LE SIÈCLE DES DICTATEURS

To offer a global and innovative view of this absolute form of absolutism, Olivier Guez has brought together an exceptional group of authors. Rather than studying the regimes, he has chosen the biographical approach through the history of their leaders, whether famous or unknown. The result is some twenty informative chapters, well served by the contributors' story-telling skills.

In just five years, from 1917 to 1922, the contemporary world, emerging from the tragedy of the First World War, invented a two-headed monster, red and black – in other words, Soviet communism and fascism, the latter metastasizing into brown with the advent of Nazism in 1933.

While their ideologies differ widely and Nazism is characterized by the specific horror of the Holocaust, these dictatorships have in common a hatred of democracy, loathing for the bourgeoisie and a subsequent rejection of capitalism in favor of a practice of power based on terror – a practice based on a dominant and dominating ideology, despising life and seeking expansion at all costs.

Condemned by history (Hitler's end and the Nuremberg trials for Nazism, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet world in 1991), dictatorships are nonetheless not ready to die, as evidenced by the advent of Iranian theocracy, the long night in Africa or the current tragedy in the Middle East. All continents have had to endure them.

Maps and a time line complete this outstanding book, which is certain to have a long-lasting impact.

A historian, writer and journalist, OLIVIER GUEZ received the Renaudot prize for his latest book La Disparition de Josef Mengele (The Disappearance of Josef Mengele) (Grasset, 2017) with more than 320,000 copies sold in France alone.


LENIN by Stéphane Courtois
MUSSOLINI by Frédéric Le Moal
STALIN by Nicolas Werth
HITLER by Eric Branca
FRANCO by Eric Roussel
PETAIN by Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon
HEDKI TOJO by Pierre-François Souyri
TITO by Jean-Christophe Buisson
THE THREE KIMS by Pascal Dayez-Burgeon
MAO by Rémi Kauffer
ENVER HODJA by François-Guillaume Lorrain
STROESSNER by Emmanuel Hecht
THE DUVALIERS by Catherine Eve Roupert
CASTRO by Elisabeth Burgos and Laurence Debray
MOBUTU by Jean-Pierre Langellier
QADDAFI by Vincent Hugeux
HONECKER by Patrick Moreau
PINOCHET by Michel Faure
POL POT by Jean-Louis Margolin
KHOMEINI by Christian Destremau
SADDAM HUSSEIN by Jérémy André
ASSAD, Father and son by Bernard Bajolet