LES FEMMES
DU FASCISME

A Project

Entry Panel

Les Femmes du Fascisme

This project examines the roles women played in the construction, normalization, and endurance of European fascist movements in the twentieth century.

Rather than focusing on leaders alone, it traces how authoritarian systems relied on women as organizers, cultural architects, moral authorities, symbols of legitimacy, and agents of normalization. In these roles, women were not exceptions to fascism, nor merely its victims. They were integral to how it functioned.

The images presented here adopt the visual languages of their time: discipline, elegance, care, culture, and order. They do not announce themselves as critiques. They mirror how fascism represented itself when it was persuasive, effective, and widely accepted.

This project does not ask whether fascism was extreme.
It asks how it came to feel reasonable.

What follows is not a chronology of atrocities, but a study of conditions — the social, cultural, and moral arrangements that allowed those atrocities to become possible.
Pilar Primo de Rivera

Pilar Primo de Rivera

Spain, 1934–1977
Founder and National Leader, Sección Femenina
“To serve is to command”
Fascism did not exclude women from power.
It redefined power in terms that made women indispensable to its survival.

Pilar Primo de Rivera led the Sección Femenina, the women’s branch of Spain’s Falange, for more than four decades. Under her authority, millions of women were trained, disciplined, and monitored in the name of service, morality, and national regeneration. Obedience was framed not as submission, but as virtue. Domestic labor became civic duty. Self-denial became patriotism.

The slogan “Servir es mandar” — to serve is to command — captures a central paradox of authoritarian systems: authority is most durable when it convinces individuals that compliance is empowerment. Primo de Rivera wielded genuine institutional power while promoting a doctrine that denied women political agency. This contradiction was not incidental; it was structural.

This poster does not depict a victim.
It depicts a function.

From Command to Taste
Spain → Italy  ·  Discipline → Culture
Fascist power does not move in a straight line.
It adapts to whatever a society already trusts.

In Spain, authority was built through discipline, morality, and service. In Italy, it was cultivated through taste, culture, and modernity.

These images do not contradict one another. They complete one another.

Authoritarian systems endure not only by commanding obedience, but by shaping aspiration — deciding what is respectable, what is refined, and what feels inevitable. When power can alternate between command and culture, resistance becomes fragmented: what one person rejects as coercion, another accepts as sophistication.

What follows is not escalation.
It is variation.

Margherita Sarfatti

Margherita Sarfatti

Italy, c. 1926–1938
Writer · Critic · Architect of Fascist Culture
“Art disciplines the nation”
Fascism does not rule by force alone.
It rules by deciding what is refined, modern, and inevitable.

Margherita Sarfatti was not a bureaucrat or a functionary. She was a cultural architect. A prominent art critic and intellectual, Sarfatti helped construct the aesthetic and ideological language of Italian Fascism, shaping how the regime presented itself to artists, elites, and the international public. She curated exhibitions, promoted modernist movements aligned with Fascist values, and authored the first major biography of Benito Mussolini, transforming political power into cultural legitimacy.

Where authoritarian systems rely on discipline to control bodies, they rely on culture to discipline taste. Sarfatti’s influence lay in defining what counted as modern, national, and serious. Under her guidance, Fascism did not appear merely coercive; it appeared cultivated.

This poster does not command.
It judges.

Placed beside images of overt authority, Sarfatti reveals a quieter mechanism of power: the normalization of ideology through elegance, intellect, and cultural authority. When power learns to speak fluently in the language of art, resistance becomes unsophisticated — and exclusion begins to feel like discernment.

From Taste to Proximity
Italy → France  ·  Culture → Distance
Culture does not require loyalty to function.
It requires proximity.

In Italy, fascist power was cultivated through aesthetics, intellect, and modernity. Culture did not merely decorate authority; it disciplined taste and determined legitimacy. To belong was to appear correct.

But culture also offers a quieter advantage: it allows power to be approached without commitment.

