Le fascisme dans les urnes
Imaginaires politiques, sociologie électorale, pratiques militantes. (Europe, 1918-1945)
Published on Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Abstract
Le présent colloque propose de relancer le chantier de la place du vote dans l’accession des mouvements fascistes au pouvoir – ou dans leurs aspirations à le faire – dans l’idée d’éclairer la place de la dynamique électorale dans la faillite des démocraties et leur processus de désintégration. Le cadre chronologique creste celui, strict et traditionnel, des années 1918-1945, où se multiplièrent, partout en Europe, des mouvements fascistes et où s’installèrent dans certains pays, des dictatures fascistes ou des gouvernements autoritaires comportant une composante fasciste. Trois directions principales seront explorées : le programme politique du fascisme, l’histoire matérielle des campagnes électorales et du vote, enfin la sociologie électorale.
Announcement
Argument
The historiography of fascism, which provided, 30 years ago, a structure for the political history of the early twentieth century, seems to have spread into just as many fruitful, albeit smaller fields. The study of fascism as a ‘political religion[1]’ and the transnational history of these movements[2] have provided many new research and insights, but it seems that the notion of ‘fascism’, which is now competing with ‘populism’ in common usage, has lost some of its vigour, especially in France. It has helped to dilute its definition.
As a concept, ‘totalitarianism’ had already been weakened by the fact that the scientific notion seemed too often to be used as a political tool in which a historical fact (totalitarian regimes), a concept (the totalitarian state as a new form of power) and a theory (a model of domination) were frequently confused[3]. The Cold War comparison between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR could hardly survive the geopolitical changes at the end of the century[4].
Fascism, on the other hand, refers to a very tangible reality identified by the protagonists of the interwar period. It is still studied and used, from many different perspectives, as a means of comparing fascist movements and regimes, in Europe or elsewhere[5]. The aim of this conference is to contribute to the recent revival of studies on fascism[6] and to reopen the question of the ‘seizure of power’ in light of a central, yet insufficiently studied, issue : the vote.
The rise to power of the main fascist movements, in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933, was the result of a combination of factors : political violence in the public arena and the compromise of the elites in power, who irresponsibly entrusted power to the far right. But in Germany especially, and also in other countries, these victories were based on undeniable roots in the ballot box.
In terms of historiography, the years 1990-2000 produced a plethora of in-depth studies on the morphology of political violence and its role in the conquest of power[7]. We might also speculate that contemporary events – in this case, the arrival in power in Europe of a number of illiberal regimes, the UK’s Brexit and the Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States in 2016 – have led to a proliferation of publications – especially on Nazism[8] – on the question of how the elites compromised in the face of fascism and authoritarian regimes, thereby demonstrating anew the vulnerability of the various governments and bodies of the State in the face of a radical threat. The centenary of the ‘March on Rome’, meanwhile, saw a reassessment of the political violence involved in the seizure of power by the Black Shirts[9].
The question of voting, on the other hand, has remained on the margins of these new developments. In the German case, this is undoubtedly because, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this historiography got bogged down in extremely technical debates on quantitative history, which were hardly likely to include colleagues not trained in its methods. While these publications have been a boon to interdisciplinary exchanges with sociology and political science[10], they have, by the same token, found themselves, so to speak, on the periphery of historical publications[11]. A more established tradition exists in Italy but, despite the centrality of the electoral question to the roots of fascism, it has very rarely crossed borders. This is very unfortunate because, at the same time, the constant use of references to fascist regimes in public debates has led to the massive circulation of knowledge that is so general as to be false, if not to truly damaging ‘fake news’. Do we not read everywhere that Hitler or Mussolini came to power ‘legally’ or that a majority of Germans voted for the Nazis ?
This conference therefore proposes to revisit the question of the role of the vote in the rise of fascist movements to power – or in their aspirations to do so – with the aim of shedding light on the role of electoral dynamics in the collapse of democracies and their process of disintegration[12].
The chronological framework remains the strict and traditional one of the years 1918-1945, when fascist movements proliferated throughout Europe and, in some countries, fascist dictatorships or authoritarian governments with a fascist component were installed. We could have looked at the later uses of the question, after the end of the Second World War, but there is enough to do – as we shall see later – in the analysis of the empirical questions we are going to raise here for the interwar period and the years 1939-1945.
