in case of hyperovarianism.41 In 1929, Pende’s assistant Tusnelda Tamburri constructed the mammary gland as a “new element of constitutional semiology,”42 with a fundamental role “in the fields of eugenics and sociology.”43 According to Tamburri, the anomalies of mammae could be endocrinologically monitored and corrected. In order to obtain the “perfect” breast,44 hypermastia—​connected with hypothyroidism—​had to be cured with thyroid extracts, while cases of atrophy, caused by hypocorticalism, could be treated with cortical opotherapy.45 Significantly, the anthropological investigation of the different racial varieties of the Italian nation implied the measurement of the different levels of fecundity. In 1933, Pende, in collaboration with Gualco, Giuseppe Vidoni, Tamburri, and Francesco Landogna-​Cassone, presented the first results of a vast biotypological study on the morphological, physiological, and psychological characteristics of the racial varieties of the Liguria region, in Northwest Italy, where Pende’s Institute was located.46 The research was conceived as part of a larger study on the “functional and metric biotypology of the white races.”47 According to Pende and his collaborators, the measurement of the different frequencies of ovarian development in the four Ligurian racial varieties showed a clear, general correlation between race, biotype, and fertility: normal or hyperovarianism could be found in the longilinear stenic type (Mediterranean race) and in the brachytypic stenic (Alpin race), while hypo-​ovarianism, in contrast, was prevalent in the longilinear astenic type (Nordic race) and in the brachytypic astenic (East-​Baltic race). Population and racial policies of Fascist Italy—​this was Pende’s suggestion—​had to concentrate their efforts not only on the preservation of the high fertility of the Mediterranean race but also on the biological improvement of the two defective racial varieties (the Nordic and the East-​Baltic). Fecundity was strictly connected with what Pende called “sexual orthogenesis.” The correction of “sexual anomalies”—​or “disgenital syndromes,” in endocrinological terms—​was a central part of Pende’s glandular eugenics and a crucial field of application of his constitutional therapies. At the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute, for instance, “intersexuality,” including female “virilism” and male “feminism,” was treated with ovary removal and successive ovary grafting or, in male subjects, with testicular opotherapy or the grafting of ape glands.48

48

48

Francesco Cassata

But intersexuality was just one of the many “disgenital syndromes” treated by Pende and his staff. Among them, the case of the so-​called Pende’s syndrome, as the Italian endocrinologist named the syndrome of constitutional hyperthymism in children and adolescents, is probably the most revealing example of this intertwining between glandular eugenics and fascist population policies. In 1937, during the First International Medical Week at Salsomaggiore Terme,49 Pende announced he had detected a new syndrome of constitutional hyperthymism in children and adolescents. The endocrinologist described the subjects affected by his syndrome as “big lazy children”: these children were “fat and tall with very small genitalia.” They looked like big babies in their appearance, faces, and temperament. They were “greedy, heavy water drinkers, lazy, and characterised by a persistent mental infantilism.”50 According to Pende, a new etiology distinguished his syndrome from Alfred Froehlich’s adipogenitalis disease: while Froehlich’s disease was caused by a pathological process in the hypophyseal–​ diencephalic area, Pende’s syndrome was allegedly caused by hyperthymism. Thymic hyperplasia was detectable through the adoption of a new method, called “transfixing percussion.”51 Once the syndrome had been detected, it could be treated by using Roentgen irradiation of the thymus.52 Between 1937 and 1942, Pende and his assistants did not hesitate to emphasize the efficacy of this treatment and its relevance for the demographic and eugenic improvement of the fascist state, claiming that the hyperthymic syndrome could affect approximately one million children in Italy.53 In Scienza dell’ortogenesi (The science of orthogenesis), published in 1939, Pende celebrated the “extraordinary results” obtained by his “totalitarian orthogenesis” in the treatment of cryptorchidism, hypogenitalism, and autoeroticism (“onanism”), through Roentgen therapy of the thymus or extracts of pineal gland.54 The volume presented thirty-​six photos of sixteen clinical cases: children and adolescents aged from eight to twenty-​two (fourteen males and two females), photographed naked before and after six months/​one year of endocrine treatment. These illustrations were intended to provide visual evidence of the efficacy of Pende’s glandular eugenics in the orthogenetic correction of hypogenitalism, adiposity, and cryptorchidism. In March 1942, Pende solicited the intervention of the fascist government by sending directly to Mussolini’s attention a report on his “new therapy of the anomalies of sexual development in children and adolescents,” with a copy of his articles published in La preparazione materna (The maternal preparation), the medical journal of the Salsomaggiore center.55 Even if Mussolini did not contribute to the development of this project on a mass scale, Pende’s request nevertheless reveals his strenuous attempts to gain political and financial backing for his science of orthogenesis.

Pende’s biotypology and the invention of “Latin” eugenics When Pende’s biotypology and glandular eugenics did become “Latin”? And what did “Latin” actually mean in Pende’s visionary biology? To answer these questions, the timing is of the essence. Between 1927 and 1932, the political convergence between fascist population policies and neo-​Lamarckian eugenics, on one hand, and the Vatican

 49

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

49

condemnation of eugenic sterilization, established with the papal encyclical Casti Connubii (On Christian marriage) (December 31, 1930), on the other, were instrumental in repositioning Italian eugenics in the international arena.56 The Italian Committee for Population Problems Studies (CISP) and the Italian Society of Genetics and Eugenics (SIGE), both headed by the statistician and Italian leading eugenicist Corrado Gini, withdrew from the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP) and from the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO), respectively in 1927 and in 1932. The transformation of Germany into an aggressive “racial” state after 1933 and the increasing international influence of Nazi racial hygiene contributed to accelerating this process of fragmentation. In 1935, under the banner of the so-​called regenerative eugenics and in opposition to the “Nordic” (Anglo-​American and German-​Scandinavian) component of the IFEO, the SIGE inaugurated the Latin Federation of Eugenic Organizations. On September 26, 1935, a letter sent by the Ministry of National Education to the presidency of the Council of Ministers and the presidency of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), based on a detailed report by Gini, officially endorsed this fracture: The Italian scholars must abstain from collaborating with the International Federation of Eugenic Organisations, from which our representatives have distanced themselves in consideration of its program, which evidently contrasts with the Italian direction regarding the qualitative population policy57.

As a result, the term “Latin” was adopted to mark a fundamental boundary, set to define the scientific and political peculiarity of fascist eugenics and to support its international dissemination against the Nordic model. In this framework, Pende’s biotypology emerged as a crucial resource for fascist cultural diplomacy and a key element in the conceptualization of the Latin model of eugenics. In Pende’s constitutional medicine, the label “Latin” encapsulated in fact three different meanings: first, a peculiar “invention of tradition” in the history of medicine, celebrating Alcmaeon of Croton as founding father of Italian constitutionalism; second, the construction of a cultural and diplomatic network in the transnational field of eugenics in Europe and Latin America; finally, an alternative model of racial eugenics, which was intended as “flexible”58 and “anti-​Nordic,” in opposition both to Nazi and Anglo-​American/Scandinavian eugenics. During the 1930s, in Pende’s writings, Latin came to define primarily a specific interpretation of the history of medicine along constitutional lines. Often used in this case as synonymous with “Mediterranean” or “Italic,” the term identified a spurious historical tradition, ranging from Alcmaeon of Croton to the De Giovanni and Viola neoconstitutionalistic school.59 Pende’s contribution at the Congress of the Latin Medical Press in Paris, in October 1934, published in La Riforma medica (The medical reform) under the title “Il genio medico latino nel pensiero medico contemporaneo” (The Latin medical genius in contemporary medical thought) is particularly revealing from this point of view.60 With his usual penchant for geometrical metaphors, Pende celebrated the “harmonious and quadrilateral pyramid” of the medical Latin genius, which included Giovanni Morgagni for morbid anatomy, Louis Pasteur for exogenous

50

50

Francesco Cassata

causalism, Claude Bernard for experimental clinical determinism, and De Giovanni for endogenous or constitutional causalism. Humanism, the “brilliance of intuition and synthesis,” and the “Leonardo harmonious universality of the mind” were the secrets of the medical latin sangue gentile (Latin gentle blood), in Petrarch’s words. Pende’s “invention of tradition” not only served to legitimate the political and institutional position of the Italian School of constitutional medicine but also contributed to the celebration of the symbiosis between fascist culture and neohippocratism. Viola and Pende edited in fact the section titled “Medical Sciences” of Giovanni Gentile’s monumental Enciclopedia Italiana (Italian encyclopedia), assigning the entry Medicina (Medicine), published in 1934, to the historian of medicine Arturo Castiglioni. The appointment of Castiglioni was not accidental. In several contributions, between 1926 and 1933, Castiglioni had underlined the relevance of neohippocratism and constitutionalism as a response by the “Mediterranean clinic” to the mechanistic “crisis of medicine.”61 In his entry for the Enciclopedia Italiana, Castiglioni portrayed the development of nineteenth-​century medicine as a progressive shift from the “materialistic” field of microbiology and bacteriology, particularly relevant in Germany, to the “Latin,” neohippocratic orientation of the Italian School of clinical medicine.62 Pende’s biotipology was also a cultural resource for fascist diplomacy and propaganda. In the mid-​1930s, not only art and literature but also science and medicine proved instrumental in promoting the achievements of the “New fascist age” among intellectual and political elites abroad. This is particularly relevant with regard to “Latin” eugenics, which from the very beginning defined an international space and an international project. From this perspective, Pende’s biotypological network was as much scientific as it was political, involving in particular France, Portugal, Romania in Europe, and Argentina and Brazil in Latin America. In France, the Italian endocrinologist had contacts in the fields of Christian medical neohumanism, homeopathy, neohippocratism, and the so-​called “cosmobiology.”63 Established on July 8, 1932 in Paris, the French Society of Biotypology, headed by the psychiatrist Édouard Toulouse, devoted great attention to the Italian School of biotypology. In the second number of the Society bulletin Biotypologie (Biotypology), the French anthropologist Eugène Schreider analyzed in detail the theoretical and methodological contributions of De Giovanni, Viola, and Pende.64 Pende himself honored the society with a visit and a lecture on July 2, 1933, dedicated to the research of his Institute on the racial varieties of Liguria65: Pende’s lecture was then published in the third number of Biotypologie. A member of the Société de Biotypologie (Association of Biotypology) and Secretary-​general of the medical section of the Association France-​ Italie, Marcel Martiny advocated Pende’s methods in the field of occupational medicine, trying to apply them in Vichy France with regard to the medical selection of apprentices for the Paris Chamber of Commerce.66 In 1934, in a conference at the Nice Society of Climatology and Medicine “of the Mediterranean Littoral,” headed by doctor Maurice Faure, Pende praised the “Latin-​Mediterranean spiritual unity,” highlighting the physical robustness and fertility of the three “brunette” races (Mediterranean, Adriatic, Alpine) against the “civilization of machines and economic individualism” incarnated in the two “blond” races (Germanic and East Baltic).67 A convinced supporter of medical holism, Alexis Carrel, in his eugenic world-​famous bestseller Man,

 51

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

51

the Unknown, referred to Pende’s Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute as a model, and in July 1936, in a letter to Pende, underlined the importance of the defense of “Latin civilization.”68 In Romania, the renowned neurologist and endocrinologist Gheorge Marinescu, head of the Romanian Royal Society of Eugenics and Heredity, contributed to the circulation of Pende’s endocrinological biotypology. In February 1935, Pende visited Romania at the invitation of the Italian Cultural Institute, giving lectures at the Royal Foundation Carol I  in Bucharest and at the University of Cluj. On February 25, he held a lecture on “Biotypology and the Improvement of Human Constitution,” dealing with the application of biotypology in the field of pre-​and postnatal orthogenesis, a practice—​according to Pende—​“preferred by the Latin races” and opposed to the “anti-​biological and anti-​human” negative eugenics. During his stay in Bucharest, Pende also participated in a meeting of the Romanian Society of Neurology, presided over by Marinescu; visited the Colţea and Colentina Hospitals; and toured the Institute of Legal Medicine, led by Nicolae Minovici. At the University of Cluj, he gave a lecture focused on “orthogenetic physical education.” In 1936, the April issue of the Cluj-​based journal Endocrinologie, Gynecologie, Obstetrică (Endocrinology, gynecology, obstetrics) was entirely devoted to Pende’s visit and the celebration of the influence of the Italian School of constitutional medicine among Romanian physicians.69 In Portugal, in the early 1930s, Luís A. Duarte Santos, Barahona Fernandes, and Álvaro Eduardo Guimarães de Caires were enthusiastic advocates of Pende’s biotypology. During the first Portuguese Hygiene Week (1930), Fernandes advocated for the establishment in Portugal of a biotypological institute along the lines of its model in Genoa. In 1937, Caires, a member of the Lisbon nucleus of the Portuguese Eugenics Society and director of the state-​funded Instituto de Biologia da Assistência (Institute for Biological Assistance), strongly emphasized the results of the biotypological approach—​particularly that of Pende—​in Fascist Italy.70 Despite “the lack of over-​ arching institutional framework”71 in Portugal, constitutional medicine and biotypology found important fields of application in psychiatric and criminological studies as well as in mapping the characteristics of local populations, both in mainland Portugal and in the colonies. With its focus on individual biotypes, its “neo-​Lamarckian” approach to heredity, and its racial “regionalism,” Pende’s biotypology seemed tailored to fit the multiethnic reality of many Latin American countries, providing a flexible tool for the definition and improvement of the national type.72 At the invitation of the Argentine Institute of Italian Culture and of Mariano Castex, professor of clinical medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, Pende first visited Argentina in November 1930, as the most important stop on a eugenic mission to several countries in the region (including Uruguay and Brazil). While in Argentina, Pende gave a short lecture course to medical doctors and students, held a series of scientific conferences, and toured medical institutions in Buenos Aires. In the midst of this exposure, he announced that his Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute in Genoa would henceforth provide fellowships for Argentinean doctors to study there. The first fellowships were awarded to the physicians Arturo R. Rossi and Octavio Lopez. Upon their return to Argentina in 1932, Rossi established the Asociación Argentina de

52

52

Francesco Cassata

Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (Argentinian Association of Biotypology, Eugenics and Social Medicine). In 1933, the Council on Education and the Schools Department for the Province of Buenos Aires adopted, at Rossi’s initiative, the school biotypological identity card.73 On the basis of these international relations, Pende, in 1936, presented Mussolini with a project for a “Mussolinian University of High Latin and Mediterranean Culture in Rome,” which was intended to become “the breeding ground for future creators of thoughts” in the Latin world.74 As in Argentina, Brazil was also subjected to the influence of Italian biotypology. Authors like Giacinto Viola, Pende, Mario Barbàra, and Marcello Boldrini inspired research on the “normal Brazilian type.” A  Gabinete de Biotipologia (Laboratory of Biotypology) was established at the Faculty of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro, and during the 1930s physicians such as Isaac Brown, Waldemar Berardinelli, and Juvenil Rocha Vaz employed biotypology as a scientific method to define the physical and phenotypic characteristics of the Brazilian nation.75 The spread of Pende’s biotypology in Central and South America as well as in France, Portugal, and Romania rested primarily on its flexible eugenic and racial model, focused not on coercive sterilization and measures against miscegenation but on individual biotypological diagnosis, “differential” analysis of the regional expressions of the nation-​race, and a lifelong state intervention to foster the correct growth of its citizens, by normalizing physical and psychological anomalies. In this framework, the adoption of the term Latin as a boundary tool raised a fundamental opposition to Nordic eugenic and racist policies, in a frame of increasing diplomatic competition between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In his 1933 book Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, which delved into the biotypological investigation of the Ligurian population carried out by the medical staff of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute in Genoa, Pende argued that the Latin race was not exclusively represented by the Romans but by the “fusion of all the Italian stocks, and above all the stocks of the Mediterranean race.”76 Thus, following the example of ancient Rome, fascist racism had to pursue the biopolitical “harmonization” of the differential racial stocks in Italy. On these grounds, starting from 1933, Pende directly and explicitly criticized German völkisch racism and antisemitism, rejecting in particular Alfred Rosenberg’s and Hans Günther’s Aryan theories.77 With the implementation of the racial laws in Fascist Italy in 1938, this critical position became involved in the internal conflict between different political and scientific interpretations of fascist racism.78 On July 14, 1938, Il Giornale d’Italia (Journal of Italy) published a long document, titled “Il Fascismo e i problemi della razza” (Fascism and the race problems), which later became known as the “Manifesto della razza” (Race Manifesto). The main author of this document was the young anthropologist Guido Landra. On this occasion, Pende publicly criticized the Nordic-​Arian biological racism that characterized the Race Manifesto. In opposition to “Nordic anti-​conceptional selective” eugenics, Pende proposed, first of all, “familial or matrimonial eugenics,” and secondly, “post-​conceptional orthogenesis.” With regard to the so-​called “matrimonial eugenics,” the endocrinologist advocated the positive value of crossbreeding between Italian racial stocks, while supporting the antisemitic fascist discrimination and segregation of Italian Jews on the

 53

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

53

principle “Italians with Italians.”79 As for “post-​conceptional orthogenesis” or “environmental eugenics,” Pende stressed the efficacy of biotypological “natural” therapies, defined as a sort of preventive orthogenetic naturism.80 Supported by the Vatican and by large sectors of the Italian scientific community, between the end of 1938 and the beginning of 1939, Pende’s biotypological interpretation of eugenics and racial policy emerged victoriously from the political dispute for the management of fascist state racism. In 1938, Mussolini finally approved Pende’s project for a new Central Institute for Human Reclamation, Orthogenesis, and Naturist Therapy (Istituto Centrale di Bonifica Umana, di Ortogenesi e di Terapia Naturista), which dated from 1934. The project was conceived as part of the Universal Exposition of Rome, which would have been unveiled in 1942 (the so-​called E42). Following Pende’s suggestions, the architectonic profile of the final model, approved in February 1939, was a stronghold with four towers, a symbol of the main pillars of human biotypological “reclamation”: children, women, workers, and race. Within the stronghold, a park of two to three hectares was conceived as a site for the implementation of Pende’s “natural” therapies.81 In April 1939, Mussolini participated in the placing of the cornerstone. The construction works were carried out until the collapse of the fascist regime in July 1943.

Conclusion The synthetic overview presented above suggests that a history of biotypology in Fascist Italy offers important corrections to customary views concerning both fascist science and Latin eugenics. As historians of science Tiago Saraiva and Norton Wise stated in their 2010 seminal article, “In the historiography of science, despite a lengthy pedigree of engagement with Nazism, there is no single work dealing with the relationship between science and fascism more generally.”82 Focusing on the pursuit of autarky in food through plant genetics and breeding, Saraiva and Wise emphasized in their article the need to investigate the “material reality” of fascism as well as the coevolution of fascist policies and scientific research: “Fascist policies and genetics research together produced new tools, new crops, new products, and new landscapes (both urban and rural). Fascism was real, in the strong sense of material reality.” Along with these methodological suggestions, the case of biotypology opens a window on the process of the “fascistization”83 of science and in particular on the role of physicians in conceiving and implementing new political and social designs. The history of biotypology in Fascist Italy would also provide new insights on the so-​called Latin eugenics. As I  have previously underlined, the concept of “Latinity” should be conceived as a scientific and politico-​ideological boundary, which occurred at a precise moment, in the early 1930s, to define a space of diplomatic competition between Fascist Italy and the “Nordic” countries (Anglo-​American and German-​ Scandinavian) in the field of eugenic and population policies. “Regenerative,” “quantitative,” “neo-​Lamarckian” eugenics became Latin as a result of this process of political and diplomatic confrontation, involving not only art and literature but also science

54

54

Francesco Cassata

and medicine. Thus, in historical accounts concerning the international dimension of the eugenic movement in the interwar period, the label “Latin” has to be critically assessed, without taking it for granted. For historians, this label is clearly not part of the solution but part of the problem. Instead of passively adopting the term Latin as an umbrella category for a vast and variegated spectrum of eugenic practices, or even as an undifferentiated ethnolinguistic cluster, historical examinations will have to deconstruct Latinity in eugenics by exploring the different actors involved, the actions implemented, and the goals pursued in this process of boundary work. By assuming this methodological approach, a history of biotypology in Fascist Italy, including its significant international impact, would certainly represent a powerful lens in the analysis of the historical genesis and internal articulation of Latin eugenics.

Notes 1 Hans-​Walter Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–​1945: Crossing Boundaries (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 116. 2 The statistician and demographer Corrado Gini, head of the Italian Society for Genetics and Eugenics (SIGE), introduced the label “regenerative eugenics” (eugenica rinnovatrice) in his inaugural lecture at the Second Italian Congress of Genetics and Eugenics (1929). See Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-​Century Italy (Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2011), 167. 3 On fascist eugenics, see in particular: Giorgio Israel and Pietro Nastasi, Scienza e razza nell’Italia fascista (Bologna: il Mulino, 1998); Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1998); Anna Treves, Le nascite e la politica nell’Italia del Novecento (Milan: LED, 2011); Claudia Mantovani, Rigenerare la società: L’eugenetica in Italia dalle origini ottocentesche agli anni Trenta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004); Maria Sophia Quine, “The First-​Wave Eugenic Revolution in Southern Europe: Science sans Frontières,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press), 377–​97; Cassata, Building the New Man. 4 This apologetic approach dominated the episode, entitled “Il caso Pende,” of the television program La Storia siamo noi, broadcast by RAI 2 on February 15, 2007. 5 See José Mottola, Gente di razza: Così parlò Nicola Pende, tutore della stirpe e pupillo dei Gesuiti (Foggia: Bastogi, 2010). 6 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 7 Chandak Sengoopta, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–​1950 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Cheryl A. Logan, Hormones, Heredity, and Race: Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Nikolai Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Boschevik Science and Fiction (Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8 Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–​1950, ed. Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 9 Giacinto Viola, La costituzione individuale (Bologna: Licinio Cappelli, 1932).

 55

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

55

10 The American physician and endocrinologist Louis Berman described Pende’s 1912 paper, together with R. Stern’s monograph entitled Bodily Characteristics of Predisposition to Tabes (1912), as a turning point in the history of the discipline: “As in the case of so many of the cardinal ideas of the sciences, it was as if a solution was waiting for some particle of disturbance to permit a great crystallization. Many minds all over the world were affected by the great conception of an endocrine-​chemical determination of the anatomic and functional properties of human beings,” See Louis Berman, “Anthropology and the Endocrine Glands,” Scientific Monthly 21, no. 2 (1925): 157–​65. On Berman’s endocrinological and political vision, see: Christer Nordlund, “Endocrinology and Expectations in 1930s America: Louis Berman’s Ideas on New Creations in Human Beings,” British Journal for the History of Science 40, no. 1 (2007): 83–​104. 11 Nicola Pende, Trattato sintetico di patologia e clinica medica (Messina: Manfredi Principato, vol. 1, 1927), 80–​7; Nicola Pende, “Sintesi della mia dottrina biotipologica,” La Riforma medica 51, no. 49 (1935): 1859–​1861. 12 Mario Barbera, Ortogenesi e biotipologia (Roma: La Civiltà Cattolica, 1943). 13 Nicola Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, con applicazioni alla medicina preventiva, alla clinica, alla politica biologica, alla sociologia (Milano: Vallardi, 1939), 519. 14 See, respectively, cases 2 and 10 in Nicola Pende, Biotipologia umana ed ortogenesi (Genova: Premiata tipografia sociale, 1927). 15 Cassata, Building the New Man, 69–​134; Claudia Mantovani, Rigenerare la società, 225–​33. 16 Sante Naccarati (1887–​1929), associate professor of nervous and mental diseases at the New York Post-​Graduate Medical School, translated into English Pende’s Debolezze di costituzione. The book Constitutional Inadequacies was published in 1928, with a foreword by George Draper. Naccarati had a crucial influence in William Sheldon’s interests on the relationships between morphology, temperament, and intelligence. Sheldon’s choice of his PhD dissertation topic at the University of Chicago, “Morphologic Types and Mental Ability,” was very likely encouraged by Naccarati’s example. The collaboration between Sheldon and Naccarati ended prematurely when Naccarati was killed in an automobile accident during a summer holiday at Sulmona in Italy, in 1929. On Sheldon, see: Sarah W. Tracy, “An Evolving Science of Man: The Transformation and Demise of American Constitutional Medicine, 1920–​1950,” in Greater Than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–​1950, ed. Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 161–​88. 17 Nicola Pende, Le debolezze di costituzione: Introduzione alla patologia costituzionale (Roma: Libreria di Scienza e Lettere, 1922), 160. 18 In 1933, Pende was appointed senator. In 1940, Mussolini named him chancellor of the Academy of Italian Youth of Littorio (Gioventù Italiana del Littorio). For a synthetic biography, see Emmanuel Betta, “Pende, Nicola,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 82 (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2015). 19 Maria Sophia Quine, “Racial ‘Sterility’ and ‘Hyperfecundity’ in Fascist Italy: The Biological Politics of Sex and Reproduction,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 1, no. 2 (2012): 92–​144; Yolanda Eraso, ‘Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of Eugenics in the Treatment of Argentinian Women during the 1930s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81, no. 4 (2007): 793–​822. 20 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana, 466–​7.

56

56

Francesco Cassata

21 Nicola Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica (Bologna: Cappelli, 1933), 133–​4. 22 Ibid., 238. 23 Nicola Pende, Anomalie della crescenza fisica e psichica: Lavori dell’Istituto Biotipologico-​Ortogenetico di Genova (Bologna: Cappelli, 1929). 24 G. Arcamone, “L’Istituto biotipologico-​ortogenetico di Genova,” Annali dell’istruzione elementare 5, no. 2 (1930), 38. 25 Pende, Anomalie della crescenza fisica e psichica, 283. 26 In Genoa, the morphological section was headed by Mario Barbara, together with Muggia, Bufano, and Antognetti; the psychological section was directed by Giuseppe Vidoni, while Mario Ragazzi was head of the psycotechnics section. Other specialized rooms in Genoa included “experimental genetics,” headed by Dante Pacchioni, and “physical orthogenetics,” directed by Giovanni Ollino. See Pende, Biotipologia umana ed ortogenesi, 3–​17. 27 Sellina Gualco and Antonio Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma (Roma: Stabilimento Tipografico Luigi Proja, 1941), 25. 28 Ibid., 26–​34. 29 Ibid., 35–​52. 30 Ibid., 52–​106. 31 Ibid., 106–​44. 32 Nicola Pende, “La scheda biotipologica individuale nella medicina preventiva e nella politica sociale,” in Atti della Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze: XXVI riunione (Venezia, 12–​18 settembre 1937) (Roma: Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze, vol. 5, 1938), 284–​5. 33 Ornella Stellavato, “Gioventù fascista: L’Opera nazionale balilla” (PhD diss., Università di Roma TRE, 2008), 290. 34 Ibid., 292. 35 Nicola Pende, “Il controllo ortogenetico degli adolescenti organizzati dall’ONB,” Rivista di scienze applicate all’educazione fisica e giovanile 3 (1932): 250. 36 Pende, “La scheda biotipologica individuale,” 283. 37 Yolanda Eraso, “Biotypology, endocrinology, and sterilization: The practice of eugenics in the treatment of Argentinian women during the 1930s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81, no. 4 (2007): 800. 38 Nicola Pende, Biotipologia umana ed ortogenesi. 39 Nicola Pende, Sellina Gualco, and Anna Sarperi, “Costituzione e fecondità nella donna,” Endocrinologia e patologia costituzionale 7, no. 1 (1932): 71–​9. 40 Nicola Pende, Terapia medica speciale (Milano: Wassermann & C, 1932), 38. 41 Ibid., 40. 42 Tusnelda Tamburri, “La mammella in rapporto con lo stato morfologico-​endocrino individuale (Nuovo elemento di semeiologia costituzionale),” Endocrinologia e patologia costituzionale 4, no. 5 (1929): 471. 43 Ibid., 472. 44 Ibid., 484. 45 Ibid. 46 Nicola Pende, Sellina Gualco, and Francesco Landogna-​Cassone, “Les variétés raciales humaines de la Ligurie,” Biotypologie 1, no. 3 (1933): 113–​34. 47 Ibid., 113. 48 Pende, Terapia medica speciale [Special medical therapy], 39. Even in the post–​ Second World War period, Pende continued to “cure” homosexuality with endocrine

 57

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

57

“orthogenesis.” In 1964, Pende claimed he had “cured” the homosexuality of his patients by the grafting of calf pineal glands (see Gianni Baldi, “I grandi medici italiani: Pende,” L’Europeo 20, no. 31 (1964): 30. 49 Salsomaggiore was an internationally famous spa. With the financial support of the Ministry of Finance, Pende in 1936 established in Salsomaggiore a Centre for Scientific Research, where he developed the therapeutic uses and scientific study of the local mineral waters. On this topic, see CRSS. Centro di Ricerche Scientifiche di Salsomaggiore. Azione delle cure di Salsomaggiore sulle glandole endocrine: Lavori dell’anno 1936 (Roma: Pozzi, 1937). 50 See Liborio Dibattista, “Nicola Pende (1880–​1970) and his ‘big lazy children’: Parable of a clinical syndrome,” Medicina nei Secoli 26, no. 1 (2014): 269–​90. 51 Nicola Pende, “L’ipertimismo e la roentgenterapia del timo nelle deficienze sessuali degli adolescent,” Rassegna Clinico–​Scientifica. Periodico di Dottrina e Pratica Medica 15, no. 7 (1937): 267–​9. 52 Ibid., 269. 53 G. A. Calabrese, “Tecnica e risultati della irradiazione roentgen del timo nella sindrome ipertimica di Pende,” Policlinico: Sez. Pratica 48 (1941): 337–​9; Nicola Pende, “La sindrome ipertimica costituzionale,” Gazzetta Internazionale di Medicina e Chirurgia 51 (1942): 11–​12; Sellina Gualco and Antonio Negro, “La sindrome ipertimica di Pende: Studio clinico e terapeutico su 65 casi,” Endocrinologia e patologia costituzionale 17, no. 3 (1942–​43): 145–​238. 54 Nicola Pende, La scienza dell’ortogenesi (Roma: CNR, 1939), 204–​38. 55 Note of the Segreteria Particolare del Duce, March 7, 1942, Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Segreteria Particolare del Duce (SPD), Carteggio Ordinario (CO) 1922–​43 (Italiana State Central Archive, Particular Secretary of Duce, Ordinary Correspondence), b. 1005, f. 509057/​509059. 56 Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-​Century Italy (Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2011), 135–​46. 57 The letter is conserved in ACS, PCM (Italian State Central Archive, Presidency of the Council of Ministers), 1940–​43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000-​7, sf. 3. 58 I assume here Cheryl A. Logan’s insightful category of “flexible heredity,” referred to Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach. 59 In his Storia del pensiero medico italico, for example, the physician Eugenio Maria Poletti designed a straight line of continuity from Alcmaeon to Pende: see Eugenio Maria Poletti, Storia del pensiero medico italico: da Alcmeone a Pende, da Crotone a Roma, dal 500 av. Cr. al XIX E. F (Roma: Società Editrice del Libro Italiano, 1942). 60 Nicola Pende, “Il genio medico latino nel pensiero medico contemporaneo,” La Riforma medica 50, no. 42 (1934): 1599–​1601. 61 Arturo Castiglioni, Il volto di Ippocrate: Figure di medici e medicine d’altri tempi (Milano: Unita. 1926); Castiglioni, L’orientamento neoippocratico del pensiero medico contemporaneo (Torino: Edizioni di Minerva Medica, 1933). 62 Arturo Castiglioni, “Medicina,” in Enciclopedia Italiana vol. 22 (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1934), 703–​27. 63 In particular, at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, Maurice Loeper, professor of therapeutics, and Maxime Laignel-​Lavastine, psychiatrist and professor of history of medicine; Marcel Martiny, physician at the Leopold-​Bellan Hospital in Paris; Georges Jeanneney, professor at Bordeaux Faculty of Medicine; and Maurice Faure,

58

58

Francesco Cassata

president of the Nice Society of Medicine and Climatology. See the documentation in ACS, Ministero Pubblica Istruzione (MPI), Direzione Generale Istruzione Superiore (DGIS), Professori Universitari Epurati (Italian State Central Archive, Ministry of Public Education, General Direction of High Education, Purge of University Professors), b. 26, f. 64 Eugène Schreider, “L’école biotypologique italienne,” Biotypologie 1, no. 2 (1933): 64–​97. 65 Pende, Gualco, Landogna-​Cassone, “Les variétés raciales humaines de la Ligurie” [The human racial varieties of Liguria], 113–​34. On this visit, see: Turda and Gillette, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective, 95. 66 Jackie Clarke, France in the Age of Organization: Factory, Home and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2011), 141. 67 N. Pende, Biologia delle razze ed unità spirituale mediterranea [Biology of races and spiritual mediterranean unity], in ACS, SPD, CO 1922–​43, b. 1005, f. 500057/​509059; typewritten document. 68 Carrel to Pende, July 9, 1936, ACS, MPI, DGIS, Professori Universitari Epurati, b. 26, f. Pende. 69 Turda and Gillette, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 180–​1. 70 Richard Cleminson, Catholicism, Race and Empire. Eugenics in Portugal, 1900–​1950 (Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2014), 96–​8. 71 Ibid., 98. 72 Alexandra Minna Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and Science in Mexico, 1920–​1960,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy Applebaum, Anne S. MacPherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 187–​210. 73 Nancy Lays Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Eugenia Scarzanella, Italiani malagente: Immigrazione, criminalità, razzismo in Argentina, 1890–​1940 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1999); Andrés Horacio Reggiani, “Dépopulation, fascisme et eugénisme ‘latin’ dans l’Argentine des années 1930,” Le Mouvement Social, no. 230 (2010): 7–​26; Gustavo Vallejo, “El ojo del poder en el espacio del saper: los institutos de biotipología,” Asclepio 56, no. 1 (2004): 219–​44. 74 Pende to Osvaldo Sebastiani, July 14, 1936, ACS, SPD, CO 1922–​43, b. 1005,f. 500057/​ 509059. 75 Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes, André Luiz dos Santos Silva, Alexandre Fernandez Vaz, “O Gabinete Biométrico da Escola de Educação Física do Exército: medir e classificar para produci corpos ideais, 1930–​1940,” História, Ciências, Saúde—​ Manguinhos 20, no. 4 (2013): 1551–​69. 76 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale, 225. 77 Ibid., 227. 78 Francesco Cassata, “La Difesa della razza”: Politica, ideologia e immagine del razzismo fascista (Torino: Einaudi. 2008), 42–​76; Cassata, Building the New Man, 223–​35. 79 Nicola Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie e anomalie ereditarie,” in Atti della Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze. XXVII riunione (Bologna, 4–​11 September1938) (Roma: Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze, 1939), 71. 80 Ibid., 71. 81 Adolfo Mignemi, “Profilassi sanitaria e politiche sociali del regime per la ‘tutela della stirpe’: La ‘mise en scène’ dell’orgoglio di razza,’ ” in La menzogna della razza:

 59

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

59

Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, ed. Centro Studi F. Jesi (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1994), 65–​72. 82 Tiago Saraiva, and Norton M. Wise, “Autarky/​Autarchy: Genetics, Food Production, and the Building of Fascism,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 4 (2010): 420. 8 3 Aristotle A. Kallis, “ ‘Fascism,’ ‘Para-​Fascism’ and ‘Fascistization’: On the Similarities of Three Conceptual Categories,” European History Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2003): 219–​49.

Bibliography Arcamone, G. “L’Istituto biotipologico-​ortogenetico di Genova” [The Orthogenetic-​ biotypological Institute], Annali dell’istruzione elementare [Annals of primary education] 5, no. 2 (1930): 35–​49. Baldi, Gianni. “I grandi medici italiani: Pende” [The great Italian physicians: Pende], L’Europeo [The European] 20, no. 31 (1964): 28–​32. Barbera, Mario. Ortogenesi e biotipologia [Orthogenesis and biotypology]. Roma: La Civiltà Cattolica, 1943. Berman, Louis. “Anthropology and the Endocrine Glands,” Scientific Monthly 21, no. 2 (1925): 157–​65. Betta, Emmanuel. “Pende, Nicola.” In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani [Biographical Dictionary of the Italians], v. 82, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2015. Calabrese, G. A. “Tecnica e risultati della irradiazione roentgen del timo nella sindrome ipertimica di Pende” [Technique and results of Roentgen irradiation of thymus in Pende’s hyperthymic syndrome]. Policlinico, Sez. Pratica [The Polyclinic. Practical section] 48 (1941): 337–​9. Calvesi, Maurizio, Guidoni, Enrico, and Lux, Simonetta, eds. E42: Utopia e scenario del regime; 2. Urbanistica, architettura e decorazione [E42: Utopia and landscape of the regime; 2. city planning, architecture and decoration]. Venezia: Marsilio. 1987. Cassata, Francesco. “La Difesa della razza,” Politica, ideologia e immagine del razzismo fascista [“La Difesa della razza,” Politics, ideology and image of fascist racism]. Torino: Einaudi, 2008. Cassata, Francesco. Building the New Man. Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-​Century Italy. Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2011. Castiglioni, Arturo. Il volto di Ippocrate: Figure di medici e medicine d’altri tempi [Hippocrates’s face: Physicians and medicines from other times]. Milano: Unita, 1926. Castiglioni, Arturo. L’orientamento neoippocratico del pensiero medico contemporaneo [The neo-​hippocratic orientation in contemporary medical thought]. Torino: Edizioni di Minerva Medica, 1933. Castiglioni, Arturo. “Medicina” [Medicine]. In Enciclopedia Italiana [Italian Encyclopedia], v. 22, 703–​27. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1934. Clarke, Jackie. France in the Age of Organization. Factory, Home and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2011. Cleminson, Richard. Catholicism, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Portugal, 1900–​1950. Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2014.

60

60

Francesco Cassata

CRSS (Centro di Ricerche Scientifiche di Salsomaggiore). Azione delle cure di Salsomaggiore sulle glandole endocrine: Lavori dell’anno 1936 [Action of Salsomaggiore’s therapies on endocrine glands: works of the year 1936] Roma: Pozzi, 1937. Dibattista, Liborio. “Nicola Pende (1880–​1970) and His “Big Lazy Children”: Parable of a Clinical Syndrome,” Medicina nei Secoli 26, no.1 (2014): 269–​90. Eraso, Yolanda. “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of eugenics in the Treatment of Argentinian Women during the 1930s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81, no. 4 (2007): 793–​822. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Gualco, Sellina, and Nardi, Antonio. L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma [The Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute in Rome]. Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Luigi Proja, 1941. Gualco, Sellina, and Negro, Antonio, “La sindrome ipertimica di Pende: Studio clinico e terapeutico su 65 casi” [Pende’s hyperthymic syndrome: Clinical and therapeutic study of 65 cases,” Endocrinologia e patologia costituzionale [Endocrinology and constitutional pathology] 17, no. 3 (1942–​43): 145–​238. Israel, Giorgio, and Nastasi, Pietro. Scienza e razza nell’Italia fascista [Science and race in fascist Italy]. Bologna: il Mulino, 1998. Kallis, Aristotle A. “ ‘Fascism,’ ‘Para-​Fascism’ and ‘Fascistization’: On the Similarities of Three Conceptual Categories,” European History Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2003): 219–​49. Krementsov, Nikolai. Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolschevik Science and Fiction. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Lawrence, Christopher, and George Weisz, eds. Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–​1950. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Logan, Cheryl A. Hormones, Heredity, and Race: Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Maiocchi, Roberto. Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista [Italian science and fascist racism]. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1998. Mantovani, Claudia. Rigenerare la società: L’eugenetica in Italia dalle origini ottocentesche agli anni Trenta [Regenerating society: Eugenics in Italy from the nineteenth-​century origins to the 1930s]. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004. Mignemi, Adolfo. “Profilassi sanitaria e politiche sociali del regime per la ‘tutela della stirpe’: La ‘mise en scène” dell’orgoglio di razza” [Sanitary prophylaxis and social polizie of the regime for the “protection of the stirp”: Staging the pride of the race]. In La menzogna della razza: Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista [The lie of race: Documents and images of fascist racism and antisemitism]. Edited by Centro Studi Furio Jesi, 65–​72. Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1994. Miranda, Marisa, and Vallejo, Gustavo, eds. Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino [Social Darwinism and eugenics in the Latin world]. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno De Argentina Editores, 2005. Mottola, José. Gente di razza: Così parlò Nicola Pende, tutore della stirpe e pupillo dei Gesuiti [Pure people: Thus spoke Nicola Pende, guardian of the race and favorite of Jesuits]. Foggia: Bastogi, 2010. Nordlund, Christer. “Endocrinology and Expectations in 1930s America: Louis Berman’s Ideas on New Creations in Human Beings,” British Journal for the History of Science 40, no. 1 (2007): 83–​104. Pende, Nicola. Dalla medicina alla sociologia [From medicine to sociology]. Palermo: Prometeo, 1921.

 61

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

61

Pende, Nicola. Le debolezze di costituzione: Introduzione alla patologia costituzionale [Constitutional inadequacies: Introduction to constitutional pathology]. Roma: Libreria di Scienza e Lettere, 1922. Pende, Nicola. L’indirizzo costituzionalistico nella medicina sociale e nella politica biologica [The constitutional approach in social medicine and political biology]. Genova: Le Opere e i Giorni, 1926. Pende, Nicola. Biotipologia umana ed ortogenesi [Human biotypology and orthogenesis]. Genova: Premiata tipografia sociale, 1927. Pende, Nicola. Trattato sintetico di patologia e clinica medica [Synthetic treatise of pathology and medical clinics]. Messina: Manfredi Principato, 1927. Pende, Nicola. Anomalie della crescenza fisica e psichica: Lavori dell’Istituto Biotipologico-​ Ortogenetico di Genova [Physical and psychical growth anomalies: Works of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute in Genoa]. Bologna: Cappelli, 1929. Pende, Nicola. “Il controllo ortogenetico degli adolescenti organizzati dall’ONB” [The orthogenetic control of the adolescents, organized by ONB], Rivista di scienze applicate all’educazione fisica e giovanile [Journal of applied science to physical and youth education] 3 (1932): 247–​59. Pende, Nicola. Terapia medica speciale [Special medical therapy]. Milan: Wassermann & C., 1932. Pende, Nicola. Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica [Rational human reclamation and political biology]. Bologna: Cappelli, 1933. Pende, Nicola. “Il genio medico latino nel pensiero medico contemporaneo” [The Latin medical genius in contemporary medical thought], La Riforma medica [Medical reform] 50, no. 42 (1934): 1599–​1601. Pende, Nicola. “Sintesi della mia dottrina biotipologica” [Synthesis of my biotypological doctrine], La Riforma medica [Medical reform] 51, no. 49 (1935): 1859–​61. Pende, Nicola. “L’ipertimismo e la roentgenterapia del timo nelle deficienze sessuali degli adolescenti” [Hyperhymism and Roentgen therapy of thymus in sexual anomalies of adolescents], Rassegna Clinico–​Scientifica: Periodico di Dottrina e Pratica Medica [Clinical and scientific review: Journal of medical doctrine and practice] 15, no. 7 (1937): 267–​9. Pende, Nicola. “La scheda biotipologica individuale nella medicina preventiva e nella politica sociale” [The individual biotypological card in preventive medicine and social policy]. In Atti della Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze: XXVI riunione (Venezia, 12–​18 settembre 1937) [Proceedings of the Italian Society for the Progress of Sciences, 26th meeting]. Edited by Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze, vol. 5, 283–​6. Roma: Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze, 1938. Pende, Nicola. “La profilassi delle malattie e anomalie ereditarie” [The prophylaxis of hereditary diseases and anomalies]. In Atti della Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze. XXVII riunione (Bologna, 4–​11 September 1938) [Proceedings of the Italian Society for the Progress of Sciences. 27th meeting]. Edited by Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze, 63–​73. Roma: Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze, 1939. Pende, Nicola. La scienza dell’ortogenesi [The science of orthogenesis]. Rome: CNR, 1939. Pende, Nicola. Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, con applicazioni alla medicina preventiva, alla clinica, alla politica biologica, alla sociologia [Treatise of individual and social human biotypology, with applications in preventive medicine, clinics, political biology, and sociology]. Milano: Vallardi. 1939.

62

62

Francesco Cassata

Pende, Nicola. “La sindrome ipertimica costituzionale” [The hyperthymic constitutional syndrome], Gazzetta Internazionale di Medicina e Chirurgia [International journal of medicine and surgery] 51 (1942): 11–​12. Pende, Nicola, Gualco, Sellina, and Landogna-​Cassone, Francesco. “Les variétés raciales humaines de la Ligurie” [The human racial varieties of Liguria], Biotypologie [Biotypology] 1, no. 3 (1933): 113–​34. Pende, Nicola, Gualco, Sellina, and Sarperi, Anna. “Costituzione e fecondità nella donna” [Constitution and fecundity of the woman], Endocrinologia e patologia costituzionale [Endocrinology and constitutional pathology] 7, no. 1 (1932): 71–​9. Poletti, Eugenio Maria. Storia del pensiero medico italico: da Alcmeone a Pende, da Crotone a Rome, dal 500 av. Cr. al XIX E. F. [History of Italian medical thought: From Alcmeon to Pende, from Croton to Rome, from 500 BC to the 19th year of the Fascist Era]. Roma: Società Editrice del Libro Italiano, 1942. Quine, Maria Sophia. “The First-​Wave Eugenic Revolution in Southern Europe: Science sans Frontières.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, edited by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, 377–​97. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press 2010. Quine, Maria Sophia. “Racial ‘Sterility’ and ‘Hyperfecundity’ in Fascist Italy: The Biological Politics of Sex and Reproduction,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 1, no. 2 (2012): 92–​144. Reggiani, Andrés Horacio. God’s Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. Reggiani, Andrés Horacio. “Dépopulation, fascisme et eugénisme ‘latin’ dans l’Argentine des années 1930” [Depopulation, fascism and “latin” eugenics in 1930s Argentina], Le Mouvement Social [The social movement] no. 230 (2010) : 7–​26. Saraiva, Tiago, and Wise, Norton M. “Autarky/​Autarchy: Genetics, Food Production, and the Building of Fascism,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 4 (2010): 419–​28. Scarzanella, Eugenia. Italiani malagente: Immigrazione, criminalità, razzismo in Argentina, 1890–​1940 [Italians bad people: Immigration, criminality, racism in Argentina, 1890–​ 1940]. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999. Schmuhl, Hans-​Walter. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–​1945: Crossing Boundaries. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008. Schreider, Eugène. “L’école biotypologique italienne” [The Italian biotypological school], Biotypologie [Biotypology] 1, no. 2 (1933): 64–​97. Sengoopta, Chandak. The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–​1950. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Stellavato, Ornella. “Gioventù fascista: L’Opera nazionale balilla” [Fascist youth: The Opera Nazionale Balilla]. PhD diss., Università di Roma Tre, 2008. Stepan, Nancy Lays. “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Stern, Alexandra Minna. “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and Science in Mexico, 1920–​1960.” In Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, edited by Nancy Applebaum, Anne S. MacPherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, 187–​210. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Tamburri, Tusnelda. “La mammella in rapporto con lo stato morfologico-​endocrino individuale (Nuovo elemento di semeiologia costituzionale)” [The mammary gland in relationship with the morphological and endocrine individual state (A new element

 63

Biotypology and Eugenics in Fascist Italy

63

of constitutional semiology), Endocrinologia e patologia costituzionale [Endocrinology and constitutional pathology] 4, no. 5 (1929): 471–​84. Tracy, Sarah W. “An Evolving Science of Man: The Transformation and Demise of American Constitutional Medicine, 1920–​1950.” In Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–​1950, edited by Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz, 161–​88. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Treves, Anna. Le nascite e la politica nell’Italia del Novecento [Population politics in twentieth-​century Italy]. Milan: LED, 2001. Turda, Marius, and Gillette, Aaron. Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Vallejo, Gustavo. “El ojo del poder en el espacio del saper: los institutos de biotipología” [The eye of power in the space of knowledge: The institutes of biotypology], Asclepio [Asclepius] 56, no. 1 (2004): 219–​44. Vimieiro Gomes, Ana Carolina. “A emergência da biotipologia no Brasil: Medir e classificar a morfologia, a fisiologia e o temperamento do brasileiro na década de 1930” [The rise of biotypology in Brazil: Measuring and classifying the morphology, physiology and character of Brazilians in the 1930s], Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas [Bulletin of the Paraense Museum Emilio Goeldi. Human sciences] 7, no. 3 (2012): 705–​19. Vimieiro Gomes, Ana Carolina; dos Santos Silva, André Luiz; and Vaz, Alexandre Fernandez. “O Gabinete Biométrico da Escola de Educação Física do Exército: medir e classificar para produzir corpos ideais, 1930–​1940” [The biometric cabinet of the physical education school of the army: Measuring and classifying to produce ideal bodies, 1930–​1940], História, Ciências, Saúde—​Manguinhos [History, science, health—​ Manguinhos] 20, no. 4 (2013): 1551–​1569. Viola, Giacinto. La costituzione individuale [The individual constitution]. Bologna: Licinio Cappelli, 1932.

64

 65

3

The Aviator as New Man Fernando Esposito

The devastating “battles of materiel” at Verdun and the Somme had been fought, unrestricted submarine warfare had resumed, the February Revolution had taken place, and the United States had declared war on the German Reich when a slender book with the title Das fliegende Schwert (The flying sword) appeared on the German book market in 1917. The volume was edited by the Deutsche Luftflottenverein e.V., a typical nationalist civilian association, and contained numerous “glorious actions” of the new air arm.1 One account, originally published in the Osnabrücker Zeitung, described a flight over Verdun: It was a special feeling for me to fly like a king, laden with bombs, over the very terrain where my father had fought and won the Iron Cross 46 years before. . . . I dropped my bombs on target and saw them crash with a bang down below! Then I counted again the bridges over the Meuse and flew happily home. Never in my life have I experienced anything so wonderful! Raised above everything terrestrial, flying safe and sound, you imagine you are a god! Far below on earth, a ring of smoke lay around the town: nothing but exploding grenades. The fires blazed skyward, the whole earth was churned up and torn apart—​a gruesome spectacle! . . . Hell itself! And then you think of the soldiers fighting down there, who have to capture every meter with blood, and of the losses! And I? You float like a god above all this horror and hurl thunderbolts down on the enemy!2

The author presents the airman as “a king laden with bombs,” to be revered like a god raining thunderbolts down on the lowly creatures of the earth. When, after the war, amid the ruins of the Old World, the search for a new order and a new man began, ideologues of all persuasion looked to the airman as a prototype, as the embodiment of a new dawn that they were aiming to induce. For fascists and Italian Fascists in particular, the pilot became the symbol of a new age and of the different modernity they were trying to establish.3 In fact, the Italian historian Mario Isnenghi once aptly referred to Fascist aviation as a metaphor for Fascism itself.4

66

66

Fernando Esposito

In the following article I aim to take a closer look at the aviator and his airplane as a kind of technophilic totem of the new societies that the fascists were engineering and to ask to what extent the aviator exemplified the fascist vision of a new man. The fascists’ ambition to bring forth a new man were inextricably linked with fascism’s palingenetic “mythic core”:5 The rebirth and regeneration of the nation and of the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) relied on the “purification” of the “people’s body” (Volkskörper) as well as on the molding of both an old and a new “race” of healthy, militant, and morally restored Italians or Germans.6 Only through this ambitious and potentially murderous “anthropological revolution” would it be possible to overcome the decadence of the old liberal order and for the eternal nation to be reborn.7 Only by weeding out all “unwanted elements” on the one hand and by fostering, cultivating, and indoctrinating the desired “breed” of people on the other would the nation emerge victoriously from the struggle for survival that was raging between nations. Along with the reckless storm trooper and the violent black shirt, the uncompromising, “cold personae” and “objective” societal engineers of the Reich Security Main Office—​to name just a few manifest examples—​flying man was a prominent embodiment of fascist visions of the new man apt for the new order.8 This chapter explores the roots of the fascist vision of the aviator as a paradigmatic prototype of the longed-​for new man in the First World War. It shows how both the “first Duce,” Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Futurists but also Ernst Jünger in Germany laid the fundamental groundwork for this conception.9 Furthermore, I trace the subsequent development of the image and illuminate why the pilot was such an apt representation of the society envisaged by the fascists, or rather of the “nation of fliers” (Hermann Göring) they were trying to build.10

Death and transfiguration: Heroes of the air during the First World War In the midst of a war that marked the triumph of “modern industrialism, materialism, and mechanism,” the pilot became a sort of fetish.11 The hero cult that developed around the aviator was out of all proportion with the actual relevance of the new arm in the conflict and rested upon the symbolic potential of the “flying sword.” The high media profile of the air force can thus be seen as a result of the compensatory function that the aviation narratives served. As the quotation from the skies above Verdun suggests, the aviator–​hero brought forth by the grassroots nationalist media workers and propagandists was a product of positional warfare and represented a countermodel to it. While infantrymen on the ground felt threatened by a cruel technological automaton gone haywire, an alluring mechanical-​organic hybrid was coming into being in the sky. The aviator–​hero rose above terrestrial impotence in the face of technology. The perceived omnipotence of the “king laden with bombs” was based not least on his being presented as a master of technology, whereas the soldier in the trenches was at the mercy of a mechanized warfare in which the enemy remained faceless, hidden, and out of reach. The pilot became a technologically enhanced classical hero who boosted both the cult of speed and danger and represented collective ideas of a “proper” war:12

 67

The Aviator as New Man

67

He opposed mobility and dynamism to the standstill of trench warfare. While the troglodytes had to wade through the quagmire of a chaotic, battered landscape pockmarked with moon craters, flying man floated through vast and lofty heights. The aviator–​hero also offered further possibilities of imaginative escape, as the “knights of the air” preserved the traditional male matrix of the warrior that was being simultaneously destroyed by the “battles of materiel.” In the war in the air, as it was represented by the media, individual talents and achievements, far from being obsolete, could still help achieve honor and glory. The popular narratives that were being spread by a mobilized “culture industry” did not only compensate for a war whose destructiveness no one had foreseen as they summoned up the purifying thunderstorm. The hero cult that developed around “aces” such as Max Immelmann, Oswald Boelcke, and Manfred von Richthofen also encouraged a imitatio dei or heroica and—​as the following amateurish poem indicates—​gave purpose to action and meaning to suffering and death that transcended profane time. In a commemorative book put together by local historian Adolf Wasner shortly after Richthofen’s death in 1918, we read the following: No one outfought him, though./​Moulded perhaps by an angel/​To end the praises for the youth/​Without grief or hatred,/​A stray bullet it was/​That lightly touched his heart/​and carried him the godlike off to God./​No more is he here among us./​ His deeds tower as a mountain/​Eternal is his selfless work./​The boldest did come unstuck,/​But his people, his bold German Volk,/​Remains as ever alert!/​Fly, o nation, fly/​Full of youthful heroes,/​To glory, to victory!/​Do you not at sundown see/​The red pilot wave to you aglow?/​Yes, every evening on the sky’s edge/​He soars gently and looks down on the fatherland!/​He did but fly into the setting sun . . ./​He is not dead.13

The hero’s was not a meaningless, trivial death but a death through which he entered the sacred time of the nation or Volk.14 Following the sunset that the nation was currently experiencing—​be it the defeat of the German Reich or the vittoria mutilata, Italy’s supposedly mutilated victory—​this sacred and eternal (non)time was to be ushered in. The heroes of the Great War—​the scores of those unsung as well—​promised a new dawn, as the standard bearer of the new radicalized nationalism Ernst Jünger argued in an article entitled “Die Tradition” published in 1925:15 The hero goes under, but it is like the blood red sundown that promises a new and more beautiful morning. We should recall the Great War too as a glowing red sunset in which a splendid morning already begins to take shape. We should think of our fallen friends and see their going under as the sign of a completion, the most intense affirmation, of life itself.16

Jünger enmeshed this vision of a new morning with a “new type of German man” that he believed the war itself had borne.17 Since aviation was associated with new departures and the future, Jünger envisioned the pilot as this new type of German man, but also the tank driver or assault troop leader—​Jünger himself had been one of the

68

68

Fernando Esposito

latter—​qualified as homini novi. In his Wäldchen 125 (Copse 125), published in 1925, Jünger describes a visit to a fighter squadron, that is, to an elite, who had been brought together by the pressure for bolder forms of battle involving greater nervous tension. There were cavalrymen present too: gaunt jockey types, with smug faces frozen by gleaming monocles. . . . You could see they belonged to a breed that had had the spirit of cavalry warfare in its blood for centuries, and that looked down on this combat from behind engines and automatic weapons as inappropriate to their station.18

But there was also another type present, who, having grown up in the centers of modern industry, are thoroughly representative of the new century: twenty-​year-​olds with grim faces wrought by brute facts, for whom the bounce of city railroads, the tempo of the factory, and the poetry of steel and reinforced concrete were childhood experiences they take for granted. . . . They find technology fun: they have command of their aircraft as an Aborigine does of his boomerang. They are used to machines making life more intense.19

In Jünger’s vision, these two sharply drawn manifestations of the aviator–​hero, one noble, the other bourgeois, merge into a single human type, a new warrior race. The soldierly ideals of heroism and manhood associated with particular estates, classes, or social strata were unified and transcended in a new paradigmatic type representing a martial nobility of action or a meritocratic elite destined for leadership in a new society envisioned as an Arbeiterstaat.20 Both during the war itself and in its aftermath fliers were depicted as a “modern knighthood,” and it was conservative revolutionaries, or rather fascists like Ernst Jünger, who depicted them as the vanguard of a coming era of “steel characters” (Stahlgestalten).21 In Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Combat as inner experience), first published in 1922, Jünger writes, They are the steel characters whose eagle gaze searches the clouds ahead over whirring propellers, who sit wedged in among the confusion of tank engines, who risk the descent into hell across roaring fields of craters, who squat all day long facing certain death, half-​fainting behind blazing machine-​guns in nests surrounded by enemies and mounds of their corpses. This is the new man. The storm pioneers, the elect of Central Europe. A whole new race—​clever, strong, and willing.22

The airman drawn by Jünger represented a new nobility distinguished not by birth but by its superior character, will, and leadership as well as by its mastery of technology, its nerves of steel, “cool conduct,” and its predisposition for violence.23 In Italy this warrior aristocracy was addressed as trincerocrazia, a nobility of the trenches whose spirit the Blackshirts kept alive.24 But the flier above the skies of the Karst and the Alps was also an object of deification. Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Futurists were the main

 69

The Aviator as New Man

69

protagonists of this transfiguration or sacralization of the pilot into an Icaric type destined to redeem the nation. In the course of the intensified war effort after the Caporetto debacle a banquet in honor of a number of pilots was given at La Scala in Milan, where an appeal was made for donations to fund the purchase of more airplanes. D’Annunzio, the renowned poet, ladies’ man, agitator, and war hero, gave a speech that was published the following day, on March 26, 1918, in the Corriere della Sera under the title “Faith in Italian Aviation.”25 D’Annunzio refers to the exemplary donations made by a few cities. They were not ordinary gifts, but rather a testimony of faith. The most modest contribution is an act of faith in the only weapon that can win the war. . . . These heroes know it. The living know it, and so do the dead. The shadow of the winged machine is akin to the shadow of the wood of sacrifice and redemption. The similarity occurred to me on a day long past from that other war, on the grim field of Gonars so like a levelled Mount Calvary, when I  caught sight of the airplane piloted by Oreste Salomone, with its deadly load, spattered all over with blood. Its two wings, running transversally between nose and rudder, formed the bloody cross. . . . “O pinion of Italy, thou art my faith,” confessed those of ours who were torn and crushed, who had landed as a holocaust to be carried once more skyward by the spirit of fire.26

By transferring the Icarus trope and Christian interpretive patterns to the airplane and its pilot, Il vate (the “Bard”)—​as he is widely known in Italy—​played a considerable role in constructing the Italian “myth of the war experience,” a myth that, according to George L. Mosse, gave the war a new dimension of national and personal renewal.27 The wings of the heavenly savior had to break and he himself had to fall as a burning offering on the altar of the fatherland, before the latter could rise again. D’Annunzio used the airplane as a vehicle for the dissemination of his “theologemes of redemption,” both in the literal sense of the word, as his leaflet campaigns over Trent and Trieste show, and figuratively.28 The famous poet was able to embed the war into a horizon of meaning, and as D’Annunzio himself took part in the war, his redemption myths gained in both scope and effectiveness. The daring deeds of the aging poet, which continued during his Fiume adventure, as well as the rousing narratives that accompanied them, became Italy’s most potent propaganda weapon. D’Annunzio sanctified technological warfare and the nation in whose name it was fought, interpreting death in battle as a heroic act of sacrifice that made national survival and renewal possible. In D’Annunzio’s texts, the aviator turns not only into a superhuman new man but also becomes a miles Christi; he acquires the features of a savior of the nation, while his aircraft morphs into the cross of redemption. These “theologemes of redemption,” which D’Annunzio transferred to the aviator, formed the basic material for the Fascist political religion and its underlying palingenetic myth.29 Yet D’Annunzio’s contribution to the establishment of the aviator as a prototype of the Fascist new man went beyond his characterization of the pilot as redeemer of the nation. Already in his novel Forse che si forse che no (Maybe yes, maybe no), published in 1910, D’Annunzio had marshaled important tropes that substantiated the aviator as

70

70

Fernando Esposito

an essential candidate for a new Promethean race of men: technical dexterity, fusion with the machine, intoxication with speed, virile camaraderie, misogyny, aristocratic conduct, and contempt for the masses.30 Above all, the protagonists of Forse che che si forse che no, Cambiaso and Tarsis (an alter ego of D’Annunzio), qualify as Nietzschean supermen because they personify the habitus of vivere pericolosamente—​a life truly lived and savored through its rejection of the world of security and its contempt for death. These very same qualities of the flier were also treasured by the Futurists, who, acting in league with Benito Mussolini, syndicalists, Arditi, and other veterans, founded the Fasci italiani di combattimento on March 23, 1919.31 They too apotheosized flying man from the very beginning, as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s African novel Mafarka le futuriste shows. Mafarka, published in 1909, like the founding “Futurist Manifesto,” interwove attacks on “passéism” with mythical images of the flying superman Gazurmah.32 Marinetti’s crudely misogynistic Mafarka not only foreshadows the violent “fascist virility” that was to come but also uses flight as a metaphor for a new awakening.33 The flying creature as the polar opposite of the “passéist” woman or bourgeois is the new Nietzschean superman of the new society that arises from the ashes of the old. Furthermore, flying man helps usher in the New Age by destroying the old order. Similar to the first Manifesto, in which Marinetti praised “the love of danger” and war as “the world’s only hygiene,” in the second Futurist Manifesto, Let’s Murder the Moonshine, from April 1909, he envisions an apocalyptic bloodbath of the inhabitants of Paralysias and Podagras, that is, the “paralytic,” “gout-​stricken” bourgeoisie.34 Futurists riding airplanes institute a kind of Last Judgment, and the apocalyptic fliers and their surreal army push the inhabitants “against the high walls of Gorisankar”: Finally! So there you are ahead of us, great swarming populace of Paralysis and Gout, disgusting leprosy devouring the mountainsides . . . Swiftly we fly against you . . . But you are numberless! . . . And we might use up our ammunition and grow old in the slaughter! . . . Let me direct the fire! . . . Oh! The joy of playing billiards with Death! . . . It’s ours, the victory . . . of that I am sure, because the madmen are already hurling their hearts toward heaven, like bombs! . . . Up 800 meters! Ready! . . . Fire! . . . Our blood?—​Yes! All our blood, in waves, to recolour the sick dawns of the Earth!35

Won over to the Eros of technology and death, elated by the thrill of speed and violence, the Futurists saw war as a chance to destroy the whole of “yesterday’s world.” The bloodthirsty dream-​imagery of 1909 would become reality in 1915, the liberal order was now under fire and the “bourgeois” of the nineteenth century was dying. A new man—​molded on the battlefield, embodying the warrior spirit, contempt for life, and vivere pericolosamente—​had to take his place. In Guerra sola igiene del mondo Marinetti stated that “war is the only horizontal rudder of the new aerolife we are preparing.”36 He declared that the Futurists aimed to achieve a transformation of the human species, or, rather, the creation of a “nonhuman

 71

The Aviator as New Man

71

type,” who knew neither “moral pain, goodness, and affection” nor “love.”37 They wanted to transform man, because they believed that wings rest in the flesh of man. . . . The nonhuman, mechanical type, built for ubiquitous speed, will naturally be cruel, omniscient, and aggressive. He will have unexpected organs, adapted to the demands of an environment involving constant clashes. We can foresee the development of a nose, a protuberance of the breast bone, all the more important as future man will be an ever better aviator.38

For the Futurists, the mechanically enhanced aviator was the epitome of a completely transformed new man conceived as a model for Italy’s new generation. Flying man had not only reconciled himself to technology but also actually fused with it; it had become a metallic extension of his own capacities, a mechanical prosthesis. Thus the aviator became the symbol of a transformation that Marinetti, referring to his own maiden flight of October 1910, described in the manifesto The New Religion-​Morality of Speed (May 1916). This new religion of speed could be experienced most intensely in flight: To hurry to hurry to hurry to fly to fly. Danger danger danger danger to left to right below above inside outside to scent to breathe to drink death. . . . Instead of the slow watered-​down sensuality of walks under the sun and amidst flowers, you should prefer the ferocious and blood-​tingling massage of the raging wind. . . . You get out of the plane with an elastic and springy bounce. You’ve gotten something heavy off your back. . . . You’ve triumphed over the law which forces man to crawl.39

The airborne new man shook off the burden of the terrestrial, had grown beyond himself, and risen from insect to divine being. He owed this ascent to the technological expansion of his body, to the new vantage on the world as well as the speed provided by aviation. The mechanically enhanced new man loved and worshiped speed because it expressed the departure for new shores, new skies, and the realm of eternity. The Futurists took this theme of casting off, of entry into eternity or infinity from the cultural criticism of the nineteenth century; they borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche and translated his metaphors into the aeronautic imagery of the twentieth century.40 The aviator was not only the expression of ascent, of Nietzsche’s “Excelsior!”, but he was also a technologically enhanced Übermensch who combined destruction with reawakening and death with rebirth. The flier is not only a harbinger of the regenerative violence the Fascists would unleash but also a protagonist of the palingenetic narrative that underlay fascist ideology: airman destroys the old world and order and thus enables the birth of a new, greater Italy.

Volare! Flying and fascism As a fascinating technological innovation and as the epitome of modernity, aviation was a sought-​after symbol that was instrumentalized in the ideological conflicts that swept war-​stricken Europe. Airplanes aroused admiration and surrounded those who

72

72

Fernando Esposito

flew them with a bold, vital, and youthful aura. Thus it was no wonder that on August 20, 1919, almost exactly five months after the founding of the Fasci di combattimento, a full page on aviation appeared in Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. Beneath an italic Volare! [Flying!] came the following: Volare! Ever higher, in an extraordinary effort of the nerves, will, and intellect that only man’s small mortal frame can support. To fly over the ghastly, continual trench skirmishes that are the stuff of daily life. . . . Volare! To fly because, although Icarus died, it was man’s first bold act when he stole a little of heaven’s glory, and because Prometheus taught that the human heart can be stronger than any adverse fortune.41

Flying, the future Duce implied, holds out the promise of new shores. Aviation goes beyond the everyday, embodying man’s link to “the eternal and divine” as well as to his Icarian spirit, his Promethean or Faustian powers. Fascism presented itself as a new beginning—​as the rebirth of an eternal nation buried by the decadent bourgeois-​liberal order. The flier represented man’s outgrowing of himself, his striving for immortality, his longing for the transcendent and eternal embodied in the nation. During the Fascist years volare was synonymous with this setting off into a different future and an eternal order that Fascists had induced. Obviously, it was not in the least Mussolini himself who was to be represented as the paradigmatic embodiment of this new Fascist man—​be it as a daring revolutionary, audacious warrior, Roman, farmer, lion tamer, sportsman, or race car driver, but also as flier and primo pilota, the first pilot guiding the state.42 In his book Mussolini aviatore, published one and a half decades after the first pagina dell’aviazione, Guido Mattioli explained what it meant that Mussolini was a flier, and wherein the link between Fascism and aviation lay: Anyone who dares to take up flying knows that he faces a new path in the training of his mind. This is why Benito Mussolini began to fly so early. . . . The great games in history are won with moral and physical courage. Those who are afraid do not take action, create no facts, achieve nothing. They do not fly, cannot fly.”

And at the very beginning of the book we read, No machine requires as much concentration of the human mind, as much human will power, as the flying machine does. The pilot really knows what it means to govern. Hence there appears to be a necessary, inner spiritual affinity between aviation and fascism. Every aviator is a born fascist.43

The heroic aviator, death defying, danger loving, using the machine to expand his own capacities and subjecting it to his will, was the epitome of the new Fascist man. In his book Aviatoria, published in 1934, the journalist Nello Quilici further elaborated the relationship between Fascism and aviation: You cannot be a Fascist without feeling a little like a flier; you cannot be a flier without feeling yourself a Fascist. . . . The scorn for death, intoxication with the

 73

The Aviator as New Man

73

new, control over space, scope for achieving rapid fame, and most of all the awareness of serving a great cause through a discipline that does not kill off individual strengths but, on the contrary, asks you to give of them to the utmost: this is the sublime prospect that opens up to the willing young man who aspires to the realm of the eagles. What else has Fascism taught?44

This synonymy, or cross-​reference, between Fascism and aviation is also a feature of Aviatori, a book published in 1935 by the Lucca-​born Futurist Cristoforo Mercati, also known as Krimer. Right at the beginning, under the heading “The Duce has flown, is flying, and will fly in every sphere that arises,” Krimer referred to the “wings of the tricolor” as the “quintessence of our Fascist age.” And he went on, The fruitful seed coming from the wonderful sacrifice of countless heroes has found fertile ground in the minds of the new generation. Today’s Italian is wonderfully aware of the motto: “To dare is to conquer.” And conquer he shall. As he has always conquered before. . . . The instinct of Icarus, the human instinct to fly . . . has spread in no generation with such strong roots, with such strength and passion, as it has in ours. The will of the Roman eagle, which preceded the steady march of the legionaries across the earth, appears to be reborn in our youthful front lines. It is no longer the standard of foot soldiers; it precedes our eagle-​like conquerors and gives them encouragement.45

Thanks to the eagle simile, it was possible to integrate even the airman into the cult of romanità and to transform him into a “modern Roman,”46 At any rate, flying man was used a symbol of a renewed Italian that was poles apart from the old bourgeois, whether liberal or socialist. The aviator-​cum-​Fascist was an adventurous soul ready for self-​sacrifice, reckless, valiant, and combative, and as such a virile, winged Columbus. This guaranteed him the admiration of the young, as an article titled “I bimbi, le ali e il domani” (Children, wings, and tomorrow) noted in L’Ala d’Italia in July 1931: Italy’s young schoolchildren greet them [rulers of the skies] with the deep and warm appreciation of little Italians who behold the resurrection in the heavens, as we warriors once fearlessly stared death in the face up there. They greet in them that spirit of Italy, great, free, righteous, and upstanding, that provokes inevitable alienation from the conventional past, with its ordinary celebrity and ordinary art treasures—​ a past that they, scions of a race that prefers the future to the past, only value in so far as it affects the potential achievements and future destinies of the nation.47

Young people were expected to revere the past only when it was of use for the future of the nation. That was the antihistoricist, monumentalist, and mythical spirit that underlay fascism. To quote another article in L’Ala d’Italia, from its twentieth-​anniversary edition: Mussolini has brought about a new era of history. . . . It is an ancient, rejuvenated race that sets itself against the old age of the world, a new faith that rises up against old habits, decrepit beliefs and ideologies: it is a new destiny. The caution of pen pushers, the weariness of “Europeans,” the reverential sentimentality, the false,

74

74

Fernando Esposito abhorrent, poisonous sentimentality of bourgeois all over the world, lashes out against the “world” that Mussolini has created in the last twenty years. Fascism aims straight and without respite, singling out the weak, the incapable, the losers; . . . Italian fliers are Fascists by belief and by temperament: they are antibourgeois and anti-​European; they are fighters by temperament and by tradition. . . . The air force developed by Mussolini has become the perfect creation of Fascism.48

In contrast to liberals, the aviator–​Fascist was willing to subordinate and sacrifice his ego to the collective. Attilio Longoni, himself a pilot in the First World War, who in 1919 was appointed general secretary of the Milanese Fasci, editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, and founder of L’Ala d’Italia, wrote as follows in his book Fascismo ed aviazione: Gli aviatori nella rivoluzione fascista (Fascism and aviation: aviators in the fascist revolution):49 Sacrifice, faith, and passion produced by the righteous few for the many who, out of apathy or mistrust, have been blinded by pathological theories imported from the East or West. In subordination of the self to the collective interests and the collective salvation lies the glory of the race, confidence in certain development and the inevitable destiny of the fatherland.50

The airplane and aviator served as a totem of the allegedly unified, disciplined Fascist collective. Furthermore aviation—​both symbolic and actual—​was instrumentalized at home and abroad to spread the fascist message, to boast of the regime’s achievements, and to bring about a further generation of Fascists. The most visible and influential propagandist of the new airborne arm was Italo Balbo. He had made a name for himself as a violent squadrista leader in Ferrara and beyond, and he went on to become undersecretary of state in the aviation ministry in 1926 and aviation minister in 1929.51 Balbo was responsible for the fascistization of the Regia Aeronautica, the Royal Air Force, founded in 1923: the most modern and future-​oriented branch of the armed forces was to appear the most fascist—​and conversely the qualities of the air force, the arma fascistissima, would carry over to the regime.52 Balbo strengthened the nexus between Fascism and the Regia Aeronautica and aviation in general by means of his four “mass flights.”53 The very fact that they were mass flights—​that is, collective rather than individual achievements, though under the leadership of an outstanding “hero” and “leader”—​underlined their fascist “communitarian” character.54 Sixty aircraft took part in Balbo’s first mass flight, which was conducted in the spirit of Giulio Douhet, the visionary of great air fleets and aerial battles. It unfolded in six stages between May 25 and June 2, 1928, from Orbetello over the Balearics and along the Spanish and French coasts back to Italy.55 The second mass flight, from June 5 to 19, 1929, took the forty-​one participating aircraft from Orbetello over Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania to Odessa in the Soviet Union. It served as an illustration of the modernity of Fascist Italy to people at home and abroad, but also as an advertisement for Italian technology. The Bolshevik enemy ordered thirty Savoia S-​55 hydroplanes. On December 17, 1930, a group of fourteen airplanes headed by Balbo cast off again on the 10,400 kilometers to Rio de Janeiro, where eleven arrived on January 15, 1931. Despite the loss of three machines and five airmen, the flight was considered

 75

The Aviator as New Man

75

a great success. Mussolini congratulated Balbo: “Thanks to the preparation, courage, and technique of a band of brave men, sons of the New Italy, the wing of Italy and the regime are emerging greater from the beginning of Year IX.”56 Yet Balbo achieved his greatest popularity and success with his Crociera del Decennale, the second transatlantic “mass flight” with his “winged century” on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Regia Aeronautica. When Balbo and his men landed on Lake Michigan, they were acclaimed by 100,000 people and feted for the next four days. It was a huge propaganda victory for the Fascist regime. The City of Chicago even named a street after Balbo—​it is still there—​and President Franklin D. Roosevelt received him at the White House. On July 21, 1933, the City of New York put on one of its ticker-​tape parades for the Fascist heroes, and in the evening Balbo conveyed the greetings of Mussolini’s Italy to 60,000 (200,000 in his own estimate) Italian Americans in Madison Square Garden:57 Be proud that you are Italian, . . . because you are the love and pride of the Duce—​ you who are faithful and fruitful, you who have the spirit and patience of the founders of Rome! Mussolini has put an end to the age of humiliations:  to be Italian is an honourable title.58

Balbo and his “winged century” ended the mutual acclaim with “Giovinezza” (Youth), the Fascist anthem that the Arditi had sung in the First World War and during the Fiume expedition.59 According to Balbo, the crowd inside and outside was of one voice, and its song was carried on “invisible radio waves to the fair shores of Italy.”60 In song everyone partook in the myth, in “the spring of beauty,” and thus in the renewed national community. Balbo’s mass flights were the most striking and popular symbol of the new, heroic Fascist community. This community, gathered “under the sign of Rome and on the orders of a great leader,”61 pointed to the future and to a realm of eternity that also encompassed past generations of the dead. Balbo had already emphasized this on March 28, 1933, the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Italian air force, when 4,000 “blue centurions” paraded through the streets of Rome and past the duce in the ruins of Diocletian’s stadium. There Balbo addressed Mussolini as follows: Duce! . . . six and a half years ago you gave me the command [of the air force], and today . . . I can proudly declare that the young air force of yesteryear has overcome its imperfection and defects. The hyperindividualist spirit that diminished the military character of the force has been torn up by the roots. . . . We have had hundreds of dead in ten years of tough daily work, but now the dead have left their dark graves for the radiant skies above the imperial Palatine. They want to appear before you, together with the living, as a recompense for the duty they have fulfilled.62

The Fascist regime attempted to root out from the whole society that “hyperindividualist spirit” that went hand in hand with the liberal order and modernity. By choosing Balbo and his “winged century” as their heroes and holding their virtues up as examples to be followed, the Italian Fascists sought to shape a “nation of fliers.”63 Balbo’s German counterpart, Hermann Göring, spelled out what this meant in his speech of

76

76

Fernando Esposito

June 24, 1934: “Today in National Socialist Germany,” it was important that “no one runs around as a lone wolf. In the end, the people combines in a unity that is the only source of strength for future achievements. In these times, it goes without saying in German aviation too that the common goal, the common achievement, the communal will should prevail over the individual.”64 Nor did Göring’s analogy between flying and fascist community stop there: Discipline and the will to leadership are alive once more. This Deutschlandflug should be proof that the individual . . . works in this discipline in the spirit of a joint task. It should prove to the German Volk that German aviation has attained its old level, that it is imbued with the old spirit, even if it works on different soil. . . . Young Germany should be brought up in the same passion for fliers, so that the German nation becomes a nation of fliers.65

The image of the airman drawn in the fascist media sought to transmit this communal spirit of “discipline” and “will to leadership” to society as a whole, to turn “transcendentally homeless” individualists into a “nation of fliers” with a common goal, will, and faith. The individual was nothing, the Volk or nation everything. Individuals were expected to fuse with the nation and to sacrifice themselves for it: society should change into community, and the “flying swords” of old into flying swarms. Balbo and his “swarms” of transatlantic pilots were a paradigmatic model for this transformation.

Conclusion: Casting off into eternity Following the First World War, a longing for an allegedly stable order captured broad sections of the Italian and German societies. The liberal system was overwhelmed by the manifold problems that arose in the aftermath of the war and for which no reliable and proven solutions existed. Moreover, the great expectations that the war would have a purifying, redemptive, and lastingly unifying effect had been disappointed and left the people yearning for orientation, order, and community. The widespread “discontent with civilization” (Sigmund Freud) was accompanied by a search for alternative models of life, society, and modernity in general. In addition, the break with the past, which the horrific war represented, had also increased the willingness to try out radical solutions to the urgent problems modernity posed. The fascists were, among other things, a product of the sacralization of the nation and the subsequent radicalization of nationalism in the course of war. Together with the brutalization through the war experience this radicalization led to the venomous vehemence with which the new ultranationalists campaigned and acted against liberalism, Marxism, the “System of Versailles,” and their representatives. Yet fascism was not only defined by its enmity to liberalism, Marxism, and conservatism. It also tried to fill the void mentioned above, that is, to bring forth a new man and to fulfill the longing to cast off into a New Age. This alternative modernity was envisaged as a stable and lasting order grounded in a regenerated eternal nation or people. The age of decline and degeneration was superseded by a new fascist era, the advent of an eternal unmoving

 77

The Aviator as New Man

77

time, where immutable values reigned, existence was imbued with meaning, and the life of the nation or the Volk transcended death.66 The aviator symbolized this era of renewal of the eternal nation and embodied the new man it had brought about, that is, Icarian man was able to transport the palingenetic message of the rebirth of the nation that lay at the root of fascist ideology. In his willingness to sacrifice himself for the nation, or the Volk, his death became a prerequisite for the life and rebirth of the collective. The ending of the individual’s life became meaningful as it was indispensable for the eternal life of the nation. The radical fascist ideologues, politicians, and social engineers sought to actualize this utopian (or rather dystopian) vision of man and of the world as if the latter were a drawing table. Thus the regenerative violence they unleashed served both to bring forth the new and eternal, and to destroy all that was old and in the way, ambivalent, and incompatible. When all “obstacles” had been extirpated, millions of “others” annihilated, the world would present itself as a tabula rasa on which man could be molded anew. The genocidal aspect of the fascist and especially the radical fascist National Socialist “gardening state” was not elaborated on in this chapter, yet it should always be taken into consideration that the construction of the new man was only the other face of the modern Janus head that the fascists created.67 To remain with Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor, we may say that it was the very same gardener who both eradicated “weeds” and cultivated the “useful plants” he wished to nurture. Cultivation and eradication were two sides of the same coin. Thus, the “anthropological revolution” that defined the “totalitarian” character of fascist ideology and its political praxis was, in principle, always twofold:68 on the one hand weeding out those who were deemed unsuitable, pathological, or who allegedly inhibited the emergence of the new order by measures that could encompass genocide, and on the other hand eugenic population policies that strengthened the nation and race, that made the people strong and fit for war. Eugenics, or rather neogenics, the bringing forth of a good or new race, did not however only comprise strictly biopolitical policies, it was also based on the shaping of the mentality, of the Weltanschauung and convictions of the populace by means of education, indoctrination, and by achieving cultural hegemony, coining aesthetic preferences, and defining prevailing discourses. Thus, the new fascist man—​and woman—​was not solely a product of “breeding” and of body politics but also the outcome of processes of mental cultivation:  ideal values and mores were encouraged, favored attitudes strengthened and rewarded, undesirable conduct sanctioned, that is, a fascist worldview was nurtured and a specific “image of man” disseminated.69 Yet this process of dissemination had not only one sower but multitudes of them. The new fascist man was not solely a party and state project designed at the top of the new hierarchy. It was also a grassroots ambition. And thus the fascist new man was not only created by state agencies like the schools, universities, and armies or solely through the party apparatus and its wide range of organizations and institutions from the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio or the Hitler-​Jugend, to the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro and the Kraft durch Freude, to the Lebensborn, e.V., the Rasse-​und Siedlungshauptamt and the journal La difesa della razza. New man was also constructed by the above-​quoted artists and poets, journalists, and everyday men

78

78

Fernando Esposito

and women who were dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and longed for a fundamental transformation of society. The revolutionary desire to transform man was the acme of the spirit of modernity and the belief in the malleability and feasibility of the world that accompanied it. The alleged necessity to bring forth a new man had grown alongside the spreading fears of his degeneration in the course of the late nineteenth century, and positively exploded in the course of the process of working through or digesting the experience of the war.70 As became clear, the flier as new man was a product of trench warfare. He compensated the fundamental disillusionments the war had brought about, counteracted the alienation with technology, and was a representative of the new virile, distanced, and cool “steel characters,” whose popularity grew in the course of the “new objectivity” of the 1920s. The images of the flier illustrated above offered a template in which recipients could insert their lives or a yardstick by which to measure them. The pilot as he was represented by the media served as a paradigm, as a model of manhood that supplied maxims of conduct and the virtues that were regarded as desirable. One could make oneself into a new fascist man by abiding by these maxims and by taking on these virtues. Thus the flier functioned as a matrix for men and simultaneously heralded the New Age of national rebirth as aviation stood for the dawn of an eternal order, and the aviator, not least because of his embrace of technology, his boldness, love of danger, indomitable will, Faustian power, heroism and warrior spirit, discipline, collectivism, and his willingness to sacrifice himself in the name of the nation corresponded to this mythical modernity.

