MAGA supporters sang the national anthem during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 20, 2025. Cheney Orr/ Reuters
Why is there such complicity with the old Fascism and why such an acceptance of the new Fascism? Because there is – and this is the point – a guiding principle common to both, sincerely or insincerely: that is the idea that the greatest ill in the world is poverty and that therefore the culture of the poorer classes must be replaced by the culture of the ruling class.
Taking the issue of fascism seriously requires us to consider, at the same time, how we oppose it. Jean-Luc Debry proposes here a demanding form of anti-fascism, that is to say, one that manages to steer clear of both the path of resentment and cheap moral self-righteousness. We do not morallychallenge right-wing culture; we combat it from a higher ethical standpoint, that is to say, a more generous one.
People are fools: The good conscience and the coming fascism
Jean-Luc Debry
The phrase, “People are fools”[1], as it was uttered in a fit of rage fuelled by inconsolable disappointment in the aftermath of elections marked by the Rassemblement national-RN’s [National Rally’s] gains and entrenchment at local level – and in the face of the threats its success poses at the national level should it win the presidential election – is a veritable slogan, almost a manifesto. This bitter observation reflects a slightly disillusioned sense of superiority that could well be one of the explanations for this deep rift, which is fuelling an increasingly threatening trend, especially since Trump has been in the White House and has been trumpeting his determination to impose a contemporary version of fascism with all the trappings of a victorious counter-revolution. It is, it seems to me, in its less explicit but equally relentless version of “we don’t associate with those sorts of people”, the product of antagonists who foster a vindictive atmosphere of very bad omens.
“They’re all fools” conveys a form of muted symbolic violence similar to what in other times was termed “class contempt”. It signifies the powerlessness to stem a desire that is overwhelming Western societies; a reproachful refrain – and one which, in my view, serves as a diagnosis. A cry from the heart already uttered with conviction during the Gilets Jaunes [Yellow Vests] movement. “People are fools!”, the matter is settled. It confirms that “class consciousness” has dissolved itself into a discourse that claims to borrow from its historical legitimacy in order to distance itself from it, a way of dismissing the “affective and emotional subjectivities” that led to this deplorable situation. It is therefore no surprise that a pathetic avatar, brimming with frustrated certainties and “mental resentiment” (sic), that of the cultural conflict pitting the educated middle classes against those they deem unworthy of consideration, after having attempted, with often unconvincing condescension, to persuade them to adopt a habitus “conforming” to its codes – where the cultural has, in a highly problematic manner, become cult-like. This is the manifestation of a sense of superiority conducive to a repulsive stance for those who must submit to the dictates of an elitism disguised as anti-elitism; as if, at the heart of a self-enclosed clique, the self-appointed moral guardians were staging their sense of superiority by sugar-coating it with a display of their condescension.
The least one can say is that generosity is nowhere to be found. The festering contempt is unbearable for those weighed down by it. It creates the conditions for a desire for the negative when it transforms the “no”, as children do, into an affirmation of an existence distinct from that of the mother, as it seeks the path to its own singularity – a path which, as we know, will ensnare more than a few.
An individual’s need to belong to their community is largely underestimated, if not denied outright – in this regard, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s[2] reflections deserve careful consideration when he addresses this subject in his Scritti corsari. The relevance of his remarks, which, alas, rendered him inaudible, earned him the label of reactionary, even as he scrutinised the ravages of standardisation that were levelling “traditional, rural cultures”, crushed by the post-war consumer society – which he considered a form of fascistic dehumanisation in both its ambition and its results, even though the means employed were based on the principle of voluntary servitude. This local claim is regarded as reactionary by nature. It will therefore be mocked, scorned and superbly ignored. It’s all wrong; move along, there’s nothing to see here! To be incapable of considering that “their” lives only make sense if the “people” in question embrace the values, rituals and customs of their community, where they live, and that they are part of an intimate history—that of their family and the place where it has always lived—is a limitation of the mind and the heart, because ideology dehumanises the stances born of the cross-pollination between a patroness and a political commissar. In this sphere, there are roman à clef that open no doors. By judging them from the height of an immodest sense of superiority, whilst they are pitted against a counter-model whose codes they do not possess—notably in the form of an ideologised nomadism that bears the hallmarks of a consumerism of people and places— condemns them to shameful silence or to a form of revolt that reinforces the prosecutors’ status as bearers of “the good word”, ever ready to despise those who resist their convictions. The protagonists, regarding themselves as the inherited custodians of a social history that lives on through them, are locked away, according to the court’s judgement, into a defamatory category without further ado. Do they have any recourse other than to assert an identity which, in itself, is in no way culpable? And yet, it is often reduced to the label: “they’re all fascists” – an ideologised variant of “they’re all fools”. Generosity seems singularly absent when one treads paths where one hardly encounters any sensitive souls capable of understanding anything other than the certainties they regurgitate as a sign of recognition. A Provençal tale is just as good as an African one, isn’t it!; where one praises the distant to better despise one’s neighbours. Then, frustrated by the resistance they put up, we move away, cursing them. “They’re all fools.” A devastating sense of self-righteousness! This is a cult of the distant, at the expense of the nearby stranger, which becomes a comfortable stance in which the proponents of a discriminatory principle recognise themselves. It is true, we must admit, that the “reaction” which consists of responding grumpily: “This is our home!” and “Things used to be better!” does not encourage the development of a sense of sympathy towards “people” who do not listen to the music they ought to, read authors they ought not to, do not eat what they ought to, and drive to work, drink and smoke around a barbecue.
The response, that of the “people” – and therefore “the fools” – rejects the shameful label pinned on them and reacts with a form of vengeful symbolic violence. This is fertile ground on which the emerging neo-fascism thrives, allowing genuine fascists, or those close to them, to capitalise on it. It has become the expression of subjective factors that form part of a conflictual social process which clearly has deep roots and is by no means trivial. Its vindictive rhetoric is reactive, and that is what gives it its strength. It offers an outlet for repressed desires fuelled by resentment. It is of the same nature as the great outburst of football fans, a hateful jubilation that gives pleasure. There is a sort of common paradigm, driven by the ill wind of the desire for revenge of those who, in order to exist, refuse to be placed under a guardianship that denies their social reality and reproaches them for consumerist practices deemed “non-compliant”. We would like them to be ashamed of who they are, even though they are pitifully subjected to a situation over which they have no control and which they have no means of changing. A luxury that is not theirs. And they, out of defiance, out of provocation, give the finger and say “fuck you” to the neo-priestly types who suffocate them with their sanctimoniousness, like school inspectors coming to solicit their votes whilst holding their noses. Everything serves to reinforce a sense of dispossession. Their condition is a cursed fate in which they struggle to survive as best they can with the means at their disposal. The well-off look down on those who barely earn enough to live decently and shop at Lidl, whilst they themselves frequent La Vie Claire and buy overpriced organic produce.
