History of fascism

The history of fascism is the ideological, historical, and intellectual influences that culminated in the development of fascism, a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement that rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe. The roots have been seen in the political culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and later in Nazism and Italian Fascism.

Fascism emerged throughout the 20th century as a diverse, evolving synthesis of reactionary and revolutionary ideas, rather than a single, coherent system.

Early influences (before 1880)

Background and 19th-century roots

Depiction of an ancient Greek hoplite warrior. Ancient Sparta has been considered an inspiration for fascist and quasi-fascist movements, such as Nazism and quasi-fascist Metaxism.

Early influences that shaped the ideology of fascism have been dated back to Ancient Greece. The political culture of ancient Greece and specifically the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta under Lycurgus, with its emphasis on militarism and racial purity, were admired by the Nazis.^[1]^{[page needed]}^[2]^[3] Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler emphasised that Germany should adhere to Hellenic values and culture – particularly those of ancient Sparta.^[1]^{[page needed]}^[2] He rebuked potential criticism of Hellenic values being non-German by emphasising the common Aryan race connection with ancient Greeks, saying in Mein Kampf: "One must not allow the differences of the individual races to tear up the greater racial community".^[4] In fact, drawing racial ties to ancient Greek culture was seen as necessary to the national narrative, as Hitler was unimpressed with the cultural works of Germanic tribes at the time, saying, "if anyone asks us about our ancestors, we should continually allude to the ancient Greeks."^[5]^{[page needed]}

Bust of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose works were admired by Mussolini^[6]

Bust of Roman Dictator Julius Caesar.

Hitler went on to say in Mein Kampf: "The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hellenism and Germanity together".^[4] The Spartans were emulated by the quasi-fascist regime of Ioannis Metaxas who called for Greeks to wholly commit themselves to the nation with self-control as the Spartans had done.^[7] Supporters of the 4th of August Regime in the 1930s to 1940s justified the dictatorship of Metaxas on the basis that the "First Greek Civilization" involved an Athenian dictatorship led by Pericles who had brought ancient Greece to greatness.^[7] Italian fascist Benito Mussolini had a strong attachment to the works of the Greek philosopher Plato.^[6] In October 1943, Mussolini was reported to have kept Plato's work Republic on his desk at home, and he claimed to consult it from time to time before beginning his work each day.^[8]

Italian Fascists identified their ideology as being connected to the legacy of ancient Rome and particularly the Roman Empire: they idolised Julius Caesar and Augustus.^[9] Italian Fascism viewed the modern state of Italy as the heir of the Roman Empire and emphasised the need for Italian culture to "return to Roman values".^[10] Italian Fascists identified the Roman Empire as being an ideal organic and stable society in contrast to contemporary individualist liberal society that they saw as being chaotic in comparison.^[10] Julius Caesar was considered a role model by fascists because he led a revolution that overthrew an old order to establish a new order based on a dictatorship in which he wielded absolute power.^[9] Mussolini emphasised the need for dictatorship, activist leadership style and a leader cult like that of Julius Caesar that involved "the will to fix a unifying and balanced centre and a common will to action".^[11] Italian Fascists also idolised Augustus as the champion who built the Roman Empire.^[9] The fasces – a symbol of Roman authority – was the symbol of the Italian Fascists and was additionally adopted by many other national fascist movements formed in emulation of Italian Fascism.^[12] While a number of Nazis rejected Roman civilisation because they saw it as incompatible with Aryan Germanic culture and they also believed that Aryan Germanic culture was outside Roman culture, Adolf Hitler personally admired ancient Rome.^[12] Hitler focused on ancient Rome during its rise to dominance and at the height of its power as a model to follow, and he deeply admired the Roman Empire for its ability to forge a strong and unified civilisation. In private conversations, Hitler blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on the Roman adoption of Christianity because he claimed that Christianity authorised racial intermixing that he claimed weakened Rome and led to its destruction.^[11]

There were a number of influences on fascism from the Renaissance era in Europe. Niccolò Machiavelli is said to have influenced Italian Fascism, particularly through his promotion of the absolute authority of the state.^[13] Machiavelli rejected all existing traditional and metaphysical assumptions of the time – especially those associated with the Middle Ages – and asserted as an Italian patriot that Italy needed a strong and all-powerful state led by a vigorous and ruthless leader who would conquer and unify Italy.^[14] Mussolini saw himself as a modern-day Machiavellian and wrote an introduction to his honorary doctoral thesis for the University of Bologna – "Prelude to Machiavelli".^[15] Mussolini professed that Machiavelli's "pessimism about human nature was eternal in its acuity. Individuals simply could not be relied on voluntarily to 'obey the law, pay their taxes and serve in war'. No well-ordered society could want the people to be sovereign".^[16] Most dictators of the 20th century mimicked Mussolini's admiration for Machiavelli and "Stalin... saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian virtù".^[17]

During the Enlightenment, a number of ideological influences arose that would shape the development of fascism. The development of the study of universal histories by Johann Gottfried Herder resulted in Herder's analysis of the development of nations. Herder developed the term Nationalismus ("nationalism") to describe this cultural phenomenon. At this time nationalism did not refer to the political ideology of nationalism that was later developed during the French Revolution.^[18] Herder also developed the theory that modern Europeans are the descendants of Proto-Indo-Europeans that were then referred to as "Aryans" based on language studies. Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint and science.^[19] Contemporaries of Herder used the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture and this antisemitic variant view of Europeans' Aryan roots formed the basis of Nazi racial views.^[19] Another major influence on fascism came from the political theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.^[13] Hegel promoted the absolute authority of the state^[13] and said "nothing short of the state is the actualization of freedom" and that the "state is the march of God on earth".^[14]

The French Revolution and its political legacy had a major influence upon the development of fascism. Fascists view the French Revolution as a largely negative event that resulted in the entrenchment of liberal ideas such as liberal democracy, anticlericalism and rationalism.^[20] Racist nationalists in particular condemned the French Revolution for granting social equality to "inferior races" such as Jews.^[20] Mussolini condemned the French Revolution for developing liberalism, scientific socialism and liberal democracy, but also acknowledged that fascism extracted and used all the elements that had preserved those ideologies' vitality and that fascism had no desire to restore the conditions that precipitated the French Revolution.^[20] Though fascism opposed core parts of the Revolution, fascists supported other aspects of it, Mussolini declared his support for the Revolution's demolishment of remnants of the Middle Ages such as tolls and compulsory labour upon citizens and he noted that the French Revolution did have benefits in that it had been a cause of the whole French nation and not merely a political party.^[20] Most importantly, the French Revolution was responsible for the entrenchment of nationalism as a political ideology – both in its development in France as French nationalism and in the creation of nationalist movements particularly in Germany with the development of German nationalism by Johann Gottlieb Fichte as a political response to the development of French nationalism.^[18] The Nazis accused the French Revolution of being dominated by Jews and Freemasons and were deeply disturbed by the Revolution's intention to completely break France away from its history in what the Nazis claimed was a repudiation of history that they asserted to be a trait of the Enlightenment.^[20] Though the Nazis were highly critical of the Revolution, Hitler in Mein Kampf said that the French Revolution is a model for how to achieve change that he claims was caused by the rhetorical strength of demagogues.^[21] Furthermore, the Nazis idealised the levée en masse (mass mobilisation of soldiers) that was developed by French Revolutionary armies and the Nazis sought to use the system for their paramilitary movement.^[21]

Georges Valois, founder of the first non-Italian fascist party Faisceau,^[22] claimed the roots of fascism stemmed from the late 18th century Jacobin movement, seeing in its totalitarian nature a foreshadowing of the fascist state.^[23] Historian George Mosse similarly analyzed fascism as an inheritor of the mass ideology and civil religion of the French Revolution, as well as a result of the brutalisation of societies in 1914–1918.^[23]

