REJECTION OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM – ADMIRATION OF BISMARCK
Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political
and the economic sphere. The importance of liberalism in the 19 th
century should not be
exaggerated for present day polemical purposes, nor should we make of one of the many
doctrines which flourished in that century a religion for mankind for the present and for all time
to come. Liberalism really flourished for fifteen years only. It arose in 1830 as a reaction to the
Holy Alliance which tried to force Europe to recede further back than 1789; it touched its zenith
in 1848 when even Pius IX was a liberal. Its decline began immediately after that year. If 1848
was a year of light and poetry, 1849 was a year of darkness and tragedy. The Roman Republic
was killed by a sister republic, that of France. In that same year Marx, in his famous Communist
Manifesto, launched the gospel of socialism.
In 1851 Napoleon III made his illiberal coup d’état and ruled France until 1870 when he was
turned out by a popular rising following one of the severest military defeats known to history.
The victor was Bismarck who never even knew the whereabouts of liberalism and its prophets. It
is symptomatic that throughout the 19 th
century the religion of liberalism was completely
unknown to so highly civilized a people as the Germans but for one parenthesis which has been
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described as the “ridiculous parliament of Frankfort ” which lasted just one season. Germany
attained her national unity outside liberalism and in opposition to liberalism, a doctrine which
seems foreign to the German temperament, essentially monarchical, whereas liberalism is the
historic and logical anteroom to anarchy. The three stages in the making of German unity were
the three wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870, led by such “liberals” as Moltke and Bismarck.
And in the building of Italian unity, liberalism played a very minor part when compared to the
contribution made by Mazzini and Garibaldi who were not liberals. But for the intervention of
the illiberal Napoleon III we should not have had Lombardy, and without that of the illiberal
Bismarck at Sadowa and at Sedan very probably we should not have had Venetia in 1866 and in
1870 we should not have entered Rome. The years going from 1870 to 1915 cover a period
which marked, even in the opinion of the high priests of the new creed, the twilight of their
religion, attacked by decadentism in literature and by activism in practice. Activism: that is to
say nationalism, futurism, fascism.
The liberal century, after piling up innumerable Gordian Knots, tried to cut them with the sword
of the world war. Never has any religion claimed so cruel a sacrifice. Were the gods of liberalism
thirsting for blood?
Now liberalism is preparing to close the doors of its temples, deserted by the peoples who feel
that the agnosticism it professed in the sphere of economics and the indifferentism of which it
has given proof in the sphere of politics and morals, would lead the world to ruin in the future as
they have done in the past.
This explains why all the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal, and it is supremely
ridiculous to endeavor on this account to put them outside the pale of history, as though history
were a preserve set aside for liberalism and its adepts; as though liberalism were the last word in
civilization beyond which no one can go.