Q: Can we consider the IIIrd Republic proto-fascist?

As TRH said. Your claim that "It's interesting to note that the countries that became fascist were relatively recent and in need of a national identity" also has Spain and Portugal as prime counterexamples. And perhaps Japan, although it's arguable how well fascism as a ideology translates into the East Asian political landscape.
I knew I was forgetting something, I concede the point.
 
I think you're confusing Fascism with Nazism, the pre-war Italian Fascists weren't eliminationist.
Not to the point of physical elimination (at least outside of colonial wars and the repression of the Libyan insurgency in particular), but Italian fascism spent a lot of effort in trying to erase the German cultural identity from Alto Adige-South Tyrol as well as the Slovenian/Croat identities from the new territories on the Eastern border. Later on they even tried to italianize Albania. This included changing place (still a contentious issue in Südtirol/Alto Adige) and sometimes birth names to Italian ones and prohibiting non-Italian cultural expressions.
 
Not to the point of physical elimination (at least outside of colonial wars and the repression of the Libyan insurgency in particular), but Italian fascism spent a lot of effort in trying to erase the German cultural identity from Alto Adige-South Tyrol as well as the Slovenian/Croat identities from the new territories on the Eastern border. Later on they even tried to italianize Albania. This included changing place (still a contentious issue in Südtirol/Alto Adige) and sometimes birth names to Italian ones and prohibiting non-Italian cultural expressions.
But didn't that mean assimilating the locals? It wasn't about pushing away other cultures but forcing them to conform
 
Not really. Nationalism is a key element of Fascism and pre-French Revolution the Kingdoms of Europe were about the Divine Right of Kings rather than the National Destiny of the Volk. There were similarities but the underlying ideological foundation was very different. Even if you did a tour of Europe in 1860 the Second Empire is an outlier among the Great Powers.
Britain is a quasi democracy, libertarian, free market and remarkably pacific for a global superpower, it doesn't really tick any.
Prussia ticks the Authoritarian and Militarist boxes but it is not Nationalist, 1848 and refusing to "take a crown from the gutter" isn't very long ago also while it isn't Britain it is more democratic than the Second Empire. It's also too Monarchist.
Russia is anti-democratic, authoritarian and militarist again but it isn't corporatist, it's feudal* and it's the purest example of Monarchical Divine Right rather than popular nationalism as an ideological foundation (though there are plenty of Slavic Nationalists around, they just aren't in charge).
The Hapsburg Empire is a multiethnic confederation and the government is ruthlessly stamping down on any sign of nationalism, it's also fairly feudal.
Italy ticks a few more of the boxes, Corporatist, Nationalist, Assimilationist and Militarist but it doesn't really tick the authoritarian, anti-democratic box. The Royal Government wary of democratic forces but freedom of the press is relatively strong and Parliament does matter and does have power.

*By feudal I mean government and political power is restricted to the old High Aristocracy, unlike Fascist Corporatism with it's embrace of industrialists, bankers, entrepreneurs, the professions even trade unions.

Britain post 1830's Reform Act is certainly more of a liberal state, but I diden't say it wasen't. In the late 18th and early 19th century it was as merchantalist as they come and still highly restrictive. In Prussia, the King was beating the drum of German Unification neigh constantly: when the Potato Riots broke out in Berlin it was the first thing he turned to, and played that card almost constantly in his policy fencing with the revolutionaries/protestors when they pressed for lightening up censorship or increasing suffrage. The fact he diden't want to trade in his actually powerful throne for a virtually worthless symbolic title under the Frankfurt Constitution is no sign he was anti-unification: just that he wanted it on authoritarian terms. Both of these are also post French Revolution though, so not what I was arguing.

As for Russia, Feudalism is the epidomy of corporitism in the sense I was interpretting it: a system in which political power and rights are assigned based on one's membership in the classes/corperate groups of people, and those groups interact politically with one another as collectives. Fedualism is all about codifying these relations. The fact Russia's economy at that point was still too underdeveloped for those financial and proffesional classes to exist in large numbers as distinct, wealthy, influential groups hardly precludes the structural model from being use:authority and rights are just distributed differently
 

Md139115

Banned
I think Mussolini summed up the difference between the French Third Republic and himself best:

“After socialism, Fascism trains its guns on the whole block of democratic ideologies, and rejects both their premises and their practical applications and implements. Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage. Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces. Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical, and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant... In rejecting democracy, Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism, the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress.“

Source: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm

You know that statement “All men are created equal,” or the French equivalent “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité?” One of the bedrock principles of fascism is that these are wrong.
 
What about Romania?

They made life difficult for the people in power, but never ruled on their own. During the '30s they were quite a nuisance, they assassinated 2 or 3 prime ministers, a minister of justice, and the head of the state security services after several governments tried to ban them. The feeling was mutual, the King cracked down on them hard by the end of the decade. By 1939 the original leadership had been eliminated because they were "shot while trying to escape from jail" like Corneliu Codreanu.
The Legion advocated an alliance with Nazi Germany, but the Romanian government was pro-French before the militarization of the Rhineland, and tried to stay neutral after that. German-Romanian relations are a good case study of conflicting priorities from different parts of the government. Hitler and the Nazi party preferred to work with the King or a dictator like Antonescu. The SS, on the other hand, was ideologically sympathetic to the Iron Guard.

Many of the second tier leadership like Horia Sima who survived the crackdowns of the late '30s fled Romania for Germany, where they also received funding and support from the SS and Rosenberg.

The Iron Guard was brought into power in September 1940 as a kind of junior partner, but Antonescu was still the in driver's seat. Fascists promised a revolutionary transformation once they were in office, so being in government but unable to deliver on their message torpedoes a lot of their popular support. Romania's government is like if the Nazi-DNVP coalition from early in '33 had actually lasted with Von Papen and the conservatives still in control.

The Iron Guard attempted to launch a coup in January 1941 by seizing a couple ministries in Bucharest, but the attempt only lasted 3 days. Guardists also launched a brutal pogrom against the Jews of Bucharest to try and portray their enemies as being on the same side as the Jews, a massive negative in the eyes of Romania's antisemitic peasantry.

Antonescu, a mildly antisemitic dictator who promised to ally with Germany and retake Romania's lost territories, was close enough to the fascist promise that most would-be fascist supporters settled for the conservative authoritarian instead and he co-opted much of their platform.
 
Can we consider the early twentieth century Third Republic proto-fascist? Obviously, no. Frequent elections in which everyone from the SFIO to the extreme right participated--and which actually brought about changes in government--are incompatible with fascism. (Fascism, whatever else may be said about it--and in the nature of things, it is harder to define than, say, Communism [1]--does require dictatorship. Sorry to state such an obvious point, but somehow some people seem to be missing it...)

Were there some people with proto-Fascist views? Arguably, yes--but so what? One could say the same thing about almost any democratic or semi-democratic country in the early twentieth century.

[1] It will always be debatable whether a particular regime was "Fascist" given that as Stanley Payne writes "There was no fascist international equivalent to the Comintern, no single international center and orthodoxy such as that provided by the Soviet Union, no single bible of fascism equivalent to the writings of Marx and Lenin." https://books.google.com/books?id=Lv0AQzbnRlUC&pg=PA199
 
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