Notes 1 Deutscher Luftflottenverein, ed., Das fliegende Schwert: Wesen, Bedeutung und Taten der deutschen Luftflotte in Wort und Bild [The flying sword: Nature, significance and actions of the German air force in word and image] (Oldenburg im Großherzogtum: Stalling, 1917), 15. This article is largely based on: Fernando Esposito, Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity trans. Patrick Camiller (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). 2 “Ein Flug über Verdun” [A flight over Verdun], in Deutscher Luftflottenverein, Das fliegende Schwert, 69f. 3 When speaking of Italian Fascism, I use the capital letter, and when I mean the generic concept, I write “fascism” with a lowercase “f.” 4 Mario Isnenghi, L’Italia del Fascio [Fascist Italy] (Florence: Giunti Editore, 1996), 233. On the nexus between fascism, aviation, and the new man, see also: Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Christian Kehrt, Moderne Krieger: Die Technikerfahrungen deutscher Militärpiloten 1910–​1945 [Modern warriors: How German military pilots experienced technology 1910–​1945] (Paderborn: Schönigh, 2010); Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–​1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Stefanie Schüler-​Springorum, Krieg und Fliegen: Die Legion Condor im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg [War and flying: The Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War] (Paderborn: Schönigh, 2010); Detlef Siegfried, Der Fliegerblick: Intellektuelle, Radikalismus und Flugzeugproduktion bei Junkers 1914–​1934 [The aviator’s gaze: Intellectuals, radicalism

 79

The Aviator as New Man

5 6

7

8

9 10

79

and the production of Junkers aircraft 1914–​1934] (Bonn: Dietz, 2001); Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908–​1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) and idem, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1920–​1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). On the aviator in the Soviet Union, see Scott W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006). See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993 [repr.]), 26. On the centrality of the concept of Volksgemeinschaft for the National Socialist society, see: Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, eds., Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). On the “anthropological revolution,” see: Emilio Gentile, ‘L’uomo nuovo’ del fascismo: Riflessioni su un esperimento totalitario di rivoluzione antropologica’ [Fascism’s new man: Reflections on a totalitarian experiment in anthropological revolution], in Emilio Gentile, Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione (Rome: Laterza, 2005), 235–​64. While the new man of the interwar period is ubiquitous in historical research, no detailed study has yet been made of this trope and of the change it underwent in fascism. Some investigations, though, within various perspectives, look at the theme of the fascist new man. See: Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo: L’Omosessualità nell’Esperimento Totalitario Fascista [New man’s enemy: Homosexuality during fascist Italy’s totalitarian experiment] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005); Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique 62 (1994): 71–​110; Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 302–​41; Alexandra Gerstner, ed., Der Neue Mensch: Utopien, Leitbilder und Reformkonzepte zwischen den Weltkriegen [New man: Utopias, guiding principles and concepts for reform between the World Wars] (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2006); Bernd Hüppauf, “Schlachtenmythen und die Konstruktion des ‘Neuen Menschen’” [Myths of battle and the construction of “new man”], in Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch . . . : Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkrieges, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Gerd Krumeich (Essen: Klartext 1993), 43–​84; George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998 [repr.]); Alessio Ponzio, Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015); Jürgen Reulecke, “Neuer Mensch und neue Männlichkeit: Die ‘junge Generation’ im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts” [New man and new masculinity: The “young generation” in the first third of the 20th century], Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs 6 (2001): 109–​138; Bernd Wedemeyer-​Kolwe, “Der neue Mensch”: Körperkultur im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik [“New man”: Body culture during the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic] (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004). On Gabriele D’Annunzio as “first Duce,” see: Michael A. Leeden, The First Duce (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). See Hermann Göring, “Der alte Fliegergeist lebt: Rede zum Abschluss des Deutschlandfluges am 24. Juni 1934” [The aviator’s old spirit is alive: Speech delivered at the conclusion of the flight across Germany on June 24, 1934], in Hermann

80

80

Fernando Esposito

Göring: Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Erich Gritzbach (Munich: Eher, 1938), 121–​4 and 122. 11 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [repr.]), 115. 12 Cf. Aribert Reimann, Der große Krieg der Sprachen: Untersuchungen zur historischen Semantik in Deutschland und England zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs [The Great War of languages: Studies on the historical semantics in Germany and England during the First World War] (Essen: Klartext, 2000), 70; Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); George L. Mosse, “The Knights of the Sky and the Myth of the War Experience,” in War: A Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, ed. Robert A. Hinde and Helen E. Watson, 132–​42 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1995). 13 Alfred Hein, “Zum Gedächtnis des Rittmeisters Freiherr von Richthofen” [In commemoration of Rittmeisters Freiherr von Richthofen], in Adolf Wasner, Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen: Ein Lebensbild nach Zeitungsberichten (Diesdorf bei Gäbersdorf: Rettungsanstalten, 1918), 5f. 14 On the distinction between profane and sacred time, see: Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1959); idem, Patterns in Comparative Religion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), esp. ch. 11: “Sacred Time and the Myth of Eternal Renewal.” 15 On Ernst Jünger in general, see: Helmuth Kiesel, Ernst Jünger: Die Biographie (Ernst Jünger: the biography] (Munich: Siedler, 2007). 16 Ernst Jünger, “Die Tradition,” in Politische Publizistik 1919 bis 1933, ed. Sven Olaf Berggötz, (Stuttgart: Klett-​Cotta, 2001), 125–​31 and 126f. 17 Cf. Ernst Jünger, “Der neue Typ des deutschen Menschen,” in ibid., 167–​72. 18 Ernst Jünger, Das Wäldchen 125: Eine Chronik aus den Grabenkämpfen 1918 [Copse 125: A chronicle from the trench warfare of 1918] (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1925), 78. 19 Ibid., 78f. 20 On Jünger’s Arbeiterstaat and his “worker,” see inter alia: Uwe K. Ketelsen, “Ernst Jüngers ‘Der Arbeiter’: Ein faschistisches Modernitätskonzept” [Ernst Jünger’s “the worker”: A fascist concept of modernity], in Literatur und “Drittes Reich,” ed. Uwe K. Ketelsen (Schernfeld: SH-​Verlag, 1992), 258–​85; Friedrich Strack, ed., Titan Technik: Ernst und Friedrich Georg Jünger über das technische Zeitalter [Titan technology: Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger on the technological age] (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000). 21 On the “modern knighthood . . . dawning on the horizon,” see: Edgar J. Jung, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen: Ihr Zerfall und ihre Ablösung durch ein neues Reich [The rule of the inferior: Its disintegration and removal through a new Reich] (Berlin: Verlag Deutscher Rundschau, 1930 [orig. 1927]), 349. On the “steel characters” or “types” in general and conjunction with the flier, see: Hüppauf, Schlachtenmythen and Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers. 22 Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis [Battle as inner experience] (Berlin: Mittler, 1922), 76. 23 See: Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 24 The Italian term trincerocrazia (literally “trench rule,” but modeled on aristocrazia) comes from an article by Mussolini in Il Popolo d’Italia, December 15, 1917. See

 81

The Aviator as New Man

25

26 27 28 29

30

31

32

33 34

81

Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology 1918–​1925 (New York: Enigma, 2005 [repr]), 34. On D’Annunzio’s life in general, see: John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). See also: Lucy Hughes-​Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War (London: Fourth Estate, 2013). Gabriele D’Annunzio, “La fede nell’aviazione italiana” [Faith in Italian aviation], in D’Annunzio: Scritti giornalistici 1889–​1938, vol. 2, ed. and introduced by Annamaria Andreoli (Milan: Mondadori, 1918/​2003), 736–​8 and 737f. See George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 159. On “theologemes of redemption,” or redemption myths, see: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “I redentori della vittoria: On Fiume’s Place in the Genealogy of Fascism,” in Journal of Contemporary History 31 (1996), 253–​72. On fascism as a political religion, see inter alia: Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Idem, “Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics—​A Critical Survey,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religion 6 (2005): 19–​32. On palingenesis and fascism, see inter alia: Gentile, Origins of Fascist Ideology; Griffin, The Nature of Fascism; Idem, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). See: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Forse che si forse che no [Maybe yes, maybe no] (Milan: Treves 1910). Cf. Felix Philipp Ingold, Literatur und Aviatik: Europäische Flugdichtung 1909–​1927 [Literature and aviation: European flight poetry 1909–​ 1927] (Frankfurt/​Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 28–​49; Wohl, A Passion for Wings, 114–​22. On the nexus between futurism and fascism: Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–​1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996); Emilio Gentile, “La nostra sfida alle stelle”: Futuristi in Politica [“Our challenge of the stars”: Futurists in politics] (Rome: Laterza, 2009); Idem, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003); Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). On the context and interpretation of Mafarka the futurist, see Luci Ballerini, introduzione to Mafarka il futurista, by Filippo T. Marinetti (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), vii–​xlviii; Hansgeorg Schmidt-​Bergmann, “Mafarka le Futuriste: F. T. Marinetti’s literarische Konstruktion des futuristischen Heroismus,” in Filippo T. Marinetti, Mafarka der Futurist: Afrikanischer Roman (Munich: Belleville, 2004), 261–​84; Barbara Spackman, “Mafarka and Son: Marinetti’s Homophobic Economics,” Modernism/​Modernity 1 (1994): 89–​107. On “fascist virility,” see Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: Uniersity of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 1+2 [Male fantasies] (Munich: Piper, 2009). Filippo T. Marinetti, “Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo” [The foundation and manifest of futurism], in Teoria e invenzione futurista (TIF), ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Mondadori 1983 [repr.]), 7–​14, here 11; Idem, ‘Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna!’, in TIF, 14–​26.

82

82

Fernando Esposito

35 Marinetti, Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna!, 26. For the English version quoted here, see: Marinetti, “Let’s Murder the Moonshine,” in Selected Writings, ed. and with an introduction by R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 45–​54 and 53f. 36 Filippo T. Marinetti, “Guerra sola igiene del mondo” [War, the world’s only hygiene], [Orig. 1915], in TIF, 233–​341 and 333. 37 Marinetti, “Guerra sola igiene del mondo,” 299. 38 Ibid., 299 and 301. 39 Filippo T. Marinetti, “La nuova religione-​morale della velocità,” [Orig. 1916], in: TIF, 130–​8 and 133. English version of “The New Religion-​Morality of Speed,” in Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 224–​8, here 226. Translation modified. 40 Take, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem “Nach neuen Meeren” [Toward new seas], in Songs of Prince Vogelfrei. See: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 280. 41 Benito Mussolini, “Volare!” [Flying!], Il Popolo d’Italia (August 20, 1919), quoted from Ministero dell’Aeronautica, ed., L’aviazione negli scritti e nella parola del Duce (Rome: Ministero dell’Aeronautica, 1937), 31. 42 On the iconography of the “Duce,” see Simonetta Falasca-​Zamponi, “Mussolini’s Self-​ Staging,” in Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930–​1945, ed. Hans-​Jörg Czech (Dresden: Sandstein, 2007), 88–​95; Idem, The Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 [repr.]), 42–​88. On Mussolini as primo pilota, see Gerard Silk, “Il primo pilota: Mussolini, Fascist Aeronautical Symbolism and Imperial Rome,” in Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, ed. Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 67–​81. 43 Guido Mattioli, Mussolini aviatore e la sua opera per l’aviazione [Mussolini the aviator and his work for aviation] (Rome: Pinciana, 1935–​36), 15f. and 2. 44 Nello Quilici, Aviatoria [Aviation] (Naples: La Nuovissima, 1934), 274f; quoted [and translated] from Isnenghi, L’Italia del fascio, 236. 45 Krimer, Aviatori [Fliers] (Florence: Mantero 1935), 5ff. 46 Cf. Gentile, Sacralization of Politics. 47 Anonymous, “I bimbi, le ali e il domain” [Children, wings and tomorrow], L’Ala d’Italia 10 (July 1931), 519–​20. 48 Anonymous, “Ventennale” [20th Anniversary], L’Ala d’Italia 20 (March 15–​31, 1939), 3. 49 On Attilio Longoni and the Milan Fascio, see Emilio Gentile, Storia del partito fascista 1, 1919–​1922: Movimento e milizia [History of the fascist party 1, 1919–​ 1922: movement and militia] (Rome: Laterza 1989), 26ff. 50 Antonio Longoni, Fascismo ed aviazione: Gli aviatori nella rivoluzione fascista [Fascism and aviation: The aviators in the fascist revolution] (Milan: Edizioni Azzurre, 1931, 12. 51 On Balbo, see Giorgio Rochat, Italo Balbo: Lo squadrista, l’aviatore, il gerarca [Italo Balbo: the Blackshirt, the aviator, the party leader] (Turin: UTET Università, 2003); and Claudio G. Segrè, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 52 On the split between reality and propaganda, see: Gregory Alegi, “‘L’arma fascistissima’: Il falso mito dell’Aeronautica come preferita del regime” [“The most

 83

The Aviator as New Man

83

fascist of weapons”: The false myth of the air force as the regime’s favorite], in Le ali del Ventennio: L’aviazione italiana dal 1923 al 1945—​Bilanci storiografici e prospettive di giudizio, ed. Massimo Ferrari (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2005), 111–​54; and Giorgio Rochat, Italo Balbo: Aviatore e ministro dell’aeronautica 1926–​1933 [Italo Balbo: Aviator and minister of aviation 1926–​1933] (Ferrara: Bovolenta 1979), 69–​75. 53 The propaganda battle was waged in all the existing media. Not only the air ministry press office but also Editoriale Aeronautica, its publishing spin-​off founded in 1932, exploited Balbo’s mass flights to the hilt in L’Ala d’Italia and other press organs. But the most important reports were in the daily papers, on the radio, and in the weekly newsreels, while numerous posters also trumpeted the successes. Commemorative medals were struck, and model aeroplanes put on sale. The Futurists made the flights a central theme in their “aeropainting,” and the Crociera del Decenale was a key exhibit at the Esposizione dell’aeronautica italiana [Italian Air Show] in 1934. Balbo himself wrote reports on his flights for the prestigious Treves and Mondadori publishing houses: see Italo Balbo, Da Roma a Odessa: Sui cieli dell’Egeo e del Mar Nero [From Rome to Odessa: Above the Aegean and the Black Sea] (Milan: Treves 1929); Idem, Stormi in volo sull’oceano [Swarms flying above the ocean] (Milan: Mondadori 1931); Idem, Stormi d’Italia sul mondo [Italian swarms above the world] (Milan: Mondadori 1934); and idem, La centuria alata [The winged century] (Milan: Mondadori 1934). 54 Isnenghi, L’Italia del fascio, 233–​51. 55 On Balbo’s mass flights, see Rochat, Italo Balbo, 126–​35; Segrè, Italo Balbo, 191–​265; and Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight, 69–​78 and 88–​102. 56 Mussolini to General Balbo, January 15, 1930, quoted from Ministero dell’aeronautica, ed., L’Aviazione, 144. Balbo’s South Atlantic adventure also offered the Futurists an opportunity to praise the aviators and market themselves as fascist artists. The First Exhibition of Aeropainting, held in Rome in February 1931, thus became an homage to the transvolatori, the trans(Atlantic) fliers. 57 See Balbo, La Centuria alata, 300; and Segrè, Italo Balbo, 247. 58 Balbo, La Centuria alata, 298. 59 For the full text of Giovinezza, in which D’Annunzio’s war cry “eja eja alalà” functioned as a refrain, see Stanislao Pugliese, ed., Italian Fascism and Antifascism: A Critical Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 54ff. And on its different versions and their varying success, see Richard J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship 1915–​1945 (London: Penguin 2006 [repr.]), 197ff. 60 Balbo, La Centuria alata, 299. 61 Ibid., 298. 62 Italo Balbo’s speech of March 28, 1933, on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Regia Aeronautica, printed in L’Ala d’Italia, April 1933, 8–​15; here 11–​13. 63 Cf. Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers. 64 Göring, Der alte Fliegergeist lebt, 121–​4, here 121. 65 Ibid., 122. 66 Cf. Fernando Esposito/​Sven Reichardt, “Revolution and Eternity: Introductory Remarks on Fascist Temporalities,” Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015): 24–​43, here 42. 67 See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, UK: Cornell University Press, 1991). 68 Cf. Gentile, ‘L’uomo nuovo’ del fascismo. 69 Cf. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man.

84

84

Fernando Esposito

70 See: Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler [The age of nervousness: Germany between Bismarck and Hitler] (Munich: Hanser, 1998). Cf. Fritzsche/​Hellbeck, The New Man.

Bibliography Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Fliers. German Aviation and the Popular Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Fritzsche, Peter, and Hellbeck, Jochen. “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.” In Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Edited by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, 302–​41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gentile, Emilio. “L’‘uomo nuovo’ del fascismo: Riflessioni su un esperimento totalitario di rivoluzione antropologica” [Fascism’s new man: Reflections on a totalitarian experiment in anthropological revolution]. In Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione, 235–​ 64. Rome: Laterza, 2005. Gentile, Emilio. “La nostra sfida alle stelle”: Futuristi in Politica [“Our challenge of the stars”: Futurists in politics]. Rome: Laterza, 2009. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “I redentori della vittoria: On Fiume’s Place in the Genealogy of Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History 31 (1996): 253–​72. Hüppauf, Bernd. “Schlachtenmythen und die Konstruktion des ‘Neuen Menschen’ ” [Myths of battle and the construction of “new man”]. In Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch . . . : Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkrieges, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Gerd Krumeich, 43–​84. Essen: Klartext 1993. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998 [repr.]. Ponzio, Alessio. Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.

 85

Part Two

The New Man in Axis Europe

86

 87

4

Eugenic Art: Hitler’s Utopian Aesthetic Gregory Maertz

National Socialism is the determination to create a new man.

Adolf Hitler

There was no Wannsee Conference or comparable attempt to consolidate cultural policy in National Socialist Germany. In its place were hundreds of locally sponsored art exhibitions, countless public statements on the visual arts made by Adolf Hitler and his surrogates, and myriad organizational accommodations with the new regime. The emergence of “eugenic art” was predicated, firstly, on the institutionalization of the claim to the superiority of the German race and the assertion of the prerogatives of the fascist state to include intervention in sexual reproduction. Under Hitler, eugenics was connected to the ideologically charged aesthetic concepts of degeneracy and decadence, and the medical profession was mobilized to serve the purification of the Volksgemeinschaft or national racial community. In this endeavor the state sought to assert control over each individual body in the German populace. This led to the implementation of “positive” eugenic policies such as the SS Lebensborn (well-​spring of life) Aryan breeding program and the abduction of genetically valuable “Nordic” children in countries occupied by the Wehrmacht as well as “negative” eugenic policies that sought to eliminate genetic threats to the national racial community through mass sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide.1 Ultimately, the creation of a new type of human being would issue in “a new morality, a new social system, and eventually a new international order,” all of which would be in keeping with the “futuristic” nature of National Socialism. Despite the presence of anachronisms that inspired the novelist Thomas Mann to characterize National Socialism as “an explosion of antiquarianism,” Hitler’s movement has been more accurately described as a “headlong plunge into the future.”2 The second precondition for artistic representation driven by National Socialist ideology was the establishment of a linkage between the genetic imperatives of the state and attempts to monopolize German cultural production. As Hitler stated, “Our present political worldview . . . is based on the idea that creative, culture-​creating force must indeed be attributed to the state.” And the Führer was not alone among

88

88

Gregory Maertz

the leading figures of the regime to invest the production of art “with a real eugenic power.”3 In practice, however, the Nazi state and Party were remarkably circumspect about censoring the visual arts, especially in the transitional period from January 1933 to the opening of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in July 1937. Prior to the Entartete Kunstausstellung (Degenerate Art Exhibition) and the first Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in 1937, arguably the most public intervention in German artistic culture was Joseph Goebbels’s public ban on art criticism issued on November 27, 1936. This edict had two principal objectives: the first was to eliminate the intraparty differences on interpreting the regime’s policy on the visual arts, as evidenced by the shocking contradictions in the presentation of “official” Nazi art in the years leading up to the 1937 Great German Art Exhibition (e.g., the 1933–​36 Münchner Kunstausstellungen (Munich Art Exhibitions) and Party-​sponsored publications Münchner Künstler Köpfe (Leading Munich Artists) and Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart (Contemporary German Painters). In addition, Goebbels sought to create a supportive judgment-​free atmosphere that would foster the emergence of a regime-​friendly artistic style. The arrival on the scene of a “steel-​like Romanticism” was Goebbels’s ultimate goal, of course, but his rhetorical effort, like those of other leading figures in the government, was merely gestural because it lacked an accompanying stylistic or iconographic lexicon to guide artistic collaboration with the regime. Rather than an easily identifiable monolithic state style, such as Soviet socialist realism, the art of the Third Reich would remain a far messier phenomenon whose signature traits—​multiformity, heterogeneity, and hybridity—​do not signify a distinctive approach but characterize the art of the twentieth century generally. As a consequence of its failure to articulate a stable Nazi mode of representation, the 1937 Great German Art Exhibition template was scrapped; only its ad hoc selection process was carried over into the seven successive iterations of the regime’s signature art show. As we shall see below, the 1937 exhibition was judged by many Nazi cultural power brokers as, at best, a failed experiment, and, at worst, an unmitigated disaster. However, this does not mean that artists and the museum-​going public did not buy into what Hannah Arendt called Hitler’s “fictitious world of totalitarianism” along with its evolving iconography and style. Modernity, as the historian Roger Griffin has written, was perceived by many Germans as a “catastrophe” that “dashe[d]‌traditional structures and lifeways to pieces, swe[pt] away the sacred, undermines immemorial habits and inherited languages, and le[ft] the world as a set of raw materials to be reconstructed rationally.”4 The fascist search for a compensatory “transcendence and regeneration” was, however, not directed at an idealized, past golden age, but was focused on an as yet unrealized future. According to this reasoning the future is “no longer a neutral temporal space for what destiny or providence will bring, but a site for realizing transformative cultural, social, or political projects through human agency.”5 But the dreamer-​in-​chief of National Socialism exceeded even these lofty ambitions. Hitler sought nothing less than to improve the “biological substance of the nation,” and this process was emphatically “not reactionary, but revolutionary, not anti-​modern, but a bid to create a new type of modernity, even if the sense of historical destiny which legitimated this vast understanding often drew on mythical images of its historical and racial past” out of a deep sense of nostalgia.6

 89

Eugenic Art

89

As Ruth Ben-​Ghiat has suggested, Hitler’s demand that German painters should be mobilized in order to create a futural art that would anticipate the National Socialist utopia expressed “the desire to develop a model of modernity that would supplant liberal and leftist conceptions of contemporary life.”7 The resulting “fascist model of modernity”—​transhistorical, nonlinear, and fundamentally formal and antimimetic—​proceeded from a radical inversion of the conventional Enlightenment teleology of progress that posits growth from a condition of brute nature toward an increasingly sophisticated state of civilization. Hitler’s futural aesthetic vision was based on a rejection of modernity on the grounds that it generated pathogens of Nordauian decadence. “Progress,” in National Socialist terms, constituted a nostalgic journey to an imaginary pre-​modern world of Nordic racial perfection that could only be recovered by bringing about the biocultural purification of the German Volk in a utopian future. Accordingly, the regeneration and rebirth of Nordic humanity—​the ultimate goal of the National Socialist rebellion against the legacy of the Enlightenment—​was to be prefigured in the visual arts of the Third Reich. “Nazi modernism” was to be an indigenous phenomenon. Artists were encouraged to root themselves in the soil of Teutonic artistic tradition and eschew the liberal, decadent, foreign-​influenced cultural legacy of the Weimar era associated with Communism, Jews, and American culture. But even after purging itself of decadence contemporary German art was considered by its Nazi patrons as only potentially great and still rife with errors. Indeed, “for at least the first several years,” National Socialist cultural policy was, at best, “haphazard and inconsistent,” and reflected nothing more than “an extended improvisation that developed out of multiple power struggles both inside and outside the party.”8 Ironically, National Socialist critics of progressive modernism sought remarkably modernist solutions to the challenges posed by modernity. While avant-​garde artists and völkisch painters shared a pessimistic diagnosis of the modern condition, they differed on the formal conventions they prescribed as solutions to the crisis of modernity.9 For progressive artists, representation was intended to reflect the flux of modern life and thus, in the interest of verisimilitude, necessitated the use of abstraction, distortion, and exaggeration to reveal the fragmentation and ugliness of contemporary society caused by decadent liberal finance capitalism. Artists who self-​mobilized in the service of the Hitler state also saw the contemporary world in decay, but the works of art that they created eschewed the distorting lens of mimesis in order to depict the human form as if it had already been redeemed by the transcendent reality of the futural Nazi utopia. As the following examples reveal, even artists who “worked toward the Führer” offered different visions of the National Socialist racial utopia:  whereas Adolf Wissel’s depiction of women farmers (Figure  4.1) resemble anthropological studies of representatives of social classes that were fast dying out, the lithe young women in the works of Johann Schult and Robert Schwarz (Figures 4.2 and 4.3) represent anticipatory realizations of the utopian racial perfection that would be achieved as a consequence of the regime’s biopolitical agenda. “Realism” had, however, nothing to do with Nazi aesthetics. Indeed, the “objective world was simply discarded” by the artists whose works are associated with the regime: “If the tendency of modernism, from its roots in romanticism, was to ‘objectify the subjective,’ to translate into symbol

90

90

Gregory Maertz

Figure 4.1  Adolf Wissel, Jungbäuerinnen (1937) (Young women farmers), oil on canvas. Reproduction from Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart (1937).

Figure 4.2  Johann Schult, Aktbild einer jungen Tänzerin (GDK 1941) (Nude portrait of a young dancer), oil on canvas. Reproduction from Kunst dem Volk (August 1941).

 91

Eugenic Art

91

Figure 4.3  Robert Schwarz, Badende Mädchen (GDK 1943) (Bathing girls), oil on canvas. Reproduction from Kunst dem Volk (August 1943).

subjective experience,” National Socialism amplified this tendency and converted it into its central impulse—​from its aesthetics to biosocial engineering.10 As we have seen, both progressive abstraction and eugenically “futurist” representation cultivated by National Socialist patronage implied rejection of the decadent, fallen modern world on behalf of a utopian vision of reality that was coming into being. Thus the conflict between progressive and National Socialist modernism was not rooted in any fundamental disagreement over the role of art in the modern world. In both instances art was imbued with a demanding, improving social even biologically dominant role. Their far narrower dispute was over the means and media that would usher in the transformation of civic, political, and racial life by art. The state and the Volk were, for this purpose, to become aesthetic objects. Not only was the aestheticization

92

92

Gregory Maertz

of the Volk a desirable motif of the “new art” of the Third Reich, but it also was, to all intents and purposes, the sole motif of mobilized art in Nazi Germany. For example, in Schult’s reclining nude (Figure 4.2) Nazi nonmimetic futural representation attempts to resolve the flux and the disintegration of human form by projecting perfected forms of the future onto canvas. Thus modernist abstraction and Nazi futural representation are both types of formalism that are neither naturalistic nor realistic at their core. In Schult’s painting the human form has been manipulated and idealized until it functions as an anatomical abstraction, just as conceptually arbitrary, just as resistant to mimesis as the formalized constructions of progressive modernism. What Hitler envisioned as the new art befitting his utopian fantasies of Nordic racial purity was altogether a different thing from even völkisch masterpieces such as Wissel’s group portraits that exude nostalgia for a vanishing pastoral world. Nonetheless, strands of both völkisch and futural artistic style, along with threads of progressive modernism—​are woven into the fabric of National Socialist aesthetics and are displayed in exhibitions under the aegis of the regime, the Party, and affiliated local organizations. But neither völkisch nor moderately progressive techniques associated with the big annual Munich art shows (up to and including the 1936 exhibition) satisfied Hitler’s criteria for the utopian art of the future. Völkisch art was, of course, deemed vastly less transgressive than progressive modernism, and völkisch art continued to be produced and exhibited as well as great quantities of it sold throughout the duration of the twelve-​year Reich. But it was never deemed more than a stopgap, a provisional solution for the cultural crisis that National Socialism was determined to resolve because the true destiny of the German Volk could only be revealed in a racial utopia anticipated in futural representation rather than the documentary, völkischly inflected clinical objectivity of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Realism).

Schiller and the Greek ideal Each politically historical epoch searches in its art for the link with a period of an equally heroic past. Greeks and Romans suddenly stand close to Teutons.11 The new age of Today is at work on a new human type. Tremendous efforts are being made in countless spheres of life to elevate our people, to make our men, boys, youths, girls and women healthier and thereby stronger and more beautiful . . . Never was mankind closer than now to antiquity in its appearance and its sensibilities.12

Just prior to the launch of the 1939 Great German Art Exhibition Benito Mussolini made a state visit to the Nazi Reich. On a stop in Munich he unveiled a special gift, the Discobolus (Discus thrower), the statue of an athlete and a priceless relic from the Greco-​ Roman past that offered a glimpse of future Aryan racial perfection. Appropriately enough, Hitler’s opening address at the 1939 Great German Art Exhibition (his last appearance at this annual event) emphasized that the Nazi regime’s desire to emulate

 93

Eugenic Art

93

the Greeks aesthetically would result in the fulfillment of his eugenic fantasies: “Let us perceive how splendid man’s physical beauty once was, and how we may only speak of progress when we have not only achieved such beauty, but even surpassed it . . . May we find here a measure of the tasks that confront us in our time! May we strive as one for beauty and elevation, so that both our race and our art will withstand the judgment of the millennia!” Hitler’s purpose in building the House of German Art as a showplace for contemporary art was “to draw the German people there so that, by coming face to face with the most noble part of itself, it would at last awaken to its eternal creative essence.”13 Hitler’s use of the ancient Greeks as a template for the Nazi “new man” and humanity’s ascension from the fragmented deformities of the present to a perfected state in the future was adapted from Friedrich Schiller’s critique of modernity in Über die ästhetische Erziehung der Menschheit (1794) (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind). For Schiller, too, the human condition had declined from the pinnacle of antique perfection that art had restored:  “Humanity has lost its dignity; but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant store.”14 Schiller’s dialectic of modernity versus antiquity anticipates Max Nordau’s association of modernity with inevitable decline as well as the assertion that spiritual rebirth alone, however, could not save mankind. What is necessary, according to Schiller, is man’s physical resurrection into the beautiful perfection or “consummation” last attained by the human form in the time of the ancient Greeks.15 Similarly, in the National Socialist doctrine of the rebirth of the Volk physical beauty is identified as the vehicle that would lead mankind to futural perfection. Thus the biocracy formed by the German Volk will be healed and made whole again through properly directed aesthetic impulses. Greek culture is, however, not invoked in National Socialist art and iconography merely as an expression of nostalgia for a lost golden age but also as a way of inspiring creative rivalry between contemporary German artists and their ancient peers. Out of this agon, or conflict, a genuine German art was to emerge that would take its place beside the Greeks’ cultural achievement. Wolfgang Willrich, author of the notorious Die Säuberung des Kunsttempels (The Cleansing of the Temple of Art) (1937) and one of Hitler’s leading surrogates in the Nazi culture war on progressive modernism, demonstrated how the Schillerian paradigm was co-​opted by the anti-​modernist faction in the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP): “To awaken the German people’s nostalgic desire for such a nobility, to establish the beautiful and the sublime clearly and engrave this in a compelling way within it, not simply as a privilege of the gods in whom it is impossible to believe, but as a human possibility and as the ultimate goal of regeneration [Aufartung] . . . what a sublime task that is for art!”16 Hitler, Willrich, and their allies were reacting to variations on the same cultural and social pressures associated with modernity by Schiller. The “new man” was, paradoxically, to be engineered by the archaic practice of easel painting, the traditional low-​tech medium privileged by Willrich above photography and literature for its capacity to engage the empathy of the viewer: Neither words nor photography have the power to call forth at once the clearest representations and enthusiastic participation. Only the plastic arts can do that . . . When it comes to feeling, and above all to the eye’s judgment as to whether a feature is noble or not, words an concepts are far too inadequate masters. The art of

94

94

Gregory Maertz the painter or the sculptor, in contrast, can convey directly to the subconscious what should be worshipped and what should not and can do so with insistent penetration.17

Einfühlung, or empathy, is the designated vehicle for identification with and engagement in the national project of biocultural renewal. Under the influence of empathy works of art will succeed in drawing spectators out of egoic self-​involvement and facilitate their absorption into the otherness and the shared destiny of the German Volk. In order to re-​racinate or de-​deracinate German art as a countermeasure to the influence of decadent American or “Negro” popular culture, incentives were offered by Nazi patronage mechanisms for the production of works of art that represented fascist manifestations of modern existence. Realistic representation was not a desideratum for Hitler’s futural art because “realism” implied a critique of society rather than the construction of preferred utopian fantasies. From the outset Nazi aesthetics was focused on postulating aspirational paradigms for a youth-​oriented society evolving toward racial purification. In an essay published by Baldur von Schirach in 1942, all genuine creative impulses, whether these impulses are manifested in works of art, politics, or armed struggle—​are directed toward eternity: Art serves not reality but the truth . . . Any artist who believes that he should paint for his own time and follow the taste of that time has not understood the Führer at all. Nor has our Volk created its Reich just for its own time. Similarly, no soldier fights and dies purely for his own time. Any commitment on the part of the nation covers the whole of eternity. The same applies to art, which is a struggle for immortality on the part of mortals. Therein lies the piety of the artist. The Führer’s warning applies to him, too: “Woe betide whoever lacks faith!” Even if, among the countless artistic creators, that sacred goal of highly human and artistic life is but rarely achieved, any work that has pretensions to be art must absolutely manifest a thirst and pressing desire for eternity. The perfect artists Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and Beethoven and Goethe, do not represent an appeal to return to the past, but show us the future that is ours and to which we belong.18

As Eric Michaud has observed, in this passage Schirach explicitly “contrasted photographic ‘reality,’ which conveys only the present, to the ‘truth’ of painting, which is oriented toward the future.”19 The attempted monopolization of cultural production by the state and Nazi Party elites has until now concentrated our gaze on architecture, film, and public spectacles, and influenced our analysis of easel painting, namely, by assuming that it, too, was similarly coordinated by the regime. The challenge of studying the mobilization of traditional oil painting has to do with the unique nature of this medium and its intrinsically complex relationship to totalitarian authority. Unlike state-​supported building policy that involved “the mobilization of vast resources and labor that so often was influenced, shaped, or directed by other political goals,”20 as was the case with the construction of Albert Speer’s Reichskanzlei (Reich Chancellery), easel painting was neither subject to

 95

Eugenic Art

95

the kind of regimentation and surveillance that characterized the relationship between the state and various branches of the construction business nor, for that matter, the technical infrastructure and staffing of the film industry. Even as the war progressed and greater centralized control was exerted over the German economy, easel painting continued to be far from fully integrated into the state’s cultural bureaucracy. From the seizure of power to Hitler’s suicide, it remained a matter of individual choice whether painters worked “toward the Führer,” and if they opted to do so they worked in constantly evolving regional administrative, organization, and display contexts. Such unstable variables produced results that were neither predictable nor monolithic, including the unexpectedly hybridic exhibitions sponsored by the German military throughout occupied Europe and the renegade Party leader and patron of the arts, von Schirach, during his time as the Führer’s representative in Vienna.

Munich Any discussion of formal innovation in German art during the Third Reich cannot be separated from an examination of relevant social and organizational structures and behaviors. The major beneficiaries of the armistice reached in the Nazi culture war in July 1937 were not the older, relatively more conventional artists who had received their training prior to the First World War and found themselves marginalized in the 1920s by the much-​reviled “Weimar system” of arts patronage, which was roundly blamed by Nazi ideologues for privileging globalized modes of progressive modernism at the expense of indigenous artistic traditions. National Socialist patronage actually targeted younger artists who had been radicalized by the experience of trench warfare and the destitution to which thousands of artists were condemned in the 1920s and 1930s and whose careers before Hitler seized power may have included affiliation with modernist groups such as DADA, Bauhaus, the November Group, and the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists in Germany (ASSO).

The Degenerate Art Exhibition The anti-​modernist cultural crusade that crystallized in the deaccessioning of 5,000 paintings from German state museums in June 1937 was motivated less by aesthetic preferences and more by the desire to exact revenge on the left-​leaning artistic rivals of völkisch proto-​Nazi painters. That the motives of organizers of the Entartete Kunstausstellung (Degenerate Art Exhibition), Goebbels and Adolf Ziegler, were primarily political in nature rather than aesthetic led to glaring inconsistencies in the purging of modernist art that resulted in works, for example, by Rudolf Schlichter and Rudolf Belling being included in both the Degenerate Art Exhibition and the Great German Art Exhibitions. According to the denazification affidavit of the sculptor Arno Breker, the deaccessioning of art from German state museums and the organization of the Degenerate Art Exhibition were both extempore “wild actions” not approved in advance by Hitler.21 It has even been speculated that the Degenerate Art Exhibition was

96

96

Gregory Maertz

so hastily organized and installed in the Institute of Archaeology (the narrow, cloister-​ style building in Munich’s Hofgarten) because it was a last-​minute solution. Serving up extreme examples of modernist departures from the conventional realist tradition, the Degenerate Art Exhibition was intended to distract attention from the failure of the Great German Art Exhibition to articulate a coherent and distinctive National Socialist style going forward. Breker insisted that it was the first-​generation expressionists’ association with the November Revolution of 1918 that compromised them in the eyes of the Rosenberg faction in the Nazi culture war. By contrast, the second generation of expressionists were, despite their obvious connections with the aesthetic legacy of the avant-​garde, politically untainted and thus largely exempt from being banned and purged. Self-​serving as it might be, Breker’s testimony helps explain why the less overtly progressive second generation expressionist style is nearly universally present in exhibitions organized under Nazi patronage—​such as the exhibitions sponsored by the Wehrmacht and Goebbels’s Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. The crucial decision that brought about this generational shift—​dividing artists participating in the newly organized Great German Art Exhibition and the preexisting annual Munich Art Exhibitions into two separate exhibitions—​was utterly impromptu and did not reflect the organizers’ original intentions. In January 1937 a call for submissions was circulated in newspapers throughout the Reich. All German artists belonging to the Reichskammer der Kultur (Reich Chamber of Culture), whether based at home or abroad, were eligible to submit works of art to the jury. The first two Great German Art Exhibitions—​in 1937 and 1938—​ran for fifteen weeks each. Starting in 1939 the exhibitions were extended to thirty consecutive weeks with exchange exhibitions added in December of each year. An artist’s presence in the House of German Art provided legitimization and enrichment, and thus the submission rate was massive.22 The exhibition’s focus on contemporary artists was entirely adventitious, however, and would not have occurred had Hitler not altered the original plans for the use of the new museum. Rather than canonical German works representing the “2,000 Years of German Culture,” as celebrated in the opening festivities, the Führer abruptly ordered that the emphasis of the Great German Art Exhibitions should shift from historical masterpieces to contemporary art. Hitler did not, however, offer any clear criteria for vetting the submissions aside from “nothing that is unfinished or problematic,” as Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter (regional leader) of Bavaria, vaguely put it. The historian Joan L. Clinefelter explains that “the ability to explain or show just what German art looked like was a perennial problem for both cultural traditionalists and völkisch believers. They could readily point to art that was not German—​i.e., modernist art—​but identifying art of the Volk was a much thornier problem.”23 Further complicating matters, Hitler also put the organization of the Great German Art Exhibition into the hands of Goebbels, who was Rosenberg’s more liberal rival in the Expressionismusstreit (conflict over expressionism). Fifteen hundred works were initially chosen for the 1937 exhibition, but Hitler was reportedly so appalled during the preview, calling the selected objects “regular Bolshevik art” (according to Goebbels), that the jury was sacked and replaced by Heinrich Hoffmann. A former student of painting at the Munich Academy and the Führer’s photographer and confidant, Hoffmann culled the checklist to 884 objects. The axe fell primarily on local Munich artists who skewed völkisch and older.24

 97

Eugenic Art

97

But despite Hitler’s direct intervention in the vetting of objects, the final selections suggest that even he and Hoffmann were incapable of making clear distinctions between the three categories of art that, according to Nazi cultural policy, were to be kept separate: progressive modernism or “degenerate art,” völkisch art that was associated with the 1933-​36 Munich shows and thus was meant to be segregated in the newly reorganized Munich Art Exhibitions, and works of art that properly embodied the regime’s utopian aesthetic aspirations.

The resurgence of völkisch art With the resolution of the Rosenberg-​Goebbels dispute in the former’s favor in the summer of 1937, progressive modernist art was, of course, effectively expelled from the public sphere; as an historical school that was not only an anachronism (its practitioners had adopted new styles and methods, entered inner exile, or fled the country), but was reviled by progressive and conservative critics alike. Indeed, the dominant aesthetic positions of the United States, Soviet Union, France (under the Third Republic and the Vichy government alike), and Hitler’s Germany were uniformly anti-​progressive and generally favored a conventional figurative realism in their propaganda. But the victory over the avant-​garde left created new problems for the cultural management of the regime. Far more worrisome to Nazi arts policy makers in the first years after the seizure of power was responding to the expectations of the resurgent völkisch artistic tradition that filled the void created by the demonization of modernist art. Völkisch art was associated stylistically with regional pastoralism and aspects of postimpressionism and neoexpressionism. In terms of patronage, völkisch art was linked to the bourgeoisie, the Nazis’ principal class enemy, and the conservative cultural establishment that still dominated cultural affairs in the Reich. Because their work featured split mind-​sets and manifested unstable oscillations between the poles of progressive modernism and academic traditionalism, völkisch artists were considered unreliable allies in the Nazi culture wars. Their work afforded few glimpses of the “new man” that was to be the greatest gift of the Nazi regime to the German people. The presence of works of art by völkisch artists in exhibitions set up under Nazi patronage was tolerated, of course, but acquiescence in the participation of these artists should not be confused with unconditional endorsement. Temporary, provisional adoption of the völkisch style associated with the Munich Art Exhibitions as the Nazi court style would continue, so the rationalization went, only until the arrival on the scene of a sufficient number of younger artists who had no experience of organizations prior to the seizure of power or training at the Weimar-​era Academy of Visual Art. This alliance between self-​mobilized völkisch artists and the NSDAP was necessarily uneasy, frequently quarrelsome, and, given the Führer’s ambitions for the emergence of a new generation of wholly Nazified artists that would render aesthetic compromises with holdovers from the Weimar period unnecessary, intended to be short-​lived. This marriage of convenience was, like so many coalitions forged by the Nazis in the first few years after January 1933—​with the SA, the Centrist Party, and the Roman Catholic Church—​merely a useful expedient, an ad hoc arrangement that was not designed to

98

98

Gregory Maertz

serve as a permanent compromise. But then, according to an early observer of the Nazi state cited by Modris Ecksteins, “contrary to surface impressions of monolithic unity centered on the Führer and of administrative efficiency, if not wizardry, the party and the Reich represented an ‘authoritarian anarchy’.”25 The postwar polarization between “degenerate” and “official” art in our understanding of the Third Reich has obscured from view the awkward period when Munich-​ based artist groups vied for cultural supremacy in the months following the seizure of power. Preexisting arts organizations were not disbanded and reconfigured under the Reich Chamber of Culture until September 22, 1933, which means that the three major artist organizations in Munich—​the Münchner Künstlergenossenschaft (Munich Society of Artists), the Münchner Secession (Munich Secession), and the Neue Secession (New Secession)—​continued to function temporarily as before. Chief among their shared duties was the staging of Munich’s annual contemporary art exhibition scheduled for the summer of 1933. Not even the mysterious burning in June 1931 of the Glaspalast (Crystal Palace), the exhibition venue that had hosted the city’s annual art show since 1854, had interrupted the opening of the 1932 and 1933 exhibitions in the borrowed quarters of the Deutsches Museum (German Museum). Confusion about Hitler’s plans for the visual arts in Munich was evident in early press coverage in which the designation of the replacement museum, designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, was revealed as the Neue Glaspalast. Even provisional use of this name for the new edifice suggested a commitment to carrying on the tradition of the Munich Art Exhibitions, which had brought together, for nearly 80 years, the work of contemporary Munich artists, along with special exhibitions of canonical German art, such as the irreplaceable romantic-​era paintings that were destroyed in the Glaspalast conflagration in 1931. This explicit identification with preexisting exhibition practice could only defer rather than eliminate the major challenge facing the organizers of the Munich Art Exhibitions in the art world of Hitler’s Germany: the question of what was to be done with the legion of more traditional local artists, a majority of whom may have been sympathetic to the regime—​and ready to become willing collaborators—​but whose völkischly inflected methods and techniques failed to embody the Führer’s utopian eugenic vision for the art of the Third Reich. During the four years following the seizure of power a tricky alliance between völkisch traditionalists and Nazi “futurists” held together as the Munich Art Exhibitions prospered as they previously had done. Originally, of course, the Great German Art Exhibitions were not organized to compete with the Munich tradition of exhibiting contemporary German art presented in Parisian-​salon fashion as objects for sale to the public. On the occasion of the Richtfest, or topping-​out ceremony, for the House of German Art, held on July 29, 1935, Gauleiter Wagner, as master of ceremonies, announced that the first exhibitions to be installed in the new purpose-​built “temple of art” would be historical shows of canonical masterpieces. The first exhibition concept, 2000 Jahre deutscher Kunst (2000 Years of German Art), was subsequently modified to a more compressed survey of recent cultural achievements, 100 Jahre deutscher Malerei und Plastik (100 Years of German Painting and Sculpture). In contrast to the contemporary art exhibitions that would monopolize the House of German Art for the first eight years (1937–​44) of its existence, the shows described by Wagner were intended to

 99

Eugenic Art

99

be retrospective, historical exhibitions of masterpieces that would reinforce National Socialist claims to cultural greatness by co-​opting the past achievements of German and Nordic artists and leaving out any references to the minefield of contemporary art. The grandiosely conceived exhibition 2000 Years of German Art was to have focused on the 400 years of cultural production in the German-​speaking lands between the careers of Albrecht Dürer (d. 1528) and Lovis Corinth (d. 1925). The uncontroversial if hubristic idea of celebrating two millennia of German artistic achievement, which would have meant including the work of progressive modernists, was promoted in 1935 when the internecine Nazi culture war between the Goebbels and Rosenberg factions might have gone either way. Similarly, the second exhibition scheme broached by Wagner, that of featuring a mere 100 years of German painting and sculpture, did not foresee the slash-​and-​burn treatment meted out to twentieth-​century art in the summer of 1937. To take away the distinctive achievements of German artists in the years leading up to the seizure of power, many of which were associated with progressive modernism, would restrict the Great German Art Exhibitions to only two acceptable categories of cultural production:  pre-​twentieth-​century German art and the works of art that successfully anticipated the eugenic perfection of the German Volk—​the former being outdated and the latter still in development. The revised exhibition blueprint that replaced Wagner’s two historical shows thus required the appropriation by the National Socialists of the contemporary German art template of the 1932–​36 Munich Art Exhibitions. But following Hitler’s vehement repudiation of the preselections for the 1937 Great German Art Exhibition (he is reputed to have ripped scores of paintings from the walls), it was clear that merely duplicating the Munich paradigm in a new venue would not only fail to advance the project of Nazi eugenic futurism, it would also create new causes of aesthetic discord. Most urgently, there was the question of what was to be done with all of the völkischly traditional artists who had regularly participated in the Munich Art Exhibitions but did not work in the futural, salvific, nonmimetic mode reserved for the Great German Art Exhibitons and were thus excluded from Munich’s new Nazi-​sponsored annual exhibition. While many artists were dedicated to figurative, pastoral realism, and others embodied a moderate progressive modernism in their work, the majority of Munich artists was simply not mobilizable and thus could not be permitted to share space with artists forging the National Socialist art of the future. Of course, the regime’s cultural priorities did not preclude the participation of Munich-​based artists. Indeed, long before Hitler arrived in Munich in 1913 as an undocumented migrant from neighboring Austria, the city was a major European center for training in the arts as well as the production and, with the presence of leading auction houses, the distribution of contemporary art. From the mid-​nineteenth through the early twentieth century, Munich was thus a magnet for the greatest artistic talents in Europe and North America, including Carl von Marr, Fritz Behn, Otto Hierl, Heinrich von Zügel, Ludwig Dill, and, most importantly, Franz von Stuck. But by the time of the Nazi seizure of power, however, Munich’s status as a cultural center had been largely eclipsed by Berlin, a city closely associated with the New Secession, the November Group, and artists such as Christian Schad, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Rudolf Schlichter, and Max Beckmann. Hitler was determined to restore Munich’s

100

100

Gregory Maertz

preeminence as an international cultural center and thus it was necessary to end the complacency and isolation of his adopted city’s artistic culture. As has been documented so ably by Jonathan Petropoulos and Ines Schlenker, we know that haste and faulty coordination were responsible for the simultaneous appearance of artists in both the Great German Art Exhibition and Degenerate Art Exhibition. Improvisational chaos was not untypical of the regime as were the mixed messages generated by this and countless other “wild actions.” To this category of impromptu state or party-​sanctioned behavior belongs the cancellation of the Munich Art Exhibition in 1937 and the associated failure to compensate the excluded local artists, who were justifiably aggrieved. The sudden termination of the 1937 Munich Art Exhibition cut off many Munich-​based artists from their customary distribution outlet and main source of sales and commissions for an entire year. The pauperization of culture producers and artisans during the Weimar Republic as a consequence of hyperinflation and the 1929 Wall Street crash was a catastrophe of such immense scale that many artists had been inclined to take at face value Nazi propaganda rhetoric about the significant role that artists were to play in the new national racial community. They welcomed Hitler’s government with enthusiasm and expectancy. As a consequence, the cancellation of the 1937 Munich Art Exhibition thus seriously threatened to damage the credibility of Nazi promises to improve the lot of artists. After a proper assessment of the damage done after the uproar caused by disgruntled artists who could have legitimately questioned the National Socialist commitment to the welfare of Munich’s artistic community, the Munich Art Exhibition was quietly reinstated in 1938 and ran for six years. Far from concluding that the resumption of the Munich Art Exhibitions in 1938 constituted a setback that exposed the regime to charges of ideological inconsistency and bureaucratic chaos, the resulting split between the Great German Art Exhibitions and Munich Art Exhibitions can be seen to have, in fact, furthered the regime’s cultural agenda. Restoring the status quo for Munich-​based artists, many of whom were older and were thus perceived as conservative and bourgeois, allowed successive, post-​1937 juries to focus on selecting younger artists based outside Munich who were deemed to be more likely to advance the Führer’s eugenic aesthetic objectives. Because the regime was concerned with maintaining a high level of artist participation in public exhibitions that was at least comparable to, if not greater, than pre-​1933 levels, the ad hoc decoupling of the Great German Art Exhibitions and the Munich Art Exhibitions also served the interests of local Munich artists who had been nursing a grievance against the regime ever since the 1937 Munich Art Exhibition was cancelled and many regulars participants had been left out in the cold. Moreover, the void created by the reduction of Munich-​based artists participating in the Great German Art Exhibitions was quickly filled by artists from other parts of the Reich, which was in keeping with Hitler’s plan to Germanize the exhibition more inclusively and to expand the pool of artists eligible to benefit from the regime’s patronage. Thus, at its relaunch in 1938, the Great German Art Exhibition was more fully representative of the art of greater Germany and more attuned to the regime’s vision of eugenic art than the Munich Art Exhibition-​Great German Art Exhibition hybrid of 1937. Excluding Munich Art Exhibition artists who would otherwise have had no choice but to submit works for the

 101

Eugenic Art

101

Great German Art Exhibition, which set them up for likely rejection and consequent loss of income, also permitted the 1938 Great German Art Exhibition jury to avoid having to inflict further humiliation on these artists by excluding objects that were either too traditionally conservative or too conventionally progressive to meet Nazi expectations for the Great German Art Exhibitions. The omission of the work of a number of Munich artists from the Great German Art Exhibitions served another objective central to the propaganda value of the revised exhibition concept. Paintings selected for the Great German Art Exhibitions combined didactic and devotional functions that focused the spectator’s attention on the purpose of the National Socialist revolution: the creation of a purified national racial community, an aristocracy based on genetically transmitted biocultural wealth. Here we see the impact of Zur Geneaologie der Moral (1887) (The Genealogy of Morals), by Friedrich Nietzsche, a writer of great influence among Nazi intellectuals. His idea of the morality of the strong, healthy, and free was attributed to the sculptures and paintings in the Great German Art Exhibitions where the National Socialist notion of the aristocracy of blood was manifested in idealized human forms. In addition, the perfection of the Volk as depicted in the Great German Art Exhibitions revealed a world in which the deformities of socioeconomic class consciousness, especially the alienation experienced by proletarianized labor and obsolescent artisanal craftsmen, were eradicated: the representation of perfect equilibrium between peasants and their rural occupations with workers in industry was a function of the National Socialist inversion of the traditional valorization of capital that privileged heavy industry as an evolutionary advance from the feudal occupations of the peasantry. Despite the widespread borrowing of a diversity of historical styles associated with the Nazarenes, Jugendstil, symbolism, neoimpressionism, neoexpressionism, and New Realism, the development of Nazi court style did not reflect a rejection of modernity per se and a flight into the past; rather, it constituted the embrace of an eclectic assortment of futuristic advances—​in the realm of technophilia as well as aesthetics—​that resulted in a new synthetic and syncretic Nazi modernism. Such selectivity accommodated and mobilized artists, styles, and iconographies by being constantly in flux, endlessly in formation, and open to additions and further developments. This very instability was an advantage in mobilizing and incentivizing artists to participate in exhibitions organized by the regime and its institutional proxies. Our assumptions about the function of art in the twentieth century, so overwhelmingly informed by progressive modernism, differ radically from the Führer’s futural, eugenic prescription for German art. The works of art produced under his patronage are relics of an imaginary as alien to our time as Socrates’s utopian vision in Plato’s Republic. For Hitler and his followers, art was no mere commodity in a market economy, but served as the medium of prophecy and the solution to social, biological, and cultural deformities. Art was, just as Plato saw it, a potentially seditious force in society, and so cultural production required leadership that would insure its proper application to the benefit of the national racial communty. With the downfall of Hitler’s regime, the bridge to the Nazi future collapsed, leaving the teleological narrative of fascism broken and the revolution that art was supposed to instigate bankrupt. Nazi eugenic futurism is a monstrous biocultural experiment that failed, and its demise explains our

102

102

Gregory Maertz

resistance to recognizing the product of Hitler’s utopian aesthetic as genuine works of art. The possibility of acknowledging the historical importance of these objects is contingent upon a thorough assessment of the revolutionary bioethos and utopian aesthetic values of National Socialist culture that were oriented toward abstraction of a different sort from that associated with progressive modernism. Eugenic representation offered an escape from the imperfection of contemporary mankind by placing a nostalgic conception of premodern human perfection above the alienating, dehumanized features of life in the modern world. Moreover, futural representation was intended to elevate the German Volk (a transitory, unstable, and contingent substance) into stable, paradigmatic, supranatural forms. The Nazis, like artists on both the right and the left, “regarded art as the matrix from which the future would be born,”26 and this emphasis on art as a transformative force in society paralleled the revolutionary and transformative potential of progressive modernist art. In this sense alone, the family resemblance between fascists and progressives as modernists is recognizable. In contrast to Soviet socialist realism, in Nazi aesthetics art does not reflect “reality” in a manner that seeks to anchor the proletariat in the present moment, but rather the eugenic art of the Third Reich offers a vision of a utopian future that seeks to inspire the German Volk to work for its own biological perfection.

Notes 1 Between 12,000 and 16,000 children were born in Lebensborn facilities, while upwards of 250,000 children were kidnapped by the SS in territories controlled by the German military. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of Hereditary Health banned interracial marriages and paved the way to the forced sterilization of 400,000 Germans and to the beginning of a campaign of euthanasia that targeted children and others with congenital illnesses and mental disabilities. 2 Modris Ecksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2012), 303. 3 Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), 126. 4 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 48. 5 Ibid., 50. 6 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), 111. 7 Ruth Ben-​Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–​1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 120. 8 Joan L. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2005), 59. 9 Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 311: “Nazism was a popular variant of many of the impulses of the avant-​garde. It expressed on a more popular level many of the same tendencies and posited many of the same solutions that the avant-​garde did on the level of ‘high art.’ Above all, it, like the moderns it claimed to despise, tried to marry subjectivism and technicism.”

 103

Eugenic Art

103

10 Ibid., 314. 11 Adolf Hitler, Speech at Nazi Party Congress, Nuremberg, 11 September 1935. 12 Adolf Hitler, Opening Address at the House of German Art, Munich, 18 June 1937. 13 Michaud, Cult of Art, 101. 14 Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 57. 15 Ibid., 103. 16 Quoted in Michaud, Cult of Art, 162. 17 Quoted in ibid. 18 Baldur von Schirach, Zwei Reden zur Deutschen Kunst [Two Speeches on German Art] (Weimar: Gesellschaft der Bibliophilen, 1941), 16. 19 Michaud, Cult of Art, 129. 20 Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), 219. 21 Arno Breker’s Fragenbogen [Denazification Questionnaire], HdDK/​38/​BHSA. 22 Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich, 27: “While artists received an average of three to five times more for their work in 1921 than they had in 1913, the prices of canvas, paint, and linseed oil had doubled; turpentine and painted had quintupled. In all, if the artist’s materials represented 8 percent of the price of a painting in 1913, they now [in Weimar] represented 22 percent of the price. Meanwhile, basic living expenses—​heat and light, rent and food, transport and clothing—​had increased 800 to 1,000 percent. As the inflation worsened, sales plummeted.” 23 Ibid., 35. 24 A total of 2,465 artists were selected for the eight Great German Art Exhibitions. The number of artists who submitted works to the jury approximated the entire membership of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künstler: 14,300 painters; 2,900 sculptors; 2,300 commercial artists; and 4,200 graphic artists. In the eight Great German Art Exhibitions 12,500 objects were exhibited; 600,000 visited the exhibitions; and Hitler purchased over 700 painters at a cost of 6.8 million RM. 25 Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 317. Here he cites W. Petwidic, Die autoritäre Anarchie [Authoritarian Anarchy] (Hamburg, 1946). 26 Michaud, Cult of Art, 97.

Bibliography Ben-​Ghiat, Ruth. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–​1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Clinefeler, Joan L. Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany. Oxford; New York: Berg, 2005. Ecksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2012. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. London; New York: Routledge, 1991. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Jaskot, Paul B. The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy. London: Routledge, 2000.

104

104

Gregory Maertz

Michaud, Eric. The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004. Schiller, Friedrich von. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Edited and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Schirach, Baldur von. Zwei Reden zur Deutschen Kunst [Two Speeches on German Art]. Weimar: Gesellschaft der Bibliophilen, 1941.

 105

5

Army Educators and the Making of a “Total Man” in Late Fascist Croatia Rory Yeomans

The Croatian Domobrans and the Ustasha Corps is one united army. One and the other sacrifice their young lives for the defence of their people, their land and their state against the most impudent enemies that exist. Brothers and sisters! When I ordered the organisation of the Ustasha Corps I had in mind the following: the state has its regular army. The regular army is trained, constructed and ready to fight for the needs of war, but I also realised that the bandits would not allow peace and I thought: there needs to be an Ustasha Corps which first of all will make its duty the killing of the undesirables. So, I ordered that the Ustasha Corps should be organised to be mobile and ready for all kinds of battles.1 When the Poglavnik spoke these words at a workers’ rally on September 8, 1944, the state was in crisis.2 Just days before in an atmosphere of total war he had ordered a campaign against “fifth columnists” and “defeatists” following the discovery of an alleged attempted coup against his leadership by Mladen Lorković, the foreign minister, and Ante Vokić, a colonel in the Ustasha Corps (Ustaška vojska; UV), the party’s elite army. An internal purge to liquidate dissident elements was already underway.3 Around the same time, the educational department of the Ministry for the Armed Forces (Ministarstvo oružanih snaga; MINORS) published a collection of poems, short stories and firsthand accounts of war by serving soldiers entitled Ustaška se vojska diže (An Ustasha army is rising). The first poem was “The Ustasha and the Domobran,” about brotherhood between soldiers in the UV and the regular Croatian army (the Domobrans). “Give me your hand brother, our struggle is the same struggle./​The same suffering accompanies us and/​we defend the same native soil!” Arguing that they protected the homeland with the same guns and fed themselves with the same hands, the poem explained that the same hands would destroy the state’s “foreign” enemies: “Give me your hand, brother!/​Look, the blood from our wounds/​pours into the same soil so that a blessing is born!/​Each one of its drops is the herald of a new day/​this blood is our light/​which leads us to a new dawn!”4

106

106

Rory Yeomans

The Poglavnik’s speech and the poem in the army anthology were part of the same project: to foster an atmosphere of national unity and mass mobilization in defense of a state whose future looked increasingly untenable. MINORS played a key role in the forging of national unity through its project to bring the Domobrans and the militias of the UV into one nationalized Ustasha army representing a synthesis of the best qualities of both institutions. The campaign to establish a unified Croatian army in the summer of 1944 in part reflected a continuation of the policies the leadership had been employing since the middle of 1942 to transform the Ustasha movement from an elite vanguard into the ideological expression of the entire nation. The creation of a Croatian army also aimed to address the wider crisis of legitimacy the state had been experiencing since the summer of 1941 when an insurgency by Serb communities in the countryside had broken out in response to the terror of Ustasha militias. By 1944, that insurgency had turned into a general mass uprising against the state led by the Partisan movement. At the same time, the project exposed the fundamental tensions that existed between those same militias, on the one hand, and the Domobrans, on the other, since the latter had generally not participated in the terror. By integrating the Domobrans and the Ustasha militias into one organization, MINORS not only sought to remove those divisions but also to foster an impression of national purpose among ordinary people in one last desperate effort to prevent the victory of the communist-​ led Partisans and the collapse of the state. If the new man was an integral element of cultural politics in the Ustasha state, he was also central to the construction of a new Croatian army. In the formative period of the state when Ustasha terror against “undesired elements,” first and foremost the state’s Serb minority, was at its height, the new man was personified in the Ustasha militia member, a ruthless warrior prepared to use violence at the cost of sacrificing his own life for the purification of the nation. While education and culture were important elements of building the new man, the emphasis on his martial qualities inevitably pushed them to the margins. From late 1941 onward, though, there were increasingly sharp exchanges between party intellectuals about the future role of the Ustasha movement, something that was related to broader anxieties about the long-​term viability of the campaign of terror with which the militias were inextricably linked. The subject, debated energetically in the party’s intellectual newspaper, Spremnost, exposed major fault lines between party radicals who argued that the Ustasha movement should remain a vanguard organization and that the “revolution of blood,” as they termed the terror against Serbs, Jews, and Roma, should continue, and “soft line” pragmatists who favored transforming the movement into a mass nationwide organization and were less enthusiastic about terror as a solution to the Serbian and Jewish “problem.”5 In this power struggle, the “moderates” initially appeared to have prevailed. In June 1942, the movement’s central organization, the Main Ustasha Headquarters (Glavni Ustaški stan; GUS) initiated a mass recruitment campaign via Ustasha camps to register Croats as members, and the Ustasha Youth Center, meanwhile, even sometimes encouraged Serb families to register their children in the local Ustasha Youth. Three months later, GUS carried out a purge of prominent hard-​liners, among whom was Eugen Dido Kvaternik, the feared head of RAVSIGUR, the Ustasha secret police. Even if many other hard-​liners retained their positions, GUS did use the opportunity to

 107

The Making of a “Total Man”

107

promote a cohort of nonparty young technocrats to a range of ministries tasked with the industrial, educational, and cultural construction of the state and with inculcating citizens with an Ustasha consciousness. The turn from the terror of the “revolution of blood” to the mass enlightenment of what the young writer Stanko Vitković referred to as “the second revolution” signified the aspirations of GUS to transform what had been a militia state into a bureaucratic one, a process that included expanding and professionalizing the regular army and the UV and disbanding violent militias.6 The second revolution also had an impact on the image of the new man, one of the dominant symbols of the Ustasha state since it aimed to smooth out and correct some of his rougher aspects and nourish him with education and cultural enlightenment. While the Ustasha man had provided an ideal template during the violence of the “revolution of blood,” he was not, it was reasoned, as well suited to the role of national construction in the second revolution of the soul and of man, as the party journal Ustaša defined it. In place of the new Ustasha man, army educators proposed a synthesis between the militia man and the Croatian soldier, the “total man” (podpuni čovjek).7 While the martial qualities of the Ustasha man remained important, he had to be imbued with culture, education, moral values, and the examination of his inner soul.8 From the beginning of 1942, the educational department of MINORS and its direct predecessors in charge of shaping the minds of both soldiers in the regular army and the Ustasha Corps had been developing education and moral instruction to reconstruct the new man.9 Since for MINORS the soldier was the essential building block in constructing “total men” in the military, this program of reconstruction would not only help bring citizens closer to the army but also assist in rebuilding the state as the vanguard of national consciousness. Yet the work of MINORS educationalists was troubled by a question: if the new man could not be reconstructed, how could the citizen or the state for that matter? In fact, the contradiction at the heart of the total man, caught between the militia man’s revolution of blood and the self-​examining revolution of the soul, exacerbated by the incompatibility of merging an antagonistic army and militia force, meant that the project to construct a total man was never likely to be finished. At once both martial and soul searching, like the state he was the iconic symbol of, he was never able to reconcile the demand for blood and the exhortation to look inward, to the soul. Rather than being a herald of integration, he signified the withering away of the state from the inside out. The incarnation of a new man as the herald of a revolutionary society, sweeping away bourgeois values, was something fascist intellectuals frequently ruminated on. For Stelio Bonavita, fascism had created “new men of courage, fearless and tough, for whom dedication to the cause is not an act of servility but of strength, in which the supreme good is not the ‘contentment’ of the bourgeois man, but something more lasting, stronger, more profound and something which cannot be conceived in a bourgeois sense, by the bourgeois man.”10 Likewise, the French fascist novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle argued that fascism was “an explanation of the world, vigorous, brutal, of the kind which men have always needed.”11 Visions of a new woman were also central to fascist ideology, but there is arguably an important distinction in the way historians have addressed these complementary aspects of fascist gender politics. As early as

108

108

Rory Yeomans

the 1970s, studies about the new fascist woman began exploring the ambiguity of the concept and its adaptability and changeability to ideological retrenchment, conflicts between competing interest groups, and outbursts of state radicalism. Moreover, from the beginning, the ways in which women responded to the expectations and burdens placed on them by fascist gender policy were an important aspect of these studies.12 By contrast, much of the established historiography has tended to present the new fascist man as a static monolithic category, someone who would live, in the words of Oswald Mosley, like an athlete, but little else besides.13 True, in the early 1970s Hans Peter Bleuel produced a pioneering study of the policing of male and female sexuality under National Socialism, while some explorations of women’s lives under Italian fascism, French fascism, and National Socialism also gave meaningful attention to shifting attitudes toward masculinity.14 However, studies dedicated to the new fascist man were not only fewer in number but also were dominated by cultural history approaches that often reduced the subject to an exercise in rhetoric and literary tropes, separated from any wider practical political program.15 Despite the increasing number of studies in the past two decades examining the new man phenomena in the “core fascisms” of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany16 as well as, increasingly, “peripheral” European fascisms,17 it is only recently that scholars have begun considering, in a systematic way, how ideas about the building of a new man might have been related to socioeconomic, demographic, and ideological crises within individual fascist states, how it impacted on the lives of male subjects, and how they negotiated it.18 In this sense, the story of the incarnation, evolution, and deconstruction of the new Ustasha man can serve as a case study in how one specific project of fascist cultural politics instigated “from above” through state propaganda and the public debates of party intellectuals was not just responded to but ultimately reflected “from below” and “from within” processes. Ideological retrenchment at the party grassroots, power struggles between hard-​liner radicals and conservative soft-​liners, an interrupted and contested program of genocide, and the pressures of social mobility all played their part in transforming understandings of what the new man meant. The politics of the new man in Fascist Croatia was not simply an exercise in rhetoric or an invented cultural category. Rather, it was part of a wider project of social engineering, one that underlined both the crisis in state-​society relations and the polycratic nature of fascist regimes more generally.19

In search of the new man “within ourselves” The search for the new man was intrinsically linked to state identity and the Ustasha movement’s ideological vision. As the poet and youth instructor Vinko Nikolić explained in the party journal Ustaša in January 1942, the establishment of a people’s community imbued with Ustasha values was impossible without the incarnation of a new man as the vanguard of economic, social, and cultural regeneration. The Ustasha revolution, he wrote, was “a revolution of the new state and the new man . . . Everything begins with the man, everything depends on the man. That’s why we must build a new man.”20 In the state’s formative period, the Ustasha militia “warrior” was held up as the

 109

The Making of a “Total Man”

109

prototype of the new man. His self-​sacrificing, fearless behavior set the standard by which all Croat men were to be judged. Militia biographies frequently contrasted the selfless blood-​soaked deeds of the militia man with the selfish inaction of the urban bourgeois bachelor, in this way drawing a sharp distinction between them and the “morass” of society. In his 1942 book about the Black Legion militia and their campaign of terror in eastern Bosnia, entitled Ljudi koji gledaju smrt u oči (Men who look death in the face), the war reporter Franjo Rubina lauded their “cold blooded” exploits, gazing with “amazement” at their “manly sun-​burnt faces.” They were, he wrote, “men who look death in the face!” These supermen were not found in “offices or bureaus, parties or kindergartens.” Instead, you would meet them “on the streets of our towns with wooden crutches and bandaged hands or in white clothing in hospitals or sanatoriums as they suffer in agony while warm red blood seeps through their bandages.” More commonly, though, you would find them “in the gorges and ravines of our homeland . . . where it was most arduous and most dangerous, where bombs and rifles explode, where red blood is sprinkled on the rocks and earth and where eyes and life are extinguished.”21 True, the education, cultural enlightenment, and social conscience of the militia man separated him from what the army pedagogue Boris Pavlek termed “animals in human attire.”22 In the months following the “national revolution” of April 1941, the new party-​state launched a number of educational initiatives aimed at acculturating militia members, including a mass literary program targeted at members of the armed forces. Local Ustasha camps also established Ustasha libraries, bookstores, and reading rooms in towns and cities across the state. While these libraries were often short of funds, they were nonetheless portrayed as vibrant centers of education and consciousness-​raising.23 Individual militias, meanwhile, such as the Poglavnik Body Guard and the Black Legion, established their own educational battalions to encourage their men to express themselves through writing, singing, and art, while the party journal, Ustaša, organized numerous competitions that encouraged militia men to write stories about life and death on the front line.24 Despite this, the image of the warrior Ustasha man began to seem incongruous in the context of the second revolution that emphasized feeling, the intellect, and inner transformation—​a revolution from within. The existential crisis of the movement in late 1941 had a direct impact on concepts of the new man. In his commentary of December 1941 in Hrvatska smotra, in which he had identified the need for a “second revolution,” Stanko Vitković argued that the attainment of “an Ustasha living style” that would refashion the consciousness of the masses depended on the “shaping and incarnation” of new men. “The manifestation of a new Croat man is not something abstract,” he insisted. “It is not idealisation, a notion of something unachievable. We already have new men. They exist but are small in number. We need more of them, many more of them. The whole of Croatia needs them.”25 In fact, the new man was at the center of much debate between hard-​line and soft-​line factions regarding the future of the movement, the viability of terror as a state-​ building instrument, and the need for a new mentality to build a revolutionary society. Ustaša set the parameters of the discussion in November 1941, reminding readers that while the “Ustasha revolution” had been brought into being by “blood and faith,” the

110

110

Rory Yeomans

next task was the construction of a “man of the Ustasha revolution” who would help imbue the masses with the Ustasha values of hard work, order, and discipline. In the existential struggle between the new man and the new Europe on the one hand and Versailles man on the other, between a physical concept of man and a concept that incorporated his soul, “the soul must win, the intellect must win, the temperament must win, the man of the future and the man of the Ustasha revolution must win.”26 Likewise, Nikolić emphasized that the Ustasha man was not just “the rampart of the state, its guard and defender, its brave soldier and warrior,” nor was the Ustasha ideology merely “a concept of heroism.” Instead, the Ustasha revolution was a revolution of the soul and a revolution from within that demanded the construction of new men. “We must all build this Ustasha in ourselves,” he asserted. “We must all create a new man in ourselves.”27 Marko Baković, in Hrvatski krugoval, meanwhile, argued that the second revolution and the building of a new man had to be founded on ethical principles. One of the challenges of creating a new moral man, he maintained, was that contemporary man, brought up in the liberal era, had not been taught to respect laws or moral conscience or to realize that “he is a member of human society and therefore he is required to work exclusively for the good of the community on which he depends.” For Baković, the only way to cure the social ill of selfishness was through the construction of “a new type of man” in all social classes who would realize that he was a member of society, possessed of a conscience that rejected all damaging behavior and capable of deep soul searching. “We must embark on the construction of a man from the bottom up,” he declared. “His soul must be made noble so that he sees himself in everyone else and that everything he does to others he does to himself. And when we have succeeded in constructing a man of such a soul, new ideas will be born from him, human ideas which will easily and painlessly solve all the problems of today.”28 In June 1942, the Ustasha movement published its regulations detailing the conduct and behavior expected of each member. Partly, these regulations reflected criticisms of hard-​line intellectuals such as Ivo Guberina, who noisily complained that with the opening of membership to citizens, the movement had lost its “revolutionary élan.” But since the publication of the regulations coincided with the attempt to turn the movement into a mass political phenomenon, they can also be understood as a means of reassuring ordinary people that joining their Ustasha camp meant becoming a member of an ethical community. They also sought to allay anxieties, especially among female intellectuals, that the glorification of militia values were making men “coarse” and crude.29 As such, the regulations emphasized the movement’s “respectability,” its fidelity to “faith and family,” and the harsh measures being taken to purge “godlessness, cursing, drunkenness, immorality, disharmony, lies and profanity” from the nation and family.30 Commenting a few days later in Hrvatski narod, the writer Jure Pavičić pointed out that in this second stage of revolution, the movement was not just struggling for the resurrection of a Croatian state but also “the regeneration of a new man, the incarnation of a new man.” Pavičić was clear that the new man would embody not a radical avant-​garde as the militia man had but the entire Croatian nation. “To be a good Croat means to be a good Ustasha and today’s Croat man seeks to be a good man,” he stated firmly.31

 111

The Making of a “Total Man”

111

Josip Mrmić’s guidebooks for “total men” If the second revolution signaled the end of the militia man as an exclusive model of the new man, in its aftermath, policy advisers, and educators in the Croatian army sought to generate fresh ideas about the role of educational policy in the incarnation of a different kind of man as the building block of a national army and community. One of the first to do so was a young army captain and professor at the military academy in Zagreb, Mate Matovac. In a paper he sent to the Ministry of Croatian Domobrans (Ministarstvo hrvatskog domobranstva; MHD) in February 1942, Matovac argued that the army education system was a crucial subject because a strong nationally conscious army and a civilian population imbued with nationalist values were interdependent. Being involved with the education of young soldiers made him well placed, he believed, to offer suggestions for the improvement of army training, which, while it had changed practices, had done little to change mentalities. “Looking at the barracks, the street, field exercises and on the battlefield, today’s Croat soldier, reservists as well as their superiors, are taught to be men of order, awareness and enthusiasm, but the weak greetings and non-​military bearing, desultory exercises and lack of enthusiasm for battle justifies frequent concern. Nor is there any trace of the celebrated bravery of Croat former generations,” he complained. While the problem had been identified by many, he had isolated the cause in the increasing “Bolshevism and nihilism in public and private life.” In the 1920s and 1930s, cultural Marxism had become influential, but following the national revolution, “everything again became fresher and livelier,” and public order, authority, and discipline prevailed. Against the grain of intellectual debates and state policy, Matovac had complimentary words for the new Ustasha militia man, someone, he insisted, whose existence had not only been essential in the state’s formative period but remained integral to its future too. “The times produced new opportunities, new dynamics and a new man! The old one would not return, despite lots of grumbling. We must again count on this ‘new man.’ ” True, there were on the one hand, problems with his behavior and conduct, but on the other hand, “whatever he is, he is ours. Seen from this perspective, he is not so bad. Perhaps many of his sins are ‘surface’ ones and it’s just a question of finding a national, important and intelligent leader who will use modern methods to remove this ‘surface.’ Then the eternal and radiant character of the Croatian soul will again express itself.”32 Matovac argued that the problem of army training was not just military but also “national, political and psychological.” In order to resolve it, all aspects of public life had to be looked at as one entirety since soldiers and citizens were “brothers in blood and for the homeland.” Consequently, the state’s inability to “imbue the souls of today’s Croat population with a national state consciousness” meant that it had failed to make soldiers possessed of “invincible belief and consciousness” or convince them why it was necessary to die for the nation. Moreover, under the influence of damaging social trends, toil and the spirit of self-​sacrifice as well as order and discipline were losing their currency. Why had this happened? Matovac ascribed the persistence of an “incompletely educated and constructed” generation to the speed with which it had been summoned to military service in 1941. This had resulted in a “terrible emptiness”

112

112

Rory Yeomans

that persisted in the army. Unlike military education in Germany, which developed in an era of peace and as part of a wider ideological system of indoctrination, the Ustasha state’s aspiration to incarnate an “ideal warrior” had coincided with a period of turmoil. “From the first days of our newly-​built and incompletely constructed state,” he wrote, Croats had been involved in military struggles. This meant they could not “peacefully, calmly or systematically construct our soldier.” Instead, they had to carry out two tasks simultaneously, one connected to construction and the other to struggle. To correct this, he argued, it was necessary to regenerate the current generation from the bottom up “in the cult of belief, character, family, social solidarity, national consciousness, authority, discipline and order.” Only in this way would soldiers of the future become “total men in the national, state, spiritual sense of the word.” No one, including the remnants of the “old mentality,” should be allowed to obstruct this program of regeneration. As he reminded the MHD, “We are in a war. We are in a ceaseless spiritual revolution, in other words an extraordinary time.”33 While many of Matovac’s suggestions ideally suited the ideological contours of the second revolution of the soul, it is not clear how far they got. However, beginning in 1942 the MHD and later MINDOM (Ministarstvo domobranstva; Ministry of Domobrans) did begin to dedicate increasing attention to the intellectual and physical education of soldiers in preparation for the construction of the “total” man Matovac had referred to. Between 1942 and 1944 the educational department of the Croatian army grew into a large complex organization as a MINORS guidebook of 1944 for army educators made clear. By the time Josip Mrmić’s pedagogical guidebook Smjernice za odgojni rad u oružanim snagama (Directives for educational work in the armed forces) was published, the department was divided into sections for physical education and sport and intellectual development, reflecting its belief that both were essential to the education of the reconstructed man. The emphasis MINORS placed on the physical and educational aspects of physical education was intentional. Mrmić, head of MINORS education department and one of the most prolific authors of educational guidebooks for Croatian soldiers, explained that far from being merely sport, physical education meant “the total education of the man as a person.” In this respect, the ultimate aim of physical education meant the incarnation of a “physically and spiritually healthy, harmoniously developed man, full of desire, clarity, work capability and living energy with deeply-​developed feelings for order, discipline and the community and a ready defender of the homeland.” In order to achieve these aims, MINORS educational advisers argued that six factors were crucial: correct nutrition; sensible dressing; physical work (which included everyday movement; active work in the family, agricultural field or factory; and physical exercise in school, in the Ustasha Youth, in the army, in courses, or sports clubs); an understanding of the development of the body; pure, sunny ventilated accommodation; and healthy morals. The development of pedagogic activity and physical training in the educational department in the three years between 1942 and 1944 was illustrated with three identical images of a naked blond warrior holding a sword in one hand and a flaming torch in the other. While the muscle-​bound figure for 1942 was tiny, the corresponding figure for 1944 was enormous, taken as evidence of the expansion of activity in the fields of physical and intellectual education but also implying the importance MINORS placed on the physical prowess of the “total” man.34

 113

The Making of a “Total Man”

113

At the same time, intellectual development for rank-​and-​file soldiers was wide ranging, including courses in economics, health, and general education and lasting for up to six weeks. Officers, meanwhile, studied the history and geography of the state, legal and constitutional statutes, and agriculture as well as firearms training, competitive sport, and physical education.35 Mrmić’s guidebook stressed physical and mental health as equally important attributes of the Croat soldier. On the one hand, the reconstructed man was to possess bravery, enterprise, sincerity, consciousness, accuracy, justness, pride, honesty, refinement, dignity, ambition, and sobriety as the “foundations which inform his life and being.” On the other hand, to be a total man also demanded developed spiritual qualities, with a particular emphasis on the examination of the self and the soul. Mrmić promised that “the intellectual side of [the soldier’s] education will consist of observation, introspection, the desire for learning and the cognition of all that benefits him as a Croat soldier and his nation.” In this way, Mrmić argued, he would become a building block of the future state. An educated soldier who thought and felt in such a way would be “spiritually and physically developed” and someone who would serve for the benefit of the Croatian national community. “He will become a step and foundation stone on which the Croatian state will be built.” He added, His inner characteristics and refinement will serve the benefit of himself and his closest relatives as long as it never presents an obstacle to the Croat people and state . . . Only the spiritually and physically healthy, harmoniously developed soldier, full of desire, clarity, work capability and life energy with a deeply-​developed affinity for work, discipline and the needs of the community, will become and be a capable defender of his Croatian homeland.