Historians such as Irene Collins and Howard C. Payne see Napoleon III, who ran a 'police state' and suppressed the media, as a forerunner of fascism.^[24] According to David Thomson,^[25] the Italian Risorgimento of 1871 led to the 'nemesis of fascism'. William L Shirer^[26] sees a continuity from the views of Fichte and Hegel, through Bismarck, to Hitler; Robert Gerwarth speaks of a 'direct line' from Bismarck to Hitler.^[27] Julian Dierkes sees fascism as a 'particularly violent form of imperialism'.^[28]

Fin de siècle era and the fusion of nationalism with Sorelianism (1880–1914)

The ideological roots of fascism have been traced to the 1880s and in particular to the fin de siècle theme of that time.^[29]^[30] The theme originated from revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and liberal democracy.^[31] The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism.^[32] The fin-de-siècle mindset saw civilisation as being in a crisis that required a massive and total solution.^[33] The fin-de-siècle intellectual school of the 1890s – including Gabriele d'Annunzio and Enrico Corradini in Italy; Maurice Barrès, Edouard Drumont and Georges Sorel in France; and Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Germany – saw social and political collectivity as more important than individualism and rationalism. They considered the individual as only one part of the larger collectivity, which they did not view as an atomised numerical sum of individuals.^[33] They condemned the rationalistic individualism of liberal society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society.^[31] They saw modern society as one of mediocrity, materialism, instability, and corruption.^[33] They denounced big-city urban society as being merely based on instinct and animality and without heroism.^[33]

The fin-de-siècle outlook was influenced by various intellectual developments, including Darwinian biology; Wagnerian aesthetics (Gesamtkunstwerk); Arthur de Gobineau's racialism; Gustave Le Bon's psychology; and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Henri Bergson.^[34] Social Darwinism, which gained widespread acceptance, made no distinction between physical and social life and viewed the human condition as being an unceasing struggle to achieve the survival of the fittest.^[34] Social Darwinism challenged positivism's claim of deliberate and rational choice as the determining behaviour of humans, with social Darwinism focusing on heredity, race and environment.^[34] Social Darwinism's emphasis on biogroup identity and the role of organic relations within societies fostered legitimacy and appeal for nationalism.^[35] New theories of social and political psychology also rejected the notion of human behaviour being governed by rational choice, and instead claimed that emotion was more influential in political issues than reason.^[34] Nietzsche's argument that "God is dead" coincided with his attack on the "herd mentality" of Christianity,^[36] democracy, and modern collectivism; his concept of the Übermensch; and his advocacy of the will to power as a primordial instinct were major influences upon many of the fin-de-siècle generation.^[37] Bergson's claim of the existence of an "élan vital" ("vital instinct") centred upon free choice and rejected the processes of materialism and determinism, thus challenging Marxism.^[38]

With the advent of the Darwinian theory of evolution came claims of evolution possibly leading to decadence.^[39] Proponents of decadence-theories claimed that contemporary Western society's decadence was the result of modern life, including urbanisation, a sedentary lifestyle, the survival of the least fit and modern culture's emphasis on egalitarianism, individualistic anomie, and nonconformity.^[39] The main work that gave rise to decadence-theories was the book Degeneration (1892) by Max Nordau that became popular in Europe; ideas of decadence helped the cause of nationalists who presented nationalism as a cure for decadence.^[39]

Gaetano Mosca in his work The Ruling Class (1896) developed the theory that claims that in all societies, an "organized minority" will dominate and rule over the "disorganized majority".^[40]^[41] Mosca claims that there are only two classes in society, "the governing" (the organised minority) and "the governed" (the disorganised majority).^[42] He claims that the organised nature of the organised minority makes it irresistible to any individual of the disorganised majority.^[42] Mosca developed this theory in 1896, arguing that the problem of the supremacy of civilian power in society is solved in part by the presence and social structural design of militaries.^[42] He claims that the social structure of the military is ideal because it includes diverse social elements that balance each other out; and more important is its inclusion of an officer class as a "power élite".^[42] Mosca presented the social structure and methods of governance by the military as a valid model of development for civilian society.^[42] Mosca's theories are known to have significantly influenced Mussolini's notion of the political process and fascism.^[41]

Related to Mosca's theory of domination of society by an organised minority over a disorganised majority, Robert Michels in 1911 propounded his theory of an iron law of oligarchy,^[40] which was a major attack on the basis of contemporary democracy.^[43] Michels argues that oligarchy is inevitable as an "iron law" within any organisation as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organisation. On the topic of democracy, Michels stated: "It is organisation which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organisation, says oligarchy."^[43] He claims: "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."^[43] He states that the official goal of contemporary democracy of eliminating élite rule was impossible, that democracy is a façade which legitimises the rule of a particular élite and that élite rule (which he refers to as oligarchy) is inevitable.^[43] Michels had previously been a social democrat, but became drawn to the ideas of Georges Sorel, Édouard Berth, Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone; he came to strongly oppose the parliamentarian, legalistic and bureaucratic socialism of social democracy.^[44] As early as 1904 he began to advocate in favor of patriotism and national interests.^[45] Later he began to support activist, voluntarist, and anti-parliamentarian concepts, and in 1911 he took a position in favor of the Italian war-effort in Libya and started moving towards Italian nationalism.^[46] Michels eventually became a supporter of fascism upon Mussolini's rise to power in 1922, viewing fascism's goal of destroying liberal democracy in a sympathetic manner.^[47]

Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), a French politician of the late-19th and early-20th centuries who influenced the later fascist movement, claimed that true democracy was authoritarian democracy, while rejecting liberal democracy as a fraud.^[48] Barrès claimed that authoritarian democracy involved a spiritual connection between a leader of a nation and the nation's people, and that true freedom did not arise from individual rights or from parliamentary restraints, but through "heroic leadership" and "national power".^[48] He emphasised a need for hero-worship and for charismatic leadership in national society.^[49] Barrès was an early member of the League for the French Fatherland (French: Ligue de la patrie française) founded in 1898, and coined the term "socialist nationalism" to describe his views during an electoral campaign in 1898.^[49] He emphasised class collaboration, the role of intuition and emotion in politics alongside racial antisemitism, and "he tried to combine the search for energy and a vital style of life with national rootedness and a sort of Darwinian racism."^[49] Later in life he returned to cultural traditionalism and parliamentary conservatism, but his ideas contributed to the development of an extremist form of nationalism in pre-1914 France.^[49] Other French nationalist intellectuals of the early 20th century also wished to "obliterate the class struggle in ideological terms", ending the threat of communism by persuading working people to identify with their nation rather than with their class.^[50]

The rise of support for anarchism in this period of time was important in influencing the politics of fascism.^[51] The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin's concept of propaganda of the deed, which stressed the importance of direct action as the primary means of politics – including revolutionary violence, became popular amongst fascists who admired the concept and adopted it as a part of fascism.^[51]

Syndicalism

Georges Sorel

Charles Maurras.

