On 3 June 1896, a caravan consisting of an interpreter, a few black servants and one European, escorted by Berber guides, set up camp near the remote oasis of El Ouatia in the Tunisian desert. The European was the Marquis de Morès – explorer, adventurer and far-right demagogue – who aimed to forestall British influence in the region by opening up a route for French trade and colonisation. Five days later, however, a dispute arose with the local tribesmen over the quality of the fresh camels they had supplied to the expedition and a vicious fight broke out. With the exception of the servants and a Tunisian attendant, the members of the camp were quickly killed, but Morès managed to hold off his attackers with his revolver for two hours before he too succumbed.

Morès’s death made front-page news: obituaries appeared in the international press from Le Figaro to the New York Times, and his funeral took place in Notre-Dame. Yet today he is almost completely forgotten, a footnote in histories of the French extreme Right. In his fascinating book, Sergio Luzzatto aims to fill this gap. Morès, he argues, was a pioneer of 20th-century fascism, combining many of its salient features, including, among others, racism and corporatism. This is a bold claim, but Luzzatto marshals a considerable amount of evidence to support it.

Far-right politics formed only one part of Morès’s career. Indeed, his life reads like a dime novel (a term he would have recognised). Born in 1858 into a wealthy aristocratic family of Sardinian descent, he was handsome, charismatic and boundlessly energetic. He first trained as a cavalry officer, becoming an expert fencer and horseman, but in 1882 he married Medora, the daughter of the German-American banker Louis von Hoffmann, and emigrated to New York. Here he was soon alerted to the financial opportunities offered by the booming cattle industry. 

The introduction of refrigerated railway cars had made it possible to provide consumers in the east with freshly slaughtered animals from the Great Plains of the west. In months Morès had founded a town in the Badlands of Dakota, named it after his wife, bought a large ranch and brought his family out to live with him. There followed four years of a Wild West experience, including a gunfight with a band of cowboys who had trespassed on his land. Ultimately, Morès was unable to break the stranglehold of the Chicago stockyards on the US meat market and his enterprise failed. Along the way, however, he acquired a great talent for exploiting his striking personality and picturesque adventures to gain the attention of the newly emerging mass-circulation press. His wife also made good copy: she was a crack shot, once killing four bears on a hunting expedition in Montana.

Back in Paris, Morès now took on the role for which he would become most famous: that of ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic demagogue. The origins of his hatred of Jews are unclear, but the catalyst was a meeting in autumn 1889 with Edouard Drumont. Beginning as a playwright and journalist, Drumont had enjoyed a huge success in 1886 with the publication of La France juive, two dense volumes asserting in lurid terms how Jewish high finance was taking over France’s economy and enslaving her workers. In the 1880s, the French public was increasingly receptive to such a message. This stemmed in part from simple anti-immigration sentiment, as thousands of Russian and eastern-European Jews arrived in France fleeing pogroms and persecution. It also resulted from the identification of Jews with capitalism at a time of great economic change and dislocation. Particularly hard hit were Parisian small businessmen and shopkeepers, who could not withstand the competition of the new department stores, which were often Jewish-owned. The butchers of the great slaughterhouses at La Villette were vulnerable, too. In a sinister echo of his previous career in the meat industry, Morès took care to court them, claiming rightly or wrongly that they were being undercut by meat imported by German-based Jewish wholesalers. His argument convinced the butchers, some of whom even formed a bodyguard to intimidate his opponents at meetings and demonstrations.

Morès had other ideas apart from anti-Semitism, and Luzzatto dissects these with skill. Once the power of the Jews was broken, the French economy was to be reconstructed along corporatist lines, which Morès viewed as a form of hybrid socialism. Workers’ cooperatives would be set up, aided by loans provided by a bank ‘for the little guys’. Armed with this programme, Morès presented himself to the electorate and stood in the municipal elections of April 1890 for a working-class district of Paris, gaining the dubious honour of becoming the first openly anti-Semitic candidate in the history of France. Although he was defeated, he made a respectable showing, proving that his brand of populist anti-Semitism could appeal to a wide audience. 

The years 1892–3 marked the high point of Morès’s political career. This was in large part the result of the Panama scandal, which rocked the foundations of the Third Republic. Formed in 1881 to cut a canal through the isthmus of Panama, the Panama Company had soon run into financial difficulties. To counter them, three Jewish fixers linked to the company, Cornélius Herz, the Baron de Reinach and Emile Arton, had bribed a significant number of parliamentary deputies to vote for a capital increase to save it from bankruptcy. With so many of its lawmakers tainted by corruption, the Third Republic was plunged into a crisis of legitimacy. 

Since he left behind no detailed plans, it is difficult to reconstruct exactly how Morès intended to exploit the situation, but it is probable that he aimed, with the help of his allies in the press, to stoke popular anger to the point that a Constituent Assembly would be called to vote for a new constitution ‘charged with purging France of all the parasites that devour and crush it’. This plan may seem far-fetched, but the situation in the winter of 1892–3 was extremely febrile and pressure from the streets could have had far-reaching consequences. ‘At no other time,’ Luzzatto concludes, ‘did [Morès] find himself as close to the zenith as a new possible incarnation of a recurring figure in the collective imagination of modern France: the saviour.’

Yet, ironically, Panama brought Morès not triumph, but nemesis. His opponents had one card to play against him. In 1891, dogged by financial problems, since his family was increasingly unwilling to fund his political activities and extravagant lifestyle, he had obtained a loan from none other than the future villain of the Panama scandal, Cornélius Herz. The revelation of this hypocrisy compromised Morès and alienated even his strongest supporters. His response was to withdraw from Parisian politics and devote himself to the African expedition that would lead to his death.

However repellent his ideas, Morès was a remarkable figure. But was he, as Luzzatto claims, the first fascist? This is a difficult question to answer, since fascism is notoriously difficult to define, spanning diverse and contradictory positions, such as anti-capitalism and anti-socialism. That said, certain elements recur, in differing combinations, in all fascist movements: ultra-­nationalism, racism, the cult of the leader, anti-parliamentarism, corporatism. Morès espoused all of these. Corporatism was a major part of his programme, while his racist anti-Semitism was so extreme it could be seen as proto-Nazi. Decades before Mussolini, he invoked the image of the Roman fasces, the bundle of rods bound together to symbolise the organic links between all elements of the nation. 

Yet to drive the argument home, some sustained comparison needs to be made between Morès and his contemporaries in Europe as leaders of the far Right: the Austrians Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger and the German Adolf Stöcker. Of these, only Schönerer is mentioned, briefly, in the prologue. Nonetheless, in this arresting and disturbing book Luzzatto makes a convincing case that Morès, if not necessarily the founder of fascism, was indeed one of its fathers.