This phrase – “the people are fools” – is an emotional response, powerless to contain the negativity of the stigmatised response that comes back in return. It is, as it were, a case of “the ball being thrown back into the sender’s court”. It evokes what the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, in a book entitled The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in the heat of the moment between 1930 and 1933, analysed as “a desire for fascism”. Mass psychology complements the usual socio-economic analysis by explaining behaviours which, in his view, are not rational but stem from social pathos structured in the depths of the individual unconscious by negative and self-destructive drives. There is a desire for fascism that morality and the culture of good intentions fail to contain. The clear conscience of the educated middle classes is powerless to curb it through an approach guided by “common sense”. The guilty conscience that feeds a sense of guilt turns against them because, as one can guess, “the people are fools”. Nietzsche, too, in his own way, exposed the progressive optimism of his century. He explored the depths of human history by highlighting the role that resentment has played in history, dwelling, with his characteristic vigour, on all the ambiguities contained within moralising good conscience and the mechanisms that drove human communities to action in the way they conceived the dynamics of resentment upon which they founded a problematic moral order. This is fertile ground for demagogic temptations. Resentment, followed by the desire for revenge, opens up avenues for them.
All the more so as there are many reasons to place only limited trust in fine-sounding declarations, including, in particular, those encountered in the world of work with participatory management and in local government with the parodies of participatory democracy. They correspond to the management of focus groups in political discourse through the manipulative methods of managerial ideology and, in both cases—corporate and municipal—its newspeak—ever-present and asserted with bold confidence by its users; a deceptive rhetoric whose devious twists and turns escaped only those who, whether through naivety, stupidity or cynicism, wished to remain oblivious. Highly Marcon inspired methods – complaint books, citizens’ conventions – which led many of us to distance ourselves from this perverse practice of transforming a technique derived from behavioural psychology into collusive conclaves, the aim of which is to make the participants believe, provided they are of good will, that they can influence the crucial decisions affecting them, whilst everything is decided elsewhere and this childish, chatty distraction was merely a way of keeping them occupied so they might “live together harmoniously” within a system whose decisions they were subjected to – such as, for example, choosing the colour of the carpet to make the open-plan office more pleasant, proof of a “human” approach to managing the department; a fiction that left a bitter taste in the mouths of those who agreed to play along. A fool’s game, in truth. The historian Johann Chapoutot reminded us, quite aptly, in his essay Free to Obey: How the Nazis Invented Modern Management[3], that the 1930s in Germany were also a testing ground where the managerial dogmas that would come to define the post-war era in Western companies and states were conceived and put into practice, as if this continuity of deceptive discourse were part of a single narrative arc in which, whatever you say, whatever you do, you will always be the butt of the joke, the joke offered up to the men and women in power who need your enthusiasm and your naive participation to achieve their goal and, not least, to have peace of mind. Power is the realm where narcissistic perverts, a land of hubris, can, backed by ideological rhetoric, stage a will to power that transforms their psychopathic deviance into a competence, or even a quality necessary for its exercise.
Once again, widespread disdain prevails and resentment runs deep. The scars run deep. How much credence can we give to words that mask practices contrary to what they profess, and which serve as a cover for values compatible with an authoritarian and dehumanising system? The betrayal of the intellectuals, in this sphere too, distances us from the honeyed words that revel in humanist vocabulary and claim to listen to a voice that will never be anything other than that of the exploited.
On another front that deprives you just as much of what constitutes you as a subject, an individual’s belonging to their community is effectively nullified – hide that inclination, lest I should see it. They are considered reactionary by nature if the unwelcome idea of claiming that belonging should cross their mind. They will therefore be mocked, despised and haughtily ignored. Yet, admitting that one’s life only makes sense insofar as one embraces the values of one’s community is in no way fascist, and judging this from a presumptuous sense of superiority slams the door in the face of the “locals”, the natives, the heirs to an intimate, generational history that deserves better than this smugness expressed with disdain by consumerist nomads who love only what flatters their egos without ever questioning what drives their desire for power.
And so, for them, the time for resentment has come.
“That sorrow, that dark bitterness that swells within your heart, that bitter force that takes hold of you when you feel powerless in the face of another’s violation of your rules and your ideals: that is resentment, which gives your anger that indignant, accusatory edge, which makes your voice grate in the name of virtue. When this force overcomes you, do not hope to exhaust it by giving it free rein: for it is insatiable, as ravenous as desire itself; it is nothing other than desire tamed by morality, the very energy of morality itself. The law he has broken, the word he has betrayed, is precisely what you believed would ‘hold him in check’, and your resentment is as strong as the sense of your own powerlessness. To take bitter revenge, to undo, to restore the previous state: this is what your now reactive libido sets about doing, day and night. ” wrote François Fourquet in 1974 in the journal Recherches published by the CERFI (Centre d’Etudes, de Recherche et de Formation Institutionnelle), dedicated to “the historical ideal”, when he unsparingly scrutinised the militant ideal and its incarnations since the birth of the labour movement, at a time when left-wing apparatuses – Maoists and Trotskyists – still held sway (sic) and used the hope they claimed to embody as a stepping stone to the exercise of a power which, from daily contact with them, we knew would be devoid of compassion or justice, but in the service of a dogma that was merciless towards dissent – it took us time to realise this, but once the lesson was learnt after a few knocks and after witnessing delaying tactics, manipulation and actions contrary to the most basic democratic principles during the student strikes of the 1970s, the memory never faded. Trust will never return, unless we cultivate a system’s bad faith. For ultimately, what are we talking about, if not structures of power.
The expression of a nihilistic desire elevates the spirit of revenge to a historical ideal. It is a veritable manifesto that accompanies the return of the repressed. It bears the mark of negativity in action, to which a sense of disillusioned superiority responds; a superiority which, at heart, merely confirms its own contemptuous legitimacy—a legitimacy of the same nature, albeit purely reactive. A tragic game of mirrors against a backdrop of “anthropological degradation”, to borrow Pier Paolo Pasolini’s edifying phrase. The cult of hedonism centred on “well-being” and “good living” and its negativity—that of the fools—become a story within a story. The desire for mutual domination that runs through it is put into perspective and acts as a decoy against a backdrop of identity-based claims, “us and them”. This abyss is undoubtedly a symptom of a state of anomie fuelled by a very real sense of dispossession, long present in society and now shaking it to its core, as the Gilets Jaunes [Yellow Vests] movement, despite all its ambiguities, has revealed. This is a cultural crisis in the anthropological sense of the term; a sentiment that must be taken seriously. The false liberation of well-being/wellness state has created a culturally unequal situation that feeds a deep-rooted resentment which, as time goes by, delves ever deeper into the depths of resentment to seek the nourishment necessary for its growth, until it becomes irrational and unintelligible, to the point where invective and hateful slogans, and unabashed racism, serve as a political programme. And, above all, they provide a vindictive jubilation devoid of any sense of restraint or simple honour; a trade in indecency. This is what the far-right media trade in, and which, apparently, seems to suit them so well. They have it all their own way.
Alain de Benoist, a leading figure in the intellectual movement known as the “New Right”, who would play a significant role in establishing an intellectually revitalised far-right discourse, during a symposium organised by GRECE (Le Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne) published in 1982, advocated a “right-wing Gramscian” approach by hijacking the concept of “cultural hegemony” for his own ends. This attempt to appropriate Gramsci’s thought is based on a desire to to make compatible a culture of far-right neo-fascism (a pleonasm) with a political ideology that fought against it and paid the price—that of its freedom and its life. Following in his footsteps with full knowledge of the facts, the billionaire Pierre-Edouard Stérin and his organisation—which funds several identity-based associations and media outlets openly aligned with the radical far right, or to put it bluntly, fascist in nature—and Vincent Bolloré—a close friend of Sarkozy—with his powerful media machine, comprising newspapers, television, radio and publishing – are turning this manipulated desire into fertile ground for utterly uninhibited jubilation that hides neither its intentions nor its desire to capitalise on a favourable situation to pander to the vengeful instincts of a reverse deconstruction. The alignment of the stars is working in favour of their political ambition. Each, in their own way, influences the course of national politics, and subsequently gives their affairs a boost fuelled by ideologically motivated patronage, without any safeguards. Neither appeals to reason, nor appeals to the most basic morality, and even less to professional ethics, seem capable of stemming such a “letting go” that unleashes the basest, most hateful instincts, where shared hatred provides a form of shared pleasure experienced as a collective reward. They indulge in the pleasure this brings. Building a community through the trade in resentment is a political reality that they exploit with a success which raises questions about the unconscious drivers of such a dynamic. They stoke a fever of security and xenophobia with the conviction of a Templar setting out to conquer the Holy Land. This leaves the small trade in happiness and its henchmen literally speechless, as if in the midst of a Pilate-style trial. Faced with this competition, one has to admit that they are no match for them.
The desire for revenge felt by those who, rightly or wrongly, feel discredited by the “theological contempt” (cf. Pasolini) of those who have assumed the role of guides, or even an enlightened vanguard, keeps alive the smouldering embers from which sparks fly in a culture of resentment stoked by a powerful media apparatus that is quite openly neo-fascist, which then reaps the rewards. The radical far right capitalises on the “available minds” won over by this wave rising from the depths of the human soul, minds that have become receptive to its rhetoric. It uses them as a necessary stepping stone to establishing a regime in line with its ideology. He who sows theological contempt (an updated version of class contempt) reaps resentment.
Nothing seems capable of halting this march towards power, which seizes hold of consciences and offers a shared sense of gratification. We will not succeed in containing it by pitting it against a climate of civil war that deepens the fissures threatening the edifice, and for which the fascist gangs are far better equipped, as they are on their home turf: martial virility, military discipline and the maintenance of physical fitness useful for combat. Fighting is their raison d’être. It would be a strategic miscalculation to believe we can compete with them by using their methods. Physical clashes between gangs of supporters (the “ultras”), between rival gangs, conducted in a militarised manner (modelled on the 1930s), in an atmosphere of settling scores between hooligans of different factions, between territorial hooligans, or against a militarised police force behaving itself like a gang intoxicated by its own violence, but better organised, better armed, better prepared and enjoying institutional complacency that amounts to a form of implicit impunity, as was lamented during the repression of the Gilets Jaunes movement, lead only to outcomes with no prospect of victory. A belligerent stance in the tradition of the fascist militias of yesteryear and the OAS, which reinforces and stokes the desire for a fight, is the lifeblood of far-right activists. And, in the course of their duties, it justifies the behaviour of law enforcement units whose sympathies for values akin to those of fascist circles are no secret, and which they never fail to demonstrate whenever the opportunity arises.
The enemy is essentialised on both sides – the racist and the racialised – and the radical nature of the stances appears as a desire to eliminate the adversary in order to demonstrate one’s strength and determination. Those who are not for it are against it; those who are against it are villains, so the end justifies the means. This is not a class-against-class struggle, but an essentialised confrontation that confines everyone within a cultural group that makes them either a chosen one or a supporter of “Evil”. It fits perfectly into the current pseudo-cultural battle, that of an anti-fascism whose legitimacy draws inspiration from the aborted revolutions of the past, against a fascism that is supposedly a modern-day replica of its past, with no connection to the alienation in which a people finds itself—due to the dispossession of its destiny and the dissolution of its culture in globalised standardisation—a people whom one no longer seeks to charm or convince. And it is not references to distant postcolonial or religious conflicts, such as Palestine or Iran, Venezuela or Cuba, that will enable an identification which, in any case, is problematic. Such identification is reserved for the activists and supporters of these distant causes, whether they are just or not.
In this arena – that of violence in the face of fascism – victories are short-lived; they are sometimes tactical but rarely strategic or decisive. They herald devastating defeats in terms of the rule of law. The anti-fascism of the era Gramsci speaks of was, in Italy, rooted in intense social struggles within an insurrectionary climate, as in Germany, which ended in their defeat and the seizure of power by the fascists and Nazis. It is a strange return to the future to believe that things could be any different today, when it is clear that no mass movement is capable of sustaining an anti-fascism sufficiently rooted in society to resist the rise of Mussolini’s heirs and avowed neo-Nazis who, like Quentin Deranque, who was beaten to death whilst lying on the ground (which, after all, raises an ethical issue and creates a sense of unease that is all too quickly dismissed),[4] display preferences that make no secret of their sinister political agenda.
Pasolini, once again, who was inspired by this theme – and with good reason – writes in particular in Lutheran letters[5] that “There exists today a form of archaeological anti-fascism which is, in short, a convenient pretext for awarding oneself a certificate of genuine anti-fascism. This is an easy form of anti-fascism, whose object and aim is an archaic fascism that no longer exists and will never exist again. […] This is why a large part of today’s anti-fascism—or, at least, what is called anti-fascism—is either naïve and stupid, or merely pretextual and in bad faith; for it fights, or pretends to fight, a phenomenon that is dead and buried, archaeological, and can no longer frighten anyone. It is, in short, a form of anti-fascism that is entirely comfortable and unchallenging.”
It was neither a coup d’état nor victorious street fighting that brought the fascist regime in Italy and the Nazi regime in Germany to power (unlike Lenin’s USSR). It is indeed worth remembering that in Italy, the doors of the Italian parliament opened to the Blackshirts because Benito Mussolini was tasked, on 16 November 1922, by King Victor Emmanuel III with forming a government; and that in Germany, on 30 January 1933, it was German President Paul von Hindenburg who appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor within a coalition in which they were not the majority political force following the elections. The political circles, business circles and institutional components of Italian and German society at the time allowed the rise of a power that also had ambitions which appealed to the masses and their desire for fascism, thanks to a mechanism that gave them social credibility, whilst the seizure of power in both cases was based on a legitimacy that ostensibly respected democratic institutions and pretended to combat street violence in the name of order and public tranquillity – creating disorder in order to then present themselves as the party of order. It was the choice of the economic elites (industrialists, financiers, insurers) and the patrimonial elites (rentiers, shareholders) that made the difference. Faced with the KPD (German Communist Party), they utilised the militant strength of the Nazi party, which offered a reassuring counterweight,[6] “and which had to be harnessed at all costs to a resolute defence of the social and economic order. A gamble, in short: as the Nazis were inexperienced, flanking them with shrewd and seasoned politicians made it possible to tame them within the framework of shared power in a coalition government. ‘A coalition that the Austrian loudmouth never accepted’.” “The Nazi solution was favoured by the business world after the elections of 6 November 1932.” Von Papen’s cabinet was a patchwork, unprecedented since 1918, “of the most caricatured elements offered by the patrimonial elites of industrial, banking, agrarian, aristocratic and military capital.”[7]
The seizure of power thus took place on a different level once the people gave in to a desire for revenge, a nihilistic desire, a desire for fascism with its cult of the leader, of force and of arbitrariness. A revenge whose roots lie beyond the realm of reason and which, in its malicious joy and its sad passions, will make resentment the driving force of history by celebrating a deadly cult that will demand its share of sacrificial victims like a bloodthirsty god endowed with an insatiable appetite. The brief Spanish Revolution escaped this disastrous scenario. It was triggered by an anti-fascism rooted in a deep desire for social transformation, championed by the people who held high the libertarian ambitions that animated them, but it was crushed by the two totalitarianisms of the century: fascism and Stalinism, born from the ranks of Leninism, under whose auspices fascism and Stalinist anti-fascism employed the same police, carceral and militaristic mechanisms, served by a swift and arbitrary justice system, all glorified by state lies, the ambition of criminals and the aestheticisation of their deadly desire.
Italian and German antifascism lacked the force that comes from the resentment that drives “the masses” (sic), a desire as a will to political power. A visceral and unspeakable rancor had absorbed rationality, rendering the resistance’s rationality powerless and allowing the catastrophe to appear as the expression of the destructive energy of “the masses”… and what a paradox! – as a liberating revolt. They paid a heavy price: repression, deprivation of freedom of opinion, massacres and senseless wars—in short, the annihilation of simple humanity, in a grandiose display of excessively theatrical displays of force. Only the death of the combatants could stop it; a suicide, in essence.
The gods of resentment were not appeased by the sacrifice of scapegoats and demanded ever more blood to quench their thirst, fuelled by the exaltation of martyrdom freely given in the name of honour and loyalty. And resentment, in its insatiable need for victims, was only further stimulated, never satisfied.
This is the path taken today by Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, while awaiting Europe’s turn to finalise this historical process which, as I write this, seems, alas, well underway, so true is it that everyone appears to be contributing and playing with disconcerting zeal the score of a symphony celebrating the four horsemen of the apocalypse in place of universal salvation. Beyond these possibilities, the subjugation of docile and servile vassals, as seen in Argentina, Chile, and Orban’s Hungary, may be the solution chosen by those who aspire to serve a master whose ambitions they will honour with extreme zeal. This would create a situation of a city-state subjugated to the Empire, until imperial rivalries erupt and transform global chaos into an uncontrollable conflagration.
[1] This is a translation of the French expression, “Les gens sont cons”, with the word “cons” also translatable as “idiots”, “morons”, “assholes”, and the like, depending on the degree of desired vulgarity, or one could assume the English language translation of Samuel Beckett’s Estragon, of Waiting for Godot: “Les gens sont des cons” / “People are bloody ignorant apes”; none of which equal the eloquence of Hilary Clinton’s description of what she considered half of Donald Trump’s supporters during the 2016 US presidential election campaign: “Basket of deplorables”.
[2] Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsair, Collana Memorie documenti, Garzanti, Milano, 1ª ed. 1975; Ecrits corsaires, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Flammarion, 1976.
[3] Johann Chapoutot, Libres d’obéir : le management, du nazisme à aujourd’hui, Gallimard, 2020. [Johann Chapoutot, Free to Obey: How the Nazis Invented Modern Management, Europa Editions, 2023.]
[4] “Striking a protester who has fallen to the ground is tantamount to striking oneself, as it casts a shadow over the entire police force. It is even more serious to strike demonstrators after their arrest and whilst they are being taken to police stations for questioning […] Bear this in mind and spread the word: every time unlawful violence is committed against a demonstrator, dozens of their comrades will seek to avenge them. There is no limit to this escalation.” Letter sent on 29 May 1968 by Maurice Grimaud, Chief of Police, to every officer at the police headquarters during the events of May 1968. In it, he reminded them that certain rules must be observed in the suppression of disturbances and that he would not tolerate certain behaviour.
[5] Lettres luthériennes in le Petit traité pédagogique, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Points Documents, 2002.
[6] Johann Chapoutot, Les irresponsables. Qui a porté Hitler au pouvoir?, Gallimard, 2025.
People are fools
Why is there such complicity with the old Fascism and why such an acceptance of the new Fascism? Because there is – and this is the point – a guiding principle common to both, sincerely or insincerely: that is the idea that the greatest ill in the world is poverty and that therefore the culture of the poorer classes must be replaced by the culture of the ruling class.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 1983
From lundimatin #517, (28/04/2026)
Taking the issue of fascism seriously requires us to consider, at the same time, how we oppose it. Jean-Luc Debry proposes here a demanding form of anti-fascism, that is to say, one that manages to steer clear of both the path of resentment and cheap moral self-righteousness. We do not morallychallenge right-wing culture; we combat it from a higher ethical standpoint, that is to say, a more generous one.
People are fools: The good conscience and the coming fascism
Jean-Luc Debry
The phrase, “People are fools”[1], as it was uttered in a fit of rage fuelled by inconsolable disappointment in the aftermath of elections marked by the Rassemblement national-RN’s [National Rally’s] gains and entrenchment at local level – and in the face of the threats its success poses at the national level should it win the presidential election – is a veritable slogan, almost a manifesto. This bitter observation reflects a slightly disillusioned sense of superiority that could well be one of the explanations for this deep rift, which is fuelling an increasingly threatening trend, especially since Trump has been in the White House and has been trumpeting his determination to impose a contemporary version of fascism with all the trappings of a victorious counter-revolution. It is, it seems to me, in its less explicit but equally relentless version of “we don’t associate with those sorts of people”, the product of antagonists who foster a vindictive atmosphere of very bad omens.
“They’re all fools” conveys a form of muted symbolic violence similar to what in other times was termed “class contempt”. It signifies the powerlessness to stem a desire that is overwhelming Western societies; a reproachful refrain – and one which, in my view, serves as a diagnosis. A cry from the heart already uttered with conviction during the Gilets Jaunes [Yellow Vests] movement. “People are fools!”, the matter is settled. It confirms that “class consciousness” has dissolved itself into a discourse that claims to borrow from its historical legitimacy in order to distance itself from it, a way of dismissing the “affective and emotional subjectivities” that led to this deplorable situation. It is therefore no surprise that a pathetic avatar, brimming with frustrated certainties and “mental resentiment” (sic), that of the cultural conflict pitting the educated middle classes against those they deem unworthy of consideration, after having attempted, with often unconvincing condescension, to persuade them to adopt a habitus “conforming” to its codes – where the cultural has, in a highly problematic manner, become cult-like. This is the manifestation of a sense of superiority conducive to a repulsive stance for those who must submit to the dictates of an elitism disguised as anti-elitism; as if, at the heart of a self-enclosed clique, the self-appointed moral guardians were staging their sense of superiority by sugar-coating it with a display of their condescension.
The least one can say is that generosity is nowhere to be found. The festering contempt is unbearable for those weighed down by it. It creates the conditions for a desire for the negative when it transforms the “no”, as children do, into an affirmation of an existence distinct from that of the mother, as it seeks the path to its own singularity – a path which, as we know, will ensnare more than a few.
An individual’s need to belong to their community is largely underestimated, if not denied outright – in this regard, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s[2] reflections deserve careful consideration when he addresses this subject in his Scritti corsari. The relevance of his remarks, which, alas, rendered him inaudible, earned him the label of reactionary, even as he scrutinised the ravages of standardisation that were levelling “traditional, rural cultures”, crushed by the post-war consumer society – which he considered a form of fascistic dehumanisation in both its ambition and its results, even though the means employed were based on the principle of voluntary servitude. This local claim is regarded as reactionary by nature. It will therefore be mocked, scorned and superbly ignored. It’s all wrong; move along, there’s nothing to see here! To be incapable of considering that “their” lives only make sense if the “people” in question embrace the values, rituals and customs of their community, where they live, and that they are part of an intimate history—that of their family and the place where it has always lived—is a limitation of the mind and the heart, because ideology dehumanises the stances born of the cross-pollination between a patroness and a political commissar. In this sphere, there are roman à clef that open no doors. By judging them from the height of an immodest sense of superiority, whilst they are pitted against a counter-model whose codes they do not possess—notably in the form of an ideologised nomadism that bears the hallmarks of a consumerism of people and places— condemns them to shameful silence or to a form of revolt that reinforces the prosecutors’ status as bearers of “the good word”, ever ready to despise those who resist their convictions. The protagonists, regarding themselves as the inherited custodians of a social history that lives on through them, are locked away, according to the court’s judgement, into a defamatory category without further ado. Do they have any recourse other than to assert an identity which, in itself, is in no way culpable? And yet, it is often reduced to the label: “they’re all fascists” – an ideologised variant of “they’re all fools”. Generosity seems singularly absent when one treads paths where one hardly encounters any sensitive souls capable of understanding anything other than the certainties they regurgitate as a sign of recognition. A Provençal tale is just as good as an African one, isn’t it!; where one praises the distant to better despise one’s neighbours. Then, frustrated by the resistance they put up, we move away, cursing them. “They’re all fools.” A devastating sense of self-righteousness! This is a cult of the distant, at the expense of the nearby stranger, which becomes a comfortable stance in which the proponents of a discriminatory principle recognise themselves. It is true, we must admit, that the “reaction” which consists of responding grumpily: “This is our home!” and “Things used to be better!” does not encourage the development of a sense of sympathy towards “people” who do not listen to the music they ought to, read authors they ought not to, do not eat what they ought to, and drive to work, drink and smoke around a barbecue.
The response, that of the “people” – and therefore “the fools” – rejects the shameful label pinned on them and reacts with a form of vengeful symbolic violence. This is fertile ground on which the emerging neo-fascism thrives, allowing genuine fascists, or those close to them, to capitalise on it. It has become the expression of subjective factors that form part of a conflictual social process which clearly has deep roots and is by no means trivial. Its vindictive rhetoric is reactive, and that is what gives it its strength. It offers an outlet for repressed desires fuelled by resentment. It is of the same nature as the great outburst of football fans, a hateful jubilation that gives pleasure. There is a sort of common paradigm, driven by the ill wind of the desire for revenge of those who, in order to exist, refuse to be placed under a guardianship that denies their social reality and reproaches them for consumerist practices deemed “non-compliant”. We would like them to be ashamed of who they are, even though they are pitifully subjected to a situation over which they have no control and which they have no means of changing. A luxury that is not theirs. And they, out of defiance, out of provocation, give the finger and say “fuck you” to the neo-priestly types who suffocate them with their sanctimoniousness, like school inspectors coming to solicit their votes whilst holding their noses. Everything serves to reinforce a sense of dispossession. Their condition is a cursed fate in which they struggle to survive as best they can with the means at their disposal. The well-off look down on those who barely earn enough to live decently and shop at Lidl, whilst they themselves frequent La Vie Claire and buy overpriced organic produce.
