Words matter — that’s how we might sum up this important book by Joseph Fronczak, a research scholar and lecturer in the Department of History at Princeton University. Because words have a performative value, especially a word like “antifascism” that means “only what people make of it and [is] meaningful only to the extent that we make it so.”¹ Caught between the hammer of the various public and political uses of the term from the 1930s onward and the anvil of its universalizing scope, an analysis of antifascism is hampered by the term’s extraordinary plasticity. The heterogeneity of the studies devoted to antifascism has not fostered a comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon, which “stands out for remaining so little understood.” The relative absence of global analyses has fueled an ever-growing debate over the characteristics of antifascism and its legacy. But it is also true that this is a complex story, because of the diversity of antifascist organizing and of the values expressed by antifascists, and it’s a challenge that Fronczak’s book undoubtedly meets in analyzing antifascism all around the world.

Fronczak begins by confronting the idea that antifascism can be reduced to a tool in the hands of communism, identified purely and simply with its Comintern version, itself described as strictly criminal. This reading, which can be traced back to the 1980s, was the product of a d on a “historical paradigm” of anti-communism and its corollary, anti-antifascism.² Aware that the best response to the delegitimization of antifascism is to reinscribe its history in the analysis of a concrete political movement, Fronczak rightly insists on a reading of antifascism “from below.” Throughout these three-hundred-some pages, the author describes a movement rooted in its time, carried forward by men and women who knew at a given moment not to wait helplessly for the night to pass. They were certainly a minority, but not an insignificant one. Fronczak does not underestimate the role antifascism played as a party-building tool within the German Communist Party (KPD) as well as the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). “The leaders of both parties,” writes Fronczak, “wielded the idea of antifascist solidarity rather cynically, so as to boost their own party and bury the other.” The main result of the instrumental role they gave to antifascism can be summed up as “how not to fight fascism.”

However, Fronczak is not interested in the bureaucratic apparatuses of the parties but rather in what flowed underneath, that is to say, the “popular antifascism made of real determination and feeling,” that existed without the need for any prior doctrine — simply put, antifascism in the making, even before the activists involved identified themselves as antifascists, even before they used the noun “antifascism” to distinguish this particular type of militancy. Fronczak’s approach to antifascism is, in a way, like that of historian Anson Rabinbach, who insisted in a seminal article that antifascism was “less an ideology than a mentalité, more of a habitus than a doctrine.”³ Fronczak situates the genesis of this existential antifascism in Parma in August 1922, when the entire population, men and women (but especially women), rose up in support of the Arditi del Popolo resistance movement against the attempted occupation of the city by fascist squads. This event took place two years after the same fascist squads had succeeded in ousting Bologna’s elected socialist council from the city’s town hall (the Palazzo d’Accursio).