One of the key persons who greatly influenced fascism was the French intellectual Georges Sorel (1847–1922), who "must be considered one of the least classifiable political thinkers of the twentieth century" and who supported a variety of different ideologies in the course of his life, including conservatism, socialism, revolutionary syndicalism and nationalism.^[52] Sorel also contributed to the fusion of anarchism and syndicalism together to form anarcho-syndicalism.^[53] He promoted the legitimacy of political violence in his work Reflections on Violence (French: Réflexions sur la violence, 1908), during a period in his life when he advocated radical syndicalist action to achieve a revolution which would overthrow capitalism and the bourgeoisie through a general strike.^[54] In Reflections on Violence, Sorel emphasised need for a revolutionary political religion.^[55] In his book The Illusions of Progress (1908), Sorel denounced democracy as reactionary, saying "nothing is more aristocratic than democracy".^[56] By 1909, after the failure of a syndicalist general strike in France, Sorel and his supporters abandoned the radical left and went to the radical right, where they sought to merge militant Catholicism and French patriotism with their views – advocating anti-republican Christian French patriots as ideal revolutionaries.^[57] In the early 1900s Sorel had officially been a revisionist of Marxism, but by 1910 he announced his abandonment of socialism, and in 1914 he claimed – following an aphorism of Benedetto Croce – that "socialism is dead" due to the "decomposition of Marxism".^[58] Sorel became a supporter of reactionary Maurrassian integral nationalism beginning in 1909, and this greatly influenced his works.^[58]

Sorel's political allegiances shifted constantly, influencing a variety of people across the political spectrum from Benito Mussolini to Benedetto Croce to Georg Lukács, and both sympathisers and critics of Sorel considered his political thought to be a collection of separate ideas with no coherence and no common thread linking them.^[59] In its heterogeneity, Sorelianism is considered to be a precursor to fascism, as fascist thought also drew from disparate sources and did not form a single coherent ideological system.^[60] Sorel described himself as "a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction", and stated that his goal was to be original in all of his writings and that his apparent lack of coherence was due to an unwillingness to write down anything that had already been said elsewhere by someone else.^[59] The academic intellectual establishment did not take him seriously,^[61] but Mussolini applauded Sorel by declaring^[when?]: "What I am, I owe to Sorel".^[62]

Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was a French right-wing monarchist and nationalist with an interest in merging his nationalist ideals with Sorelian syndicalism as a means to confront liberal democracy.^[63] This fusion of nationalism from the political right with Sorelian syndicalism from the left took place around the outbreak of World War I.^[64] Sorelian syndicalism, unlike other ideologies on the left, held an elitist view that the morality of the working class needed to be raised.^[65] The Sorelian concept of the positive nature of social war and its insistence on a moral revolution led some syndicalists to believe that war was the ultimate manifestation of social change and moral revolution.^[65]

The fusion of Maurrassian nationalism and Sorelian syndicalism influenced radical Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini.^[66] Corradini spoke of the need for a nationalist-syndicalist movement, led by elitist aristocrats and anti-democrats who shared a revolutionary syndicalist commitment to direct action and a willingness to fight.^[66] Corradini spoke of Italy as being a "proletarian nation" that needed to pursue imperialism to challenge the "plutocratic" French and British.^[67] Corradini's views were part of a wider set of perceptions within the right-wing Italian Nationalist Association (ANI), which claimed that Italy's economic backwardness was caused by corruption in its political class, liberalism, and division caused by "ignoble socialism".^[67] The ANI had ties and influence among conservatives, Catholics, and the business community.^[67] Italian national syndicalists held a common set of principles: the rejection of bourgeois values, democracy, liberalism, Marxism, internationalism and pacifism and the promotion of heroism, vitalism and violence.^[68]

Until 1914, Italian nationalists and revolutionary syndicalists with nationalist leanings remained apart. Such syndicalists opposed the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 as an affair of financial interests and not of the nation, but both Italian nationalists and syndicalists saw World War I (in which Italy participated from May 1915) as a national affair.^[69]

Futurism

Radical nationalism in Italy – support for expansionism and cultural revolution to create a "New Man" and a "New State" – began to grow in 1912 during the Italian conquest of Libya and was supported by Italian Futurists and by members of the ANI.^[70] Futurism was both an artistic-cultural movement and initially a political movement in Italy led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the Futurist Manifesto (1908), that championed the causes of modernism, action and political violence as necessary elements of politics while denouncing liberalism and parliamentary politics. Marinetti rejected conventional democracy as based on majority rule and egalitarianism, while promoting a new form of democracy, which he described in his work "The Futurist Conception of Democracy" as the following: "We are therefore able to give the directions to create and to dismantle to numbers, to quantity, to the mass, for with us number, quantity and mass will never be – as they are in Germany and Russia – the number, quantity and mass of mediocre men, incapable and indecisive".^[71] The ANI claimed that liberal democracy was no longer compatible with the modern world and advocated a strong state and imperialism, claiming that humans are naturally predatory and that nations were in a constant struggle, in which only the strongest nations could survive.^[72]

World War I and aftermath (1914–1922)

At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the Italian political left became severely split over its position on the war. The Italian Socialist Party opposed the war on the grounds of proletarian internationalism, but a number of Italian revolutionary syndicalists supported intervention in the war on the grounds that it could serve to mobilise the masses against the status quo and that the national question had to be resolved before the social one.^[73] Corradini presented the need for Italy as a "proletarian nation" to defeat a reactionary Germany from a nationalist perspective.^[74] Angelo Oliviero Olivetti formed the Revolutionary Fascio for International Action in October 1914, to support Italy's entry into the war.^[73] At the same time, Benito Mussolini joined the interventionist cause.^[75] At first, these interventionist groups were composed of disaffected syndicalists who had concluded that their attempts to promote social change through a general strike had been a failure, and became interested in the transformative potential of militarism and war.^[76] They would help to form the Fascist movement several years later.^{[citation needed]}

This early interventionist movement was very small, and did not have an integrated set of policies. Its attempts to hold mass meetings were ineffective and it was regularly harassed by government authorities and socialists.^[77] Antagonism between interventionists and socialists resulted in violence.^[77] Attacks on interventionists were so violent that even democratic socialists who opposed the war, such as Anna Kuliscioff, said that the Italian Socialist Party had gone too far in its campaign to silence supporters of the war.^[77]

Benito Mussolini became prominent within the early pro-war movement thanks to his newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, which he founded in November 1914 to support the interventionist cause. The newspaper received funding from the governments of Allied powers that wanted Italy to join them in the war, particularly France and Britain.^[78] Il Popolo d'Italia was also funded in part by Italian industrialists who hoped to gain financially from the war, including Fiat, other arms manufacturers, and agrarian interests.^[78] Mussolini did not have any clear agenda in the beginning other than support for Italy's entry into the war, and sought to appeal to diverse groups of readers. These ranged from dissident socialists who opposed the Socialist Party's anti-war stance, to democratic idealists who believed the war would overthrow autocratic monarchies across Europe, to Italian patriots who wanted to recover ethnic Italian territories from Austria, to imperialists who dreamed of a new Roman Empire.^[79]

By early 1915, Mussolini had moved towards the nationalist position. He began arguing that Italy should conquer Trieste and Fiume, and expand its northeastern border to the Alps, following the ideals of Mazzini who called for a patriotic war to "secure Italy's natural frontiers of language and race".^[80] Mussolini also advocated waging a war of conquest in the Balkans and the Middle East, and his supporters began to call themselves fascisti.^[79] He also started advocating for a "positive attitude" towards capitalism and capitalists, as part of his transition towards supporting class collaboration and an "Italy first" position.^[81]

Italy finally entered the war on the Allied side in May 1915. Mussolini later took credit for having allegedly forced the government to declare war on Austria, although his influence on events was minimal.^[82] He enrolled into the Royal Italian Army in September 1915 and fought in the war until 1917, when he was wounded during a training exercise and discharged.^[83] Italy's use of daredevil elite shock troops known as the Arditi, beginning in 1917, was an important influence on the early Fascist movement.^[84] The Arditi were soldiers who were specifically trained for a life of violence and wore unique blackshirt uniforms and fezzes.^[84] The Arditi formed a national organisation in November 1918, the Associazione fra gli Arditi d'Italia, which by mid-1919 had about twenty thousand young men within it.^[84] Mussolini appealed to the Arditi, and the Fascist Squadristi movement that developed after the war was based upon the Arditi.^[84]

