Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
The Friendly Fascist
By Robert O. Paxton
Communism and Collaboration: Simon Sabiani and Politics in Marseille, 1919-1944
by Paul Jankowski
Yale University Press, 240 pp., $27.50
Simon Sabiani was a Corsican neighborhood boss in Marseille from the 1920s until the end of the German occupation in 1944. Emerging from World War I having lost an eye but having gained many decorations along with a passionate hatred for war and the establishment, the young immigrant found his first political home in the Marseille branch of the new Communist party. He was the first Communist elected to a city office, that of neighborhood assemblyman, in 1922. Like many other unruly first recruits, Sabiani grew restive under the Party's increasing rigidity and dogmatism. He left it in the spring of 1923, taking along his neighborhood following to found his own Parti socialiste-communiste, half a party and half a personal clique.
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