“If there is an avant-garde within the historiography of modern European culture, then Mark Antliff is one of its luminaries. This remarkable book contributes in a scholarly and exciting way to the history of ideas, art, visual culture, and politics, while enriching comparative studies in both modernism and generic fascism. The complex and ideologically sophisticated fascist milieu of inter-war France has finally been released from the prison of intellectual history: French fascism’s distinctive personality is revealed as a nexus of visionary artistic, social, and cultural schemes to regenerate the nation’s productive dynamism in a way that would heal the degeneracy of the age and place the nation at the cutting edge of modernity.”—Roger Griffin, author of Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler “This outstanding study adds an important dimension to our understanding of French fascism. Mark Antliff deftly identifies a variety of ways in which fascists in France and elsewhere activated myths of the past to propel challenging yet seductive visions of achievable futures. This approach is not only crucial to a better grasp of the real causes of fascism’s success in the early twentieth century; it also implies a similar alertness to the threats—and the appeal—posed by the fundamentalisms that seek power in apparently democratic societies today.”—Terry Smith, editor of In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity “The book is superb on cultural politics and the various fascist discourses on art and culture in the interwar period. . . . Avant-Garde Fascism is an important and accomplished work, and it is definitely required reading for anyone interested in either fascism or modern art.”
Ihor Junyk
Journal of Modern History