Fascism in Europe and Beyond by Baxa Paul;

Author:Baxa, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2025-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Fascism and Its Imitators

A Meeting in Montreux

The town of Montreux sits at the western edge of Lake Geneva, part of the so-called Swiss Riviera. Since the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloïse in 1761, this sleepy enclave nestled between the lake and the foothills of the Swiss Alps has become a site of pilgrimage for European romantics. The medieval castle on the shores of the lake was the setting for Lord Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon,” based on the true story of a Genevan monk chained in the tower during the Wars of Religion. In 1906, to cater to tourists who found Montreux a place of escape, one of Europe’s great grand hotels, the Palace, opened not far from the castle. It was there, in this massive, two hundred and thirty room Art Nouveau resort that a group of men, representing thirteen countries descended on December 17, 1934, to take part in a singular conference held in one of the hotel’s fifteen meeting rooms.

The occasion was a meeting of the Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalità di Roma (CAUR), an organization founded in Mussolini’s Rome to foster a “universal fascism,” aimed at bringing together fascist parties and movements from European countries and beyond. Created in 1932, on the occasion of the fascist regime’s Decennale, the CAUR hoped to create links between fascist movements via the myth of Rome, a better option than the idea of a Fascist International first floated in the 1920s (Kallis 2016). The organization’s statutes called for a “spiritual alliance that will give the world, still tormented and full of discord, its political restoration and civic and social salvation” (Kallis 2016). To this congress came fascist leaders from all parts of Europe. These included representatives from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Spain, Lithuania, and Switzerland (Ledeen 1972, 114–15).

That CAUR should hold its congress in the swanky Palace Hotel in Montreux seemed a curious location to forge a “spiritual alliance.” The hotel reflected the crass materialism that many of these movements rejected. The Palace Hotel and the Swiss Riviera were haute bourgeois, which contradicted the social and moral revolution hoped for by the fascists. One Italian fascist, writing to Galeazzo Ciano, the Minister of Press and Propaganda, complained of the locale as an underhanded means of getting people to come to the congress (Ledeen 2002, 124). For those who looked deeper, the location reflected some of the deeper aspirations of fascism. Lake Geneva and its surroundings had long pandered to fantasies of making a new world. From the “New Jerusalem” of Jean Calvin’s Geneva, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the lake and its surrounding mountains and densely wooded slopes appealed to those who hoped for a new world and a New Fascist Man instead of the materialist cities of the West. Montreux, in contrast to the austerity of Geneva, attracted those who longed for escape. The Palace Hotel was a refuge for Russian emigres fleeing Bolshevism, as well as other exiles who dreamed of a different world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.