What follows is not ideology, but adjacency. Not belief, but benefit. Fascism here does not ask to be endorsed. It asks only to be useful.

When authority becomes elegant, collaboration no longer needs conviction.
It needs access.

Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel

France, 1940–1944
Designer · Cultural Figure · Collaborator
“Order is elegant”
Collaboration does not always announce itself as ideology.
Sometimes it presents itself as discretion.

During the German occupation of France, Coco Chanel resided at the Hôtel Ritz, a location reserved for senior German officers and collaborators. Her personal relationship with a German intelligence officer granted her protection, mobility, and access unavailable to most Parisians. While her fashion house remained closed during the war, Chanel actively pursued personal and financial interests, including attempts to reclaim control of her perfume business under antisemitic “Aryanization” laws imposed by the occupation.

Chanel did not speak publicly for fascism, nor did she organize on its behalf. Her collaboration operated through proximity rather than proclamation. She benefited from the conditions of occupation while maintaining aesthetic and social distance from the regime itself — a posture that allowed deniability without risk.

This poster does not depict belief.
It depicts alignment.

Placed alongside images of ideological conviction and institutional authority, Chanel represents a different mode of participation: collaboration as survival strategy, opportunism as neutrality, elegance as insulation. In such cases, power does not require loyalty — only usefulness.

When order becomes profitable, silence becomes a position.

From Distance to Normalization
Individual → State  ·  Discretion → Administration
When collaboration no longer requires individuals, it becomes policy.

Personal discretion can protect those close to power. But systems do not rely on discretion alone. They endure by redistributing responsibility until no single choice feels decisive.

What was once navigated privately becomes administered publicly. What was once optional becomes routine. Authority moves from salons and hotels into schools, offices, and homes.

This is the moment where fascism stops being selective and becomes infrastructural.

Distance is no longer required.
Participation becomes ordinary.

Vichy France

Vichy France

France, 1940–1944
Allegory · Administration · Moral Infrastructure
Fascism does not always appear as force.
Sometimes it appears as care.

The Vichy regime governed not primarily through spectacle or mass mobilization, but through normalization. Authority was framed as protection. Obedience was framed as responsibility. Collaboration was rendered administrative, domestic, and moral.

In Vichy propaganda, the state was imagined as a guardian: organizing families, guiding children, preserving tradition, and transmitting values. These images did not demand belief. They asked for trust. In doing so, they dissolved the distinction between private life and political power.

This poster contains no villain, no threat, and no explicit ideology. That absence is intentional. Fascism here operates without passion or charisma — embedded in paperwork, education, public health, and routine. Participation becomes habitual. Resistance becomes impolite.

This image does not persuade.
It reassures.

Placed after figures of conviction, culture, and collaboration, Vichy reveals fascism at its most durable: not as an exception, but as a system that presents itself as necessary, reasonable, and maternal.

When authority feels protective, submission feels like gratitude.

From Reassurance to Inevitability
State Normalization → Biological Consequence
When obedience becomes routine, the system no longer needs to persuade.
It classifies.

Under Vichy, authority appeared as care — protective, administrative, maternal. Participation became ordinary. Resistance became impolite.

But normalization is not the final stage. It is the condition that makes the final stage possible. When a society has learned to comply through care, convenience, and routine, it can be reorganized through classification without resistance.

What follows does not command. It does not reassure. It does not judge.
It defines.

Germany: The Ideal Type

The Ideal Type

Germany, 1933–1945
Classification · Optimization · Permanence
When ideology becomes design, belief is no longer required.

The final image in this sequence does not depict an individual. It depicts a category.

Under the Third Reich, the feminine was not celebrated but classified. Womanhood was reduced to biological function, racial designation, and reproductive capacity. The regime did not merely assign roles to women — it defined which women qualified as women at all. Beauty was not personal; it was diagnostic. Health was not private; it was hereditary. Motherhood was not chosen; it was optimized.