This phrase – “the people are fools” – is an emotional response, powerless to contain the negativity of the stigmatised response that comes back in return. It is, as it were, a case of “the ball being thrown back into the sender’s court”. It evokes what the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, in a book entitled The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in the heat of the moment between 1930 and 1933, analysed as “a desire for fascism”. Mass psychology complements the usual socio-economic analysis by explaining behaviours which, in his view, are not rational but stem from social pathos structured in the depths of the individual unconscious by negative and self-destructive drives. There is a desire for fascism that morality and the culture of good intentions fail to contain. The clear conscience of the educated middle classes is powerless to curb it through an approach guided by “common sense”. The guilty conscience that feeds a sense of guilt turns against them because, as one can guess, “the people are fools”. Nietzsche, too, in his own way, exposed the progressive optimism of his century. He explored the depths of human history by highlighting the role that resentment has played in history, dwelling, with his characteristic vigour, on all the ambiguities contained within moralising good conscience and the mechanisms that drove human communities to action in the way they conceived the dynamics of resentment upon which they founded a problematic moral order. This is fertile ground for demagogic temptations. Resentment, followed by the desire for revenge, opens up avenues for them.
All the more so as there are many reasons to place only limited trust in fine-sounding declarations, including, in particular, those encountered in the world of work with participatory management and in local government with the parodies of participatory democracy. They correspond to the management of focus groups in political discourse through the manipulative methods of managerial ideology and, in both cases—corporate and municipal—its newspeak—ever-present and asserted with bold confidence by its users; a deceptive rhetoric whose devious twists and turns escaped only those who, whether through naivety, stupidity or cynicism, wished to remain oblivious. Highly Marcon inspired methods – complaint books, citizens’ conventions – which led many of us to distance ourselves from this perverse practice of transforming a technique derived from behavioural psychology into collusive conclaves, the aim of which is to make the participants believe, provided they are of good will, that they can influence the crucial decisions affecting them, whilst everything is decided elsewhere and this childish, chatty distraction was merely a way of keeping them occupied so they might “live together harmoniously” within a system whose decisions they were subjected to – such as, for example, choosing the colour of the carpet to make the open-plan office more pleasant, proof of a “human” approach to managing the department; a fiction that left a bitter taste in the mouths of those who agreed to play along. A fool’s game, in truth. The historian Johann Chapoutot reminded us, quite aptly, in his essay Free to Obey: How the Nazis Invented Modern Management[3], that the 1930s in Germany were also a testing ground where the managerial dogmas that would come to define the post-war era in Western companies and states were conceived and put into practice, as if this continuity of deceptive discourse were part of a single narrative arc in which, whatever you say, whatever you do, you will always be the butt of the joke, the joke offered up to the men and women in power who need your enthusiasm and your naive participation to achieve their goal and, not least, to have peace of mind. Power is the realm where narcissistic perverts, a land of hubris, can, backed by ideological rhetoric, stage a will to power that transforms their psychopathic deviance into a competence, or even a quality necessary for its exercise.
Once again, widespread disdain prevails and resentment runs deep. The scars run deep. How much credence can we give to words that mask practices contrary to what they profess, and which serve as a cover for values compatible with an authoritarian and dehumanising system? The betrayal of the intellectuals, in this sphere too, distances us from the honeyed words that revel in humanist vocabulary and claim to listen to a voice that will never be anything other than that of the exploited.
On another front that deprives you just as much of what constitutes you as a subject, an individual’s belonging to their community is effectively nullified – hide that inclination, lest I should see it. They are considered reactionary by nature if the unwelcome idea of claiming that belonging should cross their mind. They will therefore be mocked, despised and haughtily ignored. Yet, admitting that one’s life only makes sense insofar as one embraces the values of one’s community is in no way fascist, and judging this from a presumptuous sense of superiority slams the door in the face of the “locals”, the natives, the heirs to an intimate, generational history that deserves better than this smugness expressed with disdain by consumerist nomads who love only what flatters their egos without ever questioning what drives their desire for power.
And so, for them, the time for resentment has come.
“That sorrow, that dark bitterness that swells within your heart, that bitter force that takes hold of you when you feel powerless in the face of another’s violation of your rules and your ideals: that is resentment, which gives your anger that indignant, accusatory edge, which makes your voice grate in the name of virtue. When this force overcomes you, do not hope to exhaust it by giving it free rein: for it is insatiable, as ravenous as desire itself; it is nothing other than desire tamed by morality, the very energy of morality itself. The law he has broken, the word he has betrayed, is precisely what you believed would ‘hold him in check’, and your resentment is as strong as the sense of your own powerlessness. To take bitter revenge, to undo, to restore the previous state: this is what your now reactive libido sets about doing, day and night. ” wrote François Fourquet in 1974 in the journal Recherches published by the CERFI (Centre d’Etudes, de Recherche et de Formation Institutionnelle), dedicated to “the historical ideal”, when he unsparingly scrutinised the militant ideal and its incarnations since the birth of the labour movement, at a time when left-wing apparatuses – Maoists and Trotskyists – still held sway (sic) and used the hope they claimed to embody as a stepping stone to the exercise of a power which, from daily contact with them, we knew would be devoid of compassion or justice, but in the service of a dogma that was merciless towards dissent – it took us time to realise this, but once the lesson was learnt after a few knocks and after witnessing delaying tactics, manipulation and actions contrary to the most basic democratic principles during the student strikes of the 1970s, the memory never faded. Trust will never return, unless we cultivate a system’s bad faith. For ultimately, what are we talking about, if not structures of power.
