as the broke and dithering thirties limped on, many
idealists with no personal experience of power were attracted by the capacity
for unimpeded action that dictatorship seemed to offer. “I am asking for a
Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis,” declared H. G. Wells, addressing the
Oxford Union in 1932, still, despite all the evidence, apparently believing that
a benign dictatorship was not an oxymoron. “The world is sick of parliamentary
democracy. The fascist party is Italy. The Communist is Russia. The Fascists of
liberation must carry out a parallel ambition on a far grander scale.”
With hindsight, Wells’s call seems extraordinarily
naive. But it was a true expression of his personal creed, which managed to
combine socialism with unambiguous elitism. Many of his novels— The Time Machine, A Modern Utopia, The New Machiavelli,
Anticipations —envisaged worlds ruled by a special governing order of
the best and the brightest. And Wells was not alone in this seemingly
incompatible combination of beliefs: this was the generation of socialists who
embraced the new “science” of eugenics—but who were appalled when those theories
were actually translated into action.
It is tempting—though probably false—to wonder
whether eugenic considerations partly explain the fascist sympathies of Europe’s
beauty tycoons. The perfumier François Coty famously backed the far-right
Faisceau and Croix de Feu movements during the 1930s, and a little later founded
the infamous paramilitary group Solidarité Française; Coco Chanel was a renowned
horizontal collaborator. Eugenics, after all, did identify physical
beauty—which, for these Europeans, naturally meant Caucasian beauty—as a
prerequisite for most other desirable qualities. As the then-celebrated American
psychologist Knight Dunlap put it in 1920, “All dark races prefer white
skin.” 46
In his book Personal Beauty
and Racial Betterment , Dunlap, who, inter
alia , saw baldness as a sign of physical degeneration—“It is
difficult to conceive of a baldheaded musical genius or artist” 47 —pointed the way, twenty years before the
event, to notions of the Untermensch and the Final Solution. “Perhaps there are
limits beyond which the preservation of the individual is undesirable. It seems
not only useless but dangerous to preserve the incurably insane and the lower
grades of the feeble-minded.” 48
Dunlap was not alone in these thoughts. Similar
theories were commonplace among psychologists at the time, some of whom had
little hesitation in acting upon them when they could with impunity. Their use
of inmates in American state hospitals as fodder for experimentation during the
1920s and thirties has become notorious. If fascism is the absolute subjection
of the individual to the needs of the state, as defined by the ruling
dictatorship, then those psychologists—absolute dictators in their own
realm—were undoubtedly fascists. And if—as after World War II—culpability is
graded along a scale of readiness to eradicate undesirable individuals, with
Hitler at one end and, say, H. G. Wells at the other, then Dunlap and his ilk
would probably not have survived a Nuremberg.
Most of those who held these views, however, lay at
some point between these two extremes. In those cases, the matter of gradation
could become a question of crucial personal concern. And one of these cases
would be Eugène Schueller.
[ 1 ] Now a
small fruit and grocery store.
[ 2 ] As it
happens, one of the U.K.’s most consistently successful businesses, the
John Lewis Partnership department-store chain, was, and still is, run in
a similar way—in a “partenariat” (as opposed to a salariat), a scheme
evolved by Schueller’s almost exact contemporary, John Spedan Lewis, and
begun in 1928. There is, however, a vital difference. Schueller would
have viewed with horror the idea that a “partenariat” should make the
workers actual partners, with shares in the enterprise, as
idealists with no personal experience of power were attracted by the capacity
for unimpeded action that dictatorship seemed to offer. “I am asking for a
Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis,” declared H. G. Wells, addressing the
Oxford Union in 1932, still, despite all the evidence, apparently believing that
a benign dictatorship was not an oxymoron. “The world is sick of parliamentary
democracy. The fascist party is Italy. The Communist is Russia. The Fascists of
liberation must carry out a parallel ambition on a far grander scale.”
With hindsight, Wells’s call seems extraordinarily
naive. But it was a true expression of his personal creed, which managed to
combine socialism with unambiguous elitism. Many of his novels— The Time Machine, A Modern Utopia, The New Machiavelli,
Anticipations —envisaged worlds ruled by a special governing order of
the best and the brightest. And Wells was not alone in this seemingly
incompatible combination of beliefs: this was the generation of socialists who
embraced the new “science” of eugenics—but who were appalled when those theories
were actually translated into action.
It is tempting—though probably false—to wonder
whether eugenic considerations partly explain the fascist sympathies of Europe’s
beauty tycoons. The perfumier François Coty famously backed the far-right
Faisceau and Croix de Feu movements during the 1930s, and a little later founded
the infamous paramilitary group Solidarité Française; Coco Chanel was a renowned
horizontal collaborator. Eugenics, after all, did identify physical
beauty—which, for these Europeans, naturally meant Caucasian beauty—as a
prerequisite for most other desirable qualities. As the then-celebrated American
psychologist Knight Dunlap put it in 1920, “All dark races prefer white
skin.” 46
In his book Personal Beauty
and Racial Betterment , Dunlap, who, inter
alia , saw baldness as a sign of physical degeneration—“It is
difficult to conceive of a baldheaded musical genius or artist” 47 —pointed the way, twenty years before the
event, to notions of the Untermensch and the Final Solution. “Perhaps there are
limits beyond which the preservation of the individual is undesirable. It seems
not only useless but dangerous to preserve the incurably insane and the lower
grades of the feeble-minded.” 48
Dunlap was not alone in these thoughts. Similar
theories were commonplace among psychologists at the time, some of whom had
little hesitation in acting upon them when they could with impunity. Their use
of inmates in American state hospitals as fodder for experimentation during the
1920s and thirties has become notorious. If fascism is the absolute subjection
of the individual to the needs of the state, as defined by the ruling
dictatorship, then those psychologists—absolute dictators in their own
realm—were undoubtedly fascists. And if—as after World War II—culpability is
graded along a scale of readiness to eradicate undesirable individuals, with
Hitler at one end and, say, H. G. Wells at the other, then Dunlap and his ilk
would probably not have survived a Nuremberg.
Most of those who held these views, however, lay at
some point between these two extremes. In those cases, the matter of gradation
could become a question of crucial personal concern. And one of these cases
would be Eugène Schueller.
[ 1 ] Now a
small fruit and grocery store.
[ 2 ] As it
happens, one of the U.K.’s most consistently successful businesses, the
John Lewis Partnership department-store chain, was, and still is, run in
a similar way—in a “partenariat” (as opposed to a salariat), a scheme
evolved by Schueller’s almost exact contemporary, John Spedan Lewis, and
begun in 1928. There is, however, a vital difference. Schueller would
have viewed with horror the idea that a “partenariat” should make the
workers actual partners, with shares in the enterprise, as
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