Coup d’Etat: The technique of revloution

Description

Curzio Malaparte would have fit nicely into our modern age of fluid political ideologies. First an Internationalist, later a Fascist, and finally a Catholic Maoist, Malaparte had an admirable talent to antagonize any political movement he fell in. Described by Leon Trotsky as a “fascist theoretician”, there is an ideological independence within Malaparte’s writing that resists characterization. A dandy, a freethinker, a lover of political intrigue and enemy of all bigoted orthodoxies, Malaparte remains one of the most unappreciated writers of the last century.

In Coup d’Etat, Malaparte attempts to study the means by which a coup can be won or lost, by comparing eight different examples. More dramatist than historian, each chapter is framed as a dramatic dialogue between different historical actors. Here Trotsky and Lenin debate the necessity of historical materialism in carrying out a succesful coup d’etat (Trotsky would later remark that “It is hard to believe that such a book has been translated into several languages and taken seriously.“), there Gustav Bauer muses over the necessity of historical materialism in preventing one.