This book outlines the history of the Black International, a secret organisation, directly linked to the Vatican, which brought together the leaders of the Catholic committees in nine European countries. The organisation tried to stem the tide of liberalism, socialism and nationalism that threatened the Catholic Church at the end of the 19th century. The story of the origins, workings and ending of this International at times seems like a detective story. The book offers an extensive discussion of the influence of this organisation on the press policy and the international position of the Vatican. It also explores its impact on the development of militant Catholicism and, through its after-effects in the Union of Fribourg (1884-1891) on the emergence of social Catholicism in Europe. L'Internationale noire était une association secrète qui groupait les chefs de file des comités catholiques de neuf pays européens. Elle essaya de faire front contre les trois courants qui menaçaient l'Eglise catholique à la fin du XIXe siècle: le liberalisme, le socialisme et le nationalisme. Cette Internationale noire dépendait directement du Vatican. Analysant l'histoire de la naissance, du fonctionnement et de la dissolution de cette organisation secrète, le présent ouvrage ressemble quelquefois à un roman policier. Il accorde également une grande attention à l'influence exercée par ce réseau sur la politique de presse et sur la politique internationale du Vatican. Enfin, il évalue son impact sur le développement du catholicisme militant puis, à travers son prolongement dans l'Union de Fribourg (1884-1891), sur la percée du catholicisme social en Europe.

In Socialism of Fools, Michele Battini focuses on the critical moment during the Enlightenment in which anti-Jewish stereotypes morphed into a sophisticated, modern social anti-Semitism. He recovers the potent anti-Jewish, anticapitalist propaganda that cemented the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in the European mind and connects it to the atrocities that characterized the Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the eighteenth century, counter-Enlightenment intellectuals and intransigent Catholic writers singled out Jews for conspiring to exploit self-sustaining markets and the liberal state. These ideas spread among socialist and labor movements in the nineteenth century and intensified during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Anti-Jewish anticapitalism then migrated to the Habsburg Empire with the Christian Social Party; to Germany with the Anti-Semitic Leagues; to France with the nationalist movements; and to Italy, where Revolutionary Syndicalists made anti-Jewish anticapitalism the basis of an alliance with the nationalists. Exemplified best in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous document that "leaked" Jewish plans to conquer the world, the Jewish-conspiracy myth inverts reality and creates a perverse relationship to historical and judicial truth. Isolating the intellectual roots of this phenomenon and its contemporary resonances, Battini shows us why, so many decades after the Holocaust, Jewish people continue to be a powerful political target.