A major event that greatly influenced the development of fascism was the October Revolution of 1917, in which Bolshevik communists led by Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia. The revolution in Russia gave rise to a fear of communism among the elites and among society at large in several European countries, and fascist movements gained support by presenting themselves as a radical anti-communist political force.^[85] Anti-communism was also an expression of fascist anti-universalism, as communism insisted on international working class unity while fascism insisted on national interests.^[86] In addition, fascist anti-communism was linked to antisemitism and even anti-capitalism, because many fascists believed that communism and capitalism were both Jewish creations meant to undermine nation-states. The Nazis advocated the conspiracy theory that Jewish communists were working together with Jewish finance capital against Germany.^[86] After World War I, fascists have commonly campaigned on anti-Marxist agendas.^[85]

Mussolini's immediate reaction to the Russian Revolution was contradictory. He admired Lenin's boldness in seizing power by force and was envious of the success of the Bolsheviks, while at the same time attacking them in his paper for restricting free speech and creating "a tyranny worse than that of the tsars."^[87] At this time, between 1917 and 1919, Mussolini and the early Fascist movement presented themselves as opponents of censorship and champions of free thought and speech, calling these "among the highest expressions of human civilisation."^[88] Mussolini wrote that "we are libertarians above all" and claimed that the Fascists were committed to "loving liberty for everyone, even for our enemies."^[88]

Mussolini consolidated control over the Fascist movement in 1919 with the founding of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan. For a brief time in 1919, this early fascist movement tried to position itself as a radical populist alternative to the socialists, offering its own version of a revolutionary transformation of society. In a speech delivered in Milan's Piazza San Sepolcro in March 1919, Mussolini set forward the proposals of the new movement, combining ideas from nationalism, Sorelian syndicalism, the idealism of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the theories of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto.^[89] Mussolini declared his opposition to Bolshevism because "Bolshevism has ruined the economic life of Russia" and because he claimed that Bolshevism was incompatible with Western civilisation; he said that "we declare war against socialism, not because it is socialism, but because it has opposed nationalism", that "we intend to be an active minority, to attract the proletariat away from the official Socialist party" and that "we go halfway toward meeting the workers"; and he declared that "we favor national syndicalism and reject state intervention whenever it aims at throttling the creation of wealth."^[90]

In these early post-war years, the Italian Fascist movement tried to become a broad political umbrella that could include all people of all classes and political positions, united only by a desire to save Italy from the Marxist threat and to ensure the expansion of Italian territories in the post-war peace settlements.^[91] Il Popolo d'Italia wrote in March 1919 that "We allow ourselves the luxury of being aristocrats and democrats, conservatives and progressives, reactionaries and revolutionaries, legalists and antilegalists."^[92]

Later in 1919, Alceste De Ambris and futurist movement leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti created The Manifesto of the Italian Fasci of Combat (also known as the Fascist Manifesto).^[93] The Manifesto was presented on 6 June 1919 in the Fascist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia. The Manifesto supported the creation of universal suffrage for both men and women (the latter being realised only partly in late 1925, with all opposition parties banned or disbanded);^[94] proportional representation on a regional basis; government representation through a corporatist system of "National Councils" of experts, selected from professionals and tradespeople, elected to represent and hold legislative power over their respective areas, including labour, industry, transportation, public health, communications, etc.; and the abolition of the Italian Senate.^[95] The Manifesto supported the creation of an eight-hour work day for all workers, a minimum wage, worker representation in industrial management, equal confidence in labour unions as in industrial executives and public servants, reorganisation of the transportation sector, revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance, reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55, a strong progressive tax on capital, confiscation of the property of religious institutions and abolishment of bishoprics and revision of military contracts to allow the government to seize 85% of war profits made by the armaments industry.^[96] It also called for the creation of a short-service national militia to serve defensive duties, nationalisation of the armaments industry and a foreign policy designed to be peaceful but also competitive.^[97] Nevertheless, Mussolini also demanded the expansion of Italian territories, particularly by annexing Dalmatia (which he claimed could be accomplished by peaceful means), and insisted that "the state must confine itself to directing the civil and political life of the nation," which meant taking the government out of business and transferring large segments of the economy from public to private control.^[98] The intention was to appeal to a working class electorate while also maintaining the support of business interests, even if this meant making contradictory promises.^[99]

With this manifesto, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento campaigned in the Italian elections of November 1919, mostly attempting to take votes away from the socialists. The results were disastrous. The fascists received less than 5000 votes in their political heartland of Milan, compared to 190,000 for the socialists, and not a single fascist candidate was elected to any office.^[100] Mussolini's political career seemed to be over. This crippling electoral defeat was largely due to fascism's lack of ideological credibility, as the fascist movement was a mixture of many different ideas and tendencies. It contained monarchists, republicans, syndicalists and conservatives, and some candidates supported the Vatican while others wanted to expel the Pope from Italy.^[101] In response to the failure of his electoral strategy, Mussolini shifted his political movement to the right, seeking to form an alliance with the conservatives. Soon, agrarian conflicts in the region of Emilia and in the Po Valley provided an opportunity to launch a series of violent attacks against the socialists, and thus to win credibility with the conservatives and establish fascism as a paramilitary movement rather than an electoral one.^[101]

With the antagonism between anti-interventionist Marxists and pro-interventionist Fascists complete by the end of the war, the two sides became irreconcilable. The Fascists presented themselves as anti-Marxists and as opposed to the Marxists.^[102] Mussolini tried to build his popular support especially among war veterans and patriots by enthusiastically supporting Gabriele D'Annunzio, the leader of the annexationist faction in post-war Italy, who demanded the annexation of large territories as part of the peace settlement in the aftermath of the war.^[103] For D'Annunzio and other nationalists, the city of Fiume in Dalmatia (present-day Croatia) had "suddenly become the symbol of everything sacred."^[103] Fiume was a city with an ethnic Italian majority, while its suburbs were largely ethnic Croatian.^[104] Italy demanded the annexation of Fiume and the region around it as a reward for its contribution to the Allied war effort, but the Allies – and US president Woodrow Wilson in particular – intended to give the region to the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia).^[105]

As such, the next events that influenced the Fascists were the raid of Fiume by Italian nationalist Gabriele D'Annunzio and the founding of the Charter of Carnaro in 1920.^[106] D'Annunzio and De Ambris designed the Charter, which advocated national-syndicalist corporatist productionism alongside D'Annunzio's political views.^[107] Many Fascists saw the Charter of Carnaro as an ideal constitution for a Fascist Italy.^[108] This behaviour of aggression towards Yugoslavia and South Slavs was pursued by Italian Fascists with their persecution of South Slavs – especially Slovenes and Croats.^{[citation needed]}

In 1920, militant strike activity by industrial workers reached its peak in Italy, where 1919 and 1920 were known as the "Red Years".^[109] Mussolini first supported the strikes, but when this did not help him to gain any additional supporters, he abruptly reversed his position and began to oppose them, seeking financial support from big business and landowners.^[110] The donations he received from industrial and agrarian interest groups were unusually large, as they were very concerned about working class unrest and eager to support any political force that stood against it.^[110] Together with many smaller donations that he received from the public as part of a fund drive to support D'Annunzio, this helped to build up the Fascist movement and transform it from a small group based around Milan to a national political force.^[110] Mussolini organised his own militia, known as the "blackshirts," which started a campaign of violence against Communists, Socialists, trade unions and co-operatives under the pretense of "saving the country from bolshevism" and preserving order and internal peace in Italy.^[110]^[111] Some of the blackshirts also engaged in armed attacks against the Church, "where several priests were assassinated and churches burned by the Fascists".^[112]

