François Furet Quotes

Hitler did a better job than Stalin of accomplishing Lenin's totalitarian promises—better, too, than Mussolini.

Nazism was a form of Bolshevism turned against its initial form.

In many thundering discourses, Hitler expressed his respect, if not admiration for Stalinist Communism and its leader.

What was new about Hitler and Stalin was what Friedrich Meinecke, in an attempt shortly after World War II to express his horror at Hitler’s moral nihilism, called a ‘ Machiavellianism of the masses'.

The fact that Communism and Fascism assigned contradictory roles to history and reason—the emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of the Aryan race—mattered little.

To understand this relationship we may start with what has become an accepted observation: Stalinized Bolshevism and National Socialism constitute the two examples of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Not only were they comparable, but they form a political category of their own, which has become established since Hannah Arendt.

In Fascism, as in Communism, the idea of the future was based on a critique of bourgeois modernity ... It rose from a variety of currents and from authors of very different origins, all of whom demonized the bourgeoisie. The doctrine was cast as post-Marxist, not as pre-liberal.

Born of war, both Bolshevism and Fascism drew their basic education from war. They transferred to politics the lessons of the trenches: familiarity with violence, the simplicity of extreme passions, the submission of the individual to the collectivity, and finally the bitterness of futile or betrayed sacrifices.

Fascism was born of the reaction of the particular against the universal, the national against the international. In its origins it was inseparable from Communism, fighting the latter’s goals even while adopting its methods… Communism and Fascism grew up on the same soil, the soil of Italian Socialism. The founder of the fasci in March 1919, Mussolini was a member of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement prior to supporting Italy's entry into the Great War; then, immediately afterward, he found himself in violent conflict with the Bolshevik-leaning leaders of his former party.

The American people were possessed by the capitalist spirit without ever having had a bourgeoisie; French political society, in contrast, created a bourgeoisie devoid of the capitalist spirit.

The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth.