This book has a peculiar background. It began as a long interview recorded in Paris in 2016, in the build-up to a French presidential election that would be dominated by the rise of Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Régis Meyran, a friend and journalist who works for the publisher Textuel, prepared a set of questions that framed our conversations. We met again after Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the US presidential election. Starting from a political anxiety grounded in the present, the interview sought a perspective based on greater historical hindsight. The dramatic rise of the far right in almost all the countries of the European Union powerfully awakens the ghosts of the past and again raises the question: what is fascism? Is it still meaningful to speak of fascism in the twenty-first century? I hope to provide some elements for a provisional answer, to enlighten this dark landscape by connecting the present with its historical premises. Sebastian Budgen from Verso asked me to turn this conversation into a single book, which I did with the agreement of Régis and the help of David Broder, who translated the text from the original French. Thus, I completely reworked the text: reformulating, nuancing, and sometimes updating ideas in light of more recent developments. The genesis of this book explains its French focus—in particular with respect to the questions of immigration, colonialism, and Islamophobia—in spite of its general, all-encompassing historical scope. But this concerns exclusively Part I (‘The Present as History’, a wink to Paul Sweezy), whereas Part II (‘History in the Present’) deals with the ways in which the legacies of fascism, antifascism, and totalitarianism haunt our current intellectual and political debates. It provides a critical analysis of the uses and abuses of these categories in a historiographical realm that is far from being a ‘neutral’ ivory tower standing apart from the sound and fury of the present. The book includes three texts that originally appeared in journals and collected books. A first version of chapter 4 and chapter 6 were published in Constellations (Volume 15, no. 3, 2008) and History and Theory (Volume 56, no. 4, 2017); Chapter 5 was originally included in Rethinking Antifascism, the proceedings of a conference on antifascism edited by Hugo Garcia, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, and Cristina Clímaco (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). This book would not exist without my original conversations with Régis Mayran, David Broder’s translation, and Sebastian Budgen’s suggestion to transform it into a different, English-language text. Many thanks to all of them.