The geographical framework poses a more complex question. It seems obvious that Italy and Germany will be at the centre of the reflection, although the electoral dynamics have a very different function in the accession to power in these two countries. In Germany, Hitler relied on scores of above 35 % of voters. In Italy, the famous ‘Acerbo law’ of July 1923, which reformed the electoral system, could be considered by Giovanni Sabbattucci as a ‘key moment’, more crucial than the March on Rome or the Matteotti affair[13]. Then there are three countries where clearly fascist movements won significant results in certain elections : the Romanian Iron Guard in the 1937 elections (16 %) ; Léon Degrelle’s Rexist movement in the elections of May 24, 1936 in Belgium (11.5 %) ; and the local results of the British Union of Fascists, for example in 1937.
What about other European fascist movements ? Didn’t the Hungarian Arrow Crosses win 14.5 % of the vote in the legislative elections of May 1939 ? Our aim here is to be pragmatic, without necessarily reopening the often-heated debates on the typology of fascist movements or proposing an exhaustive inventory of what we consider to be such movements. Proposals that seem to enrich the conference by falling within the guidelines set out below will be examined, regardless of the European country studied.
The preferred working languages are English and French ; Italian and German are also possible.
Our discussions will focus on three main themes :
Political programs and democratic horizon
It would be gullible to believe that the voters of various fascist movements turned to them based on an in-depth knowledge of a coherent programme. On the other hand, it is no longer possible today to consider any form of support for fascism as an irrational reaction of fear or hatred, and fascist movements as pure catch-all parties, recipients of accumulated anger without any political backbone. There was a real and massive adherence to the fascist project, without this meaning exhaustive attention paid to words and promises[14]. The new history of politics, anthropology and cultural history have clearly shown that fascism was based at least as much on ideas as on practices, rituals, symbolism, semiotics and the imaginary. The point here is not to return to the history of ‘ideologies’, about which we already know a great deal.
By proposing a shift in perspective, this section aims at analyzing political programmes in all their forms – written, oral, symbolic and ritual – in the light of a fundamental contradiction : how did movements that aspired to overcome and destroy democracy justify their recourse to electoral competition ? The point here is not simply to describe the purely instrumental justification of fascist movements which believed, like Joseph Goebbels, that it was enough to use the tools of democracy against it. Was there not, in fact, an unconscious fascination on the part of fascist movements for the real power of the demos in action ? In the interwar period, the notion of the (national) people – the German Volk – was being challenged by the emergence of an indeterminate mass, whose potential for power (Macht), to quote Elias Canetti’s analysis[15]. Everyone hoped to capture, could we not detect a porosity, or at least an ambiguity, within fascist discourse, in the place they assigned to the ballot box in their enterprise of conquest ? In Italy, the “long effort undertaken by the regime to promote a political framework conducive to the creation of the new man took concrete form in the institutions[16]” and in electoral strategies concerned with maintaining appearances.
A material history of election campaigns and voting
What do we know about fascist election campaigns in detail ? While the role of political violence, the intimidation of political opponents and the militarization of public space have been analysed at length, we lack a more concrete, pragmatic and material study of election campaigns. How were campaign weeks organized ? Who printed and pasted the posters ? Were the directives centralized, or were they negotiated at a local level, adapted to each territory according to its particularities ? How did the protagonists combine the fierce militancy of these periods of intense mobilization with their professional activities ? What role did women play in these campaigns ? Did they take on ‘care’ roles within the organization, where men shared out the most exposed tasks ?
These questions accompany a scientific revival of the “act of voting[17]”, which shows that the practice of voting is part of a ritual that forms the basis of a certain ‘electoral culture’, which is by no means linear and needs to be historicised. Attention to the material aspects of voting (the ballot box, the polling booth, the temporality of voting) will complement the more traditional analyses of the effects of the type of ballot in structuring the political field and short- and medium-term dynamics.
How were election campaigns financed ? Did state funding or international funding creep into the economic organization ? This raises the broader question of the transnational nature of election campaigns : were models circulated, borrowed or imitated ? Do fascist movements apply recipes from abroad, in the same way that Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was inspired by the German example after a trip to Berlin in 1922 ?[18] If the question of circulation concerns the material history of electoral campaigns, it can also be applied to the first axis, that of programmes and ideas, which are also often replicated from one movement to another, from one country to another. In short, it is the whole “physiology of the campaigns”[19] of fascism, to use Serge Noiret’s expression, that this conference aims to retrace at every level : like the traditional parties, the fascist movements drew inspiration from their neighbours, in their ideas and in their ways of constructing their struggle.
