Abstract

The current wave of extreme nationalism in France should dispel any illusions that fascism was a phenomenon which began and ended with Nazism. Although focused on the period between the wars, Kaplan's engrossing if diffuse study of French fascism bears a disturbing relevance to the contemporary French political scene, where the ultrareactionary National Front is spreading its xenophobic gospel — “La France aux Francois!” — with alarming success.

Working with categories borrowed from developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, Kaplan ascribes the popularity of fascism to what she calls its “mother-bound” elements, which evoke the oceanic feeling that Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, associates with the relationship between an infant and its mother.