François Furet Quotes

François Furet was a French historian and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, best known for his books on the French Revolution.

Furet was elected to the Académie française in March 1997, just three months before he died in July. Wikipedia

✵ 27. March 1927 – 12. July 1997

François Furet: 12 quotes0 likes

Famous François Furet Quotes

“The American people were possessed by the capitalist spirit without ever having had a bourgeoisie; French political society, in contrast, created a bourgeoisie devoid of the capitalist spirit.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 7

“The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 4

“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 bourgeoisie. The doctrine was cast as post-Marxist, not as pre-liberal.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 175

“Nazism was a form of Bolshevism turned against its initial form.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 205

“What was new about Hitler and Stalin was what Friedrich Meinecke, in an attempt shortly after World War II to express his horror at Hitler’s moral nihilism, called a ‘Machiavellianism of the masses.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p.191

“Hitler did a better job than Stalin of accomplishing Lenin’s totalitarian promises—better, too, than Mussolini,…”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 205

François Furet Quotes

“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.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p.191

“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 regimes. Not only were they comparable, but they form a political category of their own, which has become established since Hannah Arendt.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 180

“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, the submission of the individual to the collectivity, and finally the bitterness of futile or betrayed sacrifices.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p.163

“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, of history was that both totalitarian regimes, identical in their aim for absolute power over dehumanized beings, presented themselves as protection from the danger presented by the other.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), pp. 205-06

“Nazism was a German form of Bolshevism.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 207

“In many thundering discourses, Hitler expressed his respect, if not admiration for Stalinist Communism and its leader.”

François Furet

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 191

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