François Furet

"It was in Nazi Germany that Bolshevism was perfected; there, political power truly absorbed all spheres of existence, from the economy to religion, from technology to the soul. The irony, the tragedy,…"

"After all, in my country as well, and in democratic Europe, fascism, a fortiori in its Nazi form, was a more or less taboo subject for the historian. I mean that the moral condemnation directed agains…"

"In Fascism, as in Communism, the idea of the future was based on a critique of bourgeois modernity… It rose from a variety of currents and from authors of very different origins, all of whom demonized…"

"The historians of our era, obsessed by the determinist idea and by the sociological conception of history, often tend to misjudge what was accidental in the European tragedy in the twentieth century a…"

"Born of war, both Bolshevism and Fascism drew their basic education from war. They transferred to politics the lessons of the trenches: familiarity with violence, the simplicity of extreme passions, t…"

"The idea of the October Revolution as the product of a plot of international Judaism is part of this type of representation. I don’t deny for an instant that there were numerous Jewish militants on th…"

"The fact that Communism and Fascism assigned contradictory roles to history and reason—the emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of the Aryan race—mattered little."

"To understand this relationship we may start with what has become an accepted observation: Stalinized Bolshevism and National Socialism constitute the two examples of twentieth-century totalitarian re…"