Zeev Sternhell

The 'Anti-materiolist' Revision of Marxism as an Aspect of the Rise of Fascist Ideology

as well as the nationalist right and finally brought about a synthesis of a certain trend of ethical and spiritual socialism with radical nationalism. ’Anti-materialism’ was the dominant trait and the common denominator of all the movements of revolt before the first world war and between the two world wars. It was ’anti-materialism’ which brought together, in one same opposition to capitalism and liberalism, currents of thought which had arisen from the right and left, but which were in conflict with both. It was in the name of ’antimaterialism’ that men who had issued from different political streams condemned Marxism and liberalism and the political, social and cultural characteristics of the traditional left and right. All of them shared a common hatred of money, speculation and bourgeois values in general, and all of them condemned the exclusion of the working class from intellectual and cultural life. At the turn of the century, revolutionary syndicalism in France and Italy laid the groundwork for this form of revisionism which declared the failure of Marxist determinism and, rejecting the materialistic and mechanistic aspect of Marxism, began a process of superseding it. Immediately after the first world war, the non-conformists of the new generation of socialists followed a similar path, and thus, from Sorel, Michels, Lagardelle and Arturo Labriola to Hendrik de Man and Marcel D6at, this variant of socialism underwent a profound transformation. Indeed, this idealistic revisionism became far more an attempt morally to regenerate society as a whole and to save civilization than

Paul Déroulède and the origins of modern French nationalism

From September 1870 until the outbreak of the Great War the shadow of the disastrous defeat at Sedan hung over the French Republic, and the Alsace-Lorraine question constituted one of the constants of its political life. Indeed, the years following the loss of the two provinces form an exceptional period in which the essential themes of a particular nationalism aroused broad and fervent support, and in which the very expression of this nationalism tended, in the massive shock of defeat, almost to become confused with that of the national consciousness as a whole. The crisis in French