At the same time, Mussolini continued to present himself as the champion of Italian national interests and territorial expansion in the Balkans. In the autumn of 1920, Fascist blackshirts in the Italian city of Trieste (located not far from Fiume, and inhabited by Italians as well as Slavs) engaged in street violence and vandalism against Slavs. Mussolini visited the city to support them and was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd – the first time in his political career that he achieved such broad popular support.^[87] He also focused his rhetoric on attacks against the liberal government of Giovanni Giolitti, who had withdrawn Italian troops from Albania and did not press the Allies to allow Italy to annex Dalmatia. This helped to draw disaffected former soldiers into the Fascist ranks.^[113]

Fascists identified their primary opponents as the socialists on the left who had opposed intervention in World War I.^[108] The Fascists and the rest of the Italian political right held common ground: both held Marxism in contempt, discounted class consciousness and believed in the rule of elites.^[114] The Fascists assisted the anti-socialist campaign by allying with the other parties and the conservative right in a mutual effort to destroy the Italian Socialist Party and labour organisations committed to class identity above national identity.^[114]

In 1921, the radical wing of the Italian Socialist Party broke away to form the Communist Party of Italy. This changed the political landscape, as the remaining Socialist Party – diminished in numbers, but still the largest party in parliament – became more moderate and was therefore seen as a potential coalition partner for Giolitti's government. Such an alliance would have secured a large majority in parliament, ending the political deadlock and making effective government possible.^[113] To prevent this from happening, Mussolini offered to ally his Fascists with Giolitti instead, and Giolitti accepted, under the assumption that the small Fascist movement would make fewer demands and would be easier to keep in check than the much larger Socialists.^[115]

Mussolini and the Fascists thus joined a coalition formed of conservatives, nationalists and liberals, which stood against the left-wing parties (the socialists and the communists) in the Italian general election of 1921. As part of this coalition, the Fascists – who had previously claimed to be neither left nor right – identified themselves for the first time as the "extreme right", and presented themselves as the most radical right-wing members of the coalition.^[116] Mussolini talked about "imperialism" and "national expansion" as his main goals, and called for Italian domination of the Mediterranean Sea basin.^[116] The elections of that year were characterised by Fascist street violence and intimidation, which they used to suppress the socialists and communists and to prevent their supporters from voting, while the police and courts (under the control of Giolitti's government) turned a blind eye and allowed the violence to continue without legal consequences.^[116] About a hundred people were killed, and some areas of Italy came fully under the control of fascist squads, which did not allow known socialist supporters to vote or hold meetings.^[116] In spite of this, the Socialist Party still won the largest share of the vote and 122 seats in parliament, followed by the Catholic popolari with 107 seats. The Fascists only picked up 7 percent of the vote and 35 seats in parliament, but this was a large improvement compared to their results only two years earlier, when they had won no seats at all.^[116] Mussolini took these electoral gains as an indication that his right-wing strategy paid off, and decided that the Fascists would sit on the extreme right side of the amphitheatre where parliament met. He also used his first speech in parliament to take a "reactionary" stance, arguing against collectivisation and nationalisation, and calling for the post office and the railways to be given to private enterprise.^[117]

Prior to Fascism's accommodation of the political right, Fascism was a small, urban, northern Italian movement that had about a thousand members.^[118] After Fascism's accommodation of the political right, the Fascist movement's membership soared to approximately 250,000 by 1921.^[119]

The other lesson drawn by Mussolini from the events of 1921 was about the effectiveness of open violence and paramilitary groups. The Fascists used violence even in parliament, for example by directly assaulting the communist deputy Misiano and throwing him out of the building on the pretext of having been a deserter during the war. They also openly threatened socialists with their guns in the chamber.^[117] They were able to do this with impunity, while the government took no action against them, hoping not to offend Fascist voters.^[117] Across the country, local branches of the National Fascist Party embraced the principle of squadrismo and organised paramilitary "squads" modeled after the arditi from the war.^[120] Mussolini claimed that he had "400,000 armed and disciplined men at his command" and did not hide his intentions of seizing power by force.^[121]

Rise to power and initial international spread of fascism (1922–1929)

Beginning in 1922, Fascist paramilitaries escalated their strategy by switching from attacks on socialist offices and the homes of socialist leadership figures to the violent occupation of cities. The Fascists met little serious resistance from authorities and proceeded to take over several cities, including Bologna, Bolzano, Cremona, Ferrara, Fiume and Trento.^[122] The Fascists attacked the headquarters of socialist and Catholic unions in Cremona and imposed forced Italianisation upon the German-speaking population of Trent and Bolzano.^[122] After seizing these cities, the Fascists made plans to take Rome.^[122]

Fascist Italy

On 24 October 1922, the Fascist Party held its annual congress in Naples, where Mussolini ordered Blackshirts to take control of public buildings and trains and to converge on three points around Rome.^[122] The march would be led by four prominent Fascist leaders representing its different factions: Italo Balbo, a Blackshirt leader; General Emilio De Bono; Michele Bianchi, an ex syndicalist; and Cesare Maria De Vecchi, a monarchist Fascist.^[122] Mussolini himself remained in Milan to await the results of the actions.^[122] The Fascists managed to seize control of several post offices and trains in northern Italy while the Italian government, led by a left-wing coalition, was internally divided and unable to respond to the Fascist advances.^[123] The Italian government had been in a steady state of turmoil, with many governments being created and then being defeated.^[123] The Italian government initially took action to prevent the Fascists from entering Rome, but King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy perceived the risk of bloodshed in Rome in response to attempting to disperse the Fascists to be too high.^[124] Some political organisations, such as the conservative Italian Nationalist Association, "assured King Victor Emmanuel that their own Sempre Pronti militia was ready to fight the Blackshirts" if they entered Rome, but their offer was never accepted.^[125] Victor Emmanuel III decided to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister of Italy and Mussolini arrived in Rome on 30 October to accept the appointment.^[124] Fascist propaganda aggrandised this event, known as "March on Rome", as a "seizure" of power due to Fascists' heroic exploits.^[122]

Upon being appointed Prime Minister of Italy, Mussolini had to form a coalition government because the Fascists did not have control over the Italian parliament.^[126] The coalition government included a cabinet led by Mussolini and thirteen other ministers, only three of whom were Fascists, while others included representatives from the army and the navy, two Catholic Popolari members, two democratic liberals, one conservative liberal, one social democrat, one Nationalist member and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile.^[126] Mussolini's coalition government initially pursued economically liberal policies under the direction of liberal finance minister Alberto De Stefani from the centre of the National Fascist Party, including balancing the budget through deep cuts to the civil service.^[126]^[127]^[128] Initially little drastic change in government policy occurred, and repressive police actions against communists and d'Annunzian rebels were limited.^[126] At the same time, Mussolini consolidated his control over the National Fascist Party by creating a governing executive for the party, the Grand Council of Fascism, whose agenda he controlled.^[126] In addition, the squadristi blackshirt militia was transformed into the state-run MVSN, led by regular army officers.^[126] Militant squadristi were initially highly dissatisfied with Mussolini's government and demanded a "Fascist revolution".^[126]

In this period, to appease the King of Italy, Mussolini formed a close political alliance between the Italian Fascists and Italy's conservative faction in Parliament, which was led by Luigi Federzoni, a conservative monarchist and nationalist who was a member of the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI).^[129] The ANI joined the National Fascist Party in 1923.^[130] Because of the merger of the Nationalists with the Fascists, tensions existed between the conservative nationalist and revolutionary syndicalist factions of the movement.^[131] The conservative and syndicalist factions of the Fascist movement sought to reconcile their differences, secure unity and promote fascism by taking on the views of each other.^[131] Conservative nationalist Fascists promoted fascism as a revolutionary movement to appease the revolutionary syndicalists, while to appease conservative nationalists, the revolutionary syndicalists declared they wanted to secure social stability and ensure economic productivity.^[132] This sentiment included most syndicalist Fascists, particularly Edmondo Rossoni, who as secretary-general of the General Confederation of Fascist Syndical Corporations sought "labor's autonomy and class consciousness".^[133]