The expression of a nihilistic desire elevates the spirit of revenge to a historical ideal. It is a veritable manifesto that accompanies the return of the repressed. It bears the mark of negativity in action, to which a sense of disillusioned superiority responds; a superiority which, at heart, merely confirms its own contemptuous legitimacy—a legitimacy of the same nature, albeit purely reactive. A tragic game of mirrors against a backdrop of “anthropological degradation”, to borrow Pier Paolo Pasolini’s edifying phrase. The cult of hedonism centred on “well-being” and “good living” and its negativity—that of the fools—become a story within a story. The desire for mutual domination that runs through it is put into perspective and acts as a decoy against a backdrop of identity-based claims, “us and them”. This abyss is undoubtedly a symptom of a state of anomie fuelled by a very real sense of dispossession, long present in society and now shaking it to its core, as the Gilets Jaunes [Yellow Vests] movement, despite all its ambiguities, has revealed. This is a cultural crisis in the anthropological sense of the term; a sentiment that must be taken seriously. The false liberation of well-being/wellness state has created a culturally unequal situation that feeds a deep-rooted resentment which, as time goes by, delves ever deeper into the depths of resentment to seek the nourishment necessary for its growth, until it becomes irrational and unintelligible, to the point where invective and hateful slogans, and unabashed racism, serve as a political programme. And, above all, they provide a vindictive jubilation devoid of any sense of restraint or simple honour; a trade in indecency. This is what the far-right media trade in, and which, apparently, seems to suit them so well. They have it all their own way.
Alain de Benoist, a leading figure in the intellectual movement known as the “New Right”, who would play a significant role in establishing an intellectually revitalised far-right discourse, during a symposium organised by GRECE (Le Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne) published in 1982, advocated a “right-wing Gramscian” approach by hijacking the concept of “cultural hegemony” for his own ends. This attempt to appropriate Gramsci’s thought is based on a desire to to make compatible a culture of far-right neo-fascism (a pleonasm) with a political ideology that fought against it and paid the price—that of its freedom and its life. Following in his footsteps with full knowledge of the facts, the billionaire Pierre-Edouard Stérin and his organisation—which funds several identity-based associations and media outlets openly aligned with the radical far right, or to put it bluntly, fascist in nature—and Vincent Bolloré—a close friend of Sarkozy—with his powerful media machine, comprising newspapers, television, radio and publishing – are turning this manipulated desire into fertile ground for utterly uninhibited jubilation that hides neither its intentions nor its desire to capitalise on a favourable situation to pander to the vengeful instincts of a reverse deconstruction. The alignment of the stars is working in favour of their political ambition. Each, in their own way, influences the course of national politics, and subsequently gives their affairs a boost fuelled by ideologically motivated patronage, without any safeguards. Neither appeals to reason, nor appeals to the most basic morality, and even less to professional ethics, seem capable of stemming such a “letting go” that unleashes the basest, most hateful instincts, where shared hatred provides a form of shared pleasure experienced as a collective reward. They indulge in the pleasure this brings. Building a community through the trade in resentment is a political reality that they exploit with a success which raises questions about the unconscious drivers of such a dynamic. They stoke a fever of security and xenophobia with the conviction of a Templar setting out to conquer the Holy Land. This leaves the small trade in happiness and its henchmen literally speechless, as if in the midst of a Pilate-style trial. Faced with this competition, one has to admit that they are no match for them.
The desire for revenge felt by those who, rightly or wrongly, feel discredited by the “theological contempt” (cf. Pasolini) of those who have assumed the role of guides, or even an enlightened vanguard, keeps alive the smouldering embers from which sparks fly in a culture of resentment stoked by a powerful media apparatus that is quite openly neo-fascist, which then reaps the rewards. The radical far right capitalises on the “available minds” won over by this wave rising from the depths of the human soul, minds that have become receptive to its rhetoric. It uses them as a necessary stepping stone to establishing a regime in line with its ideology. He who sows theological contempt (an updated version of class contempt) reaps resentment.
Nothing seems capable of halting this march towards power, which seizes hold of consciences and offers a shared sense of gratification. We will not succeed in containing it by pitting it against a climate of civil war that deepens the fissures threatening the edifice, and for which the fascist gangs are far better equipped, as they are on their home turf: martial virility, military discipline and the maintenance of physical fitness useful for combat. Fighting is their raison d’être. It would be a strategic miscalculation to believe we can compete with them by using their methods. Physical clashes between gangs of supporters (the “ultras”), between rival gangs, conducted in a militarised manner (modelled on the 1930s), in an atmosphere of settling scores between hooligans of different factions, between territorial hooligans, or against a militarised police force behaving itself like a gang intoxicated by its own violence, but better organised, better armed, better prepared and enjoying institutional complacency that amounts to a form of implicit impunity, as was lamented during the repression of the Gilets Jaunes movement, lead only to outcomes with no prospect of victory. A belligerent stance in the tradition of the fascist militias of yesteryear and the OAS, which reinforces and stokes the desire for a fight, is the lifeblood of far-right activists. And, in the course of their duties, it justifies the behaviour of law enforcement units whose sympathies for values akin to those of fascist circles are no secret, and which they never fail to demonstrate whenever the opportunity arises.
The enemy is essentialised on both sides – the racist and the racialised – and the radical nature of the stances appears as a desire to eliminate the adversary in order to demonstrate one’s strength and determination. Those who are not for it are against it; those who are against it are villains, so the end justifies the means. This is not a class-against-class struggle, but an essentialised confrontation that confines everyone within a cultural group that makes them either a chosen one or a supporter of “Evil”. It fits perfectly into the current pseudo-cultural battle, that of an anti-fascism whose legitimacy draws inspiration from the aborted revolutions of the past, against a fascism that is supposedly a modern-day replica of its past, with no connection to the alienation in which a people finds itself—due to the dispossession of its destiny and the dissolution of its culture in globalised standardisation—a people whom one no longer seeks to charm or convince. And it is not references to distant postcolonial or religious conflicts, such as Palestine or Iran, Venezuela or Cuba, that will enable an identification which, in any case, is problematic. Such identification is reserved for the activists and supporters of these distant causes, whether they are just or not.
In this arena – that of violence in the face of fascism – victories are short-lived; they are sometimes tactical but rarely strategic or decisive. They herald devastating defeats in terms of the rule of law. The anti-fascism of the era Gramsci speaks of was, in Italy, rooted in intense social struggles within an insurrectionary climate, as in Germany, which ended in their defeat and the seizure of power by the fascists and Nazis. It is a strange return to the future to believe that things could be any different today, when it is clear that no mass movement is capable of sustaining an anti-fascism sufficiently rooted in society to resist the rise of Mussolini’s heirs and avowed neo-Nazis who, like Quentin Deranque, who was beaten to death whilst lying on the ground (which, after all, raises an ethical issue and creates a sense of unease that is all too quickly dismissed),[4] display preferences that make no secret of their sinister political agenda.
