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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 and the role played by several men. They don't want to see that sometimes monstrous events have small causes.

— François Furet Fascism & Communism (2004)

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More quotes by François Furet

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.

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.

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

The fascist movement fed on anticommunism, the communist movement on antifascism. But both shared a hatred for the bourgeois world, which allowed them to unite.

Fascism & Communism (2004)

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

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: François Furet (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.