The Fascists began their attempt to entrench Fascism in Italy with the Acerbo Law, which guaranteed a plurality of the seats in parliament to any party or coalition list in an election that received 25% or more of the vote.^[134] The Acerbo Law was passed in spite of numerous abstentions from the vote.^[134] In the 1924 election, the Fascists, along with moderates and conservatives, formed a coalition candidate list, and through considerable Fascist violence and intimidation, the list won with 66% of the vote, allowing it to receive 403 seats, most of which went to the Fascists.^[134] In the aftermath of the election, a crisis and political scandal erupted after Socialist Party deputy Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist.^[134] The liberals and the leftist minority in parliament walked out in protest in what became known as the Aventine Secession.^[135] On 3 January 1925, Mussolini addressed the Fascist-dominated Italian parliament and declared that he was personally responsible for what happened, but he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and proclaimed himself dictator of Italy, assuming full responsibility for the government and announcing the dismissal of parliament.^[135]

From 1925 to 1929, Fascism steadily became entrenched in power: opposition deputies were denied access to parliament, censorship was introduced and a December 1925 decree made Mussolini solely responsible to the King. Efforts to increase Fascist influence over Italian society accelerated beginning in 1926, with Fascists taking positions in local administration and 30% of all prefects being administered by appointed Fascists by 1929.^[136] In 1929, the Fascist regime gained the political support and blessing of the Roman Catholic Church after the regime signed a concordat with the Church, known as the Lateran Treaty, which gave the papacy recognition as a sovereign state (Vatican City) and financial compensation for the seizure of Church lands by the liberal state in the 19th century.^[137] Two years later the Church renounced fascism in the Encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno as a "pagan idolatry of the state" which teaches "hatred, violence and irreverence".^[137] Not long after signing the agreement, by Mussolini's own confession, the Church had threatened to have him "excommunicated", in part because of his intractable nature, but also because he had "confiscated more issues of Catholic newspapers in the next three months than in the previous seven years".^[138] By the late 1930s, Mussolini became more vocal in his anti-clerical rhetoric, repeatedly denouncing the Catholic Church and discussing ways to depose the pope. He took the position that the "papacy was a malignant tumour in the body of Italy and must 'be rooted out once and for all,' because there was no room in Rome for both the Pope and himself."^[139] In her 1974 book, Mussolini's widow Rachele stated that her husband had always been an atheist until near the end of his life, writing that her husband was "basically irreligious until the later years of his life".^[140]

Though Fascist propaganda had begun to speak of the new regime as an all-encompassing "totalitarian" state beginning in 1925, the Fascist Party and regime never gained total control over Italy's institutions. King Victor Emmanuel III remained head of state, the armed forces and the judicial system retained considerable autonomy from the Fascist state, Fascist militias were under military control and initially, the economy had relative autonomy as well.^[141]

Between 1922 and 1925, Fascism sought to accommodate the Italian Liberal Party, conservatives, and nationalists under Italy's coalition government, where major alterations to its political agenda were made – alterations such as abandoning its previous populism, republicanism, and anticlericalism – and adopting policies of economic liberalism under Alberto De Stefani, a Center Party member who was Italy's Minister of Finance until dismissed by Mussolini after the imposition of a single-party dictatorship in 1925.^[127] The Fascist regime also accepted the Roman Catholic Church and the monarchy as institutions in Italy.^[142] To appeal to Italian conservatives, Fascism adopted policies such as promoting family values, including the promotion of policies designed to reduce the number of women in the workforce, limiting the woman's role to that of a mother. In an effort to expand Italy's population to facilitate Mussolini's future plans to control the Mediterranean region, the Fascists banned literature on birth control and increased penalties for abortion in 1926, declaring both crimes against the state.^[143] Though Fascism adopted a number of positions designed to appeal to reactionaries, the Fascists also sought to maintain Fascism's revolutionary character, with Angelo Oliviero Olivetti saying that "Fascism would like to be conservative, but it will [be] by being revolutionary".^[144] The Fascists supported revolutionary action and committed to secure law and order to appeal to both conservatives and syndicalists.^[132]

The Fascist regime began to create a corporatist economic system in 1925 with the creation of the Palazzo Vidoni Pact, in which the Italian employers' association Confindustria and fascist trade unions agreed to recognise each other as the sole representatives of Italy's employers and employees, excluding non-Fascist trade unions.^[145] The Fascist regime created a Ministry of Corporations that organised the Italian economy into 22 sectoral corporations, banned all independent trade unions, banned workers' strikes and lock-outs, and in 1927 issued the Charter of Labour, which established workers' rights and duties and created labor tribunals to arbitrate employer-employee disputes.^[145] In practice, the sectoral corporations exercised little independence and were largely controlled by the regime, while employee organisations were rarely led by employees themselves, but instead by appointed Fascist party members.^[145]

In the 1920s, Fascist Italy pursued an aggressive foreign policy that included an attack on the Greek island of Corfu, aims to expand Italian territory in the Balkans, plans to wage war against Turkey and Yugoslavia, attempts to bring Yugoslavia into civil war by supporting Croat and Macedonian separatists to legitimise Italian intervention, and making Albania a de facto protectorate of Italy (which was achieved through diplomatic means by 1927).^[146] In response to revolt in the Italian colony of Libya, Fascist Italy abandoned the previous liberal-era colonial policy of cooperation with local leaders. Instead, claiming that Italians were a superior race to African races and thereby had the right to colonise the "inferior" Africans, it sought to settle 10 to 15 million Italians in Libya.^[147] This resulted in an aggressive military campaign against the Libyans, including mass killings, the use of concentration camps, and the forced starvation of thousands of people.^[147] Italian authorities committed ethnic cleansing by forcibly expelling 100,000 Bedouin Cyrenaicans, half the population of Cyrenaica in Libya, from land that was slated to be given to Italian settlers.^[148]^[149]

Inspiring other fascists

The March on Rome brought Fascism international attention. One early admirer of the Italian Fascists was Adolf Hitler, who less than a month after the March had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists.^[150] The Nazis, led by Hitler and the German war hero Erich Ludendorff, attempted a "March on Berlin" modelled upon the March on Rome, which resulted in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923, where the Nazis briefly captured Bavarian Minister-President Gustav Ritter von Kahr and announced the creation of a new German government to be led by a triumvirate of von Kahr, Hitler, and Ludendorff.^[151] The Beer Hall Putsch was crushed by Bavarian police, and Hitler and other leading Nazis were arrested and detained until 1925.^{[citation needed]}

Emblem of MOVE, ca. 1920

ORJUNA flag presentation in Vič near Ljubljana, Yugoslavia.