Mrmić also paid considerable attention to the role of the army educator. A link between the commanding officer and the ordinary soldier, the educator had to be a spiritual leader looking after not only the entertainment and reading of the soldier but also “a warrior with his soul and body,” standing shoulder to shoulder with the tactical leadership and enjoying “limitless” trust from both his commanding officer and his soldiers. He was always to keep in mind that his role was to fashion “unified and indestructible ranks of Croat fighters and not to tear them apart.” For this reason, the educator was always to speak “from the heart and soul so he doesn’t create the impression of being a wise guy in front of soldiers who have come to debate with him.” A “total” Croatian education, he wrote, would only succeed if it penetrated to the last soldier in the unit.36 One of the most important tasks of the army educator lay in ideological indoctrination. In setting out the educators’ duties Mrmić explained that education had the same aim as military training: the task of “fostering a militant spirit in the army founded on Croatian principles.” Consequently, it was to be considered the most important area of activity. In his endeavors, the educator would be aided by “an essential circle” of collaborators through whom he would “directly influence the subordinates in his unit,” at every stage maintaining “the closest contacts with activists of the Croatian regime.” Only in this way would he be able to defend “his soldiers from the damaging influences of enemy propaganda.” Mrmić insisted that as the carrier of all the positive

114

114

Rory Yeomans

aspirations of the Croat people, the army was the bearer of a “militant spirit”; therefore, “it shouldn’t be difficult for the educator to instil such an education in the army and bring into harmony the militancy of the soldier with his own world views.” He also argued, however, that while the final victory of the Croatian state was in sight, the education of the soldier, even though it was an essential component of the liberation of the state, was a never-​ending process involving mental struggle and spiritual development. This should be reflected in the work of the army educators too. Every Croat, even if he carried in himself “the best and most beautiful characteristics of national feeling” had to be “ceaselessly continually educated,” all the more, he explained, because the Croat people had not had an opportunity to construct themselves, their political understanding, or their state in peace. “Consequently, this education must attach the same amount of importance to [spiritual construction] as to weapons training.” It was vital to “elevate and educate every Croat soldier because our final victory and that of the individual depend on this,” he added.37 Theoretically, as a pedagogue attached to an individual unit, the army educator had responsibility for questions of political education. In reality, as Mrmić’s handbook made clear, the authority of the army educator was limited and he was expected to report on the responses of his soldiers during training sessions to the commanding officer, including deviant behavior. Educators were obligated to send monthly updates on the disciplinary situation, morale, the success of their work, and the resources needed for its continuation to the MINORS educational department. In case that they experienced difficulties in their teaching or were confronted by a challenging classroom atmosphere, they needed to be explicit about the problem because if the individual educator was not to blame for the situation, the educational department could offer him suggestions to elevate the spirit of the unit or identify which units needed direct “assistance” from the educational department. Furthermore, while the educator was responsible for political education, training nevertheless had to be run along strictly Croatian lines. In his courses and leisure activities he should therefore use Croatian educational materials to increase unit cohesion and “elevate belief in victory.” In addition, the educator was required to run all educational and training questions past the unit commander, someone, Mrmić wrote, who “will think and work according to Croatian principles and the Croatian view of the world.” Since the education of the total man was supposed to involve not only total ideological immersion but the construction of a modern army, educators were encouraged to use mass communication to counter enemy propaganda. One example of this was an agreement with state radio by which MINORS established a daily radio program covering war reports and programs about the homeland. The idea was that units would take dictation from them and write daily reports that would then be read out in the following day’s class, accompanied by a short commentary from the commander or the educator, “disabling the false recitation of events and negative relations with the unit which otherwise the enemy would eagerly make use of.” Just as importantly, in these antipropaganda classes, the army educator was recommended to include “all influences which come from ordinary citizens and which impact negatively or positively on the unit.”38 In an educational system that stressed ideological refashioning, cultural activities were an intrinsic element of consciousness-​raising pedagogy. One of the key tasks of the educator involved encouraging the active participation of officers and soldiers in

 115

The Making of a “Total Man”

115

contributing creative writing to army and daily newspapers, even if articles, pictures, poems, and short stories had to be cleared through the MINORS educational department before being submitted. Although encouraging artistic and spiritual expression by soldiers fulfilled the terms of the revolution of the spirit the construction of total men was supposed to represent, it limited it in some senses since it implied surveillance of the inner thoughts of soldiers’ souls. In addition, Mrmić’s proposal that young soldiers who had fallen or had achieved valorous deeds in combat should be immortalized through the printing of their photographs or even specially commissioned portraits emphasized their material qualities over their inner spiritual lives. This was of little consequence to Mrmić, though, since the agitprop value in mobilizing a diminishing pool of young men to sacrifice their lives for the state outweighed any objections about interior autonomy. Other soldiers, he reasoned, would read the heroic adventurous accounts of their comrades and be inspired to greater actions of bravery, while young men would learn about their exploits in daily newspapers and be inspired to enlist. As he explained, It is crucial the soldier recognizes that the eyes of the Croat people and his nearest and dearest are directed at him and that they all follow his struggle for the Croatian homeland. It is not an irrelevant matter if, in this battle, he behaves like a hero, faithful to the ancestors of his father or as a coward. He will only understand this if our propaganda institutions and educators do everything to write and publish more about these warriors who are giving everything including their lives. Consequently, it is very important to emphasize decorations for heroes, to send their photographs to the educational department, which will publish them and make our best sons known to our public. In exceptional cases we will send a painter to paint a portrait of the relevant soldiers so that our heroes are immortalized for posterity.39

Cultural activities were not driven solely by ideological indoctrination. If one of the key characteristics of the second revolution was the examination of the soul, this was also an important aspect of the project to make a total man. It was this ethical introspection that separated him from the Ustasha warrior, almost always portrayed in popular literature, at least, as unquestioningly fearless.40 This did not mean that there had not been an expectation the Ustasha warrior would be virtuous. On the contrary, personal morality and respectable family lives were considered extremely important criteria for admission to the ranks of both the Ustasha Corps and the movement more generally from the outset. This was made clear in a recruitment notice of May 22, 1941, in Ustaša, which had stressed that only Croats with “a pure political and moral past” could be members of the movement and “the best and most select” members of the Ustasha Corps. Upon taking the oath the new member became part of “the great Ustasha family,” and, as such, was required to conduct “the whole of his personal and family life” in accordance with the movement’s moral precepts.41 Similarly, the first competition for entry into the Ustasha Corps Officer School (Častnika škola Ustaške vojnice; UVČAS) in July 1941 stressed that not only should every prospective cadet be “of pure blood Croat origins” but also “entirely spiritually healthy,” living “the strictest Ustasha life” and conducting themselves in a “model manner.”42 Nevertheless, a recognition among some party intellectuals at least that the violence of the “revolution of blood” had resulted in the emergence of coarse behaviors

116

116

Rory Yeomans

among new Ustasha men made moral indoctrination in the building of the “total man” even more pressing. In fact, the moral education of the young soldier was judged to be such a priority that MINORS assigned it jointly to officers and army educators. As Mrmić explained in the MINORS guide for officers Hrvatski častnik i njegov vojnik (The Croatian officer and his soldier) officers needed to pay particular attention to the private imagination and emotions of the young recruit. “Every man serving in the army knows that the day he removes his civilian clothes and puts on a uniform is a great moment in his life. He throws off numerous personal habits and comforts and prepares to sacrifice himself in the service of the community.” The recruit, Mrmić instructed, had to be made to feel that the eyes of the entire state were on him and that the Poglavnik and citizens were observing his faith and courage. Simultaneously, army educators were to ensure the soldier was given spiritual nourishment and that should he need to be disciplined, it was done in such a way as to incentivize him to nobler endeavors.43 Further, to ensure that the positive characteristics of the recruit were elevated, the officer or educator should ensure that the soldier’s life was filled not simply with exercise, work, and service but enjoyment and relaxation too. Naturally, this should not include activities or discussions that undermined the soldier’s inculcation of moral values. Officers who engaged “in intimate conversations about women” or who cursed were likely to lose the respect of their soldiers. This did not mean that “one should avoid conversations about women, members of the family and conversations about the family and children generally.” As Mrmić sternly pointed out, “a healthy and settled family is the foundation of future healthy and settled Croatian generations and the Croatian state.” In fact, the soldier had to be educated “with an inclination for the healthy family, to find joy in the rearing of children and know that large families are the future of the Croat people.” Nevertheless, the young soldier’s interest in women had to remain pure and free of sexualized connotations until he was complete: Our relationship towards women must be one of special respect and idealism; it must be sublime. We must think of women as we do about our mothers, our own wives, fiancées or even our own sisters. For the very reason we are soldiers we cannot and must not look for some kind of ideal or model in those men who chase after women. One should not throw into the conversation details about amorous adventures because this could inflame the sexual fantasies of young men who are still unconstructed and incomplete. They could, in a moment of weakness, carry out an attack which could leave a terrible mark on their entire future and health and that of their families. The soldier must have the opportunity to discuss all these questions with his officer and to hear correct and clear advice from them.44

As the founding cell of the new national army, the importance of the moral conduct and inner life of the total man as much as his martial attitude was emphasized in other MINORS educational guidebooks too. In his pamphlet Hrvatski vojnik i narod (The Croatian soldier and the people), for example, published in 1944, army educationalist Zdenko Štrugar evoked an idealistic picture of the army that was emerging and of the holistic man within it. In the “new Croatian national army” and “regenerated”

 117

The Making of a “Total Man”

117

barracks, he wrote, the “best sons” of the “Croat mother” were being educated to be “always conscious of the truth [that] . . . the honour and respect of our mothers, wives, fiancées and sisters, the sacredness of our churches and mosques, the silent repose of our graves and cemeteries, and most importantly, the happiness and freedom of the entire nation depends on their strength, militancy, self-​denial and heroism.” Not just a herald of ancestors, today’s soldier was the defender of the nation, the guarantor of a better future. As a result, the Croat people loved the army since in its ranks were gathered not just “first-​class cold-​blooded warriors fighting for the homeland and justice who don’t fear death” but also soldiers who in life were “conscious and exceptional workers and creators of all those values which assure our people a responsible position and an appropriate place in the world being born in the arduous efforts and sacrifices of countless millions.”45 Josip Mrmić similarly argued that the heroism and “all-​encompassing love for the whole national collective” exhibited by the Croat soldier derived as much from his intellectual depth and spiritual self-​examination as military prowess. “The cult of sacrifice, struggle and perishing is the concept which leads the Croatian armed forces,” he stressed. “Not I, but the community; not my personal needs but the future happiness of Croatia; not my family but all the families of liberated Croatian soil. Every member of the Croatian armed forces is not only a first-​class soldier-​warrior but a conscious militant nationalist who will, in the days when he has not had to shed his blood, fulfil his duties in their entirety, the duties of an educated son of his people, a total man who will not only make use of his military capabilities but the capabilities of a constructed man . . . for the construction of a new unconquerable and invincible Croatia.”46

“Speaking national” in the educational hour The making of total men involved many different materials and workmen, from theatrical troupes to physical education instructors, but the cadre of army educators led the inner transformation of the soldier’s soul. However, in order to make complete men, army educators themselves needed to be constructed. According to pedagogical theorist Boris Pavlek, in a speech to army educators in June 1943, educators needed to be exemplary constructed men in order to produce model soldiers. The homeland urgently needed, he continued, to create in all parts of the army a cadre of educational specialists who were “total and constructed men” at all levels, not, he added, “those who will think one thing, feel another and do a third.” Rather they needed to be “men of one piece and persona—​principled, modest, sacrificing, social, of universal good character, especially in their private life. This is the springboard for public life.” With such men, the Croatian state would be unconquerable and indestructible.47 Yet, according to Juraj Petroci, writing in the army educational journal Prosvjetnik in 1944, there was a problem with the education of young soldiers. As far as he could tell in all the speeches he heard, despite the fact that the soldier was supposed to be the nation “in the fullest sense of the word,” in talks and the educational hour there was “a specific deficiency in speeches to soldiers about the state and the nation in the state-​legal and state-​political sense of the word.” While the soldier listened, Petroci and

118

118

Rory Yeomans

other pedagogical experts could not shake off the feeling that as the educator spoke to the soldier-​student “about the state, about the battle for the state, about the duty of all Croats, especially the duty of the Croat soldier towards the state,” it did not resonate with him in the way one would expect. Why? Because, Petroci argued, consideration of these issues demanded preexisting knowledge. While the “eternal thirst for justice” that, through centuries, had manifested itself in the Croat people was present in “those peasants, workers, employees who sit in front of us in soldiers’ uniforms,” it was “latent and hidden and not tangible or active.” As a result, it had left “no deep impression on them.” Petroci insisted that in the current atmosphere where soldiers were required to show “maximum effort and total physical preparedness,” educators needed to speak to them in a national key they understood, speaking a national language: The soldier is close to his land, his native home, his family, his commune, his village, region, area. We will illuminate the concept of the nation, the land, the homeland only if we explain these national-​political concepts from the point of view of those who embody them and that is the nation which is composed of individual peasants, workers, intellectuals, connected in blood and language . . . We can only deliver the education of soldiers if we do it in a national-​political context because then such an education will be shaped from the concept of the nation, the land, the homeland, from those unformed concepts and feelings which these soldiers carry in their souls and which are the hidden inheritance of past generations.48

In terms of national education, Petroci wrote, there were eight national-​political laws that should form the foundation of the education of the Croat soldier: these included the law of the native soil “on which our villages, communes and regions are situated” and “on which generations of Croats, soldiers, peasants, teachers, citizens, workers and priests were born and died”; the law of the Croatian language, which included unity of land, feelings, speech in the “richness” of its regional dialects, national poetry, costumes, and habits; the law of the Croatian “national shrine,” the Croat homeland; and the law of Croat blood, which meant the unity of nation, land, and homeland. These were the foundations of national-​political education and should be presented to the Croat soldier in such a way “that he feels these are his own thoughts and feelings, feelings which he has taken in with his mother’s milk.”49 For the army educator, the weekly educational hour was supposed to be one of the fundamental building blocks of soldiers’ education, bringing him “into the closest contact with all of his young men who will receive their ideological directions from him.” The educational hour, Prosvjetnik explained, was to be “a total expression of the educational and nurturing activities of the educator.” At the same time, during this hour everything had to be done to ensure that the “soul” of the soldier was taken over. “It can’t be reduced just to lectures and simple teaching; everything should be done to ensure that the soldier experiences and lives in his soul everything about which one speaks.” The educational hour was designed to take place at least once a week with educational materials prepared and organized for each lesson in such a way that they would aid soldiers in the learning process. Although the educational hour was composed of a number of different elements, every hour was to begin with “our marching

 119

The Making of a “Total Man”

119

song which the soldiers can sing along with if they know the tune.” If this was not possible, Prosvjetnik advised, the educator was to find soloists among the soldiers. However, it cautioned that this should be an exception since the hour was about building a shared collaborative and communal experience and consciousness. “As a rule one should ensure that all our soldiers sing the best-​known marching songs. In this sense, make sure the soldiers understand the significance of the marching songs, that individuals pronounce the words accurately and that they know the melodies well. With these songs at the beginning of the education hour we will ‘wake up’ the young men and from the outset and immediately lead them into active collaboration in work.” For this purpose, the MINORS educational department had published a collection of marching songs that army educationalists could purchase free. After the marching songs the educator was encouraged to teach national-​state, moral, and social laws since the fundamental information for the soldier about the “burning questions of our time” was contained in them. This part of the teaching hour was not to be understood as a lecture in the usual sense of the word; rather, the instructor was to ensure that soldiers learned about these laws in the “most relaxed way” possible. In the first month of June, Prosvjetnik advised, the first two national-​state laws could be taught: “1. Love the Croat soil which has been sanctified in the blood and sweat of ancestors; 2. The glorious past is the strength and guarantee of the Croatian future.” This part of the hour could then be followed, Prosvjetnik suggested, by “some kind of patriotic verse, recital or something similar,” depending on the skill of the instructor in finding verses and “appropriate” young soldiers to recite them. While the initiative could be left to the men themselves the instructor was to ensure that the “the recital has an educational aspect (it must be patriotic, moral, respectable entertainment etc.).” At the same time, he must not allow the “beauty” of the language to be neglected or for pronunciation to be mangled.50 Music was a crucial part of the hour and nationalist consciousness-​raising more generally. “Wherever possible, one must find a place for music. In the first instance one should consider national songs and then our well-​known marching songs. It is better if one takes well-​known marching songs and then everyone sings them.” Prosvjetnik recommended that particular attention should be paid to regional and linguistic aspects of selected songs so that they adhered to state policy on linguistic cleansing, which prohibited the use of “foreign” words or the “Serbian” ekavian dialect words, on the one hand, and promoted regional diversity within a national framework on the other. It is recommended that songs are taken from those regions from which the majority of the young men of the relevant unit come. In any case, one must consider the content of national songs (one can read out Dalmatian national songs or sevdalinkas to ensure that they aren’t sung in ekavian because this has a very bad impact). For the same reason, avoid foreign melodies and hits (even those that were ours before becoming songs) and pay attention to language (for example, words that don’t have an educational impact.) As far as they are about units which have already been or are going into battle, one can sing lyrics about battle experiences of this unit to well-​known melodies of national songs or marching tunes. The young soldiers can do this themselves.

120

120

Rory Yeomans

The educational hour should finish with a discussion about topics of interest and collective singing. As Prosvjetnik argued, there should be “an air of cordiality, brotherliness, love, comradeship” as well as “military discipline, militant élan and soldierly courage.” Prosvjetnik stressed that this schedule was not proscriptive:  an instructor could deviate from it according to the situation. Furthermore, it was important for instructors to keep in mind the guiding aim of the educational hour:  “the spiritual construction of the Croat warrior.”51 If one vision animated soldiers’ education it was “intellectual completeness.” How was this to be measured? One benchmark was ideological commitment. While the spiritual life of an individual was constantly subject to change, “completeness” in the soldier would be evident in the fact that his beliefs remained “as firm as an oak tree in the mountain, a cliff in the sea over which the wind blows and cannot damage.” By contrast, “vulgar selfishness had to be destroyed,” and whoever thought of their own state “as something from which they could draw personal benefit” was a scoundrel on whom no one should waste time. But the concept of the total man was always more complicated than ideological indoctrination since it encouraged soldiers to bare their souls. Hence, educators advised caution even in cases of ideological deviation since someone who was depressed and had “momentarily attacked his homeland and people,” but wanted the best for them “with all his heart,” could still be “elevated” and put on the right path. His belief about the “worthiness” of his own state could be corrected. In this kind of scenario, a successful intervention from a “constructed” educator would perform a great service for the homeland because it was not a massive leap from “spiritual depression” to an “erroneous” view of events, spiritual illness and “an apathetic lethargy against which we must fight.” This was all the more urgent when it was considered that the principle aim of the enemy was to make use of such spiritual depression in the souls of young men and “turn warriors into pacifist men and hence further destroy them.” Thus, in order to create “mental toughness” in his soldiers, the educator needed to understand the challenges confronting soldiers and connect with them emotionally. “He must actively empathise with his men, especially his younger men,” Prosvjetnik advised. “In such a way he will get close to the souls of the soldier and will develop mutual understanding and support in pursuit of high-​minded work.”52 For all the emphasis army educators were supposed to place on connecting with the souls of young soldiers, Prosvjetnik reminded them that, ultimately, they were “comrades in the same struggle” as the soldiers they were training: the defense of the nation in armed struggle. The entire armed forces, irrespective of which unit they worked in or what kind of tasks they were engaged in, represented “a united front of fighters” who collaborated equally in the defense of the homeland and who could only successfully fulfill their tasks in close cooperation. If a warrior on the battlefield was giving “the most precious thing he has—​his blood—​and if necessary his life,” then it was obvious that his spiritual needs were as important as food or ammunition. The main aim of instructors then was the “spiritual construction of warriors (in the widest sense) so that the soldier, whether he is on the battlefield or in the barracks, in full measure consciously realizes the greatness and worthiness of his struggle.” Similarly, while singing and cultural expression played an important educative role, the purpose of the instructor was not to provide “happy performances of entertainment for comrades and—​even for one

 121

The Making of a “Total Man”

121

moment—​to take away thoughts about their everyday toil.” True, entertainment had to be represented in a “respectable way” in the education schedule. Yet, instructors had to be aware that the reason for the special educational units was because a need had been identified for the “spiritual construction” of the soldier to increase his “psychological readiness for battle,” which, “from our point of view, will be far more successful the more enthusiastic, conscious and imbued with sincere patriotism our soldier is.” In fact, education could actively influence the outcome of confrontations with the enemy, Prosvjetnik claimed, citing the letters from individual commanders in the battlefield who, with “much gratitude,” mentioned visits by members of educational platoons. After presentations, talks, and other educational activities, their young soldiers had fought “much more fiercely and with greater fervour.” Although educational work could be varied, its fundamental aim as Prosvjetnik stressed, was to influence the “temperament and soul” of the fighter in order to “increase his militancy.” However many weapons and technology were present in the current war, it concluded, the “souls” of men who fought with those weapons was always more decisive.53 Were army educators themselves soldiers? Prosvjetnik thought so. It argued that they were an integral part of the armed forces since they enjoyed control over a number of special units. But the instructor’s role in penetrating the souls of soldiers gave him a special status, meaning that even when he was not physically at the front, spiritually he was always a frontline fighter. The instructor, even if for the time being his work does not engage directly with the front but in the educational sphere in the background, doesn’t in any respect lose his soldierly militant value. That being so, he is actively involved in battles because the war is today total and it would not be correct to understand it just as a conflict with arms against the enemy. The war today is being pursued everywhere and by all means and in this sense the educator is in a very exposed place because in an extremely exaggerated way with the weapons of the soul and education he leads a battle and very important contribution to the coming victory.54

By no means all educators in the Domobran and Ustasha schools were cultivated intellectuals or ideologically aligned with the aims of the “revolution of the soul.” Always short of qualified personnel (an enduring problem for the state), MINORS was forced to appoint as educators some highly unsuitable individuals, including those who had cut their teeth in the very same militia ranks that were the incarnation of the new man during the “revolution of blood” but who were now in need of employment. As such, officers’ training schools sometimes served as a clearinghouse for tough young Ustashas whose brand of violent masculinity had become deeply unfashionable but whom the movement was unsure what to do with. For a brief period one of these educators was Leo Tonogal, an unemployed 24-​year-​old clerk who was living with his mother and disaffected young bride in Zagreb at the time he was appointed as an educator at the Varaždin Domobran officers’ school in August 1944. With only a cursory high school education and little interest in culture, but with a proven taste for killing, he lasted barely three months. In a checkered career, he had, variously, led a murderous student militia in Herzegovina; been head of the Sarajevo UNS and a lieutenant

122

122

Rory Yeomans

in Jure Francetić’s Black Legion death squad; served a short stint as a member of the Ustasha military disciplinary court in Zagreb; and fought in various army units against the “bandits” prior to his appointment as an army educator. Given this résumé, being appointed to help cultivate young officer’s souls was never likely to be appealing. By October of that year he had returned to Zagreb, where he rejoined the UV, remaining there until the collapse of the state, no doubt to his and his students’ considerable relief.55 Moreover, despite the idealistic hopeful rhetoric of Prosvjetnik, UV commanders regularly wrote to MINORS to complain that army educators were increasingly being pushed into battlefield roles they were not cut out for. Such was the case with Sergeant Major Zvonko Burić, an educational instructor, who, along with Ante Lugonjić, another educationalist, had—​so his commanding officer Robert Merkić, complained—​ demonstrated cowardice and “signs of weak leadership” under fire. When ordered back to the battlefield, he had become ill and had applied to be transferred to Sisak. In fact, Merkić suggested that the rapid expansion of education programs under MINORS had created a senior officer cadre that was overly intellectual but that had no military experience and lacked the ideological fanaticism necessary for hand-​to-​hand combat. “In my view it is obvious that sergeant majors Lugonjić and Burić have never been on the battlefield but became officers and company officers through the backdoor and are as educators perhaps very good (Sergeant Major Burić as an ideological educator, for example), but as officers they are not suitable for the battlefield.” Furthermore, this situation had been exacerbated, he implied, by the merging of the Ustasha Corps and the Domobrans. The question of officers had to be “energetically solved” and acceptance into the ranks reserved only for those who were capable as officers “both in the barracks and on the battlefield.”56 Two months after this report, setting out the problems inherent in the construction of a total man, very much as Matovac had done three years earlier, though rather more optimistically, the project to build a fascist national state in Croatia was itself permanently unmade.

Between the total man and the militia man The attempt to construct a total man was one of the defining projects in late Fascist Croatia. Spanning the period between the relaunch of the Ustasha project and the final crisis of the crisis state, as an attempt to create unity between the army and militias and hence mobilize citizens in defense of the state, it was never likely to succeed. The image of the total man was a central character in this drama. The first version of the new man, the Ustasha warrior, who had led the terror against “undesired elements” in the countryside during the “revolution of blood,” proved himself to be problematic. His aggression could quickly turn against the state itself. Pressure from party intellectuals for a reconstructed man inculcated not just with warrior values but also education, literature, and a social conscience constituted part of a wider power struggle played out between hard-​liners and moderates throughout Fascist Croatia’s entire existence. The bureaucratizing character of the second revolution also led to the increasing professionalization of the armed forces and growing pressure for the creation of

 123

The Making of a “Total Man”

123

a unified national army out of the Domobrans and the Ustasha Corps. By the time this plan was implemented in 1944, the cadre of army educators at MINORS had already been busy producing training manuals, pedagogic syllabi, and guidelines for the incarnation of a “total man” who would synthesize the best qualities of the Domobran soldier and the Ustasha militia man, the two sides of the “national revolution.” Since the second revolution was also, explicitly, a revolution of the soul in which the party-​state would express the eternal yearnings of the Croat masses and in which citizens were encouraged to examine their inner souls, the total man was to be not only nationally militant and inculcated with a martial spirit but also attuned to culture, informed by a moral conception of life, and characterized by soul searching and self-​examination. As the embodiment of second revolution Ustasha values he would be close to the people. In reality, the new total man failed to materialize. Partly this was because, as Matovac pointed out, the state had not succeeded in imbuing ordinary citizens with Ustasha values, so how could they expect soldiers to embody them either? More fundamentally, the vision of a total man was fatally undermined by the incompatible values of the revolution of blood and of the revolution of the soul, the values of the violent militia man and of the introspective soldier. This failed project reflected the dilemma that animated the state too. Was it to be shaped by the demands of “blood” or the yearnings of the spirit? The state could never decide. What chance then to construct a total man, martial on the outside but looking inward to the revolution in his soul?

Notes 1 “Svaki je Hrvat danas vojnik rekao je Poglavnik sastanku u Zagrebu,” Prosvjetnik 2, no. 9–​11 (September 1944): 1–​2. 2 Poglavnik (head or chief) was the title Ante Pavelić gave himself as leader of both the Ustasha movement and, later, the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska; NDH). It was supposed to evoke the idea of a supreme national leader, analogous to the Italian duce and German Führer. 3 For a detailed discussion of the coup and its aftermath, see Bogdan Krizman, Ustaše i treći reich, vol. 2 (Zagreb: Globus, 1983), 78–​140; Nada Kišić-​Kolanović, Mladen Lorković: ministar urotnik [Mladen Lorković: minister conspirator] (Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 1998), 242–​76. 4 “Ustaša i domobran,” In Ustaška se vojska diže . . . (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944), 4–​5. 5 Cf. Ivo Guberina, “Naše Ustaštvo,” Spremnost, March 28, 1942, and Ivo Bogdan, “Ustaštvo i Ustaše,” Spremnost, February 1, 1942, with Julije Makanec, “Put hrvatskoga naroda do slobode,” Spremnost, November 3, 1942, and Tias Mortigjija, “Hrvatska intelektualna mladež u oslobodilačkog borbi,” Spremnost, April 16, 1942. 6 For a fuller discussion of this, see Rory Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–​1945 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2013), 1–​29. 7 The expression podpun, meaning “complete” or “total,” is a variant of the Serbo-​ Croatian word potpun. The unusual spelling was one of the idiosyncrasies of the program of “linguistic cleansing” in the Independent State of Croatia to create an

124

124

8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15

Rory Yeomans authentically “Croatian” language. The reform of syntax, spelling, and grammar, led by young linguists at the Croatian State Bureau for Language [Hrvatski državni ured za jezik], was based on the principle of “etymological script” [Korienski pravopis], in which the spelling of words in declensions was determined by its root rather than phonetics. Based on the Western ijekavian variant of the Štokavian [Serbo-​ Croatian] dialect, the reforms created an extremely complex “language” that was not only almost impossible even for officials and linguists to master but also was incomprehensible to most of the Croat public and increasingly ridiculed. For details of the main rules, see Hrvatski pravopis, ed. Franjo Čipra, Kruno Krstić, and Antun Klaić (Zagreb: Hrvatski državni ured za jezik, 1941); Koriensko pisanje, edited and compiled by Antun Klaić (Zagreb: Union, 1942). “Nastavlja se revolucija Ustaškog pokreta,” Ustaša 11, no. 5 (September 30, 1941): 1. The Ministry of Croatian Domobrans (Ministarstvo hrvatskog domobranstva; MHD) was established in June 1941. This was renamed the Ministry of Domobrans (Ministarstvo domobranstva; MINDOM) in October 1942 and finally MINORS in January 1943. Stelio Bonavita, “Dall’uomo Borghese all’uomo Fascista,” Gerarchia 19, no. 4 (April 1939): 282. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, “Nous faisons un parti Français, un parti qui ne se paye pas de mots,” in Chronique Politique, 1934–​1942 (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 69. See also “Un Parti d’Hommes,” in Avec Doriot (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 169–​73. There is an extensive literature on female lives under European fascism and National Socialism. See, for example, Maura E. Hametz, In the Name of Italy: Nation, Family and Patriotism in a Fascist Court (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism and Culture in the Twenties and Thirties, ed. Robin Pickering-​Iazzi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–​1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, Family and Nazi Politics (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987); Martina Bitunac, La donna e il movimento Ustascia (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2013); Amora G. Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood: Gender and Ideology in Franco’s Spain (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilising Gender in Vichy France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Kevin Passmore, ed. Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​1945 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2003); Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (New York: Longman, 2001): Perry Wilson, The Clockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); ibid., Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurale (London: Routledge, 2002). The pioneering works on the subject are probably Alexander de Grand, “Italian Women under Fascism,” The Historical Journal 19, no. 4 (1976): 947–​68 and Pietro Meldo, Sposa e madre esemplare [Exemplary brides and mothers] (Rimini: Guaraldi, 1975). Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (London: British Union of Fascists, 1932), 150. Hans Peter Bleuel, Strength through Joy: Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1973). See also De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women; Pollard, Reign of Virtue. See, for example, Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); George Mosse, “The New Fascist Man,” in The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 155–​81; Roger Griffin, “I

 125

The Making of a “Total Man”

16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

125

Am No Longer Human, I Am a Titan, a God!”, in A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. Matthew Feldman (Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2008), 3–​23. Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth Century Italy, trans. Erin O’Loughlin (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011); Alessio Ponzio, Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015); Thomas J. Saunders, “ ‘A New Man’: Fascism, Cinema and Image Creation,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 12, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 227–​46. See, for example, Valentin Săndelescu, “Taming the Spirit: Notes on the Shaping of the Legionary New Man,” in Vers un Profil Convergent des Fascismes? “Nouveau Consensus” et religion politique en Europe centrale, edited Patrick Renaud (Paris: Cahiers de la Nouvelle Europe, 2010), 207–​16; Rebecca Haynes, “Work Camps, Commerce and the Education of the New Man in the Romanian Legionary Movement,” Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (2008): 943–​67; ibid., “Saving Greater Romania: The Romanian Legionary Movement and the New Man,” in Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War, edited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman (Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), 174–​96; Rory Yeomans, “Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–​1945,” Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 4 (October 2005): 685–​732; ibid., Visions of Annihilation, 126–​67. See, for example, Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney (Madison: University of Wisconsin University Press, 2012); Joan Tumbelty, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Crisis of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Nicola Labanca, “Constructing Mussolini’s New Man in Africa: Italian Memories of the Fascist War on Ethiopia,” Italian Studies 61, no. 2 (2006): 225–​32. On the polycratic nature of fascist states and the differences between fascism as a political movement and state, see especially Robert Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (March 1998): 10–​22. Vinko Nikolić, “Ustaštvo je nosilac novog poredka,” Ustaša 12, no. 2 (January 11, 1942): 15. Franjo Bubanić, Ljudi koji gledaju smrt u oči (Zagreb: Ustaša, 1942), 5–​6. Boris Pavlek, “Podpuni ljudi,” Prosvjetnik 1, no. 2 (1943): 4. On the media representation of these libraries see, for example, “Otvorenje ustaške čitaonice i knjižnice u Zagrebu” [Ustasha reading room and library opened in Zagreb], Hrvatski list, July 27, 1943; “Jučer je otvorena čitaonica Ustaškog stožera Zagreb,” Nova Hrvatska, July 27, 1943. Regarding funding problems and future plans for increasing the number of Ustasha libraries see report of April 28, 1942, detailing plans for an Ustasha library and bookstore in Bjelovar, HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 1942, 3.249/​1942; request to Vilko Rieger, head of the State Investigative and Propaganda Office (Državni izvještajni i promičbeni ured; DIPU) from the Ante Starčević Ustasha reading room in Zagreb, May 5, 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 15.237/​ 17952/​42. Regarding the Black Legion educational battalion, see, for example, “Tragom slavnih borbi Francetićeve legije,” Sarajevski novi list, May 18, 1943. Stanko Vitković, “Druga revolucija,” Hrvatska smotra 9, no. 12 (December 1941): 624. “Čovjek ustaške revolucije,” Ustaša 11, no. 20 (November 16, 1941): 3. Nikolić, “Ustaštvo je nosilac novog poredka,” 15.

126

126

Rory Yeomans

28 Marko Baković, “Izgrađujmo ljude,” Hrvatski krugoval, July 15, 1942, 11. 29 See, for example, Maca Minić, “Uloga žene,” Ustaška mladež 2, no. 13 (Easter 1942): 5. 30 “Propisnik o zadaći, ustrojstvo, radu i smjernicama ‘Ustaše’—​hrvatskog oslobodilačkog pokreta,” Narodne novine, July 13, 1942. 31 Jure Pavičić, “Sveobuhvatnost Ustaškog pokreta,” Hrvatski narod, August 19, 1942. 32 Mate Matovac, “Hrvatski domobranski odgojni sustav: nacionalni odgoj i strucima izobrazba hrvatskog domobranstva (jedno misljenje i konkretno prijedlog)” [The Croatian Domobran educational system: National education and the professional education of the Croatian Domobran (One thought and a concrete proposal)], February 22, 1942, HDA, NDH, MINDOM, 3.487, 1–​3. 33 Matovac, “Hrvatski domobranski odgojni sustav,” 11. 34 Josip Mrmić, Smjernice za odgojni rad u oružanim snagama (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944), n.p. 35 “Uzstrojba školstva domobranske pripreme” [Organization of the schooling of the reserve Domobrans], May 19, 1942, HDA, NDH, MINDOM, 1. 487/​165/​8610, 17–​27. 36 Mrmić, Smjernice za odgojni rad u oružanim snagama, 26–​9. 37 Ibid., 36–​41. 38 Ibid., 23–​5. 39 Ibid., 40–​9. 40 Typical examples of this genre include Salih Alić, “Smrt ustaše Salke,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943): 302–​6; Stjepan Petričec, “ ‘Nismo se bojali smrti . . .’ ” Ustaša 13, no. 20 (May 23, 1943): 10–​11; Krešimir Golik, “Jer Ustaša se živ ne predaje . . .” Ustaša 13, no. 3 (January 17, 1943): 8–​11. 41 “Uvjeti za pristup u Ustašku vojnici,” Ustaša 11, no. 1 (May 22, 1941): 11. 42 “Natječaj za primitak u častniku školu ustaške vojnice,” Ustaša 11, no. 4 (July 19, 1941): 12. 43 Josip Mrmić, Hrvatski častnik i njegov vojnik (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944), 15–​17. 44 Mrmić, Hrvatski častnik i njegov vojnik, 19–​24. 45 Dr. Z. Š., “Vojska i narod,” in Hrvatski vojnik i narod (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944), 7–​11. 46 Mrmić, Hrvatski častnik i njegov vojnik, 23. 47 Pavlek, “Podpuni ljudi,” 4–​5. 48 Jure Petroci, “Narodno-​politički odgoj domobrana,” Prosvjetnik 2, nos. 1–​2 (January–​ February 1944): 13. 49 Petroci, “Narodno-​politički odgoj domobrana,” 13. 50 “Prosvjetni sat,” Prosvjetnik 1, no. 1 (January 1943): 5. 51 “Prosvjetni sat,” 6. 52 S. K., “Prosvjetnik kao odgojitelj,” Prosvjetnik 1, no. 2 (February 1943): 8. 53 V. P., “I prosvjetnici su sudionici u istoj borbi,” Prosvjetnik 2, nos. 1–​2 (1944): 14–​15. 54 Ibid. 55 Silva Tonogal to the State Commission for War Crimes in Sarajevo, April 16, 1947, Leo Tonogal dossier, Arhiv Jugoslavije, Zemaljska komisija za ratne zločine, 60708/​ 488–​586/​33–​34. 56 Report from Robert Merkić to the headquarters of the UV, March 6, 1945, HDA, NDH, UV, 3.205/​2993. Whether the Ante Lugonjić mentioned here is the same Ante Lugonjić who, as a “people’s poet,” composed a series of decasyllable [deseterac] epic poems in 1941 about the Poglavnik, the “heroic deeds” of Mijo Babić, Antun Pogorelec, and other Ustasha militia leaders and the killing of Croat “martyrs” under the regime of King Aleksandar of Yugoslavia is not clear.

 127

The Making of a “Total Man”

127

Bibliography Archival sources Croatian State Archives (Hrvatski državni arhiv –​ HDA) 237 Glavno ravnateljstvo za promičbu (Main Directorate for Propaganda; GRP) 487 Ministarstvo domobranstva (The Ministry for Domobrans; MINDOM) 205 Ustaška vojnica (The Ustasha Corps; UV)

Arhiv Jugoslavije (AJ) 60708 Zemaljska komisija za utvrdivanje ratnih zločina (Countrywide Commission for the Determination of War Crimes; ZKRZ)

Printed primary and secondary sources Alić, Salih. “Smrt ustaše Salke” [The death of the Ustasha Salko]. Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943): 302–​6 Baković, Marko. “Izgrađujmo ljude” [We are constructing men]. Hrvatski krugoval 2, no. 15 (July 1942): 11. Benadusi, Lorenzo. The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy, translated by Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Bitunac, Martina. La donna e il movimento Ustascia [The woman and the Ustasha movement]. Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2013. Bleuel, Hans Petar. Strength through Joy: Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1973. Bogdan, Ivo. “Ustaštvo i Ustaše,” Spremnost, February 1, 1942. Bonavita, Stelio. “Dall’uomo Borghese all’uomo Fascista” [From the bourgeois man to the fascist man], Gerarchia 19, no. 4 (April 1939): 282. Bubanić, Franjo. Ljudi koji gledaju smrt u oči [Men who look death in the face]. Zagreb: Ustaša, 1942. Cassata, Francesco. Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth Century Italy, translated by Erin O’Loughlin. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011 “Čovjek ustaške revolucije” [The man of the Ustasha revolution], Ustaša 11, no. 20 (November 16, 1941): 3. Dr. Z. Š. “Vojska i narod” [The soldier and the nation]. In Hrvatski vojnik i narod, 7–​11. Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944. Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre. “Un Parti d’Hommes” [A party of men]. In Avec Doriot, 171. Paris: Gallimard, 1937. Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre. “Nous faisons un parti Français, un parti qui ne se paye pas de mots” [We will create a French political party, a party that believes in action, not words]. In Chronique Politique, 1934–​1942, 69. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. Golik, Krešimir. “Jer Ustaša se živ ne predaje . . .” [Because an Ustasha never surrenders alive], Ustaša 13, no. 3 (January 17, 1943): 8–​11. Grand, Alexander de. “Italian Women under Fascism,” Historical Journal 19, no. 4 (1976): 947–​68.

128

128

Rory Yeomans

Grazia, Victoria di. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–​1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Griffin, Roger. “I Am No Longer Human, I am a Titan, a God!” In A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, edited by Matthew Feldman, 3–​23. Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2008. Guberina, Ivo. “Naše Ustaštvo” [Our Ustasha spirit], Spremnost, March 28, 1942 Hametz, Maura E. In the Name of Italy: Nation, Family and Patriotism in a Fascist Court. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Haynes, Rebecca. “Work Camps, Commerce and the Education of the New Man in the Romanian Legionary Movement,” Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (2008): 943–​67. Haynes, Rebecca. “Saving Greater Romania: The Romanian Legionary Movement and the New Man.” In Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War, edited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman, 174–​96. Oxford: Berghahn, 2016. Hrvatski pravopis [Croatian orthography], edited by Franjo Čipra, Franjo Kruno Krstić, and Antun Klaić. Zagreb: Hrvatski državni ured za jezik, 1941. “Jučer je otvorena čitaonica Ustaškog stožera Zagreb” [Yesterday, the reading room of the Ustasha Centre of Zagreb was opened]. Nova Hrvatska, July 27, 1943. Kišić-​Kolanović, Nada. Mladen Lorković: ministar urotnik [Mladen Lorković: Minister conspirator]. Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 1998. Klaić, Antun B. Klaić, ed. Koriensko pisanje [Etymological writing]. Zagreb: Union, 1942. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, Family and Nazi Politics. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. Krizman, Bogdan. Ustaše i treći reich [The Ustashas and the Third Reich], vol. 2. Zagreb: Globus, 1983. Labanca, Nicola. “Constructing Mussolini’s New Man in Africa: Italian Memories of the Fascist War on Ethiopia,” Italian Studies 61, no. 2 (2006): 225–​32. Makanec, Julije. “Put hrvatskoga naroda do slobode” [The journey of the Croat people to freedom], Spremnost, November 3, 1942 Meldo, Pietro. Sposa e madre esemplare [Exemplary wives and mothers]. Rimini: Guaraldi, 1975. Minić, Maca. “Uloga žene” [The role of women], Ustaška mladež 2, no. 13 (Easter 1942): 5. Morcillo, Amora G. True Catholic Womanhood: Gender and Ideology in Franco’s Spain. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Mortigjija, Tias. “Hrvatska intelektualna mladež u oslobodilačkog borbi” [Croat intellectual youth in the liberation struggle], Spremnost, April 16, 1942. Mosley, Oswald. The Greater Britain. London: British Union of Fascists, 1932. Mosse, George. “The New Fascist Man.” In The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, 155–​81. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mrmić, Josip. Hrvatski častnik i njegov vojnik [The Croatian officer and his soldier]. Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944. Mrmić, Josip. Smjernice za odgojni rad u oružanim snagama [Directives for educational work in the armed forces]. Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944. “Nastavlja se revolucija Ustaškog pokreta” [The revolution of the Ustasha movement continues], Ustaša 11, no. 5 (September 30, 1941): 1. “Natječaj za primitak u častniku školu ustaške vojnice” [A competition for admittance into the officers’ school of the Ustasha Corps], Ustaša 11, no. 4 (July 19, 1941): 12. Nikolić, Vinko. “Ustaštvo je nosilac novog poredka” [The Ustasha spirit is the carrier of the new movement], Ustaša 12, no. 2 (January 11, 1942): 15.

 129

The Making of a “Total Man”

129

“Otvorenje ustaške čitaonice i knjižnice u Zagrebu” [The opening of the Ustasha reading room and library in Zagreb], Hrvatski list, July 27, 1943. Passmore, Kevin, ed. Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​1945. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2003. Pavičić, Jure. “Sveobuhvatnost Ustaškog pokreta” [The universality of the Ustasha movement], Hrvatski narod, August 19, 1942. Pavlek, Boris. “Podpuni ljudi” [Total men], Prosvjetnik 1, no. 2 (1943): 4. Paxton, Robert. “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (March 1998): 10–​22. Petričec, Stjepan. “ ‘Nismo se bojali smrti . . .’ ” [We didn’t fear death], Ustaša 13, no. 20 (May 23, 1943): 10–​11. Petroci, Jure. “Narodno-​politički odgoj domobrana” [The national-​political education of the Domobran], Prosvjetnik 2, nos. 1–​2 (January–​February 1944): 13. Pickering-​Iazzi, Robin, ed. Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism and Culture in the Twenties and Thirties. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Pollard, Miranda. Reign of Virtue: Mobilising Gender in Vichy France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Ponzio, Alessio. Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. “Propisnik o zadaći, ustrojstvo, radu i smjernicama “Ustaše”—​hrvatskog oslobodilačkog pokreta” [Regulation about the tasks, organisation, work and directives of the Ustasha—​Croatian liberation movement], Narodne novine, July 13, 1942. “Prosvjetni sat” [Educational hour], Prosvjetnik 1, no. 1 (January 1943): 5. S. K., “Prosvjetnik kao odgojitelj” [The educator as mentor], Prosvjetnik 1, no. 2 (February 1943): 8. Săndelescu, Valentin. “Taming the Spirit: Notes on the Shaping of the Legionary New Man.” In Vers un Profil Convergent des Fascismes? “Nouveau Consensus” et religion politique en Europe centrale, edited by Patrick Renaud, 207–​16. Paris: Cahiers de la Nouvelle Europe, 2010. Saunders, Thomas J. “ ‘A New Man’: Fascism, Cinema and Image Creation,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 12, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 227–​46. Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Stephenson, Jill. Women in Nazi Germany. New York: Longman, 2001. “Svaki je Hrvat danas vojnik rekao je Poglavnik sastanku u Zagrebu” [Today, every Croat is a soldier, said the Poglavnik at a rally in Zagreb], Prosvjetnik 2, nos. 9–​11 (September 1944): 1–​2. “Tragom slavnih borbi Francetićeve legije” [In the footsteps of the glorious battles of Francetić’s Legion], Novi list, May 18, 1943. Tumbelty, Joan. Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Crisis of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. “Ustaša i domobran” [The Ustasha and the Domobran]. In Ustaška se vojska diže . . ., 4–​5. Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944. “Uvjeti za pristup u Ustašku vojnici” [Conditions for admission into the Ustasha Corps]. Ustaša 11, no. 1 (May 22, 1941): 11. V. P., “I prosvjetnici su sudionici u istoj borbi” [Educators are also participants in the same battles], Prosvjetnik 2, no. 1–​2 (1944): 14–​15. Vitković, Stanko. “Druga revolucija” [The second revolution], Hrvatska smotra 9, no. 12 (December 1941): 624.

130

130

Rory Yeomans

Willson, Perry. The Clockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Willson, Perry. Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurale. London: Routledge, 2002. Yeomans, Rory. “Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–​1945.” Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 4 (October 2005): 685–​732. Yeomans, Rory. Visions of Annihilation: the Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–​1945. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2013.

 131

6

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State during the Fascist Era Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

The Salazarist state, a Christian and totalitarian state, is founded, first of all, on love. This assertion can seem, in the eyes of the competent, an irresponsible exclamation of a dilettante. But it is nothing other than a reduction to its ultimate elements of the revolution and reforms undertaken by Salazar. Because what is meant by the replacement of the individual (the “citizen”) by the family, the irreducible nucleus of the nation, and the return of the corporation, considered as an organic social collective. Mircea Eliade (1942)1 Backed by powerful instruments of political socialization, the mass dictatorships of the twentieth century designed prototypes of new men (and women), of the idealized society they intended to build. Italian fascism was perhaps the regime that best defined this virile and disciplined “new man” by promoting the cult of the body and spiritual virtue through the regime’s paramilitary organizations.2 But within many fascist-​era dictatorships, the ideal man and woman had to compromise with the political coalition on its origins due to the absence of a “unifying” model based on a fascist party, of the variety of institutions involved in the process, and of its main ideological components. This is the case of the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo), one of the longest-​lasting European right-​wing dictatorships. In the scholarship of interwar dictatorships, the Portuguese academic debate concerning the nature of António de Oliveira Salazar’s New State has been characterized by views that either consider Salazarism a fascist, even totalitarian, regime, or an authoritarian or reactionary and conservative one. It follows that, while the later assumes the New State’s idealized man as one in which Catholicism, imperialism, and corporatism are mixed, the former acknowledges the existence of a fascist new man as a product of a “regime with a totalitarian vocation,” even if it paradoxically considers the regime to be nationalist, traditionalist, and Catholic.3 This lack of conceptual clarity may stem from the initial tension between tradition and modernity or from the dictatorship’s different ideological components.

132

132

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

This chapter seeks to overcome the fascism versus authoritarianism dichotomy by analyzing Salazarism’s institutions and dominant political discourse in relation to the ideal type of men and women it creates. The regime’s propaganda and education departments are investigated, as is its single party, militia, and official youth movement. The main thesis here is that while it used modern institutions inspired by fascism, the Portuguese New State favored an “organic” vision of society based on traditionalist and Catholic values, which was the dominant element in the socialization of Portuguese youth.

The institutions of the Portuguese New State during the 1930s Portugal was ruled by a right-​wing dictatorship from 1926, when a military coup d’état overthrew the First Republic, until April 25, 1974, when it was overthrown by another military coup. The first years of the military dictatorship were ones of crises, revolts, and military conspiracies and movements led by republican officers calling for the restoration of the liberal order; however, at the governmental level, a more cohesive group of conservative generals consolidated around General Óscar Carmona, who was elected president in a manipulated plebiscite in 1928. Salazar was appointed finance minister at the height of a major financial crisis, and subsequently obtained wide-​ranging powers over the other ministries. Salazar was a conservative Catholic politician and university professor who remained Portugal’s leader until he was incapacitated in 1968. In 1933, a new constitution declared Portugal to be a “unitary and corporatist republic,” in which the liberal and corporatist principles of representation were balanced.4 The constitution retained a directly elected head of state and a parliament to which deputies were elected from a single list prepared by the single party, the National Union (União Nacional; UN), and introduced a corporatist chamber. The result was a dictatorship headed by a prime minister and a national assembly dominated by the UN through noncompetitive elections. Censorship eliminated any suggestion of political conflict, and censors devoted their attention to the opposition and in particular to the fascist minority in the National Syndicalist Movement (Movimento Nacional Sindicalista; MNS), led by Rolão Preto, which had initially challenged the new regime.5 Salazar created the UN in 1930 as an “antiparty party” that united all civilian forces supporting the new regime. In 1933, the regime established the National Propaganda Secretariat (Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional; SPN), which was headed by António Ferro.6 Ferro, who enjoyed Salazar’s confidence, was a cosmopolitan journalist and admirer of fascism. He provided the regime with a cultural project that skillfully united elements of modern aestheticism with a “reinvention of tradition” allegedly rooted in folk culture. The victory of the Popular Front in the 1936 elections in neighboring Spain and the subsequent outbreak of civil war severely impacted the New State. In response to the alleged “red threat,” the Portuguese regime developed a new political discourse and symbolism and established two militia organizations. These steps have often

 133

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State

133

been interpreted as the “fascistization” of the Salazar regime. Until the civil war in Spain, Salazar had refused either to create a militia-​type organization or to permit the fascistization of the single party, a policy in which he was supported by ministers and leading figures in the UN, including its leader, Carneiro Pacheco, who claimed that “contrary to what happened in Italy and Germany, where the revolution triumphed due to the militia that created it, in Portugal it was the army that brought the revolution to power, and the army neither needed nor consented to a militia to defend the regime.”7 In the changed circumstances of 1936, however, in response to the victory of the Popular Front in Spain, the regime created a paramilitary youth organization, Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa), within the Ministry of Education. In September of that year, following an anticommunist rally organized by the “national unions,”8 and as a result of “genuine pressure” from sections of the extreme right that had recently joined the regime, Salazar authorized the formation of the Portuguese Legion (Legião Portuguesa), which came under strict government control. The Legion was intended to channel the radical right-​wing supporters of the regime and to face the communist threat that was being fueled by the situation in Spain. An SPN newsreel on the anticommunist rallies organized by the Legion in 1936 summarized the situation thus: While in Spain the wave of savagery and destruction, carried on by true bandits and murders, is ruining all the nations’ activities and wealth, in Portugal anti-​ communist rallies are organized all over country, in which order and popular vibrancy prevail.9

This film also shows a group holding a placard on which is written “Death to Communism that is against fatherland, destroyer of families, disturber of peace, and violator of homes.” By cultivating the opposing virtues, demo-​liberalism, and especially “barbarian” and “atheist” communism, would vanish.10 Similarly, Nobre Guedes, leader of the Mocidade and a Nazi sympathizer,11 delivered a speech in which he stated the Mocidade’s main aim was to fight against all enemies of Christian civilization that were threatening the moral and territorial unity of Portugal.12 A fascist choreography was clearly emerging. Salazarist ideology was based on the four-​part doctrine of “God, fatherland, family, and work,” and the schools were probably the clearest model the dictatorship had to offer concerning the type of society it wanted to build along these lines. Textbooks and special classroom decorations containing this message were distributed. The values of resignation and obedience and the concepts of “organic” conflict and of a society free of politics dominated primary school teaching. Promoting Christianity was another obsession affecting everything within the classroom, from posters to school rituals. As early as 1932, the Minister of Education drew up a new policy that greatly strengthened “the family as a social cell,” “faith as . . . an element of national unity and solidarity,” and “authority” and “respect for the hierarchy” as “principles of social life.”13 These were the institutions that created Salazarism’s ideal new man. Their thought in relation to this new man is analyzed below.

134

134

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

The image of the Salazarist “new man” A large statue called Sovereignty stood in the Praça do Império in the heart of the 1940 Portuguese World Exhibition.14 Created by the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida (1898–​ 1975), the feminine figure rose like a warrior, in her right hand an armillary sphere—​the centuries-​old symbol of Portuguese sovereignty—​while her left hand rested on a column on which the names of the five continents were engraved. Behind this figure was a giant map of the world on which the words of Portugal’s sixteenth-​century bard Luís Camões were written, “And if more worlds there were, [Portugal] would had arrived there” (“E se mais mundos houvera lá chegara”). “With her hair swept back by the wind and her right foot forward, Sovereignty looked straight across the Praça, facing an imagined future with a stern and determined expression.”15 Considering Sovereignty, one might think it epitomized the Portuguese eagerness for a new man and society just as imagined by the fascist regimes. However, if Sovereignty has some similarities with a fascist aesthetic, the exhibition it was part of was largely imagined, “according to essentially conservative and backward-​looking historical and social codes.”16 Some aspects of the fascist new man might be recognized in the representations of the Portuguese regime, both in terms of material form and synesthetic perception. Yet the viewer always has a sense of incompleteness. For example, on August 1, 1940, the cover of the Mocidade’s magazine carried an image of its leader, Nobre Guedes, as a handsome man in an impeccable military uniform, with his eyes looking firmly to the future.17 While in many respects similar to typical fascist images, this portrait lacks vigor:  the stern visage of the fascist new man is here instead one of timidity. Similarly, claims that the militia should be “the instrument to create a new soul,”18 and that “the UN is, and always will, be a revolutionary force”19 as well as the references in the Mocidade’s anthem to the rebirth of the fatherland and the parallels between the New State and the restoration of December 1, 1640—​when the Portuguese allegedly “rose from the ashes” by freeing themselves from the Spanish yoke—​could induce the feeling that something profoundly new and revolutionary was emerging. As Emilio Gentile notes, fascists believed in a “radical transformation of the existing state and society,” and by revolution they meant “a process of national palingenesis, which was to radically innovate not only the political and social order, but also the character of the Italians, in order to create a new man.”20 At the ceremony to launch Vanguard School Action (Acção Escolar Vanguarda; AEV), António Ferro stated, I come here, lads, to preach the revolution. . . . The revolution is the corporatist state, the miracle of the balanced budgets, roads without holes, the new fleet, public works, and the new constitution.

He goes on to note that some people would have preferred a more theatrical leader more able to emulate Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. However, Salazar was no one’s disciple; rather, he was the master. If one could understand his “apparent coldness” and “dynamic serenity,” that would be enough to “excite us” much more than “the exuberant Mediterranean gestures of the great Mussolini or the theatrical speeches, wisely orchestrated by Hitler.”21 The AEV newspaper reproduced a picture of Ferro, a short

 135

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State

135

man with big belly and an appearance of bonhomie, despite his admonishing finger wagging. It is an image that widens the gap between the New State and other more radical dictatorships. Ferro’s conservative discourse contrasts with some of the AEV’s initially impassioned statements in which a revolutionary impetus can be discerned. Indeed, the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the fatherland; the passionate appeal for discipline, obedience, and work; the dead commanding the living, and Salazar’s infallibility were all mentioned. However, this form of words began to disappear from 1934. Salazar had even criticized the fascist new man. Soon after seizing power, the president gave an interview in which he said the French writer Henri Béraud had seen many young Italians imitating Mussolini’s pace, his frown, and his gaze and self-​assurance: that is to say, those features that are the inner essence of the new man. This did not surprise the Portuguese dictator, who believed “mobs always tend to emulate the weaknesses of their idols.”22 While Salazar criticized Mussolini’s appearance and behavior, it was no wonder that within his regime, the young, healthy, beautiful, swift, virile, hypermasculine warrior fascist male longing to embrace modernity, who was so idealized by the Italians and Germans, was replaced by an unremarkable middle-​aged man. The idealized man in Portugal was rather a tired breadwinner, a paterfamilias who was profoundly in love with his country, whose brief rest was found in the evenings, while seated on a sofa with a blanket over his knees as he sat before a raging fire as his wife, having fed her family and tidied the kitchen, sat silently sewing the family’s hand-​me-​down clothes, as the children play on the rug. From this standpoint, it seems all the Salazarist and fascist men had in common was the rejection of decadent individualism that stemmed from liberalism and Bolshevik egalitarianism. If this is true, then the Salazarist ideal man was very far from the feminine representation of Sovereignty created for the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1940. Salazar was often considered to be a role model for the new man through the “leadership cult” associated more with a paternalistic elitist guide.23 Indeed, the education minister, Carneiro Pacheco, said, The country instinctively and providentially found in the person of Doctor Oliveira Salazar the restorer of the nation’s conscience through contamination by his own life.24

Likewise, Ferro claimed Mussolini and Hitler imposed themselves by “consciously acting on the sentiments of the crowd, on their instincts, whether good or bad. Salazar, on the other hand, dominates and makes us believe by force of his intelligence and character.”25 In the Portuguese case, emotional heat was replaced by cold reasoning.

Rural utopia As was the case with other fascist-​era dictatorships, the ideologues of the New State described the Portuguese regime as a singular case. While it was one thing to spread

136

136

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

Mussolini’s impassioned words in the Legion’s newspaper,26 it was an altogether different thing to expect similar language from cold, Christian, and “reasonable” Salazar, who had stated publicly that the Italian Fascist regime was not limited by law and morals, and that it tended toward “pagan caesarism.” Unlike in Fascist Italy, the Portuguese New State never sought to occupy the role of family or the church. Competition for social indoctrination between the Portuguese dictatorship and the Catholic Church was so mild that in 1935 a constitutional amendment, promoted by the head of the female paramilitary youth movement, made sure state education was Catholic.27 According to Salazar, the use of violence was also unthinkable because of the mild nature of the Portuguese.28 He believed that the Portuguese people had been wrongly educated by the previous republican regime, and expected proper education would put people back on the right track; however, he thought time would be needed to adequately prepare society for the necessary changes.29 João Ameal, editor of the Legion’s newspaper and a supporter of the Action Française, argued that Portuguese integral nationalism was neither an emulation of the French organization nor a copy of Mussolini’s fascism or of the Primo de Rivera regime in Spain. While they were “vital reactions” against “a common evil,” Ameal argued that Portuguese nationalism had its own character in exactly the same way as the forms of nationalism in France, Italy, and elsewhere had their own.30 While fascists considered themselves to be “the only authentic representatives of the ‘New Italy’ . . . the creators of the new state, who would . . . lead Italy in the conquest of modernity,”31 the Portuguese regime, said Ameal, sought to bring about an “enlightened resurgence of the traditions and institutions that have made Portugal a great empire.”32 As a result, the New State would emerge “all of it imbued with noble ideas, all of it full of civilization and past culture.”33 Portugal’s history was important but tradition was even more so, because to create a new spirit the “national revolution” had to grasp the qualities of the race: “work, ownership of land, family, religion and fatherland.”34 All these qualities were praised by the New State and incorporated in some essential aspects into the regime: Catholicism, poverty, obedience, charity, gender inequality, and limited social mobility. Salazar’s rejection of modernity is sometimes evident in his speeches, where he expresses some sympathy toward the rural poverty he considered to be a source of virtue: the place where “mankind’s purity” endured.35 In 1937, at a meeting at which he welcomed some members of the Portuguese community in Brazil, Salazar spoke about modernization: We are seduced neither by wealth nor by the luxury of techniques, by the machine that diminishes the man nor the delirium of mechanics . . . We want to preserve Portugal at all costs from the wave that is falling all over the world, we want to preserve the simplicity of life, the purity of morals, the sweetness of the feelings, the balance of social relations, that familiar look, modest but worthy, of Portuguese life—​and through these conquests or re-​conquests of our traditions, we will reach social peace.36

The dictator’s private behavior shows how deeply he believed in a rural utopia. Indeed, in 1938, Salazar personally oversaw plans for housing chickens and rabbits in

 137

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State

137

his official residence in the center of Lisbon. What Salazar did there was to be applied throughout the nation. Textbooks were probably the most effective tool for indoctrination. One book intended for children in their first year of formal education contains the following conversation between a father and son: Joãozinho’s house was one of the oldest in the village. His grandfather and his great-​grandfather lived there. . . . I [his father], have maintained and improved it. . . . One day, it will be you who will be in charge of looking after our old house. . . . When you grow up you cannot forget the recognition and love you owe your grandparents’ house.37

All school textbooks promoted agriculture as the noblest of all human economic activities, while the only other industry mentioned was artisan manufacturing, such as canned fish and ceramics. Whatever means employed, the focus of propaganda activities was “the diffusion of an integrative idea of a collective nation forged by joining nationalism, traditionalism and ruralism, with a modern language.”38 As with other fascist-​ era dictatorships, Salazarism cultivated folklore and an organic view of society as a response to the harmful effects of modernization.39 However, Salazar’s “ruralism” was imposed via powerful mechanisms of ideological indoctrination—​similar to those used by fascist regimes, albeit with distinctive doctrinal content—​within the framework of a nationalist dictatorship.

Christian fatherland Catholicism and religious values were ever present within the state propaganda apparatus and the regime’s main political institutions. The proceedings of the first congress of the UN, held in 1934, begin with a speech by Canon Correia Pinto,40 entitled “Christian Fatherland” (Pátria Cristã), in which he declares divine providence to be the central element in Salazar’s leadership: A man appeared as a superior representative of the aspirations of the army and of the country. A man appeared who was chosen by the military without him knowing it. A man—​the providential secret—​was suddenly revealed to our land, perhaps as a reward for the faith we always had. A man appeared whose destiny is to overcome the dreadful crisis and reintegrate the nation: its self-​awareness, its duty, strength, greatness and mission in the world. . . . Christian and poignant Portuguese people arise again for our history, our land, our tradition, our faith, our soul—​Te Deum laudamus, Te Dominum Confitemur! (You are God: we praise You).41

Other speeches made mention of the state’s upholding of Christian morals. At the congress, the poet Correia de Oliveira recited one of his poems describing how he thought the New State ought to have a Christian morality. “I believe in God above the nation,” he says, adding, “A two century bond? Cut it with a steady and quick gesture . . .

138

138

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

Our sailors remain who they were before; Catholicism was never opposed to nationalism.”42 Even Salazar’s closing speech praised “the vibrant faith, calm energy and spirit of sacrifice required by the new times.”43 Although formally inspired by its German and Italian counterparts, the Mocidade was devoted to the Christian education of youth and the “rebirth of the fatherland.” The omnipresence of God was ensured within the Mocidade. The education minister, Carneiro Pacheco, said the “Catholic Church is the truth” and that schools and families ought to be molded by Catholicism.44 At a meeting of the Mocidade in 1938, António Lino Neto, a former leader of the Portuguese Catholic Centre, claimed Portugal emerged from its history “through the grace of God and the tenacious action of its sons.” He went on to criticize social disorder, the utter contempt for human life, and the eugenics practiced by both the Nazi and the Soviet regime. More importantly, he notes that some of the past greatness of the country was now present again.45 The conformity between the Mocidade and the church was guaranteed in the 1940 concordat between the New State and the Vatican, which also stressed the religious duties of the youth organization’s members.46 Rooted in a mythical past, the official patrons of the youth organization were Henry the Navigator and Nuno Álvares Pereira. The former founded the Sagres navigation school that turned Portugal into a vast empire straddling many continents, and the latter was the Portuguese general who defeated the Castilians at the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385. Following his wife’s death, Álvares Pereira became a Carmelite monk. He was beatified by Benedict XV in 1918 and canonized by Benedict XVI in 2009. It is significant that this warrior and man of God was whom Salazar was most often compared with, while Mussolini was compared to Napoleon and Caesar. The 1938 Manual da Mocidade Portuguesa (Portuguese youth manual) contained no appeals to revolutionary action, but it did carry a picture of Álvares Pereira on the front cover of its first edition. Like other fascist-​era regimes, the moral guidelines the young were expected to follow were: honor, order, discipline, obedience, loyalty, faithfulness, and love of the fatherland. However, the book also praises the virtues of work, religion, and the family. Its commandments also call on members to submit to the common good, to the law, and to Christian morality. Love of God was also invoked,47 with members of the Mocidade taking part in commemorations of the appearance of Our Lady of Fátima. Catholicism was also part of the Legion from its inception. One of this group’s main aims was to help restore Portugal to the proper historical path. From the outset, the Legionnaire’s Commitment (Compromisso do Legionário) was clear: “the legionnaire . . . solemnly declares his respect for the nation’s spiritual heritage—​faith, family, Christian morals, authority and Portugal’s freedom.”48 In 1940 an addition was made to this commitment, claiming the better the militia man was, the more Christian his soul and that his principal and most powerful weapon was his Christian soul.49 In 1939, during the ceremony to launch the Legion’s Social Action Services (Serviços de Acção Social), one member of the Legion would stress what he termed the legionnaire’s sacred trilogy:  “the idea of God,” “service to the fatherland,” and “obedience to the leader.”50 The cult of the leader in 1930s Portugal should not be understated: indeed,

 139

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State

139

just before the elections to the National Assembly in 1938, the young naval officer and leader of the Legion, Henrique Tenreiro, said, Next Monday, the election for the National Assembly takes place. The candidates, all chosen in accordance with the thought of the leader and all wholly in line with the doctrine of the National Revolution, deserve the vote of all self-​aware Portuguese, who, by casting their ballot, will consecrate Salazar’s great work. I am sure all legionnaires under my command will attend on Sunday, in full force and in uniform, to cast their vote.51

On the more spiritual dimension, being a legionnaire implied both being a good soldier and having highly developed morals that would enhance the recreation of a spirit that had been lost for decades, but which had been recovered and was being shared by Salazar, who was the incarnation of “the virtues of the race.”52 Catholicism was not only a source of inspiration for legionnaires but also an important presence in their rituals. While 250 men were confirming their oath of loyalty in Viana de Castelo on July 3, 1938, a mass was celebrated and the Legion’s banners were blessed by the priest. That same priest gave a “patriotic” in which he praised the Legion’s efforts promoting order, justice, and discipline. He also claimed the Legion was created at the moment two antagonistic forces—​Christian civilization and barbarism (by which he meant communism) came face to face. He ended his speech by claiming that while the Legion’s history might not be old, it was nevertheless glorious because it was a response to the call to create a group of loyal servants who would defend the country, its faith, and its independence:  “so God will bless you and strengthen you before we are forced to fight.”53 The Legion celebrated Christmas with “acts of Christian benevolence,”54 while the social role of the priest who looked after souls was praised in an article in the Bulletin of the Portuguese Legion (Boletim da Legião Portuguesa). “Who better than the priest in the small and beautiful village where his passage spills goodness and light,” asks the article, “could set down deep into the legionnaire’s soul the teachings that identify the Church’s and legionnaire’s code?”55 God occupies the Legion’s political discourse, daily rituals, and visual representations. On the cover of its journal dated August 14, 1939, the national hero Álvares Pereira was represented as a religious man, with piety being his main trait and virtue.

The Portuguese imperial mission Deeply entangled with Catholicism was the imperial myth.56 The poet Mário Beirão claimed, “the Portugal that sings is the one that extends the empire to spread the Christian faith across the world.”57 The discoveries were what the regime used to help overcome “the onslaught of modernity on the traditions of our ancestors.”58 Portugal had not suffered the consequences of the Industrial Revolution; rather, political liberalism was responsible for Portugal’s disconnection from the past, largely as a result of

140

140

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

its anticlericalism. By evoking this past, Salazarism added legitimacy and strength to national identity. It is no wonder that the flag of the House of Aviz, the royal dynasty that promoted the maritime adventure, was considered by the regime to be “the flag of eternal Portugal.”59 It was the empire that gave Portuguese nationalism its exclusionist nature.60 The Portuguese colonies were evidence of Portuguese greatness, “living symbols of the nation’s sacred legacy.”61 The cult of civic virtues led to the resurrection of the discoveries. Now, claimed the Legion’s newspaper in 1939, Portugal can pursue its greater vocation and historic destiny: the task of a nation of discoverers, that is to say, to engage in the nation’s mission to “civilize” its colonial subjects.62 Portugal would be able perform this “duty” because, unlike the case of Italy, the Portuguese empire existed and the regime needed only to preserve the status quo.63 In Portugal there was no need to change the nature of men, because the Portuguese new man emerged during the fifteenth-​century age of discoveries.

Against liberalism and democracy According to one member of the UN, demo-​liberalism would have untied “the strong knot of the ancestral spirit that lies dormant in organic creations.”64 The breakdown caused by the individualism and agnosticism of the previous republican regime had to be fought.65 Liberalism had wounded the family: the state’s duty was to get involved in the education of children until liberalism was destroyed. To this end, the state was present in both the school and the youth movement. By agreeing to share educational responsibilities with the schools and families, the totalitarian concept some scholars attribute to the youth organization does not seem to have any basis. While the fascist utopia was based on the myth of the Roman Empire, the Portuguese regime’s “golden age” was more recent. Liberalism was simply a parenthesis in history, following which “We, the members of the Legion, have awakened from the horrible and bloody dream in which we lived for some years.”66 The Portuguese regime wanted to eliminate the legacy of the constitutional monarchy of 1832 to 1910 and the First Republic of 1910 to 1926.67 Once continuity had been restored, there would be no need for a “new man” to replace the one who had been celebrated by Camões: the man who four centuries before was the first to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.68

Salazar’s new man and woman Fascism longed for an anthropological revolution that would create a new man rooted in the spirit of ancient Rome.69 The need for a “new people” was mentioned within the New State; however, this renewal was a matter of their “moral principles, religion and work.”70 According to the New State, this “new people” should within legionary devotion, to display patriotism and a willingness to sacrifice everything for the common good. Within military exercises to strengthen the body and to shape the soul following the Portuguese model, always ready to

 141

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State

141

take up arms without abandoning the plough or leaving the workshop. While showing obedience to our leaders, to become the practical demonstration of the value of hierarchy and discipline that determines the crucial order of the nation’s existence.71

Carneiro Pacheco claimed the emergence of a new order (ordem nova) would require a new mentality,72 alongside the increased “virility” and “sense of belonging to the fatherland.”73 The body should imitate the soul: “the ideal body is one of virtue and decency, of obedience and discipline, of sobriety and austerity, of hygiene and strength. A body dedicated to God, the fatherland, family and work.”74 In 1939, Francisco Leite Pinto, who was responsible for the Mocidade’s propaganda, claimed, “the Mocidade does not seek to select the strongest; rather, it seeks to provide physical education for normal, sub-​normal and even weak boys.”75 Unlike fascists, for whom the idealized new man was the citizen–​soldier who was also a farmer,76 what was at stake in Portugal was “the portrait of a tender country” populated by “farmer aesthetes” in order to convey the vision of “a uniquely peaceful and enchanting nation”77 that its inhabitants and those viewing from the outside should believe in. Moral education, the cult of civic virtues, and moderate physical activity were necessary as a means of reinforcing Portuguese nationalism. But the principles associated with the Apollonian beauty of fascist regimes had no place in the Portuguese New State, which was not interested in this pagan cult.78 Therefore, competitive sport was banned in the New State, where it was considered responsible for “foreign deformation” and “moral corruption,” and for encouraging individualism.79 As regards women, they were almost entirely excluded from activities requiring strength. The rules of the girl’s youth movement forbid anything that could offend a woman’s delicate nature. Instead, women were encouraged to practice breathing exercises that would aid in their natural mission:  giving birth.80 To this extend, gender inequality—​backed by the Catholic religion—​was legitimized: the husband and father was head of the family upon whom the woman depended while being responsible for looking after the home and children: We should not hope for the world of tomorrow and be disconsolate with our time. If we were to awake a century from now, who knows whether what happened with “the man who slept 100 years” would happen again? Live happily in our society and our time, take advantage of progress that is good, while also acknowledging the value of work that is a sacrifice but which gives us joy! In the life of event the sweetest woman, consolation would be missing when progress exempts her from the dedicate love she provides in service of the family. Is there an affectionate and tender love more real than the one that seeks to become pleasant and helpful?81

In the same vein, a member of the Legion’s woman’s section explained how women were expected to behave:  “The Legion was created to defend Christian civilization, the integrity of our homeland, the family, women’s honor and dignity.” Women

142

142

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

legionnaires were constrained by their own nature:  in the event of war they would work in hospitals as nurses, seamstresses, cooks, and so on. The peace in Portugal was praised: the country had been blessed by God and defended by Our Lady of Fátima.82 During peacetime, the women would take care of the family, and when she did not have a family of her own she should help raise the expectations of poor families by heating their cold homes and bringing joy to their misery. In the New State, women were socially subjugated to men.

Conclusion Here we have argued that the ideology and political discourse promoted by the New State were impregnated with traditionalist values and Catholic morals. Through them, men would be reborn and the pernicious character of the previous demo-​liberal regimes purged. The regime’s indoctrination apparatus was certainly new, but not the doctrines themselves. If the New State of 1932 to 1974 drew upon a variety of right-​ wing ideological elements—​ranging from conservative Catholics organized around the Catholic party to the radical right and fascism—​the conservative Catholic sector, to which Salazar belonged, was dominant.83 This proved an obstacle to the emergence of a new man similar to that idealized within fascism. While it did have some expression in Portugal during the 1930s, fascism was soon sidelined by the regime’s effective indoctrination apparatus. In the end, instead of a militarized fascist new man looking to the future, the New State’s ideal man was a God-​fearing middle-​aged man who was happy with his lot in society. This obedient, predictable, and family man was also a nationalist who extended his love for the fatherland to reach the overseas territories. He also had adjusted to the new, harmonious, corporatist political order. Indeed, the Salazarist “official” idea of society was “organic” and deployed every instrument of ideological and social control, including the elite, the state, and the Catholic Church, in order to make that vision a reality. As the regime’s elite remarked, “Corporatism does not seek to create a new man, it only wishes to find the everyman.”84

Notes 1 Mircea Eliade, Salazar și Revoluția în Portugalia (Bucharest: Editura Gorjan: 1942), 3. 2 See Emilio Gentile, Il Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione (Roma-​Bari: Laterza, 2001). 3 See Fernando Rosas, “Le Salazarisme et L’homme nouveau: Essai sur L’État nouveau et la question du totalitarisme dans les années trente et quarante,” in L’Homme nouveau dans L’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945), ed. Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 107; António Costa Pinto, “ ‘L’homme nouveau’ salazariste: Élites et centres de socialisation politique dans l’État nouveau portugais,” in Matard-​Bonucci and Milza, L’Homme nouveau dans L’Europe fasciste, 123. 4 See António Costa Pinto, ed., Contemporary Portugal (New York: SSM-​Columbia University Press, 2011). 5 See António Costa Pinto, The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascism in Interwar Europe (New York: SSM-​Columbia University Press, 2000).

 143

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State

143

6 See José Barreto, “António Ferro: Modernism and Politics,” in Portuguese Modernisms: Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro (London: Legenda, 2011), 135–​54; Ernesto Castro Leal, António Ferro: Espaço político e imaginário social (1918–​32) (Lisbon: Cosmo, 1994); Margarida Acciaiuoli, A Vertigem da Palavra: Retorica, Politica e Propaganda no Estado Novo (Lisbon: Bizâncio, 2013); Jorge Ramos do Ó, Os anos de Ferro: O dispositivo cultural nos anos da ‘Politica do Espirito’ (Lisbon: Estampa, 1999); Goffredo Adinolfi, “L’uomo che costruì il consenso al regime di Salazar: L’itinerario politico di Antonio Ferro dal futurismo al salazarismo,” Nuova Storia Contemporanea, no. 4 (2007): 61–​75. 7 António F. Carneiro Pacheco, “O Estado Novo e a União Nacional,” in Três discursos (Lisbon: [n.d.], 1934), 20. 8 See Luís Nuno Rodrigues, A Legião Portuguesa: A Milícia do Estado Novo. 1936–​1944, Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1996. 9 Comícios anti-​comunistas, (1936) [Film], Portugal: Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional; SPN. 10 Pacheco, “O Estado Novo e a União Nacional,” 11. 11 Maria Inês Queiroz, “A Mocidade Portuguesa na ‘Era dos Fascismos,’ O Enquadramento da Juventude no Estado Novo (1936–​1945)” (MA diss., Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, 2008). 12 Nobre Guedes, Algumas Palavras sobre a Mocidade Portuguesa (Lisbon: Mocidade Portuguesa, 1937). 13 Arlindo M. Caldeira, “Heróis e vilões na mitologia salazarista,” Penélope no. 15 (1995): 121–​39. 14 Organized to celebrate eight centuries of nationhood and three centuries of the liberation of the Spanish rule. 15 Ellen W. Sapega, Consensus and Debate in Salazar’s Portugal: Visual and Literary Negotiations of the National Text, 1933–​1948 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 36. 16 Ibid., 41. 17 The Portuguese youth organisation was created by the Decree-​Law 26.611 on May 19, 1936. 18 Cit. in João Ameal, “Nova Jornada,” Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 2, no. 21 (1939): 4. 19 Artur Águedo de Oliveira, A União Nacional como direcção política única (Lisbon: União Nacional, 1938), 71. 20 Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Boulder, CO: Praeger: 2003), 7. 21 Acção Escolar Vanguarda, Acção Escolar Vanguarda: Discursos da sessão inaugural e outros documentos (Lisbon: Editorial Vanguarda, 1934). 22 António Oliveira Salazar, preface to A. António Ferro, “Salazar o Homem e a sua Obra,” in Entrevistas de António Ferro a Salazar (Lisbon: Pareceria A. M. Pereira, 2003), 246. 23 António Costa Pinto, “ ‘Caos” and ‘Order’: Preto, Salazar and Charismatic Appeal in Inter-​war Portugal,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7, no. 2 (2007): 203–​14. 24 António Carneiro Pacheco, “O Estado Novo e a União Nacional,” 9. 25 António Ferro, “A Vibrante oração de António Ferro,” Avante, February 3, 1934, 6. 26 “Assim falou Mussolini . . .,” Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 3, no. 30 (February 1940), 310.

144

144

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

27 Rita Almeida de Carvalho, “Interwar Dictatorships, the Catholic Church and Concordats: The Portuguese New State in a Comparative Perspective,” Contemporary European History 25, no. 1 (2016): 37–​55. See also Rita Almeida de Carvalho, A Concordata de Salazar (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2013), 476–​8. 28 António Oliveira Salazar, cit. in António Ferro, “A Ditadura e o seu contacto com a Nação—​3ª Entrevista,” Entrevistas de António Ferro a Salazar (Lisbon: Pareceria A. M. Pereira, 2003): 49–​50. 29 As regards the 1933 Constitution as well the 1940 concordat signed with the Holy See, Salazar publicly assumed that he always preferred to act with prudence. Rita Almeida de Carvalho, “Interwar Dictatorships, the Catholic Church and Concordats,” 37–​55. 30 João Ameal, “Panorama do nacionalismo português,” [1932], in Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, “Espólio João Ameal,” E37/​6132. 31 Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, 82. 32 Lemos Solta, “Discurso do Director da Sala Salazar, o aluno da universidade, Lemos Solta,” in A Universidade na Revolução (Lisbon: União Nacional, 1941), 19. 33 Carlos de Vasconcelos, O Dinamismo do Estado Novo: Discurso proferido na sessão solene de inauguração do edifício da União Nacional de Macau, pelo vogal da Comissão Executiva, Carlos Vasconcelos (Macau: União Nacional, [1940]), 3. 34 Lemos Solta, “Discurso do Director da Sala Salazar,” 55. 35 Daniel Melo, O essencial sobre a cultura popular no Estado Novo (Coimbra: Angelus Novus: 2010), 18. 36 António Oliveira Salazar, “A Embaixada da Colónia Portuguesa no Brasil e a nossa Política Externa,” in Discursos e Notas Políticas. II. 1935–​1937, 2nd ed. (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1945), 276–​7. 37 António Figueirinhas, Livro de Leitura para a Primeira Classe (Porto: Ed. Educação Nacional, 1936). 38 Melo, O essencial sobre a cultura popular no Estado Novo, 74. 39 Vera Marques Alves, Arte Popular e Nação no Estado Novo: A Política Folclorista do Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2013), 108–​9. 40 Who would soon afterward become a member of the Portuguese Assembleia Nacional. 41 Cortês Pinto, “Pátria Crista: Alocução proferida na Igreja de S. Domingos,” in I Congresso da União Nacional, vol. 1 (Lisbon: União Nacional, 1935), 18–​22. 42 António Correia de Oliveira, “Patria Nostra: O Sereno Escultor/​da Imagem Nova sobre a Velha Traça . . .,” I Congresso da União Nacional, vol. 1 (Lisbon: União Nacional, 1935), 11–​16. 43 António Oliveira Salazar, [opening address], in I Congresso da União Nacional, vol. 1 (Lisbon: União Nacional, 1935), 139–​42. 44 António F. Carneiro Pacheco, Discurso proferido por sua Exa. o Ministro da Educação Nacional, Prof. Dr. A. F. Carneiro Pacheco na Sessão de Encerramento (Lisbon: s.d. [Editorial Império], 1939). 45 António Lino Neto, A Restauração de 1640, a Mocidade Portuguesa e o Renascimento da Pátria (Lisbon: s.d. [Imprensa Gráfica Lisbonense],1938). 46 Rita Almeida de Carvalho, A Concordata de Salazar, 399–​402. 47 Alexandre de Morais, Manual da Mocidade Portuguesa (Lisbon: s.n. [Centro Tip. Colonial], 1938), 21–​3. 48 “Discurso de Lumbrales na inauguração dos serviços de Acção Social e Política no antigo Palácio do Grémio Lusitano a 17 de Dezembro de 1937,” in Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 1, no. 1, February 15, 1938, 24.