Pasolini, once again, who was inspired by this theme – and with good reason – writes in particular in Lutheran letters[5] that “There exists today a form of archaeological anti-fascism which is, in short, a convenient pretext for awarding oneself a certificate of genuine anti-fascism. This is an easy form of anti-fascism, whose object and aim is an archaic fascism that no longer exists and will never exist again. […] This is why a large part of today’s anti-fascism—or, at least, what is called anti-fascism—is either naïve and stupid, or merely pretextual and in bad faith; for it fights, or pretends to fight, a phenomenon that is dead and buried, archaeological, and can no longer frighten anyone. It is, in short, a form of anti-fascism that is entirely comfortable and unchallenging.”
It was neither a coup d’état nor victorious street fighting that brought the fascist regime in Italy and the Nazi regime in Germany to power (unlike Lenin’s USSR). It is indeed worth remembering that in Italy, the doors of the Italian parliament opened to the Blackshirts because Benito Mussolini was tasked, on 16 November 1922, by King Victor Emmanuel III with forming a government; and that in Germany, on 30 January 1933, it was German President Paul von Hindenburg who appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor within a coalition in which they were not the majority political force following the elections. The political circles, business circles and institutional components of Italian and German society at the time allowed the rise of a power that also had ambitions which appealed to the masses and their desire for fascism, thanks to a mechanism that gave them social credibility, whilst the seizure of power in both cases was based on a legitimacy that ostensibly respected democratic institutions and pretended to combat street violence in the name of order and public tranquillity – creating disorder in order to then present themselves as the party of order. It was the choice of the economic elites (industrialists, financiers, insurers) and the patrimonial elites (rentiers, shareholders) that made the difference. Faced with the KPD (German Communist Party), they utilised the militant strength of the Nazi party, which offered a reassuring counterweight,[6] “and which had to be harnessed at all costs to a resolute defence of the social and economic order. A gamble, in short: as the Nazis were inexperienced, flanking them with shrewd and seasoned politicians made it possible to tame them within the framework of shared power in a coalition government. ‘A coalition that the Austrian loudmouth never accepted’.” “The Nazi solution was favoured by the business world after the elections of 6 November 1932.” Von Papen’s cabinet was a patchwork, unprecedented since 1918, “of the most caricatured elements offered by the patrimonial elites of industrial, banking, agrarian, aristocratic and military capital.”[7]
The seizure of power thus took place on a different level once the people gave in to a desire for revenge, a nihilistic desire, a desire for fascism with its cult of the leader, of force and of arbitrariness. A revenge whose roots lie beyond the realm of reason and which, in its malicious joy and its sad passions, will make resentment the driving force of history by celebrating a deadly cult that will demand its share of sacrificial victims like a bloodthirsty god endowed with an insatiable appetite. The brief Spanish Revolution escaped this disastrous scenario. It was triggered by an anti-fascism rooted in a deep desire for social transformation, championed by the people who held high the libertarian ambitions that animated them, but it was crushed by the two totalitarianisms of the century: fascism and Stalinism, born from the ranks of Leninism, under whose auspices fascism and Stalinist anti-fascism employed the same police, carceral and militaristic mechanisms, served by a swift and arbitrary justice system, all glorified by state lies, the ambition of criminals and the aestheticisation of their deadly desire.
Italian and German antifascism lacked the force that comes from the resentment that drives “the masses” (sic), a desire as a will to political power. A visceral and unspeakable rancor had absorbed rationality, rendering the resistance’s rationality powerless and allowing the catastrophe to appear as the expression of the destructive energy of “the masses”… and what a paradox! – as a liberating revolt. They paid a heavy price: repression, deprivation of freedom of opinion, massacres and senseless wars—in short, the annihilation of simple humanity, in a grandiose display of excessively theatrical displays of force. Only the death of the combatants could stop it; a suicide, in essence.
The gods of resentment were not appeased by the sacrifice of scapegoats and demanded ever more blood to quench their thirst, fuelled by the exaltation of martyrdom freely given in the name of honour and loyalty. And resentment, in its insatiable need for victims, was only further stimulated, never satisfied.
This is the path taken today by Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, while awaiting Europe’s turn to finalise this historical process which, as I write this, seems, alas, well underway, so true is it that everyone appears to be contributing and playing with disconcerting zeal the score of a symphony celebrating the four horsemen of the apocalypse in place of universal salvation. Beyond these possibilities, the subjugation of docile and servile vassals, as seen in Argentina, Chile, and Orban’s Hungary, may be the solution chosen by those who aspire to serve a master whose ambitions they will honour with extreme zeal. This would create a situation of a city-state subjugated to the Empire, until imperial rivalries erupt and transform global chaos into an uncontrollable conflagration.
[1] This is a translation of the French expression, “Les gens sont cons”, with the word “cons” also translatable as “idiots”, “morons”, “assholes”, and the like, depending on the degree of desired vulgarity, or one could assume the English language translation of Samuel Beckett’s Estragon, of Waiting for Godot: “Les gens sont des cons” / “People are bloody ignorant apes”; none of which equal the eloquence of Hilary Clinton’s description of what she considered half of Donald Trump’s supporters during the 2016 US presidential election campaign: “Basket of deplorables”.
[2] Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsair, Collana Memorie documenti, Garzanti, Milano, 1ª ed. 1975; Ecrits corsaires, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Flammarion, 1976.
[3] Johann Chapoutot, Libres d’obéir : le management, du nazisme à aujourd’hui, Gallimard, 2020. [Johann Chapoutot, Free to Obey: How the Nazis Invented Modern Management, Europa Editions, 2023.]
[4] “Striking a protester who has fallen to the ground is tantamount to striking oneself, as it casts a shadow over the entire police force. It is even more serious to strike demonstrators after their arrest and whilst they are being taken to police stations for questioning […] Bear this in mind and spread the word: every time unlawful violence is committed against a demonstrator, dozens of their comrades will seek to avenge them. There is no limit to this escalation.” Letter sent on 29 May 1968 by Maurice Grimaud, Chief of Police, to every officer at the police headquarters during the events of May 1968. In it, he reminded them that certain rules must be observed in the suppression of disturbances and that he would not tolerate certain behaviour.
[5] Lettres luthériennes in le Petit traité pédagogique, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Points Documents, 2002.
[6] Johann Chapoutot, Les irresponsables. Qui a porté Hitler au pouvoir?, Gallimard, 2025.
[7] Op. Cit.