100 books like French Peasant Fascism

This is a dazzling mix of theory, sociology, and history. Falasca-Zamponi is attentive to the myths, rituals, festivals and ceremonies, symbols, and recurring images of Italian fascism—and she is attentive, too, to the political power that Mussolini relentlessly drew from such cultural forms.

With tremendous analytical imagination, Falasca-Zamponi unpacks the significance of the fascist salute, Mussolini’s balcony poses, all the axe-and-bundle imagery, those omnipresent black shirts, and the fascists’ distinctive “passo romano” marching style. For me, the heart of the book is its intense analysis of fascist violence as spectacle. Not just spectacle, though. Falasca-Zamponi also makes the case that for the early fascists violence—“great, beautiful, inexorable violence,” in Mussolini’s words—was sublime, regenerative, glorious, salvific.

The early fascists made violence, Falasca-Zamponi suggests, as if it were art. 

This ferocious little book is brilliant. It’s as much about how to fight fascism as it is about fascism itself, but it’s still a good place to start figuring out how the fascists came to power in Italy.

The key thing to grasp, Behan insists, is that there was nothing inevitable about Benito Mussolini’s rise (hence the “resistible” in the title, which is also a clever homage to Bertolt Brecht’s classic antifascist allegory, his 1941 play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui). Behan’s big point is that if the foes of early Italian fascism had all worked together and resisted, they could have smashed fascism before it got going. 

This is a wonderful book attentive to the cultural dimensions of fascism.

It is also a good book for making sense of fascism’s global attraction. Within a few years of its creation in Italy, fascism began to attract adherents around the world. To give just a few examples, there were Goldshirts in Mexico, Grayshirts in South Africa, Blackshirts everywhere from Kenya to the United States, and Greenshirts in Egypt and France. In Ireland were Blueshirts. And in China there were Blueshirts as well.

In Revolutionary Nativism, the historian Maggie Clinton details the Chinese Blueshirts’ ideological vision of exclusionary nationalism, hyper-modernist regeneration, and military authoritarianism.

The Blueshirts’ attempts to realize their vision, Clinton writes, amounted to a “Cultural Revolution from the Right.”

Enzo Traverso is a gifted thinker, the sort who doesn’t simply change his readers’ minds but rather reshapes how they might even begin to perceive the world around them.

He offers his readers intense, tragic, and peculiarly inspiring visions of the modern world. In The New Faces of Fascism, Traverso considers the twenty-first century radical right, the right of Éric Zemmour, the “great replacement,” MAGA, the Golden Dawn, and Brexit. Unlike simplistic critiques posing the new right as the “return” of fascism, Traverso’s method for understanding the new right begins with the recognition that it “inevitably awakens the memory of fascism.” Fascism haunts our world. It is a ghostly presence in the present.

Read New Faces of Fascism alongside From Fascism to Populism in History, written by another of the great present-day historians of fascism, Federico Finchelstein, and feel the press of the past on the politics of… show more.

The best historians and anthropologists either draw you into a subject as if you were living it or they directly connect their topic to life in the here and now.

Kristin Ross does both in Communal Luxury which crystalizes a radical imaginary drawn from a vividly reproduced past and posits it as a contemporary manifesto. An irresistible re-reading of the Paris Commune and all it stands for in the present and, more particularly, for our joint futures. 

An expert in French fascism, Kaplan meticulously documents the career and the fate of the anti-Semitic, collaborationist novelist and journalist, Robert Brasillach. He was one of the few prominent intellectuals executed after the Liberation in France. His trial in late 1944 and execution in February 1945 put on the public stage the drama the country had just experienced: the Occupation, collaboration with the Nazis, the Resistance. As Kaplan presents it, Brasillach’s eloquent defense lawyer, the equally eloquent prosecutor, and Brasillach himself articulated the collision of visions of what it meant to be French and what it meant to be a patriot (or a traitor), arguments that still agitate France today. 

They told the 40-year-long story of their home at ‘the ZAD’, 4,000 acres of wild wetlands and forest that the French state intended for an international airport. Community-building and collective resistance in the face of intense and repeated police assault – the footage of which is astonishing to witness – eventually saw off the planned devastation, and has inspired numerous other ZADs around France and the world.

We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself weaves together captivating theory and hard-fought practice in telling the kind of true story our world desperately needs more of.  Pure distilled inspiration for those pondering their path, as centralised power structures weaken.

Zeev Sternhell, who died in 2020, was a scholar of matchless integrity and a personal friend.

His groundbreaking study, Neither Right Nor Left, transformed our understanding of the history of fascism. It also upended the received wisdom that indigenous fascism had been nonexistent in France: the myth that fascist ideology had been brutally imposed on the French in 1940 by the Nazi conquerors. Sternhell’s book intervened in timely fashion to remind us that France was the birthplace not only of republican humanism, but also of the European counterrevolution, as represented by intellectuals such as Joseph de Maistre, Edouard Drumont, and Maurice Barrès.

He demonstrates that, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1905), counterrevolutionary ideology metastasized into a series of diabolically antisemitic pro-fascist movements. Perhaps the best-known exemplar was the Integral Nationalism of Charles Maurras and the Action Française.

Sternhell’s stunning conclusion, which continues to be hotly debated today, is… show more.

While not strictly a book on fashion in Paris, it is a wonderful exploration of all things French after World War II, and one of those things was the Christian Dior couture house. Karnow arrived in Paris in 1947 to study, and soon landed a gig writing for Time magazine. One of his assignments was a cover story on Christian Dior, whose company, in less than a decade, had become so successful it was known as the General Motors of Fashion. In the Dior chapter, Karnow beautifully evokes the mechanisms and machinations of a French couture house, and shows how fashion and Paris were deeply intertwined at the time. The rest of the book is a rollicking good read, too.

The accomplished historian of France across the years of Revolution, Empire and Restoration, Munro Price brings all his arsenal of erudition, archival acumen, and intellectual insight to bear on the last crisis of the empire. His attention to detail, his sensitivity to character and motivation make for one of the most penetrating, illuminating accounts of the implosion of support for Napoleon among the French elites ever written. No non-French scholar had picked through the complex politics of late Napoleonic France with as much skill or precision. Price delivers all this in elegant prose, the sign of a subtle historian.