Thoughts on the place of Count Gobineu in particular and the French Legitimists in general in the history of fascism? Espescially interested in those deeply reactionary forces that were a pure defense of pre-modernity and the way that they relate to such a modern phenomenon as Fascism.
I don’t know that I would call them a ‘pure defense of pre-modernity’ since I’ve increasingly realized, as Roger Griffin puts it,
In a sense, then, every ideological and spiritual product of a society affected by modernisation cannot help but be a manifestation of modernity: they are not to be seen as ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-modern’, but as resulting from the interaction of specific forces of modernity with specific forms of traditional society within a unique and dynamically changing configuration of historical forces.
And especially Gobineau’s biological racism was hardly pre-modern. I get what you’re saying though, that his unabashed aristocratic elitism and royalism differs from fascism fundamentally; so does his pessimism about racial decline of course. In that sense he was vaguely similar to Spengler, both diagnosing syndromes of decadence in society that they thought were inexorable and could be at most managed or held off temporarily, for their intellectual descendants to go “Actually, through [eugenics, revolution, etc] all things are possible.” Gobineau’s monarchism and fusion of racial and class elitism could maybe be compared to proto- or quasi-fascists like List, Lanz von Liebenfels, and Evola, but again the pessimism thing: the latter three were all millenarian reactionary-revolutionaries aspiring to a new utopian world order.
Action française would I guess be the closest thing to a direct link between legitimist thought and the origins of fascism (well and there was a Carlist workers’ union in Spain that developed a fascist tendency) even though AF wasn’t formally legitimist. The maurrasistes are sometimes considered anti-modern reactionaries, and I sometimes present them that way to people because it’s simpler, but they especially drive home Griffin’s point and Stanley Payne has suggested the word ‘reactionary’ doesn’t really fit Action française because of the amount of modern social and political thought they inevitably incorporated, above all the ultra-nationalism which Maurras anachronistically projected back onto the ancien régime. In turn AF thought was partially anticipated by Louis de Bonald, who was ahead of his time but reflective of the fact that even shortly after the Revolution, Counter-Revolutionary thinkers had realized that the old order in the strictest sense was permanently lost.
In the injection of an updated corporatism and organic nationalism or proto-nationalism into traditionalist monarchism, these types remind me of Ivan Ilyin who was in much the same position, like de Bonald an aristocrat grappling with the destruction of the traditional social order by a revolution, in the world of the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth. Stephen Shenfield has a short discussion of Ilyin in Russian Fascism that I mostly like (note that Shenfield’s concept of modernity is basically a value judgment and by “premodern values” he just means illiberal ones):
Ilyin described fascism as “a complex and multi-sided phenomenon [that] arose as a healthy and necessary reaction to bolshevism, as a concentration of state-preserving forces on the right.” Other praiseworthy features of fascism were its patriotic feeling and its search for just social reforms. However, fascism was marred by six “deep and serious errors”—namely hostility to Christianity and to religion in general; totalitarianism; one-party monopoly, leading to corruption and demoralization; nationalist extremism, belligerent chauvinism, and a mania for national grandeur; a tendency toward state socialism; and “idolatrous caesarism, with its demogogy, slavishness, and despotism”.
The first of Ilyin’s objections does not serve to separate him from fascism in the generic sense, which, as was demonstrated in the last chapter, is compatible with a variety of religious orientations. Nevertheless, a person who rejects totalitarianism, chauvinism, and caesarism can hardly be considered a fascist. We might also note his reference to the traditionalist conservative regimes of Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal as positive alternatives to “fascism”. Ilyin sensed that he shared many of his premodern values with the fascists—hence his perception of them as basically well-intentioned people who had made unfortunate “errors”—but he could not bring himself to accept the new order.