The geometric abstraction of this image is not decorative. It is structural. The figure is idealized not to inspire admiration, but to establish a standard against which all others are measured, categorized, and excluded. This is authority speaking in the language of biology and design — where persuasion has been replaced by classification, and compliance has been replaced by inevitability.

This poster does not persuade.
It classifies.

By the time a system can define what a person should look like, believe, and produce — and present that definition as nature rather than ideology — it has already succeeded. What preceded this image made it possible. What follows it is not escalation. It is maintenance.

Every portrait in this exhibition depicted someone else.

This one does not.

The final image requires no screen.
It is already looking back at you.

The question it leaves you with is not who believed,
but what was allowed to become normal.

Fascism does not announce itself as an ending.
It presents itself as a solution.

Across these images, authority changes its language. It moves from discipline to culture, from elegance to administration, from reassurance to inevitability. At no point does it require universal hatred or mass hysteria. It requires only repetition, legitimacy, and time.

This project does not ask whether fascism is evil. It asks how it becomes acceptable.

If the final image feels distant, impersonal, or inevitable, consider what preceded it. No single poster produced this outcome. Each made the next one possible.

The mirror this exhibition offers is not historical.
It is structural.

The question it leaves you with is not who believed, but what was allowed to become normal.

Fascism does not survive by convincing everyone.

It survives by making resistance feel unnecessary.

When Power Stops Persuading

Fascism is often remembered through its excesses: mass rallies, uniforms, symbols, and violence. These images persist because they allow for moral clarity and historical distance. They suggest that fascism announces itself loudly, that it arrives already monstrous, and that its appeal lies in irrationality.

This exhibition proposes a more disturbing interpretation.

Fascism succeeds not by rejecting a society’s values, but by inhabiting them.

Across Europe, women played essential roles in this process. They organized populations, shaped cultural legitimacy, normalized obedience, and translated ideology into everyday life. In some cases, they wielded institutional authority; in others, they provided aesthetic, moral, or social insulation for power. These roles were not peripheral. They were structural.

The sequence of images in Les femmes du fascisme traces a progression from persuasion to inevitability. Authority begins as discipline — framed as service and virtue. It becomes culture — framed as refinement and modernity. It adopts elegance and discretion, allowing collaboration without declaration. It enters the domestic and administrative sphere, where obedience feels like care. Finally, it dispenses with persuasion altogether, reducing society to classification and optimization.

The final image does not depict fanaticism. It depicts clarity.

By the time ideology speaks in the language of biology and design, belief is no longer required. The system has already succeeded. What remains is maintenance.

This progression challenges the assumption that fascism is sustained by hatred alone. Hatred may mobilize, but normalization sustains. The most durable authoritarian systems are those that do not feel authoritarian at all.

The women depicted in this exhibition are not presented as anomalies. They are presented as evidence: that power does not always dominate from above, but circulates through culture, care, and legitimacy. When these domains align, violence becomes administrative rather than exceptional.

The mirror this exhibition holds up is not historical nostalgia. It is structural warning.

The question it leaves unresolved is not whether fascism can return, but whether societies recognize it while it is still persuading — or only after it has stopped.

Curatorial Thesis & Ethical Position

Project Overview

Les femmes du fascisme is a visual and curatorial investigation into how fascist systems in Europe mobilized women to stabilize power across political, cultural, and domestic domains. The project spans Spain, Italy, France, and Germany, tracing a structural progression rather than a national comparison.

The exhibition argues that fascism did not rely solely on coercion or mass hysteria. It embedded itself through legitimacy, taste, care, administration, and normalization — domains in which women played decisive roles.

Thesis

Fascism persists not because it is irrational, but because it is adaptive. Across different national contexts, authoritarian systems aligned themselves with preexisting values: morality and service; culture and refinement; elegance and discretion; domestic care and administration; biological inevitability.

Women were central to these alignments. Whether as leaders, ideologues, collaborators, or symbolic figures, they translated authoritarian power into forms that felt ethical, modern, respectable, or necessary.

