In sublime overview of the valley of the Little Missouri River, in the Badlands of North Dakota, stands a simple but elegant residence from the 1880s known as the Chateau de Morès. As a historian, I have a little bit of a problem with anachronism here. You see, I can uncover no evidence that people in the territory ever called this place the Chateau des Morès. In his biography of the Marquis de Morès, historian Jerry Tweton says the residence was “called ‘the chateau’ by the press and local folks.” There is no footnote for that. I can say for sure, the press made no such usage, and there is no record of “local folks” (and really, I hate that phrase) using it.
There was no Chateau de Morès, but there was a Chapeau de Morès. Which is to say, the hat of the Marquis de Morès. When he emerged as the leader of antisemitic proto-fascism in Paris during the 1890s, following his misadventures in Dakota in the 1880s, the Marquis made it part of his personal branding to wear a western-style, broadbrim hat, the Chapeau de Morès. There he is, in his chapeau, on the cover of the new biography by Sergio Luzzatto, First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès. I do not find the Luzzatto biography authoritative about the Marquis’s years in the territory. He doesn't know enough about land and cattle, but then, neither did Morès—heck, he even failed in the sheep business, in which countless other absentee owners profited. What Luzzatto does is detail the despicable origins of French fascism, centered on Morès and on his contemporary, Edouard Drumont. Luzzatto also finds the actions of Morès in Dakota Territory—cavalier disregard for others, to the point of homicide, heedless spending, and general fecklessness in management—consistent with his whole life trajectory.
The first book-length biography of Morès dates from 1970, University of Oklahoma Press. Entitled The Marquis de Morès: Emperor of the Bad Lands, it is, as evident from the title, a puff piece. Suffice it to say, this was not a shining moment for a great publisher of literary nonfiction.
Soon after came The Marquis de Morès: Dakota Capitalist, French Nationalist, by North Dakota’s own Jerome Tweton, published by the Institute for Regional Studies,1972. It’s a pretty good biography, written from the standpoint of the America West, and it relates in matter-of-fact fashion some of the Marquis’s political debasements in France. But he goes light on them, and doesn’t have the archival evidence used by Luzzatto.
So that’s all just historiography, and of interest perhaps only to scholars in their seminars, but we in North Dakota also have invested heavily in a positive mythology around the Marquis de Morès. The so-called Chateau is the jewel in the crown (monarchical overtones intended) of our state historic sites. When we put it on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, after publication of the Tweton biography, we said its significance “lies in its status as a memorial to the man who built it, because therein is related a remarkable story of the development of the West and the diversity of the people who settled it, and tamed it and made it a productive part of this nation.”
Then we have the bronze statue of the Marquis, sent from France by two of his sons, installed on a high pedestal in a park in Medora. The author of the national register nomination for the park, in 2018, left us (I suspect intentionally) a clue as to what we should think. She points out that prior to its unveiling in 1927, Jerry Tweton’s “local folks” set fire to it. We can no longer feign innocence of all that the Marquis de Morès represents.