Another early admirer of Italian Fascism was Gyula Gömbös, leader of the Hungarian National Defence Association (known by its acronym MOVE), one of several groups that were known in Hungary as the "right radicals." Gömbös described himself as a "national socialist" and championed radical land reform and "Christian capital" in opposition to "Jewish capital." He also advocated a revanchist foreign policy and in 1923 stated the need for a "march on Budapest".^[152] Yugoslavia briefly had a significant fascist movement, the ORJUNA, which supported Yugoslavism, advocated the creation of a corporatist economy, opposed democracy and took part in violent attacks on communists, though it was opposed to the Italian government due to Yugoslav border disputes with Italy.^[153] ORJUNA was dissolved in 1929 when the King of Yugoslavia banned political parties and created a royal dictatorship, though ORJUNA supported the King's decision.^[153] Amid a political crisis in Spain involving increased strike activity and rising support for anarchism, Spanish army commander Miguel Primo de Rivera engaged in a successful coup against the Spanish government in 1923 and installed himself as a dictator as head of a conservative military junta that dismantled the established party system of government.^[154] Upon achieving power, Primo de Rivera sought to resolve the economic crisis by presenting himself as a compromise arbitrator figure between workers and bosses and his regime created a corporatist economic system based on the Italian Fascist model.^[154] In Lithuania in 1926, Antanas Smetona rose to power and founded a parafascist regime under his Lithuanian Nationalist Union.^[155]

International surge of fascism and World War II (1929–1945)

Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös (left) meeting with Mussolini (right)

The great depression

The conditions of economic hardship caused by the Great Depression brought about an international surge of social unrest.^[157] Fascist propaganda blamed the problems of the long depression of the 1930s on minorities and scapegoats: "Judeo-Masonic-bolshevik" conspiracies, left-wing internationalism and the presence of immigrants.^[158]

The Great Depression in Germany contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party, which resulted in the demise of the Weimar Republic and the establishment of the fascist regime, Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.^[159]^[160] With the rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power in 1933, liberal democracy was dissolved in Germany and the Nazis mobilised the country for war, with expansionist territorial aims against several countries.^[161]^[162] In the 1930s, the Nazis implemented racial laws that deliberately discriminated against, disenfranchised and persecuted Jews and other racial and minority groups.^[163]

Fascist movements grew in strength elsewhere in Europe. Hungarian fascist Gyula Gömbös rose to power as Prime Minister of Hungary in 1932, he created an eight-hour work day and a forty-eight-hour work week in industry; sought to entrench a corporatist economy; and pursued irredentist claims on Hungary's neighbors.^[164] The fascist Iron Guard movement in Romania soared in political support after 1933, gaining representation in the Romanian government, and an Iron Guard member assassinated Romanian prime minister Ion Duca.^[165] The Iron Guard was the only fascist movement outside Germany and Italy to come to power without foreign assistance.^[166]^[167] The Iron Guard had little in the way of a concrete program and placed more emphasis on ideas of religious and spiritual revival.^[168] During the 6 February 1934 crisis, France faced the greatest domestic political turmoil since the Dreyfus Affair when the fascist Francist Movement and multiple far-right movements rioted en masse in Paris against the French government resulting in major political violence.^[169] A variety of para-fascist governments that borrowed elements from fascism were formed during the Great Depression, including those of Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Yugoslavia.^[170]

In Spain, shortly after the Popular Front's victory in the 1936 election, groups of officers, both active and retired, got together to discuss a coup. By the end of April General Emilio Mola emerged as the leader of a national conspiracy network.^[172] Francisco Franco became a key player because of his prestige as a former director of the military academy and as the man who suppressed the Asturian miners' strike of 1934.^[173] The coup was initiated on 18 July 1936, beginning the Spanish civil war.^[174] On 19 April 1937, Franco united the leading parties of the nationalist faction, the national syndicalist Falange Española de las JONS with the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista, with the Unification Decree, forming the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS (FET y de las JONS).^[175] The official ideology was the Falangists' 27 puntos—reduced after the unification to 26. While the Carlists came off worse in this forced union, Franco had correctly deduced that they would be more obedient and less politically minded, making it less of a concern.^[176]^{[page needed]} Franco's troops conquered the last holdout of Catalonia in a whirlwind campaign during January and February of 1939.^[177] On 27 February, the United Kingdom and France recognized the Franco regime.^[178] The subsequent Falangist one-party state in Spain was officially neutral during World War II, although Franco's rise to power had been directly assisted by the militaries of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War.^[179]^[180] The first years were characterized by a repression against the anti-fascist ideologies, deep censorship, and the suppression of democratic institutions (such as the elected Parliament, the Spanish Constitution of 1931, and the regional statutes of autonomy).^[181]^[182]

Fascism outside of Europe

In the Americas, several mostly short-lived fascist governments and prominent fascist movements were formed during this period. Argentine President General José Félix Uriburu proposed that Argentina be reorganised along corporatist and fascist lines.^[183] In Brazil, the Brazilian Integralists led by Plínio Salgado claimed as many as 200,000 members, although following coup attempts it faced a crackdown from the Estado Novo of Getúlio Vargas in 1937.^[184] In the 1930s, the National Socialist Movement of Chile gained seats in Chile's parliament and attempted a coup d'état that resulted in the Seguro Obrero massacre of 1938.^[185] In Paraguay in 1940, Paraguayan President General Higinio Morínigo began his rule as a dictator with the support of pro-fascist military officers, appealed to the masses, exiled opposition leaders and only abandoned his pro-fascist policies after the end of World War II.^[153] In Peru, president Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro founded the Revolutionary Union in 1931 as the state party for his dictatorship. It was a fascist political party which remained in power to 1933 with the death of Sánchez Cerro. After which Luis A. Flores lead the party as its supreme chief.^[186]^[187] Flores sought to mobilise mass support for the group's nationalism and started a paramilitary blackshirts arm as a copy of the Italian group, but the Union lost heavily in the 1936 elections and faded into obscurity.^[188]^[186] One of the party's earliest and fervent members was Raúl Ferrero Rebagliati, who later served as the 107th Prime Minister of Peru.^[188]

Fascism also expanded its influence outside Europe, especially in East Asia, the Middle East and South America. In China, Wang Jingwei's Kai-Tsu p'ai (Reorganisation) faction of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party of China) supported Nazism in the late 1930s.^[190]^[191] In Japan, a Nazi movement called the Tōhōkai was formed by Seigō Nakano. The Al-Muthanna Club of Iraq was a pan-Arab movement that supported Nazism and exercised its influence in the Iraqi government through cabinet minister Saib Shawkat who formed a paramilitary youth movement.^[192] Another ultra-nationalist movement that arose in the Arab world during the 1930s was the irredentist Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) led by Antoun Sa'adeh, which advocated the formation of "Greater Syria". Inspired by the models of both Italian fascism and German Nazism, Sa'adeh believed that Syrians were a "distinct and naturally superior race". SSNP engaged in violent activities to assert control over Syria, organise the country along militaristic lines and then impose its ideological project on the Greater Syrian region.^[193] During the Second World War, Sa'adeh developed close ties with officials of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.^[189] Although SSNP had managed to become the closest cognate of European fascism in the Arab World, the party failed to make any social impact and was eventually banned for terrorist activities during the 1950s.^[194]^[195]^[196]

Interventionism and expansionism

During the Great Depression, Mussolini promoted active state intervention in the economy. He denounced the contemporary "supercapitalism" that he claimed began in 1914 as a failure because of its alleged decadence, its support for unlimited consumerism, and its intention to create the "standardization of humankind".^[197] Fascist Italy created the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), a giant state-owned firm and holding company that provided state funding to failing private enterprises.^[198] The IRI was made a permanent institution in Fascist Italy in 1937, pursued fascist policies to create national autarky and had the power to take over private firms to maximise war production.^[198] While Hitler's regime only nationalised 500 companies in key industries by the early 1940s,^[199] Mussolini declared in 1934, "[t]hree-fourths of Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state."^[200]

Due to the worldwide depression, Mussolini's government was able to take over most of Italy's largest failing banks, who held controlling interest in many Italian businesses. The IRI reported in early 1934 that they held assets of "48.5 percent of the share capital of Italy", which later included the capital of the banks themselves.^[201] Political historian Martin Blinkhorn estimated Italy's scope of state intervention and ownership "greatly surpassed that in Nazi Germany, giving Italy a public sector second only to that of Stalin's Russia".^[202] In the late 1930s, Italy enacted manufacturing cartels, tariff barriers, currency restrictions and massive regulation of the economy to attempt to balance payments.^[203] Italy's policy of autarky failed to achieve effective economic autonomy.^[203] Nazi Germany similarly pursued an economic agenda with the aims of autarky and rearmament and imposed protectionist policies, including forcing the German steel industry to use lower-quality German iron ore rather than superior-quality imported iron.^[204]