 145

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State

145

49 J. C. Ferreira, “Função espiritual da Legião Portuguesa,” in Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 3, no. 31, March 1940, 7. 50 “Discurso de Lumbrales na inauguração dos serviços de Acção Social e Política,” 13. 51 Henrique Tenreiro, “Brigada Naval—​Alocução proferida pelo seu comandante . . .,” Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 1, no. 18, December 1, 1938. See Álvaro Garrido, Henrique Tenreiro—​Uma biografia política (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2009). 52 “Discurso de Lumbrales na inauguração dos serviços de Acção Social e Política,” 17. 53 “Em Viana do Castelo a ratificação do compromisso de honra deu ensejo a uma brilhante jornada legionária,” in Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 1, no. 11, July 15, 1938, 11. 54 “Acção Social,” in Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 3, no. 30, February 1940, 8. 55 António de Almeida Figueiredo, “A missão do Padre, do Médico e do Professor na Legião,” in Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 3, no. 29, January 1940, 23. 56 Fernando Catroga, “As ritualizações da história,” in História da História em Portugal (séculos XIX–​XX), ed. Luís Reis Torgal (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 1998), 226–​304; Ernesto Castro Leal, Nação e nacionalismos: a Cruzada Nacional D. Nuno Alvares Pereira e as origens do Estado Novo (1918–​1938) (Lisbon: Editora Cosmos, 1999). 57 Mário Beirão, “Alto Glorioso Emblema,” in Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 3, no. 32, April 1940, 3. 58 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (London/​New York: Routledge, 1998), 97. 59 João Ameal, “Á sombra da bandeira de Aviz,” in Boletim Legião Portuguesa 1, no. 15, August 1938. 60 See Sérgio Campos Matos, Consciência Histórica e Nacionalismo (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2008). 61 Sapega, Consensus and Debate, 118. 62 See António O. Fragoso Carmona, “O Chefe do Estado fala ao País,” Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 1, no. 14, September 1938, 4. 63 Pietro Tessatori, “O Homem Novo do Fascismo italiano e do Estado Novo Português,” PhD diss., Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, 2014, 27. 64 Vasconcelos, O Dinamismo do Estado Novo, 3. 65 Ibid., 8. 66 Ary dos Santos, “Exortação à Mocidade Portuguesa,” Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 3, no. 30, February 1940, 4–​5. 67 António Oliveira Salazar, preface to Ferro, “Salazar o Homem e a sua Obra,” 236. 68 Ocidente, Revista portuguesa de cultura, 1939, 4–​6. 69 Andrea Giardina, “The Fascist Myth of Romanity,” Estudos Avançados 22, no. 62 (2008): 64. 70 Tomaz Dias, “Discurso do Director da Faculdade de Engenharia, Prof. Doutor Tomaz Dias,” in A Universidade na Revolução (Lisbon: União Nacional, 1941), 53. 71 António Oliveira Salazar, “Palavras de Ordem para o Ano XIV,” Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 2, no. 22, June 1939, 12–​13. 72 Pacheco “O Estado Novo e a União Nacional,” 16. 73 Ibid., 9–​10. 74 Vítor Sérgio Ferreira, “Modas e modos: a privatização do corpo no espaço público português,” in História da Vida Privada em Portugal, Os nossos Dias, ed. Ana Nunes de Almeida (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2011), 244. 75 Speech given by Francisco Leite Pinto at the First Congress of the Mocidade Portuguesa [Portuguese Youth], May 22, 1939, cit. in Queiroz, “A Mocidade Portuguesa,” 98.

146

146

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

76 Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, 88–​9. 77 Alves, Arte Popular e Nação no Estado Novo, 25. 78 Ferreira, “Modas e modos: a privatização do corpo no espaço público português,” 248. 79 Ibid., 245. 80 See Anne Cova and António Costa Pinto, “Women under Salazar’s Dictatorship,” Portuguese Journal of Social Sciences 1, no. 2 (2002): 129–​46. 81 Menina e Moça, Boletim da Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, [1939]. Cit. in Irene Flunser Pimentel, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (Lisbon: Esfera dos Livros, 2007), 94. 82 Maria de Jesus, “Ser Legionária—​Definições Prévias,” Boletim da Legião Portuguesa 1, no. 5, April 15, 1938: 13. 83 See António Costa Pinto and Maria Inácia Rezola, “Political Catholicism, Crisis of Democracy and Salazar’s New State in Portugal,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 2, no. 8 (2007): 353–​68. 84 J. M. Cortez Pinto, cit. in Herlânder Duarte, Salazar e a Santa Igreja (Lisbon: Nova Arrancada, 1999), 33.

Bibliography Acciaiuoli, Margarida. A Vertigem da Palavra: Retorica, Politica e Propaganda no Estado Novo [Antonio Ferro: The vertigo of the word. Rhetoric, politics and propaganda in the New State]. Lisbon: Bizâncio, 2013. Adinolfi, Goffredo. “L’uomo che costruì il consenso al regime di Salazar: L’itinerario politico di Antonio Ferro dal futurismo al salazarismo,” [The man that built the consensos in Salazar’s regime: The political path of António Ferro from futurismo to salazarismo] Nuova Storia Contemporanea [New Contemporary History], no. 4 (2007): 61–​75. Alves, Vera Marques. Arte Popular e Nação no Estado Novo: A Política Folclorista do Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional [Popular art and nation in the New State. The Folklore policy of the Secretariat of National Propaganda]. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2013. Barreto, José. “António Ferro: Modernism and Politics.” In Portuguese Modernisms: Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts. Edited by Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro, 135–​54. London: Legenda, 2011. Caldeira, Arlindo Manuel. “Heróis e vilões na mitologia salazarista,” [Heroes and villains in Salazar mythology] Penélope, no. 15 (1995): 121–​39. Carvalho, Rita Almeida de. A Concordata de Salazar [Salazar’s Concordat – Portugal and the Holy See]. Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2013. Carvalho, Rita Almeida de. “Interwar Dictatorships, the Catholic Church and Concordats: The Portuguese New State in a Comparative Perspective,” Contemporary European History 1, no. 25 (2016): 37–​55. Catroga, Fernando. “As ritualizações da história.” [Ritualizations of history] In História da História em Portugal (séculos XIX-​XX) [The History of History (XIX-XX centuries)]. Edited by Luís Reis Torgal, 547–​671. Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 1998. Cova, Anne, and Pinto, António Costa. “Women under Salazar’s Dictatorship,” Portuguese Journal of Social Sciences 1, no. 2 (2002): 129–​46. Eliade, Mircea. Salazar și Revoluția în Portugalia [Salazar and the Revolution in Portugal]. Bucharest: Editura Gorjan, 1942

 147

The “Everyman” of the Portuguese New State

147

Ferreira, Vítor Sérgio. “Modas e modos: a privatização do corpo no espaço público português.” [Fashions and modes: The privatization of the body in the Portuguese public space] In História da Vida Privada em Portugal, Os nossos Dias [History of private life in Portugal]. Edited by Ana Nunes de Almeida, 242–​76. Lisbon: Temas e Debates: 2011. Garrido, Álvaro. Henrique Tenreiro—​Uma biografia política [Henrique Tenreiro – A political biography]. Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2009. Gentile, Emilio. Il Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione [Fascism: History and interpretation], Roma-​Bari: Laterza, 2002. Gentile, Emilio. The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism. Boulder, CO: Praeger: 2003. Giardina, Andrea. “The Fascist Myth of Romanity,” Estudos Avançados 22, no. 62 (2008): 55–​76. Leal, Ernesto Castro. António Ferro: Espaço político e imaginário social (1918–​32) [Antonio Ferro: Political space and social imagery]. Lisbon: Cosmo, 1994. Leal, Ernesto Castro. Nação e nacionalismos: a Cruzada Nacional D. Nuno Alvares Pereira e as origens do Estado Novo (1918–​1938) [Nation and Nationalisms: The D. Nuno Alvares Pereira’s cruzade and the New State’s origins]. Lisbon: Editora Cosmos, 1999. Matos, Sérgio Campos de. Consciência Histórica e Nacionalismo [Historical conscience and nationalism]. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2008. Melo, Daniel. O essencial sobre a cultura popular no Estado Novo [The essentials about popular culture in Estado Novo]. Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2010. Ó, Jorge Ramos do. Os anos de Ferro: O dispositivo cultural nos anos da “Politica do Espirito.” [The António Ferro’s years : Cultural devices in the years of the “Politics of the Spirit”] Lisbon: Estampa, 1999. Pimentel, Irene Flunser. Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina [The Portuguese Femimine youth]. Lisbon: Esfera dos Livros, 2007. Pinto, António Costa, The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascism in Interwar Europe. New York: SSM-​Columbia University Press, 2000. Pinto, António Costa. “ ‘L’homme nouveau’ salazariste: Élites et centres de socialisation politique dans l’État nouveau portugais.” [The Salazarist new man: Elites and centers of political socialization in the Portuguese New State] In L’Homme nouveau dans L’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945) [The new man in the fascist Europe]. Edited by Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza, 109–​23. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Pinto, António Costa. “ ‘Caos’ and ‘Order’: Preto, Salazar and Charismatic Appeal in Inter-​ war Portugal,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 2, no. 7 (2007): 203–​14. Pinto, António Costa, ed. Contemporary Portugal. New York: SSM-​Columbia University Press, 2011. Pinto, António Costa, and Inácia Rezola, Maria. “Political Catholicism, Crisis of Democracy and Salazar’s New State in Portugal,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 2 (2007): 353–​68. Queiroz, Maria Inês, “A Mocidade Portuguesa na ‘Era dos Fascismos,’ O Enquadramento da Juventude no Estado Novo (1936–​1945).” [The Portuguese femimine youth in the fascist era] MA thesis, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, 2008. Rodrigues, Luís Nuno. A Legião Portuguesa: A Milícia do Estado Novo. 1936–​1944 [The Portuguese legion: The New State’s Militia]. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1996. Rosas, Fernando, “Le Salazarisme et L’homme nouveau: Essai sur L’État nouveau et la question du totalitarisme dans les années trente et quarante.” [Salazarism and the new man. Essay on the New State and the question of totalitarianism in Europe during the

148

148

Rita Almeida de Carvalho and António Costa Pinto

thirties and forties] In L’Homme nouveau dans L’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945) [The new man in the fascist Europe]. Edited by Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza, 87–​123. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Sapega, Ellen W. Consensus and Debate in Salazar’s Portugal: Visual and Literary Negotiations of the National Text, 1933–​1948. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism and Modernism. London; New York: Routledge, 1998. Tessadori, Pietro. “O Homem Novo do Fascismo italiano e do Estado Novo Português.” [The New Man of Italian Fascism and the Portuguese New State] PhD diss., Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, 2014.

 149

Part Three

The New Man in Radical Right Regimes beyond Europe

150

 151

7

Peronism: The Consumerist Revolution and the New Argentinean Alberto Spektorowski

Peronism is probably one of the most elusive and least understood political movements in Latin American politics. Long after Juan Perón’s death and after the movement’s political and ideological transformation, most observers would agree that the spirit of Peronism is still a living reality in Argentina’s politics. Several questions have provoked debate on Peronism. Historians and sociologists have discussed whether Peronism was a Latin American version of fascism. This was a pungent debate that dominated historical and sociological discussion until the end of the twentieth century. Yet this was not only a theoretical debate. Since Peronism was and still is a living political force in Argentina, any attempt to relate it to fascism, even under the frame of a theoretical discussion, implied an attempt to delegitimize a strong a popular force of Argentinian society. For historians the dominant question was whether fascism played a role in the genesis of Peronism. This relates not only to whether Juan Perón was a fascist but also to whether fascism can usefully serve as a conceptual framework or as an inspiring force for Peron’s national populist, anti-​imperialist, “third way.” Some historians of fascism outside Europe considered the protofascist “third way” as conceived by intellectuals and ideologues even before the development of the fascist political movement, as an inspiring intellectual force especially for political movements in the non–​European world. French integral nationalists such Maurice Barrés and Charles Maurras or German Conservative revolutionaries, such as Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger, advanced a model of National Socialism that not only fit fascism but that was also at the heart of other movements of national liberation. The idea of nationalist mobilization, vitalism, and a sociopolitical formula that would surpass both liberalism and Marxist socialism was enticing for nationalist leaders in the non–​European world. Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s was not an exception, and it is a case in point that allows us to reflect on how these ideas were introduced in modernist national populist movements. However, fascism included much more than a “third way” between Marxist socialism and liberalism. Fascism produced the image of a heroic new man, and it advanced an aesthetic of violence and sacrifice that set the basis for alternative

152

152

Alberto Spektorowski

view of an antimaterialist path of modernization. Fascism, as noted by Roger Griffin, aims to bring about the total rebirth of the nation from its present decadence.1 The idea of decadence was implicit in fascism, and the new man of the fascist state symbolized the overcoming of a decadent society. The question is whether the fascist new man made an imprint on the image of a new Argentina as propounded by Perón. Did the image of a mobilized and organized fascist society coincide with the aesthetics of a proud, unionized Peronist working class? This is an important question for historical analysis. However, it has become an important political question for contemporary politics. Indeed, in the last ten years Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and even Argentina under Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, advanced a reformulated version of national economic populism, and a confrontational tone against political enemies usually defined as Western imperialism—​one best represented by neoliberal globalization as advanced by the United States. Undoubtedly, Perón’s historical confrontation with Western economic and political liberalism has been resurrected in the last decade and presented as a renewed confrontation of national populism against liberal elites. However, the question is in what sense this confrontation recalls the fascist “imperialism of the poor nations” and of the fascist “third way” against liberal democracy and Marxian socialism. As is widely accepted, the fascist third way was elaborated as a total rebuke to the fundaments of political democracy, especially of its rationalist and materialist underpinnings. Scholars such as Ernesto Laclau, for example, have twisted the debate on populism from its comparison with fascism, and did not accept the idea that populism is a threat to democracy. Laclau claimed that populism is an essential component of democracy. The basis of populism lies in the creation of empty signifiers—​especially words and ideas that suggest a universal idea of justice and inclusion, an ideal that is quite distant from what could be defined as the exclusionist and vitalist fascist community.2 Other scholars, however, cast doubts on Laclau’s legitimization of populism and tend to stress the fascist content of the Peronist “third way,” or at least its fascist tendencies. As is noted by Federico Finchelstein, Perón should not be defined as a fascist. Nonetheless, the Peronist phenomenon, especially in terms of its cultural socioeconomic and ideological genealogies, rethought the fascist legacy while not denying it entirely.3 Indeed, it is clear that fascism, especially its syndicalist corporatist side, inspired Perón. It is clear as well that the upsurge of Peronism, similar to fascism, was preceded by a vast ideological development: an Argentinian intellectual “conservative revolution” that enhanced antiliberal and antidemocratic values. Still, the question is to what extent Perón responded positively to that intellectual current or, the other way around, to what extent Peronism itself signaled a break with the conservative tradition. In response, there is widespread consensus that Peronism represented a synthesis of populist authoritarianism and economic nationalism, which Perón and his wife Evita succeeded in turning into a collective identity: the “Patria Peronista,” representing what was national and resistant to Western models of modernization. The new Argentinian man and woman belonged to an organized community, which confronted the evil interests of Western imperialism and its socioeconomic agents. However, it is

 153

Peronism

153

not clear whether this type of third way and national populism can be included within the frame of an ideological conservative revolution against Marxist and liberal materialist decadence. Indeed, the image of the new society and the new man of Peronism was, conceptually, far removed from the new Prometheus spearheaded by fascism in order to raise up a postmaterialist civilization. If there is one element where the Peronist legacy is relevant, it is that the very idea of economic and social redistribution is related to the idea of the national community, that is, a mythical demos whose foes are foreign interests. Although the debate in Argentina centered on two different concepts of nation—​the one promoted by liberal or socialist political elites, and the other by nationalists of the right and the left—​still the idea of the Patria Peronista was not related to any mythical, nonmaterialist new man, but to a very materialist, consumerist nationalism. The national community was hardly a violent civilizational alternative to liberal cosmopolitanism, but instead was a materialist, consumerist, and productive community, something that defied liberals, conservative Catholics, and fascists alike.

Peronism as fascism? Debates over the legacy of Peronism have been ongoing for years. Those considering Peronism as fascism can be divided into those who see in it an Argentinian version of fascism,4 and those who hold that, if the concept of fascism is used to include Peronism, then it should be through a broader and more open definition. For Tulio Halperin Donghi, despite some common features, Peronism and fascism remain different political experiences.5 While fascism was an experience that at first glance came to reinforce the current political domination, through the crash of independent working–​class organizations, Peronism nevertheless appeared more as a social revolution, insofar as new classes took predominance. Several scholars had overtly resisted the classification of Peronism as fascism. From an ideological and phenomenological perspective, scholars such as Christian Buchrucker have suggested that the Catholic nationalist ideology emerging in Argentina during the 1930s was an ideological construction that totally differed from the populist ideology of Peronism. From a sociopolitical perspective Daniel James focuses upon the socioeconomic differences between the Peronist phenomenon and fascism.6 Peronism, according to James, set the basis for the expansion of social citizenship—​ something that fascism never did. These later explanations coincide with what left–​ wing nationalists, some of them of Peronist extraction, had since the 1960s advanced to explain the popular anti–​imperialist and socialist communitarian side of Peronism. Authors like Hernandez Arregui or Abelardo Ramos placed special emphasis upon the left–​populist intellectuals supporting Perón, especially those coming from FORJA. The anti–​imperialist wing of the Radical Party (FORJA) radicalized the populist trend embedded in Yrigoyenismo (derived from Hipólito Yrigoyen, leader of the Radical Party). Motivated by economic nationalism and by the quest for neutrality in the Second World War FORJA advocated a politically and economically emancipated Argentina.

154

154

Alberto Spektorowski

The important point, however, is that they developed the idea that the nation’s enemies were the liberal oligarchy and its foreign associates, especially the British. Scholars emphasizing the left–​social aspects of Peronism stressed that it was successful in offering real, “materialist” solutions to the working class. Peronist corporatism, in this sense, may be portrayed as progressive in that it was capable in creating social citizenship. Yet other scholars observed, however, that the populist side of FORJA was not so alienated from the “republican” side of right–​wing nationalism appearing with Félix de Uriburu’s coup d’état of 1930, which initiated a long period of right–​wing fascistization in the Argentinian public sphere. For example, scholars such as Enrique Zuleta Alvarez remark that the conservative right in 1930s Argentina was divided between republicans and Catholic reactionaries.7 The former, best represented by the brothers Rodolfo and Julio Irazusta, together with Ernesto Palacios represented that branch of the nationalist right that corresponded to the nationalist left of FORJA. The question for historians then becomes, can that synthesis of the Republican right and the nationalist left be defined as a fascist or antifascist? In more senses than one, it is suggested here that this synthesis underpins the Peronist ideology, and it is indeed very close to the nationalist syndicalist face of fascism.8 The ideological roots of Peronism thus are rooted in left populist and right–​ wing authoritarian sources. In other words, it should not be forgotten that fascism displayed two faces:  the anti–​Marxist syndicalist left, and the integral nationalist right.9 Moreover, the most advanced face of fascism appears in the national syndicalist, populist side of Argentinian nationalism—​one that would later be projected onto Peronism. In basic terms, Perón—​similar to his army colleagues of the GOU, who took power in 1943—​was a fervent admirer of European fascism. He paid especial attention to fascist success in putting the economy at the service of the nation. In particular, he admired the fascist twist of the Marxist dichotomy bourgeoisie–​proletariat into productive forces against “parasitical” capitalism. However, although Perón aspired to emulate this type of productionist conception of fascism, the socioeconomic conditions in Argentina were different from Italy. Argentina was a rich country, and its wealth could be used for distribution and social policies. That means that, for Perón, an economic equilibrium that blended productionist policies based in “national interest” with populist social justice and “consumerism” was certainly biased toward the latter. At root, however, the idea of social justice could not be interpreted as a tendency leading to the autonomy of the working class. Far from it. In fact, Perón strove to identify the productive forces of the nation with his syndicalist state. Social welfare was to be the basis for the transformation of Argentina from a dependent to an emancipated state. The most compelling claim sustaining claims of difference between fascism and Peronism in this light would be the attitude of the working class. While Gino Germani claimed that the new industrial nonunionized workers constituted an “available mass” and supported Perón, the old guard of unionized workers rejected the new type mass movement. In opposition scholars including Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Portantiero, however, considered the role of the old unified syndicalism as important in the origins of Peronism.10 In their mind there was some rationality in the workers’

 155

Peronism

155

support for Perón, manifested in their decision to exchange their political liberty for higher salaries. As Jeremy Adelman has claimed, workers had been negotiating pragmatically with Perón at different stages of his rule.11 The endgame, however, was that workers gave up their political autonomy in exchange for social welfare—​fewer political rights for more social rights within the coverture of the Peronist community. Workers, thus, became authentic first–​class “social” citizens rather than “political’ citizens. What is clear thus far, then, is that regardless of its intellectual sources, as a social phenomenon Peronism could neither be classified as merely a reactionary nationalist phenomenon nor as a forward-​ looking, fascist productionist one, in which workers would hardly benefit from the productionist system. The idea of social benefits was embedded in the Peronist national populist “repertoire.”

Ideological origins: Between Catholicism and anti-​imperialist nationalism The point above coincides with claims made by several scholars, suggesting that Peronism was devoid of intellectual depth. Perón used to call the nationalist intellectuals of the 1930s espianta votos, noting that he did not need them since they did not attract voters. Despite Perón’s utterance, however, in reality it is impossible to understand the Peronist phenomenon without both the Catholic corporatist tradition on the one hand, and the national populist tradition on the other. Scholars may disagree with the attempt to synthesize these two clearly opposing traditions. After all, the corporatist tradition initiated by the intellectuals of La Nueva Republica, or of intellectuals such as Leopoldo Lugones—​which set the basis for Uriburu’s military “coup d’état” of 1930—​basically overthrew the constitutional government of Yrigoyen (considered the first populist regime in Argentina). For this reason, advocates of Peronism as a populist democratic tradition suggest that it is rooted in Yrigoyenismo first, and thereafter in the left nationalist intellectuals of FORJA (the anti-​imperialist group that spring up from Yrigoyenismo), with hardly any roots in the Integralist Catholic right. Yet there can be no doubt that Peronist ideology, defined as Justicialismo, had deep roots in the corporatist thinking of the church. Now, this does not mean that Catholic Integralists displayed any sympathy for Peronism brand of populism. In more sense than one, Peronism represented a perversion of the authoritarian corporatism of the church, so with fascism. For Argentine Catholic Integralists, both Peronism and fascism represented a direct attack on liberalism, and that was a blessing in itself. At the same time both fascism and Peronism presented a perverse version of the church’s teachings. This was especially related to the “new man,” which the secular, totalitarian ideologies of fascism and Bolshevism intended to craft. Catholics were well aware that Peronist populist consumerism and the fascist Supermensch represented a contradiction to the austerity, discipline, and religiosity stressed by the church. In any case, the “fascist debate” was not absent in Argentina, neither from the Catholic Integralists nor from those figures who supported Peronism. Although Catholic intellectuals like Cesar Pico believed that

156

156

Alberto Spektorowski

fascism represented the political counterpart to spiritual Catholicism, in reality most Argentinean Integral Catholics looked to Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortes rather than to Benito Mussolini. In more senses than one, their interpretation of de Maistre differed from that of Carl Schmitt, who saw in those Catholic thinkers the basis for his approach to the political act of nonmoral decisionism. Argentina’s Catholics, like Father Meinvielle and Leonardo Castellani, instead considered only “normative decisionism,” that is, the cross and the sword. They believed that the church should legitimize the actions of the government. Accordingly, that assumption put them in direct confrontation with fascism and Peronism. For them, a Catholic type of corporatism rejected both liberalism and communist egalitarianism but also needed to reject fascist mobilization and secular corporatism. The crux of this line was that democratic politics was not well suited for practicing Catholics in Argentina. Democracy, in their mind, was the creation of a total rebellion against the Catholic natural order12 Instead, Argentinean Catholics often aspired for an authoritarian restoration, through the synthesis of the church and the sword.13 They had thus been very influential in establishing an ideological background to delegitimize the project of liberal modernization as previously conceived by Argentine political elites. At the same time, however, they could hardly cope with the idea of popular national sovereignty. Traditional political principles, rather, “should be opposed to the democratic doctrinarism represented by Rousseau.”14 Their ideal political model was the medieval one, a “cultural zenith in which a deep spirituality prevailed . . . and where hierarchies were respected.15 In the Middle Ages, thus, the church produced the miracle of harmonizing the “moral and the political realm.”16 The problem for most of these Catholics was what that, in the real world of politics, the only authentic political movement offering a successful resistance to liberalism was fascism. Did fascist modernism therefore represent the new Middle Ages? As noted by the priest Gustavo Franceschi, “there is no possible reconciliation between totalitarianism and Catholicism.”17 His assumption echoed the earlier attitude of the Vatican toward Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Yet at the same time, Pius XI sought concordats with the new totalitarian regimes. Although the idea was to preserve the autonomy of the church organizations, it is clear that Catholics could not be totally neutral in the conflict between liberalism and fascist totalitarianism. Indeed, the possibility of defending liberal democracy against fascism was unthinkable. In 1935, Cesar Pico, a bacteriologist by profession and a lecturer in metaphysics at Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires, who was also one of the most influential figures in the Cursos de Cultura Católica, synthesized previous discussions on the relationship between Catholicism and the new revolutionary totalitarianism. In his “Letter to Jacques Maritain,” Pico interpreted the rise of European fascism as a means of coping with the secularist liberal threat to Christian society. Pico again tried to justify fascism, which, according to him, and in spite of the message from Rome, was not necessarily totalitarian and was actually at the service of Christianity: Fascism . . . appears as a reaction against the calamities ascribed to liberal democracy, socialism and capitalism; a reaction which in its origin is instinctive and that

 157

Peronism

157

searches a doctrine to justify it. In fact, at times that doctrine had been wrongly formulated and supported a totalitarian posture . . . [However] neither Oliveira Salazar, nor Dollfuss, . . . nor the nationalist movements in Spain and in Latin America could be classified as totalitarians. In those areas where the influence of Catholicism had been more evident, the noted reaction had been conciliated with a traditional conception of law.18

The result of Pico’s convictions was the notion that a new type of fascistized Catholic offered a real option for Argentina’s Catholics as the solution to the problems posed by political modernization. Several intellectuals continued this attempt to elaborate a sociological classification of “clerical fascism,” which, in more than one way, defied an accurate definition of fascism. Even more than fascism, it was the interwar Spanish revolution’s political phenomena that excited Argentine Catholics. The Spanish revolution, besides possessing all the characteristics of a fascist movement, was “truly metaphysical and is without a doubt a complete revolution.”19 At the time, Francisco Franco’s triumph in the Spanish Civil War confirmed the possibilities of political success for an authentic sort of Hispanic conservative revolution, wherein Falangismo was seen as the real expression of a holy war. Rather than fascism they dreamed with Franco, in whose hands God put the “sword of war”—​which was full of blood because Spain’s salvation demanded a bloody war, a war demanded by Christ. The “Reconquista” implied for Argentinian rightists not only an expulsion of materialist liberalism and communism but also the opposition to any kind of paganism or etatism.20 The example of the Spanish Falange served to resolve the conflict between political fascism and Catholic spiritualism. In their own way, Falangismo and Franco were creating a different totalitarianism:  “This is the fascism that was underway in Spain, with the blood of the martyrs (that is, the fascism) . . . that we belong to.”21 The idea, then, was to look to Franco’s Spain for the animating spirit of Argentina’s national idea. While Argentina’s modernizing elites of 1836 attempted to shape a national identity in contrast to the Spanish communitarian spirit, this was, by contrast, a moment to restore the common spirit unifying Spain and its ex-​colonies. The idea of “Hispanidad,” underscored by the Falangist struggle in Spain, was originally coined by M. Menéndez y Pelayo and propagated in Argentina by Ramiro de Maeztu in his book Defensa de la Hispanidad.22 The basic point is that the cultural values of “Hispanidad” and Catholicism are supranational values, while nationalism and fascism were a step toward this supranational feeling of Hispanismo. In many Argentinian minds, therefore, Catholicism could provide fascism with a doctrine, while fascism would provide Catholicism with a new spirit of political action. From the theoretical point of view, despite the attempt to evangelize fascism, the differences were clearly marked. As noted by Leonardo Castellani, “the liberals’ concept of liberty and liberal étatism are two equivalent phenomena as Donoso and Maulnier have proved.”23 His same vision was supported by Gustavo Franceschi, the editor of Criterio. For him both the Action Française and fascism are etatist.24 At the same time, as Ernesto Palacio noted, Catholicism was an “autonomous political force.”25

158

158

Alberto Spektorowski

Only a Catholic concept of politics could produce a corporatist societal solution that would not plunge into the jaws of state socialism. This entailed a society regulated by a corporatist organization based on a spirit of Christian solidarity.26 The state should simply aid the “corporations, promote their foundation, favor their functioning, and sanction their statutes and convictions.”27 This Catholic interpretation of corporatism implied the restitution of the social “liberties” embedded in the Catholic order. However, the main insight was that no popular movement could bring forth political restoration. Indeed, restoration could not be fostered through a plebeian counterrevolution, but only through the army, the only solid agent of the quest for tradition and order. The Catholic intellectuals of la Nueva Republica, who were the ideological mentors of the coup ‘d’état against Yrigoyen’s brand of populism, and who were the ones that inspired the Army, advocated a Christian corporatism as as substitute for popular democracy. The military coup ‘d’état thus, was launched in order to instaurate an authoritarian Christian corporatist system. But what happened afterward? The decade of the 1930s, defined in Argentina as “the infamous decade” due to political corruption and the economic dependency on Great Britain, was the decade when several Catholic integralists began to embrace national populism. That was a time when the economic and social time idea of authoritarian Catholic corporatism would finally join forces with populism. Argentinian nationalists of the right and the left believed that they were setting the ideological basis for a new authoritarian–​ populist movement. The uncertainty is whether Peronism would fulfill those expectations. This, in turn, poses the question of just what topics these two traditions blended. Both traditions rejected Argentina’s liberal elites, and rejected those elites’ interpretation of Argentinian national history. Of special importance was the liberal elites’ construction of Argentina’s political identity, one based upon the bitter struggle against the caudillista tyranny of Juan Manuel de Rosas. For antiliberal activists of both the right and the left, the figure of Rosas represented a struggle for national sovereignty and portrayed the image of the nation vis-​à-​vis the civilized Europeanized elite. In their minds, this put Argentina in a position of dependency upon Western imperialism. This school of thought defended an Axis-​biased type of neutrality during the Second World War, similar to Franco’s Spain. Moreover, both trends advocated a corporatized type of populism led by the national army. There is no question that such antiliberal nationalist intellectuals believed that this trend was associated with a Catholic-​type fascism, and that Peronism could be portrayed as its representative in Argentina—​if only Peronism could be cleaned of its plebeian features. Yet they were to be disappointed. Although the Perón justicialista doctrine relied upon Catholic corporatism, and Perón admired not only the fascist code of labor but also the fascist type of authoritarian mobilization, at the same time, Perón’s tendency was to embrace the plebeian, avoiding any intermediary role for the church. In more sense than one, the Peronist appeal to the plebian was grounded in a very materialist and rationalist view, which also marked his differences with fascism.

 159

Peronism

159

Los descamisados: The creation of a Peronist myth? The fascist idea of the “new man” is well embedded in Georges Sorel’s belle époque revolutionary syndicalism. The latter represented, for Sorel, a new civilization rather than a trade union–​minded organization to negotiate salaries for workers. Sorel’s syndicalism was a revolutionary school from which a new, national, and productivist society—​entailing a postbourgeois and non-​Marxist new civilization—​could rise up. Simply put, the worker and the soldier are the two complementary faces of this new civilization. In this light, the question is whether the Peronist worker, the descamisado, is represented in the new civilizational picture. The descamisado, or “without shirts,” was used as an insult by Argentinian elites to describe Perón’s followers. However, Perón and his wife Eva reclaimed the term with a new sense of pride. These were the Argentinean sansculottes, who demanded Perón’s release from prison in the afternoon of 1945 after his jailing by a military junta. While waiting for Perón on that “hot day” of October 17, many men in the crowd removed their shirts—​hence the term “shirtless.” That mobilization—​whereby workers from the poor neighborhoods of Avellaneda converged onto the streets demanding the release of Perón—​established the myth of Peronism as a worker’s movement. Perón not only was immediately released but also the “military junta” surrendered to the demand for elections that would bring Perón to power in a democratic vote. Perón’s formula for the subsequent elections, and the formula for his opponents, was a crystal-​clear representation of how Argentina’s politics would divide along lines that symbolized a real social confrontation: not as one of right against left but of nationalists of the right and the left against liberals of right and left extraction The former group was composed of populists, nationalists, and syndicalists. The intransigent Yrigoyenist wing of the Radical Party “represented the people,” a new popular mass rising up in name of the “nation.” The latter group of liberals were represented by a coalition of the old institutionalized parties such as the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the liberal side of the Yrigiyenista Radical Party (the “Alvearistas”). These disparate groups represented liberal democracy, either presented as a form of democratic socialism or as liberalism. They largely portrayed what Western democracies wanted Argentina to look like. Worst of all, they received the blessings of the American ambassador in Argentina, Spruille Braden. Perón won these elections. In doing so, one of the reasons was his electoral slogan, “Braden or Perón.” That phrase synthesized the confrontation that best suited Perón’s aims:  the Argentinian nation against American imperialism and its domestic enablers. Undoubtedly, the United States contributed to Perón’s strategy by publishing the Blue Book, which attempted to prove Perón’s complicity with the Nazis and with Fascist Italy. Yet this was hardly news anyway. Indeed, Perón had always demonstrated his admiration for the labor policies of fascism, from the years when he was a military attaché in Fascist Italy. As noted above, Perón was attracted by the idea that the working class could be separated from the communists and the socialists. More importantly, Perón became aware that the working class could act as a “personal” source of power. From the moment that Perón—​and

160

160

Alberto Spektorowski

especially Evita—​led the military regime’s Departamento Nacional del Trabajo, he understood the tremendous political power that could be harnessed through direct contact with the workers. Under the advice of his wife, Perón proceed to reduce housing rents for workers, and to that end he added a marked increased of salaries, especially for poorly paid workers. One of the interesting results of that policy was that Perón transformed a minor office within the Interior Ministry, the Secretaria de Trabajo y Prevision, into the pearl of the new postwar regime. Thereafter, direct contact with workers was emphasized, ultimately becoming one of the clearest features of the regime. Perón attempted to reach union leaders, met with syndicalists from the old CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo de la República Argentina ), while showing a predisposition to intervene in their favor over conflicts with the employers. A  case in point was his intervention in favor of the Frigorifico Berisso workers in La Plata. He pushed forward to achieve collective agreements with the workers, while also using the good offices of autonomous unions such as that led by Cipriano Reyes. Reyes helped Perón insofar as he placed into Perón’s hands the party he founded, the Partido Laborista (a sort of British Labour party). The party supported Perón’s candidacy for the presidency, while at the same time expecting to preserve the autonomous character of the labor movement. Yet as was immediately perceived by Reyes himself, the idea of a free labor movement supporting Perón could not prosper when Peronism began to consolidate as a political movement. Perón’s subsequent policies tended to eliminate freedom of association and exchange. Social and political freedoms were replaced by state-​directed cooperation between state-​manipulated businesses and state-​dominated unions. As a matter of fact, Perón did not hide from Reyes’s intentions, which were clear to all. Decree 156.074 of November 27, 1943, for instance, assigned to Perón the function of taking the necessary measures to increase harmony among the productive forces of the country. The idea was to co-​opt the labor leadership and strip from it all autonomy. As labor secretary in the military junta, Perón had already promoted the Law of Professional Associations, which resembled Mussolini’s labor code. Decree 23.852 of October 1945 eliminated the creation of parallel unions and set the unions’ full legal rights. As such, this new labor structure had the clear intention of co-​opting workers’ leadership. It gave unions legal rights to participate in politics; however, that would be only related to unions that were accepted and recognized by the Labor Secretariat (Article 43). Strikes and lockouts were forbidden. This antiliberal legislation was accompanied in the 1943–​45 period by prolabor legislation, and by state support of unions during the period between 1943 and 1955. Indeed, this period was a major watershed in the labor history of Argentina. In his electoral campaign Perón promoted his labor policies, as expressed in the Syndical Statute (which was already enacted under the military government in 1943). Perón reflected on these ideas in a very simple and concrete way: “I am personally a syndicalist . . . and as such I am anti-​communist, but I believe that labor must be organised on a syndicalist basis.”28 Thus the state shifted the balance between labor and capital in favor of the former, and this action had a noticeable short-​term impact, as the share of labor in national income abruptly increased 8 percent toward the end of the 1940s. The growth of union density during the 1940s, although likely overestimated, was

 161

Peronism

161

impressive. For example, the union density rate in Britain and the United States in 1935 was 25 percent and 7 percent, respectively, and it was 39 percent and 23 percent in 1945, while it was 44 percent and 25 percent in 1955. US union density peaked in 1945, while Britain’s density peaked in 1980 with a rate of 53 percent. Argentina’s rates seem to have stabilized around 45  percent until the early 1990s, when they dipped below 40 percent. Britain’s rates have also decreased since the early 1980s, and were at approximately 40 percent by the early 1990s. Thus, Britain and Argentina showed similar union density rates since the 1940s. This setting provided the architecture for elections of delegates and stewards and a network of bargaining with employers, with vague allusions to coparticipation in management decisions. It also gave unions legal rights in order to take part in politics, providing workers the green light to form the political party that would eventually win the elections in February 1946. Government control of economic and political life was enhanced by the nationalization of key industries and the expulsion of foreign firms and capital. It is true that almost all labor codes and social security laws emphasized corporatist ideas of harmony between labor and capital. However, as noted above, that harmony was based on the idea that the state would recognize unions while not respecting workers’ individual rights.

Consolidating power and creating the new consumerist man The trade-​off of concessions to labor in return for workers’ tentative support eventually paid off for both the working class and for Perón. The next step would be an attempt to consolidate a sort of mobilized patriotic—​and in some sense, totalitarian—​society within the frame of a pseudodemocratic regime. That path was conceived in order to transform Argentina into an autarkic economy that would also promote social justice. Such an enterprise demanded the consolidation of an educative enterprise, which would set the basis of a new productive society. As argued by Eduardo Elena, the role of the state under Peronist rule has, for decades, received little empirical attention. The question is how exactly the state and its closely allied institutions—​what together could more accurately be called the “regime”—​exercised authority.29 To be sure, the Peronist state was more than a welfare state. Clearly the military junta of 1943, in which Perón was one of its main leaders, had already restructured the state. What Juan and Eva Perón added was the centrality of their own personalities to the political structure. As explained by Raanan Rein, second-​class leaders such as Atilio Bramuglua were overshadowed by the cult of personality embedded in Eva and Juan Perón.30 Still more important to stress is that the authoritarian state propounded a totalitarian culture of welfare and consumerism, something that differs greatly from fascism. Mariano Ben Plotkin, for example, analyzes culturalist methods as applied to politics and focuses upon the construction of a Peronist subculture—​one based on partisan myths and rituals in order to ensure political consent and mass mobilization and focuses.31 Other scholars have placed especial emphasis upon what might be termed a “consumerist nationalism.” Social justice and progress were matched to the idea of working-​class people’s potential to consume. This type of consumer citizenship

162

162

Alberto Spektorowski

appears to be one of the central assets in the enterprise of creating Peronism.32 As Natalia Milanesio suggests, Perón wanted both the working-​class and the middle-​class to be an integral part of the consumerist practices. In a very direct way, that trend triggered resentment of the old political and social elites, who perceived that their status was being undermined. Nonetheless, the question is whether the image of middle-​class welfarism differs from the image of the descamisado, which, at first glance, represented the anarchical sansculotte of Peronism. Surely, the descamisado was evocative of Peronism’s “new man.” He was the symbol of the new privileged class in Argentinean society. It is also clear that the descamisado represented the antihero. On the one hand, the aesthetic flavor of descamisado populist aesthetics hardly fit the fascist, Catholic, or Soviet ideals. The later despised the nonorganized spontaneity of the people. Indeed, popular demands and the “aesthetic” of popular demands did not fit the productionist side of fascism. Rather, the question is in what sense it fit the “consumerist nationalism” of Perón. On the other hand, the descamisado was well fitted to a new age of easy spending, buttressed by a political regime able to make the welfare state its most important goal. He was the “sansculotte,” an anarchical plebeian who is domesticated and becomes a “total client” of the corporatist state, which teaches him how to consume. This image of a welfarist consumerism not only differed fundamentally from the fascist new man but also from the image of the organized worker in institutionalized social democratic societies in postwar Europe. The very idea of the social democratic citizen in an institutionalized democracy composed of a progressive working class enjoying both political and social rights was foreign to Peronism. In this light, Peronism did not seek to achieve neither a new man in the fascist sense of the concept nor a democratic citizen as pursued by Europe’s social democracy. The final question is how these welfarist and aesthetic ideals penetrated the Argentinian popular mind. This can be explained through the reforms in the educational system during Perón’s first regime. Reforms in education were considered, first and foremost, to consolidate the idea that Perón and his wife Evita represented the nation itself. Yet, if this might be seen to support the thesis of Peronism as fascism—​or at least as the culminating point of Argentinean nationalist rebellion against the liberal and modernizing elites—​then there is one key point that casts doubts about it. In her work on the politics of education, Monica Rein makes an important contribution in grasping the values promoted by the Peronist regime. Interestingly, Rein argues that the ideals of the regime were liberal and cosmopolitan. The history of Rosas, which embrace the mythical figure of a caudillo, fighting against the Europeanized liberal and modernizing elites, was eradicated from the textbooks. That may sound since the image of Rosas could fit well into the image of the new man: the descamisado. Both were rebellious and anarchical, and both images represented what the liberal elites most hated. Paradoxically, however, while Perón resisted an association with Rosas, the military junta that overthrew Perón in 1955 later did precisely that. It was quick in associating Perón with Rosas. For example, the vice president of the new junta, Isaac Rojas, created a national commission in 1955 to investigate repression under the Peronist regime. He

 163

Peronism

163

remarked that the new commission responded to an “outcry of the Fatherland and the voices of history.” Results of the investigations were subsequently published in a book, whose title (Libro negro de la segunda tirania, or the Black book of the second tyranny) implied that Peronism had to be seen as a repetition of Rosas’s “first” tyranny33 The attempt to link Perón with Rosas was even accepted by the Peronist movement post-​ Peron. That suggests the Peronist movement began to resist the advance of the liberal elites in power after Perón’s overthrew from power. As T.  M. Goebel claims, due to the fact that the “Liberating Revolution,” which overthrew Perón in 1955, had alienated both those nationalist sectors of the left and the right, all of the latter “drew together in opposition to the regime, a revisionist imagery which embrace the figure of Juan Manuel de Rosas. The history of the periodical Palabra Argentina can illustrate the interplay between various processes in which intellectuals, journalists and politicians fostered the identification between Peronism and Rosismo.”34 As also analyzed by Rein, historical revisionism was not part of the educational project of Perón. He did not need it in order to suppress individual liberties and behave in an authoritarian way. Thus, Perón modernized university studies by opening the gates to more students. At the same time, he launched a war against intellectuals and critical studies.35 He suppressed independent thought and action, and searched for the replacement of talent by mediocrities who would toe the line with Perón’s regime. Indeed, he was very clear in expressing that independent opinions should be marginalized.36 In the fourth section of the first Five-​Year Plan elaborated by the Peronist government, as a frame for action there was a section on culture stressing the necessity of creating national uniformity. The program, published in 1947, expressed the early tendencies of Peronism in molding a new national consciousness, which was to be expressed above all in the education system. His second Five-​Year Plan, published 1951, consolidated the Justicialista doctrine as a national doctrine. It expressed the spirit of the “Organic Statute” of the Peronist Party. As such, its second article stressed the doctrinaire face of the Peronist movement, which praised unity and demanded loyalty and obedience to Juan and Eva Perón—​as was expressed in Argentinian art from the period. Yet these reforms did not entail that Peronism portray itself as a movement aspiring to undermine or erase the progressive roots of Argentinean history. In this sense, Perón could not be included in the pantheon of Rosas. Instead, Peronism was conceived in order to civilize the descamisado, through consumption and social rights.

Concluding remarks When coming to define the type of society and the image of pride the Peronist movement wanted to express there are no definitive conclusions. It is clear, fascism inspired the Peronist sense of state corporatism and political leadership. But at the same time, the image of a fascist new man is far from the aesthetics and ideology of Peronism. Also clear is that there is no continuity between the ideals of the corporatist society conceived by Argentinean nationalists of the 1930s and Perón’s welfare corporatism. While both branches of Argentinean nationalism were antiliberal and anti-​imperialist,

164

164

Alberto Spektorowski

and both defended historical revisionism by appropriating the figure of Rosas in their attempt of reinventing the character of Argentinean national identity, Peronism did not embrace these ideological ambitions. Peronism instead shared with nationalists of the right and the left the idea that a welfare society could be achieved via a national–​ syndicalist state. For nationalists on the right, the national–​syndicalist state would be a traditionalist, institutionalized, and authoritarian state, while for nationalists on the left, it would be an authoritarian state representative of, and advocating for, the working masses. The Peronist ideology of Justicialismo, however, sought a middle road between idealism, materialism, collectivism, and individualism. The aesthetic ideal of the descamisado fit well into the ideal of an authoritarian state, one based in the masses and in search of a model of national welfare based on capitalist consumption. The idea of citizenship developed by Peronism was therefore nationalist as well as part of the broader populist movement. For the individual could only reach happiness as part of the organized community. In turn, the national community was an organized community that did not leave an open place for individual critical thought, while Justicialismo stressed the role of nationalism and authoritarian leadership under Juan and Eva Perón. At the same time. however, the idea of personal happiness appears to be a liberal ideal. In contrast to fascism, the idea of personal happiness and individual material benefits were key to Peronism. Although the Peronist concept of personal happiness supposedly represented an image distinguished from the idea of bourgeois happiness, this is hardly convincing. Personal happiness for Peronism was related to material happiness despite the fact that the idea of an organized community was opposed to that of civil society. The organized community, not civil society, was the natural place for the descamisado: an Argentine “new man” of the Peronist legacy. In this light, the seeds of failure were embedded in Peronist populist authoritarianism. Peter Smith correctly suggests that Perón chose authoritarian action because it provided the quickest and most rational means of satisfying the desires of the working class. Yet perhaps more importantly, Argentines understood only too well that formal democracies did not always provide for the people.37 As noted above, these factors formed the background to Perón’s overthrow. It hardly left space for political opposition.38 The Peronist new man, thus, is neither the fascist nationalist superman nor the Marxist revolutionary proletarian. It is the consumer, however, not a representative of bourgeois consumerism but of a pure plebeian consumerism, whose impact in Argentinean society is everlasting. Probably this distinction is what makes Peronism a quite different phenomenon from fascism. The new man of fascism was the driving force of a new heroic civilization of sacrifice. The new man of Peronism portrays a quite different image of proletarian welfare under a nationalist populist flag

Notes 1 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 32. 2 See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).

 165

Peronism

165

3 See Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–​1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 4 See Carlos Fayt, La naturaleza del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Viracocha, 1967); Juan Jose Sebrelli, Los deseos imaginarios del Peronismo (Buenos Aires: Legasa, 1983). 5 See Tulio Halperin Donghi, La larga agonia de la Argentina Peronista (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994). 6 See Christian Buchrucker, Nacionalismo y Peronismo: La Argentina en la crisis ideologica mundial (1927–​1955) (Buenos Aires: Ed. sudamericana, 1987); Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–​ 1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 7 Enrique Zuleta Alvarez, El Nacionalismo Argentino, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Ediciones La Bastilla: distribuidor exclusivo, Editorial Astrea, 1975), vol. 1. 8 Alberto Spektorowski, The Origins of Argentina’s Revolution of the Right (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001). 9 See Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California University Press, 1976), 315–​78. 10 Gino Germani, Politica y sociedad en una epoca de transicion (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1962); Juan Carlos Portantiero and Miguel Murnis, El Movimiento Obrero en las Origines del Peronismo. (Buenos Aires: Documento de Trabajo, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1969, 24–​6. 11 Jeremy Adelman, “Reflections on Argentina Labour and the Rise of Peronism,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 11, no. 3 (1992): 242–​59. 12 Julio Meinvielle, Los Tres Pueblos Biblicos (Buenos Aires: Ed. Adsum, 1937), 54. 13 Leonardo Castellani, “Decadencia de las Sociedades,” in Seis ensayos y tres cartas (Buenos Aires: Dictio, 1973), 109. 14 Cesar Pico, “Nacionalismo y Democracia,” La Nueva Republica, May 5, 1928. 15 Cesar Pico, “El Problema de Oriente y Occidente,” La Nueva Republica, December 25, 1927 16 Tomás Caceres, “Politica y Moral,” La Nueva Republica, January 15, 1928. 17 Gustavo Franceschi, “La Jerarquia y el orden temporal,” Criterio 9, no. 560, November 24, 1938: 315. 18 Cesar Pico, Carta a Jacques Maritain sobre la colaboración de los catolicos con los movimientos de tipo fascista (Buenos Aires: Ed. Adsum, 1937): 176. 19 Ibid., 13. 20 Julio Meinvielle, “De la Guerra Santa,” Criterio, 494, August 19, 1937. 21 Crisol, September 12, 1936. On the impact of the Spanish Civil War on Argentine public opinion and on its political establishment, see M. Falcoff and F. B. Pike, The Spanish Civil War, 1936–​39 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 22 Ramiro de Maeztu, Defensa de la Hispanidad (Madrid: Ed.Grafica Universal, 1934), 298. The idea of “Hispanidad” was originally introduced by Marcelino Menedez y Pelayo in his book Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880–​1881) (Madrid: 1880). 23 Leonardo Castellani, “Revolución,” Cabildo 608, June 16, 1944. 24 Gustavo Franceschi, “El despertar nacionalista,” Criterio 5, no. 242, October 20, 1932: 55. 25 Ernesto Palacio, Historia de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ed. Alpe, 1954), 533. 26 Eduardo M. Lustosa, “La idea corporativa,” Criterio, March 31, 1938: 379. 27 Ibid. 28 Interview given by Peron to El Mercurio of Chile, republished in La Prensa, November 12, 1943.

166

166

Alberto Spektorowski

29 Eduardo Elena, “New Directions in the History of Peronism, EIAL 25, no. 1 (2014): 19. 30 Raanan Rein, In the Shadow of Perón: Juan Atilio Bramuglia and the Second Line of Argentina’s Populist Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 31 Mariano Ben Plotkin, Mañana es San Perón: A Cultural History of Perón’s Argentina, trans. Keith Zahniser (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003). 32 Eduardo Elena, “What the People Want: State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–​1955,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 1 (2011): 81–​108; Natalia Milanesio, “Food Politics and Consumption in Peronist Argentina,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90 (2010): 75–​108. 33 See T. M. Goebel, Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism, Peronism and Historiography, 1955–​76 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). 34 Ibid., 173. 35 Mónica Esti Rein, Politics and Education in Argentina, 1946–​1962 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). 36 Juan Domingo Perón, Conduccion politica (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Mundo Peronista,1952), 55. 37 Peter Smith, “Social Mobilization, Political Participation, and the Rise of Juan Perón,” Political Science Quarterly 84, no. 1 (1969): 30–​49. 38 James W. McGuire, Peronism without Perón: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 73.

Bibliography Adelman, Jeremy. “Reflections on Argentina Labour and the Rise of Peronism,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 11, no. 3 (1992): 242–​59. Alvarez Zuleta, Enrique. El Nacionalismo Argentino [Argentina nationalism], 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Ediciones La Bastilla: distribuidor exclusivo, Editorial Astrea, 1975. Ben Plotkin, Mariano. Mañana es San Perón: A Cultural History of Perón’s Argentina [Tomorrow is “San” Peron: A cultural history of Perón’s argentina]. Translated by Keith Zahniser. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003. Buchrucker, Christian. Nacionalismo y Peronismo: La Argentina en la crisis ideologica mundial (1927–​1955) [Nationalism and Peronism: Argentina in the world ideological crisis (1927–​1955)]. Buenos Aires: Ed. sudamericana, 1987. Caceres, Tomás. “Politica y Moral” [Moral and politics], La Nueva Republica, January 15, 1928. Castellani, L. “Revolución” [Revolution] Cabildo 608, June 16, 1944. Castellani, Leonardo. “Decadencia de las Sociedades” [Decay of societies]. In Seis ensayos y tres cartas [Six essays and three letters]. Buenos Aires: Dictio, 1973, 1–​150. Donghi, Tulio Halperin. La larga agonia de la Argentina Peronista [The long agony of Peronist Argentina] Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994. Elena, Eduardo. Dignifying Argentina, Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2011. Elena, Eduardo. “What the People Want: State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–​1955,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 1 (2011): 81–​108. Elena, Eduardo. “New Directions in the History of Peronism,” EIAL 25, no. 1 (2014): 17–​37.

 167

Peronism

167

Falcoff, M., and Pike, F . The Spanish Civil War, 1936–​39. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Fayt, Carlos. La naturaleza del peronismo [The nature of Peronism]. Buenos Aires: Viracocha, 1967. Finchelstein. Federico. Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–​1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Finchelstein, Federico. The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Franceschi, Gustavo. “El despertar nacionalista” [The nationalist awakening], Criterio 5, no. 242, October 20, 1932. Franceschi, Gustavo. “La Jerarquia y el orden temporal” [Hierarchy and temporal order], Criterio 9 no. 560, November 24, 1938. Germani, Gino. Politica y sociedad en una epoca de transicion [Politics and society in an epoch of transition]. Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1962. Goebel, T. M. Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism, Peronism and Historiography, 1955–​76. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Hayes, Paul M. Fascism. New York: Free Press, 1973. James, Daniel. Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–​1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005. Lustosa, Eduardo M. “La idea corporativa” [The corporatist idea], Criterio, March 31, 1938. Maeztu, Ramiro de Defensa de la Hispanidad [In defense of Hispanidad]. Madrid: Ed. Grafica Universal, 1934. Maritain, Jacques. “Sobre la guerra santa” [About the Holy War], Sur 35 (1937): 101. Cited in Marc Falcoff, “Argentina.” In The Spanish Civil War, 1936–​39: American Hemispheric Perspectives. Edited by Mark Falcoff and Fredrick Pike. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 325. McGuire, James W. Peronism without Perón: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Meinvielle, Julio. “De la Guerra Santa” [On the Holy War], Criterio, 494, August 19, 1937. Meinvielle, Julio. Los Tres Pueblos Biblicos [Three biblical peoples]. Buenos Aires: Ed. Adsum, 1937. Milanesio, Natalia. “Food Politics and Consumption in Peronist Argentina,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90 (2010): 75–​108. Palacio, Ernesto. Historia de la Argentina [History of Argentina]. Buenos Aires: Ed. Alpe, 1954. Peron, Juan Domingo. Conduccion politica [Political leadership]. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Mundo Peronista, 1952. Pico, Cesar. “El Problema de Oriente y Occidente” [The problem of the Eastern and Western worlds], La Nueva Republica, December 25, 1927. Pico, Cesar. “Nacionalismo y Democracia” [Nationalism and democracy], La Nueva Republica, May 5, 1928. Pico, Cesar. Carta a Jacques Maritain sobre la colaboración de los catolicos con los movimientos de tipo fascista [Letter to Jacques Maritain about the Catholics’ collaboration with fascist–​type movements]. Buenos Aires: Ed. Adsum, 1937.

168

168

Alberto Spektorowski

Portantiero Juan Carlos, and Murnis, Miguel. El Movimiento Obrero en las Origines del Peronismo [The movements and the origins of Peronism]. Buenos Aires: Documento de Trabajo, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1969. Rein, Mónica Esti. Politics and Education in Argentina, 1946–​1962. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Rein, Raanan. In the Shadow of Perón: Juan Atilio Bramuglia and the Second Line of Argentina’s Populist Movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Smith, Peter. “Social Mobilization, Political Participation, and the Rise of Juan Perón,” Political Science Quarterly 84, no. 1 (1969): 30–​49. Spektorowski, Alberto, The Origins of Argentina’s Revolution of the Right. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001. Sternhell, Zeev, “Fascist Ideology.” In Fascism: A Reader’s Guide. Edited by Walter Laqueur. Berkeley: University of California University Press, 1976, 315–​78.

 169

8

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil Aristotle Kallis

The Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair turned out to be one of the most memorable, iconic highlights of this global event on the eve of the Second World War. Occupying a moderate-​sized curved rectangular plot on the edge of the exhibition’s Government zone at the recently reclaimed lands of Flushing Meadows, it offered a surprising glimpse of a country that basked in the glory of its kaleidoscopic traditions and its seeming contradictions but that had confidently directed its gaze toward a futural vanishing point.1 Nine years after the “revolution” headed by Getúlio Vargas, and just two years after the regime that he headed had mutated into an increasingly authoritarian dictatorship with a new constitution based on corporatist ideas (the New State—​Estado Novo2), the Brazilian government used the occasion of the 1939 World’s Fair—​for which, for the first time, it had commissioned an ad hoc national pavilion—​ to project a self-​assured image of modernity, progress, and above all cultural optimism for the vast South American country that had only recently celebrated its first centenary of independence.3 The pavilion—​a subtly angular exhibition building with clean lines and gleaming white surfaces, raised on pilotis, accessed through a curved ramp, and framing an internal “tropical garden”—​was the work of two young architects who, at the time, were on the cusp of making their mark on the global architectural scene as the two most authoritative names of that special, confident, and independent “Brazilian way” to modernism.4 Lucio Costa was actually the sole winner of the national architectural competition for the pavilion, yet he decided to work together with the architect in charge of the project ranked second, Oscar Niemeyer, to produce a hybrid design that borrowed ideas from their two original projects but in effect amounted to a third, even more impressive one. The two architects were still in their thirties at the time (Costa, born in 1902, was five years older than Niemeyer), but their partnership had already delivered a project that would become one of the landmark early monuments of both international modernism and the unique Brazilian (so-​called carioca5) modernist style—​the headquarters of the Ministry of Education and Health (Ministerio de Educación y Salud; MES) in downtown Rio de Janeiro, which began construction in 1939 and was completed four years later.6 Established only weeks after Vargas’s

170

170

Aristotle Kallis

1930 “revolution,” the ministry remained the hub of the regime’s quest for a campaign of “new man, Brazilian and modern” (novo homem, brasileiro e moderno).7 Combining responsibilities for both education and health (in addition to an ambitious but failed bid to acquire control of cultural matters too), and being at the center of the regime’s campaign for the “renovation” (renovação) of modern Brazil, the ministry introduced a series of reforms with the principal aim to both “educate and sanitize” the country. Under ministers Francisco Campos and especially his successor, Gustavo Capanema, the MES waged numerous campaigns against disease, poverty, social inequality (also linked to a debate on race), urban degradation, and illiteracy. It also played a pivotal in the state’s efforts to redefine a unifying collective feeling of modern “Brazilian-​ness” (brasilidade).8 Such campaigns unfolded against a complex national and international backdrop. Within Brazil, a battle between traditionalists and modernists was in full swing even before Vargas seized power with the 1930 coup. Modernism in the arts and architecture emerged as a radical “third way” discourse, sketching an alternative future for Brazil in opposition to both a bourgeois Eurocentric elitism and a narrow, insecure nationalism based on the revival of Brazil’s colonial heritage.9 Meanwhile, on the international field, the rise of fascism in Europe provided Vargas’s Brazil with an influential matrix that appeared to herald a postliberal and nationally rooted modern(ist) futural counter paradigm to both Western liberalism and Soviet-​style communism.10 In fact, since 1937, the Vargas regime had been embarking on its own “third way,” having turned violently against the communist left and having suppressed the homegrown fascists of the Brazilian Integralist Action (Ação Integralista Brasileira; AIB).11 With the introduction of a new constitution in 1937 and the proclamation of the corporatist “New State,” the regime seemed more and more indebted in ideological and institutional terms to António de Oliveira Salazar’s Portugal—​and, more generally, to this distinct form of interwar authoritarian dictatorship with strong fascist influences witnessed in a growing number of European countries during the 1930s.12 However, even if diverse fascist influences traveled across the Atlantic, even if they impacted in different ways on the ideological development of both the Integralists and, in different ways, of Vargas’s Estado Novo, they were refracted through the lens of a Brazilian singularity that produced surprising hybrid results. This is why the two projects for the MES building and the 1939 Brazilian pavilion matter so much beyond their place in the annals of architectural history. The two buildings were designed and unveiled at a time when the Brazilian version of “culture wars” was in full force; still together they offered a crystalline vision for the country’s future as a model for a “tropical modernity.”13 In complementary ways, they signified a vote of confidence for a cutting-​edge modernist lexicon—​but one that was mature, “situated” in its new cultural, historical, and geographic/​environmental home, more Brazilian than international, though indubitably both, infusing the universal with the local, and the futural with the unmistakably traditional. Above all, however, the two projects offered tangible evidence of the receptiveness, inclusiveness, and acculturation dynamics of 1930s Brazil as an omnivorous culture, capable of devouring and actively digesting the most diverse mix of local traditions and external influences.

 171

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

171

The trope of an all-​ingesting and -​digesting Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s is central to the discussion of how the myth of the “new Brazilian man” was crafted, promoted, and represented by the Vargas regime. The celebration of a pamphagous culture had already been provocatively articulated by the modernist artist Oswald de Andrade in 1928 with his provocative “Anthropophagic Manifesto”14—​a text that turned the stereotypical European image of cannibalism into an allegory for the virtue of receptiveness and assimilation of alterity. This trope, I argue, permeated in different ways a number of discrete plateaus in interwar Brazil—​race and hygiene, identity and culture, history and politics, art and architecture. The “new man, Brazilian and modern” was celebrated during the years of the Vargas regime as a felicitous hybrid of native, colonial, and immigrant; of “white” and “brown” and “black”; of tropical and equatorial; even of the international and regional and the distinctly local, infusing the celebration of hybridity with the idea of deliberate, active appropriation with an aspirational horizon of progress and perfectibility. This idea lay at the heart of the MES’s political and social mission, as the giant laboratory for the production of the hybrid, all-​encompassing utopia of the Brazilian “new man.” It also underpinned the reimagining of 1930s Brazil, as a national spectacle of progress rooted in cultural, historical, and geographic singularity, for the international audience of the World’s Fair. But it was an idea fraught with contradictions that surfaced in the course of designing and executing the two architectural projects. In this respect, the stories of the MES building and of the 1939 Brazilian pavilion provide an opportunity to reflect on the inherent tensions of the campaign for “renovation” in 1930s Brazil—​and to appreciate why, in the country of Gilberto Freyre’s “racial democracy” and Andrade’s proud “anthropophagy,” the “new man, modern and Brazilian” was deemed of mixed descent (mestizo) yet still about to be(come) almost white.

“Anthropophagy”: A nonsubtractive utopia for 1930s Brazil How did the notion of anthropophagy come to form the basis of a surprising cultural consensus in 1930s Brazil? At the beginning of the twentieth century, the professor of legal medicine Raimundo Nina Rodriguez had studied the overwhelmingly mixed racial makeup of populations across Brazil and had campaigned for a series of measures aimed at the “whitening” (branqueamento) of the country as the most effective defense against a future of putative decadence and underdevelopment.15 The development of a distinctly Brazilian branch of eugenics (eugénia) in the immediate post–​First World War years divulged fears, hopes, and expectations that were largely shaped under the influence of contemporary European beliefs: that racial hygiene mattered enormously for the development of Brazil; that reproduction could not be left unchecked; that the state had a central role to play in promoting racial health through a combination of “positive,” “preventive,” and in some cases “negative” measures.16 Nevertheless, Brazilian eugenics operated in a demographic and social context that was indeed very different from its contemporary European counterparts. Many fin-​ de-​siècle Brazilian scientists had indeed subscribed to the idea that the black race was inferior to the white one, but the vast majority of them came to reject rigid Mendelian

172

172

Aristotle Kallis

genetics in favor of a more pragmatic approach based on a neo-​Lamarckian fusion of nature and nurture, race and environment.17 Even as Arthur Gobineau used Brazil as a prime example of catastrophic racial degeneration allegedly caused by miscegenation between different racial types, in early twentieth-​century Brazil racial mixing was accepted by both political and scientific elites as not just an established fact but also as part of the perceived solution.18 What was this solution? Ever since the abolition of slavery in 1889, Brazil had introduced a policy of inviting mass immigration into the country—​but mostly from a preapproved list of “white” countries (initially overwhelmingly European, then from parts of Asia and the Middle East). Until 1914, when this policy came to a temporary halt, nearly one million “white” immigrants had arrived in the country and been strategically placed by the state in areas where they could “whiten” the racial makeup of the community. Immigration resumed in the 1920s, bringing an extra 850,000 people.19 Disturbing though the underpinning rationale of the official policy of branqueamento undoubtedly was, it did set the cultural, political, and indeed psychological foundations for a Brazilian singularity that is at the heart of this chapter’s argument. Even at its most reactionary, Brazilian racism was rarely alluding to a subtractive anthropological utopia. In other words, it did not equate the defeat of perceived decadence with the forced distancing from, or removal—​in whatever sense of the word—​of groups of the population, as was the case in so many branches of contemporary Western scientific racialist thought. Somewhere between a pragmatic, perhaps even grudging, acceptance of the complex situation on the ground and a sense of cultural optimism about this “new world in the tropics” experiment,20 Brazil was, and wanted to be seen as, different from its putative “Western,” European and American, sources of cultural reference. The “mixing of races” that had fueled fears of a future racial apocalypse in Europe and pessimistic narratives such as the “passing of a great (white) race” in the United States,21 was part of an emerging “mainstream” consensus on modern Brazilian identity.22 Like in the famous novel The Cosmic Race, published by the Mexican author and politician José Vasconcelos in 1925, Brazil appeared to be broadly at ease with its status as a massive laboratory of transcendence of racial divisions.23 Even when mass, state-​sponsored immigration eventually came to be seen as a social problem in the late 1920s, resulting in the introduction of severe restrictions on inward migrant flows and on migrants’ employment rights,24 the temptation to transform unease and socioeconomic tension into ethnic or racial resentment and scapegoating was broadly resisted by the Brazilian political elites and, to an extent, even by the more radical forces of the “new” right in the country, such as the Integralists.25 It was in this effervescent cultural and political context that Andrade launched his avant-​garde, provocative Manifesto of Anthropophagy. The text, first published in Saõ Paolo in 1928, crowned a decade in Andrade’s cultural and artistic activity during which he (together with other celebrated figures of Brazilian modernism, such as the musician Hector Villa Lobos and the author Mario de Andrade) had sought to articulate a synthesis between a national identity based on native authenticity and a modernist aesthetic capable of being cosmopolitan, inclusive, and disruptive all at once.26 The 1928 Manifesto fused culture and history into contemporary politics, society, and identity, conflating a hybrid, all-​devouring culture and identity with a celebration of an

 173

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

173

inclusive notion of hybrid Brazilian society and people. “I am only interested in what is not mine,” decried Andrade.27 For him, anthropophagy was a universalizable alternative vision of social and cultural modernity that could reunify the core concepts of identity and otherness—​an additive, constantly hybridizing and transforming, indeed liquid utopia.28 Andrade’s provocative anthropophagic counterutopia appeared at a time when radical cultural manifestos were very much in vogue in Brazil. In 1924, Andrade had already been involved in the publication of the Manifesto of Brazilwood Poetry (Poesia Pau-​Brasil). In it he focused on the theme of active synthesis between binary opposites (“the forest and the school,” as he put it) that would find their way into his Anthropophagic Manifesto four years later.29 Then in 1926 the sociologist Freyre published the Regionalist Manifesto. The manifesto was appropriately launched in the northern city of Recife as a deliberate corrective to the concentration of political, cultural, and economic power in the southern metropolitan centers and the state of Minas Gerais—​the so-​called politics of coffee with milk (Política do café com leite30), referring to the monopoly of power at the hands of the coffee barons of Saõ Paolo and the lucrative mineiro dairy industries. With this manifesto, Freyre sang the praises of the kaleidoscope of regional traditions as the best source of an inclusive Brazilian identity that could also successfully withstand external influences of what he censured as “false” modernity.31 In the 1930s, Freyre would become famous for his vision of Brazil as a “racial democracy”—​another lucid historical and cultural defense of hybridity—​by celebrating the product of racial mixing, the mulatto not as an interim stage toward some utopia of racial purity but as the superior product of a citizen democracy, social and racial, particularly suited to the past and present of Brazil.32 Then in 1929, a very different group, Verde-​Amarello, launched their own homonymous radical manifesto. Taking its name from the two national colors of Brazil (the name of the movement means “green and yellow”), the group had been active for much of the 1920s, part of Brazil’s burgeoning scene of radical modernist startups but militating against what they perceived as the urban, bourgeois cultural establishment of Saõ Paolo and the cultural cosmopolitanism of Pau-​Brasil.33 While, however, the earlier discourse of the group rested on an expansive, all-​consuming notion of Brazilian nationalism based on a historical continuum of ever-​mutating hybridity, the 1929 manifesto redefined the essence of modern brasilidade as emanating from the violent disappearance of the indigenous Tupi tribe—​a disappearance that allowed for the Tupis’ transformation into a subjective spiritual substratum of a truly shared Brazilian identity, as the primary agent of national continuity and singularity.34 Tellingly, the 1929 group took on the name Anta, after one of the most powerful totemic symbols of the Tupi. One of the protagonists of both the Movimento Verde-​Amarelo and Grupo da Anta was a young writer and fledgling politician called Plinio Salgado. The later founder of Brazil’s version of fascism and leader of the AIB began his intellectual life very much within the modernista trench in the Brazilian culture wars of the 1920s. In 1929, when he collaborated in the publication of the Anta Manifesto, he was yet to travel to Europe, visit Italy, meet Benito Mussolini, and start his own political project of “brazilianizing” fascism.35 Throughout the 1920s, the stars of the Brazilian modernist movement spent

174

174

Aristotle Kallis

as much time attacking their common enemies (the paulista academic establishment; the passive bourgeois culture of foreign emulation; the lack of cultural appreciation for the country’s precolonial roots and traditions) as lambasting each other’s ideas. In fact, across the whole spectrum from Salgado’s Anta to Andrade’s Antropofagia, they owed each other intellectual debts and shared a vision of national regeneration through the modern rediscovery of local and regional traditions.36 Their joint celebration of cultural authenticity as the platform for the construction of a modern Brazilian identity was accompanied by an embrace of cultural hybridity and a celebration of the very absence of a distinct, fixed identity. Even Salgado, increasingly attracted to Catholicism and nationalist in his views, celebrated the Tupi as a “nonidentity” and “nonphilosophy,” a zeroing cultural agent that would serve the vision of integrating Brazil’s ethnic, racial, social, cultural, and regional mélange.37 Regionalismo, Verdeamarelismo, and Antropofagia shared a profound celebration of hybridity as the basis for a modern Brazilian singularity. They also subscribed to the idea that modernism, as a force of national renovation, could only become truly, authentically rooted in Brazil by embracing the kaleidoscope of local and regional traditions of Brazil.38 And yet, Andrade’s modern Brazil was more diverse than Freyre’s and far more open and inquisitively inclusive than Salgado’s.39 Whereas Andrade was praising Brazil as the ferment of “critical devoration” of the universal and its critical appropriation by the local or the national, Freyre used “indigenism” as a counterbalance to the tendency toward uncritical, slavish European emulation that he continued to fear and disdain.40 And while Andrade saw critical “devoration” of potentially anything and everything external as the key to the country’s dynamic future, Salgado and his collaborators gradually harked back to a defensive sense of Brazilian nationalism, rejecting European and other foreign influences as harmful to the authenticity of brasilidade. The later Salgado of the 1930s in particular countered Andrade’s open-​ ended consumption and digestion of “the other” with a sense of historical determinism and exaltation of the precise amalgam of precolonial Brazilian primitivism and Portuguese Catholicism.41 More importantly, he came to see modern European influences as incompatible with, and detrimental to, the essence of modern Brazilian singularity. Andrade’s anthropophagic imagery pointed to ingestion and digestion42—​in fact, acknowledging either the danger from, or potential superiority of, some external influences and choosing to actively absorb, break down, mine, “regurgitate” creatively, and thus neutralize them.43 By contrast, Salgado progressively embraced the trope of egestion of “foreign” influences as a prerequisite for nurturing a modern Brazilian organic national identity.44

The Ministry of Education and Health and the search for the novo homem, brasileiro e moderno in Vargas’s Brazil The era of manifestos and the decade that had nurtured them in Brazil came to a dramatic end with an act of political rupture: the 1930 “revolution” that brought Vargas to power.45 Vargas wasted no time in presenting the revolution as a moment of historical fissure and the foundational event for a radical departure.46 In the face of such a

 175

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

175

tumultuous change (conventionally, 1930 was seen as marking the end of the “Old” Republic and the birth of the “New” one), the modernistas of the 1920s followed fascinatingly different ideological and political paths. Soon after Vargas’s ascension to power, Andrade moved sharply away from his “anthropophagic” worldview to embrace the social revolutionary agenda of the Brazilian Communist Party.47 Yet this kind of ideological trajectory proved to be highly atypical for the bulk of the cultural figures who had contributed to the intellectual ferment of 1920s modernism. Salgado had originally supported the candidacy of the establishment presidential candidate whom Vargas had successfully deposed, Júlio Prestes,48 but his trip to Europe and the new landscape of Brazilian politics that he encountered upon his return to Brazil made him increasingly more amenable to the kind of political alternative represented by Vargas. The Integralist movement that he founded in October 1932 was largely accommodated under Vargas’s large ideological umbrella until 1938–​39, when increasingly disaffected militants of the AIB attempted to stage a coup that resulted in the movement’s suppression by Vargas and Salgado’s own imprisonment and forced exile in Portugal.49 The musicologist Maria de Andrade, one of the towering figures of Brazilian modernism and one of the organizers of the famous 1922  “Week of Modern Art,” collaborated with the regime authorities on cultural projects, but he too felt the consequences of the hardening of Vargas’s stance after the 1937 coup and the introduction of the one-​party Estado Novo. As for Freyre, although he had benefited significantly from the generous patronage of figures of the old republic and was initially hesitant to throw his lot with Vargas, he did come round to a qualified form of support that was solidified through a close relationship with Vargas in subsequent years.50 But it was the even younger architect Costa who did the most to align the bulk of the forces of Brazilian modernism with the Vargas regime. In many ways, Costa was an unlikely candidate for the role of chief promoter of modernism in Brazil. In the late 1920s he had shown far more interest in the fusion of Portuguese colonial architecture with regional traditions, especially in the culturally rich state of Minas Gerais, often criticizing the tendency to imitate foreign styles at the expense of unique regional traditions.51 When Le Corbusier visited Brazil for the first time in 1929 and gave a series of lectures advertising the modern approach to architecture of the then-​fledgling CIAM movement,52 Costa allegedly stormed out of the venue in protest, allegedly describing his as a “charlatan.”53 Still, it was his appointment as director of the National School of Fine Arts (ENBA) in 1930 and his professional collaboration with Gregori Warchavchik, the enfant terrible of modernist architecture in 1920s Brazil, that transformed Costa into the most potent defender of a new Brazilian modernism. His efforts to reform and modernize ENBA’s curriculum became a rallying cry for the modernistas against what they perceived as bourgeois mediocrity and a sense of scandalous entitlement that characterized Brazil’s artistic “academic” entitlement in the early 1930s.54 Costa did not survive in his new post beyond September 1931, when the powerful coalition of his fierce academic and cultural critics succeeded in getting him replaced by the far more predictable Arquimedes Memória, an architect with strong Beaux Arts affinities and impeccably mainstream academic credentials.55 But the two men would confront each other again, five years later—​and this proved to be an encounter with critical symbolic significance for the entire project of national regeneration that the

176

176

Aristotle Kallis

Vargas regime was so keen on pursuing in the second half of the 1930s. Around 1935, a series of competitions for new government buildings were announced—​among them the MES and the Ministry of Labor, Industry, and Commerce. Both ministries had been created shortly after Vargas had become president in 1930 and were the linchpin of the new regime’s strategy of addressing the country’s huge socioeconomic inequalities.56 Of the two, however, it was the MES that was invested with the most significant regenerative capital as an integral component of Vargas’s program of “national reconstruction.”57 It was the second minister, the ardent modernizer Gustavo Capanema (1934–​45), who defined MES’s mission as “dedicated to preparing, to forming, to crafting the man of Brazil,” calling it essentially the “ministry of man.”58 Capanema understood the significance of his ministerial portfolio as a driver of physical renewal, anthropological regeneration, and cultural renovation. His grand vision for the MES as the laboratory of a new Brazil convinced him that this ambition would be far better served if MES’s political mission were to be identified with a high-​profile architectural project for its official headquarters in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Thus, in 1935, he announced an architectural competition for a new building that would provide not just administrative office space but also underline the new ministry’s cultural and political capital with a dedicated exhibition wing, an auditorium, and a lecture theater.59 In order not to further alienate the academic architectural establishment, the majority of the judging panel members for the MES competition were affiliated with the academic traditions of the ENBA and the official professional association of Brazilian architects. It thus came as no surprise that the panel chose a conservative, Beaux Arts–​inspired building designed by no other than Memória himself, in partnership with Francisque Cuchet. What followed the conclusion of the official MES competition, however, was nothing short of a (well-​documented) aesthetic coup d’état.60 Unimpressed by the timidity of the winning design,61 Capanema intervened to annul the outcome of the competition (after awarding Memória the pecuniary side of the prize) and entrust the project to none other than Costa, whose design had earned the second place.62 Cleverly Costa turned his project into a collaborative tour de force of young Brazilian modernists by inviting architects Carlos Leão, Jorge Moreira, Ernani Vasconcelos, Affonso Reidy, and the fiercely ambitious but largely untested Oscar Niemeyer; the painter Cândido Portinari; and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx to join the project team. In addition, Costa succeeded in convincing Capanema to invite Le Corbusier to visit Brazil, officially to deliver a set of (paid) lectures but also to act as an adviser to the MES project—​informally, because new rules implemented by the Vargas regime prevented non-​Brazilian architects from being in charge of public building projects.63 Le Corbusier came and went, leaving behind a series of detailed sketches for both the MES building and another project linked to Capanema under discussion at the time, this time for a new campus of the Federal University of Brazil in the suburban periphery of Rio de Janeiro.64 The university campus was far more attractive to him because of its scale and potential impact on the future of urban planning across the entire metropolitan area of Rio.65 Still, upon his arrival, Le Corbusier realized that he was far from the single authority advising the Brazilian government on these landmark architectural projects. For Capanema had also invited two more architects to visit

 177

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

177

Brazil and act in an advisory role—​the French Auguste Perret and the Italian Marcello Piacentini.66 Taken together, Le Corbusier, the enfant terrible of interwar modernist architecture; Perret, without doubt the pioneer of a more rational architecture based on the use of reinforced concrete;67 and Piacentini, the impresario of official state architecture in Fascist Italy with an impressive record of recent large-​scale projects under his name68 represented a rather unworkable advisory team, representing distinctly different takes on the broader modernist canon in architecture. Inevitably, then, the designs executed by Le Corbusier and Piacentini for the university campus differed wildly—​not only in their spatial and formal recommendations (Piacentini largely reproduced the winning formula of a monumental, stripped-​down classic design that he had just executed for the Città Universitaria in Rome;69 Le Corbusier opted for a far more articulated, strongly horizontal, and less centered compound in a strikingly antimonumental tone70) but also in their suggested location (Le Corbusier rejected the original location of Piacentini’s plan and situated his design on a different, seaside location, as part of his broader vision of rethinking urban planning in Rio that went back to his earlier visit in 1929). In spite of their efforts, neither Le Corbusier nor Piacentini put their creative signature on any landmark official building in Brazil. The judging committee for the university campus favored Piacentini’s design over Le Corbusier’s design ideas. In spite of both foreign architects’ efforts to push their own design and influence the outcome of the competition, the advent of the war marked the abandonment of the project. In the case of the MES headquarters in Rio, Costa absorbed the majority of design suggestions made by Le Corbusier but then refracted them through the diverse creative sensibilities of his design team of Niemeyer, Portinari, and Burle Marx. While the Le Corbusian perspective was preserved in the use of pilotis, brise soleil, use of structural columns that enabled the extensive use of windows on the surfaces, and overall predominance of geometric lines, Costa and Niemeyer converted the Swiss architect’s emphasis on the horizontal arrangement of interconnected and intersecting volumes into a simpler, strongly vertical project.71 The final design moved the central building slab (augmented in both height and functions) to the center of the plot, departing from the low-​lying proposal of Le Corbusier, its pilotis design raising it by ten meters—​ nearly twice as high as the Swiss architect had suggested in his designs.72 But it was the creative contribution of Portinari and Burle Marx that injected an irreverent, nonconformist Brazilian legibility to the modernist architectural design. Portinari’s large-​scale blue and white mural compositions on the ground floor and in the interior spaces of the MES building reappropriated with irreverent freedom the colonial-​era tradition of azulejo.73 Burle Marx suffused Le Corbusier’s love of terraces with his distinctive vision for a tropical garden that he had experimented with during his earlier work for the public gardens of Recife.74 Both he and Niemeyer instilled the sensibility of the curvilinear design in the otherwise strictly linear composition for the main MES edifice.75 Le Corbusier’s and Piacentini’s private irritation with the unhappy outcome of their involvement in the MES and university projects is well documented.76 But in hindsight, the Swiss architect had more of a point. His radical principles and ad hoc ideas were symbolically ingested by the partnership of homegrown architects who oversaw the construction of MES shortly afterward. On his part, Capanema was delighted with

178

178

Aristotle Kallis

the design of the Brazilian team and gave the go-​ahead for the construction. But just a year later, in 1938, the landmark headquarters for his “ministry of man” produced one final controversy that lay bare profound tensions within the project of crafting the Brazilian new man. Capanema had willed this “new man” to be represented visually through an imposing statue to be placed on the grounds of the new ministry. In 1937 he commissioned the modernist sculptor Celso Antonio to design and execute the ten-​meter colossal statue. Antonio, well connected with Costa and Niemeyer,77 understood the brief as an opportunity to celebrate the anthropophagic qualities of Brazilian culture by presenting the homem novo as precisely the felicitous product of physical/​ racial, regional, social, and cultural mixing. When, however, Capanema observed the figure that Antonio had almost completed—​a nude, seemingly crude, and fiercely realist projection of a common “mixed” native and Portuguese Brazilian, the caboclo, he was shocked and dismayed. Since Capanema saw MES’s mission as not just healing and educating but also perfecting the Brazilian man, since he saw the ministry as the greatest laboratory of the new Brazil spearheaded by Vargas’s Estado Novo, he immediately concluded that Antonio’s realist caboclo figure was an unsuitable projection of the future Brazilian man. Capanema justified his rejection of the statue with the help of a variety of arguments: it lacked aspiration by looking toward the past; it offered a misleading picture of what Brazilians allegedly looked like; it was aesthetically at odds with the clean modernist design of the MES building; it was based on a misunderstanding of the original brief; and, finally, it contradicted scientific opinion. When he turned to scientists, they overwhelmingly endorsed his negative assessment of the design and condoned his preference for a more aspirational form—​“Mediterranean” in features, stronger in build, more willed in expression, and essentially whiter. Faced with the prospect of having an ad hoc scientific committee in charge of the new design, Antonio refused to cooperate and abandoned the project.78 This incident exposed a fundamental fissure at the heart of what would otherwise could be described as a cultural consensus on the merits of figurative “anthropophagy” as a nonsubtractive, all-​embracing color-​blind utopia in Vargas’s Brazil. While the statue designed by Antonio celebrated the “Brazilian man” as a prismatic figure in the present tense, based on a kaleidoscope of regional and local singularities, for Capanema the novo homem, moderno e brasileiro was a strongly aspirational project for the near future, based on idealized abstraction. Even if the obsession with branqueamento had been largely rejected as the sole guiding principle of racial and cultural development of Vargas’s Brazil, a form of “whitening” as an aspirational streak had also been ingested (or perhaps not fully egested) by the authoritarian modernizing elites in charge of Vargas’s Estado Novo. Capanema perceived the figure of the “Brazilian man” as an ideal type of “Mediterranean” strength, will, and stature, neither excluding the presence of the caboclo nor questioning the centrality of mixing for modern Brazil, yet privileging a particular idea of future perfection based on the prevalence of certain attributes, such as skin color and body type.79 To be sure, even if the colossal statue was never executed, when the MES building was officially inaugurated in 1944, it was in itself a riotous celebration of ingestion. The austere volumes of the building were tempered, both externally and internally, by an impressive variety of artistic contributions—​from the azulejo panels, oversize

 179

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

179

murals, and paintings of Portinari, the pieces of sculpture executed by the Swiss Jacques Lipschitz and none other than Antonio, to the landscaping of the grounds and roof terraces by Burle Marx and the curved carpets designed by Niemeyer himself.80 The linearity of interior spaces, from the entrance lobby to the principal floor corridors, was tempered by the introduction of curvilinear elements—​a desk, a carpet, a staircase, the motifs playfully inscribed on the pavement, all designed to marry the strict rationality of the architectural design with the curved geometries steeped in the supremely malleable and prismatic Brazilian sensibility.81 Although the course of events after Le Corbusier’s departure—​especially the lack of any tangible contract—​left the Swiss architect feeling embittered, both Costa and Niemeyer did their very best to acknowledge his contribution, as the one who sowed “the seed . . . now blossoming into a flowering architecture . . . in this dear Brazilian earth.”82

The novo homem brasileiro travels to the world of the future: New York 1939 If in hindsight the checkered story behind the construction of the MES building marked the official birth of that fabled carioca school of modernist architecture and design, its first tangible product actually predated the construction of the ministry headquarters in Rio by nearly five years. While still working on the MES design, Costa and Niemeyer took part in another competition for an official architectural project, this time for the pavilion that would represent Brazil in the 1939 New York World’s Fair. This would be the first time that the country would be represented with its very own bespoke building at such an occasion. What is more, after the introduction of the Estado Novo in 1937, the theme of the 1939 World’s Fair (“the world of tomorrow”) offered the Vargas regime a prime opportunity to present a triumphant image for a “new Brazil,” regenerated under the corporatist experiment of the Estado Novo, dynamic and modern, prismatic, and capable of assimilating the most wildly diverse influences from the past and the present, from within, near, and afar.83 The competition resulted in a victory for Costa and a highly praised award of runner-​up status to Niemeyer. Costa’s design was typically rational and symmetrical with its main exhibition volume raised on pilotis, while Niemeyer’s was unsurprisingly curved and organic in form, following the shape of the plot granted to Brazil by the fair organizers.84 But the two architects decided to work together in coauthoring the pavilion, fusing their individual projects into a new design that, in its own way, ingested the sensibilities of the two rising-​star architects of Brazilian modernism. The Brazilian pavilion was perhaps the most discussed and praised at the 1939 World’s Fair. The Vargas regime had made a huge investment in the selection process of every single element (from architecture to art on display to landscaping to exhibition and commercial/​entertainment use of spaces) as well as in the lavish construction of the pavilion, and the investment appeared to have paid off handsomely. In architectural terms, the pavilion ushered the fledgling Brazilian modernism into the limelight, attracting international acclaim for the Costa–​Niemeyer partnership. This was a statement of astonishingly irreverent self-​confidence and independence, rejecting

180

180

Aristotle Kallis

all sorts of traditional academic conventions and departing from a rigid rehashing of even the so in vogue modernist international style. Costa spoke of how the design was a resounding affirmation of the principles of CIAM while at the same time fusing the sensibility of the crystalline containment and organic expressiveness, the universal and the singularly local. Meanwhile, works of art exhibited in the galleries combined bold modernist technique with a strong regionalist sensibility.85 Portinari’s three large-​size panels filtered scenes of everyday life through a distinct colorful visual language that abstracted but did not idealize. Each panel referred to a particular region of Brazil, a different regional culture, as well as a different economic and social activity. Yet the people depicted were disarmingly real, the mestizos of the country’s “racial democracy” eulogized by Freyre and adopted in theory by the Vargas regime. Ironically, perhaps, the pavilion’s terrace also hosted a sculpture of a reclining nude girl—​a work by no other than Antonio destined for the interior of the MES building then under construction. It was indeed through the inclusive, realist yet celebratory in every sense of the word narrative of brasilidade crafted by Portinari and Antonio that the Brazilian pavilion performed a spectacular somersault—​projecting the image of a “new Brazil” and its “new man” through the embrace of a society and a culture forged through mixing and mutual ingestion.86 Lastly, Burle Marx’s trademark landscape designs for the luscious tropical garden in the internal court framed the architectural volumes and activities with a distinctive lexicon of inverted tropical alterity—​an external, exoticized vision of Brazil ingested by a confident modern Brazilian subject, internalized and criticized and critically reproduced. Predictably the Brazilian Institute of Architects, representing the architectural academic establishment of Brazil and the country’s fine arts establishment, protested at the competition processes and decisions that resulted in the 1939 New York pavilion. The authors of the pavilion and the MES building were typically accused of slavishly copying foreign models (Costa and Niemeyer were frequently chastised as “those two pupils of Le Corbusier”) and showing a disdain for some kind of Brazilian “tradition.”87 But Costa defended the design choices of his team by invoking the spirit of voracious appropriation and critical adaptation. The architecture and cultural symbolism of both the MES and the pavilion pointed to the embrace of the very spirit of mestizaje that formed the basis of the celebration of modern Brazil’s racial democracy under the Vargas regime. It is not a coincidence that Costa celebrated the bridging of all divides through active appropriation—​the Doric and the Ionic, the classical and the neocolonial, the traditional and the modern, the universal and the national/​regional spirit.88 The team of architects, designers, and artists assembled to give MES, Capanema’s “ministry of man,” its suitably monumental headquarters became the winning partnership for conceptualizing “the house of Brazil in a foreign country.” Futural progress for Vargas’s Brazil seemed more than ever tied to wholesale ingestion of the wildest diversity. So what of the ill-​fated statue to the Brazilian man, originally destined for the grounds of the new MES building but drowned in the ensuing controversy about the “appropriate” color and physique of the figure? Why was Antonio’s colossal tribute to mestizaje treated as so poisonous for the busy thoroughfare of downtown Rio de Janeiro but his nude reclining female, dark in color and proudly mestizo in features,

 181

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

181

was deemed appropriate as the first sight that thousands of international visitors to the 1939 pavilion would confront upon climbing the curved ramp access to the main building? The tension between a realist and an idealized depiction of the novo homem brasileiro crafted by the Vargas regime was there, embedded even in the color-​blind utopia of Freyre’s “racial democracy.” The aspiration of collective progress, imprinted as much on the cultural and political DNA of modern Brazil as on the ribbon around the star-​filled sky depicted on the Brazilian flag, proved hard to dissociate entirely from a notion of “whiteness”—​whether purely racial or cultural, whether preserving some of the allure of traditional racial/​physical branqueamento or restricted to the figurative, yet deeply loaded with meaning lightness of the modernist surfaces of the MES building and the Brazilian pavilion. The statue of the Brazilian man in front of the MES was thus intended by Capanema as a statement of idealized abstraction, not unlike the order and clarity of the building itself amid (and in juxtaposition to) the chaotic urban sprawl of the downtown and the favelas cascading from the hills of modern-​day Rio. By contrast, the figures drawn by Portinari inside both the venues under discussion constituted proud tributes to the prismatic reality of mestizaje; of working-​class toil and everyday social life; of a rich, diverse, but above all dynamic tradition eager to embrace and ingest the spirit of global modernity. The mixed-​race women and men depicted on the panel of the New York pavilion coexisted with the white surfaces of the building, the self-​exoticization of tropical Brazil, and the presence of carefully selected female waitresses—​all young and of “good appearance” apparently89—​serving coffee to awed international visitors. They did not antagonize each other but instead flowed as tributaries into the mainstream image of a modern, progressive, yet all-​embracing and -​ingesting Brazil that the Vargas regime of the late 1930s was so eager to project. Rather than premising national renovation and greatness on a radical break with the past and on the subtractive vision of “cleansing” from allegedly negative attributes (whether racial or cultural or both), the Estado Novo embraced and promoted a version of what Andrade had praised in his 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto. The mestizo Brazilian, the product of a history and culture steeped in mixing, was far from an illustration of decadence to be purged or rejected, as was the norm in the overwhelming majority of fascist and authoritarian dictatorships of the interwar period. The Brazilian new man would instead be forged from within the horizon of active miscegenation and voracious ingestion of alterity. In this respect, the gleaming white, clear and ultramodern architectural lexicon of Costa and Niemeyer served as the ultimate reaffirmation of the myth of futural progress in an otherwise tropical, proudly mixed and ever-​mixing, figuratively cannibalistic, preindustrial, and indeed authoritarian, corporatist Brazil.