Structural Logic

  • Discipline (Spain) — Authority framed as moral duty and service.
  • Culture (Italy) — Authority legitimized through aesthetics, modernism, and intellectual life.
  • Distance (France — Individual) — Authority navigated through discretion, benefit, and plausible deniability.
  • Normalization (France — State) — Authority rendered administrative, domestic, and reassuring.
  • Consequence (Germany) — Authority reduced to optimization, classification, and permanence.

The exhibition’s structure is cumulative. Each section does not contradict the previous one; it makes it functional.

Ethical Position

This project does not aestheticize fascism to rehabilitate it, nor does it caricature it to reassure the viewer. It deliberately adopts historical visual restraint to demonstrate how authoritarian power looked when it worked.

By refusing sensationalism, the exhibition denies the viewer moral distance. The absence of explicit villains, slogans, or shock imagery is intentional. The goal is recognition, not outrage.

Intended Impact

Visitors should leave with an understanding of fascism as a system, not a deviation; awareness of how ordinary values can be reorganized into authoritarian infrastructure; and discomfort rooted in familiarity rather than horror.

Questions & Answers

Les femmes du fascisme examines how women participated in, legitimized, and normalized fascist systems in twentieth-century Europe. Rather than focusing on atrocities or leaders alone, the exhibition studies the conditions that allowed authoritarian power to function — cultural, moral, domestic, and administrative — and the roles women played within those structures.

The project is not about assigning novelty or exceptionality to women’s involvement. It is about recognizing how power operates through everyday legitimacy.

No. The exhibition does not isolate women as uniquely culpable, nor does it frame them as passive victims. It examines women as participants within broader systems of power, in roles that were often decisive precisely because they appeared non-threatening, moral, or apolitical.

The exhibition’s argument is structural, not accusatory.

Because fascism does not begin with brutality. It begins with persuasion, normalization, and legitimacy.

By adopting the visual languages fascist systems used when they were effective — discipline, elegance, care, culture — the exhibition reveals how authority looked before it required force. This approach avoids sensationalism and prevents viewers from distancing themselves emotionally from the subject.

The absence of violence is not denial; it is diagnosis.

Aestheticization becomes a problem when it obscures power or rehabilitates ideology. This exhibition does the opposite: it shows how aesthetics were instrumental to fascism’s success.

By refusing parody or exaggeration, the work denies viewers the comfort of ridicule. The images are unsettling precisely because they are coherent, restrained, and historically grounded. That discomfort is intentional and necessary.

The structure reflects how authoritarian systems evolve.

The exhibition begins with identifiable figures and roles — discipline, culture, collaboration — and moves toward normalization and finally consequence. As the system matures, individual belief becomes less relevant. What remains is infrastructure.

The final image does not depict belief or persuasion. It depicts completion.

Germany represents not escalation, but resolution.

Placed at the end, it appears not as an anomaly or exception, but as the logical outcome of processes already normalized elsewhere. The exhibition resists the idea that fascism was uniquely German or historically isolated. Instead, it shows how similar mechanisms operate across contexts, adapting to local values.

Viewers are encouraged to reflect on how normalization, cultural legitimacy, and administrative authority function in any era. The work does not instruct audiences what to think — it invites them to recognize patterns.

There is no prescribed emotional response.

The exhibition avoids shock, outrage, or catharsis. Instead, it encourages attentiveness. If visitors feel unsettled without being able to point to a single moment of rupture, that response reflects the exhibition’s thesis.

Most treatments emphasize extremity, collapse, or violence. Les femmes du fascisme focuses on durability.

It examines how fascism functioned when it was stable, persuasive, and administratively ordinary — and how that stability depended on legitimacy transmitted through culture, care, and routine.

An understanding that authoritarian systems do not rely solely on coercion or fanaticism. They rely on alignment — with values people already trust.

The exhibition leaves visitors not with answers, but with a sharpened awareness of how power becomes acceptable.

It is intended as a study.

Any warning emerges from recognition, not instruction.