A powerful new biography of Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, here generally known as the Marquis de Morès, has consequence on both sides of the Atlantic—in France, and in Dakota Territory. Its author is Sergio Luzzatto, an Italian historian with a named professorship at the University of Connecticut. Its title is The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès. Publisher, Harvard University Press.
In the prologue Luzzatto invokes a youthful Hannah Arendt, pondering, in 1941, the origins of fascism, suspecting there was something significant about the infamous Dreyfus Affair, which drove a Jewish officer out of the French army in the 1890s. She sought the “point of origin” of fascism not in Italy or in Germany but in France. Luzzatto returns to this question, with receipts.
The Marquis (we’ll just call him that for now, recognizing his title as an expatriate Sardinian, brought up in France), going forth from his boyhood in Cannes, had a dissolute youth, Jesuit military schooling ornamented with profligate spending, casinos, and bordellos. Importantly, Luzzatto chronicles the Marquis’s early habits of violent antisemitism, leading student mobs in physical violence against Jewish businessmen. Morès was handsome and a good talker and somehow won the hand of the American banking heiress, Medora von Hoffman.
Which marriage financed the next stage of his life, in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. There Morès in the 1880s sought not just to engage in the livestock business, but to enact a fantastic scheme to defy the major packers, slaughter beef at multiple western sites, and make a fortune, while establishing a sort of feudal lordship over the community of Medora. His only success was beating a murder rap for the killing of the buffalo hunter, Riley Luffsey.
Theodore Roosevelt famously came away from the Baldlands with impulsesthat animated his progressive public life. Morès, Luzzatto tells us, came away with the conviction that “disorder would produce a new order, and that the most fundamental law . . . was the survival of the fittest.”
Morès acted upon such convictions on return to France (following another feckless venture in French Indochina, the failure of which he blamed on others). Still operating on his father-in-law's cash, he emerged in the 1890s, alongside Edouard Drumont, as the leading agitator of pseudo-populist antisemitism. “The Marquis de Morès,” says Luzzatto, “wanted to make himself the most recognizable and foul-mouthed interpreter of this rising resentment.” In an amazing stroke of irony, he organized the butchers of Paris into street mobs to terrorize his enemies and shout “Death to the Jews!” He also organized reserve army officers to bait Jewish military men into duels and kill them—which he himself did, killing Armand Mayer, who was handicapped by an injury to his sword arm, on 23 June 1892, and once again, beating a homicide rap. (The friends of Riley Luffsey would like a word, please. Dr. Arendt, perhaps you’d like to join the discussion?)
Eventually Morès ran out his stock and his cash and embarked on another half-baked enterprise, seeking to draw desert peoples of North Africa into an anti-Jewish and anti-British Franco-Arab alliance. Somebody, probably his Tuareg guides, killed him in the Sahara. And somehow, after all this, he was remembered as a visionary and an adventurer, rather than a failure and a fascist. We have a problem. North Dakota is more than complicit, has been a willing partner in this failure of historical acuity. We need to think about this.