Notes 1 Hugo Segawa, Architecture of Brazil, 1900–​1990 (New York: Springer, 2012), 100–​3. 2 Aspásia Camargo, O Golpe silencioso: as origens da república corporativa (Rio de Janeiro: Rio Fundo, 1989). 3 Zilah Quezado Deckker, Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil (London; New York: Spon Press, 2013), 55.

182

182

Aristotle Kallis

4 Philip L. Goodwin, Brazil Builds. Architecture New and Old (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 81. 5 Roberto Segre, Rio de Janeiro: Guide to Contemporary Architecture (Rio de Janeiro: Viana & Mosley Editora, 2005), 15; Deckker, Brazil Built, 200–​1. 6 Reyner Banham, Guide to Modern Architecture (London: Architecture Press, 1962), 36; Goodwin, Brazil Builds, 106–​11. 7 Sandra Vivanco, “Trope of the Tropics: The Baroque in Modern Brazilian Architecture, 1940–​1950,” in Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America, ed. Felipe Hernández, Mark Millington, and Iain Borden (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2005), 198. 8 Daryle Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–​1945 (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2001), 12–​23; Angela Maria de Castro Gomes, Capanema: o ministro e seu ministério (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2000), 62. 9 John Nist, The Modernist Movement in Brazil: A Literary Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014, new ed.), esp. ch. 1. 10 See, for example, the classic account of Helgio Trindade, “Fascism and Authoritarianism in Brazil under Vargas (1930–​1945),” in Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism, ed. Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1980), 491–​528. On interwar fascism as a particular form of political modernism, see the seminal work by Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). 11 Leandro Pereira Gonçalves, “The Integralism of Plínio Salgado: Luso-​Brazilian Relations,” Portuguese Studies, 30, no. 1 (2014): 67–​93. 12 Antonio Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis, eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 1–​10; Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 44–​8. 13 Sergio B. F. Tavolaro, “Gilberto Freyre and the Brazilian ‘Tropical Modernity’: between Originality and Deviation,” Sociologias 15, no. 33 (2013): 282–​317, also available at http://​www.scielo.br/​pdf/​soc/​v15n33/​v15n33a10.pdf. 14 Oswald de Andrade, A Utopia Antropofagica (Saõ Paulo: Globo, 1995, 2nd ed); Ruben George Oliven, “Brazil: The Modern in the Tropics,” in Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, ed. Vivian Schelling (London: Verso, 2000), 58–​74; Rogerio Haesbaert, “Cultural Hybridism, Identitary Anthropophagy and Transterritoriality,” in Landscapes, Identities, and Development, ed. Zoran Roca, Paul Claval, and John A. Agnew (Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 84–​7. 15 Michael Mitchell, “Miguel Reale and the Impact of Conservative Modernization on Brazilian Race Relations,” in Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, ed. Michael Hanchard (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1999), 87–​93 and 121–​ 3; Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 154–​65. 16 Nancy Leys Stepan, “Eugenics in Brazil, 1917–​1940,” in Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark B Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 124–​6. 17 Elizabeth Farfán-​Santos, Black Bodies, Black Rights: The Politics of Quilombolismo in Contemporary Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 51. 18 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (New York; London: New York University Press, 2012), 33. 19 George Reid Andrews, “Brazilian Racial Democracy, 1900–​90: An American Counterpoint,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 3 (1996): 486.

 183

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

183

20 Gilberto Freyre, New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959). 21 Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (New York: Routledge, 2009), 63–​76. 22 George Reid Andrews, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–​1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 135–​6. 23 Michelle A. McKinley, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Black): Legal and Cultural Constructions of Race and Nation in Colonial Latin America,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-​first Century, ed. Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 123. 24 For an overview of the rise and fall and the rise again of European migration to Brazil, see Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. 24–​59. 25 Sandra McGee Deutsch, “Spartan Mothers: Fascist Women in Brazil in the 1930s,” in Right-​Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World, ed. Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power (New York; London: Routledge, 2002), 158–​60; Jeroen Dewulf, “New Man in the Tropics: The Nietzschean Roots of Gilberto Freyre’s Multiracial Identity Concept,” Luso-​Brazilian Review 51, no. 1 (2014): 93–​111, here 97. 26 Danilo Mezzadri, The 1922 Week of Modern Art and its Celebrations: A Study of Historical Reconstruction and Nationalism in Brazil (Master’s thesis, Department of Musicology Michigan State University, 2007); Beatriz Resende, “Brazilian Modernism: The Canonised Revolution,” in Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, ed. Vivian Schelling (London: Verso, 2011), 199–​ 218; Sarah Ann Wells, “Semana da Arte Moderna de 1922 [Modern Art Week, São Paulo 1922],” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016). 27 The original text can be found here: Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto antropófago,” Revista de Antropofagia 1, no. 3 (1928): 7. Thanks to the amazing work carried out by Monoskop in digitizing and making available rare resources from the history of avant-​garde modernist in the twentieth century, the journal can be accessed online at https://​monoskop.org/​Revista_​de_​Antropofagia. 28 Carlos A. Jáuregui, Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina: Ensayos de Teoría Cultural (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008), 423–​6. It is not a coincidence that Zygmunt Bauman (e.g., “Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” Thesis Eleven 43, 1995: 1–​16) appropriated the imagery of anthropophagy (and its opposite, anthropemy, meaning “vomiting people”) through the work of Claude Lévi-​Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Penguin, 1992), 387–​8. 29 Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-​Brasil,” in Gilberto Mendonça Teles, Vanguarda européia e modernismo brasileiro (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1972), 326–​31; Fernando J Rosenberg, The Avant-​garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 78. 30 Boris Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 148–​97. 31 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1986); Oliven, “Brazil: The Modern in the Tropics,” 59. 32 Andrews, “Brazilian Racial Democracy,” 487–​9. 33 Luís Madureira, Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-​garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia

184

184

Aristotle Kallis

Press, 2005), 29–​30; Anthony L. Geist and Jose B. Monleon, Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America (New York; London: Garland, 1999), 201–​5. 34 Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 17–​ 18; Madureira, Cannibal Modernities, 32. 35 Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–​1939 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 251–​2; Barbara Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 27–​70. 36 Jorge Schwartz, Vanguardas latino-​americanas: polêmicas, manifestos e textos críticos (São Paulo: EDUSP/​Iluminuras/​FAPESP, 1995), 483–​88. 37 Madureira, Cannibal Modernities, 32; Ilan Rachum, The Dismantling of Brazil’s Old Republic: Early Twentieth Century Cultural Change, Intergenerational Cleavages, and the October 1930 Revolution (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2015), 245–​7. 38 Marc Treib, The Architecture of Landscape, 1940–​1960 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 213; Eduardo Mendes de Vasconcellos, “The First Modernity in Brazil—​a Cultural Project—​Architecture and Urbanism 1930–​ 1960” (PhD diss., Architectural Association School of Architecture London, 1984), 19; Luciana Pelaes Mascaro, “Similaridades entre Regionalismo e Antropofagia: nacionalismo—​internacionalismo—​regionalismo,” Mneme 5, no. 10 (2004): 43–​59. 39 Haroldo de Campos, “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration,” Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (1986): 44. 40 Elaine O’Brien, Everlyn Nicodemus, Melissa Chiu, Benjamin Genocchio, Mary K. Coffey, and Roberto Tejada, Modern Art in Africa, Asia and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (Oxford: Wiley, 2012); Jose Vasconcelos, “The Cosmic Race,” esp. 403–​4. 41 Dunn, Brutality Garden, 16. 42 Darlene J Sadlier, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 190; Sergio Martins, Constructing an Avant-​Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–​1979 (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2013), 168. 43 Rachum, Dismantling of Brazil’s Old Republic, 115; Ray Funkhouser, “Augusto de Campos, Digital Poetry, and the Anthropophagic Imperative,” Ciberletras: Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura 17 (2007); available online at https://​dialnet.unirioja.es/​ servlet/​articulo?codigo=2321293. 44 Alejandro M Madrid, “Renovation, Rupture, Restoration,” in The Modernist World, ed. Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), 411–​12. 45 Williams, Culture Wars, 4–​5; Edgar Salvadori de Decca, 1930, O silêncio dos vencidos: Memória, história e revolução (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2004); Boris Fausto, A Revolução de 1930: Historiografia e história (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997). 46 The discussion as to whether 1930 represented a rupture or a broad continuity with the past has traditionally divided historiography, with more revisionist literature in favor of continuities coming to the fore in recent years. See Jens R. Hentschke, “The Vargas Era Institutional and Development Model Revisited: Themes,” in Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives, ed. Jens R. Hentschke (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 19–​30.

 185

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

185

47 Edwin Gentzler, Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2012), 82–​3; Dunn, Brutality Garden, 25–​6. 48 Rachum, Dismantling of Brazil’s Old Republic, 247. 49 Antonio Costa Pinto, The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascism in Inter-​war Europe (New York: SSM-​Columbia University Press, 2000), 235–​6; McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas, 304–​7. 50 Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 58. 51 Leandro Pereira Gonçalves, “O exílio de Plínio Salgado em Portugal: a Vida de Jesus e a composição do apostolado político,” Projeto História (PUCSP) 52, 2015: 140–​77. 52 Kenneth Frampton, “Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer: Influence and Counterinflyence, 1929–​1965,” in Latin American Architecture, 1929–​ 1960: Contemporary Reflections, ed. Carlos Brillembourg (New York: Monacelli Press, 2004), 34–​8. 53 Segawa, Architecture of Brazil, 82; Yannis Tsiomis, Conférences de Rio: Le Corbusier au Brésil, 1936 (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 26. When Andrade met Le Corbusier in Saõ Paolo, he flattered him by suggesting that this name is studied alongside those of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. See Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 307–​8. 54 Segawa, Architecture of Brazil, 80–​3. 55 Péricles Memória Filho, Archimedes Memória—​o último dos ecléticos (Rio de Janeiro: IBRASIL, 2008), 89–​94; Lucio Costa, “Muita construção, alguma arquitetura e um milagre,” in Lucio Costa. Sobre Arquitetura (Porto Alegre: Ceuca, 1962), 131. 56 Adalberto Cardoso, “A Brazilian Utopia: Vargas and the Construction of the Welfare State in a Structurally Unequal Society,” Dados 5, 2011: available online at http://​ socialsciences.scielo.org/​pdf/​s_​dados/​v5nse/​scs_​a06.pdf; Deckker, Brazil Built, 15–​16. 57 Maria Célia Marcondes de Moraes, “Educaçao e Política nos Anos 30: a Presença de Francisco Campos,” Revista braileira de Estudos Pedagogicos, Brasília 73 (17-​4), 1992: 292–​3. 58 Jerry Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–​1945 (Durham NC; London: Duke University Press, 2003), 21–​5; Marcos Cueto and Steven Palmer, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 122–​4. 59 Valerie Fraser, Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America (London; New York: Verso, 2000), 150–​1. 60 For the background to the competition and what followed, see Roberto Segre, Ministério da Educação e Saúde: Ícone Urbano da Modernidade Brasileira, 1935–​1945 (São Paulo: Guerra, 2013) 61 Fraser, Building the New World, 201. 62 Deckker, Brazil Built, 27–​30; Cristiane Souza Concalves, Restauração arquitetônica: a experiência do SPHAN em São Paulo, 1937–​1975 (São Paulo: FAPESP, 2007), 32–​4. 63 Tim Benton, The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009), 182–​8. 64 Jean-​Francois Lejeune, “Dreams of Order: Utopia, Cruelty and Modernity,” in Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, ed. Jean-​Francois Lejeune (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 44–​6; Frampton, “Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer,” 36–​7.

186

186

Aristotle Kallis

65 Elizabeth D Harris, Le Corbusier: Riscos Brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro: Nobel, 1987), 169–​71. 66 Marcos Tognon, Arquitetura italiana no Brasil. A obra de Marcello Piacentini (Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 1999), 175; Cecilia Rodrigues dos Santos, Le Corbusier e o Brasil (São Paulo: Tessela/​Projeto, 1987), 109; Fernando Pérez Oyarzún, Le Corbusier y Sudamérica (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Arq, 1991), 65–​6. 67 Segawa, Architecture of Brazil, 52. 68 On the work of Marcello Piacentini, see the excellent contributions in Giorgio Ciucci, Simonetta Lux, and Franco Purini, eds., Marcello Piacentini architetto 1881–​1960 (Rome: Gangemi, 2012). 69 Simon Schwartzman, Helena Maria Bousquet Bomeny, and Vanda Maria Ribeiro Costa, Tempos de Capanema, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2000), ch 3. On Piacentini’s work for the university campus in Rome, see Franco Purini, “Geometrie della Sapienza,” in Marcello Piacentini Architetto, 1881–​1960, ed. Giorgio Ciucci, Simonetta Lux, and Franco Purini (Rome: Gangemi, 2012), 241–​56; Sandro Benedetti, “Marcello Piacentini: ‘il mio Moderno,” in L’Architettura dell’altra’ modernità: Atti del XXVI Congresso di Storia dell’Architettura, ed. Marina Docci and Maria Grazia Turco (Rome: Gangemi, 2011), 68. 70 A detailed series of the original designs submitted by Piacentini and Vittorio Morpurgo for the university campus of Rio de Janeiro are in Fondo Marcello Piacentini, Università degli studi di Firenze. Biblioteca di scienze tecnologiche, busta 91. 71 Lauro Cavalcanti, Roberto Burle Marx: The Modernity of Landscape (Barcelona; Basel; New York: ACTAR, 2011), 236. 72 Styliane Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 65. 73 Richard J Williams, Brazil: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 70. 74 Jacques Leenhard, “Playing with Artifice: Roberto Burle Marx’s Gardens,” in Relating Architecture to Landscape, ed. Jan Birksted (London; New York: E&FN Spon, 1999), 69–​77. 75 Valerie Fraser, “Cannibalizing Le Corbusier: The MES Gardens of Roberto Burle Marx,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 2 (2000): 180–​99. 76 Schwartzmann, Tempos de Capanema, ch. 3. 77 Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil, 56–​7. 78 Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness, 22–​5; Beatriz Jaguaribe, “Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms,” Public Culture 11 (1), 1999: 295–​312. 79 Sheila Schvarzmann, Humberto Mauro e as Imagens do Brasil (Saõ Paolo: UNESP, 2004), 133–​4. 80 Deborah Gans, The Le Corbusier Guide, rev. ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 141. 81 Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 143; Deckker, Brazil Built, 196. 82 Willy Boesiger, Le Corbusier: Oeuvre Complète, 1938–​46 (Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture, 1946), 89–​90; cf. Lucio Costa, “O arquiteto e a sociedade contemporânea,” in Lucio Costa: sober arquitetura (Porto Alegre: UniRitter, 2007), 1–​2. 83 Lisa D Shrenk, “From Historic Village to Modern Pavilion: The Evolution of Foreign Architectural Representation at International Expositions in the 1930s,” National Identities 1, no. 3 (1999): 303–​5; Deckker, Brazil Built, 54.

 187

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

187

84 Luis E Carranza and Fernando Luiz Lara, Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 105–​6. 85 Carlos Eduardo Comas, “New York World Fair of 1939 and the Brazilian Pavilion,” Arqtexto 16 (n.d.): 89–​91. 86 Patricio del Real, “Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar” (PhD diss., Columbia University, New York, 2012), 11–​13 and 19. 87 Real, Building a Continent, 111–​15 and 135. 88 Fernando Diniz Moreira, “Lucio Costa: Tradition in the Architecture of Modern Brazil.” National Identities 8 (3), 2006: 259–​75; Madureira, Cannibal Modernities, 191. 89 Carol Hess, Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 100.

Bibliography Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto antropófago” [Manifesto of anthropophagy], Revista de Antropofagia 1, no. 3 (1928): 7–​9 Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-​Brasil.” In Vanguarda européia e modernismo brasileiro [European avant-​garde and Brazilian modernism]. Edited by Gilberto Mendonça Teles, 326–​31. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1972 (originally published in 1924). Andrade, Oswald de. A Utopia Antropofágica [An anthropophagic utopia], 2nd ed. Saõ Paulo: Globo, 1995. Andrews, George Reid. Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–​1988. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Andrews, George Reid. “Brazilian Racial Democracy, 1900–​90: An American Counterpoint,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 3 (1996): 483–​507. Banham, Reyner. Guide to Modern Architecture. London: Architecture Press, 1962. Bauman, Zygmunt. “Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” Thesis Eleven 43 (1995): 1–​16. Benedetti, Sandro. “Marcello Piacentini: ‘il mio Moderno.” In L’Architettura dell’altra’ modernità: Atti del XXVI Congresso di Storia dell’Architettura [The architecture of the other modernity: Proceedings of the 26th Congress of the History of Architecture]. Edited by Marina Docci and Maria Grazia Turco, 62–​79. Rome: Gangemi, 2011. Benton, Tim. The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009 Boesiger, Willy. Le Corbusier: Oeuvre Complète, 1938–​46 [Le Corbusier: Complete works, 1938–​46]. Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture, 1946. Burke, Peter, and Pallares-​Burke, Maria Lúcia G. Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. Camargo, Aspásia, ed. O Golpe silencioso: as origens da república corporativa [The silent coup: The origins of the corporatist republic]. Rio de Janeiro: Rio Fundo, 1989. Campos, Haroldo de. “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration,” Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (1986): 42–​60. Cardoso, Adalberto. “A Brazilian Utopia: Vargas and the Construction of the Welfare State in a Structurally Unequal Society,” Dados 5 (2011), available online at http://​ socialsciences.scielo.org/​pdf/​s_​dados/​v5nse/​scs_​a06.pdf. Carlos, Eduardo Comas. “New York World Fair of 1939 and the Brazilian Pavilion,” Arqtexto 16 (n.d.): 89–​91.

188

188

Aristotle Kallis

Carranza, Luis E., and Lara, Fernando Luiz. Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Cavalcanti, Lauro. Roberto Burle Marx: The Modernity of Landscape. Barcelona; Basel; New York: ACTAR, 2011. Ciucci, Giorgio, Lux, Simonetta, and Purini, Franco, eds. Marcello Piacentini architetto 1881–​1960 [Marcello Piacentini architect, 1881–​1960]. Rome: Gangemi, 2012. Concalves, Cristiane Souza. Restauração arquitetônica: a experiência do SPHAN em São Paulo, 1937–​1975 [Architectural restoration: The experience of SPHAN in Sao Paolo, 1937–​1975). São Paulo: FAPESP, 2007. Costa, Lucio. “Muita construção, alguma arquitetura e um milagre” [A lot of construction, some architecture and a miracle]. In Lucio Costa: Sobre Arquitetura [Lucio Costa: On architecture]. Porto Alegre: Ceuca, 1962. Costa, Lucio. “O arquiteto e a sociedade contemporânea” [The architect and contemporary society]. In Lucio Costa: Sober Arquitetura [Lucio Costa: On architecture]. Porto Alegre: UniRitter, 2007, 2–​4. Costa Pinto, Antonio. The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascism in Inter-​war Europe. New York: SSM-​Columbia University Press, 2000. Costa Pinto, Antonio, and Kallis, Aristotle, eds. Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014. Cueto, Marcos, and Palmer, Steven. Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Dávila, Jerry. Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–​1945. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2003. Decca, Edgar Salvadori de. 1930, O silêncio dos vencidos: Memória, história e revolução [The silence of the vanquished: Memory, history and revolution]. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2004. Deckker, Zilah Quezado. Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil. London; New York: Spon Press, 2013. Dewulf, Jeroen. “New Man in the Tropics: The Nietzschean Roots of Gilberto Freyre’s Multiracial Identity Concept,” Luso-​Brazilian Review, 51, no. 1 (2014): 93–​111. Dunn, Christopher. Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture. Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Farfán-​Santos, Elizabeth. Black Bodies, Black Rights: The Politics of Quilombolismo in Contemporary Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Fausto, Boris. A Revolução de 1930: Historiografia e história [The 1930 revolution: Historiography and history]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997. Fausto, Boris. A Concise History of Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Fondo Marcello Piacentini, Università degli studi di Firenze. Biblioteca di scienze tecnologiche. Frampton, Kenneth. “Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer: Influence and Counterinfluence, 1929–​1965.” In Latin American Architecture, 1929–​1960: Contemporary Reflections. Edited by Carlos Brillembourg, 34–​49. New York: Monacelli Press, 2004. Fraser, Valerie. Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America. London; New York: Verso, 2000. Fraser, Valerie. “Cannibalizing Le Corbusier: The MES Gardens of Roberto Burle Marx,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 59, no. 2 (2000): 180–​193. Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1986; first published in Portuguese as Casa-​Grande & Senzala, Rio de Janeiro: Maia e Schmidt Ltda, 1933.

 189

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

189

Freyre, Gilberto. New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil. New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 1959. Funkhouser, Ray. “Augusto de Campos, Digital Poetry, and the Anthropophagic Imperative,” Ciberletras: Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, 2007; available online at https://​dialnet.unirioja.es/​servlet/​articulo?codigo=2321293. Gans, Deborah. The Le Corbusier Guide. Rev. ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001. Geist, Anthony L., and Monleon, Jose B. Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. New York; London: Garland, 1999. Gentzler, Edwin. Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2012. Gomes, Angela Maria de Castro. Capanema: o ministro e seu ministério [Capanema: The minister and his ministry]. Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2000. Gonçalves, Leandro Pereira. “The Integralism of Plínio Salgado: Luso-​Brazilian Relations,” Portuguese Studies 30, no. 1 (2014): 67–​93. Gonçalves, Leandro Pereira. “O exílio de Plínio Salgado em Portugal: a Vida de Jesus e a composição do apostolado político” [The exile of Plinio Salgado in Portugal: The life of Jesus and the composition of the political apostolate], Projeto História (PUCSP) 52 (2015): 140–​77. Goodwin, Philip L. Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Haesbaert, Rogerio. “Cultural Hybridism, Identitary Anthropophagy and Transterritoriality.” In Landscapes, Identities, and Development. Edited by Zoran Roca, Paul Claval, and John A. Agnew, 81–​94. Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Harris, Elizabeth D. Le Corbusier: Riscos Brasileiros [Le Corbusier: Brazilian risks]. Rio de Janeiro: Nobel, 1987. Hentschke, Jens R. “The Vargas Era Institutional and Development Model Revisited: Themes.” In Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives. Edited by Jens R. Hentschke, 19–​30. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Hess, Carol. Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Jaguaribe, Beatriz. “Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 295–​312. Jáuregui, Carlos A. Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina: Ensayos de Teoría Cultural [Canibalia: Cannibalism, calibanismo, anthropophagy; essays on cultural theory]. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008, 423–​6. Kallis, Aristotle. Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe. New York: Routledge, 2009. Leenhard, Jacques. “Playing with Artifice: Roberto Burle Marx’s Gardens.” In Relating Architecture to Landscape. Edited by Jan Birksted, 69–​77. London; New York: E&FN Spon, 1999. Lejeune, Jean-​Francois. “Dreams of Order: Utopia, Cruelty and Modernity.” In Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America. Edited by Jean-​Francois Lejeune, 30–​49. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Lesser, Jeffrey. Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Lévi-​Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques [Sad tropics]. New York: Penguin, 1992.

190

190

Aristotle Kallis

Madrid, Alejandro M. “Renovation, Rupture, Restoration.” In The Modernist World. Edited by Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross, 197–​205. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. Madureira Luís. Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-​garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature. Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Mann, Michael. Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Martins, Sergio. Constructing an Avant-​Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–​1979. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2013. Mascaro, Luciana Pelaes. “Similaridades entre Regionalismo e Antropofagia: nacionalismo—​internacionalismo—​regionalismo” [Similarities between regionalism and anthropophagy: Nationalism—​internationalism—​regionalism], Mneme 5, no. 10 (2004): 43–​59. McGee Deutsch, Sandra. Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–​1939. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, McGee Deutsch, Sandra. “Spartan Mothers: Fascist Women in Brazil in the 1930s.” In Right-​Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World. Edited by Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, 158–​60. New York; London: Routledge, 2002. McKinley, Michelle A. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Black): Legal and Cultural Constructions of Race and Nation in Colonial Latin America.” In Racial Formation in the Twenty-​first Century. Edited by Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, 116–​42. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Memória Filho, Péricles. Archimedes Memória—​o último dos ecléticos [Archimedes Memória—​the last of the eclectics]. Rio de Janeiro: IBRASIL, 2008. Mezzadri, Danilo. “The 1922 Week of Modern Art and Its Celebrations: A Study of Historical Reconstruction and Nationalism in Brazil.” Master’s thesis, Department of Musicology, Michigan State University, 2007. Mitchell, Michael. “Miguel Reale and the Impact of Conservative Modernization on Brazilian Race Relations.” In Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Edited by Michael Hanchard, 116–​37. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1999. Moraes, Maria Célia Marcondes de. “Educação e Política nos Anos 30: a Presença de Francisco Campos” [Education and politics in the 1930s: The presence of Francisco Campos]. Revista braileira de Estudos Pedagogicos, Brasília 73, no. 174 (1992): 291–​321. Moreira, Fernando Diniz. “Lucio Costa: Tradition in the Architecture of Modern Brazil,” National Identities, 8, no. 3 (2006): 259–​75. Nist, John. The Modernist Movement in Brazil: A Literary Study. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014, new ed. O’Brien, Elaine, Nicodemus, Everlyn, Chiu, Melissa, Genocchio, Benjamin, Coffey, Mary K., and Tejada, Roberto. Modern Art in Africa, Asia and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms. Oxford: Wiley, 2012. Oliven, Ruben George. “Brazil: The Modern in the Tropics.” In Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America. Edited by Vivian Schelling, 58–​74. London: Verso, 2000. Oyarzún, Fernando Pérez. Le Corbusier y Sudamérica [Le Corbusier and South America]. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Arq, 1991. Philippou, Styliane. Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Purini, Franco. “Geometrie della Sapienza” [Geometries of Sapienza]. In Marcello Piacentini Architetto, 1881–​1960. Edited by Giorgio Ciucci, Simonetta Lux, and Franco Purini, 241–​56. Rome: Gangemi, 2012.

 191

Envisioning the New Man in 1930s Brazil

191

Rachum, Ilan. The Dismantling of Brazil’s Old Republic: Early Twentieth Century Cultural Change, Intergenerational Cleavages, and the October 1930 Revolution. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2015, Real, Patricio del. “Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar.” PhD diss., Columbia University, New York, 2012. Resende, Beatriz. “Brazilian Modernism: The Canonised Revolution.” In Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America. Edited by Vivian Schelling, 199–​218. London: Verso, 2011. Rodrigues dos Santos, Cecilia. Le Corbusier e o Brasil [Le Corbusier and Brazil]. São Paulo: Tessela/​Projeto, 1987. Rogers, Thomas D. The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Rosenberg, Fernando J. The Avant-​garde and Geopolitics in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Sadlier, Darlene J. Brazil Imagined: 1500 to Present. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Schvarzmann, Sheila. Humberto Mauro e as Imagens do Brasil [Humberto Mauro and the images of Brazil]. Saõ Paolo: UNESP, 2004. Schwartz, Jorge. Vanguardas latino-​americanas: polêmicas, manifestos e textos críticos [Latin-​American avant-​gardes: Polemics, manifestos and critical texts]. São Paulo: EDUSP/​Iluminuras/​FAPESP, 1995. Schwartzman, Simon, Bomeny, Helena Maria Bousquet, and Costa, Vanda Maria Ribeiro. Tempos de Capanema [Times of Capanema]. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2000. Segawa, Hugo. Architecture of Brazil, 1900–​1990. New York: Springer, 2012. Segre, Roberto. Rio de Janeiro: Guide to Contemporary Architecture. Rio de Janeiro: Viana & Mosley Editora, 2005. Segre, Roberto. Ministério da Educação e Saúde: Ícone Urbano da Modernidade Brasileira, 1935–​1945 [Ministry of Education and Health: Urban icon of Brazilian modernity, 1935–​1945]. São Paulo: Guerra, 2013. Shohat, Ella, and Stam, Robert. Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic. New York; London: New York University Press, 2012. Shrenk, Lisa D. “From Historic Village to Modern Pavilion: The Evolution of Foreign Architectural Representation at International Expositions in the 1930s,” National Identities 1, no. 3 (1999): 287–​311. Stepan, Nancy Leys. “Eugenics in Brazil, 1917–​1940.” In Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia. Edited by Mark B. Adams, 110–​52. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Stepan, Nancy Leys. “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Tavolaro, Sergio B. F. “Gilberto Freyre and the Brazilian ‘Tropical Modernity’: Between Originality and Deviation,” Sociologias 15, no. 33 (2013): 282–​317. Tognon, Marcos. Arquitetura italiana no Brasil: A obra de Marcello Piacentini [Italian architecture in Brazil: In the shadow of Marcello Piacentini]. Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 1999. Treib, Marc. The Architecture of Landscape, 1940–​1960. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Trindade, Helgio. “Fascism and Authoritarianism in Brazil under Vargas (1930–​ 1945).” In Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism. Edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust, 491–​528. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1980.

192

192

Aristotle Kallis

Tsiomis, Yannis. 2006. Conférences de Rio: Le Corbusier au Brésil, 1936 [Conferences of Rio: Le Corbusier in Brazil, 1936]. Paris: Flammarion. Vale, Lawrence. Architecture, Power and National Identity. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2008. Vasconcellos, Eduardo Mendes de. “The First Modernity in Brazil—​a Cultural Project—​ Architecture and Urbanism 1930–​1960.” PhD diss., Architectural Association School of Architecture London, 1985. Vivanco, Sandra. “Trope of the Tropics: The Baroque in Modern Brazilian Architecture, 1940–​1950.” In Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America. Edited by Felipe Hernández, Mark Millington, and Iain Borden, 189–​201. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2005. Weber, Nicholas Fox. Le Corbusier: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Weinstein, Barbara. The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil. Durham; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Wells, Sarah Ann. “Semana da Arte Moderna de 1922 [Modern Art Week, São Paulo 1922],” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016. Williams, Daryle. Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–​1945. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2001. Williams, Richard J. Brazil: Modern Architectures in History. London: Reaktion Books, 2009.

 193

9

Japan’s Perennial New Man: The Liberal and Fascist Incarnations of Masamichi Rōyama Roy Starrs

The “New Man Society” In 1918, a “New Man Society” (Shinjinkai) was founded at Japan’s leading academic institution, Tokyo Imperial University, by a group of young students and academics. Although now known as “Japan’s first student radicals” because of their revolutionary activism a few years later, initially the Society members were not fire-​breathing radicals but idealistic liberal democrats who were, by no coincidence, gentlemanly young members of the privileged elite. As in Europe after the First World War, there was a widespread conviction that the “new age” required a “new man.” Thus fascists were by no means the only ones to make use of the idea—​it was part of the general zeitgeist of the age, as other writers in this volume have pointed out was also the case in Europe. Politically speaking, it would be hard to imagine a more inoffensive and moderate group than the Japanese New Man Society of 1918. Nonetheless, as William Miles Fletcher has written, they “aspired to be the ‘new men’ who would pioneer the economic and social rebirth of Japan.”1 With all the high idealism and ambition of youth, they yearned not merely for political reform but also for a far more fundamental transformation of the underlying values and structure of society. In their own high-​flown language, they sought nothing less than “to eradicate the system of materialistic competition which stands in the way of love and peace and to liberate mankind from the state of materialistic struggle.”2 These idealistic students at first opened themselves to a variety of international political and social influences and reformist movements—​most especially, at first, the new populist and unionist developments that were occurring in British parliamentary democracy (with the rise of the new Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald). The idea of a new man being necessary for new times was itself nothing new to the Japanese. In fact, Japan may be said to be a pioneer in developing new man discourses or ideologies, mainly because of its status as a latecomer to modernization. When the island country emerged from two and a half centuries of isolation in the mid-​nineteenth century, its ambition was to transform itself, almost overnight, from

194

194

Roy Starrs

an impoverished, technologically backward and politically divided feudalistic domain into a wealthy and powerful modern nation-​state. Naturally enough, a new man was deemed to be necessary to develop the “New Japan” at the required accelerated pace of modernization. Furthermore, the perception of the urgent need for a Japanese new man arose from the challenge presented to mid-​nineteenth-​century Japan by the Western imperialist powers—​and, more specifically, by the apparent moral, intellectual, and physical superiority of the Western male. Thus the earliest model of the Japanese “new man,” as articulated most influentially by the country’s first great journalistic advocate of modernization and capitalism, Yukichi Fukuzawa, was more or less meant to be a clone of the ideal Victorian male, particularly as delineated in Samuel Smiles’s Self-​Help (1859), the first Western book to become a bestseller in Japan: morally, the new Japanese man would no longer be a humble feudal subject but an enterprising, individualistic self-​made man; intellectually, he would be thoroughly educated along modern scientific lines; and, physically, he would grow bigger and more energetic by eating such Western staples as roast beef and by playing Western sports such as baseball.3 Thus the cultivation of this “new Japanese man” already included regimes of the kind of physical training, diet, and hygiene, as well as character-​building education, as would become commonplace in European fascist countries in the following century. But, by the early twentieth century, new historical conditions seemed to call for revised versions of this Japanese new man. The nineteenth-​century Anglo-​American liberal–​ democratic capitalist model, the individualistic homo economicus, was challenged by new, more “spiritual” or more “socially committed” models of manhood proposed by the rising movements of fascism and communism. By the mid-​1920s, in fact, most members of the New Man Society had veered sharply to the left. Indeed, in Japanese political history today, the New Man Society is known as an important and influential group of elite young Marxist intellectuals who eventually served as a propaganda arm of the Japanese Communist Party and, for several years, put up a brave last-​ditch stand against the rising tide of militarism and fascism in late-​1920s Japan. Being elite university students, they were allowed more free reign than their working-​class revolutionary comrades, but, as the government increasingly cracked down on communist activity in the late 1920s, even they were finally targeted by the thought police and forced to disband in 1929.4 But the fact is that not all New Man Society members moved to the extreme left. A  few rejected that trajectory and moved just as far in the other direction, to the extreme right. The most famous example is the political scientist Masamichi Rōyama (1895–​1980), who had helped found the Society as a young academic at the Imperial University in 1918. Rōyama went on to become probably the most influential ex-​ member of the New Man Society, and a figure of some importance in mid-​twentieth-​ century Japanese history, both in the academic world, as a leading political scientist, and also within the ruling political establishment, as an influential ideologue who provided intellectual support for the increasingly fascist direction of Japanese government policies, both domestic and foreign, in the 1930s. How then are we to understand his transformation from a liberal democrat to a fascist ideologue in the space of less than twenty years? And what does it tell us about the wider history of this period in Japan?

 195

Japan’s Perennial New Man

195

There were any number of more blatantly fascistic agitators, terrorists, and would-​ be dictators in the Japan of the 1930s, self-​proclaimed fascists, idolators of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and populist demagogues such as, to take just one example, Colonel Kingorō Hashimoto, founder of the ultranationalist Cherry Blossom Society, a group of blueshirts modeled on Mussolini’s blackshirts, who attempted two coups against the civilian government in the early 1930s. And this would also include those many “radical Shinto ultranationalists,” to use Walter Skya’s term, who fervently believed in Japan’s mission to wage a “holy war” against the West. So why focus on the gentlemanly intellectual and bureaucrat Rōyama, who never openly admitted to being a “closet fascist,” rather than on one of these more obvious compeers of the European “street-​fighter” fascists and Nazis? The reason is simple: in one important respect, Japanese fascism did differ from its European counterparts, namely in the way it assumed power. As the leading theorist of Japanese fascism, the political scientist Masao Maruyama pointed out, there are two ways fascism can come to power: “mainly as a result of the seizure of power by a fascist party with some kind of mass organization,” and “largely by permeating the existing power structure from inside.” Germany, Italy, and Spain were “obvious pre-​war examples of the former type, and Japan of the latter type.”5 In other words, in Japan the fascist revolution was not attained by populist demagogues and self-​declared fascists such as Colonel Hashimoto, who most closely resembled the fascist and Nazi leaders of Europe but who was far too much of an extremist outsider to appeal to the Japanese conservative political establishment. While populist demagogues certainly played some role in whipping up popular enthusiasm for antidemocratic reforms and overseas military adventures, especially among right-​ wing groups and the military itself, the real work of transforming the government by steady degrees into a one-​party totalitarian state was accomplished from the inside, by the conservative political establishment itself, in the venerable Japanese tradition of “top-​down reform.” Indeed, one might say that this same political elite had been preparing the ground for fascism, albeit unknowingly, since the late nineteenth century, with the construction of a Shinto-​based political religion centered on the emperor as sacred totalitarian leader in theory if not in practice, and with a political system that made the military answerable only to the emperor and not to the civilian government. There is indeed much truth in Anthony James Joes’s claim that “Japan was fascist before the word was invented.”6 In this respect Japan’s encounter with European fascist ideology and alliance with the European fascist powers merely reinforced tendencies toward totalitarianism, imperialism, and racism that were already strongly present. Even more relevant to Rōyama’s case is Maruyama’s division of the history of Japanese fascism into three periods: first, the term of preparation, from the end of the First World War to the Manchurian incident in 1931—​this was “the age of nongovernmental right-​wing movements”; second, the term of maturity, from 1931 to the military coup on February 26, 1936—​this was “the age of military fascism, which was combined with the nongovernmental right-​wing movements”; and, third, the term of accomplishment, from 1936 to the end of the Second World War in 1945—​this was “the age of the construction of fascism by the military in concert with the bureaucrats, monopolistic capital, and bourgeois political parties.”7 Thus, although the first and second of these periods were characterized by European-​style “fascism from below,” it

196

196

Roy Starrs

was the third period of “fascism from above” that actually succeeded in transforming the Japanese government into a totalitarian fascist state. Needless to say, Rōyama’s role as a leading intellectual and bureaucrat became increasingly important in the second and third periods—​during which, due to his efforts and those of like-​minded colleagues, fascist ideology and the advocacy of fascist sociopolitical and foreign policies were no longer restricted to radical fringe groups but became part of the “respectable” mainstream—​though, it is important to note, never under the name of “fascism.” Nonetheless, as Christopher W.  A. Szpilman writes, “fascists were in charge in prewar Japan, even if they themselves spurned this label.”8 Rather in the way that the Chinese leadership today would never admit that it subscribed to the most cutthroat kind of capitalism, the nativist and conservative Japanese political establishment of the 1930s would never have admitted that it subscribed to the most cutthroat kind of fascism—​an arriviste foreign ideology that had nothing to do with the divine, ancient, and fundamentally peaceful Imperial Way or with its recent sublime accomplishment, the “Greater East Asia Co-​Prosperity Sphere.” As Emperor Hirohito himself declared after the conclusion of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, “We sincerely hope to bring about a cessation of hostilities and a restoration of peace, and have therefore ordered the government to ally with Germany and Italy, nations which share the same intentions as ourselves.”9

Rōyama’s road to fascism When the New Man Society was founded in 1918, Japan seemed well on its way to becoming a full-​fledged British-​style parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, and the proclaimed goal of the Society was to further advance this process. Japan had been a formal ally of Great Britain since the turn of the century, and during the period of what is now known as “Taishō democracy” (after the Emperor Taishō, who reigned 1912–​26), there was an increasing democratization of the national polity, including the first “party cabinet government” (replacing the previous cabinet of Meiji oligarchs or genro) in 1918 under Prime Minister Takashi Hara and his majority political party, the Seiyūkai (Political Friendship Party, an ancestor of the present-​ day Liberal Democratic Party), and culminating in 1925, when the Diet passed the Universal Manhood Suffrage Act. In the intellectual world, the most influential advocate of this move toward liberal democracy was the political scientist Sakuzō Yoshino (1878–​1933), a professor at Tokyo Imperial University. Yoshino was Rōyama’s teacher and, as the historian Marius Jansen has written, both the “chief theorist and exponent” of Taishō democracy and the “principal intellectual and academic sponsor” of the New Man Society.10 His influence may be seen, for instance, in the fact that the Society “grew initially out of a student campaign for universal manhood suffrage.”11 As Fletcher has pointed out, Yoshino knew that the political establishment would never countenance republicanism or any other challenge to the emperor system, and thus “argued that Japanese politics should approach the British parliamentary model as much as possible.”12 Consequently, he advocated such typical liberal–​democratic reforms as “universal suffrage, firmer guarantees of the people’s rights, a clearer separation of powers

 197

Japan’s Perennial New Man

197

between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, and popular election of both houses in the Diet.”13 Yoshino’s relatively modest proposals for reform, however, soon came to seem inadequate to the young New Man Society members. A combination of increasing popular unrest at home and revolutionary movements abroad (in particular, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and Russian Revolution of 1917) convinced them that more radical measures were required to genuinely transform and reform Japanese society. The newly awakened Japanese masses seemed to demand more than the gradual or perhaps merely “cosmetic” changes called for by liberal–​democratic academics. The birth of mass politics in Japan, especially as expressed through street-​level popular demonstrations, is usually dated to the aftermath of the Russo-​Japanese War of 1904–​5. Although Japan nominally won the war, the Japanese public was convinced that it lost the peace: in their view, the Treaty of Portsmouth, which brought the war to an end, cheated Japan of the territorial and monetary gains it rightfully deserved for the great sacrifices that had been made in lives lost and wealth expended. Protest riots broke out in Tokyo and then across the country, resulting in widespread violence and destruction of property, and ultimately leading to the collapse of the government. Thus began what Japanese historians refer to as the “period of popular disturbances,” the most serious of which were the “rice riots” of 1918. Again, although Japan, as an ally of the Western democracies, was on the winning side in the First World War, the main beneficiaries were the wealthy new capitalist class, who profited from the extensive new markets opened up by the war. The impoverished masses suffered from the inflation brought on by an overheated economy, and especially from the soaring price of the country’s main food staple, rice. Nationwide riots, the most violent in modern Japanese history, occurred over several months in 1918 and again brought about the collapse of the government with the resignation of the prime minister and his cabinet. Labor unions and socialist groups, including the Communist Party, were able to harness this widespread popular discontent to widen their membership and strengthen their political position. Coming at about the same time as the Russian Revolution and other antiestablishment rebellions in Europe precipitated by the catastrophic impact of the First World War, these popular uprisings in Japan seemed to many members of the conservative political establishment an ominous prelude to a Marxist-​style revolution. And, sure enough, there was a rise in militant unionism and Marxist agitation. The New Man Society members were certainly not immune to these stirring new developments and, as already mentioned, many of them began to move sharply toward the left. As Henry De Witt Smith points out, “Labour unrest and political change led many intellectuals, including students, to conclude that a new era of popular discontent was at hand, needing only proper leadership to effect a broad social revolution.”14 And their attention was not just focused on domestic developments. More surprisingly, some New Man Society members, in sympathy with Dr. Sun Yat-​sen’s revolution, even began to voice opposition to Japan’s increasingly aggressive imperialistic bullying of China—​a particular irony in view of the major role some of them later played in justifying far greater instances of aggression against China during the fascist period of the 1930s and 1940s.15

198

198

Roy Starrs

By 1921, disagreements had broken out between the original liberal–​democratic founders of the New Man Society, by now alumni of Tokyo Imperial University, and new student members who were becoming more radically socialist in their political ideology. It was decided to split the Society, with the younger radical students keeping the name of New Man Society, and the older founding members, now gainfully employed, establishing a new society called the Social Thought Association (Shakai shisōsha). Significantly, the New Man Society journal changed its name from “Democracy” to Narod (“People” in Russian). (They were joined by other left-​wing student societies, such as the People’s League at Waseda University in Tokyo and the Labor-​Student Society at Kyoto Imperial University.) The Social Thought Association, in contrast, was still committed to Western social democracy and to peaceful and moderate reform. As Fletcher writes, “the organization provided intellectuals like Rōyama a forum for developing their analyses of society and their ideals for social and political change.”16 Rōyama’s path to fascism most likely began with his increasing belief in the all-​ importance of a strong central government. This led him progressively away from the traditional liberal prioritization of individual human rights and liberties and, in more general terms, from the Western humanist focus on individualism, individual identity, and individual free will as the basis of all higher culture and morality. In this respect, it might be said that he underwent a typical Nippon kaiki, or “return to Japan,” change in his life course—​a well-​known phenomenon in which Japanese writers and intellectuals tend to “return” to their own tradition after a youthful infatuation with all things Western. As with other Confucian cultures, since the beginning of their recorded history, Japanese political theorists have prioritized the rights of the group—​whether family, clan, village, or nation—​over those of the individual, the key Confucian term here being wa (social harmony), a word that appears in the very first article of the so-​ called Seventeen-​Article Constitution of Prince Shōtoku (603 AD), the oldest political document in Japan. There may be an element of truth in this—​Nippon kaiki and the corresponding “overcoming modernity” movement were certainly part of the zeitgeist of the fascist 1930s and 1940s, and this may well have reassured Rōyama that he was on the right path. Nonetheless, judging by his own writings, such a “return to tradition” was not his central consideration or the major influence on his thinking. As Fletcher points out in regard to Rōyama and other right-​wing Japanese political theorists, a “striking characteristic of their writings is the lack of reference to Japan’s own intellectual past; their works are almost all concerned with European writers or the policies of European nations.”17 In his major 2009 study, Japan’s Holy War, Walter Skya has rightly called our attention to the important role played in Japanese fascism by what he calls “radical Shinto ultranationalism” and its guiding idea of a “holy war” against the West. But the fact is that many different thought streams fed into Japanese fascism; intellectually and ideologically, it was an extremely diverse phenomenon, a hybrid of sometimes even contradictory worldviews—​which is why, of course, there was much infighting among Japanese fascists, sometimes with fatal results. Rōyama is a significant example of a fascist new man of a more secular type than the radical Shinto ultranationalist:  in a sense, more purely “modernist,” an elitist rather than a populist, and a technocrat

 199

Japan’s Perennial New Man

199

devoted to the idea that a totalitarian state ruled by an elite bureaucracy could best advance the economic and social development of Japan and the rest of Asia; priding himself on his “scientific rationality” and on his wide-​ranging knowledge of Western political-​and social-​scientific theory; a close student of European history and culture and therefore more open to direct influence from European Nazi and fascist practice and political theory. In other words, he was, like many other members of his cosmopolitan, elite educated class who had studied in Europe, mainly Germany, in the 1920s and who supported the increasingly militarized and imperialistic Japanese state of the 1930s, the kind of “Westernized” Japanese fascist who seemed quite immune to the “invented” mass political religion of national Shinto and its cult of emperor worship. Even on those rare occasions when Rōyama did wax emotional or mystical, it was not over the emperor, as we shall see, but rather over Japan’s historical “destiny” as leader and liberator of Asia—​or over the pan-​Asian utopia that would eventuate once the Anglo-​American world order had been overthrown. As Eri Hotta has pointed out, “For him, this theory of a regional body with a common Eastern destiny was one of meta-​theoretical belief, just as many of Germany’s National Socialists’ claims about German national destiny were often based on dubious scientific theories.”18 As this implies, Rōyama was closer to the fascist “new men” among his fellow intellectuals in Europe than to the Shinto ultranationalists. There seems to have been no room in his hardheaded worldview for that sentimental mood of mono no aware (pathos of things) nostalgia for a long-​lost “true Japan” or “true Japanese culture” that Alan Tansman identifies as a central element of the “aesthetics of Japanese fascism.”19 Indeed, his idea of utopia resembled more Plato’s Republic than some historical fantasy of a “restored” golden-​age Japan under the direct rule of the emperor. This is not to say, of course, that he was in any way opposed to the emperor system. Like his teacher Yoshino, his attitude was pragmatic, accepting the “irrational” imperial institution as the inseparable “affective” part of the Japanese body politic and also, no doubt, as a highly effective agent of mass political mobilization. Like other members of the educated elite in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Rōyama, in fact, worried that the growing unrest and political activism of the masses might lead ultimately to a violent revolution in Japan that could disempower men of his own class as well as threaten the traditional national polity and, finally, result in a new ruling class of ignorant populist demagogues. However, he had begun to lose faith in the ability of traditional liberal democracy to control this dangerous rising power of the masses. Parliamentarians, it seemed to him, were more interested in petty power struggles among themselves than in intelligently confronting the real problems of the world outside their debating chamber. Rōyama’s impatience with the political infighting and jockeying for power of competing interest groups in a parliamentary democracy is perhaps made more understandable by the fact that his academic specialty was government administration. What was needed for efficient and effective government was a strong centralized administration, a powerful state apparatus manned by elite bureaucrats, products of the best universities, who were above petty party politics and who could solve the country’s problems through the application of expert knowledge and rational, scientific thought. Indeed, he claimed that this kind of government existed even in liberal

200

200

Roy Starrs

democracies during wartime, as for instance during the First World War in Britain, which, out of the need for urgent action, created what he regarded as the first modern example of a powerfully centralized state bureaucracy. Ideally, Rōyama wrote, “politics or administration have the same character as war. They have a tendency to direct and to intensify the cooperative relationships between all elements of society to a high degree.”20 Writing in 1924, at a time when many members of the Japanese political class were expressing great admiration for Mussolini’s Italy, he was able to point to other examples in contemporary Europe also of precisely the kind of centralized governmental efficiency he was talking about: “When we see how efficiency has expanded, we feel that cries for so-​called decentralization are no more than poetic liberalism or nostalgia.”21 Looking around the world for an alternative political system to liberal democracy, one that he felt could accommodate both the new political power of the masses and the need for a strong state apparatus manned by elite bureaucrats, he was first attracted to British guild socialism. Influenced by its leading theorist, G. D. H. Cole (1889–​1959), he became convinced that “guild socialism” was the most appropriate system for a modern industrial democracy:  that is, that democratic representation of worker or occupational groups was more important than of individual citizens, and that the state could more effectively control its working class (forestalling, for instance, the violence of class warfare) through control of these guilds.22 As Fletcher writes, Rōyama’s “belief in the centralization and functionalization of state administration was closely linked to his perception of basic changes occurring in industrial societies all over the world. For him, the rise of the proletariat meant that society was splitting into occupational groups which a new political system would have to incorporate. . . . Individualism was no longer a realistic social principle. Looking at trends in Europe, Rōyama became convinced that occupational units would soon become the most important elements in Japanese society and that their role, rather than issues relating to individual liberties, should be the central concern of his writings.”23 In this way Rōyama may be said to have slowly drifted away from the classic liberal defense of the individual and individual liberties that descended from nineteenth-​ century thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and gravitated more toward a belief in the primacy of the needs of the group or of the state over those of the individual. Needless to say, this new belief made him altogether more amenable to the new totalitarian visions of state power that were also taking shape in Europe at the same time. In the 1930s, in the wake of the Great Depression, Rōyama was attracted to Rudolf Hilferding’s model of “organized capitalism,” a capitalism that, as J. Victor Koschmann writes, would move away “from the ‘irrational’ system of free enterprise to ‘rational’ organization under the state.”24 Contemporary examples that impressed him included not only “the Soviet five-​year plans and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, but the emergence out of the Labor Party in Great Britain of Oswald Mosley’s ‘social fascism’ and the American New Deal, which he interpreted as emblematic of constitutional dictatorship.”25 (By “constitutional dictatorship” he meant “the concentration of power entailed in governments’ use of constitutional prerogatives to sidestep parliamentary institutions and administratively institute radical economic and other reforms.”26) And when finally, in October 1940, all existing political parties were dissolved and the

 201

Japan’s Perennial New Man

201

Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusan-​kai) was established as the main political institution of the “new order” (shin taisei), in many ways this represented, as Koschmann writes, “the realization in Japan of Rōyama’s model of constitutional dictatorship.”27 It also represented, of course, the closest Japan came to the European model of a fascist one-​party state

Rōyama as fascist ideologue Post–​First World War Europe also provided Rōyama and other Japanese political thinkers with another, more extreme, and apparently more successful (in economic terms at least) model of centralized state power than guild socialism: namely, fascism. As William Miles Fletcher writes, Fascism was an attractive model of reform for Rōyama [and like-​minded intellectuals such as Shintarō Ryū and Kiyoshi Miki]. The similarities between [their] initial proposals for a New Order Movement and the structure of Mussolini’s corporate state were clear in 1940. A single, national political organization based on occupational units would replace the political parties and lead to a “Japanese form of one nation, one party.” The new economic order emulated the policies of Nazi Germany: limits on profits, government supervision of excess profits, economic planning, a national organization of regional and industrial cartels, and the recognition of the primacy of national goals.28

Moreover, their view of the state as “a ‘cooperative body,’ a community that constituted a moral force and an ethical basis for action,” shaped their moral vision of the Japanese new man, who would “rise above his own selfish desires and base his actions on the collective welfare of the nation.”29 And, as Fletcher also points out, these Japanese intellectuals were easily able to reconcile this fascist vision of the proper relation between individual and state with the native kokutai (national polity) as they understood it: “The theory of the national cooperative body rested on the elaboration of a ‘national mystique’ similar to that common in the ideology of European fascism, because Rōyama, Ryū, and Miki construed Japan’s traditional national polity as centered on reverence for the emperor and as leading naturally to the ethics of the cooperative body.”30 But, to understand fully why Japanese intellectuals such as these were attracted to fascism, we must also take account of the international situation of the time, and specifically of the international reaction to Japan’s attempts at empire building on the Asian mainland. Liberal democracy was closely associated in the Japanese mind with Britain and the United States, but it was exactly those two powers that were the most vocal critics of Japan’s aggressive expansionism in China, especially after the “Manchurian incident” of 1931. Up until the early 1920s, Japan had been a cooperative partner of Britain and the United States and, at the Washington Conference of 1921–​22 and the London Naval Conference of 1930, had even agreed to limit the buildup of her naval forces in the Pacific (a concession that enraged the nationalist right wing and led to some assassinations of the politicians held responsible, including the prime minister

202

202

Roy Starrs

in 1933). But Anglo-​American attitudes toward Japan began to sour as the scale of Japanese imperialist ambitions in China progressively expanded and began to threaten British and American interests in East Asia. Ultimately Western pressure on Japan would cause her to storm out of the League of Nations in 1933 and thereafter stubbornly pursue her own course as something of a “rogue state.” As Han Jung-​Sun writes, “Increasing alienation from the international community fanned a sense of ‘national emergency’ and led to efforts to cope with the crisis by establishing a ‘national defense state.’ These developments undermined the position of the political parties and led to the army and the bureaucracy gaining greater power.”31 Within a few years, however, Japan found that she was not alone. The European fascist powers, especially Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, were also defying the post–​First World War geopolitical order—​and making some remarkable territorial acquisitions by doing so. In fact, these two fascist powers had taken some courage from Japan’s earlier defiance, and the Japanese in turn were encouraged by events in Central Europe and Ethiopia to think that they too were facing a “paper tiger” in the liberal democracies. In short, the rise of an alternative to the “Anglo-​Saxon world order” that had prevailed since the nineteenth century—​the putative new world order of the fascist powers—​seemed to promise a “reformed” international system altogether more friendly to Japan’s geopolitical ambitions. Thus, unsurprisingly, by the late 1930s the Japanese Empire had entered into a formal alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, first by signing the Anti-​Comintern Pact in 1936 and then by joining the so-​ called Axis Alliance with the Tripartite Pact of 1940. During these turbulent years Rōyama emerged as a major intellectual spokesman and apologist of the new world order and of the highly aggressive form of Japanese imperialism that it inevitably involved. The erstwhile liberal internationalist was now well on his way to becoming a nationalist-​imperialist ideologue—​in particular, a leading propagandist for the Japanese military’s vision of a new order in Asia, an order that demanded, in short, that Japan replace the West as the new master of this vast area and its abundant resources. And, to make sure his voice would be heard, Rōyama allied himself with the most powerful politician of late 1930s Japan, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who was prime minister for most of the period from 1937 to 1941. Prince Konoe had established his own think tank, the Shōwa Research Association, in 1933, described by one contemporary wit as “a factory in charge of manufacturing Konoe’s intellectual vitamins.”32 Rōyama, one of its guiding lights from the beginning, became head of its World Policy Section in 1937, just after the outbreak of the Second Sino-​Japanese War. For Rōyama, China at that historical moment, in its chaos and poverty, provided the principal negative example of the all-​importance of a strong central government—​since its all-​too-​obvious lack of such seemed to prove his theory of its necessity in the modern world. For some years he had been arguing that Western condemnations of Japanese actions in China were based on the misconception that China was a modern nation-​state ruling over a clear-​cut national territory. On the contrary, he insisted, although China had once been a loose assemblage of territories ruled by an emperor, that imperial system had finally collapsed in 1911 after being undermined for many years by the incursions and depredations of the Western powers. The chaos that presently prevailed in China (in the 1920s and 1930s), with nationalists,

 203

Japan’s Perennial New Man

203

communists, and warlords all contending for power, proved that it was incapable of ruling itself as a modern nation-​state. Therefore it was meaningless for the Western liberal democracies or the League of Nations to invoke Eurocentric international law, designed only to apply to modern nation-​states, in their condemnations of Japan. In a 1934 article rebutting League of Nations criticisms and defending Japanese actions in Manchuria, he claimed that China “is not a modern nation-​state in the full sense of the term but a country that has not yet emerged from a medieval mode of existence. In China, a strong central government that can rule its territory legally and effectively has not come about owing to various obstacles.”33 Japan, in fact, was the only power capable of imposing unity and peace on China and, as already demonstrated in Manchuria, of thus ushering in a new age of efficient government and prosperous modern development that would benefit China even more than Japan. In this sense Rōyama was, as already mentioned, a modernist, convinced, like Japanese modernists going back to the influential mid-​nineteenth-​century figure Yukichi Fukuzawa, that Japan must lead the rest of Asia into a modernist utopia.34 But, as Roger Griffin has demonstrated convincingly and in great detail, a “profound kinship . . . exists between modernism and fascism.”35 At that very moment, of course, China, under the Nationalist Government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-​shek, was energetically engaged precisely in trying to constitute itself as a modern nation-​state and in trying to develop a modern sense of national identity. But Rōyama had little respect for Chinese nationalism, which, he rather perversely argued, was merely a weapon devised by Western imperialists to undermine Japanese interests. The Chinese, he remonstrated, should abandon the “ideas of perverted xenophobic nationalism” and the “legacy of the Middle-​Ages-​like Chinese empire” and, for their own good, side with their liberator Japan against the West.36 Needless to say, very few Chinese were convinced by this line of argument. Ironically, a “New People’s Society,” or shinminkai (Hsin-​min Hui in Chinese), was formed by the Japanese in China to try to create a new breed of Chinese who believed in the Co-​Prosperity Sphere and, of course, in the necessity of Japanese mastery of that sphere. If, as Griffin writes, the “goal of producing a generation of ‘new men’ and ‘new women’ incarnating national rebirth—​was intrinsically unrealizable” by the European fascist powers in their own countries, how much more so the attempt to impose such a “national rebirth” from the outside by an imperialistic foreign power.37 Even so, some recruits were found, since, as W. G. Beasley points out, various material inducements were offered, such as “jobs, rations, housing,” to persuade the natives to join this collaborationist group—​who, needless to say, formed a rather pathetic contrast to the idealistic “new men” of 1918!38 The Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-​ shek himself, quite dryly and decisively declared, “the policy [of a new order in East Asia, founded on the concept of the East Asia Cooperative Community] was merely a catch-​all designation for Japan’s plan to overturn the international order in East Asia, enslave China, establish hegemony over the entire Pacific region, and conquer the world.”39 The stage was thus set for one of the longest and most brutal wars of the twentieth century, the Second Sino-​Japanese war of 1937–​45, a war in which the Japanese Imperial Army committed a range of war crimes

204

204

Roy Starrs

and genocidal atrocities in China and elsewhere comparable in scale and cruelty to those committed by Japan’s Nazi ally in Eastern Europe. And there was also, of course, an almost total destruction of the Chinese industrial economy—​not to mention the vast losses in men and materiel the Japanese themselves suffered. Nonetheless, throughout this whole tragic period, Rōyama continued blithely to insist that Japan had only the highest motives in China and that, if only the Chinese themselves would accept this fact, they could look forward to a future of peace and prosperity. This, in a nutshell, was the veneer of rational justification that he, once famous as an “internationalist liberal,” gifted to the wartime regime in support not just of Japan’s conquest of China but also, shortly afterward, of its “move south” into Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands—​the justification of imperial conquest that was ultimately summed up under the title of the “Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere.” Whereas Rōyama had always prided himself, as an elite academic, on his calm rationality and freedom from the kind of nationalistic emotionalism that was particularly common among other advocates of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s, as the war heated up, he began to sound more like any other fascist hothead—​carried away perhaps by the atavistic instincts aroused by Japan’s initial military successes. His rhetoric became more strident and violence prone (that is, more typical of the fascist rhetoric of the time) when, for instance, he vented the classic fascist theme of national rebirth through violence or war:  “[I]‌n the smoke of cannon and the shower of bullets, the Orient, baptized with guns and swords, will rationalize Oriental thought.”40 In other words, war to him now not only led to a more efficient and powerfully centralized state bureaucracy, as he had previously claimed, but it would also result in a new world order shaped by a “rationalized” pan-​Asianism, a pan-​Asianist utopia (to be “rational” here, of course, meant to “realistically” accept the inevitability of Japanese overlordship of Asia, recognizing that the Japanese were more “advanced” than the rest of Asia not merely because of fortunate historical circumstances but because of their racial and cultural superiority, which made them the natural leaders of Asia). According to this new Orwellian double-​talk, the worst kind of imperialistic aggression was greeted as a higher form of rationality: war became peace, and emotionalistic ultranationalism became a higher form of reason. In short, Rōyama himself had now begun to embody the emotional and irrational nationalism he had previously professed to reject. And, of course, this makes his blanket condemnation of Chinese nationalism seem all the more devious and hypocritical. But it is also revealing that Rōyama at this time adopted an entirely different tone when writing academic works directed at a Western readership, such as his Foreign Policy of Japan: 1914–​1939, which was published in English by the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1941, just a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Here he adopts a more rational, conciliatory tone, writing euphemistically of the need for “a readjustment” in Japan–​China relations, of “the new relationship of mutual reliance which Japan is inviting China to build jointly,” and assuring his Western readers that “this Japanese policy of a new order in East Asia has not been a policy suddenly or accidentally conceived, but has been nationally formulated after long and serious deliberation and with a view to settling not only the present conflict but rather the age-​long instability of the Far East.”41 No talk here of the “smoke of cannon and the shower of bullets” or of the “Orient, baptized with guns and swords.”

 205

Japan’s Perennial New Man

205

Han Jung-​Sun’s contention that Rōyama was captive of “his own economic rationality and developmentalist mentality” and thus “grossly misjudged the intensity of the Chinese commitment to national independence and self-​respect” seems to me to downplay somewhat what increasingly drove him:  his own nationalism. As the war with China intensified in the late 1930s, he seemed increasingly to be driven by emotive and mystical nationalism rather than by coolheaded scientific rationalism. As J. Victor Koschmann points out, this nationalistic turn was also expressed in his political theory. Influenced by American political scientist W. Y. Elliot’s “co-​organic theory,” he began to argue that “political society now included not only organization directed toward end values but an inner tendency toward organic unity based on cultural values.” And, Koschmann continues, Elliot’s theory led Rōyama to understand the constitutional part of “constitutional dictatorship” in Japan in an unconventional way, as “something constructed on the intrinsic principles of the national political formation centering on Japan’s ‘national essence’ (kokutai).” Thus, by the late-​1930s, Rōyama was to some extent accommodating a less rational, more nativistic-​sounding conceptual framework than had been the case earlier.42

Another major intellectual influence at this time was the philosopher Kiyoshi Miki (1897–​1945), a fellow member of the Showa Research Association. Miki had studied with Martin Heidegger in the 1920s, and through him Heidegger’s philosophy may be said to have exerted some influence on Japanese as well as on European fascism. As Yasuo Yuasa has pointed out, in his Philosophy of History (Rekishi tetsugaku, 1932), Miki tried to apply the “existentialist” view of the human condition found in Being and Time to a new “methodological theory for understanding history” in its “ontological” dimension (basically, as human self-​realization through action).43 Rōyama’s argument for a Japanese version of America’s “manifest destiny”—​that Asia was the equivalent of the American frontier for Japan, necessary for the realization or “construction” of its full national destiny—​seems to have been shaped to some extent, as Koschmann points out, by this paradoxical “Mikian/​Heideggerean” theory of historical destiny: “that historical agents discover their destiny in the process of making history.”44 Nonetheless, when it came to Miki’s vision of a “Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere,” a sphere that would see Japan expand its hegemony far beyond northeast Asia to the South Seas and southeast Asia, Rōyama thought that Japan could not accomplish this alone but only as part of a new fascist world order, a “historical movement that would subsume Japan’s own regionalism, German and Italian efforts to form a new order in Europe, and Asian movements for self-​determination.”45 At any rate, as Fletcher points out, the writings of Rōyama and other leading intellectuals such as Miki and Shintarō Ryū (1900–​67), who also willingly served as fascist ideologues and propagandists in the 1930s, “helped provide the intellectual framework that enabled prominent intellectuals to support the ideology of the Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere and a fascist new order in Japan. These writers illuminate a more general pattern of thought and behavior of activist intellectuals during the transition from the 1920s, when political parties controlled the Japanese cabinet and attempts to

206

206

Roy Starrs

cooperate with the Western powers shaped Japanese diplomacy, to the jingoism and attacks on parliamentary government that marked the 1930s.”46 And, as Koschmann adds, Rōyama “continued throughout the Pacific War to participate in public discourse related to East Asian policy and to put his international political expertise at the service of Japan’s wartime empire. . . . The vision of an Asian community that would represent the dialectical overcoming of Western-​centered imperialism, nationalism, and liberalism was extremely attractive to modern, Western-​ oriented social scientists such as Rōyama.”47

Old Man as new man: Rōyama’s postwar career and legacy From a Western perspective, perhaps the most remarkable fact about Rōyama, or about his career, is the effortless way this leading fascist ideologue of the 1930s managed to reinvent himself, yet again, in the immediate postwar era, as a leading spokesman of the “new liberal democracy,” and even as a pacifist—​and to be unconditionally accepted as such by the intellectual and political elite.48 Masao Maruyama (1914–​96), for instance, widely regarded as the major new liberal thinker of postwar Japan, greeted Rōyama’s postwar tome, The Development of Modern Political Science in Japan (1949), as a “brilliant work” and also described Rōyama himself as one of “Japan’s foremost political scientists and a leading pre-​war liberal.”49 A leading prewar liberal—​no mention at all of his long career as a mouthpiece of that militarist regime that Maruyama himself had bitterly condemned as fascist! Among recent Japanese scholarly works that carry on this hagiographical treatment of Rōyama are Tsunao Imamura’s highly reverential Gabanansu no tankyū: Rōyama Masamichi o yomu (official English title: Quest for Governance:  A Japanese Pioneer’s Effort) (2009), which presents Rōyama as a scholar who lived an exemplary life and who deserves to be more widely recognized as the indispensable “pioneer” of political and administrative studies in Japan, and Ken Yonehara’s Nihon seiji shisō (Japanese political thought, 2007), which includes a respectful study of “Rōyama’s thought” that accepts, more or less at face value, his justifications of the “new order in Asia” as a liberation from Western colonialism.50 As for the Allied Occupation authorities, they briefly placed Rōyama’s name on a list of war criminals to be purged but soon forgave him his sins. By the late 1940s, he was already publishing again and occupying a prominent position as a professor of political science. It was almost as if he were still the idealistic young founder of the New Man Society in 1918 and all that had happened in the intervening years was merely a nightmare from which he had suddenly awakened and for which he bore absolutely no responsibility. Or, like Urashima Tarō, the Japanese version of Rip van Winkle, it was as if he had returned to Japan in 1946 thinking it was still 1918 and completely unaware of the events of the past quarter century. It may well be relevant here to recall that Rōyama had long been a dedicated student of Niccolò Machiavelli, that great teacher of the art of survival by adroit adaptation to changing political circumstances. But his impressive feat of sartor resartus, we should also acknowledge, tells us as much about postwar Japan as about Masamichi Rōyama. Postwar Japan was full of Urashima Tarōs, of memory slates wiped clean, of innocent “new men” just awakened from the

 207

Japan’s Perennial New Man

207

nightmare of history. Rōyama’s was far from being the only case of adept “political retailoring.” Indeed, Rōyama’s postwar self-​reinvention must be seen as part of the much larger exercise of postwar Japan’s national reinvention, and in particular the “liberal–​ democratic” retailoring of the whole conservative political establishment, from the emperor on down. The victorious Western Allies fully collaborated with the Japanese political establishment in this “cover-​up.” The convenient fiction was invented, as stated even in the Potsdam Declaration, that Japan’s fascist misadventure was engineered entirely by the militarists. With a few exceptions, other major players, whether members of the imperial family or elite erstwhile “liberal–​democratic” politicians and bureaucrats, thus were able to be quickly “rehabilitated” and to reassume leading roles in the postwar government and academic world. The Americans, perhaps wisely, had decided, like all previous warlord conquerors of Japan, that they could make effective use of the emperor system to legitimize their rule and ensure nationwide cooperation. Thus the emperor was presented, on the orders of the Occupation commanding general, Douglas MacArthur, as a complete apolitical innocent, indeed as a liberal and a pacifist who had done his best, however ineffectually, to rein in the military. When General Hideki Tōjō, the Second World War prime minister, let slip in his testimony that actually the emperor had approved and even encouraged most of the major aggressive military actions, he was ordered to change his testimony, and promptly did so “for the sake of the emperor.” This behind-​the-​scenes political manipulation by the Americans, with the all-​too-​ willing complicity of the Japanese conservative establishment, marks a crucial difference between the Nuremberg and the Tokyo war crimes trials. At Nuremberg there was at least an attempt at a thoroughgoing top-​down purgation of those members of the Nazi regime deemed to be war criminals; at Tokyo there was only a partial, “symbolic” purgation of a few scapegoats, combined with a cover-​up of the key wartime roles of a number of imperial family members, including Emperor Hirohito himself. This is an all-​important difference that has had far-​reaching and profound implications up until today. As Hirohito’s biographer, Herbert Bix, has written, “MacArthur’s truly extraordinary measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war.”51 For instance, in his surrender announcement the emperor had apologized to other Asians for failing to rescue them from Western colonialism—​thus slyly preserving in the Japanese people’s minds the myth of that Greater East Asia Co-​Prosperity Sphere of which Rōyama was a major exponent. Even today, the myth of “Japan as the noble liberator manqué of Asia” is the common justification of Japanese military conquest used by the country’s innumerable neofascist groups—​as well as by leading members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. It is featured prominently, for instance, at the war memorial museum, the Yūshūkan, attached to the national Shinto shrine, Yasukuni Jinja, where the souls of the war dead are enshrined and venerated—​including, controversially, those convicted as Class A war criminals. There is also a memorial to the Kempeitai, the “Japanese Gestapo,” on the grounds of this shrine that Japanese government officials, including the prime minister, regularly visit to pay their respects. (One can imagine the outcry on all

208

208

Roy Starrs

sides if an equivalent national shrine were erected in Germany.) However, somewhat contradictorily, those same neofascist groups will not countenance any suggestion that the emperor himself instigated this pan-​Asian war of liberation—​as the unfortunate mayor of Nagasaki found out in 1990.52 Thus, in the world of postwar Japanese politics, it was all too often a case of “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Certainly there are far more continuities between prewar and postwar Japanese politics—​and political ideology—​than is the case in its erstwhile European fascist allies. And Rōyama is an excellent, indeed prototypical, case in point. As Seok-​Won Lee has pointed out, for instance, Rōyama Masamichi was one of the leading social scientists who developed postwar Asian regional discourses in the 1950s, and much of his Cold War Asianist thinking came from economic development-​oriented wartime Pan-​Asianism. He called for the Japanese government to actively intervene in government-​ led economic development plans in Southeast Asian countries, most of which were Japan’s former colonies. At the same time, Rōyama and like-​minded social scientists aimed to promote Japan’s position in a United States-​led Cold War Asian order. Their involvement in the making of a Japan-​led colonial empire during the wartime period continued to influence Japan’s postwar encounter with Asia.53

And there was, in fact, far more to it than that. Domestically also, Rōyama’s prewar vision of a strong, authoritarian central government guided by an elite bureaucracy in the interests of social harmony and economic efficiency—​all the while preserving the imperial system and the oligarchic status quo—​became the widely accepted vision of the “new men” of the postwar “new Japan.” In other words, this somewhat pared-​ down version of the prewar kokutai (national polity), complete with its underlying nationalistic ideology, was adopted as the official policy of the conservative “liberal–​ democratic” establishment that has ruled the country, almost without interruption, for the past seventy years—​surely the closest thing to a “one-​party state” among the world’s putative liberal democracies. Nonetheless, as the country that experienced the first “economic miracle” of postwar Asia, Japan—​now dubbed “Japan Inc.” because of the close collaboration between its government and industry—​provided the economic and political model of mercantilist “Asian capitalism” that was adopted by the smaller Asian “tiger economies,” all of which were its former colonies or occupied territories, and finally even by China itself—​with the momentous results we are still living with in the twenty-​first century. China today, in fact, is already uncomfortably close to being the East Asian superpower Japan aimed to be in the 1930s: economically dominant, ultranationalistic (driven by a myth of Han-​Chinese racial and cultural superiority), ruled by an almighty single-​ party central state, and a growing military power behaving in an increasingly threatening way toward its neighbors. Ironically, then, by its adoption of the “Japanese model,” essentially as outlined by Rōyama and his fascist colleagues in the 1930s, China has succeeded in turning the tables on its former imperial master. Which begs the

 209

Japan’s Perennial New Man

209

question: will this rising threat of China incite Japan itself to revive its own tradition of fascism and militarism—​still far from dead—​especially if the Pax Americana in the Pacific disintegrates at any future point? This is a question that has portentous implications, and not only for Japan’s future. Anyone following the ongoing territorial disputes between Japan and China, and who fears the prospect of a third Sino-​Japanese War and the catastrophic impact this would have on the entire globe—​both countries being far more powerful today, economically and militarily, than they were in the 1930s—​will not be reassured by the present Japanese prime minister, the aggressively nationalistic Shinzō Abe.54 As the grandson of a leading fascist politician and suspected war criminal (who nonetheless became prime minister in the late 1950s), Abe himself is a living embodiment of the remarkable continuity of the wartime political establishment. Needless to say, he is an enthusiastic supporter and perpetrator of the postwar Liberal Democratic Party policy of systematically reviving the prewar kokutai and all the nationalistic agenda and ideology it entails—​including the myth of Japan as Asia’s liberator and as the beneficent ruler of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere.55 In this respect, one might say, he is doing his best to perpetuate the legacy of his distinguished “liberal/​fascist” forebear, Masamichi Rōyama.

Notes 1 William Miles Fletcher III, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 1. 2 Quoted in Fletcher, Search for a New Order, 11. 3 For a further discussion of this issue, see my Modernism and Japanese Culture, 19–​33. 4 See Henry De Witt Smith’s “The Origins of Student Radicalism in Japan” for a detailed account of their political activities. 5 Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 167. 6 Anthony James Joes, Fascism in the Contemporary World: Ideology Evolution, Resurgence, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978): 155. 7 Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, 32. 8 Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Fascist and Quasi-​Fascist Ideas in Interwar Japan, 1918–​1941,” 100. 9 Quoted in Walter A. Skya, “Fascist Encounters: German Nazis and Japanese Shintō Ultranationalists,” 142. 10 Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 542. 11 Ibid., 544. 12 Fletcher, Search for a New Order, 11. 13 Ibid. 14 Henry De Witt Smith, “The Origins of Student Radicalism in Japan,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 1 (1970): 87. 15 Ibid. 16 Fletcher, Search for a New Order, 12. 17 Ibid., 5.

210

210

Roy Starrs

18 Eri Hotta, Pan-​Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–​1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 171. 19 Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 14. 20 Quoted in Fletcher, Search for a New Order, 12–​13. 21 Ibid., 13. 22 G. D. H. Cole, too, in his later work, declared his preference for the authoritarian states of the day over the capitalist liberal democracies—​the Oxford don even going so far as to say, in 1941, that he would prefer to see Hitler or Stalin in charge of Europe rather than “see an attempt to restore the pre-​war States to their futile and uncreative independence and their petty economic nationalism under capitalist domination” (G. D. H. Cole, Europe, Russia and the Future (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941), 104). It seems that Rōyama was not the only distinguished academic susceptible to “losing his head” in wartime! 23 Fletcher, Search for a New Order, 14–​15. 24 J. Victor Koschmann, “Constructing Destiny: Rōyama Masamichi and Asian Regionalism in Wartime Japan,” in Pan-​Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders, ed. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (London: Routledge, 2006), 188. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 194. 28 Fletcher, Search for a New Order, 27. 29 Ibid., 156. 30 Ibid. 31 Jung-​Sun Han, “Rationalizing the Orient: The ‘East Asia Cooperative Community’ in Prewar Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 60, no. 4 (2005): 481–​514. 32 Quoted in Hotta, Pan-​Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–​1945, 165. 33 Quoted in Han, “Rationalizing the Orient,” 502. 34 On Fukuzawa as a pioneer of both Japanese modernism and of modern Japan’s patronizing attitude toward the rest of Asia, see my Modernism and Japanese Culture, 19–​33. 35 Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 1. 36 Han, “Rationalizing the Orient,” 505. 37 Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 351. 38 W. G. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan (London: Phoenix, 2001), 206. 39 Quoted in Han, “Rationalizing the Orient,” 505. 40 Quoted in ibid. 41 Masamichi Rōyama, Foreign Policy of Japan: 1914–​1939 (Tokyo: The Japanese Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941), 169–​70. 42 Koschmann, “Constructing Destiny,” 188–​9. 43 Yasuo Yuasa, “The Encounter of Modern Japanese Philosophy with Heidegger.” In Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 164. 44 Koschmann, “Constructing Destiny,” 190. 45 Ibid., 197. 46 Fletcher, Search for a New Order, 4. 47 Koschmann, “Constructing Destiny,” 198.

 211

Japan’s Perennial New Man

211

48 Rōyama, along with Masao Maruyama, became a leading member of the Peace Problems Discussion Circle (Heiwa mondai danwakai), which in December 1950 issued a statement advocating unarmed neutrality and opposing Japan’s close postwar alliance with the United States on the grounds that, in the emerging postwar bipolar world order, this could lead to entanglement in American wars. See Koschmann, “Constructing Destiny,” 198. 49 Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969): 241 and 382. 50 Tsunao Imamura, Gabanansu no tankyū: Rōyama Masamichi o yomu (Tokyo: Keisō shobo, 2009), i–​ii; Ken Yonehara, Nihon seiji shisō (Tokyo: Minerva shobo, 2007), 184–​222. 51 Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 585. 52 When Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima mildly suggested that Emperor Hirohito must share some responsibility for the war, he was shot by a member of the Spiritual Justice School, one of the many small neofascist groups that exist in Japan today. Though seriously injured, the mayor recovered. See “Mayor Who Faulted Hirohito Is Shot,” New York Times, January 19, 1990. 53 Seok-​Won Lee, “Asianism after Asianism: Rōyama Masamichi and the Making of a Postwar Asian Order,” Journal of Northeast Asian History, 12, no. 2 (2015): 67. 54 Abe claims that he may have become a “conservative” politician because of his resentment at the fact that his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a member of Tōjō’s wartime cabinet, was a suspected Class A war criminal. Politics in Japan is, and always has been, a family affair. See “Formed in Childhood, Roots of Abe’s Conservatism Go Deep,” Japan Times, December 26, 2012. 55 Narusawa Muneo, “Abe Shinzo: Japan’s New Prime Minister a Far-​Right Denier of History,” Asia-​Pacific Journal, 11, issue 1, no. 1 (January 7, 2013). Just as I finished writing this chapter, news arrived that Abe has finally realized a major long-​term goal of the Japanese right wing: to revise (or “reinterpret”) the postwar “Peace Constitution” so as to allow the Japanese military to fight overseas in defense of its allies. See Ayako Mie, “Security Laws Usher in New Era for Pacifist Japan: ‘War Legislation’ Raises Regional, Public Fears amid Lack of Diet Opposition,” Japan Times, March 29, 2016. At the same time, US presidential candidate Donald Trump is urging Japan to “defend itself ” by “going nuclear” if necessary.

Bibliography Beasley, W. G. The Rise of Modern Japan. London: Phoenix, 2001. Bix, Herbert P. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Cole, G. D. H. Europe, Russia and the Future. London: Victor Gollancz, 1941. Fletcher, William Miles. The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Han, Jung-​Sun, “Rationalizing the Orient: The ‘East Asia Cooperative Community’ in Prewar Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica, 60, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 481–​514.

212

212

Roy Starrs

Hotta, Eri. Pan-​Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–​1945. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Imamura, Tsunao. Gabanansu no tankyū: Rōyama Masamichi o yomu [Quest for Governance: Reading Rōyama Masamichi]. Tokyo: Keisō shobo, 2009. Jensen, Marius. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Joes, Anthony James. Fascism in the Contemporary World: Ideology Evolution, Resurgence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978. Koschmann, J. Victor. “Constructing Destiny: Royama Masamichi and Asian Regionalism in Wartime Japan.” In Pan-​Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders. Edited by Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann, 185–​99. London: Routledge, 2006. Lee, Seok-​Won, “Asianism after Asianism: Rōyama Masamichi and the Making of a Postwar Asian Order,” Journal of Northeast Asian History 12, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 67–​104. Maruyama, Masao. Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Narusawa, Muneo. “Abe Shinzo: Japan’s New Prime Minister a Far-​Right Denier of History,” Asia-​Pacific Journal, 11, issue 1, no. 1 (January 7, 2013). Reynolds, E. Bruce. Japan in the Fascist Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 Rōyama, Masamichi. Foreign Policy of Japan: 1914–​1939. Tokyo: The Japanese Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941. Skya, Walter A. “Fascist Encounters: German Nazis and Japanese Shintō Ultranationalists.” In Japan in the Fascist Era. Edited by E. Bruce Reynolds, 133–​54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Skya, Walter A. Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Smith, Henry De Witt, “The Origins of Student Radicalism in Japan,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 1 (1970): 87–​103. Starrs, Roy. Modernism and Japanese Culture. Houndmills; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Szpilman, Christopher W. A., “Fascist and Quasi-​Fascist Ideas in Interwar Japan, 1918–​1941.” In Japan in the Fascist Era. Edited by E. Bruce Reynolds, 73–​106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Tansman, Alan. The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Yonehara, Ken. Nihon seiji shisō [Japanese Political Thought]. Tokyo: Minerva shobo, 2007. Yuasa, Yasuo. “The Encounter of Modern Japanese Philosophy with Heidegger.” In Heidegger and Asian Thought. Edited by Graham Parkes, 155–​74. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

 213

Part Four

The “New Man” in European Fascist Movements

214

 215

10

The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain David Alegre Lorenz

Writing an accurate history of the Spanish Civil War in Spain was difficult before Francisco Franco died in 1974. The most controversial aspects of modern Spanish history were mainly analyzed by foreign scholars, making a proper understanding of the war and dictatorship difficult within Spain.1 This last point is relevant when taking into account a hitherto systematic failure as Spanish historians to disseminate the results of our research abroad. In turn, this has tended to marginalize Spanish fascism’s relevance to comparative European approaches during the interwar period. In many instances Spain appears as somewhat peripheral and politically hybrid; or again, incomplete on the basis of ideal types.2 It is no coincidence, then, that historiography on the Spanish Civil War has inadequately captured the Spanish reality in relation to the broader European scene. More to the point, classical interpretations of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing Francoist regime were initially conceived during the last years of the dictatorship.3 At this point, Franco’s regime had become a kind of political fossil in the European panorama, far from the world of its birth—​when fascism seemed modern, fascinating, and dynamic. Fortunately, many qualified Spanish and foreign historians have worked diligently to untangle the complex trap of clichés, propaganda, and literature that surround the first half of the twentieth century in Spain.4 As in the rest of Europe, the traumatic and complex paths of the interwar period—​a gigantic transnational space of different ideologies and conflicts—​gave rise to conceptions of a new kind of man who was perhaps more intellectual illusion than fact. Nonetheless, this “New Man” existed, in fascist discourse, and, arguably, in experience, and it is therefore vital to include this conception when analyzing fascist praxis, and the concrete ways in which it operated throughout Europe. The Spanish case of fascism was essentially created in the frame of a bloody civil war, whose victors ruled the country for forty years. Ultimately, its conception of masculinity permeated every aspect of social existence in Spain. Beyond the egos, the specific nuances of discourse, the differences in respect of the praxis and power struggles that are characteristic of any dictatorial regime, political phenomena, or even party, what is clear is that there was a natural convergence around fascism between the different participants in the 1936 coup d’état, including both the

216

216

David Alegre Lorenz

rebel officers and the Spanish counterrevolutionary right. Of course, this is the case as long as fascism is understood as more than the simple possession of a party membership card, since even this did not always mean alignment with the project represented by it. Accordingly, it is important to approach the fascist new man in both practical and discursive terms, a view forming the methodological basis of this chapter.

Combative Christianity: The redemption of men and the purification of the world by means of burning steel and violence The time lag between the July 1936 coup d’état and the stabilization of a more conventional war was characterized by uncertainty and improvisation in many respects. It is true that the summer months were crucial in boosting the process of fascistization by the Spanish right in the months following the February 1936 election. Yet it also provided the lowest common denominators that could unify these diverse political, social, and military forces.5 During those hot days of July and August, the rebels’ legitimizing discourses also responded to the quickly developing events. For this reason, the first themes introduced were extremely broad and unifying: they had to allow the integration of (to some extent) varied social–​cultural sensibilities. Rapidly, the coup d’état (Alzamiento) and the war itself were codified—​and sanctified by the Spanish Catholic Church—​as a modern-​day Crusade (la Cruzada), a sacred attempt to liberate Spain and to save civilization from the mortal threat of leftist revolution. That would be the narrative around which the new national community and the Francoist state were constructed, and it would also mark in an indelible form, the new fascist man in Spain as a Christian knight.6 The ideal of masculinity was plain to the different forces on the Spanish right before the coup d’état, which was crucial in certain key respects. For example, the new man provided a model of behavior at ground level in a decisive moment, when the military situation was fluid in Spain and pivotal decisions were taken. Among other things, the accepted existence of an ideal male who should be courageous, self-​sacrificing, devout, disciplined, proud, conscious, and aggressive, propelled wartime violence toward a form of political cleansing. One of the most important ideologues of Spanish fascism and its new regime, Manuel García Morente, was quite clear about this point in reflecting upon the radical right new man, who was born in Spain in the heat of “a new sacred war of liberation.”7 Between June 1 and 2, 1938, almost a year before the military end of the Crusade, he gave a series of lectures to the Asociación de Amigos del Arte (Friends of Arts Association) in Buenos Aires. There, García Morente legitimated all that had happened in the Iberian Peninsula over the preceding two years, including the use of violence, and war (albeit not explicitly) the 52,800 Spaniards who had been killed—​ many of them abandoned on hundreds of roadsides all over Spain—​in rebel-​held areas during the initial months of the Spanish Civil War.8 According to García Morente, the Reconquista (Reconquest)9 had provided Spanish men with an extremely thorough understanding of religious struggle, crucially, as a necessary means to impose a positive ethic and a higher model of Christian community. In this respect he considered that, from then on, the Spanish masculine would

 217

The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain

217

be characterized by its status as a Caballero Cristiano (Christian knight). Therefore, García Morente’s conception of life as an existential struggle saw in this “Christian knight” a developed willpower to forge a “will of empire” (voluntad de imperio) within him. In turn, this sentiment arose from the possession of a higher and righteous—​in this case, fascist—​Weltanschauung. Accordingly, this modern, Spanish version of the Crusading knight would be visibly guided by a combative conception of Christianity (what is termed here “combative Christianity”) that understood the civil war as a kind of purifying bonfire—​one whereby an individual and collective rebirth would take place, achieving the improvement and salvation of men. In this regard, this combative Christianity facilitated the emergence of a new man in Spain. This new man would be self-​made, turning human life into a constant exercise of penance mixed with renunciation, austerity, suffering, and sacrifice. In fact, the greatness and mythic value of this Christian knight lay in the fact that he would freely choose the more difficult path exemplified by this combative Christianity. In this, the Christian knight of the Spanish Civil War reflected a particular fascist conception of freedom, namely the open and free renunciation of the principles of the allegedly false and incomplete freedom advocated by democracy or communism. Indeed, Spanish fascism had to be firmly bound to Catholicism, for the latter had long made its decisive impression upon the main events of Spanish history, playing a central role in politics and culture.10 Thus, the Christian knight was a familiar figure in Catholic Spain and appeared as a “zealous defender of the good.” For this reason, García Morente posited “direct action” as his main modus operandi in its relations with the outside world: “The Christian knight blindly believes in the virtue and immediate efficiency of his own will and zealous resolution to transform things.”11 Yet perhaps the best incarnation of this combative Christianity and the new fascist man in Spain—​which was exploited by the Francoist regime’s propaganda as such—​ was General José Millán-​Astray. He founded the Spanish Foreign Legion and was familiarly known as the Glorious Cripple. He sacrificed himself until the end on behalf of the dogma of faith that structured his life, giving him a distinctive identity: the face of the struggle to save a Spanish and Catholic civilization. For this reason, he never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his pride at being one-​eyed, one-​armed and lame due to the injuries suffered during the Spanish colonial wars in Morocco during the twenties. Put simply, Millán-​Astray was considered a living reference for all Spaniards (and he considered himself as such).12 This allegedly eternal Spanish “being,” cast as a new man in 1936 by virtue of a palingenetic and an existential war, asserted a natural desire to mold reality in his image and likeness, in a transcendent way. In some ways, García Morente maintained that this new man offered the chance to subvert and surpass the characteristic forms of debate, participation in parliamentary democracy, or any other recognized political form—​replacing them with new, natural, and more direct ones. This entailed direct action in every form, including a military dictatorship, self-​consciously belonging to the reconstructed national community:13 “The evolutionary and patient approach to influence reality sickens the Christian knight who wants, now and without delay—​and by means of his own will and power—​evil to cease to exist, and for everything to be subjected to the conclusive formula of his own words.”14 Furthermore, the Requeté

218

218

David Alegre Lorenz

(Carlist) Jesús-​Evaristo Casariego talked about the political–​spiritual communion that existed naturally among men of good will, a community born of shared values, forged during the struggle and diffused in the course of the war. This was so much the case that Casariego appropriated the term “democracy” to describe the kind of organic relationship that he and his fellow Catholics enjoyed within Spain’s political community, even denying his enemies the legitimacy to use the word: “A perfect and exact democracy, a Catholic fraternity reigned among men and the classes.”15 The legitimation of fascist violence and the value of military conflict as expressions of a healthy and naturally rebellious spirit—​one associated with combative Christianity—​were intertwined in the war-​torn Spain of the 1930s. A key driver for this association, moreover, was the new Spanish man, who was guided by his absolute faith in the moral power of will; impatience as a demand for immediate and total transformation, not gradually or in a progressive way. . . . To sum up, the moral ideal of the Christian knight is the imperative of immediate, complete and perfect realization. . . . This way of feeling and thinking involves at the same time a certain disdain for intrinsic reality, not only because he considers it bad or indifferent, but also because he considers it easily assailable, transformable, manageable. The matter, the body, are and should be under the orders of the spirit; if these refuse to do what is necessary to force them, by means of violence, if necessary, or by means of punishment upon himself and upon the others.16

It must not be forgotten that the Nationalist rebels pursued their military offensive against the Spanish Levant at the same time as García Morente offered his reflections on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Only the day before García Morente’s address in Argentina, the Catalan city of Granollers was bombed by the Italian Aviazione Legionaria. The latter had collaborated actively with the rebel forces, and was responsible for killing more than 200 people and wounding more than 161 at Granollers. Similarly, only six days earlier the Italians had bombed Alicante, south of Valencia, killing more than 250 people, with the same number of wounded (not to mention the level of material destruction in both cases). It was just this kind of “purifying action” that formed part of the individual and collective catharsis praised by García Morente. In turn, this was but one of a series of measures implemented by the fascist new men (both Italian and Spanish) to give nationalist Spain its form back, in order to return to the aforementioned Spanish destiny. Ultimately, this combative Christianity entailed that “all forms of life will have to consist essentially of a permanent emendation of things according to the dictates of the best, of the most perfect.” Despite the rhetoric, these dictates took the form of high-​caliber bombs. Thus the valorized Christian knight in civil war Spain, a new kind of man, made burning sulfur and fire rain on the Marxist Sodom and Gomorrah of the Republican rearguard, a sacred downpour that would both save Spain and redeem the secular sinners. As García Morente pointed out, the Christian knight “doesn’t know any other legality than the law of God and his own conviction. . . . He doesn’t accept any other laws than his own; he rules himself by no other lighthouse than the glowing light of his own chest.”17

 219

The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain

219

Many fascist militants and sympathizers dedicated themselves to these revolutionary principles, interpreting and applying them in different ways depending upon context. Above all, however, a consensus was forged around a model of masculinity that was extremely effective in unifying counterrevolutionary actions. In this vein as the Requeté militia ex-​combatant José María Resa Ortega, suggested, the greatness of this glorious Crusade, that only short-​sighted people have not understood, lies in having achieved the active and mutual participation without distinctions and nuances of all good Spaniards in the most sublime feat of our history; all in the spirit of heroism, generosity and patriotic excitement that will never be forgotten.18

Therefore, this ideal Christian knight, the Spanish iteration of the fascist new man, was championed as the only way to be a Spaniard, and as a result his values reflected those that should be held by anyone who wanted to be considered not only part of nationalist Spain but also as a man. In this respect, this gendered stereotype created around an idealized masculinity worked as an extremely effective inclusion–​exclusion mechanism that identified those who belonged to the new national community and those who were to be outside of it. As might be expected, those who were not ex-​combatants of the rebel army or martyrs (or family relations) of the national cause faced particular challenges in proving that they also contributed to the triumph of Spanish nationalism. Needless to say, the privileges, benefits, and “rights” of the new order were reserved only for the victors. While there were ways to prove loyalty to the Principles of the Movement, it is also the case that there were opportunities for Spanish Republicans to show remorse and be forgiven. The new men in Spain, who were forged in a holy Crusade that turned them into Christian knights, were encouraged to pursue this new order on the battlefields of the civil war. The Falangist volunteer José María Garate, for one, recalled how he and his comrades felt when they received the last war communiqué on April 1, 1939: “We remained rooted to the spot when we broke ranks. We felt upon us the enormous responsibility of peace, taking possession of a new life for which we have become men during the war.”19 In the end, this fascist new man understood both individual and collective life as a permanent enterprise of improvement. They tended to see the revolution not only as a social task but also as a personal and daily effort to which the Christian knight subjected himself. These and similar narratives in Franco’s regime remained unaltered for decades, in some cases until the very end of the dictatorship in the 1970s. José Antonio Girón de Velasco, an ex-​combatant and then minister of labor, maintained as late as 1951, our fellow man, subject of redemption, was created by the Lord to enjoy all spiritual blessings. He is a bearer of values that lineage passes on from one to another, as the sacred inheritance where man improves himself and gives his children not a worse life, but a better and a more respectable one. For this reason, we paid attention to the improvement of man from the first moment.20

220

220

David Alegre Lorenz

Yet it is necessary to pose questions to go beyond this self-​service discourse of the Christian knight and his combative Christianity. First and foremost, to what extent is it possible to perceive the actual appearance of this new man in Spanish society, either during the war or in its aftermath? And, if so, what changes were engendered by this Spanish new man? Put another way, how did the Christian knight affect politics and culture in Francoist Spain?

The Spanish Christian knight in action amid ruins and revenge The Spanish woman was wholly absent from the reflections of García Morente when theorizing about the Spanish new man. This is surely because it had not been, and in 1930s Spain should not be, her role to play a key part in the political and military events of the day. Women could nonetheless pose a grievous threat to both normality and the fulfillment of Spain’s national destiny—​as was held to be the case during the localized German uprisings immediately following the Great War. During the fights between the Freikorps and the revolutionary forces, for example, a figure called a Flintenweib appeared, termed a rifle woman, or a “castrating woman,” who supported the revolutionary cause. Especially if she had arms, this fighting woman raised pressing questions over gender relations for traditionalists during the Spanish Civil War.21 This type of woman represented a threat not only to the physical integrity of men (since they were held to kill combatants dishonorably in Spain) but also because they apparently violated impermeable gender roles. In this respect, the invariably male Christian knight would also aid Spanish women by combining political purification—​namely, the elimination of all threats represented by democracy and the workers’ movement—​with the reaffirmation of his own masculinity. For Spanish women, this required their continuing material, productive, and sexual subordination to men. At times during the Spanish Civil War, it also entailed redemption through collective punishment and ritual humiliation. Unsurprisingly, this radically aggressive model of masculinity paved the way for verbal and physical violence, which invariably fed off one another during the Spanish Civil War. A good example is provided by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, a key figure in charge of the coup d’état in Seville and Commander in Chief of the rebellion’s Army South. He specialized as a radio broadcaster from the first days of the nationalist insurrection, turning the radio into a genuine instrument of power. Queipo de Llano waged an extremely effective psychological war against his Republican enemy, but also—​and perhaps more importantly—​instructed his soldiers to act in particular ways. This is exemplified by his speech of July 23, 1936, broadcast just seven days after the first proclamations of war in the Spanish Moroccan enclaves: Our courageous legionaries and regulares [colonial troops] have shown the cowardly reds and at the same time also their women what it means to be real men. This is completely justified because these communist and anarchist women advocate free love. Now, at least, they know what real men are rather than not faggot militiamen. They [these women] won’t get away, no matter how much they bawl and kick.22

 221

The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain

221

Thus, to rape Republican women was intended to stigmatize them forever, destroying them physically and psychologically, and to violate their Republican values. By extension, it directly affected the husbands of these women, often powerless in the face of nationalist rape. By contrast, the Spanish Christian knight reinforced his manliness by raping and killing when his faith ordered him to do so. 23 In this regard, the Spanish case offers a paradigmatic example of what Alan Kramer has described as “fascist warfare”: the first in modern history “that totally eradicated that distinction” between combatants and noncombatants. This was undertaken, in part, to impose a new totalitarian system—​one combining the propitiatory framework posed by conventional military operations with cleansing actions behind the front lines—​by means of a radical violence that had few parallels in modern Europe.24 It is difficult to identify the extent to which such martial rhetoric permeated military mentalities and led to different ways of acting. Clearly propaganda has a direct impact upon warfare, albeit precisely how remains debated in Spanish historiography. For example, the former combatant Paulino Aguirre, before the civil war a philosophy student, told Ronald Fraser how they listened, “fascinated, the radio broadcasts conducted by Queipo de Llano from Seville” during the initial days of the nationalist uprising: “Their brutality, rudeness and violence expressed better than anything else the true nature of the war.”25 It was therefore no coincidence that on July 23, 1936, the same day as Queipo de Llano’s aforementioned broadcast, rebel forces destroyed popular resistance in the neighborhood of San Bernardo. This was the last bastion of the Popular Front in Seville, reduced through a concentration of artillery fire on the city alongside a political cleansing that entailed war crimes, including rape and mass murder. Similar events took place on that day in the Albayzín, the most important working-​ class neighborhood of Granada. It had resisted the coup d’état in mid-​July, and was bombed with artillery and fighter planes. When Fraser asked Aguirre if conscripted soldiers under his command advanced a clear idea about why they were fighting, he offered a telling response: It didn’t seem so. Maybe they had it in their heart, although I fear that they didn’t. The only thing that they seemed to be conscious of was obedience: to obey the orders that they received. And the same happened with many of the officers, especially those that had risen from the rank-​and-​file and had never imagined that they would have to make war.

Nonetheless, he pointed out that nationalist soldiers understood why they were fighting by the end of the civil war, as well as the rebel’s aims: “At this point they had read and heard enough propaganda.”26 The dynamics of war, especially the requirements of military organization and the social pressures among soldiers at the front, seems to have been crucial in promoting violent behavioral patterns. Moreover, it appears that many soldiers accepted notions of combative Christianity promoted by the Francoist intelligentsia. As the journalist Luis de Armiñán recalled when reflecting upon these dynamics in the nationalist trenches, “Fear disappeared in the face of the courage of others. And you felt a little ashamed when your heart beat faster and you could see

222

222

David Alegre Lorenz

the soldiers climbing the hills undisturbed and calmly as if the bullets were aimed at others.”27 This surely owed much to the vicissitudes of the long civil war in Spain, first and foremost deriving from the need to maintain morale for the war effort. Yet this ideological radicalism also forced the rebels to adopt an alternative political project, one that was necessarily attractive for its main supporters and allies. This ideation has since become more or less clear to Spanish researchers (with some interpretative nuances): the war represented a unique framework for propelling the nationalization of Spanish society. The extreme situations experienced by soldiers throughout conflict, but also the bonds of comradeship shaping military units, frequently turned these experiences into a central axis of their lives and masculine identities. Memoirs and diaries left by nationalist militants suggest that many felt empty after the civil war. Indeed for a generation of Spanish youth, war was the only profession they knew. Alongside their political motivations, the physical devastation of the country led countless young Spaniards to take part in the repressive machinery of the state after 1939. This included the Guardia Civil, which would go on fighting the Maquis (guerrillas) in the rural and mountainous parts of the country sometimes until the 1960s; the Servicio de Información y Policía Militar (Intelligence Service and Military Police) and the Brigada Político-​Social (Political-​Social Brigade, or Secret Police), who attended to the security of the regime, as well as the Inspección de Campos de Concentración (Concentration Camps Inspection), where between 350,000 and 500,000 prisoners of war and political enemies would be processed, humiliated, and exploited (redeemed and reeducated, from the perspective of the Francoist regime).28 Finally, and in large numbers, many nationalist veterans joined the División Azul (Blue Division) to finish the anticommunist tasks they had begun five years earlier, fighting alongside the Germans in the Soviet Union from June 1941. In all of these cases, their efforts may be considered a violent extension of those carried out during the war, which doubtless contributed to stabilizing the new regime. Yet at the same time, the majority of soldiers tried to return to “ordinary life” as soon as possible—​despite the fundamental changes engendered in post–​civil war Spain.29 Of course, the situation generated by the war is enormously complex. The process of nationalization obviously had its limitations in regard to individuals. This owes much to the varied personal backgrounds and experiences of Spaniards in the turbulent 1930s. Thus, some conscripted soldiers found ways to resist within the rebel army, while thousands of Spanish youths fled into the forest to avoid military service—​ especially during the first weeks of fearful uncertainty—​when no one knew what would happen nor how long the war would last.30 On the whole, this does little to mitigate against the all-​encompassing, fascistic character of nationalist warfare or of the nature of the new man born in Spain between 1936 and 1939. The boundaries for transformative actions by these Christian knights remain blurred. These limits to the effects of violent rhetoric upon mass murder—​including the tensions that they created inside the regime—​existed in every fascist experience. Yet in war-​torn Spain, such ideas typically operated subtly, persistently impacting upon mentalities and behavior. Above all, what matters here is that Spanish fascism was itself subjected to a process of fascistization in the mid-​1930s. In turn, this gave way to a political and cultural synthesis broad

 223

The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain

223

enough to assimilate a great variety of sensibilities—​from fascist political religion to forms of Catholic traditionalism—​arising from the Spanish counterrevolution. As has been argued here, the rhetorical and, ultimately, physical emergence of a new kind of man, a Spanish knight evocative of the Christian Crusades, played a crucial role in this development.

Concluding remarks: The varieties of fascist experience As discussed above, the model of masculinity promoted by the nationalist rebels was extremely patriarchal. From their perspective, its core mission was to heal the broken contours of the national community, and to reestablish the natural hierarchies within society after years of acute crisis, misery, and disorder. It is beyond doubt that many conscripted soldiers and civilians were able to identify with this gendered conception of essentialized masculinity under what became the Francoist regime. Clearly the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath remain challenging in historiographical terms. Yet as this chapter has suggested, one possible avenue for historians is to approach the conflict empathically, that is to say, from the point of view of the time and its challenges: “a mass of people” began to think “coherently and in the same coherent fashion about the real present world,” in this case by virtue of a complex process of fascistization. Through this process, the dictatorship removed participation in democratic terms, substituting it with an almost total power over their families and, sometimes—​depending upon the individual and his political–​military merits—​over their local communities as well. This was, at least in part, generated by the emergence of the fascist new man in Spain. In terms of practical consequences, this was a situation that persisted with little or no change until the end of the dictatorship in 1975. These fascist new men acted as a counterrevolutionary vanguard that seized power in the midst of a civil war. From their point of view, their success was due to a combative ethos, one guided by their Catholic faith. More importantly, however, in many cases these new men grew old holding on to this power and conditioning the private and, especially, the public sphere with these mentalities and social relations. In the end, they became a gerontocracy that would rule the country for decades. From this perspective, this Christian knight was born from extant elements in Spanish culture but also through contact with much wider European ideological and gender currents. The Spanish new man thus cast a long shadow over the postwar development of the country. In the end, Spanish fascism was inspired by the varied manifestations and potentialities of European cultures and mores. In this regard, there is much to agree with Joseph Yannielli in criticism of Roger Griffin’s “new consensus,” since it remains on the surface of what fascism was and meant—​notwithstanding its useful intuitions and ability to condition the recent historiographical agenda regarding fascism. Without doubt, this alleged consensus remains prominent in the realm of the fascist discourse and aesthetics. Yet it has not delved into the variety of fascist experiences and their different paths, which crucially depended upon local, regional, and national contexts. In short, the “new consensus” has not grasped the necessity of approaching fascism through its changing

224

224

David Alegre Lorenz

dynamics: its reality on the ground, alongside the protean significance of fascism at a wider, European level. Fascism in Europe was able to penetrate the lives of entire families, societies, and countries at a capillary level, whether through a process of politicization or by an invasion and war of occupation. Instead, fascism should be seen “as a process—​as a historical moment deeply embedded in a larger history and a larger international context.” In setting out this criticism, Yannielli defended the need to “expand the geographical and temporal boundaries of palingenetic ultranationalism,”31 arguing that the time has come to decentralize our hegemonic conception of fascism, overly derived from ideal types and the supposedly paradigmatic cases of Italy and Germany. To take a case in point, the paternalism practiced under Francoism by these Spanish Christian knights should not be necessarily understood as a reflection of the will to simply go back in time and reimpose a traditional order. Instead, so characteristic of any fascist experience was the perception of a new, radical, and collective response to tackling unique challenges. To this was added a deep sense of crisis from the point of view of these men. In the end, García Morente was clear in stressing that the Christian knight tends to feudalism by his own nature. . . . Can we say then that the Christian knight is deep down in his heart backward and reactionary? No. By no means. . . . History never retraces its steps, and no one can really be a reactionary if he becomes aware of the sense of this word.32

However, according to García Morente, “the steps of history materialize, establish or single out, so to speak, a fixed and determined repertoire of eternal human aspirations.” In this light, the Spanish experience of fascism and its new men can be extremely useful in open the study of fascism to new fields and possibilities.

Notes 1 Many of them were surely influenced by the image of a country that in most cases they had only known during the dictatorship, an image highly monopolized and determined by the regime. 2 Aristotle A. Kallis, “ ‘Fascism’, ‘Para-​Fascism’ and ‘Fascistization’: On the Similarities of Three Conceptual Categories,” European History Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2003): 219–​49. 3 For example, see Stanley G. Payne, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), a work that is still cited abroad even though it is completely outdated and overtaken by the Spanish historiographical advances of the last twenty-​five years. 4 This has not only been detected in regard to fascism but also to liberalism and to anarchism in recent years. See Assumpta Castillo, “Anarchism and the Countryside: Old and New Stumbling Blocks in the Study of Rural Collectivization during the Spanish Civil War,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 29, no. 3 (2016): 225–​39. 5 There has been much debate around this question during recent years. For different positions, see Ismael Saz, “El franquismo ¿Régimen autoritario o dictadura fascista?,”

 225

The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain

6 7

8

9 10

11 12

13

14

225

in El régimen de Franco (1936–​1975): Política y Relaciones Exteriores, ed. Javier Tusell Gómez (Madrid: UNED, 1993), 189–​201 and Fascismo y franquismo (Valencia: PUV, 2004), 151–​61; Eduardo González-​Calleja, Contrarrevolucionarios: Radicalización violenta de las derechas durante la Segunda República, 1931–​1936 (Madrid: Alianza, 2011) and Ferran Gallego, “Fascistization and Fascism: Spanish Dynamics in a European Process,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 25, no. 3 (2012): 159–​81 and El evangelio fascista: La formación de la cultura política del franquismo (1930–​ 1950) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2014), 29–​552. See Javier Rodrigo, Cruzada, Paz, Memoria: La guerra civil en sus relatos (Granada: Comares, 2013), 15–​20. García Morente was Chair of Ethics at the University of Madrid until the beginning of the war, when the Republican authorities removed him. Then he went to Paris, where he converted to Catholicism. This led him to support the rebel movement and to become a priest. In regard to his ideological importance to the Nationalists, see Gallego, El evangelio fascista, 502–​4. For these figures, see Javier Rodrigo, “Guerra al civil: La España de 1936 y las guerras civiles europeas,” in Políticas de la violencia: Europa, siglo XX, ed. Javier Rodrigo (Zaragoza: PUZ, 2014), 185. There is no reason to think that someone such as García Morente, well positioned and informed as he was, did not know what was happening in war-​torn Spain, despite the fact that he had been abroad since the coup d’état in July 1936, when he fled Madrid. This was the name given during many years to the series of wars from the eighth to the fifteenth century between the Christian kingdoms of the north of the Iberian Peninsula and the Muslim ones in the south. On the existing bond between nation and religion in the Spanish fascist project and its mobilizing power, see Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, ¡Fuera el invasor! Nacionalismos y movilización bélica durante la guerra civil española (1936–​1939) (Madrid: Alianza, 2006), 189-​244. Manuel García Morente, Idea de la Hispanidad (1938; Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe, 1961), 58. Geoffrey Jensen, Cultura militar española: Modernistas, tradicionalistas y liberales (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2014), 219–​37 and 256–​62. Jensen correctly argues that Millán Astray’s “ideology represents the culmination of the modernist and traditionalist varieties of the Spanish military thought.” Yet at the same time, he was also the incarnation of the Spanish fascist man, and not only of National Catholicism, which would be part of Spanish fascism. In fact, Millán-​Astray believed that fascism was the only adequate response to the huge challenges faced by Spain. He attacked Catalonia and the Basque provinces in his speech of October 12, 1936, at the University of Salamanca, on the occasion of the Spanish Day of Race. There, he described these regions as “cancers in the body of the nation” and maintained that only “fascism, Spain’s health-​giver, would know how to exterminate them, cutting into the live healthy flesh like a resolute surgeon free from false sentimentality.” Cited in Hugh Thomas, La guerra civil española (1962; Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1976), 294–​5. See David Alegre Lorenz, “Formas de participación y experiencia política en el primer franquismo: la pugna por los principios ordenadores de la vida en comunidad durante el periodo de entreguerras (1936–​1947),” Rúbrica Contemporánea 3, no. 4 (2014): 5–​27. García Morente, Idea de la Hispanidad, 59.

226

226

David Alegre Lorenz

15 Jesús-​Evaristo Casariego Fernández, Flor de hidalgos: Ideas, hombres y escenas de la guerra (Pamplona: Editorial Navarra, 1938), 23–​4. 16 García Morente, Idea de la Hispanidad, 59. The Falangist militant Ricardo Gutierrez went so far as to state that “fascism was nothing other than the nationalization of the Marxist doctrine. The idea turns itself into political action.” Ricardo Gutiérrez, Memorias de un azul (Salamanca: Imprenta Comercial Salmantina, 1937), 62. The same ideas were expressed at a more philosophical level as late as 1948 by the fascist intellectual José Antonio Maravall, who defended the war as a path to virtue and to the self-​made man, using Don Quixote as an example. See José Antonio Maravall, Humanismo de las armas en Don Quijote (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1948), 111–​51. 17 García Morente, Idea de la Hispanidad, 60. 18 José María Resa Ortego, Memorias de un requeté (Barcelona: Editorial Bayer, 1968), 159. 19 José María Garate, Mil días de fuego: Memorias documentadas de la guerra del treinta y seis (Barcelona: Luis de Caralt, 1972), 649. 20 José Antonio Girón de Velasco, La libertad del hombre: Meta de la revolución social en España (Madrid: Altamira, 1951), 11. 21 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (1977; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 70–​9. 22 See the speech at https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=9weVo7tCvjc. ABC Sevilla—​as well as many other newspapers on the rebel side—​used to publish speeches by Queipo de Llano, but in this case censors decided to clear this specific extract. For the role of this general in the first months of the civil war, see Paul Preston, L’holocaust espanyol, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Base, 2011), 244-​78. 23 Unfortunately, it is not possible to know the role and modus operandi of the African army and the fascist militias in all their complexity during this time, as the Archives of the Legion and the Regulares are not catalogued. Consequently, the largest part of their documentary collections is not accessible to researchers. Nonetheless, military directives exist that were issued by the General Staff of the Rebel Army, which included regulations for the entrance of the troops in towns and cities. The main aim was to avoid excesses that could result in the loss of social support of the occupied settlements. See, for example, “Instructions for Column Commanders and Sector Commanders for the Entrance to the Towns,” AGMAv, 2580, 46 /​1 (December 26, 1936) or “Discipline: Treatment to Soldiers in Liberated Towns. Conduct of the Troops,” AGMAv, 1367, 27. In contrast, the whereabouts of the archive of FET-​JONS has remained unknown (if it still exists) since the end of the Francoist regime. 24 See Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 329. Kramer largely focuses on the Italian colonial war in Ethiopia. Whereas between one-​third and one-​sixth of the victims due to the Great War were civilians, the proportion of civilian casualties was a little more than half of all victims in the Spanish Civil War. For a comparative overview using qualitative and quantitative terms for the violence during the different wars of the interwar period, see Javier Rodrigo, “Under the Sign of Mars. Violence and European Civil Wars, 1917–​49,” in Contemporary European History, forthcoming. 25 Ronald Fraser, Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros: Historia oral de la guerra civil española (1972; Barcelona: Crítica, 2007), 151.

 227

The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain

227

26 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros, 388. See also Miguel Alonso Ibarra, “Vencer y convencer. Una aproximación a la fascistización del combatiente sublevado y la construcción del consenso en la España franquista (1936-​1939)”, in Fascismo y modernismo: Política y cultura en la Europa de entreguerras (1914-​1945), ed. Miguel A. del Arco, Francisco Cobo, and Claudio Hernández (Granada: Comares, 2016): 107–​21. 27 Luis de Armiñán, Bajo el cielo de Levante: La ruta del Cuerpo de Ejército de Galicia (Madrid: Ediciones Españolas, 1939), 144. 28 These figures are provided in Javier Rodrigo, Cautivos: Campos de concentración en la España franquista, 1936-​1947 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005). 29 See Ángel Alcalde, Los excombatientes franquistas (1936–​1965) (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2014), 106–​12. According to Mary Vincent, Francoism had to change a fascist conception of man into a Carlist-​traditionalist one due to the different needs of the postwar period. Yet Vincent seems to forget that the home and the family were always crucial dimensions of any fascist project, and that the promotion of another kind of masculinity identified by the exemplary head of the household was a part of the reality (and of course the potentialities) of fascist political culture. Examples abound everywhere. See Mary Vincent, “La reafirmación de la masculinidad en la cruzada franquista,” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 28 (2006): 147–​51. 30 Francisco J. Leira Castiñeira, La consolidación social del franquismo: La influencia de la guerra en los “soldados de Franco” (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2013). 31 Joseph L. Yannielli, “The Nationalist International: Or What American History Can Teach Us about the Fascist Revolution,” European Journal of Political Theory 11, no. 4 (2012): 438–​58 and 443. 32 García Morente, Idea de la hispanidad, 90.

Bibliography Albert, Mechthild. Vanguardistas de camisa azul: La trayectoria de los escritores Tomás Borrás, Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval, Samuel Ros y Antonio de Obregón entre 1925 y 1940 [Avant-Gardists in Blue Shirt: the Career of the Writers Tomás Borrás, Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval, Samuel Ros y Antonio de Obregón between 1925 and 1940]. Madrid: Visor Libros, 2003. Alcalde, Ángel. Los excombatientes franquistas (1936–​1965) [The Spanish Excombatans, 1936–1965]. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2014. Alegre Lorenz, David. “Formas de participación y experiencia política en el primer franquismo: la pugna por los principios ordenadores de la vida en comunidad durante el periodo de entreguerras (1936–​1947),” [“Forms of Participation and Political Experience during the First Francoism: the Struggle for the Governing Principles of Community Life during the Interwar Period, 1936–1948”] Rúbrica Contemporánea 3, no. 4 (2014): 5–​27. Alonso Ibarra, Miguel. “Vencer y convencer. Una aproximación a la fascistización del combatiente sublevado y la construcción del consenso en la España franquista (1936–​ 1939).” [“To conquer and to convince: An Approach to the Fascistization of the Rebel Combatants and the Construction of Consensus in Francoist Spain, 1936–39”] In

228

228

David Alegre Lorenz

Fascismo y modernismo: Política y cultura en la Europa de entreguerras (1914–​1945) [Fascism and Modernism: Politics and Culture in Interwar Europe, 1914–1945]. Edited by Miguel A. del Arco, Francisco Cobo and Claudio Hernández, 107–​21. Granada: Comares, 2016. Borrás, Tomás. “De la revolución separatista y soviética,” [“On the Separatist and Soviet Revolution”] ABC Madrid, October 27, 1934: 21. Casariego Fernández, Jesús-​Evaristo. Flor de hidalgos: Ideas, hombres y escenas de la guerra [Flower of Noblemen: Ideas, Men, and Scenes of the War]. Pamplona: Editorial Navarra, 1938. Castillo, Assumpta. “Anarchism and the Countryside: Old and New Stumbling Blocks in the Study of Rural Collectivization during the Spanish Civil War,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 29, no. 3 (2016): 225–​39. De Armiñán, Luis. Bajo el cielo de Levante: La ruta del Cuerpo de Ejército de Galicia [Under the Sky of Levant: The Route of the Army Corps Galicia]. Madrid: Ediciones Españolas, 1939. Fraser, Ronald. Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros. Historia oral de la guerra civil española [Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War]. 1972. Barcelona: Crítica, 2007. Gallego, Ferran. “Fascistization and Fascism: Spanish Dynamics in a European Process,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 25, no. 3 (2012): 159–​81. Gallego, Ferran. El evangelio fascista: La formación de la cultura política del franquismo (1930–​1950) [The Fascist Gospel: The Forming of the Francoist Political Culture, 1930–1950]. Barcelona: Crítica, 2014. Garate, José María. Mil días de fuego: Memorias documentadas de la guerra del treinta y seis [A Thousand Days of Fire: Documented Memories of the 1936's War]. Barcelona: Luis de Caralt, 1972. García Morente, Manuel. Idea de la Hispanidad [The Idea of Spanishness]. Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe, 1938/​1961. Girón de Velasco, José Antonio. La libertad del hombre: Meta de la revolución social en España [Man’s Freedom: The Milestone of Social Revolution in Spain]. Madrid: Altamira, 1951. González-​Calleja, Eduardo, Contrarrevolucionarios: Radicalización violenta de las derechas durante la Segunda República, 1931–​1936 [Counter-Revolutionaries: Violent Radicalization of the Right Wing during the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936]. Madrid: Alianza, 2011. Gutiérrez, Ricardo. Memorias de un azul [Memories of an Spanish Fascist]. Salamanca: Imprenta Comercial Salmantina, 1937. Jensen, Geoffrey. Cultura militar española: Modernistas, tradicionalistas y liberales [Spanish Military Culture: Modernists, Traditionalists, and Liberals]. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2014. Kallis, Aristotle A. “ ‘Fascism’, ‘Para-​Fascism’ and ‘Fascistization’: On the Similarities of Three Conceptual Categories,” European History Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2003): 219–​49. Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford: OUP, 2007. Leira Castiñeira, Francisco J. La consolidación social del franquismo: La influencia de la guerra en los “soldados de Franco” [The Social Consolidation of Francoism: the Influence of War in “Franco’s Soldiers”]. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2013.

 229

The New Fascist Man in 1930s Spain

229

Maravall, José Antonio. Humanismo de las armas en Don Quijote [The Humanism of Weapons in Don Quixote]. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1948. Morente, Francisco. Dionisio Ridruejo: Del fascismo al antifranquismo [Dionisio Ridruejo: From Fascism to Anti-Francoism]. Madrid: Síntesis, 2006. Núñez Seixas, Xosé Manoel. ¡Fuera el invasor! Nacionalismos y movilización bélica durante la guerra civil española (1936–​1939) [“Against the Invader”: Nationalisms and War Mobilization during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939]. Madrid: Alianza, 2006. Parejo, José Antonio. Las piezas perdidas de la Falange: el sur de España [The Missing Pieces of Falange: The Spanish South]. Seville: Secretariado de Publicaciones Universidad de Sevilla, 2009. Payne, Stanley G. Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961. Preston, Paul, L’holocaust espanyol [The Spanish Holocaust]. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Base, 2011. Resa Ortego, José María. Memorias de un requeté [Memories of a Carlist]. Barcelona: Editorial Bayer, 1968. Ridruejo, Dionisio. Escrito en España [Written in Spain]. 1962. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1964. Rodrigo, Javier. Cautivos: Campos de concentración en la España franquista, 1936–​1947 [Captives: Concentration Camps in Francoist Spain, 1936–1947]. Barcelona: Crítica, 2005. Rodrigo, Javier. Cruzada, Paz, Memoria: La guerra civil en sus relatos [Crusade, Peace, Memory: The Spanish Civil War in Its Accounts]. Granada: Comares, 2013. Rodrigo, Javier. “Guerra al civil. La España de 1936 y las guerras civiles europeas,” [“War Against Civilians: The Spain of 1936 and the European Civil Wars”] In Políticas de la violencia: Europa, siglo XX [Policies of Violence: Europe in the Twentieth Century]. Edited by Javier Rodrigo, 145–​190. Zaragoza: PUZ, 2014. Rodrigo, Javier. “Under the Sign of Mars. Violence and European Civil Wars, 1917–​49,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 3 (2017): forthcoming. Santiáñez, Nil. Topographies of Fascism: Habitus, Space, and Writing in Twentieth-​Century Spain. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Saz, Ismael. “El franquismo ¿Régimen autoritario o dictadura fascista?.” [Francoism: Authoritarian Regime or Fascist Dictatorship?] In El régimen de Franco (1936–​ 1975): Política y Relaciones Exteriores [Francoist Regime, 1936–1975: Politics and International Relations]. Edited by Javier Tusell Gómez, 189–​201. Madrid: UNED, 1993. Saz, Ismael. Fascismo y franquismo [Fascism and Francoism]. València: PUV, 2004. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. 1977. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Tomas, Hugh. La guerra civil española [The Spanish Civil War]. 1962. Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1976. Vincent, Mary. “La reafirmación de la masculinidad en la cruzada franquista,” [“Reaffirming Masculinity during the Francoist Crusade”] Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 28 (2006): 135–​51. Yannielli, Joseph L. “The Nationalist International: Or What American History Can Teach Us about the Fascist Revolution,” European Journal of Political Theory 11, no. 4 (2012): 438–​58.

230

 231

11

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man Jeannette Baxter*

Introduction What did the new British fascist man look like? I explore this question in relation to two different yet connected forms of political portraiture produced in Britain during the 1930s. The first is a critically neglected visual–​textual feature called “Men in Fascism,” which was published over the course of a five-​month period (December 1933–​April 1934) in Fascist Week, and which showcased seventeen prominent members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Even though British fascism was a hybridized form of fascism that openly “stole the intellectual property of continental fascist aesthetics,” it nevertheless developed, as Julie Gottlieb has argued, a “British fascist style and political techniques and technologies” that “suited national and local conditions.”1 “Men in Fascism” deserves to be read as an important form of political portraiture within the BUF’s interwar political technology. Through close textual and visual analysis of a select number of “Men in Fascism,” I explore the dynamics of identification at work in these fascist portraits together with their formal strategies for presenting the new British fascist man to the politically dedicated and persuadable reader. A striking dimension of “Men in Fascism” is its visual relationship with a series of cartoon portraits by John Gilmour of “soft” political figures, including Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, and Jimmy Maxton, and “hard” photographic portraits of the quintessential new British fascist man, Oswald Mosley.2 When read in relation to the visual politics of Gilmour’s cartoons and the BUF images of Mosley, “Men in Fascism” emerges as a charged exercise in the construction and marketing of British fascist masculinity, one that despite the BUF’s political marginality in interwar Britain, aspired to give face to a fascist future. The second part of this chapter turns to forms of visual and discursive portraiture by Wyndham Lewis as they intersect with conceptions of the new British fascist man. With reference to The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Hitler (1930), I outline Lewis’s controversial engagements with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism across the late 1920s and 1930s in order to give a taste of the artist’s shifting, and often conflicting, portraits of fascist masculinities. Paying particular attention to Lewis’s visual

232

232

Jeannette Baxter

and verbal portraits of Mosley, I reexamine the nature and extent of Lewis’s fascist modernism. Should the artist–​writer be dismissed, to follow critics like John Carey, as an unequivocally noxious fascist intellectual? Or is there potential to encounter Lewis’s ambivalent art of political portraiture as less something to be rejected outright and more as a variant of what Roger Griffin has identified as “programmatic modernism”? While this line of questioning in no way seeks to apologize for a body of 1930s political writings that critics agree is, in the large part, “objectionable,”3 it nevertheless seeks to open up the complex critical energies at work in Lewis’s linguistic and visual political portraits in order to better understand the artist–​writer’s tension-​ridden relationship with British fascism more generally and the new British fascist man in particular.

“Men in Fascism”: Portraits of the new British Fascist man Our young, hard Fascism springs from the hard facts of a testing and turbulent age . . . it brings also a new type of manhood to government.4

“Men in Fascism” first appeared in Fascist Week in December 1933, and, in many ways, it serves as a visual illustration of “the microcosm of national manhood re-​born”5 that Mosley envisaged in his manifesto for British fascism, The Greater Britain (1932). A small visual–​textual feature composed of a photographic portrait and a pithy biography outlining various political and intellectual achievements of the selected individual, “Men in Fascism” presented seventeen key members of the BUF between December 1933 and April 1934. These included Alexander Raven Thomson, controller of the Research Department at National Headquarters; Eric Hamilton Piercy, officer commanding National Defence Force control (see Figure  11.1); George Gaston

Figure 11.1  Fascist Week, illustration by John Gilmour (January 1934).

 233

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

233

Vincent, senior propaganda officer; and Rex Tremlett, deputy director of publications and editor of Fascist Week (1933–​34) and Blackshirt (1934). Initially, the most eye-​catching element of “Men in Fascism” is a black and white photographic portrait of the featured BUF member. In compositional terms, the portraits hardly vary across the series: the new fascist man is presented by a head-​and-​ shoulder shot taken in a plain photographic style; in each case his gaze is determined and directed at the reader; and, in most cases, he is wearing the Blackshirt uniform. The simple, formulaic composition of each portrait is worth commenting on precisely for the way in which it emerges as a vital element in the complex consumerist dynamic at work in “Men in Fascism.” That is to say, “Men in Fascism” is best understood as an experimental branding exercise for the BUF, one that was not only alive to the reiterative methodologies of advertising but also to the shortening attention spans of the 1930s consumer. As Gottlieb observes, the aestheticization of politics and the conducting of politics as a branch of advertising were modern shifts in political technology that the BUF exploited fully: the new fascist man “was a conspicuous consumer: he accepted the wide purchase of the policy, but he also, and more significantly, was expected to buy into the myth, the spirit and the merchandizing of British fascism.”6 In the case of “Men in Fascism,” the myth being peddled was one of British fascist masculinity, and even the briefest of glimpses at these consumer-​friendly images would have established a very clear vision of what the new British fascist man did, and indeed should, look like: youthful, disciplined, and full of purpose. On the level of the accompanying biographical narrative, an aesthetic of compression works equally hard to capture the reader–​consumer’s attention. Each biography reads like a highly selective curriculum vitae, consisting of headlines of achievement and bold statements of geopolitical expertise: George Gaston Vincent is marketed as a “recognised authority on economics and all matters relating to Empire”;7 Alexander Raven Thomson is presented in polymathic terms: “Authority on sociology, history and philosophy.”8 More specifically, a rhetoric of masculine virtue dominates each biography. Tropes of virility, leadership, struggle, combat, and sacrifice, all appropriated from European fascist constructions of the “new man,” repeat across the seventeen “Men in Fascism” narratives, working in dialogue with the portrait images to showcase the BUF as a “self-​defined masculine organization replete in ‘the spirit of British manhood.’ ”9 Piercy’s biography, for instance, boasts a faultless record as director of Defence Force measures throughout Great Britain: “No political meeting with stewards controlled by Mr Piercy has yet been broken up. Keen on all forms of sport and athletics. Is responsible for maintaining the high standard of physical fitness demanded of Fascists, whether members of the Defence Force or not.”10 Notably, the violence that characterized BUF rallies is here aestheticized and marketed to the reader as virtuous and aspirational. In the athletic figure of Piercy, physical and psychological “hardness” are brought to the fore, giving form to a British fascist masculine principle that stands in stark contrast to the “weedy in body, sickly in mind, [AND] pimply in spirit,”11 which is how A. K. Chesterton described the men of liberal democracy in one of his many BUF press articles on fascist masculinities. For the committed male reader of Fascist Week, who would have already considered himself something of a new British fascist man, “Men in Fascism” exercises a crude

234

234

Jeannette Baxter

politics of identification, appealing to common values and ambitions, and reinforcing allegiance to the fascist cause. Even though revisionist historiographies of the gender politics of the BUF insist on an expansive understanding of “feminine fascism” as a complex set of practices oscillating between matriarchal models of conduct and acts of militant provocation,12 “Men in Fascism” is flagrant in its assertion of the importance of the masculine principle to the regeneration of interwar British politics and culture. Indeed, visually and discursively, “Men in Fascism” reiterates the narrow gender ideology articulated by Mosley in The Greater Britain: “The part of women in our future organization will be important, but different from that of man: we want men who are men and women who are women.”13 As far as the title “Men in Fascism” is concerned, then, the preposition “in” is unambiguous in its politics of inclusivity. “Men in Fascism” gives face to a strong, determined, and authoritative masculine community, one that strives to be identifiably British but which, like its dedicated male fascist reader, is embedded within a broader European fascist political collective. At the same time, for the curious male reader, “Men in Fascism” functions as a dynamic recruitment tool with the masculine fascist collective advertising itself as being open to anyone willing to respond to what a Blackshirt article termed “The Higher Call of Fascism.” Again, it is worth pointing out that while the BUF’s recruitment strategies necessarily extended to the female population for matters of political expediency—​1933 saw the opening of the Women’s Section of the BUF and the National Club of Women Fascists as well as the launch of the Woman Fascist14—​“Men in Fascism” targeted itself specifically at young, male consumers–​recruits who wanted to transcend the social and material realities of their lives through political action. This is well illustrated in the biography of Tremlett, the working-​class boy made good, who “started work licking stamps at 14. At 16 was prospecting for gold in Nayasaland. Tramped Central Africa seeking gold until 1928” and who “once edited four papers simultaneously . . . Has had 26 jobs since he was 16.”15 Tremlett’s rise through the ranks is overstated because it showcases elements so essential to the BUF’s recruitment drive: classlessness; the promise of mobility through a strong work ethic; and the cult of masculine adventure. As G. Webber observes, membership of the BUF reached its peak of about 40,000 members in 1934,16 a figure that can partly be explained by the Daily Mail’s support of the BUF with eye-​grabbing headlines such as “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” and a direct appeal from Lord Rothermere to the Daily Mail’s extensive readership: “Young men may join the British Union of Fascists by writing to the Headquarters, King’s Road, Chelsea, London, S.W.”17 In real terms, of course, the BUF was politically and culturally marginalized. Indeed, there existed “a great gulf between aspiration and political consequence” for the BUF, and “Men in Fascism” played a clear role in trying to reduce this gap by marketing a “nationally-​specific response to perceived imperial, cultural and bourgeois decadence” and to a “national mood of a crisis of masculinity.”18 It is notable, for instance, how “Men in Fascism” promotes the military careers of its new British fascist men, such as Ian Hope Dundas, who held a commission in the Royal Navy in his early twenties, and Vincent Keens, a First World War veteran who was invalided in Service at the end of 1918.19 As George Mosse notes, the “glorification of the First World War played a major role in fascist ideology: to have experienced the

 235

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

235

war led to true manhood, opposed to the bourgeoisie who knew neither how to live nor how to die.”20 Acutely aware of its political marginality in Europe and at home, the BUF exploited the political and cultural capital of the First World War, going as far as to present those BUF members without military experience in quasi-​military terms: Piercy as officer commanding National Defence Force control; Vincent as the senior propaganda officer. On display here is not just the BUF’s developing conception of itself as a paramilitary organization shaped and energized by military structures and official discourse but also an explicit marketing of Mosley’s “Men in Fascism” as future warriors-​cum leaders who would regenerate the emasculated landscapes of postwar British politics and culture. In this context, a noteworthy feature of “Men in Fascism” is its visual relationship with a series of political cartoons depicting figures such as Winston Churchill, Jimmy Maxton, and David Lloyd George. Sketched by John Gilmour, the cartoons appear regularly on the bottom of page 4 of Fascist Week, placing them in a direct visual relationship with the “Men in Fascism” column on page 5. As Figure 11.1 illustrates, the visual–​textual composition of Gilmour’s political cartoons echoes the visual–​textual composition of the “Men in Fascism” portraits, yet it does so in deliberately inferior ways. Lloyd George is presented as “Mr Lloyd George whose recent excursion to Portugal with his family has removed from England a whole political party.”21 Mocking and vacuous, this one-​line biography contrasts markedly with the pithy narratives of geopolitical authority that repeat across “Men in Fascism.” Similarly, the visual politics energizing Gilmour’s cartoon work hard to communicate Lloyd George’s political and cultural marginality. The former prime minister and Liberal Party leader is portrayed as old and overweight; his disproportionately fat face dominates his soft, shrinking body; his hair is unruly; and his gaze is barely a squint, suggesting an acute lack of vision. And, as if the antiaesthetic at work in Gilmour’s cartoon were not clear enough to the fascist reader, Lloyd George’s oversized bowtie and high-​collared shirt identify him sartorially as a member of the “Old Gang,” a decadent and politically ineffective collective that the new British fascist man was intent on routing. Taken in isolation, Gilmour’s portrait of Lloyd George is a straightforward political critique of the anachronistic face of democracy, and it is no coincidence that the cartoon–​portrait is embedded within a larger article attacking the “weak-​kneed enemies of discipline and order” and “the defeatist mentality of decadence.”22 It is through a closer comparative analysis of pages 4 and 5 of Fascist Week, however, that the full implications of the political options on offer to the reader come into view. The visual juxtaposition of Lloyd George’s and Piercy’s images is striking:  the overweight, effeminate Liberal, with a pudgy body and unruly hair (even his mustache is out of control) contrasts starkly with Piercy, who embodies the male fascist bodily aesthetic: young, strong, fit, hard-​bodied, and disciplined to the level of his manicured facial hair. On show here is a visual reiteration of a discursive contest that fueled so much of the language of the BUF press across the 1930s, namely a discourse of emasculation pitched against a discourse of virile fascist masculinity. Even though Fascist Week had ostensibly turned away from the modernist aesthetic that was so characteristic of Action, the New Party’s publication “in which the emphasis was very much on the ‘shock of the new’ and on harnessing the modernist sensibility for political

236

236

Jeannette Baxter

purposes,”23 closer consideration of “Men in Fascism” reveals a modified modernism at work: the technique of visual juxtaposition, inherited directly from Futurist aesthetics, but honed here for a predominantly antimodernist fascist audience, plays a subtle yet significant role in the BUF’s attempts to construct a new fascist masculinity that was fit for political and cultural purpose. In relation to this, there is a further political discourse at work in the juxtaposed cartoon and photographic portraits, and it is speaks specifically to the concept of political awakening. Writing in Action under the heading, “The Return to Manhood:  The Existence of Europe Depends on Its Youth,” A. K. Chesterton announces the return of the masculine spirit in a rhetorical echo of what would become the central Nazi theme of national awakening—​“Deutschland, erwache!” According to Chesterton, to retreat from responsibility and reality is to “crawl back into the womb of make-​believe [because the] masculine principle . . . faces up to the demands of waking life.”24 When juxtaposed with Gilmour’s political portraits, the photographic portraits of the “Men in Fascism” series initiate a similar call to political reality and responsibility. On the one hand, the cartoon portrait, with its soft, incomplete lines and caricatured content, satirizes visually the ineffectual, soft politics of democracy. On the other hand, the plain but sharp, realist photographic portrait gives face to a steely fascist commitment, which is prepared to confront the challenging political realities of the interwar period. When the reader’s gaze moves from the cartoon portrait on the left to the photographic portrait on the right, a new and clear political image comes into focus: that of the new British fascist man. Of course, there is another dimension to the visual politics at work in “Men in Fascism,” and it is one designed to market and manage the image of the most significant member of the new British fascist collective: Oswald Mosley. The “Cult of Mosley” galvanized the BUF’s political and cultural construction of itself. Collins notes how “hero-​ worship was an important aspect of the BUF’s masculine ideal” stretching back to the perceived manliness of British explorers, such as Sir Francis Drake. Yet, “the BUF’s masculine ideal was its leader Sir Oswald Mosley . . . Mosley was the Fascist superman.”25 A First World War veteran, international athlete (he was a schoolboy champion boxer, and represented Great Britain at fencing at the 1935 Empire Games), and political visionary who was not averse to fighting antifascist protesters, Mosley epitomized British masculinity. Furthermore, his charismatic personality, movie-​star good looks (Mosley was dubbed the “Rudolf Valentino of Fascism”),26 and commanding oratorical skills were celebrated to such a sycophantic extreme throughout BUF discourse that there was no room for doubting the strictly hierarchical nature of Mosley’s political leadership. Indeed, this is writ large across pages 4 and 5 of Fascist Week from February 8–​ 15, 1934 (see Figure  11.2). The object of Gilmour’s satirical portraiture in this edition is Jimmy Maxton, the ardent socialist and member of the Independent Labour Party, here recast as a “modern Robespierre” complete with elongated chin, unruly hair, impossibly skinny neck, and hollow eyes. Opposite, and in sharp contrast, the new British fascist man—​the youthful, courageous, and studious Rex Tremlett—​looks directly at the reader, full of potential and intent. Most importantly, though, and positioned just above Tremlett’s shoulder, is a larger photographic portrait of Mosley with the caption “The Leader in His Office at National Headquarters.”27 The composition of this political portrait is telling: seated at his desk, Mosley’s pose smacks of official work;

 237

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

237

Figure 11.2  Fascist Week, illustration by John Gilmour (February 1934).

there is even a large rubber stamp in the foreground of the picture, a literal object of authorization that functions simultaneously as a visual metaphor for political power. Although Mosley’s stare is strong, authoritative, and directed straight at the reader, his bodily pose is stylized in a way that gives off an air of accessible authority: his body language is open, and his right arm positioned rather casually to one side, creating a visual message that the Leader is hard at work but still has time for the fascist reader. There is also a certain level of mirroring between Tremlett’s and Mosley’s photographic portraits. Both images are in a plain, realist style, and both men are in Blackshirt uniform. Yet despite these surface similarities, the power dynamic at work on this page is never really in doubt:  “On a microcosmic scale, the BUF created a prototypical mannerbund [sic] at the service of the charismatic dark horse of inter-​war politics, Sir Oswald Mosley. The new British fascist man was Mosley in miniature.”28 “Men in Fascism” makes visible this metaphor of miniaturization, giving form to the unassailable power hierarchy that galvanized “The Cult of Mosley.” A consistent feature of “Men in Fascism,” for instance, is that it is embedded inside articles written by the Leader on a wide range of “Fascist Policies.” When the time comes to advertise Tremlett as a dedicated member of “Men in Fascism,” then, Mosley’s role as Leader is reinforced visually and linguistically:  “Fascism Is Not Dictatorship,” the headline reads, “But Leadership with the Consent of the People:  The Principle of Individual Responsibility.” Of course, there is a certain element of disingenuousness at work in this political statement: while the visual marketing of Mosley as an authoritative yet

238

238

Jeannette Baxter

accessible Leader claims to be in dialogue with its political logic, every detail on the page suggests otherwise. Mosley’s large and carefully positioned portrait, the “Men in Fascism” feature, and the advertisement for The Greater Britain work collectively to create the new British fascist man in Mosley’s image.

Wyndham Lewis’s fascist portraits This is a pertinent point at which to turn to selected visual and literary works by Wyndham Lewis as they intersect with conceptions of the new British fascist man. A  prolific artist and writer whose career spanned more than five decades, Lewis is probably best known for two reasons:  Vorticism, the short-​lived, fiercely patriotic British avant-​garde movement, which he established with the assistance of Ezra Pound in 1914; and a series of fascist writings published across the late 1920s and 1930s, including The Art of Being Ruled (1926), The Doom of Youth (1932), The Old Gang and the New Gang (1933), and Left Wings Over Europe: or How to Make a War about Nothing (1936). The most notorious and, with hindsight, politically dangerous of these writings was Hitler (1931), a series of commissioned and largely sympathetic reflections on Hitlerism, which were first serialized across 1931 in the right-​wing feminist political and literary review, Time and Tide, before appearing in book form later that year (the dust jacket, designed by Lewis, included a swastika). Although Lewis’s art and writings are shot through with ambiguities and contradictions, to which I will return, a consistent feature of his fascist writings is a profound distrust of democratic systems, which, for him, exercised mythologies of liberation in order to practice a politics of conformity. In this respect, Lewis kept company with other prominent literary and intellectual figures of the 1920s and 1930s, including Pound, H. G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley, all of whom questioned the efficacy of liberal democracy and the political acumen of the common man. Drawing on the political theories of Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon and George Sorel, The Art of Being Ruled called for, among other things, political and social transformation through forms of authoritarianism that were ordered yet peaceable, and capable of instilling discipline without “the stupid violence of physical force.”29 Autocracy was a necessary and effective corrective to democracy, the elitist artist–​intellectual insisted, because the general population “do not really know what they want . . . they do not, in their heart, desire “freedom”  . . . A disciplined, well-​policed, herd life is what they most desire.”30 For Lewis, the art of being ruled lay in the recognition that the common man was a “blind, dependent, obedient cell of a crowd organism,”31 who desired to be led by a superior figure. Notably, it is in a chapter called “Fascism as an Alternative” that Lewis develops his vision of what interwar political leadership might look like, suggesting that “for anglo-​ saxon [sic] countries as they are constituted today some modified form of fascism would probably be best . . . to get some sort of peace to enable us to work, we should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised.”32 Initially, Lewis’s modified fascism looked to Benito Mussolini’s autocratic leadership: “The more militant liberalist elements are being heavily discouraged in a very systematic way [in Fascist Italy]. They are not being physically wiped out, as happened in Russia, but they

 239

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

239

are being eliminated quite satisfactorily without recourse to murder on a large scale.”33 Lewis’s euphemistic assessment of Mussolini’s authoritarianism is clearly unsettling, collapsing as it does brutal political realities of suppression into claims of political efficacy:  the state will be “rigidly centralized, working from top to bottom with the regularity and smoothness of a machine.”34 Equally disturbing is Lewis’s portrait of an imagined British Fascist state led by a “tyrant or dictator” with his “highly disciplined, implicitly obedient, fascist bands” in tow: “In ten years a state will have been built in which at last no trace of european [sic] ‘liberalism’ or its accompanying democratic ‘liberty,’ exists.” Supplanting the “humbug of [British] democratic suffrage,”35 which, for Lewis, was already fascist in spirit, if not openly despotic, this modified British Fascist state had the potential to introduce transparent autocracy, economic stability, and peace to a politically degenerate interwar Britain. It was, however, to the National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, that Lewis eventually turned in his bid to locate the necessary qualities for peaceful yet decisive political leadership. In part 2 of Hitler, entitled “Adolf Hitler—​The Man and the Party,” Lewis writes how the National Socialist leader “seems from all accounts to be” a “ ‘great and genuine personality’ . . . and so it would be a great mistake to regard him as merely just another ‘dictator’: for he is a very different person to Mussolini”36 (Lewis had previously dismissed Il Duce as an “unfortunately theatrical, grimacing personage”).37 More specifically, Lewis goes to some length to convey how the source of Hitler’s political and personal “newness” lies largely in his identification as an everyman with peaceful intentions: “In Adolf Hitler, the German Man, we have, I assert, a ‘Man of Peace.’ . . . he is ‘a german man of the people’?”38 At least three things are apparent in sentences such as these: the voice of an author-​cum-​journalist writing at speed and to the political moment as he works through rapidly unfolding political reportage; a dialogic method of writing, characteristic of much of Lewis’s work,39 that was designed to prompt the reader into a more meditative mind-​set (whether he achieves it or not, Lewis maintained that he was a detached observer of National Socialism, not an advocate); and a form of linguistic portraiture that is, at best, ambivalent and, at worst, disingenuous because Lewis’s methodology of citation allows him to assert certain sympathies for Hitler while managing to retain some distance. Although Lewis’s linguistic portrait of Hitler is disturbing, it is necessary to acknowledge that Hitler does not offer a wholesale endorsement of National Socialist ideology. Lewis’s political writings are, as Andrjez Gasiorek, Alice Reeve-​Tucker, and Nathan Waddell recognize, “complex and hedged about with qualifications,”40 and Hitler is no exception. Waddell points to just one example of the restless nature of Lewis’s political thinking when he notes how Hitler reads, on the one hand, “like an apology for a political system about which Lewis was ambivalent,” just as it asserts, on the other, that “Hitler’s solutions to the ‘violent disequilibrium’ of Western Europe and America is something ‘not entirely to be despised, though not necessarily to be swallowed whole.’ ”41 As the many conflicting statements on his own political positioning make clear, politics was an impure practice for Lewis, and political boundaries were porous:  in the “The Diabolical Principle” (1929), Lewis presents himself as “partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism in my marxism, but at bottom anarchist with a healthy passion for order”;42 in the preface

240

240

Jeannette Baxter

to Left Wings Over Europe, he asserts: “I fly the flag of no party. My shirt is neither red, black, nor purple.”43 While these statements in no way excuse Lewis’s fascist sympathies, they do signal how his fascist writings are exercises in working through (whether successfully or not) the fiercely intricate and urgent discourses of interwar politics.44 It is also necessary to recognize that Lewis, a veteran of the First World War, was largely sympathetic toward fascism because he genuinely, if misguidedly, believed it to be the only viable form of political resistance to another war. This is nowhere more evident than in the following passages from Hitler: Hitler would, I am positive, remain peacefully at home, fully occupied with the internal problems of the Dritte Reich. And as regards, again, the vexed question of the “antisemitic” policy of his party, in that also I believe Hitler himself—​once he had obtained power—​would show increasing moderation and tolerance.45 I myself am content to regard [Hitler] as the expression of current german (sic) manhood—​resolved with that admirable tenacity, hardihood, and intellectual acumen of the Teuton, not to take their politics at second-​hand, not also to drift, but to seize the big bull of Finance by the horns, and to take a chance for the sake of freedom.46

Ivan Phillips puts it well when he writes how “history makes an ugly nonsense of these words, and these words have made a fool of their author.”47 Indeed, these passages are troubling for a couple of reasons. First, they gesture to Lewis’s antisemitism, a prejudice that, as Anna Freud Loewenstein observes, manifests itself in earlier writings, including his “attacks on Jewish writers like Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust in The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and in his defense of the white race [in] Paleface (1929).”48 Second, they reveal the extent of Lewis’s political naïveté as he misreads (spectacularly) Hitler’s political agenda: the anticapitalist Lewis believed Hitler would, among other things, protect national borders in the name of peace, fight communism, tackle the war debt, and contest the exploitative practices of loan capitalism. Armed with historically disastrous misreadings of fascism such as these, it is unsurprising that there exists a strand of postwar, post-​Holocaust literary scholarship that dismisses Lewis as a toxic fascist modernist. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey sees Lewis, the aggressively self-​fashioned new British Artist, and Hitler, the quintessential new German fascist man, as mirror images: “Both were obsessive, and expounded their relatively small collection of ideas with unflagging repetitiveness.”49 Carey’s critique of Lewis’s art and politics is relentless, but it is also selective, making no mention of the works in which Lewis went on to reevaluate his views of 1930s fascism. From late 1937, and following further visits to Berlin and a visit to the Warsaw ghetto with his wife, for instance, Lewis produced several critiques of fascism, including, The Jews: Are They Human? (1939), an antifascist, philo-​Semitic text, the title of which alludes ironically to G. J. Renier’s The English: Are They Human? (1931); and The Hitler Cult (1939), a polemical dissection of the dynamics of Nazism, which condemns European fascism as “the most efficient exponents of machine-​age barbarism—​ camouflaged beneath a bosky peasant homeliness.”50

 241

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

241

This is in no way to suggest, of course, that Lewis’s later antifascist writings should be accepted as apologies for the early appeasement texts. Contemporary Lewis scholars are careful to observe that their respective moves to reexamine the fascist writings never lapse into intellectual excuses. As Alan Munton puts it, there “are [few] writings of the 1930s as objectionable as was Hitler.”51 At the same time, though, any close reading of Lewis’s work, however unpalatable and confused its ideas might be, must remain alive to its self-​conscious and rhetorically aggressive dimensions, all of which are designed to provoke the reader into critical action. Indeed, in the early manifesto “The Code of a Herdsman” (1917), which follows Friedrich Nietzsche’s anticollectivist thinking and his lauding of the artist’s critical and civilizing powers, Lewis makes his intentions clear: “Never fall into the vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego . . . Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”52 For revisionist critics such as Shane Weller it is precisely this methodology of “contradiction, polemical energy turned back on the self and the coherence of that self ’s work that is one of the structuring-​destructuring principles of Lewis’s entire oeuvre.”53 And it is to the contradictory nature of Lewis’s work as it intersects with British fascism generally, and with constructions of the new British fascist man particularly, that the final part of the essay will turn.

Wyndham Lewis, Oswald Mosley, and the new British fascist man Across the 1930s, Lewis completed two portraits of Oswald Mosley (1934 and 1937). The first ink portrait, which is now lost (see Figure 11.3), was published in the London Mercury in October 1934, appearing opposite a portrait of Sir Stafford Cripps, Labour Member of Parliament, communist sympathizer, and cofounder of the Socialist League (see Figure 11.4). The portraits were published with the caption “Two Dictators.” Even though Lewis’s portrait commissions had started to dry up after the publication of Hitler, his artistic skill was still recognized by the likes of Walter Sickert, who continued to celebrate his peer as “the greatest portraitist of this or any other time.”54 Certainly, Lewis’s portraits are aesthetically accomplished, but they are also important cultural documents, giving form to the literary, artistic, and political circles in which the artist moved. Lewis’s many interwar subjects included Ezra Pound, members of the Sitwell family, and Mosley, whose New Party was launched at the Sitwells’ home at Renishaw in August 1931. Given Lewis’s attraction to contradictions, it is unsurprising that his relationship with Mosley and British fascism was far from straightforward. Lewis never officially joined the BUF, and he did not, as far as is evidenced, attend any BUF rallies. Nevertheless, Paul O’Keeffe points out how Lewis liked to counter friends’ eyewitness accounts of brutal fascist behavior at BUF rallies with “evidence of Communist brutality,”55 a move that echoes his problematic portrait of Hitler’s new German fascist men, the Nazis, in Hitler: “from the start the Nazis have been incessantly denounced, harassed and disarmed.”56 Furthermore, Lewis contributed once to the first issue of the BUF’s official journal, the British Union Quarterly, praising Mosley as late as 1937 for

242

242

Jeannette Baxter

Figure 11.3  Wyndham Lewis, Sir Oswald Mosley, London Mercury 1934. Pen and ink and watercolor on paper. Copyright the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis. By permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

his “great political insight and qualities as a leader.”57 Lewis also met with Mosley across the 1930s, including at a luncheon “served by heel clicking blackshirts who raised their arms in 45 degree salute on entering and leaving the room.”58 In a letter to Jeffrey Meyers, Lewis’s first biographer, Mosley describes the nature of his relationship with the artist–​writer: Wyndham Lewis came to see me often in the thirties at my house. Always a rather complicated person with coat collar turned up, etc. He had the impression that association with me made him liable to assassination. We had considerable mental sympathy, but I would certainly not claim he agreed with me in all things.59

 243

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

243

Figure 11.4  Wyndham Lewis, Sir Stafford Cripps, London Mercury 1934. Pen and ink and watercolor on paper. Copyright the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis. By permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

Christie Davies sees evidence of Lewis’s ambivalence toward Mosley in “Two Dictators,” suggesting that “Lewis captures well the essence of a man who really did have the essence of a dictator in him,” but that he also “makes Mosley look like a cross between Mussolini whom Mosley admired and an anti-​Semitic caricature of an unpleasant Jew, in a way turning against Mosley the very imagery he would exploit in his British Union of Fascists.”60 Notably, Mosley’s chiseled features are rounded-​ out; his forehead and brow are soft and bulbous, and his accentuated nose and diminished mouth are physically disproportionate. This is neither a portrait of the “Fascist

244

244

Jeannette Baxter

superman” nor, more prosaically, the face of an elite athlete. Moreover, in contrast to BUF press photographs showing the Leader’s direct and determined gaze, Mosley’s eyes are here directed away from the onlooker, suggesting a lack of political focus. So what is at stake in Lewis’s first portrait of Mosley? Certainly, this soft, obtuse image is markedly out of focus with the hard and aggressive fascist aesthetic propagated by the BUF press. And this is an aesthetic that Lewis would not only have been acutely aware of but also one that energized his own project of artistic self-​ fashioning as the “Great Enemy” of “soft” Bloomsbury modernism. In some respects, then, Lewis’s ambiguous portrait of Mosley is not that far removed from Gilmour’s political portraits. Richard Humphreys notes, for instance, how the “satirical edge” of the “Two Dictators” was not lost on Mosley, who renamed the drawings “the Governess and the Gorilla” (Mosley was the Gorilla).61 A significant aesthetic difference between Gilmour’s and Lewis’s portraits, however, is that the former straightforwardly reduces human form and psychology to particular features in order to exaggerate them, while the latter is an intricate attempt to visualize—​and hold in tension—​human complexities. After all, Lewis turned his back on visual realism in order to produce “resolutely non-​naturalistic and complex meditations on style and personality” precisely because the “personalities that fascinated him or that he admired demanded a range of responses and different forms of truth-​telling from him as an artist.”62 Lewis’s ambiguous attitude toward Mosley actually manifests itself as early as Hitler, when he writes with incredulity at the Mosley Manifesto’s proposed “cancellation of all international War-​debts for a generation.” With such a misguided policy, Lewis complains, Mosley has gone from being a “level-​headed man . . . with a great parliamentary future” to a “Credit Crank.”63 More tellingly perhaps, Mosley’s New Party fails to get a mention in Lewis’s speculative conclusion about the future of an “extreme” party in Britain, when he suggests, “it need not be ‘fascist,’ indeed it would be better if it were not Italian, nor yet german, in inspiration, of course.”64 This deliberate omission is arguably more than just a sign of Lewis’s “uneven”65 relationship with Mosley and British fascism; it signals a developing critique of Mosley’s dependency on—​and eventual aping of—​continental fascist politics and aesthetics, and particularly Mussolini’s Italian Fascism. Before the BUF’s shift to Naziphilia from the mid-​1930s, for instance, Italy was the “main model”66 for British fascism, with Mussolini appearing frequently throughout the BUF press, either as the feature of articles (and always in stylized poses, often alongside Mosley), or the feature writer.67 By the late 1930s, Lewis had started to distance himself from his earlier enthusiasm for Mussolini, writing critically of the “militant blackshirts, [and] fascist bands, with clubs and knives” as they marched on Rome, and of his own lack of critical insight: “I cannot understand how I can have missed the meaning of all this.”68 In this context, then, Lewis’s first portrait of Mosley can be read as an insightful critique of the BUF Leader’s uncritical absorption of Mussolini’s fascist politics and aesthetics. In contrast to the sycophantic images of Mosley that circulated throughout the BUF press, Lewis’s counterportrait encourages a more critical response, and it is one that dares to question the so-​called “newness” of British fascism and of the quintessential “new” British fascist man.

