The Marquis de Mores was a French aristocrat born in 1858 whom the Italian academic Sergio Luzzatto, in his book "The First Fascist", argues was an important antecedent to Mussolini and Hitler in Italy and Germany respectively. In his penchant for hierarchical order, identity politics, conspiracy theories, incitement to racial hatred and the use of body language and aesthetics to project power, Mores anticipated the worst actors of the 20th century.
Mores was a "serial failure". After a stint in the cavalry, he set off to America to become a cattle rancher, then poured energy—and other people's money—into impractical projects such as a meat co-operative and a railway along the Indochinese border. Needing someone to blame for his failures, he became a rabid antisemite.
After his return to France in 1889, he found the country in a febrile mood following the collapse of Union Générale, a bank, in 1882, which had been blamed on Jewish financiers. Portraying himself as a revolutionary socialist fighting for the dispossessed, Mores led violent demonstrations and challenged prominent Jews to duels, murdering one.
Mores used the image of the fasces—a bundle of rods that were a symbol of power in ancient Rome—arguing that the fasces had to be rebuilt. In the 19th century the symbol had come to represent the organic bond between the different components of a national group.
Mores left for Africa and wrote a polemic, "The Secret of Foreign Exchange". He quarrelled over a camel with nomads in the Tunisian desert and was slain in an ambush. His French followers saw him as a martyr.
Of course he was all in favour of Armageddon in *general* terms.