Electoral sociology and social base
The greatest efforts to analyse the fascist electorate were made in the 1970s and 1990s. The methods of structuralism were powerful, but it can also be argued that the Cold War was such a polarizing force that it helped to distort several issues : while Marxist, liberal and conservative interpretations of the fascist phenomenon had already been sedimented in the 1930s, Cold War historiography cheerfully drew on these hypotheses to propose a binary reading. On the one hand, fascism was seen as a movement driven by the petty bourgeoisie, affected by a veritable ‘panic’ ; on the other, the liberal individual reviled ‘the masses’, that unidentified political object, a reformulation of the 19th-century ‘rabble’, dressed up in the trappings of the nascent consumer society, which only added to the fear and contempt of dangerous ‘crowds’. As a result, much of the research into political or electoral sociology focused primarily on the ‘social class’ of the fascist electorate, before looking at other fundamental data such as age or gender. The result was a sometimes sterile debate about which group should be singled out for anathema : the workers, as one block ; the bourgeoisie, as another.
Based on research into the German case, which has already described the details of the Nazi electorate in great detail – although this research deserves much wider publicity – we can raise a whole series of additional questions : what role does religious affiliation play in motivating people to vote ? How can we explain why women vote for openly misogynist parties ? What about the structural effects of increased mobilization of abstainers ? What are the sociological differences between active militant movements and the fascist electorate ?
The vagueness surrounding the categories of ‘middle class’, ‘Mittelstand’, ‘petty bourgeoisie’, ‘Lower Middle Class’, ‘mass’, ‘people’, ‘workers’, etc. must be restored to their historical context, since reflection on the transformations of the major social categories is part of the period itself, and of the perception by contemporaries themselves of the dynamism of this or that movement. Similarly, as the Fascist electorate (and its victories) were particularly volatile, special attention had to be paid to diachrony, as no election resembled the previous one and some, under Fascism, looked more like plebiscites than elections[20].
Submission guidelines
Proposals should include a 500-word abstract in French or English and a Curriculum Vitae. Particular attention will be paid to proposals coming from young researchers.
To be sent to the following three email addresses :
- clement.ferrier@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr
- Jeremy.GUEDJ@univ-cotedazur.fr
- nicolas.patin@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr
before 01 march 2025
Scientific committee
- Martin Conway (University of Oxford)
- Olivier Dard (Sorbonne Université)
- Enzo Fimiani (Università degli Studi « G. d’Annunzio » Chieti – Pescara)
- Claudia Gatzka (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
- Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci (Université Paris 8)
- Didier Musiedlak (Université Paris Nanterre)
- Maurizio Ridolfi (Università degli Studi della Tuscia – Viterbo)
- Daniel Siemens (Newcastle University)
- Florin Turcanu (Universitatea din București)
Important Informations
- A publication in English is envisaged.
- Travel and accommodation costs for conference speakers can be covered by the organizers.
Notes
[1] Emilio Gentile, Le religioni della politica. Fra democrazie e totalitarismi, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2001 ; French translation : Les Religions de la politique. Entre démocraties et totalitarismes, Paris, Le Seuil, 2005 ; English translation : Politics as Religion, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006.
[2] See the works of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (COMFAS) and the Journal Fascism. Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, for example n° 13 (2024) : Martin Hamre, Sabrina Proschmann, Frederik Forrai Orskov (eds.) „Approaches to Transnational and International Fascism : Actors, Networks and Ideas, 1919-1945“. See also Sven Reichardt, “Fascism’s Global Moments. New Perspectives on Entanglements and Tensions between Fascist Regimes in the 1930s and 1940s” [Lecture], 8 April 2019, USC Max Kade Institute/USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.
[3] According to Enzo Traverso, Le Totalitarisme. Le XXe siècle en débat, Paris, Le Seuil, 2001. See also Stéfanie Prezioso, Jean-Pierre Fayet, Gianni Haver (dir.), Le totalitarisme en question, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008.
[4] Ian Kershaw, Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism. Dictatorships in Comparison, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 2-3.
[5] Antonio Costa Pinto, América Latina en la era del fascismo, Granada, Editorial Comares, 2023.
[6] See the ANR Project « Europe et fascisme italien : transnationalisme, circulations et réseaux (1922-1943) – EUROFA », led/run by Jean-Paul Pellegrinetti at Université Côte d’Azur with Jérémy Guedj and Olivier Dard at Sorbonne Université.
[7] Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism : The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925-1934, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984 ; Dirk Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik 1918-1933 : Kampf um die Strasse und Furcht vor dem Bürgerkrieg, Essen, Klartext, 2001 ; Andreas Wirsching, “Politische Gewalt in der Krise der Demokratie im Deutschland und Frankreich der Zwischenkriegszeit”, in H. Möller and M. Kittel, Demokratie in Deutschland und Frankreich 1918-1933/40. Beiträge zu einem historischen Vergleich, München, Oldenbourg, 2002 ; Giulia Albanese, Alle origini del fascismo. La violenza politica a Venezia, 1919-1922, Padoue, Il Poligrafo, 2001 ; Mimmo Franzinelli, Squadristi : protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista, 1919-1922, Milan, Mondadori, 2003.