 245

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

245

Lewis’s ambiguous relationship with Mosley and British fascism is equally apparent in his contribution to the inaugural issue of the British Union Quarterly, in which he appears alongside Pound, Roy Campbell, and the Norwegian National Socialist leader, Vidkun Quisling. Consider the following from his essay, “ ‘Left Wings’ & the C3 Mind”: Let me say at the start that I  shall not avail myself of your editorial offer to criticise—​if I felt so disposed—​the fascist principle . . . On the other hand, I could not, if I would, as a compliment to my hostility to Communism, cast an indulgent glance in the Fascist direction. That would be altogether too “provocative.”69

And: For were everything in the Fascist philosophy demonstrably false and absurd, that would still not absolve our intellectual giants from their duty to denounce all that is false and absurd in all that is not Fascism, or rather in all that is anti-​Fascism . . . There is another side to every question.70

Lewis’s refusal to occupy a strict oppositional political position combined with a linguistic style that manages to be provocative and evasive is typical, and it makes for difficult reading. It also gestures to what Phillips recognizes as Lewis’s engagement with “politics at the level of uneasy critical process rather than ideological attitude or obligation.”71 Even though Lewis’s sympathies for fascism are apparent throughout “Left Wings,” it would be reductive to ignore how he attempts to highlight the limitations of any form of fixed political thinking, including fascism. As Phillips notes, Lewis was “generally careless of categories and sceptical about the usefulness of concepts such as Left and Right” not just for what they conceal but because they fostered, in his view, a form of political response that avoids contradiction and flexibility. It is partly for these reasons that “ ‘Left Wings’ and the C3 Mind” launches a sustained attack against the left-​leaning British press and intelligentsia, whom Lewis holds responsible for blunting the nation’s critical abilities and creating a collective “C3 mind,” a term that, in the military discourse of the First World War, referred to the lowest category of physical fitness. Without in any way apologizing for Lewis’s visual and discursive engagements with fascism, there might be a case for better understanding them as variants of what Griffin has termed “programmatic modernism,” that is, a “socially transformative mode of modernism,” which acts as a “countermovement to modernity construed as decadence.”72 Indeed, Griffin’s insistence that fascism itself should not be regarded “as an oxymoron to be resolved or an aberration to be explained,” but as a “full-​fledged, internally consistent variant of programmatic modernism” with a “sustained drive towards an alternative modernity and towards a revolutionary futurity,”73 opens up useful ways of thinking about the nature and extent of Lewis’s fascist sympathies. Lewis’s desire to regenerate interwar culture and society so that it would “break free from the ‘modern slough of despond’, and mutate into the sustained aspiration to create a new objective, external world, a new future premised on the radical rejection of and opposition to prevailing reality”74 is certainly consistent with programmatic

246

246

Jeannette Baxter

modernism’s transformative drive. Moreover, even if the work does not always achieve it, a consistent belief of Lewis’s was that he, the elite artist–​intellectual, was capable of the objectivity necessary for negotiating the complexities of interwar politics and, ultimately, for challenging the “prevailing reality” of impending war. As the foreword to The Hitler Cult reveals, however, it was this very belief in his own “neutrality” that led Lewis to produce some of his most damaging work: As one of the only “neutrals” Germany has ever had in this country—​as the first English writer to produce a book on the subject of Herr Hitler—​I begin by announcing that I am no longer neutral. Nothing in my earlier neutrality has been retained, since it is obvious that the time has passed for that.75

For further evidence of Lewis’s misguided belief in his own critical neutrality and the efficacy of such a position—​“I am objective. I am detached”76—​we need look no further than his concluding address to the new British fascist man in “ ‘Left Wings’ and the C3 Mind”: You stand to-​day where Socialism stood yesterday . . . You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain store; for the peasant against the usurer:  for the nation, great or small, against the super-​state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism.77

Lewis’s political analysis may set itself up as “dispassionate,” but, as Munton has argued, it is a “one-​sided revision” of the “Proudhon–​Marx relationship, one where Proudhon, as decentralizer, is sharply devalued to serve the apparent demands of the moment. Lewis (mis)conceives that moment to belong to Mosley.”78 That “Left Wings” concludes with an unequivocally positive portrait of the new British fascist man is also somewhat baffling given the satirical edge of “Two Dictators,” and given the fact that the fiercely individualistic Lewis would have been scathing of the “herd life” of fascism. In the final analysis, then, it is difficult not to read Lewis’s linguistic portrait of the new British fascist man as anything other than another misguided reading of interwar politics in general, and of fascisms in particular. For Lewis’s blind distrust of democracy as a form of tyranny means that, even as late as 1937, he still sees the new British fascist man as the potential arbiter of peace and prosperity. The forms of political portraiture under discussion here reveal the extent to which the new British fascist man was a loaded political construct, serving differentiated discursive functions across the early 1930s. Within the BUF’s developing political technology, “Men in Fascism” should not just be read as an important tool of political alliance and recruitment for Mosley’s marginalized homegrown fascism. It is also a skillful form of political portraiture designed to market the new British fascist man as the necessary antidote to a degenerate interwar Britain. In this respect, “Men in Fascism” further evidences how the visual culture of the BUF press played a vital

 247

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

247

role in the “movement’s stated aim” to create a “British fascist aesthetic.”79 Yet, the innovation of this visual–​textual feature lies less in its palingenetic content, and more in its modified modernism, an aesthetic dimension that complicates any convenient move to place “intellectual support for modernism on the Left, and a reaction of anti-​modernism [on] the extreme Right.”80 Existing in a sophisticated relationship of juxtaposition with Gilmour’s satirical cartoon portraits, “Men in Fascism” stages a fascist satire of liberal interwar politics. At the same time, its visual dynamics bring the new British fascist man into view as the face of political responsibility and awakening. Ultimately, however, the persuasive aesthetics that galvanizes “Men in Fascism” is dedicated to marketing and managing the image of the quintessential new British Fascist man, Oswald Mosley. At first glance, “Men in Fascism” appeals to and embodies an unquestioning commitment to the British fascist collective, but it is essentially a form of hagiographic fascist portraiture fully compliant in perpetuating the “Cult of Mosley.” Indeed, it is to this very kind of uncritical political portraiture that Lewis’s “Two Dictators” partly responds. Lewis’s counterportrait of Mosley is valuable for the ways in which it dares to represent the BUF’s indiscriminating absorption of Mussolini’s fascist politics and aesthetics in the early 1930s, thereby raising questions about the “newness” of the quintessential new British fascist man, and the political relevance and efficacy of British fascism more generally. Of course, at the same time that the critical energies at work in Lewis’s art of political portraiture need to be acknowledged, so do their fascist sympathies. Lewis’s infamous linguistic portrait of Hitler and his strangely idealized portrait of the new British fascist man in “Left Wings” must haunt any revisionist reading of his visual and discursive engagements with fascism. This is partly to reacknowledge how Lewis’s “approach to politics was dangerous” and often “seriously defective,” and partly to recognize how his political imagination showed a “genuine flexibility and historical alertness”81 as it attempted to work through the fierce tensions of the interwar political landscape. It is in this respect that Lewis’s fascist portraits can be read as variants of programmatic modernism, that is, “not as anomalies or aporias to be resolved through strenuous intellectual acrobatics,” but as contradictory and challenging “manifestations of the porous membrane separating cultural and political modernism, whether of the right or the left.”82 While this reconception of Lewis’s art of political portraiture in no way excuses its fascist sympathies, it pays necessary attention to the ambivalent and contradictory energies that shape and energize one of the most challenging artistic contributions to the history of fascist ideas in Britain.

Notes * All quotations from Lewis’s writings are by permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity). I am extremely grateful to Ian Grant, founder, NZ Cartoon Archive, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, for his advice on the history of John (“Jack”) Gilmour’s political cartoons, and to Professor Paul Edwards for his advice on Lewis’s images and writings.

248

248

Jeannette Baxter

1 Julie V. Gottlieb, “The Marketing of Megalomania: Celebrity, Consumption and the Development of Political Technology in the British Union of Fascists,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 1 (2006): 35. 2 John (“Jack”) Gilmour was a New Zealand political cartoon artist. According to Ian Grant, “In 1933, having exhausted employment possibilities and every shade of political opinion, Gilmour sailed for England where he contributed cartoons to the London Evening Standard among other publications. Gilmour left England in 1939.” See Ian Grant, The Unauthorized Version: A Cartoon History of New Zealand (Auckland: Cassell New Zealand, 1980), 110. 3 Andrzej Gasiorek, Alice Reeve-​Tucker, and Nathan Waddell, eds., Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (London: Ashgate, 2011), 11. 4 Oswald Mosley, “Steel Creed of an Iron Age,” Fascist Week, November 17–​25, 1933, 5. 5 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (London: Black House, 1932), 39. 6 Gottlieb, “The Marketing of Megalomania,” 41. 7 “Men in Fascism,” Fascist Week, January, 19–​25, 1934, 5. 8 “Men in Fascism,” Fascist Week, December, 8–​14, 1933, 5. 9 Tony Collins, “Return to Manhood: the Cult of Masculinity and the British Union of Fascists,” International Journal of the History of Sport, 16, no. 4 (1999): 145. 10 “Men in Fascism,” Fascist Week, January 12–​18, 1934, 5. 11 Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, “Return to Manhood: The Existence of Europe Depends on its Youth,” Action, July 9, 1936, 9. 12 See Julie V. Gottlieb, “Women and British Fascism Revisited: Gender, the Far-​Right, and Resistance,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 3 (2004): 108–​23. 13 Mosley, The Greater Britain, 41; italics in original. 14 See Gottlieb, “Women and British Fascism Revisited.” 15 “Men in Fascism,” Fascist Week, February 9–​15, 1934, 5. 16 G. C. Webber, “Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists,” Journal of Contemporary History, 19, no. 4 (1984): 575–​606. 17 Cited in Paul Hoch, The Newspaper Game: The Political Sociology of the Press: An Inquiry Into Behind-​the-​Scenes Organization, Financing and Brainwashing Techniques of the News Media (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974), 52. 18 Julie V. Gottlieb, “Britain’s New Fascist Men: The Aestheticization of Brutality in British Fascist Propaganda,” in The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right, ed. Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan (London; New York: I. B. Taurus, 2004), 86. 19 See Fascist Week, January 5–​11, 1934, 5 and February 16–​22, 1934, 5. 20 George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 156–​60 and 158. 21 Fascist Week, January 12–​18, 1934, 4. 22 G. E. de Burgh Wilmot, “The Mind of Fascism: Discipline and Hardship of the Struggle,” Fascist Week, January 12–​18, 1934, 4. 23 Gottlieb, “The Marketing of Megalomania,” 38. 24 Chesterton, “The Return to Manhood,” 9. 25 Collins, “Return to Manhood,” 153. 26 Gottlieb, “Britain’s New Fascist Men,” 85. 27 Oswald Mosley, “Fascism Is Not a Dictatorship,” Fascist Week, February 9–​15, 1934, 5. 28 Gottlieb, “Britain’s New Fascist Men,” 97–​9. 29 Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1926/​ 1989), 19. 30 Ibid., 42.

 249

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

249

31 Ibid., 43. 32 Ibid., 320. 33 Ibid., 321. 34 Ibid., 321. 35 Ibid., 321–​2. 36 Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 51. 37 Lewis, Art, 321. 38 Lewis, Hitler, 32. 39 Alan Munton, “Quotation,” in Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity, 17–​36. 40 Gasiorek, Reeve-​Tucker, and Waddell, Wyndham Lewis, 11. 41 Nathan Waddell citing Hitler, 124, in “Lewis and Fascism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis, ed. Tyrus Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 95. 42 Wyndham Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 126. 43 Wyndham Lewis, Left Wings over Europe: or, How to Make a War about Nothing (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 17. 44 For a detailed discussions of Lewis’s shifting relationship with fascism, see Waddell, “Lewis and Fascism.” 45 Lewis, Hitler, 48. 46 Ibid., 201–​2. 47 Ivan Phillips, “In His Bad Books: Wyndham Lewis and Fascism,” Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies 2 (2011): 119. 48 Anna Freud Loewenstein, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams and Graham Greene (New York; London: New York University Press, 1993), 138. 49 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–​1939 (London: Faber, 1992), 182. 50 Wyndham Lewis, The Hitler Cult (London: Dent, 1939), 255. 51 Alan Munton, “Wyndham Lewis: From Proudhon to Hitler (and Back): The Strange Political Journey of Wyndham Lewis,” E-​rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone 4, no. 2 (2006). 52 Wyndham Lewis, “The Code of a Herdsman,” in The Essential Wyndham Lewis, ed. Julian Symons (London: Andre Deutsch, 1917/​1989), 29. 53 Shane Weller, “Nietzsche amongst the Modernists: The Case of Wyndham Lewis,” Modernism/​modernity 14, no. 4 (2007): 626. 54 Walter Sickert cited on the cover of Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008). The comment is quoted in an article on Lewis by John Rothenstein in Picture Post, 1939, but originally appeared in a telegram to the publisher of Lewis’s “Thirty Personalities and a Self-​Portrait,” produced in 1932. I am grateful to Paul Edwards for this information. 55 Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 345. 56 Lewis, Hitler, 19. 57 Wyndham Lewis, “Insel und Weltreich,” cited in Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. (London: Routledge, 1980), 191. 58 O’Keefe, Some Sort, 371. 59 Mosley letter to Jeffrey Meyers, October 14, 1977, The Enemy, 191. 60 Christie Davies, “Exhibition Note,” The New Criterion, October 2008.

250

250

Jeannette Baxter

61 Mosley cited in Humphreys’s catalogue entry to Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 84. Humphreys cites O’Keeffe, 346, for Mosley’s remark. I am grateful to Paul Edwards for this information. 62 Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 15–​16. 63 Lewis, Hitler, 168–​9. 64 Ibid., 198. 65 Waddell, “Lewis and Fascism,” 95. 66 Claudia Baldoli, “Anglo-​Italian Fascist Solidarity? The Shift from Italophilia to Naziphilia in the BUF,” in The Culture of Fascism, 151. 67 See the front-​page article, “Twilight of the Democrats: Fascist Inspiration towards a New Era of Civilisation,” Fascist Week, April 6–​12, 1934. 68 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914–​1926) (London: John Calder, 1937/​1982), 231–​2. 69 Wyndham Lewis, “ ‘Left Wings’ and the C3 Mind,” British Union Quarterly, no. 1 (January–​April 1937): 22–​3. 70 Ibid., 26–​8. 71 Ivan Phillips, “In His Bad Books,” 127. 72 Roger Griffin, “Modernity, Modernism, & Fascism: A ‘Mazeway Resynthesis’,” Modernism/​modernity 15, no. 1 (January 2008): 12. 73 Ibid., 12. 74 Ibid., 11. 75 Lewis, The Hitler Cult, vii. 76 Lewis “ ‘Left Wings’,” 30. 77 Ibid., 32–​3. 78 Munton, “Wyndham Lewis.” 79 Gottlieb and Linehan, The Culture of Fascism, 6. 80 Gottlieb, “Marketing of Megalomania,” 36. 81 Phillips, “In His Bad Books,” 127. 82 Griffin, “Modernity,” 19.

Bibliography Baldoli, Claudia. “Anglo-​Italian Fascist Solidarity? The Shift from Italophilia to Naziphilia in the BUF.” In The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right. Edited by Julie Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan, 147–​61. London: New York: I. B. Taurus. Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–​1939. London: Faber, 1992. Chesterton, A. K. “The Return to Manhood: The Existence of Europe Depends on its Youth,” Action, July 9, 1936. Collins, Tony. “Return to Manhood: the Cult of Masculinity and the British Union of Fascists,” International Journal of the History of Sport 16, no. 4 (1999): 145–​62. Davies, Christie. “Exhibition Note,” The New Criterion, October 2008. Available online: http://​www.newcriterion.com/​articles.cfm/​Exhibition-​note-​3917 (accessed November 3, 2015). de Burgh Wilmot, G. E. “The Mind of Fascism: Discipline and Hardship of the Struggle,” Fascist Week, January 12–​18, 1934, 4. Edwards, Paul. Wyndham Lewis: Portraits. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008.

 251

Portraits of the New British Fascist Man

251

Freud Loewenstein, Anna. Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams and Graham Greene. New York; London: New York University Press, 1993. Gottlieb, Julie V. “Britain’s New Fascist Men: The Aestheticization of Brutality in British Fascist Propaganda.” In The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right. Edited by Julie Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan, 88–​99. London; New York: I. B. Taurus. 2003. Gottlieb, Julie V. “Women and British Fascism Revisited: Gender, the Far-​Right, and Resistance,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 3 (2004): 108–​23. Gottlieb, Julie V. “The Marketing of Megalomania: Celebrity, Consumption and the Development of Political Technology in the British Union of Fascists,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 1 (2006): 35–​55. Grant, Ian. The Unauthorized Version: A Cartoon History of New Zealand. Auckland: Cassell New Zealand, 1980. Griffin, Roger. “Modernity, Modernism, & Fascism: A ‘Mazeway Resynthesis’,” Modernism/​ modernity 15, no. 1 (2008): 9–​24. Hoch, Paul. The Newspaper Game: The Political Sociology of the Press: An Inquiry into Behind-​the-​Scenes Organization, Financing and Brainwashing Techniques of the News Media. London: Calder and Boyars, 1974. Lewis, Wyndham. “The Code of a Herdsman.” In The Essential Wyndham Lewis. Edited by Julian Symons, 25–​30. London: Andre Deutsch, 1917/​1989. Lewis, Wyndham. The Art of Being Ruled. 1926. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989. Lewis, Wyndham, The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931. Lewis, Wyndham. Hitler. London: Chatto & Windus, 1931. Lewis, Wyndham, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914–​1926). 1937. London: John Calder, 1982. Lewis, Wyndham. “ ‘Left Wings’ and the C3 Mind.” British Union Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1937): 22–​34.Lewis, Wyndham. Left Wings over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing. London: Jonathan Cape, 1937. Lewis, Wyndham. The Hitler Cult. London: Dent, 1939. “Men in Fascism,” Fascist Week, December 8–​14, 1933. “Men in Fascism,” Fascist Week, January 12–​18, 1934. “Men in Fascism,” Fascist Week, January 19–​25, 1934. “Men in Fascism,” Fascist Week, February 9–​15, 1934. Meyers, Jeffrey. The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. London: Routledge, 1980. Mosley, Oswald. The Greater Britain. London: Black House, 1932. Mosley, Oswald. “Steel Creed of an Iron Age,” Fascist Week, November 17–​25, 1933, Mosley, Oswald. “Fascism Is Not a Dictatorship,” Fascist Week, February 9–​15, 1934. Mosse, George. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Munton, Alan. “Wyndham Lewis: From Proudhon to Hitler (and Back): the Strange Political Journey of Wyndham Lewis,” E-​rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone [E-rea: An Electronic Review of Studies on the Anglophone World] 4, no. 2 (2006). Available online: http://​erea.revues.org/​220 (accessed 14 December 2015). Munton, Alan. “Quotation.” In Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity. Edited by A. Gasiorek, A. Reeves-​Tucker, and N. Waddell, 17–​36. London: Ashgate, 2011. Mussolini, Benito. “Twilight of the Democrats: Fascist Inspiration towards a New Era of Civilisation,” Fascist Week, April 1934. O’Keeffe, Paul. Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000.

252

252

Jeannette Baxter

Waddell, Nathan. “Lewis and Fascism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis. Edited by Tyrus Miller, 87–​99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Webber, G. “Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists,” Journal of Contemporary History 19, no. 4 (1984): 575–​606. Weller, Shane. “Nietzsche amongst the Modernists: The Case of Wyndham Lewis,” Modernism/​modernity, 14, no. 4 (2007): 625–​43. Wilkinson, Clennell. “Wyndham Lewis on Hitler,” Everyman 5, April 2, 1931.

 253

12

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–​45 Joan Tumblety

Homme nouveau, a man who makes his mark, but whose forebears remain unknown. Larousse dictionary, 1919 Interwar France was seemingly saturated with “new men.” Communist youth leaders evoked the term in the early 1920s in the hope of inspiring young workers with the same revolutionary zeal that triumphed in Russia in 1917.1 Pierre Taittinger, the leader of the newly formed far-​right paramilitary league the Jeunesses Patriotes, used the same trope when he addressed a crowd of 7,000 supporters in late 1925, urging new men to rise up against the supposedly useless parliamentary elites of the Third Republic (1870–​1940).2 Organized Catholics, when celebrating religious devotion or when attacking secular materialism sometimes prompted readers to think in spiritual terms of the creation of new men through divine grace.3 The nomenclature echoed across popular culture, too, providing the eponymous title for several films, novels, newspapers, and treatises. It also channeled the obsessions of those interested in physical exercise, who routinely lamented that Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic dream of creating new men had withered on the vine, leaving behind only selfish athletic competitors.4 The rhetorical deployment of the new man was almost everywhere a call to action that would enable a dual transformation of the self and the collective, of whatever kind. Accordingly, its lexicon usually contained a range of nominative equivalents—​ the man of action, the energetic man, the strong man. His imagined characteristics align with what we know of the physical and behavioral attributes of interwar normative masculinity: the new man was usually in his youthful prime, leanly muscular, and possessed of authority over himself and over others. If the spiritual dimension of the Catholic version was not universally replicated, its insistence on courage, discipline and self-​restraint fitted the general template remarkably well. The apparent ubiquity of this configuration in early to mid-​twentieth-​century France forces us to consider how we understand the meaning of what we are seeing. What does it say for the presumptive link between the new man and totalitarian politics that both the term and

254

254

Joan Tumblety

the concept seemed to resonate much more broadly in interwar discourse? This essay seeks to historicize the “new man.” In untangling the processes through which the term acquired meaning, one can see both that the construction traveled widely in interwar (political) culture and that it remained multivalent and highly adaptable. Moreover, it is necessarily in relation to other, less politically radical variants that the fascist incarnation acquires its heuristic value. I start, however, by considering the historiography on the subject, whose idées fixes have partially obscured the French “fascist new man” from view.

The scholarly conversation Since the resurgence in the 1990s of the interpretation of fascism as a form of revolutionary totalitarianism, the new man has loomed large in both Anglophone and francophone treatments. Unlike the totalitarianism theories of the 1950s and 1960s, the most influential recent version of this theory of fascism has eschewed both Cold Warrior anticommunism and social scientific structuralism in favor of a focus on culture. It is most closely associated with the Italian historian Emilio Gentile, whose scholarly renown lies in the claim that fascism (or at least Italian Fascism) is best understood as a political religion, one whose essential components—​the quest for national rebirth (or palingenesis) and the sacralization of politics—​were both achieved through an anthropological revolution centered on the creation of a “new man.”5 Gentile’s intervention has inspired several cultural histories of Benito Mussolini’s Italy, which take the “fascist imaginary” seriously for the light it sheds on the mentality of the regime’s leadership and the quest for just this kind of transformation.6 Where this approach has penetrated francophone historiographies, however, it has been bound by a curious kind of reductionism. Gentile’s work permeates a recent two-​ volume dictionary of fascism produced by Pierre Milza and Serge Berstein, two of the most prominent francophone scholars in the field.7 The authors grapple with the new man at several points in their introduction. For them the concept is integral to totalitarianism, that is, to dictatorships in the age of mass politics that sought control over civil society by attempting to transform the very nature of the human being.8 It is somewhat perplexing, therefore, to find that there is no entry in the volumes proper for the “new man,” and that nowhere do the authors connect the figure to political developments in interwar France. The apparent paradox of this simultaneous reliance on but exclusion of the concept makes more sense when we realize that Gentile’s emphasis on the revolutionary nature of the fascist–​totalitarian project nicely buttresses the so-​called “consensus school” of French fascism, whose foundations were laid in the 1950s and 1960s by the seminal work on the French right written by René Rémond.9 Rémond’s views were later elaborated by a range of scholars, including Milza and Berstein themselves: fascism in France failed to take hold because democratic political culture was sufficiently strong there to make the French immune to this foreign virus.10 What one might call the “germ theory” of fascism was palatable for a range of reasons, not least of which was its ability to rescue the (plural) right from the taint of the collaborating Vichy regime

 255

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

255

(1940–​4). Moreover, it could take root among academic minds only if one accepted a key assumption—​that fascism was in essence revolutionary, and that any evidence of political conservatism within a movement on the radical right would necessarily exclude it from the definition. In this way, the Croix de Feu/​Parti Social Français (CF/​ PSF) of Colonel François de la Rocque, which undoubtedly displayed conservative traits, could be disbarred from the qualification fascist, and since it was the only genuinely mass movement on the radical right in this period, with over a million members by 1937, the so-​called immunity thesis can be upheld. The embrace of Gentile’s work in these French historiographical circles has not therefore entrained any serious consideration of the “fascist new man” in 1930s France. Accordingly, virtually no attention was paid to the interwar French radical right in another of Milza’s projects, a symposium in which “the new man of fascisms” was the very object of study.11 The organizers deliberately excluded treatment of the communist variants for the sake of keeping a tight focus, and fascism-​as-​regime featured more heavily than fascism-​as-​movement, even where, as at least one contributor pointed out, some of the regimes considered—​Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s Portugal in particular—​did not easily warrant classification as either fascist or totalitarian.12 Treatment of the French case in the resulting edited volume foregrounded post-​1940 activities, in particular the publications of high-​profile Nazi sympathizers such as the intellectuals Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, who operated outside the conservative Vichy regime and who were atypically preoccupied with the place of the male body in the “fascist mystique.” Ultracollaborationist efforts to recruit French men into the Wehrmacht to fight on the eastern front as anti-​Bolshevik warriors also featured, as did the “virile order” imagined in the youth training initiatives of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime.13 Given that it is rare for historians to argue that this so-​called “État français” was fascist either in its ideological underpinning or in its execution, exploring the new man of the Pétainist imagination may illuminate all sorts of features and strategies at the heart of this authoritarian regime, but it cannot tell us much about French fascism.14 In not properly distinguishing these strands, one is left with the impression that the volume reduces French engagement with the new man to the problem of collaboration with Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, the agency of those on the radical right who collectively mobilized tens of thousands of supporters in France before 1940—​most notably François de la Rocque, Jacques Doriot, Pierre Taittinger, Charles Maurras, and Georges Valois—​is effectively obscured. Definitional determinism also haunts Anglophone studies less wedded to the quest to understand fascism generically, and which have been produced outside these particular French academic contexts. The existence or otherwise of a new man configuration in the activities of the rightist CF/​PSF, for example, has at times been turned into a litmus test for the movement’s fascist credentials. It is supposed either that the movement routinely urged members to recreate themselves as virile warriors in the manner of Fascists, Nazis and various French fellow-​traveling intellectuals, and was therefore fascist or that it emphasized instead that men should be respectable if somewhat authoritarian fathers, and was therefore not fascist.15 It is a testament to the power of the interpretive schemas around fascism that such reductionism marks even the most nuanced and innovative scholarly writing on the subject.

256

256

Joan Tumblety

One of the principal obstacles to seeing the “fascist new man” in France afresh, therefore, is the potential of such historiographical frames to obscure our vision. On the one hand, definitional (and often circular) disputes over the meaning of fascism have clouded the question of what this figure can tell us that is not already presumed about radical rightist politics. On the other, francophone scholars have seemingly shunned the explanatory potential of the “fascist new man” for pre-​1940 France altogether, and applying it without qualification to the authoritarian but not fascist Vichy regime, and to lone collaborationist intellectuals, risks further obfuscation. In what follows, I try to see the emergence of the new man in interwar France, and his linkages with the radical right, outside these customary frames of vision. In particular, I want to escape the “classificatory logic” that has arguably straitjacketed historians of fascism for decades—​at least where the French case is concerned—​into a futile exercise of model building, and which has impeded them from exploring manifestations of the radical right more fully in relation to other features of the interwar landscape.16 If the rise of the “Gentile school” amounts to a cultural turn in generic fascism studies, it is ironic indeed that for the French case it has had the effect of excising the phenomenon of the “fascist new man” from its wider cultural contexts.

The emergence of the new man The new man—​of any affiliation—​was not born fully formed with the armistice of 1918; rather, he was shaped incrementally by a range of agents out of cultural resources inherited from the past. The very term homme nouveau—​defined in such a loose way in the new edition of the Larousse dictionary in 191917—​was in common usage long before the surge in radical popular politics that characterized the 1920s. Its precedents stretch back beyond attempts to forge a new republican culture in the 1880s and a modern monarchy in the 1830s, through the martial cults of Napoleon Bonaparte and the muscular revolutionaries of the first republic, to the eighteenth-​century Enlightenment and the seventeenth-​century “Renaissance man.” In these earlier periods, the idea of a collective transformation—​or regeneration—​built on the site of the remade male body seems to have taken shape, whether or not the term itself was used.18 It is a great irony that where these antecedents have been noted by French scholars investigating the totalitarian political culture of the twentieth century, it has not dislodged the close association of the new man with the fascist varieties.19 Given these heterogeneous roots it is not surprising that, as the opening examples to this chapter suggest, the term had plural significations in France after 1918 as well. Studying them allows us to illuminate the field in which the fascist new man acquired meaning. There is an important transnational element to the story because engagement with the concept in France took place in the knowledge of developments elsewhere, especially in Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia, where the championing of the new man explains its close association with so-​called totalitarian politics. That association is not just the product of a retrospective scholarly gaze, then; it was recognized by contemporaries themselves. The new man understood in the mainstream newspapers of the era was bifurcated. On the one hand, he was filtered through a palpable fear of

 257

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

257

Bolshevism: the Soviet new man provided the very mechanism through which the Red East would destroy Western civilization.20 On the other hand, Mussolini’s uomo fascista was more likely to be heralded—​with some reservations, especially in relation to squadristi violence—​as a force for social and political order, at least among mainstream conservatives.21 Even in the 1930s, Italian Fascist anticommunism and its apparent defense of the family was a source of admiration in France.22 The result was that the new man of the extremes carried somewhat contradictory meanings, being at once an opportunity for the French to learn how to fix their own problems of civil division and a threat to political stability. Moreover, these faraway developments impinged directly on France. Revolution in Russia drove a wedge between parliamentary socialists and revolutionary communists, so much so that the socialist Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) split in 1920 and the French communist party (Parti Communiste Français; PCF) was created, leaving countless observers fearful of the political disorder that the latter’s agitation might bring. Italian Fascism was right on the doorstep, too, not only due to Georges Valois’s short-​lived Faisceau (inspired by Mussolini’s success) but also in the shape of the Fascio de Paris, formed in 1923 to provide mutual aid for Italian subjects living in the city. Purged of nonfascists in the mid-​1920s, this organization had 3,000 members ten years later. It held regular cinema evenings and thés dansants as well as operating a system of poor relief and holiday camps for children.23 By the late 1920s, a thousand Italian children traveled to Italy each summer where they were incorporated into Balilla groups and taught how to give the Roman salute.24 This activity had its counterpart on the antifascist left. Festivals, meetings, demonstrations, the distribution of leaflets, and even assaults on Fascio-​run soup kitchens were organized by Italian communists and socialists desperate to weaken the Fascists’ hold.25 Communists also agitated outside the Gare de Lyon on the return of Italian children from Fascist summer camps, a form of protest that was actively and routinely encouraged in the pages of the communist daily newspaper L’Humanité.26 These confrontations thus drew in French nationals as well. In May 1934, the inauguration in Père-​Lachaise cemetery of a monument for Italians who had fought and died for France offers just one example.27 Alongside Italian Fascists marched members of Marcel Bucard’s radical rightist Francistes and Solidarité Française (SF), sporting their customary blue shirts and giving the Roman salute. This was a clear encroachment on the commemorative terrain of the left, whose claims extended back to the martyrdom of Communards at the Mur des Fédérés in May 1871. Indeed, the police had tried to make SF members put on their jackets to avoid provocation.28 In 1935, the police feared that the SF and the monarchist Action Française (AF), whose press openly supported Mussolini’s military campaign in Ethiopia, were planning to join forces with Italian Fascists to form a “Latin legion” that would fight in Africa for Italy, just as the Garibaldians had come to French aid in 1870 and 1914.29 Whether for those inside or outside the flourishing radical rightist movements of the 1930s, the “fascist new man”—​in the shape of the uniformed militant throwing his weight around in public places—​was thus rather close to home. If this street violence tarnished the new man image for some, there were other dynamics in play that served to rehabilitate it. The genre of imperial heroes, both real

258

258

Joan Tumblety

and imagined, also shaped the meaning of this figure. In 1922, Claude Farrère, a future member of the Académie Française, wrote a novel entitled Les Hommes nouveaux while staying with his personal friend Marshal Louis-​Hubert Lyautey, the French resident general in Morocco. The novel offered a fictionalized account of the latter’s forging of an imperial order in the French protectorate.30 Despite resigning under a cloud during the Rif war of 1925, which was fought by French and Spanish forces against Moroccan Berbers, Lyautey had already been catapulted into stardom. By the time of his death in 1934, the marshal was widely adulated as the epitome of martial patriotism and valor, as the extensive press coverage of his funeral and the transfer of his remains to Morocco the following year attest.31 The colonial conqueror enjoyed a particularly warm reception on the French radical right, where he was the object of veritable hero worship, something in keeping with the marshal’s own nondemocratic political tastes (he was a royalist).32 It was precisely the endorsement of rightist politics implicit in Lyautey’s popular fame that led antifascist leftists in the mid-​1930s to vilify him as a defender of the paramilitary leagues and as a man bent on poisoning the minds of youth with his penchant for authoritarian politics.33 If Lyautey himself could not embody the youthful vigor of the “new man,” the male leads in countless interwar feature films set in the French colonies came closer. Many were shot and set in Morocco precisely because of Lyautey’s support for the nascent film industry there when still resident general, including the first film dramatization of Farrère’s novel.34 It may be that the popularity of these superficial tales of imperial conquest, in which handsome and willful characters subdued the natives, somehow enabled more pointed political uses of the new man idea to gain traction. At the very least, Lyautey’s high standing helped sanitize the figure by connecting it with state-​sanctioned imperialism. There were countless other mainstream new men conjured up in the 1920s and 1930s, nowhere more powerfully than in Catholic youth initiatives. In seeking to capture the working classes of the “red belt” of Paris and the northern industrial cities for the church, one priest told his audience that the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (Christian Worker Youth) “remakes its man from head to toe; it dismantles, examines, reassembles, and readjusts every hour of the day; it offers him precise, understandable formulas for every difficulty he encounters.”35 During the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the umbrella Catholic youth organization (Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française) in 1936, these new men of the JOC were praised to the rafters in the Catholic press (although in testament to its elasticity the moniker was applied to both sexes).36 Catholic youth leaders in France at the same time strongly disapproved of the initiatives at the political extremes, whether in the form of French “communist Scoutism” (whose sexual mixité, military-​style drills, and general assertion of collectivism appalled) or the youth movements of Germany, Italy, and the USSR.37 As Martin Conway has shown for the Belgian case, it was not uncommon for the Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Belge (the Belgian equivalent of the French ACJF) to use the martial language of knights, militia, and mobilization to express “a new mood of religious militancy” that was enacted self-​consciously in the shadow of—​but also against—​the “totalitarian” right and left.38 That dual attitude of emulation and disdain was not uncommon. The conservative nationalist Paul Reynaud noted that on the cusp of the Popular Front era “anti-​fascists

 259

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

259

[were] adopting the behaviour of fascists,” such as mass rallies and militant salutes.39 He feared that the republican emphasis on liberty and individualism in French youth organizations was boring, and that the young were consequently in danger of being “seduced by the collective,” whether through the “unanimous emotions of Hitler’s regime” or by the brave new world being fashioned on the Russian steppes.40 Reynaud’s own party, the newly formed secular republican Alliance Démocratique, itself began to incorporate elements more commonly found on the political extremes—​the personality cult (around the new party chef, Pierre-​Étienne Flandin) and a sense of “mystique” around the party mission (intended to mobilize popular support while providing potential elites with a tool for governing the masses).41 Furthermore, the Alliance established its own youth wing (the Jeunesse républicaine française; JRF) in 1934 in part to provide a security force at meetings: previously Jeunesses Patriotes (JPs) members had fulfilled this function.42 The Lyon branch had even been founded by a former member of the JPs, and in 1936 the JRF leader was the future extremist Jean-​Charles Legrand, who resigned in December 1937 in order to create the radical rightist Front de la Jeunesse.43 While these developments did not signal a totalitarian turn on the part of the Alliance (on the contrary, the party pursued a clearly liberal line), they do suggest that broadly centrist visions of political mobilization were negotiated in relation to radical versions elsewhere. In fact, the most blatant appeal for an anthropological revolution in interwar France emerged not on the radical fringes but on the conservative right. In professing “biocracy in place of democracy,” the Catholic medical scientist and Nobel Prize–​winning surgeon Alexis Carrel imagined an antidote to the supposed biocultural decline wrought by modernity. In particular, Carrel thought that social welfare was undoing the necessary work of natural selection. Without such state support, those unfit to breed would be weeded out of the reproductive pool, thus solving at a stroke the problem of hereditary disease, alcoholism, and feeble-​mindedness.44 Carrel closed his best-​ selling book of 1935, Man the Unknown, with a strident appeal to remake man: There is need today of men of larger mental and moral size, capable of accomplishing such a task. The establishment of a hereditary biological aristocracy through voluntary eugenics would be an important step toward the solution of our present problems. . . . In remaking modern human beings we must endeavour to give them the freedom and the happiness engendered by the perfect soundness of organic and mental activities.45

Elsewhere in Carrel’s political milieu, engagement with the new man was inflected differently. Carrel’s contemporary, the historian and journalist Lucien Romier, spoke in July 1937 at a mass meeting to honor the AF leader Charles Maurras’s release from prison, and was later a close advisor to Pétain and the chair of Vichy’s National Council.46 He also shared aspects of Carrel’s critique of modernity and his preference for a reorganized society informed by scientific expertise. But Romier did not focus on physiology, nor did he envisage anthropological revolution. Indeed, in an eponymous treatise published in the late 1920s, Romier’s new man embodied not the solution to civilizational decline but proof of the very problem, a product of the crass materialism

260

260

Joan Tumblety

of the modern age and the “moral solitude” that it entrained.47 Even for fellow conservatives willing to rub shoulders with the radical right, then, the new man lacked a singular, stable meaning, and its use did not signal overt totalitarian sympathies.

Negotiating the fascist new man It remains to establish whether the radical right in France nurtured its own new man in the manner of Mussolini’s uomo fascista. The fetishization of the chef was certainly widespread in its discourse. In the 1920s, Georges Valois’ Faisceau emulated Mussolini’s Fascists in this respect as in many others. Leadership cults were established around such distinct figures as the paternalist CF/​PSF leader François de la Rocque, and the former street-​fighting communist head of the Parti Populaire Français (PPF), Jacques Doriot. Both of these organizations also built a cult of personality around the ill-​fated athletic aviator Jean Mermoz, who disappeared without a trace in December 1936.48 Furthermore, it is plausible that the wearing of uniforms among the paramilitary leagues of the 1920s and 1930s (the most militant members of the Légion, Faisceau, Jeunesses Patriotes, Francistes, SF, CF/​PSF, and PPF wore blue shirts) presented a sartorial articulation of the “new man.” The insignia of such groups certainly evoked the warrior ideal (Figure 12.1). As we have seen, the figure featured in rhetorical attacks on parliamentary democracy: Pierre Taittinger was not alone in demanding willful and energetic new men who would teach Frenchmen the long-​forgotten language of political action.49 It was there, too—​so boldly as to be parodic—​in the tiny organization created in late 1937 by the disgruntled lawyer and former Alliance Démocratique youth activist Jean-​Charles Legrand (Figure 12.2). His so-​called Front de la Jeunesse refused the fascist label (if only because its critics applied it), but nonetheless demanded a playfully designated “brand new man” (homme neuf) to replace the “false leaders” of the Third Republic.50 Radical populist movements from the mid-​1920s onward routinely appealed to notions of manliness in order to recruit members, to train shock troops and to concretize their struggle to transform the political order.51 But if we accept that this diffuse instrumentalization of virility is distinct from the concerted attempt at anthropological revolution channeled through the invocation of a “new man,” it follows that this latter formulation, if not the paramilitary and antirepublican purposes it was often designed to serve, was no more entrenched on the radical right than on any other part of the interwar landscape. There was more systematic treatment of the new man after 1940, when the concept (not always the term) echoed across Vichy’s project of National Revolution. It was encountered most often in the sphere of youth training, through sports education in schools, the elite training colleges in Uriage and Antibes, and the compulsory work camps for young men known as the Chantiers de la Jeunesse.52 The irony of seeing Vichy’s focus on the new man in relation to radical rightist varieties, however, is that the Vichy incarnation drew on Catholic precedents rather than totalitarian ones. In fact, it owed much to the ethos of interwar Catholic youth movements in which the new man and athletic manliness in general were deployed as a counter to such illiberal populist experiments.53 That Vichy explicitly rejected the single party and single youth

 261

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

261

Figure 12.1  Insignia of the Jeunesses Patriotes, Le Populaire, January 1, 1935.

organization associated with totalitarian politics (indeed it banned political parties outright) means that we must exercise caution in interpreting its apparent anthropological revolution in the light of developments in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany.54 Furthermore, it is the anthropological—​rather than the purely representational—​ dimensions of this celebration of virility that warrant further investigation if we are to examine what the “fascist new man” actually explains about the operations of power.55 Thinking in terms of gendered etiquette seems a good place to start. Chris Millington has recently shown how shared codes of honor determined the boundaries of acceptable behavior in grassroots mobilization, especially where physical confrontations in the street and meeting hall were concerned.56 Interwar police records offer thick description of such sharp encounters between rival groups. Communists and radical rightists regularly invaded each other’s meetings and roughed each other up.57 Fights broke out when members of the international league against antisemitism turned up to protest Front de la Jeunesse meetings. Even PPF members came to cause trouble.58 In response, such groups trained their own security forces. The FJ put armed militants in charge of expelling opponents, the Action Française used Camelots du Roi for the same purpose, and the Jeunesses Patriotes developed its own elite teams to deal with potential threats to order.59 If the physically impressive, uniformed young men who

262

262

Joan Tumblety

Figure 12.2  The decidedly bourgeois Jean-​Charles Legrand in his office, 1934.

stood guard by the lectern as part of the service d’ordre at any given meeting of the Faisceau, Jeunesses Patriotes, AF, CF/​PSF, PPF, or Front de la Jeunesse were ready to respond with force when communist, anarchist, or antifascist protesters turned up to heckle, their presence was also an implicit warning against any challenge to the leadership among the party faithful. After all, what characterizes the ideological warrior is his obedience as much as his capacity for aggression. Similarly, ridicule offered a means of policing the line between those who belonged and those who did not. In leftist political theater, for example, “fascist new men” and their republican accomplices (as interwar Marxists saw it) came in for a literal pounding. Communist festivals in the 1930s featured jeux de massacre (the popular fairground attraction, the “coconut shy”) in which hammers and sickles decapitated mock-​ups of Hitler and Mussolini, and where workers were invited to throw balls into chamber pots adorned with the likenesses of these Nazi and Fascist leaders alongside those of François de la Rocque, Jacques Doriot, Pierre Taittinger, and Charles Maurras. Parliamentarians and public officials were also ridiculed in this way, most commonly Pierre Laval and the Paris prefect of police Jean Chiappe, well known for his sympathies for the paramilitary leagues.60 In addition to identifying political enemies and establishing a sense of belonging, such ridicule plausibly functioned as a tool of control by showing the penalty faced by members who failed the test of loyalty. Thinking in terms of behavioral codes and their impact on interpersonal relations in the spaces of radicalism in this way offers us a more textured glimpse into the world of popular politics than a study of propagandist idealizations of masculinity normally allows. It takes

 263

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

263

us right into the field of “day-​to-​day commitment” in which engagement with gender norms was embedded in practice as well as in rhetoric.61 If appeals to virility or the defense of the venerated chef could be used to shore up hierarchies among men in this way, they presumably also functioned to justify and to perpetuate sex difference in these movements. Some of the most exciting research on the French radical right in recent years has demonstrated just how central women and notions of family were to the functioning of populist movements on the far right. The CF/​PSF, for instance, depended heavily on women to run its far-​reaching social program, which not only encompassed an enormous range of activities from health care to youth centers, but also formed a key strategy in the transformation of the CF/​PSF from a veterans’ organization into a mass movement.62 The involvement—​indeed the leadership—​of women in this public domain thus brought them real power and influence. However, this status was sanctioned precisely because female authority in this sphere exemplified in interlocking ways the familial rhetoric of the movement’s leaders and their masculinist assumptions: the nation was but a family—​a natural hierarchy in which women and children were valued on their own terms but who ultimately fell under the authority of the chef. Tacit support for women’s suffrage rights on the radical right was usually articulated precisely in relation to this idea of their simultaneous familial responsibility and subjugation.63 It is in integrating the recent scholarship focused on women with the growing body of work on masculinity that we are able to see how recognition of female agency on the part of these movements was at the same time a defense of masculine privilege.64

Conclusion When we acknowledge just how pervasively the concept of the new man traveled, and when we recognize that there were Catholic and conservative incarnations in addition to the more familiar leftist and radical rightist varieties, we are forced to see the fascist new man in relation to the widely shared cultural resources out of which the figure was forged, and not exclusively within the frame of totalitarianism. Christopher E. Forth has stressed “the degree of continuity that exists between fascist and non-​fascist approaches to the male body” across Europe in these years: the “fascist strongman” was merely “a variation on a broader theme.”65 It is easier to understand how and why the concept of the new man developed traction in such varied circles when we recognize that it was created out of the component parts of interwar normative masculinity. The perception of crisis and decline for which the new man might atone was remarkably widespread, and the organicist thinking that nurtured the positive eugenicist thought that helped to make this figure appealing for so many was deeply entrenched. It was not unusual to read across the entire political spectrum, exhortations for the “improvement of the race,” or for the healthful physical appearance of young men, skin tanned by the sun and lungs cleansed with fresh air, to be taken as proof that a new man was on the cusp and would offer national salvation when he arrived. In this, sharp political disputes about the nature of the republic shared the reasoning of interwar naturism.66

264

264

Joan Tumblety

These synergies should serve not to support the conclusion that interwar French society was experiencing “totalitarian drift” but rather to sever the concept’s necessary ties with totalitarianism altogether.67 I have suggested that there are real limits to the explanatory power of the “fascist new man” if we use this construction only to confirm what we already believe to be true—​that is, that fascism is a political religion whose proponents preach anthropological revolution, and that this feature is a necessary component of any movement or regime if we are to classify it as fascist. If approached differently, however, the concept may yield other interpretive possibilities. We might be able to see with greater clarity how masculine norms (as well as the new man configuration specifically) were instrumentalized whether consciously or otherwise on the radical right, not only to stir up passions against ideological foes but also to create and to maintain internal hierarchies between different groups of men, and between men and women. Christopher Dillon has recently shown how such manly norms as courage, self-​discipline, and the refusal of (feminizing) compassion were key elements in the training of SS troops, so that self-​ regulating peer pressure among men enabled Nazi brutality.68 Indeed, the new man may have more to tell us about the relationship between gender and politics in the fascist field than about fascism itself. Furthermore, paying attention to the processes by which interwar contemporaries negotiated their new man in the light of other incarnations helps us understand more clearly the cultural dimension of the quest for political differentiation. The work of Laurent Kestel on Jacques Doriot’s PPF shows that something deemed as ideologically essential to fascism as antisemitism was adopted by this movement’s national leadership principally as a strategy for staving off a decline in membership that was already underway. It became a “legitimate resource”—​something whose virtue could be made public in speeches and the press—​only at the point when the organization became more heavily dependent on the support of its Algerian branch, for whose leaders the “Jewish problem” had been the principal concern for some time. We might ask how—​ indeed if—​the new man came to constitute a “political product” in just this way.69 In other words, in order to comprehend what the figure tells us about the radical right in France, we need to do more to grasp the role that the configuration of the new man played within wider political practice.

Notes 1 Varine, “À l’Avant-​Garde!”, L’Avant-​Garde, September 25, 1920, 1. 2 Also attending were members of Antoine Rédier’s Légion and several hundred Camelots du Roi, the youth street-​fighting wing of the monarchist Action Française. See police reports, Archives Nationales [AN] F7 13232. As a conservative deputy since 1919, Taittinger presumably did not count himself among those to be axed. 3 A.-​M. Carré, “Les Jeunes devant le Christ,” La Croix, June 2, 1938, 4; Pierre Delattre, “L’Eglise évangélique aux prises avec le national-​socialisme,” La Croix, July 11, 1933. 4 Emile Valtier, “Le sport spectaculaire,” La Culture physique, June 1927, 163. 5 The definitive statement is Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

 265

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

265

6 See Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Simonetta Falasca-​ Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 7 Serge Berstein and Pierre Milza, Dictionnaire des fascismes et du nazisme, 2 vols. (2010; repr., Paris: Editions Perrin, 2014). 8 Ibid., 1:14 and 22. 9 Kevin Passmore has made a powerful case along these lines in “L’historiographie du ‘fascisme’ en France,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 3 (2014): 475–​8 and 487–​8. 10 René Rémond, The Right Wing in France from 1815 to de Gaulle, trans. James M. Laux, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1969 [orig. 1954]); Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–​1939 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995), 6; Serge Berstein, “La France des années trente allergique au fascisme—​à propos d’un livre de Zeev Sternhell,” Vingtième Siècle 2 (1984): 84–​94. 11 L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945): entre dictature et totalitarisme, ed. Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza (Paris: Fayard, 2004). The lead interpretive chapter was a translated excerpt from Gentile’s Il fascismo, storia e interpretazione [Fascism, history and interpretation] (2001). 12 Review of the symposium, Anne Dulphy, Vingtième siècle 67 (2000): 152–​3. 13 Laurence Bertrand-​Dorléac, “Les vieilles images de l’homme nouveau (France 1900–​1945),” 333–​45, and Christian Delporte, “L’homme nouveau dans l’image de propagande collaborationniste,” in L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste, ed. Matard-​Bonucci and Milza, 347–​62, 14 Julian Jackson, “Vichy and Fascism,” in The Development of the Radical Right in France: from Boulanger to Le Pen, ed. E. Arnold (London: Arnold, 2000), 153–​71; Michèle Cointet-​Labrousse, Vichy et le fascisme (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1999). 15 Sean Kennedy uses the absence of a new man fixation within the Croix de Feu to suggest that it was not fascist, Reconciling France against Democracy: the Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927–​1945 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2007), 117–​19; while Geoff Read draws the opposite conclusion due to the same movement’s insistence on virility, in “He Is Depending on You: Militarism, Martyrdom, and the Appeal to Manliness in the Case of France’s Croix de Feu, 1931–​ 1940,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 16, no. 1 (2005): 261–​91. 16 Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–​13. 17 Larousse classique illustré: nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique, ed. Claude Augé, 28th ed. (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1919), 704. 18 The Jacobin-​dominated National Convention almost made the figure of Hercules (not Marianne) the emblem of the new republic. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 94 and 103 ff. Mona Ozouf, L’Homme régénéré: essais sur la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 116–​57, and Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–​1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), ch. 3, “Regeneration: the Marvellous Body, or the Body Raised Upright of the New Revolutionary Man,” 131–​56, show how the rhetoric of regeneration during the French Revolution often centered on the “simple,” “emancipated” or “denuded” male body. 19 See Sophie-​Anne Leterrier, “L’homme nouveau, de l’exégèse à la propagande,” 23–​33, and Laurence Bertrand-​Dorléac, “Les vieilles images de l’homme nouveau (France

266

266

20 21

22 23 24 25

26 2 7 28

2 9 30

31

32 33

Joan Tumblety 1900–​1945),” in L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste, ed. Matard-​Bonucci and Milza, 333–​45. Charles Baussan, “Le Bolchevisme,” La Croix, September 18, 1933, 3. Bruno Goyet, “La “March sur Rome”: version originale sous-​titrée. La réception du fascisme en France dans les années 20,” in Le Mythe de l’allergie française au fascisme, ed. Michel Dobry (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), 69–​105; Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–​1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 225–​6; Joel Blatt, “French Reaction to Italy, Italian Fascism, and Mussolini, 1919–​1925: The Views from Paris and the Palazzo Farnese” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, New York, 1976), vol. 2, chaps. 9–​13. Robert Soucy, “French Press Reactions to Hitler’s Two Years in Power,” Contemporary European History 7, no. 1 (1998): 36; Charles A. Micaud, The French Right and Nazi Germany (1933–​1939) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1943), 52–​66. Police reports, February 12, 1931; January 6, February 26, and June 16, 1933; January 14 and 27, 1934; May 29, 1938, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris [APP] BA 2165. Prefect of Police to the Minister of the Interior, November 26, 1928, and police notes, June 21, 1932, June 22, 1933, June 28, 1934, September 9, 1936, APP BA 2165. Police notes, May 1930, April 15 and 16, 1934, September 27, 1935, December 15, 1938; Prefect of police to Minister of the Interior, October 9, 1935, APP BA 2387; police commissioner to Prefect of Police, Paris, January 5, 1934, APP BA 2165. It is estimated that a dozen deaths took place in Paris between 1923 and 1929 as a result of clashes between Italian supporters and opponents of Fascism. Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-​Croswhite, Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 130. Prefect of Police to Minister of the Interior, August 20, 1930 and L’Humanité, September 5, 1931, APP BA 2165. In 1931, the demonstration led to seventy-​two arrests (twenty-​one French and fifty-​one foreigners). Police notes, December 14, 1931, and May 27, 1934, APP BA 2164. Director General of municipal police to the Prefect of Paris police, May 27, 1934; L’Humanité, May 19, 1934. A small bomb, probably planted by communists, detonated shortly before the inauguration ceremony injuring two grounds men. Laboratoire Municipal de Chimie report, May 28, 1934, APP BA 2164. Police report, September 26, 1935, APP BA 2165. Marie-​Hélène Heurtaud-​Wright, “Les Hommes nouveaux (Marcel L’Herbier, 1936): Nostalgia, Masculinity and the French Colonial Film of the 1930s,” Modern & Contemporary France 8, no. 2 (2000): 215; Claude Farrère, Les Hommes nouveaux (Paris: Flammarion, 1922). The book was reissued several times in the 1920s and 1930s. Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Martin Thomas, “ ‘Thinking Imperially’? Popular Imperialism in France,” The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 185–​208. The CF/​PSF leader had served directly under Lyautey in Morocco in 1913 and regarded him as a mentor. Kennedy, Reconciling France against Democracy, 27 and 31–​ 2; Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy, 311–​12. Lyautey was honorary president of the French scouting movement. A. Bertrand, July 25, 1939, to Prime Minister’s office, AN F60 435. For leftist outrage see Vigilance, June 10, 1934, 7.

 267

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

267

34 David H. Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–​1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 64–​ 72. The film was remade in 1936 with the story transposed to Algeria. 35 These words were spoken in Lille in 1929. Susan B. Whitney, Mobilising Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 93. 36 J. M. “Les Jeunes autour de la semaine sociale,” [Young people on the subject of the social week] La Croix, July 30, 1936, 4. On Catholic youth, see Gérard Cholvy, Histoire des organisations et mouvements chrétiens de jeunesse en France XIXe—​XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999). 37 Diemer, “Scoutisme Communiste,” Jeunesse nouvelle, organe de la Jeunesse catholique du Loir-​et-​Cher, May–​June 1936; Rémi Fabre, “Les Mouvements de jeunesse dans la France de l’entre-​deux-​guerres,” Mouvement social 168 (1994): 14. 38 Martin Conway, “Building the Christian City: Catholics and Politics in Interwar Francophone Belgium,” Past and Present 128 (1990): 124, 127, 118, and 131. 39 Paul Reynaud, Mémoires, envers et contre tous: 7 Mars 1936–​16 juin 1940, vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion, 1963), 44–​5. 40 Paul Reynaud, Jeunesse, quelle France veux-​tu? Dialogue avec le lecteur sur les crises et les réformes (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 7 and 89. 41 Kevin Passmore, “La Droite entre les deux guerres: psychologie des foules, sciences de l’organisation et publicité moderne,” Politix 27, no. 106 (2014): 24 and 29–​30. 42 Passmore, The Right in France, 301 and 304–​5. 43 Police note, January 27, 1938, APP BA 2494. 44 Alexis Carrel, December 4, 1942, Jour après jour, 1893–​1944 (Paris: Plon, 1956), 235; Horacio Reggiani, God’s Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Socio-​Biology of Decline (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). 45 Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (1935; repr., London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941), 282 and 290. 46 Pierre-​Marie Dioudonnat, Je suis partout, 1930–​1944: les maurrassiens devant la tentation fasciste (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1973), 216; Julian Jackson, France, the Dark Years, 1940–​1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 53, and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–​1944 (1972; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 198. 47 Lucien Romier, L’Homme nouveau (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1929) 12. For evidence of the high recognition factor of the “new man,” see the survey of intellectuals including H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Emmanuel Berl, and Jean Coutrot published in the periodical L’Homme nouveau, January and February 1934. The frame of reference for these writers was as much utopian fiction as Soviet and Fascist propaganda. 48 Kennedy, Reconciling France against Democracy, 110–​2 and 217, and “The Croix de Feu, the Parti Social Français, and the Politics of Aviation, 1931–​1939,” French Historical Studies 23, no. 2 (2000): 373–​99. 49 Jean Renaud, La Solidarité française attaque (Paris: Œuvres françaises, 1935), 30. 50 Jean-​Charles Legrand, “Au nom de la nation,” Le Défi, March 20, 1938, 1; police notes, January 27, and February 6, 1938, APP BA 2494. 51 Joan Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 133-​204; Christopher Millington, “Street-​Fighting Men: Political Violence in Inter-​War France,” English Historical Review 129, no. 538 (2014): 606–​38.

268

268

Joan Tumblety

52 In particular, Limore Yagil, “L’Homme nouveau” et la révolution nationale de Vichy (1940–​1944) (Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1997), which lies outside the “Gentile school”; also John Hellman, The Knight Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940–​1945 (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1993), 49; Christophe Pecout, Les Chantiers de la Jeunesse et la revitalisation physique et morale de la jeunesse française (1940–​1944) (Paris: Harmattan, 2007). 53 Yagil concurs that Vichy was not totalitarian, although she sees its plurality and individualism mainly in relation to interwar non-​conformism. “L’Homme nouveau,” 13–​17 and 275. 54 Jackson, “Vichy and Fascism,” 153–​71. 55 For a parallel approach, see Christopher Dillon, “ ‘Tolerance Means Weakness’: The Dachau Concentration Camp S.S., Militarism and Masculinity,” Historical Research 86, no. 232 (2013): 373–​89. 56 See Christopher Millington, “ ‘Street-​Fighting Men’ and ‘Duelling with Words and Fists’: Meeting Hall Violence in Interwar France,” in Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe, 1918–​1940, ed. Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 112–​26. 57 Police report on the Jeunesses Patriotes, n.d. APP BA 1942. 58 Police reports, February 10, October 27, November 2, December 5, 1938, APP BA 2494. 59 Police reports, n.d. probably 1926, AN F7 13206; police report, March 10, 1931, AN 13232. 60 Police reports, September 2 and 7, 1937; September 4 and 5, 1938, APP BA 1720. 61 Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck complain that this dimension is often overlooked in studies of the new man in favor of investigating the figure as “a merely rhetorical or aesthetic construct,” “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 303. 62 Caroline Campbell, “Building a Movement, Dismantling the Republic: Women, Gender, and Political Extremism in the Croix de Feu/​Parti Social Français, 1927–​ 1940,” French Historical Studies 35, no. 4 (2012): 691–​726 and Political Belief in France, 1927–​1945: Gender, Empire, and Fascism in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). 63 Daniella Sarnoff, “An Overview of Women and Gender in French Fascism,” in The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, ed. Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy (Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 141–​59; Kevin Passmore, “ ‘Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism’: Women’s Social Action in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français,” Journal of Modern History 71 (1999): 814–​51; Cheryl Koos and Daniella Sarnoff, “France,” in Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​45, ed. Kevin Passmore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 169–​88. 64 For a discussion of this dynamic in other contexts, see Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 65 Christopher E. Forth, Masculinity and the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 195–​6, italics in original; also Lorenzi Benadusi, “The Making of the Virile Italian,” Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 28.

 269

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

269

66 Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body, ­chapters 1 and 3. Similarly, Lutz Raphael argues that utopian movements such as life reform “enabled the diffusion . . . [of Nazi Weltanschauung] into the ways in which ordinary Germans interpreted the social world,” thus helping to secure the success of Hitler’s regime. “Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung,” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 80 and 76. 67 On this point I therefore disagree with the conclusions drawn by Geoff Read in The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 54–​90. 68 Christopher Dillon, Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), ­chapter 5. 69 Laurent Kestel, “The Emergence of Anti-​Semitism within the Parti Populaire Français: Party Intellectuals, Peripheral Leaders and National Figures,” French History 19, no. 3 (2005): 370 and 392. The new man construction did resonate in this imperial context. See Samuel Kalman, French Colonial Fascism: The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919–​1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5–​11 and 179.

Bibliography Aldrich, Robert. Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Augé, Claude (ed.), Larousse classique illustré: nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique [Classic illustrated Larousse: New encyclopedic dictionary], 28th ed. Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1919. Benadusi, Lorenzi. “The Making of the Virile Italian.” In Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy. Translated by Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Berstein, Serge. “La France des années trente allergique au fascisme—​à propos d’un livre de Zeev Sternhell” [France in the 1930s allergic tofascism—concerning a book by Zeev Sternhell], Vingtième Siècle 2 (1984): 84–​94. Berstein, Serge, and Milza, Pierre. Dictionnaire des fascismes et du nazisme [Dictionary of fascisms and Nazism], 2 vols. Paris: Editions Perrin, 2010/​2014. Bertrand-​Dorléac, Laurence. “Les vieilles images de l’homme nouveau (France 1900–​ 1945)” [Old images of the new man (France 1900–1945)]. In L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945): entre dictature et totalitarisme [The New Man in fascist Europe (1922–1945): Between dictatorship and totalitarianism]. Edited by Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza, 333–​45. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Blatt, Joel. “French Reaction to Italy, Italian Fascism, and Mussolini, 1919–​1925: The Views from Paris and the Palazzo Farnese.” PhD diss., University of Rochester, New York, 1976. Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

270

270

Joan Tumblety

Brunelle, Gayle K., and Finley-​Croswhite, Annette. Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Campbell, Caroline. “Building a Movement, Dismantling the Republic: Women, Gender, and Political Extremism in the Croix de Feu/​Parti Social Français, 1927–​1940,” French Historical Studies 35, no. 4 (2012): 691–​726. Campbell, Caroline. Political Belief in France, 1927–​1945: Gender, Empire, and Fascism in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Carrel, Alexis. Man, the Unknown. 1935. Reprinted. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941. Carrel, Alexis. Jour après jour [Day after day, 1893–1944], 1893–​1944. Paris: Plon, 1956. Cholvy, Gérard. Histoire des organisations et mouvements chrétiens de jeunesse en France XIXe—​XXe siècle [History of Christian youth organizations and movements in 19th-century France]. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999. Cointet-​Labrousse, Michèle. Vichy et le fascisme [Vichy and fascism]. Paris: Editions Complexe, 1999. Conway, Martin. “Building the Christian city: Catholics and Politics in Interwar Francophone Belgium,” Past and Present 128 (1990): 117–​51. de Baecque, Antoine. The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–​ 1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Delporte, Christian. “L’homme nouveau dans l’image de propagande collaborationniste” [Representing the new man in collaborationist propaganda]. In L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–​1945): entre dictature et totalitarisme. Edited by Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza, 347–​62. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Dillon, Christopher. “ ‘Tolerance Means Weakness’: The Dachau Concentration Camp S.S., Militarism and Masculinity,” Historical Research 86, no. 232 (2013): 373–​89. Dillon, Christopher. Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Dioudonnat, Pierre-​Marie. Je suis partout, 1930–​1944: les maurrassiens devant la tentation fasciste [Je suis partout, 1930–1944: The Maurrassians in the face of fascist temptation]. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1973. Drouard, Alain, Alexis Carrel (1873–​1944): de la mémoire à l’histoire. [Alexis Carrel (1873–1944): From memory to history] Paris: Harmattan, 2005. Dulphy, Anne. Review of the symposium on the “New Man in Fascist Europe,” Vingtième siècle 67 (2000): 152–​3. Fabre, Rémi. “Les Mouvements de jeunesse dans la France de l’entre-​deux-​guerres” [Youth movements in France in the interwar period], Mouvement social 168 (1994): 9–​30. Falasca-​Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Farrère, Claude. Les Hommes nouveaux [The New Men]. Paris: Flammarion, 1922. Forth, Christopher E. Masculinity and the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. Fritzsche, Peter, and Hellbeck, Jochen. “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.” In Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Edited by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, 302–​41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Gentile, Emilio. The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Translated by Keith Botsford. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

 271

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

271

Goyet, Bruno. “La ‘March sur Rome’: version originale sous-​titrée; La réception du fascisme en France dans les années 20” [The “March on Rome”: Subtitled originalversion. The reception of fascism in France in the 1920s]. In Le Mythe de l’allergie française au fascism [The myth of the French allergy to fascism]. Edited by Michel Dobry, 69–​105. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003. Hellman, John. The Knight Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940–​1945. Montreal: McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 1993. Heurtaud-​Wright, Marie-​Hélène. “Les Hommes nouveaux (Marcel L’Herbier, 1936): Nostalgia, Masculinity and the French Colonial Film of the 1930s,” Modern & Contemporary France 8, no. 2 (2000): 215–​26. Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Jackson, Julian. “Vichy and Fascism.” In The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen. Edited by E. Arnold, 153–​71. London: Arnold, 2000. Jackson, Julian. France, the Dark Years, 1940–​1944. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kalman, Samuel, French Colonial Fascism: The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919–​1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kennedy, Sean. “The Croix de Feu, the Parti Social Français, and the Politics of Aviation, 1931–​1939,” French Historical Studies 23, no. 2 (2000): 373–​99. Kennedy, Sean. Reconciling France against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927–​1945. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2007. Kestel, Laurent. “The Emergence of Anti-​Semitism within the Parti Populaire Français: Party Intellectuals, Peripheral Leaders and National Figures,” French History 19, no. 3 (2005): 364–​84. Koos, Cheryl, and Sarnoff, Daniella. “France.” In Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​45. Edited by Kevin Passmore, 169–​88. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Micaud, Charles A. The French Right and Nazi Germany (1933–​1939). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1943. Millington, Christopher. “Street-​Fighting Men: Political Violence in Inter-​War France,” English Historical Review 129, no. 538 (2014): 606–​38. Millington, Christopher. “Duelling with Words and Fists: Meeting Hall Violence in Interwar France.” In Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe, 1918–​1940. Edited by Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore, 112–​26. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ozouf, Mona. L’Homme régénéré: essais sur la Révolution française [Regenerated man: Essays on the French Revolution]. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Passmore, Kevin. “ ‘Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism’: Women’s Social Action in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français,” Journal of Modern History 71 (1999): 814–​51. Passmore, Kevin. The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Passmore, Kevin. “La Droite entre les deux guerres: psychologie des foules, sciences de l’organisation et publicité moderne,” [The Right between the wars: crowd psychology, the science of organization and modern publicity], Politix 27, no. 106 (2014): 5–​31. Passmore, Kevin. “L’historiographie du ‘fascisme’ en France” [The historiography of “fascism” in France]. French Historical Studies 37, no. 3 (2014): 469–​99.

272

272

Joan Tumblety

Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–​1944. 1972. Reprinted. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Pecout, Christophe. Les Chantiers de la Jeunesse et la revitalisation physique et morale de la jeunesse française (1940–​1944) [The Chantiers de la Jeunesse and the physical and moral revitalization of French youth (1940–1944)]. Paris: Harmattan, 2007. Raphael, Lutz. “Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung.” In Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives. Edited by Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, 73–​86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Read, Geoff. “He Is Depending on You: Militarism, Martyrdom, and the Appeal to Manliness in the Case of France’s Croix de Feu, 1931–​1940,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 16, no. 1 (2005): 261–​91. Read, Geoff. The Republic of Men: Gender and The Political Parties in Interwar France. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Reggiani, Andres H. “Alexis Carrel, the Unknown: Eugenics and Population Research under Vichy,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 331–​56. Reggiani, Horacio. God’s Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Socio-​Biology of Decline. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. Rémond, René. The Right Wing in France from 1815 to de Gaulle. Translated by James M. Laux, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1969. Renaud, Jean. La Solidarité française attaque [Solidarité Française attacks]. Paris: Œuvres françaises, 1935. Reynaud, Paul. Jeunesse, quelle France veux-​tu? Dialogue avec le lecteur sur les crises et les réformes [Youth, what France do you want? Dialogue with the reader on crises and reforms]. Paris: Gallimard, 1936. Reynaud, Paul. Mémoires, envers et contre tous: 7 Mars 1936–​16 juin 1940 [Memoirs, despite all opposition: 7 March 1936–16 June 1940], vol. 2. Paris: Flammarion, 1963. Romier, Lucien. L’Homme nouveau. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1929. Sarnoff, Daniella. “An Overview of Women and Gender in French Fascism.” In The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism. Edited by Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy, 141–​59. Oxford: Berghahn, 2014. Schneider, William H. Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-​Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Slavin, David H. Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–​1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Sophie-​Anne Leterrier, “L’homme nouveau, de l’exégèse à la propagande” [The new man from interpretation to propaganda]. In L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–​ 1945): entre dictature et totalitarisme. Edited by Marie-​Anne Matard-​Bonucci and Pierre Milza, 23–​33. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Soucy, Robert. French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–​1933. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Soucy, Robert, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–​1939. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995. Soucy, Robert. “French Press Reactions to Hitler’s Two Years in Power,” Contemporary European History 7, no. 1 (1998): 21–​38. Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

 273

The Fascist New Man in France, 1919–45

273

Thomas, Martin. “ ‘Thinking Imperially’? Popular Imperialism in France,” in The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Tumblety, Joan. Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Whitney, Susan B. Mobilising Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Yagil, Limore. “L’Homme nouveau” et la révolution nationale de Vichy (1940–​1944) [The new man and the Vichy national revolution (1940–1944)]. Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1997.

274

 275

13

The Salience of “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements, 1922–​44 Roland Clark

One of the recurring problems in the study of interwar fascism is that fascists did not always mean what they said or say what they meant. As the sociologist Rogers Brubaker has argued, when politicians speak about “the nation” they are articulating a political stance rather than an “ethnodemographic fact.”1 Terrorist attacks and assassinations by fascist groups against state officials showed that fascist “nation-​ statism” was more about promoting individual fascist leaders than about supporting the nation-​state in its existing form.2 If fascist speech about the nation was ambiguous, how much more so was their talk about new men? Although he acknowledges that speech about new men was common to most fascist groups, Roger Eatwell has emphasized that almost everyone meant something different by the term. Some thought they were creating new elites, others emphasized fascist new men as warriors. Some applied the term to women, while others ignored them completely. For some fascists creating the new man meant using group activities to teach their followers to speak and act like fascists, and for others it meant encouraging individual acts of heroism.3 In Romania, rhetoric about the new man was so common within the country’s most prominent fascist movement, the Legion of the Archangel Michael, that Valentin Săndulescu and Rebecca Haynes have suggested that the desire to create new men was the driving force behind most of the movement’s activities. In particular, legionaries used their extensive system of voluntary work camps to instill fascist values and to shape fascist bodies that would build a glorious new Romanian nation-​state.4 The problem with this interpretation is that the movement preceded the ideology that apparently defined it, and continued after the rhetoric of national rebirth and the new man had faded away. Nor was the concept of the new man stable or even clearly defined during those years when legionaries used it to characterize their program. To describe the Legion as a movement animated by an ideal is to put the cart before the horse. As other historians have noted, it was the charisma, not the speeches, of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and other prominent legionaries that caused many sympathizers to join the

276

276

Roland Clark

Legion, and state violence against legionary activists shaped their activities more profoundly than rhetoric about new men ever did.5 Traian Sandu has argued that the Legion had a “double character,” claiming that its ideology of the new man was simply rhetoric for intellectuals that had little relation to the novel mobilization structures and use of technology that attracted peasants.6 The rise of new man rhetoric did closely coincide with the ascendance of intellectuals as legionary propagandists, but ideas nonetheless matter as signifiers that identified activists with a political phenomenon of pan-​European proportions. Europeans of the 1930s associated new men with fascism in the same way as they identified the goose step, paramilitary uniforms, muscular male bodies, and the “Roman” salute with fascism.7 By speaking about new men and national rebirth, legionaries and other Romanian activists and politicians associated themselves with Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and other fascist leaders abroad. By tying their rhetoric of the new man specifically to the Romanian context, they emphasized the local peculiarities of their movement and argued that they were not simply importing a foreign ideology. The context in which one spoke about new men mattered. Bolsheviks and Christian missionaries also wanted to create new men, and gymnastics associations also cherished muscular masculinity, but the phrase signified fascism when it was articulated by people who also identified themselves with other fascist markers. Constantin Iordachi has argued that legionaries’ ideas about national palingenesis emerged out of nineteenth-​century nationalist mythologies, and Rebecca Haynes that talk of new men was a result of their Orthodox Christianity, but when legionaries first spoke about new men it was to contrast themselves with corruption they said was destroying the country.8 “Anti-​politicianism,” as the legionaries called it, evolved into rhetoric about new men quite slowly and predated the Legion by roughly fifty years. The ultranationalists who populated the Legion and other fascist movements in Romania during the 1930s had been criticizing “politicianism” and the ruling elites’ willingness to tolerate Jews since the nineteenth century. Claiming that politicians were corrupted by Jews allowed ultranationalists to maintain that they, and not the state’s legally elected leaders, had the true interests of the nation at heart. Antisemitic student activists developed their own critique of their country’s rulers when successive governments refused to exclude Jews from the universities, and early legionaries contrasted their youth and “purity” with the corrupt political machinations of their elders. Legionary discourses about youth were initially aimed at other ultranationalists; former allies they claimed had become politicians. Over time, legionary propagandists articulated an ideal type of fascist men and women and began calling these people “new men” (oameni noi), the Romanian phrase being gender neutral. Legionaries talked more about new men from 1933 onward, once fascism became more popular as a political option abroad and a new political climate inside the country made violence less useful as a means of propaganda. The phrase disappeared from legionary discourse after Codreanu’s death in November 1938, only to reappear when the Legion came to power in September 1940, this time simultaneously as a way of glorifying dead legionary heroes and as a new catchphrase for fascist youth groups and institutions.

