ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to center author's research on the decade-and-a-half immediately before Peron's appearance on the political scene. As any scholar who works with old periodicals soon learns, some of the most useful information is gleaned not from articles dealing with the ostensible subject of the research but from the apparently superfluous addenda—even social notes or advertisements. Like Romania, Argentina possessed an elite that preferred French to the local language to distinguish itself from the hoi polloi; a capital city consciously modeled on Paris; a particularly reactionary form of Catholic Christianity, which in turn nourished a low grade anti-Semitism; a fragile and uncertain commitment to economic and political liberalism. Peronism was not merely no longer proscribed; it was, in fact, the declared political preference of almost anyone who heeded the counsels of fashion—or prudence. True, many Argentines of the period imagined that some sort of fascism was the wave of the future.