[8] Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friedrichs, Die Totengräber : Der letzte Winter der Weimarer Republik, Frankfurt, S. Fischer Verlag, 2019 ; Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy : Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2018 ; Peter Ross Range, The Unfathomable Ascent : How Hitler Came to Power, History Press Limited, 2020 ; Timothy W. Ryback, Takeover. Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, New York, Hachette UK, 2024. Regarding Italian case, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen. Mussolini to the Present, New York, Norton & Company, 2020.
[9] Didier Musiedlak, La marche sur Rome, entre histoire et mythe, Presses universitaires de la Sorbonne, Paris, 2022, and the Italian extended edition, La marcia su Roma tra stroia e mito, Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 2024 ; Olivier Dard and Didier Musiedlak (dir.), « Signification et portée de la marche sur Rome. Europe, Amérique latine », in : Cahiers de la Méditerranée, no 107, décembre 2023.
[10] See Jürgen W. Falter, Hitlers Wähler : Die Anhänger der NSDAP 1924– 1933, Frankfurt, Campus Verlag, 2020.
[11] Pier Luigi Ballini, Le elezioni nella storia d’Italia dall’Unità al fascismo. Profilo storico-statistico, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1988 ; Marie Serena Piretti, Le elezioni politiche in Italia dal 1848 a oggi, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1995 ; Giovanni Sabbattucci, Le riforme elettorali in Italia (1848-1994), Milan, Unicopli, 2003.
[12] Regarding the Italian case, the question of the voting system lies at the heart of the country’s democratic crisis, contemporary with the emergence of fascism : Jean-Yves Frétigné, « L’impossible réformisme démocratique italien (1901-1922) », Il Politico. Rivista italiana di scienze politiche, vol. LXIX, no 2, 2004, p. 239-273.
[13] Giovanni Sabbattucci, « Il “suicido” della classe dirigente liberale. La legge Acerbo, 1923-1924 », Italia contemporanea, no 174, mars 1989, p. 57 ; see also Alessandro Visani, La conquista della maggioranza. Mussolini, il PNF e le elezioni del 1924, Gênes, Fratelli Frilli Editori, 2004.
[14] Robert Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers. How Ordinary People Became Nazis, Oxford University Press, 2020.
[15] Elias Canetti, Masse et puissance, Gallimard, Paris, 1966 [1960].
[16] Didier Musiedlak, « Stratégies institutionnelles et création de l’homme nouveau dans l’État fasciste », in Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, Pierre Milza (dir.), L’Homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922-1945). Entre dictature et totalitarisme, Paris, Fayard, 2004, p. 208.
[17] Yves Déloye, Olivier Ihl, L’acte de vote, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2008.
[18] Traian Sandu, » Les relations entre la Garde de fer et l’Allemagne, 1919-1938 », Germanica [Online], 62 | 2018, mis en ligne le 1er janvier 2021, URL : http://journals.openedition.org/germanica/4312;DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/germanica.4312
[19] Serge Noiret, « L’organizzazione del voto prima e dopo la Granda guerra (1913-1924) », in Pier Luigi Ballini, Maurizio Ridolfi (a cura di), Storia delle campagne elettorali in Italia, Milan, Mondadori, 2002, p. 156.
[20] Enzo Fimiani, Vox Populi ? Pratiche plebiscitarie in Francia, Italia, Germania (secoli XVIII-XX), Clueb, 2010.
Subjects
- History (Main category)
- Society > Political studies > Political history
- Periods > Modern > Twentieth century > 1918-1939
- Society > Political studies > Political and social movements
- Periods > Modern > Twentieth century > 1939-1945
- Zones and regions > Europe
- Society > History > Social history
Places
- Bordeaux, France (33)
Event attendance modalities
Full on-site event
Date(s)
- Saturday, March 01, 2025
Keywords
- fascisme, vote, élections, sociologie électorale, démocratie
Contact(s)
- Jérémy Guedj
courriel : jeremy [dot] guedj [at] univ-cotedazur [dot] fr
Information source
- Jérémy Guedj
courriel : jeremy [dot] guedj [at] univ-cotedazur [dot] fr
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Le fascisme dans les urnes », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, December 10, 2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/12w10