 277

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

277

Fascists and antisemites, 1921–​27 The first explicitly fascist movements in Romania were the Italian–​Romanian National Fascist Movement led by Elena Bacaloglu and the National Romanian Fascists (FNR), led by D. C. Pădeanu. Both looked to Mussolini’s Italy for inspiration and support, and Bacaloglu’s organization merged with FNR in late 1922. The Fascists grew briefly in popularity over the next two years, with one police report estimating FNR’s membership numbers in the tens of thousands.9 Leadership struggles destroyed the organization, however, and its members soon joined other ultranationalist causes. FNR publications emphasized radical social reforms that included universal literacy, industrialization, new roads and train lines, and a corporatist economic agenda.10 Fascists talked on the one hand about “saving the Fatherland” and of securing the hegemony of ethnic Romanians in the state, but on the other hand, FNR propagandists humbly allied themselves with “needy Romanians.”11 Other right-​wing groups, such as Constantin Pancu’s Guard of the National Conscience, Romanian Action, and A.  C. Cuza’s National Christian Defense League (LANC), also ignored the Italian rhetoric about new men. Articles in the Guard’s newspaper focused on the threat of Bolshevism and on protecting workers’ rights.12 Romanian Action publications, in contrast, fixated on excluding Jews and other “foreigners” from universities, businesses, and public life.13 LANC was by far the largest organization on the Romanian extreme right during the 1920s. It too focused primarily on attacking Jews and Bolsheviks, but maintained close ties with and recommended texts by antisemites in France, Germany, Hungary, and the United States.14 Cuza also adopted the swastika in 1922, a year after the German National Socialists, but claimed that it was an ancient symbol of salvation without acknowledging any Nazi connection.15 LANC’s program during the 1920s was a negative one, emphasizing the Jewish peril and Cuza’s struggle against it without articulating any positive vision of what the organization might offer the country if it came to power. Romanian observers were nonetheless well aware that Italian fascists were dedicated to creating new men. In his 1927 study of fascism, the renowned sociologist Petre Andrei equated Mussolini’s new man with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch. According to Mussolini, Andrei wrote, “the fascist hero, who has the right and the duty to lead others, will be produced gradually through the awakening of the spirit of the people and through social and biological transformations. This is thus an activist and aristocratic ideology.”16 Though he never mentioned them explicitly here, Andrei’s major concern was a large antisemitic student movement that had tormented Romanian universities since December 1922. Andrei was an outspoken critic of the student violence, and he lived in such fear of revenge that he committed suicide when the Legion came to power.17 Andrei noted that young people in particular found Fascism attractive, and suggested that the same desire for establishing themselves motivated both Italian Fascists and Romanian youth.18

278

Roland Clark

278

Youth and purity, 1922–​28 The students claimed that their goal was to limit the number of Jews allowed to study at Romanian universities, but they also referred to themselves as heroes, hinting at a concept of new men that would become explicit several years later.19 The lyrics of a song published in the student movement’s newspaper in May 1923 argued that the students could save the nation because of their youth and purity: Brother students, great apostles Good and strong Romanians, Today our gentle nation Awaits its salvation! From a danger that threatens it With a consuming flood Of leprous Yids Who spread out ever further We are its apostles Young and spotless, Our nation calls out together with us To pay the valleys their tribute.20

Whereas older ultranationalists hesitated to identify themselves too closely with Italian Fascism, the students proudly noted that they were the first to oppose “individualism” in the name of the nation and announced that “we will unfurl the flag of a cultural fascism of which students will be the avantguarde.”21 The students’ conception of heroism was predominately a masculine ideal, but women were nonetheless very active in the student movement as propagandists, vandals, and advisers.22 The notion that the students embodied a new spiritual ideal became popular during 1923, when several student leaders were arrested as part of a plot to assassinate leading business and political figures. In his confession to the police one of the accused, Ion Moţa, described the student movement as a “holy” cause, and another of the arrested students, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, claimed to have had a religious experience in front of an icon of the Archangel Michael in the prison chapel.23 Codreanu, Moţa, and others had supported Cuza’s LANC since its inception, but broke with their former professor in 1927 after a power struggle split the party’s leadership. Codreanu named his splinter group the Legion of the Archangel Michael, and in the first issue of their newspaper, Moţa wrote that “we do not do politics, and we have never done it for a single day in our lives. We have a religion, we are slaves to a faith. We are consumed in its fire and are completely dominated by it. We serve it until our last breath.”24 Moţa’s reference to “doing politics” was an attack on Cuza, who the legionaries argued had become just like the politicians they had always fought against. Early legionary publications made frequent references to how young the legionaries were, building on the association of youth with innocence, purity, and future promise. Legionaries

 279

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

279

are “young in spirit,” one early article explained, “pure in lifestyle, strong and disinterested in battle.”25 It took several years before the majority of antisemitic students joined the Legion, but the rhetoric of spiritual youth continued to invigorate student propaganda as well. This was not an anthropological revolution, however, it was supposedly the natural result of generational change. In one article from late 1926 a student writer claimed he was part of a “new generation,” which, he said, was “free of all material preoccupations and purer in spirit than anyone else in society.”26 When students began a pogrom in Oradea Mare in December 1927, the journalist and future historian of religions Mircea Eliade wrote that the riots were the growing pains of an “authentic rebirth of religiosity.”27 Their parents who had fought in the First World War called themselves “the generation of fire,” and talk about generations was nothing new in 1920s Romania.28 The following year Eliade identified himself as the leader of a group of intellectuals he called “the young generation,” and other young intellectuals quickly followed suit, criticizing their elders and defining their generation in spiritual terms.29 Threatened both by the audacity of Eliade and his cohort and by the violence of the student movement itself, leading social commentators quickly responded, enshrining the idea of a “new generation” in Romanian public discourse.30

Legionary heroism, 1927–​33 Legionaries did not use the phrase “new men” until 1933, but they did claim the students’ ideology of youth and heroism as their own and incorporated it into their propaganda and their internal documents. Corneliu Georgescu, who had been arrested together with Codreanu and Moţa in connection with the 1923 assassination plot, bemoaned the lack of heroism in recent Romanian history and encouraged his fellow legionaries to “break down the murderous wall of apathy with your swords! Let in fresh air to raise up breasts grown mouldy from waiting for sacrifice and soon new pages of glory will be written into the History of this Nation!”31 Legionary propaganda leaflets from 1930 told Romanians that “when your voice and arm will proclaim the Victory, Romania shall reawaken. Peonies will bloom—​your children. The foreigner will respect you. The enemy shall fear you.”32 Legionary heroism was not limited only to men, and one newspaper article from 1933 explained that “a legionary sister must be a fearless warrior and a new ideal. Her home must be an altar and her soul a ray of pure sunlight. Her soul, her mind and her hands are for serving the Legion.”33 Legionaries were ambivalent on the question of whether heroes were born or made. Sometimes they implied that Romanians simply had to stand up and fight. One leaflet from 1930 stated, “History calls you once again! Come as you are. With broken arms, worn out feet. With pierced lungs.”34 Another newspaper article defined national rebirth as “a reawakening of the slumbering energies of the nation and involves restoring them to their normal creative functions.”35 Other publications placed the onus on mothers to “give a soldier to king and country” by raising their children “in the Christian faith” because morality had to be restored to Romanian society, which was “beginning to collapse under the enemy’s boot.”36 Legionaries established youth sections called “Blood

280

280

Roland Clark

Brotherhoods” whose goal was “to create good Romanian soldiers for tomorrow.”37 Similarly, when they began making bricks for their new headquarters at Ungheni, near Iaşi, they called the brickworks “the first anti-​Semitic university in the world.”38 Even though they believed in their own potential, legionaries thrilled at the idea of improving themselves. A police report from 1929 stated that “Corneliu Z. Codreanu will soon establish a Christian student society aimed at cultivating sport and physical education among its members. It will focus in particular on boxing, fencing, and marksmanship in order to teach them how to handle a gun and to cultivate a sense of honour.”39 “The only thing the ‘[Iron] Guard’ does,” Codreanu wrote about the Legion’s paramilitary formations in a circular from 1933, “is constructive educational work.”40 More explicitly fascist references to “new men” entered legionary discourse once intellectuals joined the movement. One of the most dedicated of these men, the law student Vasile Marin, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Italian Fascism in 1932. Marin had been involved with antisemitic student activism during the 1920s and joined the Legion soon after it was founded in 1927. He argued that Italian Fascists held “an organic, historical view of society, opposed to the atomistic and materialistic traditional view because it thinks about society in terms of its group life, which surpasses that of individuals.”41 Marin simultaneously emphasized the Fascist idea of “mass man” alongside the idea of “new men” as fascist heroes. He quoted Mussolini’s statement that “Fascism wants active and engaged men of action; it wants them virile, aware of and ready to confront the difficulties of the world.”42 Once legionaries began winning minor electoral victories, two prominent right-​ wing intellectuals came out in support of them:  Nichifor Crainic in May 1932 and Nae Ionescu in November 1933.43 Both men used their positions as university professors and newspaper editors to establish themselves as patrons and mentors of aspiring writers, whom they encouraged to join the Legion. In his newspaper Calendarul (The calendar), Crainic praised Italian Fascism’s “moral foundation” and claimed that Hitler was creating “a Christian spiritual front” against atheism and Bolshevism.44 Commenting on legionary marches, he wrote that “in its vigour this new spirit, this young spirit, toughened through suffering, strengthened by persecution, ignited by revolt, dares to give fresh moral energy to our Romania, crushed as it has been under the hooves of so many adventurers.”45 In Cuvântul (The word), Ionescu argued that any political revolution must be preceded by a “spiritual revolution” and that Romania required “a new spirituality” if it was to have a positive future.46 In October 1932, journalists influenced by Crainic and Ionescu collaborated with a handful of legionary activists to publish a short-​lived newspaper entitled Axa (The axis).47 In its pages they elaborated legionary doctrine for the first time, evoking “the example of fascism” as their model.48 “The legionary state will create a new aristocracy,” wrote Mihail Stelescu, “an aristocracy of work, honesty and genius. The blue-​blooded aristocracy of money and sloth will be cut out at its roots.”49 Vasile Marin called his generation “the demiurges of the new world who carry a pickaxe in one hand and a trowel in the other, with which they will build a new life.”50 Two months later he wrote that “the Nietzschean principle of existence has caught on, fertilizing the spirit of our Romanian generation,” which has begun a political struggle to institute an “ethical state” on new foundations.51 Legionaries experienced increasing police persecution

 281

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

281

in the months before the national elections of December 1933 and claimed that it was because “the forces of conservatism” were afraid of the “epoch-​making” forces of Fascism, Nazism, and other revolutionary youth organizations such as the Legion.52 It was in the pages of Axa that legionaries first used the term “new man,” applying it to Codreanu as a representative of the movement as a whole. Constant Onu wrote, The new systems, the epochal reforms which reorganized the lives of entire peoples exist thanks to a certain type of person . . . the new man [omul nou]. The Italian revolution succeeded through Mussolini; the German revolution through Hitler. Both had the unanimous and devoted support of the youth behind them; youth imbued with the novelty and virtue characteristic of those leaders and religions which illuminate its path. . . . The new man is the one whose name Romanian youth speak with awe and in whom they believe fanatically. Nameless multitudes come to him with a rare reverence and are inspired by his myth. He is, and apart from him there is no other.53

In the same issue another legionary activist, Ion Banea, waxed poetic in his praise of Codreanu, emphasizing the image of “the Captain” as a new sort of warrior: “He is a boundary stone; a border. A sword stretched between two worlds. One old, which he confronts bravely, destroying it completely. The other new, which he creates, gives life, and calls into the light.” Codreanu, Banea said, personified the nationalist movement as a whole.54 The image of Codreanu as a messianic figure solidified from this point onward, and four years later Traian Herseni wrote of Codreanu that “the Captain is not chosen by men, nor is he made a leader; he is sent by the people’s destiny, which does not err, born that he might save our country.”55 In articulating a leader cult, speaking of national revolution and rebirth, and in evoking the concept of new men, legionary intellectuals explicitly associated themselves with fascist movements elsewhere in Europe. Whereas early legionary newspapers such as Pământul strămoşesc (The ancestral land) had publicized only antisemitic movements abroad, in Axa legionaries exhibited their fascist credentials by reproducing rhetoric fascists were using across Europe. Legionaries spoke less and less about antisemitism from 1934 onward, and their vicious campaign against Jews remained muted until they came to power in September 1940, when attacks on Jews suddenly became a key legionary repertoire once again. There were a number of reasons for this change of tactics, which the legionary journalist Mihail Polihroniade identified as the moment when the Legion “matured.”56 On one level it had to do with the increasing influence of intellectuals over legionary policy, a development that led to factionalism and rivalries within the movement.57 Factionalism, in particular Mihai Stelescu’s decision to break away and form his own movement in 1934, caused Codreanu to rethink the movement’s structure and core ideology.58 New members began joining the Legion in droves, and Codreanu responded by insisting on “a rigorous examination” and “grueling tests” for new recruits in order to protect the Legion’s elitist reputation and to distinguish them from the “true legionaries” who had been killed in 1933.59 One police report noted that “Codreanu says that he does not need a large number of followers, but a few well-​disciplined soldiers.”60

282

282

Roland Clark

Talking about “new men” rather than “youth” now became increasingly necessary as the movement’s leadership aged. Codreanu turned thirty-​four years old in 1933, and most of the other leaders were also more than a decade beyond their university studies. As Oliver Jens Schmitt has shown, from this point on a smaller and smaller percentage of legionaries were younger than twenty-​five years old.61 As the legionaries discovered after they assassinated the prime minister, Ion Gh. Duca, in December 1933, street violence and clashes with police also provoked official repression and the movement as a whole suffered.62 Whereas in 1930 Codreanu had supported acts of violence against his enemies even when he had had nothing to do with them, when someone attacked the rector of the University of Iaşi, Traian Bratu, in 1937, Codreanu publically denounced the deed as “disgraceful.”63 Antisemitism also had only limited electoral appeal and failed to distinguish the Legion from other right-​ wing parties, which was a problem that the legionaries were only too aware of.64 Most importantly, however, after Hitler’s rise to power adopting pan-​fascist rhetoric and affiliating the Legion with European fascism increased the number of votes in their favor when national elections came around.65

New men, 1934–​38 In 1935, Codreanu published a book entitled Pentru legionari (For my legionaries), which was part memoir, part manifesto, and became required reading for legionaries in their weekly meetings.66 In it he explained that the Legion had no political program because “this country is suffering from lack of men, not of programs. . . . Therefore,” he said, “we don’t need to create programs but men, new men.”67 The idea of “creating legionaries” shaped the movement’s activities and propaganda profoundly from 1935 until Codreanu’s death in 1938, with General Cantacuzino ordering legionaries to swear to behave with “honesty, honour, order, love of work, and faith in God”—​all attributes that should characterize new men.68 “A new style of living was born together with the Legion,” wrote Ernest Bernea in 1937, one which “knows how to distinguish the light from the darkness and life from death.”69 Comparing the legionaries to mystics, the student leader Gheorghe Furdui wrote that creating new men involved “the infiltration of certain values into one’s consciousness, living them organically with the help of all of the spirit’s attributes, with the goal of being able to identify them with the spirit, giving birth to that ineffable and irrational warmth inside that irresistibly leads to [new] realities and achievements.”70 In 1933, Codreanu had written a Cărticică şefului de cuib (Little handbook for nest leaders), which laid out what his followers should do in their regular meetings and was the definitive guide to legionary conduct.71 He now followed through on his promise to impose rigorous conditions on new members, and instituted membership cards, ranks, and functions, all organized according to a strict hierarchy.72 The behavior of legionaries was to be monitored by a group called “Legionary Control,” who periodically investigated how legionaries in positions of responsibility conducted the movement’s affairs.73 Codreanu was interested not only in catching thieves but also in reprimanding those who were not sufficiently careful with the Legion’s money.74 He also issued

 283

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

283

“Ten Commandments” that “the legionary must follow so as not to wander from his glorious path in these dark times.” The commandments emphasized following orders, mistrusting nonlegionaries, refusing bribes, bickering and giving shallow praise, and trusting in God to lead the Legion to victory.75 In an organization as large as the Legio, not all of these commandments were strictly followed, and Codreanu had to periodically reissue orders about several of them.76 More specific regulations were introduced over time, such as rules against dueling, insulting women, disrespecting authority figures, gossiping about other legionaries, and displaying excessive joviality.77 Those who could or would not live up to Codreanu’s expectations were suspended or expelled from the Legion.78 “Beware colleagues,” Codreanu wrote, “for through bad behaviour or dishonesty you lose a life of honour and any future joy.”79 Different leaders took different approaches to creating new men. Ioan Victor Vojen wrote that “the legionary elite will be selected according to their spiritual purity, their capacity for work, their courage and never-​ending faith in the great historic mission of the Romanian people. A stern law will govern every moment in the lives of members of this proud class of men, the harshest law, the law of one who must be a permanent example for others.”80 Vojen chastised those under his command who he thought were underprepared and established a “school” for new legionaries and potential leaders in 1937.81 In contrast, Maria Iordache, another legionary leader, told her communist interrogators in 1955 that “our ideal was to form a new man. . . . We realized this ideal through an examination of conscience, through the sincere confession of our mistakes and by going to church. We also read from the Bible at every meeting.”82 Others held up legionary martyrs as perfect examples of new men whose lives could serve as models for the rest.83 At a student congress in 1935, Alexandru Cantacuzino told his listeners that “the Romanian of tomorrow must desire severe, tough, heroic existence, to feel at one with the collective and the national good. He must have the cacophonous, cursed characteristics of being violent and extremist. The Romanian of tomorrow must know that he was born to die for his Nation.” He proposed to create this type of new man “through severe spiritual exercises and by flogging the lethargic Romanian spirit.”84 Some of the most conspicuous legionary activities of this period involved summer work camps at which legionaries performed voluntary labor, building roads and bridges, or repairing churches and wells. A  legionary book promoting the camps explained that they were places “where students, graduates, tradesmen, workers and peasants will become brothers through the same rough and disinterested work for the good of the community.”85 Codreanu ran his first work camp in 1924, but established them as a trademark of the legionary movement in 1934, expanding the number and scope of the camps dramatically over the next two years. He ordered in 1935 that “this year the work camps have an educational role of creating and of beginning to create the honest man [omul corect]. So far we have created: the man of faith, the man of courage, the man who sacrifices. Now we need the honest man. Honest in every aspect: towards himself, towards the outside world (in bearing, attitude, good faith, respect, etc.), towards the organization, his colleagues, his leaders, his country, and with God.”86 Participants at legionary work camps took part in daily group exercises, grueling marches, demanding physical labor, and a frugal diet as well as listened to speeches and discussed legionary ideology at length.87 Those who successfully completed fifteen days at

284

284

Roland Clark

a work camp received a “diploma” testifying to their achievement.88 In 1936, Codreanu made participation in a work camp or voluntary labor at the legionary headquarters in Bucharest compulsory for all student members of the Legion.89 Work camps were central to the Legion’s conception of new men during this period. An article from the prolegionary newspaper Libertatea (Liberty) in 1936 explained that this legionary host does not publicize itself loudly, it does not bluster in the alleyways, it does not promise the world, but it works silently to build a new life. This new life must be created and led by new men, who do not seek riches and gold squeezed out of the helpless worker, but who must be used to living only from hard and sober work. That is why the Captain of the legionaries has filled the country with work camps where churches are built, houses are erected for the poor, things are built for the public good. Because by working arduously here, intellectuals and city folk—​the future leaders of a legionary country—​will become used to another life, difficult and hard, and will no longer long for a life of luxury based on theft.90

Legionary rhetoric about new men reached its pinnacle in February 1937, after the deaths of two prominent legionaries, Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin, in the Spanish Civil War. “Let us establish Moţa and Marin as the basis of Romania’s future elite,” Codreanu said at their funeral. He ordered his followers to swear “to behave in such a way that you truly be a healthy beginning, a great future Romanian elite, that you will defend the entire legionary movement so that it might not slip into the ways of business, luxury, good living, immorality, the satisfaction of personal ambitions or the desires of human greed.” The crowd then promised, 1 . 2. 3. 4. 5.

to live in poverty, putting to death in us the desires for material wealth; to live a harsh and difficult life, casting aside luxury and gluttony; to refuse any attempt by one person to exploit another; to sacrifice permanently for the country; [and] to defend the legionary movement with all our strength, against all that might lead it toward compromises and against any deviation from a high moral line.91

Fascist alternatives, 1934–​41 Legionaries were not the only political group to speak about new men during the 1930s. Like the legionaries, LANC propagandists emphasized how different their electoral campaigns were from those of the major parties in that they avoided fraud, bribery, and corruption, and LANC leaders also carried out periodic inspections of members from other counties.92 They organized themselves along hierarchical, military lines and formed “assault brigades” to compete with legionary paramilitary units.93 LANC never explicitly spoke about new men, however, preferring to associate itself directly with Hitler as a political ally.94 Whereas Codreanu claimed to be quite strict about who was allowed to become a legionary, LANC only limited its membership to “pure-​blooded Romanians who have never been condemned under Romanian law and who represent

 285

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

285

a moral guarantee for the future of the Romanian nation in all social aspects,” explicitly excluding minors, “traitors to the national cause” and members of the armed forces.95 A  similar attitude prevailed when Cuza joined with Octavian Goga and Nichifor Crainic to establish the National Christian Party (PNC) in 1935, with members swearing to obey “ten commandments” that included believing in Christ’s teachings and promising to fight for king and country but not to transform oneself into a new man.96 One LANC leader who did appreciate the power of new man rhetoric was Tiberiu Rebreanu, a law student from the University of Cluj who broke with Cuza in 1934 and established his own movement known as The New Group, which adopted the rhetoric and style of Italian Fascism.97 Most of Rebreanu’s black-​shirted supporters were students, and although his movement was supported by the rector of his university, it failed to generate a significant following.98 Similarly, the brown-​shirted members of Swastika of Fire, another LANC splinter group established in 1936 by the lawyer I. V. Emilian, focused on young people but failed to threaten the popularity of either LANC or the Legion. Mihai Stelescu, one of the Legion’s most prominent leaders, broke away to form his own movement in 1934. Stelescu named his group The Crusade for Romanianism, and pledged to follow the same goals as the legionaries but to do so independently of Codreanu, who Stelescu claimed was an imposter who did not live up to his public image.99 The authorities welcomed Stelescu’s attempt to undermine the hegemony of the Legion, financed his movement with government money, and some members of a more socially respectable nationalist group known as The Cult of the Fatherland agreed to join him.100 Stelescu’s Crusade was organized according to the same structure as the Legion, and Stelescu toured the country inspecting the state of the organization and giving orders to local leaders.101 Although the Crusade welcomed prominent individuals such as the formerly communist novelist Panait Istrati, Stelescu also followed Codreanu’s approach to ensuring ideological conformity by expelling Alexandru Talex for publishing “left-​wing” articles in the Crusade’s newspaper.102 Legionaries assassinated Stelescu in 1936, and despite continued scuffles between rank-​and-​file members of both groups the Crusade quickly faded into insignificance. In Transylvania, Fritz Fabritius established a Saxon fascist movement known as “Self-​Help” in 1922, which affiliated itself wholesale with German Nazism in 1932, going through several name changes as it incorporated and reincorporated every time the government banned its predecessor. Fabritius initially fought for political representation for Saxons, established new Saxon settlements in Transylvania, and opposed capitalism as a predatory force destroying Saxon families. During the 1930s it developed a strong eugenic agenda, however, and adopted discourses about new men from German Nazism.103 In 1933, Ştefan Tătărescu claimed his version of Saxon National Socialism represented “a new form of collective life which has begun to develop on a superior level to that of today.”104 Its members were expected to undertake six years of study, including both theoretical and practical subjects, spiritual instruction, physical education, and voluntary labor.105 Saxon National Socialists recruited girls to live with Nazi families in Germany, telling them that by working as domestic servants for minimal wages they would learn skills and ideology that they could then use when they returned to Romania.106 Other right-​wing commentators respected the Saxons’ methods, which became a model for legionary work camps a few years later.107 Both

286

286

Roland Clark

Fabritius and Tătărescu were aware of their similarities with both LANC and the Legion and discussed mergers on several occasions.108 Not all right-​wing groups during the early 1930s styled themselves as fascists and adopted the rhetoric of new men. Grigore Forţu, for example, a teacher at an elite school in Bucharest, established the Citizen’s Block in 1930 and then the Romanian Brotherhood in 1935.109 Forţu was ideologically similar to the Legion and praised it in his newspaper, one of his supporters writing that Romania needed “a man with authority, harsh and righteous, with an iron first that is ready to strike.”110 Nonetheless, he refused to subordinate himself to Codreanu and rejected fascism’s openness to the lower classes by associating himself primarily with lawyers, doctors, and generals.111 Similarly, the economist Mihail Manoilescu maintained close ties to Codreanu from 1934 onward.112 He wrote prefaces for legionary publications, spoke at legionary events, and offered to subsidize a legionary newspaper, but his Corporatist League did not seek to create new men and did not engage in the sorts of marches or street violence that the Legion was famous for.113 Another right-​wing organization, the Block of the Generation of 1922, represented veterans of the student movement opposed to Codreanu. Instead of swearing oaths and donning uniforms, their meetings involved formal speeches by government ministers with patriotic exhortations to serve one’s country.114 In 1935, a dissident of the National Peasant Party, Alexandru Vaida-​Voevod, established The Romanian Front and advocated for a numerus valachius that would limit the number of Jews allowed to practice certain professions. Contemporaries were convinced that Vaida-​Voevod’s antisemitism was opportunistic posturing and a testimony to the Legion’s popularity that a relatively mainstream politician should try and imitate.115 Vaida-​Voevod called the legionaries his “children” because when he was prime minister in 1932 he had allowed them to campaign freely, thus giving them their early electoral successes.116 Members of The Romanian Front held mass rallies, paraded in uniforms and national dress, spoke about “national reawakening,” and organized paramilitary violence.117 In a similar move, that year King Carol II established The Sentinels of the Fatherland, a youth organization that encouraged physical fitness, staged marches and uniformed mass meetings, and preached “faith and work for king and country.”118 In 1937, The Sentinels ran summer camps for youth aged seven to eighteen and refused to allow anyone in this age range to attend legionary camps on the grounds that the state had provided much better camps of its own.119 At these camps young people played sport, listened to patriotic speeches, and performed community service, mirroring the activities on offer at legionary camps.120 The king encouraged university students to join the Office for the Education of Romanian Youth (ONEF) and the Royal Foundations, giving out scholarships and commandeering university buildings and other public spaces for their activities.121 By the time Codreanu was killed in November 1938, the state had monopolized attempts to transform young people into a new type of human being. Official repression meant that legionaries had not been able to run their usual activities since the king appointed a government led by Cuza and Goga’s PNC that January, and after police murdered scores of prominent legionaries in September 1939 in retribution for the assassination of the minister of the interior, Armand Călinescu, the Legion became

 287

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

287

a clandestine, terrorist organization.122 Most legionary organizing between late 1938 and September 1940 took place in secret, and there is no record of legionaries speaking about or attempting to create new men during this period. What had been a major building block in the movement’s ideology was, by necessity, muted by the new circumstances that legionaries now found themselves in. In September 1940, international and domestic politics conspired in such a way that legionaries unexpectedly seized power together with General Ion Antonescu, establishing what they called the National Legionary State. As privileged representatives of this new regime, many legionaries abandoned any attempt to cultivate themselves as fascist new men. Instead, they dedicated themselves to plunder, attacking Jews and confiscating their goods and their businesses in the name of the state.123 Legionaries drank heavily and vandalized bars, then refused to pay, stole food from shops in the name of their charity, and extorted money from people through protection rackets.124 At the same time they published articles in state-​sponsored newspapers describing the Legion as a “school of heroism” and promising that schools could now create honest Romanians because they had been rid of Jewish teachers and students.125 “The legionary state does not only mean a new regime,” the journalist Ion Protopopescu wrote. “The legionary state is the expression of new meaning that has been given to life. It is the establishment of a new era in history that has begun.”126 Legionaries drew a strict line between the new world that had been established by the creation of the National Legionary State and all that came before. “This new spirit is no longer shared by only part of the country,” Octav Onicescu said, because now all Romanians had apparently embraced legionary ideals.127 The new regime celebrated the lives of legionary heroes and martyrs, holding commemorations and writing eulogies that exemplified the ideal fascist new men.128 The regime promised to reopen Codreanu’s work camps and established its own charity, but there is little evidence that many people took the rhetoric of new men particularly seriously any more.129 Rhetoric about new men shaped the priorities and public image of the Legion from its propaganda campaigns to internal discipline and summer work camps, but the movement cannot be reduced to its speech about new men. Following the changing salience of new men discourses over time shows that legionary ideology evolved from antisemitism and antipoliticianism into a self-​conscious movement that used the concept of new men to identify itself with fascist movements abroad. From 1933 onward Codreanu relied on this idea to distance the Legion from the reputation for violence, assassination, and hooliganism it had cultivated during the previous decade and to rebrand it as an organization of youthful elites working for national rebirth. The contingency of the concept became apparent when others showed that they could use it for quite different political ends and by the fact that legionaries themselves abandoned it in 1938 as soon as it was no longer politically expedient. When they came to power in September 1940, legionaries revived the rhetoric of new men to legitimate the regime, but undermined it through repeated acts of murder, theft, and vandalism. Even though antisemitism did not feature prominently in legionary discourse from 1933 onward, the National Legionary State was characterized much more heavily by acts of violence toward Jews than by attempts to create fascist new men. Words are powerful political signifiers and are often very meaningful to those who use them, but the evolution of

288

288

Roland Clark

the concept of the new man within Romanian fascism demonstrates how difficult it is to reduce a complex movement with a long history to any one ideal, no matter how prominent it may have been at certain times.

Notes 1 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5. 2 Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13–​15. 3 Roger Eatwell, “The Nature of ‘Generic Fascism,’” in Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives, ed. Constantin Iordachi (London: Routledge, 2010), 140–​4. 4 Valentin Săndulescu, “Fascism and Its Quest for the ‘New Man’: The Case of the Romanian Legionary Movement,” Studia Hebraica 4 (2004): 349–​61; Rebecca Haynes, “Work Camps, Commerce, and the Education of the ‘New Man’ in the Romanian Legionary Movement,” Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (2008): 943–​67. 5 Constantin Iordachi, Charisma, Politics and Violence: The Legion of the “Archangel Michael” in Inter-​War Romania (Budapest: Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies, 2004); Radu Harald Dinu, Faschismus, Religion und Gewalt in Südosteuropa Die Legion Erzengel Michael und die Ustasa im historischen Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013). 6 Traian Sandu, “Le fascisme, révolution spatio-​temporelle chez les Roumains,” in Vers un profil convergent des fascismes ? “Nouveau Consensus” et religion politique en europe centrale, ed. Traian Sandu (Paris: Cahiers de la Nouvelle Europe, 2010), 217–​30. 7 Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1919–​1945 (London: Routledge, 1995), 7; George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 155–​80. 8 Constantin Iordachi, “God’s Chosen Warriors: Romantic Palingenesis, Militarism and Fascism in Modern Romania,” in Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives, ed. Constantin Iordachi (London: Routledge, 2010), 316–​56; Rebecca Haynes, “Die Ritualisierung des “Neuen Menschen”—​Zwischen Orthodoxie und Alltagskultur,” in Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts: Die “Legion Erzengel Michael” in Rumänien 1918–​ 1938, ed. Armin Heinen and Oliver Jens Schmitt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2013), 89–​112. 9 Romanian National Archives (ANIC), Fond Direcţia Generală a Poliţiei, Dosar 36/​ 1923, f. 9–​10 and 16–​21. 10 “Fascismul nostru,” Fascismul, June 15, 1923, 1. 11 “Un catechism al Fascismului,” Fascismul, July 15, 1923, 1. 12 “Apel,” Conştiinţa, August 30, 1919, 4; F. Gugui, “Socialismul şi ‘Garda Conştiinţei Naţionale’,” Conştiinţa, September 18, 1919, 3; “Pentru muncitoare şi funcţionare,” Conştiinţa, January 5, 1920, 2. 13 A. C. Cuza, Îndrumări de politica externa: Discursuri parlamentare rostite in anii 1920–​ 1936 (Bucharest: Cugetarea–​Georgescu Delafras, 1941) 11–​15; Comitetul Central, “Cuvântul Acţiunei Româneşti către cetitor,” Acţiunea românească, November 1, 1924, 1–​2. 14 “Atenţiune,” Apărarea Naţională, January 1, 1923, 34; A. C. Cuza, “ ‘Scandalul european al falşurilor rassisto-​fasciste’—​Eckhardt, Gömbös, Cuza,” Naţionalistul, January 21, 1926, 5.

 289

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

289

15 A. C. Cuza, “Svastica,” Apărarea Naţională, June 15, 1922, 1–​2. 16 Petre Andrei, Fascismul (Focşani: Editura Neuron, 1995), 17. 17 Iaşi County Archives, Fond Universitatea A. I. Cuza, Rectoratul 1860–​1944, Dosar 1051/​1924–​1925, f. 4ff; “Ultima scrisoare a lui Petre Andrei,” Magazin istoric 1, no. 8, (1967). 18 Ibid., 24. 19 “Erou între eroi,” Cuvântul studenţesc, March 18, 1924, 2. 20 S. Şiciovan, “Înainte,” Apărarea națională, 2/​4 (May 15, 1923): 21. 21 N. N. Creţu, “Fascismul cultural,” Cuvântul studenţesc, January 19, 1923, 1; “Un manifest,” Cuvântul studenţesc, June 26, 1923, 4. 22 Roland Clark, “Die Damen der Legion: Frauen in rumänischen faschistischen Gruppierungen,” in Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts: Die “Legion Erzengel Michael” in Rumänien 1918–​1938, ed. Armin Heinen and Oliver Jens Schmitt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2013), 194–​7. 23 National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), Fond Penal, Dosar 013207, vol. 2, f. 16–​18; Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Pentru legionari (Bucharest: Editura Scara, 1999), 138. 24 Ion Moţa, “La icoană!” Pământul strămoşesc, August 1, 1927, 9–​10. 25 “Legiunea ‘Arhanghelului Mihail’,” Pământul strămoşesc, August 15, 1927, 1. 26 Ion Fotiade, “Studenţimea în generaţia nouă,” Cuvântul studenţesc, November 26, 1926, 1. 27 Mircea Eliade, “O generaţie,” Cuvântul studenţesc, December 4, 1927; reprinted in ibid., vol. 2, 92–​3. 28 Mircea Vulcănescu, “Tânară generaţie”: Crize vechi în haine noi (Bucharest: Editura Compania, 2004). 29 Mircea Eliade, Itinerariu spiritual: Scrieri de tinereţe (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2003); Sorin Pavel, Ion Nestor, and Petre Marcu-​Balş, “Manifestul ‘Crinului Alb’,” Gândirea 8 (8–​9), 1928: 311–​17. 30 Constantin Rădulescu-​Motru, “Perspectivele nouei generaţii,” Datina 6 (5–​6), 1928: 65–​9; Geroge Călinescu, “ ‘Crinul alb” şi “Laurul negru,’” Viaţa literara 3 (92), 1928: 1–​2. 31 Corneliu Georgescu, “Criza de eroism,” Pământul strămoşesc, August 1, 1928, 5. 32 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Circulări şi manifeste, 1927–​1938 (Bucharest: Editura Blassco, 2010), 12. 33 “Cum se constitue o cetatuie,” Garda de Fier (Basarabia) April 1, 1933, 3. 34 Ibid., 15. 35 Nichifor Crainic, “Răspunsul d-​lui profesor Nichifor Crainic,” Calendarul, December 6, 1933; reprinted in Ideologie şi formaţiuni de dreapta în România, vol. 3, ed. Ioan Scurtu (Bucharest: Institutul Naţional pentru Studiul Totalitarismului, 2002), 234–​6; italics in original. 36 “Organizarea Legiunii ‘Arhanghelul Mihail’,” Pământul strămoşesc, October 1, 1927, 1. 37 “Organizarea Legiunii ‘Arhanghelul Mihail’,” Pământul strămoşesc, October 15, 1927, 1. 38 “Situaţia la cărămidărie,” Pământul strămoşesc, July 15, 1928, 1. 39 US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Reel #137, Dosar 4/​1929, f. 33. 40 Codreanu, Circulări, 20. 41 Vasile Marin, Fascismul: Organizarea constituţională a statului corporativ Italian (Bucharest: Editura Majadahonda, 1997), 25.

290

290

Roland Clark

42 Ibid., 20. 43 Roland Clark, “Nationalism and Orthodoxy: Nichifor Crainic and the Political Culture of the Extreme Right in 1930s Romania,” Nationalities Papers 40 (1), 2012: 112; Marta Petreu, Diavolul şi ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu—​Mihail Sebastian (Iaşi: Polirom, 2009), 111. 44 Nichifor Crainic, “Împotriva proxeneţilor,” Calendarul, February 7, 1932, 1; Nichifor Crainic, “În Germania şi la noi,” Calendarul, February 4, 1933, 1. 45 Nichifor Crainic, “Marşul tineretului,” Calendarul, March 19, 1932, 1. 46 Nae Ionescu, “Tot despre ‘revoluţie’,” Cuvântul, August 31, 1931, 1. 47 Valentin Săndulescu, “Generation, Regeneration and Discourses of Identity in the Intellectual Foundations of Romanian Fascism: The Case of the AXA Group,” in “Regimes of Historicity” in Southeastern and Northern Europe: Discourses of Identity and Temporality, 1890–​1945, ed. Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi, and Marja Jalava (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 210–​29. 48 Mihail Polihroniade, “Dreapta românească,” Axa, November 10, 1932; reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 3, ed. Scurtu, 124–​7. 49 Mihail Stelescu, “Dreapta românească şi proletariatul,” Axa, December 22, 1932; reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 3, ed. Scurtu, 137–​8. 50 Vasile Marin, “Crez de generate: Ideologia faptei,” Axa, January 22, 1933, 1. 51 Vasile Marin, “Generaţie nouă şi statul etic,” Axa, March 19, 1933, 2. 52 Mihail Polihronade, “ ‘Garda de Fier’ şi statul democrat,” Axa, May 31, 1933, 1. 53 Constant Onu, “Omul nou,” Axa, October 29, 1933, 4. 54 Ion Banea, “Capitanul,” Axa, October 29, 1933, 2. 55 Traian Herseni, Mişcarea legionară şi tărănimea (Bucharest, 1937). 56 Mihail Polihroniade, “Sensul revoluţie naţionale,” Axa, October 15, 1933, 1. 57 Iordachi, Charisma, 99–​100; CNSAS, Fond Informativ, Dosar 160182, vol. 1, f. 160. For an alternative account of the rise of factionalism during this period, see Oliver Jens Schmitt, Căpitan Codreanu: Aufstieg und Fall des rumänischen Fascistenführers (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2016), 148–​52. 58 Schmitt, Căpitan Codreanu, 158. 59 Police report, January 27, 1933; reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 3, ed. Scurtu, 146; Codreanu, Circulări, 30–​1. 60 Police report, October 22, 1933; reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 3, ed. Scurtu, 221. 61 Oliver Jens Schmitt, “Wer waren die rumänischen Legionäre? Eine Fallstudie zu faschistischen Kadern im Umland von Bukarest 1927 bis 1941,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 64, 2016: 419–​48. 62 Dinu, Faschismus, 91. 63 Codreanu, Pentru legionari, 302–​4; Codreanu, Circulări, 125–​6. 64 Traian Sandu, Un fascisme roumain: Histoire de la Garde de fer (Paris: Perrin, 2014), 65. 65 Armin Heinen, Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail”: Mişcare social şi organizaţie politică (Bucharest: Humantias, 2006), 171–​3; Armin Heinen, “Wahl-​Maschine. Die Legion ‘Erzengel Michael’, die Wahlen 1931–​1937 und die Integrationskrise des rumänischen Staates,” in Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts: Die “Legion Erzengel Michael” in Rumänien 1918–​1938, ed. Armin Heinen and Oliver Jens Schmitt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2013), 130–​54. 66 Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 112–​15. 67 Codreanu, Pentru legionari, 238; italics in original.

 291

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

291

68 Gheorghe Cantacuzino, “Chemare,” March 1935; reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 4, ed. Scurtu, 94. 69 Ernest Bernea, Stil legionar (Bucharest: Serviciul propagandei legionare, 1940), 5. 70 Gheorghe Furdui, “Mistica naţionalistă,” Cuvântul studenţesc, February 10, 1935, 3. 71 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Cărticica şefului de cuib (Bucharest: Editura Bucovina, 1940). 72 ANIC, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Dosar 10/​1935, f. 185–​96; CNSAS, Fond Informativ, Dosar 160181, f. 422. 73 Codreanu, Circulări, 69 and 115–​17. 74 Ibid., 104–​6. 75 Ibid., 51–​2. 76 Ibid., 72, 94, and 148–​9. 77 Ibid., 96, 124–​5, 184–​5, and 195–​8; CNSAS, Fond Penal, Dosar 11784, vol. 19, f. 74. 78 Codreanu, Circulări, 75–​7, 125, 155–​6, 164, and 179. 79 Ibid., 179. 80 Ioan Victor Vojen, “Elita legionară,” Buna vestire, June 27, 1937, 5. 81 CNSAS, Fond Penal, Dosar 7215, vol. 2, f. 56–​57; CNSAS, Fond Informativ, Dosar 160181, f. 277–​9. 82 CNSAS, Fond Penal, Dosar 160, vol. 3, f. 191–​5. 83 ANIC, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Dosar 10/​1935, f. 1. 84 Alexandru Cantacuzino, “Românul de mâine,” in Alexandru Cantacuzino, Opere complete (Filipeşti de Târg, Prahova: Editura Antet XX, n.d.), 52. 85 Mihail Polihroniade, Tabăra de muncă (Bucharest: Tipografia Ziarului Universul, 1936), 3. 86 Codreanu, Circulări, 53; italics in original. 87 Valentin Săndulescu, “Revolutionizing Romania from the Right: The Regenerative Project of the Romanian Legionary Movement and its Failure (1927–​1937)” (PhD diss., Central European University, Budapest 2011), 153–​8. 88 ANIC, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Inv. 2247, Dosar 10/​1935, f. 92. 89 ANIC, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Inv. 2247, Dosar 10/​1935, f. 68. 90 “Tace şi munceşte la temeliile unei vieţi noi,” Libertatea, April 5, 1936, 4. 91 Codreanu, Circulări, 120–​2. 92 A. C. Cuza, “LANC şi alegerile judeţene,” Apărarea Naţională, February 16, 1930, 1; “Lugoj,” Sabia lui Traian, November 1, 1930, 4. 93 USHMM, Fond SRI Files, Reel 97, Dosar 566, f. 327–​33; CNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 8912, vol. 2, f. 13–​14. 94 Cuza, Îndrumări, 69. 95 “Comunicatul Organizaţiei LANC Braşov,” February 22, 1931, reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 3, ed. Scurtu, 46–​8; “Comunicat,” Sabia lui Traian, November 1, 1930, 2. 96 CNSAS, Fond Penal, 324, vol. 5, f. 123. 97 CNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 008909, vol. 2, f. 171. 98 Iaşi County Archives, Fond Inspectoratul Regional de Poliţie Iaşi, Dosar 5/​1934, f. 192; CNSAS, Fond Penal, Dosar 13206, vol. 2, f. 192, vol. 3, f. 108–​11; Heinen, Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail,” 250. 99 “Polemica Mihail Stelescu—​Corneliu Codreanu. Alte învinuiri aduse ‘Căpitanului’,” Lupta, March 29, 1935; reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 4, ed. Scurtu, 92–​3. 100 ANIC, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Dosar 3/​1936, f. 68; Heinen, Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail,” 250. 101 ANIC, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Dosar 10/​1935, f. 20.

292

292

Roland Clark

102 ANIC, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Dosar 3/​1936, f. 26; Mircea Iorgulescu, “Panait Istrati şi Cruciada Românismului,” România literara, November 7, 1991, 4–​5. 103 Tudor Georgescu, “Ethnic Minorities and the Eugenic Promise: The Transylvanian Saxon Experiment with National Renewal in Inter-​War Romania,” European Review of History: Revue Europeenne d’Histoire 17 (6), 2010: 861–​80; Andreas Hillgruber, Hitler, Regele Carol şi Maresalul Antonescu: Relaţiile Germano-​Române 1938–​1944 (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994), 146. 104 Ştefan Tătărescu, “Nici la extrema dreaptă, nici la extrema stângă!,” Crez nou, June 15, 1933; reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 3, ed. Scurtu, 190–​1. 105 Police report, 1933; reprinted in Ideologie, vol. 3, ed. Scurtu, 265–​8. 106 ANIC, Fond Direcţia Generală al Poliţiei, vol. 1, Dosar 112/​1928, f. 8. 107 “Caracterul hitlerismului din România,” Calendarul, August 31, 1933, 3; “Studenţi hitlerişti în Jud. Constanţa,” Calendarul, September 18, 1933, 4; Ion Moţa, “Hitlerismul Germanilor din România,” Axa, October 15, 1933, 1. 108 Heinen, Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail,” 172 and 217; Sandu, Un fascisme roumain, 78, 82, and 97. 109 Heinen, Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail,” 204–​5. 110 G. Ionescu, “Omul care ne trebuie,” Calea nouă, January 27, 1936, 5. 111 CNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 12408, f. 14–​19, 87–​8, and 106–​9. 112 ANIC, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Dosar 3/​1936, f. 316–​17; Heinen, Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail,” 163–​6. 113 Mihail Manoilescu, “Prefata,” in Lorenzo Baracchi Tua, Garda de Fier (Bucharest: Editura Mişcării Legionare, 1940), 7–​9; “Informaţii,” Cuvântul studenţesc, February 15, 1936, 3; CNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 12694, vol. 3, f. 60; 114 USHMM, Fond Ministerul de Interne—​Diverse, Reel #132, Dosar 2/​1922, f. 1–​17. 115 Mihail Sebastian, Journal, 1935–​1944 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 5; Armand Călinescu, Însemnări politice (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990), 249. 116 CNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 10866, f. 31. 117 Ibid., f. 31–​45,62–​63, and 82–​6; ANIC, Fond Direcţia Generală a Poliţiei, vol 1., Dosar 108/​1935, f. 2–​4; Iaşi County Archives, Fond Chestura de Poliţie, Dosar 93/​ 1936, f. 133. 118 “Educarea tineretului prin strajerie şi premilitarie,” Realitatea ilustrată, September 1, 1937, 22; Virgil Gheorghiu, Memorii: martorul Orei 25 (Bucharest: Editura 100 1 Gramar, 1999), 363–​8. 119 ANIC, Fond Direcţia Generală a Poliţiei, vol. 2, Dosar 254/​1937, f. 16. 120 Braşov County Archives, Fond Inspectoratul Muncii Braşov, Dosar 163/​1940, f. 32–​6. 121 Cluj-​Napoca County Archives, Fond Universitatea Ferdinand I, Facultatea de Drept, Dosar 467/​1937, f. 20, Dosar 254/​1937, f. 10–​12; CNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 12694, vol. 2, f. 39. 122 Clark, Holy Legionary Youth, 216–​21; Sandu, Un fascisme roumain, 161–​94. 123 Jean Ancel, The Economic Destruction of Romanian Jewry (Jerusalem: International Institute for Holocaust Research Yad Vashem, 2007), 72–​101. 124 Iaşi County Archives, Fond Chestura de Poliţie, Dosar 8/​1940, f. 87, Dosar 109/​1940, f. 447, 461, Dosar 116/​1941, f. 48; CNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 8912, vol. 23, f. 57–​8. 125 Pompiliu Preca, “Şcoala eroică,” Cuvântul studenţesc, November 8, 1940, 15; Nicolae Roşu, “Şcoala caracterelor,” Cuvântul, October 16, 1940, 1. 126 Ion Protopopescu, “Datoria de azi,” Cuvântul, October 21, 1940, 1. 127 Octav Onicescu, “De vorba cu un om al trecutului,” Cuvântul, October 23,1940, 1.

 293

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

293

128 For example, “Părintele Duminică Ionescu,” Cuvântul, November 21, 1940, 3. 129 “Reîncepem tabărele muncii legionare,” Cuvântul, November 17, 1940, 3; ANIC, Fond Direcţia Generală a Poliţiei, vol. 2, Dosar 244/​1940, f. 1–​85.

Bibliography Ancel, Jean. The Economic Destruction of Romanian Jewry. Jerusalem: International Institute for Holocaust Research Yad Vashem, 2007. Andrei, Petre. Fascismul [Fascism]. Focşani: Editura Neuron, 1995. Bernea, Ernest. Stil legionar [Legionary style]. Bucharest: Serviciul propagandei legionare, 1940. Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Călinescu, Armand. Însemnări politice [Political notes]. Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990. Cantacuzino, Alexandru. Opere complete [Complete works]. Filipeşti de Târg, Prahova: Editura Antet XX, n.d. Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea. Cărticica şefului de cuib [The little handbook for nest leaders]. Bucharest: Editura Bucovina, 1940. Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea. Pentru legionari. Bucharest: Editura Scara, 1999. Clark, Roland. “Die Damen der Legion: Frauen in rumänischen faschistischen Gruppierungen” [The ladies of the legion: Women in Romanian fascist movements]. In Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts: Die “Legion Erzengel Michael” in Rumänien 1918–​ 1938 [Staging the Right: The Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania]. Edited by Armin Heinen and Oliver Jens Schmitt, 193–​216. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2013. Clark, Roland. Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Clark, Roland. “Nationalism and Orthodoxy: Nichifor Crainic and the Political Culture of the Extreme Right in 1930s Romania,” Nationalities Papers 40, no. 1 (2012): 107–​26. Cuza, A. C. Îndrumări de politica externa: Discursuri parlamentare rostite in anii 1920–​ 1936 [Foreign policy guidance: Parliamentary speeches, 1920–1936]. Bucharest: Cugetarea–​Georgescu Delafras, 1941. Dinu, Radu Harald. Faschismus, Religion und Gewalt in Südosteuropa Die Legion Erzengel Michael und die Ustasa im historischen Vergleich [Fascism, Religion and violence in Southeast Europe: The Legion of the Archangel Michael and the Ustasa in historical perspective]. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013. Eatwell, Roger. “The Nature of ‘Generic Fascism.’” In Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives. Edited by Constantin Iordachi, 134–​62. London: Routledge, 2010. Eliade, Mircea. Itinerariu spiritual: Scrieri de tinereţe [Spiritual itinerary: Youthful writings]. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2003. Georgescu, Tudor. “Ethnic Minorities and the Eugenic Promise: The Transylvanian Saxon Experiment with National Renewal in Inter-​War Romania,” European Review of History: Revue Europeenne d’Histoire 17, no. 6 (2010): 861–​80. Gheorghiu, Virgil. Memorii: martorul orei 25 [Memoires: Witness to the twenty fifth hour]. Bucharest: Editura 100 1 Gramar, 1999. Haynes, Rebecca. “Die Ritualisierung des “Neuen Menschen”—​Zwischen Orthodoxie und Alltagskultur” [The ritualization of new men—between Orthodoxy and everyday culture]. In Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts: Die “Legion Erzengel Michael,” in

294

294

Roland Clark

Rumänien 1918–​1938 [Staging the right: The Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania]. Edited by Armin Heinen and Oliver Jens Schmitt, 89–​112. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2013. Haynes, Rebecca. “Work Camps, Commerce, and the Education of the ‘New Man’ in the Romanian Legionary Movement,” Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (2008): 943–​67. Heinen, Armin. Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail”: Mişcare social şi organizaţie politică [The Legion of the Archangel Michael: Social movement and political organization]. Bucharest: Humantias, 2006. Heinen, Armin. “Wahl-​Maschine: Die Legion ‘Erzengel Michael,’ die Wahlen 1931–​1937 und die Integrationskrise des rumänischen Staates.” [Election machine: The Legion of the Archangel Michael in the 1931–1937 election and the integration crisis of the Romanian state]. In Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts: Die “Legion Erzengel Michael” in Rumänien 1918–​1938. Edited by Armin Heinen and Oliver Jens Schmitt, 130–​54. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2013. Herseni, Traian. Mişcarea legionară şi tărănimea [The Legionary Movement and Peasantry]. Bucharest, 1937. Hillgruber, Andreas. Hitler, Regele Carol şi Maresalul Antonescu: Relaţiile Germano-​ Române 1938–​1944 [Hitler, King Carol and Marshall Antonescu: German-Romanian relations, 1938–1944]. Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994. Iordachi, Constantin. Charisma, Politics and Violence: The Legion of the “Archangel Michael” in Inter-​War Romania. Budapest: Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies, 2004. Iordachi, Constantin. “God’s Chosen Warriors: Romantic Palingenesis, Militarism and Fascism in Modern Romania.” In Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives. Edited by Constantin Iordachi, 326–​56. London: Routledge, 2010. Mann, Michael. Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Marin, Vasile. Fascismul: Organizarea constituţională a statului corporativ Italian [Fascism: The constitutional organization of the Italian corporatist state]. Bucharest: Editura Majadahonda, 1997. Mosse, George. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Payne, Stanley. A History of Fascism, 1919–​1945. London: Routledge, 1995. Petreu, Marta. Diavolul şi ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu—​Mihail Sebastian [The devil and his disciple: Nae Ionescu—Mihail Sebastian]. Iaşi: Polirom, 2009. Polihroniade, Mihail. Tabăra de muncă [Work camp]. Bucharest: Tipografia Ziarului Universul, 1936. Sandu, Traian. “Le fascisme, révolution spatio-​temporelle chez les Roumains” [Fascism, spatial-temporal revolution in Romania]. In Vers un profil convergent des fascismes ? “Nouveau Consensus” et religion politique en Europe centrale [Towards a generic fascism? The “new consensus” and political religion in central Europe]. Edited by Traian Sandu, 217–​30. Paris: Cahiers de la Nouvelle Europe, 2010. Sandu, Traian. Un fascisme roumain: Histoire de la Garde de fer [Romanian fascism: History of the Iron Guard]. Paris: Perrin, 2014. Săndulescu, Valentin. “Fascism and Its Quest for the ‘New Man’: The Case of the Romanian Legionary Movement,” Studia Hebraica 4 (2004): 349–​61. Săndulescu, Valentin. “Generation, Regeneration and Discourses of Identity in the Intellectual Foundations of Romanian Fascism: The Case of the AXA Group.” In “Regimes of Historicity” in Southeastern and Northern Europe: Discourses of Identity and Temporality, 1890–​1945. Edited by Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi, and Marja Jalava, 210–​29. Houndmills, Basingstroke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

 295

The “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements

295

Săndulescu, Valentin. “Revolutionizing Romania from the Right: The Regenerative Project of the Romanian Legionary Movement and its Failure (1927–​1937).” PhD diss., Central European University, Budapest, 2011. Schmitt, Oliver Jens. Căpitan Codreanu: Aufstieg und Fall des rumänischen Fascistenführers [Captain Codreanu: The rise and fall of the Romanian fascist leader]. Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2016. Schmitt, Oliver Jens. “Wer waren die rumänischen Legionäre? Eine Fallstudie zu faschistischen Kadern im Umland von Bukarest 1927 bis 1941,” [Who were the legionaries? A case study of fascist cadres in the Bucharest region, 1927–1941] Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64 (2016): 419–​48. Scurtu, Ioan ed. Ideologie şi formaţiuni de dreapta în România [Ideology and Romanian right-wing movements]. 5 vols. Bucharest: Institutul Naţional pentru Studiul Totalitarismului, 2002. Sebastian, Mihail. Journal, 1935–​1944. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. Tua, Lorenzo Baracchi. Garda de Fier [The Iron Guard]. Bucharest: Editura Mişcării Legionare, 1940. Vulcănescu, Mircea. “Tânară generaţie”: Crize vechi în haine noi [The young generation: Old crises in new garments]. Bucharest: Editura Compania, 2004.

296

 297

Index Action 235, 236 Action Française (AF) 136, 157, 257, 261 Adelman, Jeremy 155 aestheticization 91 Aguirre, Paulino 221 Alcmaeon of Croton 49 Almeida, Leopoldo de 134 Alvarez, Enrique Zuleta 154 Ameal, João 136 anabolism 41 Andrade, Oswald de 9, 171–​5 Anthropophagic Manifesto (Manifesto of Anthropophagy) 172, 181 Antropofagia 174 Manifesto of Brazilwood Poetry (Poesia Pau-​Brasil) 173 Andrei, Petre 277 Anglophone 254, 255 Anta Manifesto 173 anthropological revolution 77 anthropophagical utopia, Brazil 171–​4 anti-​imperialist nationalism, in Argentina 153–​5 anti-​politicianism 276 antisemitism 26, 52, 277, 282, 286, 287 Antonescu, Ion 287 Antonio, Celso 178, 179, 180, 182 Arbeiterstaat 68 Arendt, Hannah 88 Argentina 7, 50, 151 Catholicism and anti-​imperialist nationalism 153–​5 Communist Party 159 consumerist nationalism 161–​2 Five-​Year Plans 163 liberal elites 158 Liberating Revolution 163 Los descamisados 159–​61 Peronism, see Peronism power and new consumerist man 161–​3 Radical Party 159

social welfare 154, 155 Socialist Party 159 union density 160–​1 Argentine Catholic Integralists 155 Armiñán, Luis de 221 Arregui, Hernandez 153 Aryan theories 52, 92 Asian capitalism 208 Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Belge 258 Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists in Germany (ASSO) 95 Associazione fascista della scuola (Fascist School Association) 22 Associazione nazionale insegnanti fascisti (National Association of Fascist Teachers ) 22 avant-​garde 89, 110 aviator 65–​6 eternity 76 First World War 66–​71 flying and fascism 71–​6 Axa 280, 281 Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action) 24 Bacaloglu, Elena 277 Baković, Marko 110 Balbo, Italo 74–​5 Baldi, Gianni 40 Balilla 22, 45, 257 Banea, Ion 281 baptism 3 Barbàra, Mario 52 Barnes, James Strachey 5 Barrés, Maurice 151 Battle of Aljubarrota 138 Bauhaus 95 Bauman, Zygmunt 77 Baxter, Jeannette 10, 231 Beasley, W. G. 203 Beckmann, Max 99

298

298

Index

Beethoven 94 Behn, Fritz 99 Beirão, Mário 139 Belling, Rudolf 95 Ben-​Ghiat, Ruth 89 Berardinelli, Waldemar 52 Béraud, Henri 135 Bernard, Claude 50 Bernea, Ernest 282 Berstein, Serge 254 biotypological card 46 Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute 8, 41, 45–​8, 51 internal structure 45 personality card 46 biotypology 41–​4 and “Latin” eugenics invention 48–​53 Bix, Herbert 207 Black Legion 109 Blackshirt 233, 234 Bleuel, Hans Peter 108 Block of the Generation of 1922 286 Blood Brotherhoods 279–​80 Blue Book 159 Boelcke, Oswald 67 Boldrini, Marcello 52 Bolshevism 3, 155, 276, 277 Bonavita, Stelio 107 Braden, Spruille 159 Brasillach, Robert 255 Brazil 7, 9, 50, 52, 169–​71 anthropophagy 171–​4 brasilidade 173, 180 eugenics 171 homem novo 178 immigrations 172 Integralist movement 170, 175 Ministry of Education and Health 169–​ 70, 171, 174–​9, 180 modernism 175 novo homem brasileiro 179–​81 novo homem, moderno e brasileiro 178 racial democracy 173, 180 racism 172 representation in 1939 New York World’s Fair 179–​81 Vargas’ 1930 coup 170 whitening (branqueamento) policy 171, 172, 178

Brazilian Communist Party 175 Breker, Arno 95, 96 Brigada Político-​Social 222 British Union of Fascists (BUF) 2, 10, 231, 233–​6 Brown, Isaac 52 Brubaker, Rogers 275 Bucard, Marcel 257 Buchrucker, Christian 153 Burić, Zvonko 122 Burle Marx 179, 180 Bzik, Mijo 6 Caballero Cristiano, see Christian knight Caires, Álvaro Eduardo Guimarães de 51 Călinescu, Armand 286 Cambiaso 70 Camelots du Roi 261 Camões, Luís de 140 Campbell, Roy 245 Campi Dux 26 Campos, Francisco 170 Campos, Ismael Saz 5 Cantacuzino, Alexandru 282, 283 Capanema, Gustavo 170, 176, 177–​8, 181 capitalism 154 Caporetto debacle 69 Carey, John, Intellectuals and the Masses, The 240 Carmona, Óscar 132 Carol II, King 286 Carrel, Alexis 50, 259 Man the Unknown 50–​1, 259 Carvalho, Rita Almeida de 9, 131 Casariego, Requeté (Carlist) Jesús-​Evaristo 218 Cassata, Francesco 8, 39 Castellani, Leonardo 156, 157 Casti Connubii (On Christian marriage) 49 Castiglioni, Arturo 50 Castles of the Teutonic Order 25 catabolism 41 Catholic corporatism 158 Catholicism 6, 137–​9, 153 in Argentina 153–​5 and totalitarianism 156 Central Europe 68

 299

Index Central Institute for Human Reclamation, Orthogenesis, and Naturist Therapy 53 Cherry Blossom Society 195 Chesterton, A. K. 233, 236 Chiang Kai-​shek, Generalissimo 203 Chiappe, Jean 262 China 202, 203, 208–​9 and Japan 202, 203–​4, 209 Christian corporatism 158 Christian Fatherland 137–​9 Christian knights 217, 220–​3, 224 Christian missionaries 276 Churchill, Winston 231, 235 CIAM 180 Citizen’s Block 286 Clark, Roland 10, 275 clerical fascism 157 Clinefelter, Joan L. 96 Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea 275, 278, 280, 281–​4, 286–​7 Cărticică şefului de cuib 282 Pentru legionari 282 Cole, G. D. H. 200 Collins, Tony 236 combative Christianity 216–​20 Communist Party 23 Confucianism 198 consensus school 254 constitutional causalism 50 constitutionalism 2 consumerist nationalism 161–​2 conversion 5–​6 Conway, Martin 258 co-​organic theory 205 Corinth, Lovis 99 Cortes, Donoso 156 Costa, Lucio 169, 175, 179–​80 Coubertin, Pierre de 253 coup d’état (1936) 155, 158, 215, 220 Crainic, Nichifor 280, 285 Cripps, Sir Stafford 243 Croatia 6, 8, 106 Mrmić’s guidebooks for total men 111–​17 national revolution 109 revolution of blood 122 search of the new man “within ourselves” 108 second revolution 107, 122–​3

299

speeches and education 117–​22 total man and militia man 122–​3 Croix de Feu/​Parti Social Français (CF/​ PSF) 255, 263 Crusade for Romanianism, The 285 Cuchet, Francisque 176 Cult of the Fatherland, The 285 cultural holism 44 Cuza, A. C. 277, 278, 285 DADA 95 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 66, 68, 69 Forse che si forse che no (Maybe yes, maybe no) 69–​70 Davies, Christie 243 De Gasperi, Alcide 30 De Giovanni, Achille 41, 49, 50 Degenerate Art Exhibition, Germany 95–​7, 100 democracy 159 and Catholicism 156 Démocratique, Alliance 259 descamisado 164 Deutsches Museum 98 Dill, Ludwig 99 Dillon, Christopher 264 Discobolus (Discus thrower) 92 División Azul 222 Dix, Otto 99 Domobrans 106, 121–​123 Donghi, Tulio Halperin 153 Doriot, Jacques 255, 260, 262 Douhet, Giulio 74 Drake, Sir Francis 236 Dundas, Ian Hope 234 Dürer, Albrecht 99 Eatwell, Roger 275 Ecksteins, Modris 98 Ecuador 152 Einfühlung 94 Elena, Eduardo 161 Eliade, Mircea 5–​6, 279 elites 68, 158 Elliot, W. Y. 205 Emilian, I. V. 285 Endocrinologie, Gynecologie, Obstetrică (Endocrinology, gynecology, obstetrics) 51

300

300

Index

Enlightenment 89 Entartete Kunstausstellung (Degenerate Art Exhibition) 88 Eraso, Yolanda 46 espianta votos 155 Esposito, Fernando 8, 65 Estado Novo 175 État français 255 étatism 157 eugenic art 87–​92 Munich 95 resurgence of völkisch art 97–​102 eugenics 77 and Schiller 92–​5 Europe 71, 95, 235, 280, 281, see also specific European countries fascism 5, 108 radical right 4 Evola, Julius 25 Expressionismusstreit 96 Fabritius, Fritz 285, 286 Falange 5 Falangismo 157 Farrere, Claude 258 Les Hommes nouveaux 258 fascism 1, 2, 5, 7, 19, 28, 76–​7, 101, 107, 140, 151–​2, 155, 170, 201 brazilianization of 173 as etatist 157 and flying 71–​6 and left and right wings 154 Peronism as 153–​5 fascist collective 74, 234, 236 Fascist Croatia 108, 122, see also Croatia Fascist Italy 5, 7, 8, 39, 40, 53, 74, 108, 177, 256, see also Italy and Japan 202 fascist third way 152, 153 fascist warfare 221 Fascist Week 233, 235, 236 fascistization 1, 53 Faure, Maurice 50 Federal University of Brazil 176 feminine fascism 234 Fernandes, Barahona 51 Ferro, António 132, 134–​5 Finchelstein, Federico 152

First International Medical Week at Salsomaggiore Terme 48 First World War 4, 19, 197, 200, 235 aviator 66–​71 Fischer, Eugen 39 Fletcher, William Miles 193, 196, 198, 200, 201, 205 FORJA 153, 154, 155 Forth, Christopher E. 1, 263 Forţu, Grigore 286 France 50, 97 French fascism 108, see also French fascist new man Franceschi, Gustavo 156, 157 Francistes 257 Franco, Francisco 5, 157, 215 francophone 254 Fraser, Valerie 221 French communist party (Parti Communiste Française; PCF) 257 French fascist new man 253–​4 emergence of 256–​60 negotiating 260–​3 scholarly conversation 254–​6 French Revolution 3 French Society of Biotypology 50 Freyre, Gilberto 171, 174, 175, 181 Regionalist Manifesto 173 Froehlich, Alfred 48 Front de la Jeunesse 259, 261 Fukuzawa, Yukichi 194 Furdui, Gheorghe 282 futurism 8, 70 Gabinete de Biotipologia (Laboratory of Biotypology) 52 Garate, José María 219 García Morente, Manuel 216, 217, 218, 224 Gasiorek, Andrjez 239 Gentile, Emilio 4, 7, 19, 20–​1, 23, 134, 254 Gentile, Giovanni, Enciclopedia Italiana (Italian encyclopedia) 50 George, David Lloyd 231, 235 Georgescu, Corneliu 279 Germani, Gino 154 Germany 4, 28, 49, 50, 97, 285 aviation 76

 301

Index degenerate art 98 Degenerate Art Exhibition 95–​7 eugenic art, see eugenic art National Socialism 87 Gilmour, John 231, 232, 235, 236, 247 Gini, Corrado 39, 49 Giovani fascisti (young fascists) 24 Giovanni Gentile School Reform 22 Giovent u Italiana del Littorio (GIL; Italian Youth of the Lictor) 24, 25, 26, 28 Glaspalast 98 Gobineau, Arthur 172 Goebbels, Joseph 88, 95, 96 Goebel, T. M. 163 Goethe 94 Goga, Octavian 285 Göring, Hermann 75–​6 Gottlieb, Julie V. 2, 231, 233 GOU 154 Great German Art Exhibitions 88, 92, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101 Greater East Asia Co-​Prosperity Sphere 207, 209 Greek ideal, and Schiller 92–​5 Griffin, Roger 2, 3, 19, 88, 152, 203, 223, 232, 245 Nature of Fascism, The 2 Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) 88 Grosz, George 99 Gruppi universitari fascisti (GUF; university fascist groups) 24 Gualco, Sellina 47 Guard of the National Conscience 277 Guardia Civil 222 Guberina, Ivo 110 Guedes, Nobre 133, 134 guild socialism 200 Günther, Hans 52 Hashimoto, Kingorō 195 Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) 88 Haynes, Rebecca 275, 276 Heidegger, Martin 205 Henry the Navigator 138 Herseni, Traian 281 Hierl, Otto 99

301

Hilferding, Rudolf 200 Hirohito, Emperor 196, 207 Hispanidad 157 Hitler, Adolf 4, 6, 87–​8, 92, 95, 96, 99–​100, 134, 195, 276 futural aesthetic vision 89 futural art 94, 101 visit to Rome 26 Hitler-​Jugend (Hitler Youth) 28 Hoffmann, Heinrich 96–​7 Holocaust 6 homem novo 178 homme nouveau 256 homo economicus 194 Hotta, Eri 199 House of German Art 93, 96, 98 Hrvatski častnik i njegov vojnik 116 humanism 50 Humphreys, Richard 244 100 Jahre deutscher Malerei und Plastik 98 Il Giornale d’Italia (Journal of Italy) 52 Il Popolo d’Italia 72 Il primo libro del fascista (The fascist’s first book) 26 Il secondo libro del fascista (The fascist’s second book) 26 Il vate (the “Bard”) 69 Imamura, Tsunao 206 Immelmann, Max 67 Imperial Japan 7 Imperial Rule Assistance Association 201 imperialism 158, 159, 202 Independent State of Croatia (NDH) 5, 6, 8 Ingrao, Christian 6 Inspección de Campos de Concentración 222 Institute of Archaeology, Munich 96 Integralist Catholicism 155 International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO) 39, 49 Ionescu, Nae 280 Iordache, Maria 283 Iordachi, Constantin 276 Irazusta, Rodolfo and Julio 154 Istituto Luce 25 Istrati, Panait 285

302

302 Italian Aviazione Legionaria 218 Italian Committee for Population Problems Studies (CISP) 49 Italian–​Romanian National Fascist Movement 277 Italian Social Republic 8, 30, 31 Italian Society of Genetics and Eugenics (SIGE) 49 Italy 8, 27–​31, 71, 73, 254, 280 aviator 68, 69 Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action) 24 Balilla 22 Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute 45–​8 biotypology 41–​4 Campi Dux 26 Centri di preparazione al lavoro (vocational training centers) 25 combat sports 25 corporativism 44 eugenics 48–​53 fascism 4, 5, 19–​20, 39, 108, 136 fascism, in schools 21–​4 Giovani fascisti (young fascists) 24 Giovent u Italiana del Littorio (GIL; Italian Youth of the Lictor) 24, 25, 26, 28 Gruppi universitari fascisti (GUF; university fascist groups) 24 medical constitutionalism 41 military culture in national curriculum 22 modernism 4 Partito nazionale fascista (PNF; National Fascist Party) 20 provincial camps 26 reeducation modalities 30 regeneration 21 Risorgimento (unification) 21–​2 totalitarian regeneration 20 totalitarianism 20, 29 young war volunteers 29 “Youth March” 29 youth organizations 24–​7 James, Daniel 153 Jansen, Marius 196 Japan 9 Anti-​Comintern Pact 202 and China 202, 203–​4, 209

Index fascism 199 Imperial Rule Assistance Association 201 liberal democracy 201 mass politics 197 New Man Society 193–​6 New Order Movement 201 Potsdam Declaration 207 rice riots 197 Rōyama, see Rōyama, Masamichi Social Thought Association 198 Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne 258 Jeunesse républicaine française (JRF) 259 Jeunesses Patriotes 253, 261 jeux de massacre 262 Jews 106, 277 Joes, Anthony James 195 Jung, Edgar Julius 68 Jünger, Ernst 66, 68, 151 Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Combat as inner experience) 68 Wäldchen 125 (Copse 125) 67–​8 Jung-​Sun, Han 202, 205 Justicialismo 155, 164 Kallis, Aristotle 1, 4, 9, 169 Keens, Vincent 234 Kestel, Laurent 264 Konoe, Prince Fumimaro 9, 202 Koonz, Claudia 2 Koschmann 201, 206 Koschmann, J. Victor 200, 205 Kramer, Alan 221 Kuhne, Thomas 6 Kvaternik, Eugen Dido 106 La Nueva Republica 155, 158 La preparazione materna (The maternal preparation) 48 La Riforma medica (The medical reform) 49 La Rochelle, Pierre Drieu 107 La Rovere, Luca 8, 19 Laclau, Ernesto 152 Landogna-​Cassone, Francesco 47 Landra, Guido 52 Latin America 2, 9, 50, 51 Peronism, see Peronism “Latin” eugenics 48–​53

 303

Index Laval, Pierre 262 Lawrence, Christopher 40 Le Corbusier 175, 176–​7 League of Nations 203 Leão, Carlos 176 Lee, Seok-​Won 208 Legion of the Archangel Michael 275, 276, 278, 281–​4, 286–​7 legionary heroism 279–​82 Legionnaire’s Commitment 138 Legrand, Jean-​Charles 259, 260, 262 Leopoldo Lugones 155 Lewis, Wyndham 10, 231–​2, 241 Art of Being Ruled, The 231, 238–​9, 240 “Code of a Herdsman, The” 241 fascist portraits 238–​41 Hitler 231, 238, 239–​40, 241, 244 Jews, The: Are They Human? 240 Time and Tide 238 Lezioni sul fascismo (Lessons on fascism) 28 L’Humanité 257 liberal étatism 157 liberal materialism 5 liberalism 76, 156, 159 Libertatea (Liberty) 284 Libyan desert war 30 Lipschitz, Jacques 179 Llano, Gonzalo Queipo de 220 Llano, Queipo de 220, 221 Lobos, Hector Villa 172 Loewenstein, Anna Freud 240 London Mercury 241 Longoni, Attilio, Fascismo ed aviazione: Gli aviatori nella rivoluzione fascista 74 Lopez, Octavio 51 Lorenz, David Alegre 9, 215 Lorković, Mladen 105 Los descamisados 159–​61 Luftflottenverein, Deutsche, Das fliegende Schwert (The flying sword) 65 Lugonjić, Ante 122 Lyautey, Marshal Louis-​Hubert 258 Lyon, Gare de 257 MacArthur, Douglas 207 Machiavelli, Niccolõ 206 Maertz, Gregory 8, 87

303

Maeztu, Ramiro de, Defensa de la Hispanidad 157 Main Ustasha Headquarters (Glavni Ustaški stan; GUS) 106–​7 Maistre, Joseph de 156 Mann, Thomas 87 Manoilescu, Mihail 286 Manual da Mocidade Portuguesa (Portuguese youth manual) 138 Mare, Oradea 279 Marin, Vasile 280, 284 Marinescu, Gheorge 51 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 71 Guerra sola igiene del mondo 70–​1 Let’s Murder the Moonshine 70 Mafarka le futuriste 70 Martiny, Marcel 50 Maruyama, Masao 195 Development of Modern Political Science in Japan, The 206 Marx, Roberto Burle 176, 177 Marxism 76, 111, 197 mass flights 75–​6 Matioli, Guido, Mussolini aviatore 72 Matovac, Mate 111–​12, 123 Maurras, Charles 151, 255, 259, 262 Maxton, Jimmy 231, 235, 236 Meinvielle, Father 156 Memória, Arquimedes 175 “Men in Fascism” 231, 232–​8, 246–​7 Menéndez y Pelayo, M. 157 Mercati, Cristoforo, Aviatori 73 Merkić, Robert 122 Mermoz, Jean 260 Meyers, Jeffrey 242 Michael, Archangel 10 Michaud, Eric 94 Michelangelo 94 Miki, Kiyoshi 205 Milanesio, Natalia 162 Mill, John Stuart 200 Millán-​Astray, José 217 Millington, Chris 261 Milza, Pierre 254, 255 MINDOM 112 MINORS 106, 107, 112, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 123 Minovici, Nicolae 51 Mocidade 133, 138

304

304

Index

Moreira, Jorge 176 Morgagni, Giovanni 49 Moroccan Berbers 258 Mosley, Sir Oswald 10, 108, 200, 231, 235–​6, 237–​8, 242–​3, 247 Greater Britain, The 232, 234, 238 portraits of 241 Mosse, George L. 1, 19, 69, 234–​5 Moţa, Ion 278, 284 Mrmić, Josip 111–​17 Münchner Künstlergenossenschaft 98 Münchner Secession 98 Munich 95, 99, 100, 101 visual arts in 98 Munich Art Exhibitions 96, 97, 99, 100 Munton, Alan 241, 246 Murmis, Miguel 154 Mussolini, Benito 4, 6, 8, 20, 24, 29, 39, 44, 48, 53, 70, 72–​5, 134, 135, 136, 195, 257, 260, 276, 277 Dottrina del fascismo ( Doctrine of Fascism ) 22 Muti, Ettore 27, 29 Napoleon Bonaparte 256 National Christian Defense League (LANC) 277, 278, 284, 285 National Christian Party (PNC) 285 national collectivity 4 National Fascist Party, see Partito nazionale fascista (PNF; National Fascist Party) National Legionary State 287 national populism 152 National Propaganda Secretariat (Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional; SPN) 132, 133 National Romanian Fascists (FNR) 277 National Socialism 87, 88, 91, 93, 96, 99, 100, 101, 108, 151 National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) 93, 97 National Syndicalist Movement (Movimento Nacional Sindicalista; MNS) 132 National Union (União Nacional; UN) 132, 137 nation-​statism 275 Nazi Germany/​Nazis 1, 6, 8, 92, 94, 108, 133, 201, 255, 285 aesthetics 94

eugenic futurism 99, 101 futurism 8 Holocaust 6 and Japan 202 modernism 89 National politische Erziehungsanstalten (Napolas; National-​Political Education Institutes) 25 patronage 97 neoconstitutionalism 49 neoexpressionism 97 neogenics 77 neohippocratism 50 neoliberalism 152 Neto, António Lino 138 Neue Glaspalast 98 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Realism) 92 Neue Secession 98 new art 92 New Aryan Man 8 new British fascist man 231–​2, 241–​7 Lewis’s fascist portraits 238–​41 “Men in Fascism” 231, 232–​8, 246–​7 new consumerist man 161–​3 New Group, The 285 “New Man Society”, Japan 193–​6 New People’s Society 203 New Secession 99 New State, Portuguese 131–​2 Nice Society of Climatology and Medicine 50 Niemeyer, Oscar 169, 176, 179 Nietzsche, Friedrich 70–​1 Zur Geneaologie der Moral 101 Nikolić, Vinko 108, 110 Nippon kaiki 198 nonfascist radical right 2 Nordau, Max 93 Nordic humanity 89 normative decisionism 156 November Group 95, 99 November Revolution of 1918 96 novo homem brasileiro 179–​81 novo homem, moderno e brasileiro 178 Nuno Álvares Pereira 138 obedience, and fascism 29 O’Keeffe, Paul 241 Oliveira, Correia de 137

 305

Index Onicescu, Octav 287 Onu, Constant 281 Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) 23, 24, 46 Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (Workers Leisure Time) 27 organized capitalism 200 Ortega, José María Resa 219 Pacheco, Carneiro 133, 135, 138, 141 Pădeanu, D. C. 277 pagan caesarism 136 Palabra Argentina 163 Palacio, Ernesto 154, 157 palingenesis 19 Pământul strămoşesc 281 pan-​Asianism 204, 208 Pancu, Constantin 277 para-​fascist regimes 2 Parti Populaire Français (PPF) 260, 261 Partisans 106 Partito nazionale fascista (PNF; National Fascist Party) 7, 8, 20, 27, 42 Pasteur, Louis 49 pastoralism 97 Patria Peronista 152, 153 Pavičić, Jure 110 Pavlek, Boris 117 Payne, Stanley 7 Pende, Nicola 8, 39–​40, 41–​3, 45, 47, 50, 52 Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute 51 biotypology and “Latin” eugenics invention 48–​53 Bonifi ca umana razionale e biologia politica (Rational human reclamation and political biology) 44, 52 Debolezze di costituzione (Constitutional inadequacies) 42 “invention of tradition” 50 Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti 40 Scienza dell’ortogenesi (The science of orthogenesis) 48 visit to Argentina 51 visit to Romania 51 Pende’s syndrome 48 Perón, Juan and Eva 7, 9, 151, 154, 161, 164 Peronism 9, 151–​3, 163–​4

305

as fascism 153–​5 Justicialismo 164 Law of Professional Associations 160 myth 159–​61 as populism 155 power and new consumerist man 161–​3 Peronist corporatism 154 Perret, Auguste 177 personality card 46 Pétain, Marshal 255 Petrarch, Francesco 50 Petroci, Juraj 117 Petropoulos, Jonathan 100 Phillips, Ivan 240, 245 Piacentini, Marcello 177 Pico, Cesar 155, 156–​7 Piercy, Eric Hamilton 232, 235 pilot, see avitor Pinto, António Costa 2, 9, 131 Pinto, Canon Correia 137 Pinto, Francisco Leite 141 Pius XI 156 Plato 101 Plotkin, Mariano Ben 161 Poglavnik 105, 106 Poglavnik Body Guard 109 Polihroniade, Mihail 281 politicianism 276 Popular Front 132 populism 152, 153, 155, 158 Portantiero, Juan Carlos 154 Portinari, Cândido 176, 180 Portugal 9, 50, 51 anticlericalism 140 idealized man in 135 imperial mission 139–​40 liberalism and democracy 140 national revolution 136 nationalism 136 politcal liberalism 139 Portuguese 131–​2 Portuguese Legion (Legião Portuguesa) 133, 141–​2 Social Action Services 138 Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) 131 Christian Fatherland 137–​9 institutions during the 1930s 132–​3 rural utopia 135–​7 Portuguese Youth 133

306

306 postimpressionism 97 Pound, Ezra 241, 245 Prestes, Júlio 175 Preto, Rolão 132 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio 5 programmatic modernism 245 progressive artists 89 progressive modernism 89, 92, 97, 99, 102 Prosvjetnik 118, 119, 120, 121, 122 Protopopescu, Ion 287 Proudhon, Pierre-​Joseph 238 Proust, Marcel 240 Quilici, Nello, Aviatoria 72–​3 Quisling, Vidkun 245 Race Manifesto 52 racial democracy 171, 181 racism 52, 53 radical right 2, 4, 5, 7 Ramos, Abelardo 153 realism 89, 94, 97, 102 Rebreanu, Tiberiu 285 Reconquista (Reconquest) 216 Reeve-​Tucker, Alice 239 Regia Aeronautica 74, 75 Regionalismo 174 Reichskammer der Kultur (Reich Chamber of Culture) 96, 98 Reidy, Affonso 176 Rein, Monica 162, 163 Rein, Raanan 161 Rembrandt 94 Rémond, René 254 Renier, G. J. English: Are They Human?, The 240 Hitler Cult, The 240 revolution of blood 121 Reyes, Cipriano 160 Reynaud, Paul 258–​9 Ricci, Renato 24, 26 Richtfest 98 Risorgimento 4, 22 Roberts, David D. 1 Rochelle, Pierre Drieu la 255 Rocque, François de la 255, 260, 262 Rodriguez, Raimundo Nina 171 Roma 106

Index Romania 50, 51 fascist alternatives 284–​8 fascists and antisemites 277 legionary heroism 279–​82 new men 282–​4 youth and purity 278–​9 Romanian Action 277 Romanian Fascist Movements 275–​6 Romanian Front 286 Rome 75 Romier, Lucien 259–​60 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 75 Rosas, Juan Manuel de 158, 162–​3 Rosenberg, Alfred 52, 96 Rossi, Arturo R. 51–​2 Rothermere, Lord 234 Rōyama, Masamichi 9, 194, 208 as fascist ideologue 201–​6 Foreign Policy of Japan: 1914–​1939, 204 postwar career and legacy 206–​9 road to fascism 196–​201 Rubina, Franjo, Ljudi koji gledaju smrtuoči 109 rural utopia 135–​7 Russian Revolution 197 Russo-​Japanese War 197 Sabato fascista (Fascist Saturday) 27 sacralization 5, 6, 10, 76 Sagres navigation school 138 Salazar, António de Oliveira 7, 9, 131–​3, 135, 136, 170, 255 on modernism 136–​7 new man and woman 134–​5, 140–​2 Salazarism 131–​2, 140 ideology 133 Salgado, Plinio 173, 175 Anta 174 Sandu, Traian 275 Săndulescu, Valentin 275 Santos, Luís A. Duarte 51 Saraiva, Tiago 53 Sarperi, Anna 47 Saxon fascist movement 285 Saxon National Socialism 285 Schad, Christian 99 Schiller, Friedrich 92–​5 Über die ästhetische Erziehung der Menschheit 93

 307

Index Schlenker, Ines 100 Schlichter, Rudolf 95, 99 Schmitt, Carl 151, 156 Schmitt, Oliver Jens 282 Schreider, Eugene 50 Schult, Johann 89, 90, 92 Schutzstaffel (SS) 6, 87 Schwarz, Robert 89, 91 second revolution 115 Second World War 5, 21, 29, 153, 158 Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) 257 “Self-​Help” 285 Sentinels of the Fatherland, The 286 Serbs 106 Servicio de Información y Policía Militar 222 Seventeen-​Article Constitution of Prince Shōtoku 198 Shinto ultranationalism 199 Shorten, Richard 4 Shōwa Research Association 202, 205 Sickert, Walter 241 Skya, Walter 195 Japan’s Holy War 198 Smiles, Samuel, Self-​ Help 194 Smith, Henry De Witt 197 Smjernice za odgojni rad u oru žanim snagama 112 social citizenship 154 social fascism 200 Social Thought Association 198 socialist realism 88 Socrates 101 Solidarité Française (SF) 257 Sorel, Georges 159, 238 Sovereignty (statue) 134, 135 Soviet Russia 97, 256 Spackman, Barbara 1 Spain 5, 132–​3, 136, 215–​16 Caballero Cristiano (Christian knight) 217 Christian knight 220–​3, 224 civil war in 5, 9, 133, 157, 215, 220 combative Christianity 216–​20 fascism 215–​16, 223–​4 nationalism 219 Popular Front 133

307

Spanish revolution 157 Speer, Albert, Reichskanzlei 94 Spektorowski, Alberto 9, 151 spiritual depression 120 Spremnost 106 Starace, Achille 20, 26–​7 Starrs, Roy 9, 193 “steel characters” (Stahlgestalten) 68 Stein, Gertrude 240 Stelescu, Mihai 280, 281, 285 Štrugar, Zdenko, Hrvatski vojnik i narod 116–​17 syndicalism 154, 159 System of Versailles 76 Szpilman, Christopher W. A. 196 Taishō democracy 196 Taittinger, Pierre 253, 255, 260, 262 Takashi, Hara 196 Talex, Alexandru 285 Tamburri, Tusnelda 47 Tansman, Alan 199 Tarō, Urashima 206 Tarsis 70 Tătărescu, Ştefan 285, 286 Tennōstate 9 Tenreiro, Henrique 139 Third Reich 2, 8, 88, 89, 92, 95, 98, 102 Thomson, Alexander Raven 232, 233 Togliatti, Palmiro 28–​9 Tōjō, Hideki 207 Tokyo Imperial University 193 Tonogal, Leo 121–​2 total man (podpuni čovjek) 107 and militia man 122–​3 Mrmić's guidebooks for 111–​17 speeches and education 117–​22 totalitarianism 2, 4, 20, 29, 77, 155, 156, 199, 254, 256 Toulouse, Édouard 50 Treaty of Portsmouth 197 Tremlett, Rex 233, 234, 236 Troost, Paul Ludwig 98 Tumblety, Joan 10, 253 Tupi tribe 173, 174 Twenty-​Second Congress of Internal Medicine, Rome 41 2000 Jahre deutscher Kunst (2000 Years of German Art) 98, 99

308

308 Übermensch 71 United Kingdom, see also new British fascist man union density 161 United States 97, 152, 159, 172, 201 union density 161 Uriburu, Félix de 154 military “coup d’état” 155, 215, 220 Ustaša 107, 109, 115 Ustasha Corps 6, 8, 105–​8, 115, 116, 122, 123 military education 112 Ustasha Corps Officer School 115, 121 Ustasha libraries 109 Ustasha movement 5, 6, 106, 108, 110 Ustasha revolution 109–​10 Ustasha Youth Center 106, 112 Ustaška vojska se diže 105 utopian eugenic art 92, 97, 98 utopian future 89 Vaida-​Voevod, Alexandru 286 Valois, Georges 255, 257, 260 Vanguard School Action (Acção Escolar Vanguarda; AEV) 134–​5 Vargas, Getúlio 7, 169–​70, 174–​9, 180 Vasconcelos, Ernani 176 Vasconcelos, José, The Cosmic Race 172 Vaz, Juvenil Rocha 52 Velasco, José Antonio Girón de 219 Venezuela 152 Verdeamarelismo 174 Verde-​Amarello 173 Vichy France 50, 255, 256, 260–​1 Vidoni, Giuseppe 47 Vincent, George Gaston 233, 235 Vincent, Mary 6 Viola, Giacinto 41, 49, 50, 52 Vitković, Stanko 107, 109 vivere pericolosamente 70 Vojen, Ioan Victor 283 Vokić, Ante 105 Volare! 71–​6

Index Volk 6, 77, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 101 völkisch art 92, 97 painters 89 resurgence of 97–​102 Volksgemeinschaft 2, 6, 8, 87 von Marr, Carl 99 von Richthofen, Manfred 67 von Schirach, Baldur 94, 95 von Stuck, Franz 99 von Zügel, Heinrich 99 Waddell, Nathan 239 Wagner, Adolf 96, 98, 99 Warchavchik, Gregori 175 Wasner, Adolf 67 Weimar-​era Academy of Visual Art 97 Weimar Republic 4 Weimar system of arts patronage 95 Weisz, George 40 Weller, Shane 241 Willrich, Wolfgang 93 Die Säuberung des Kunsttempels 93 Wise, Norton 53 Wissel, Adolf 89, 90 group portraits 92 Woman Fascist 234 World’s Fair (1939) 169 Yannielli, Joseph 223, 224 Yeomans, Rory 6, 8–​9, 105 Yonehara, Ken, Nihon seiji shisō 206 Yoshino, Sakuzō 196 Young Fascist Battalion 30 youth 6, 28 and fascism 8 and purity 278–​9 Yrigoyenismo 153, 155, 158, 159 Yuasa, Yasuo, Philosophy of History (Rekishi tetsugaku) 205 Yugoslav 6 Yugoslavism 5 Yukichi, Fukuzawa 203 Ziegler, Adolf 95

 309

310

 311

312