Séminaire | European Forum on US History

From Respectability to the Fringe: The Far Right in the Interwar Era

Speaker: Olivier Burtin (Université de Picardie Jules Verne/Sciences Po-Paris)

Host: Dario Fazzi (Leiden University / Roosevelt Institute for American Studies)

Organized by: European Forum on US History (American Studies Center, University of Warsaw · LAB-USA, University of Bologna · CHSP, Sciences Po · Instituto Franklin-UAH · Roosevelt Institute for American Studies · Rothermere American Institute · University of Southern Denmark)

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Dr. Olivier Burtin is Associate Professor of U.S. history and civilization at Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France) and an affiliated researcher at the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po. He is currently working on a survey of the US far right and a co-edited volume entitled War in Modern U.S. History: A Transatlantic Perspective (forthcoming with Ohio University Press). He is the author of A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the bilingual journal Politique Américaine, and his own work has appeared in a number of publications such as Journal of Contemporary History, Journal of Right-Wing Studies, and Reviews in American History. 

This talk is based on a chapter of a larger book project about the history of the US far right. The paper examines the American far right in the interwar period as a formative moment in its modern development. It argues that far-right movements were not marginal but deeply embedded in mainstream political and social life, most notably through the mass mobilization of the second Ku Klux Klan. In the 1920s, these actors largely operated in defense of an existing racial and national order, often in alignment with state authority. The crises of the 1930s, however, fostered a partial shift toward more oppositional and sometimes revolutionary forms of activism, shaped by the New Deal, the Great Depression, and the global rise of fascism.