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany pursued territorial expansionist and interventionist foreign policy agendas from the 1930s through the 1940s, culminating in World War II. Mussolini supported irredentist Italian claims over neighbouring territories, establishing Italian domination of the Mediterranean Sea, securing Italian access to the Atlantic Ocean, and the creation of Italian spazio vitale ("vital space") in the Mediterranean and Red Sea regions.^[205] Hitler supported irredentist German claims overall territories inhabited by ethnic Germans, along with the creation of German Lebensraum ("living space") in Eastern Europe, including territories held by the Soviet Union, that would be colonised by Germans.^[206]

From 1935 to 1939, Germany and Italy escalated their demands for territorial gains and greater influence in world affairs. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, resulting in condemnation by the League of Nations and widespread diplomatic isolation.^{[citation needed]} In 1936, Germany remilitarised the industrial Rhineland, a region that had been ordered demilitarised by the Treaty of Versailles.^{[citation needed]} In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. The next year, Czechoslovakia was partitioned between Germany and a client state of Slovakia. At the same time, from 1938 to 1939, Italy was demanding territorial and colonial concessions from France and Britain in the Mediterranean.^[207] In 1939, Germany prepared for war with Poland, but also attempted to gain territorial concessions from Poland through diplomatic means. Germany demanded that Poland accept the annexation of the Free City of Danzig to Germany and authorise the construction of automobile highways from Germany through the Polish Corridor into Danzig and East Prussia, promising a twenty-five-year non-aggression pact in exchange.^[208] The Polish government did not trust Hitler's promises and refused to accept German demands.^[208] Following a strategic alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939, the two powers invaded Poland in September of that year.^{[citation needed]}

In response, the United Kingdom, France, and their allies declared war against Germany, resulting in the outbreak of World War II. Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland between them in late 1939 followed by the successful German offensive in Scandinavia and continental Western Europe in 1940. On 10 June 1940, Mussolini led Italy into World War II on the side of the Axis. Mussolini was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity to carry out a long war with France or Britain and waited until France was on the verge of imminent collapse before declaring war, on the assumption that the war would be short-lived.^[209] Mussolini believed that Italy could gain some territorial concessions from France and then concentrate its forces on a major offensive in Egypt.^[209] Plans by Germany to invade the United Kingdom in 1940 failed after Germany lost the aerial warfare campaign in the Battle of Britain.^{[citation needed]} The war became prolonged contrary to Mussolini's plans, resulting in Italy losing battles on multiple fronts and requiring German assistance. In 1941, the Axis campaign spread to the Soviet Union after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.^{[citation needed]} Axis forces at the height of their power controlled almost all of continental Europe, including the occupation of large portions of the Soviet Union. By 1942, Fascist Italy occupied and annexed Dalmatia from Yugoslavia, Corsica and Nice from France and controlled other territories. During World War II, the Axis powers in Europe led by Nazi Germany participated in the extermination of millions of Jews and others in the genocide known as the Holocaust.^{[citation needed]}

After 1942, Axis forces began to lose their early upper hand. By 1943, after Italy faced multiple military failures, complete reliance and subordination to Germany and an Allied invasion, Mussolini was removed as head of government and arrested by the order of King Victor Emmanuel III. The king proceeded to dismantle the Fascist state and joined the Allies. Mussolini was rescued from arrest by German forces and led the German client state, the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany faced multiple losses and steady Soviet and Western Allied offensives from 1943 to 1945.^{[citation needed]}

On 28 April 1945, Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian communist partisans. On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide during the Battle of Berlin between collapsing German forces and Soviet armed forces. Shortly afterward, Germany surrendered and the Nazi regime was dismantled and key Nazi members were arrested to stand trial for crimes against humanity including the Holocaust.^{[citation needed]}

Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia requested the extradition of 1,200 Italian war criminals, but these people never saw anything like the Nuremberg trials since the British government, with the beginning of Cold War, saw in Pietro Badoglio a guarantee of an anti-communist post-war Italy.^[210] The repression of memory led to historical revisionism^[211] in Italy and in 2003 the Italian media published Silvio Berlusconi's statement that Benito Mussolini only "used to send people on vacation",^[212] denying the existence of Italian concentration camps such as Rab concentration camp.^[213]

Fascism, neofascism and postfascism after World War II (1945–2008)

In the aftermath of World War II, the victory of the Allies over the Axis powers led to the collapse of multiple fascist regimes in Europe. The Nuremberg Trials convicted multiple Nazi leaders of crimes against humanity including the Holocaust. However, there remained multiple ideologies and governments that were ideologically related to fascism.^{[citation needed]}

In Spain, after World War II and a period of international isolation, Franco's regime normalised relations with the Western powers during the Cold War, until Franco's death in 1975 and the transformation of Spain into a liberal democracy.^[214]

Historian Robert Paxton observes that one of the main problems in defining fascism is that it was widely mimicked. Paxton says: "In fascism's heyday, in the 1930s, many regimes that were not functionally fascist borrowed elements of fascist decor in order to lend themselves an aura of force, vitality, and mass mobilization." He goes on to observe that António de Oliveira Salazar "crushed Portuguese fascism after he had copied some of its techniques of popular mobilization".^[215] Paxton says: "Where Franco subjected Spain's fascist party to his personal control, Salazar abolished outright in July 1934 the nearest thing Portugal had to an authentic fascist movement, Rolão Preto's blue-shirted National Syndicalists. ... Salazar preferred to control his population through such 'organic' institutions traditionally powerful in Portugal as the Church. Salazar's regime was not only non-fascist, but 'voluntarily non-totalitarian,' preferring to let those of its citizens who kept out of politics 'live by habit.'"^[216] However, historians tend to view the Estado Novo as para-fascist in nature,^[217] possessing minimal fascist tendencies.^[218] Other historians, including Fernando Rosas and Manuel Villaverde Cabral, think that the Estado Novo should be considered fascist.^[219]

Peronism, which is associated with the regime of Juan Peron in Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and 1973 to 1974, was strongly influenced by fascism.^[220] Prior to rising to power, from 1939 to 1941 Peron had developed a deep admiration of Italian Fascism and modelled his economic policies on Italian Fascist economic policies.^[220]

The South African government of Afrikaner nationalist and white supremacist Daniel François Malan was closely associated with pro-fascist and pro-Nazi politics.^[221] In 1937, Malan's Purified National Party, the South African Fascists and the Blackshirts agreed to form a coalition for the South African election.^[221] Malan had fiercely opposed South Africa's participation on the Allied side in World War II.^[222] Malan's government founded apartheid, the system of racial segregation of whites and non-whites in South Africa.^[221] The most extreme Afrikaner fascist movement is the neo-Nazi white supremacist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) that at one point was recorded in 1991 to have 50,000 supporters with rising support.^[223] The AWB grew in support in response to efforts to dismantle apartheid in the 1980s and early 1990s and its paramilitary wing the Storm Falcons threatened violence against people it considered "trouble makers".^[223]

Another ideology strongly influenced by fascism is Ba'athism.^[224] Ba'athism is a revolutionary Arab nationalist ideology that seeks the unification of all claimed Arab lands into a single Arab state.^[224] Zaki al-Arsuzi, one of the principal founders of Ba'athism, was strongly influenced by and supportive of Fascism and Nazism.^[225] Several close associates of Ba'athism's key ideologist Michel Aflaq have admitted that Aflaq had been directly inspired by certain fascist and Nazi theorists.^[224] Ba'athist regimes in power in Iraq and Syria have held strong similarities to fascism, they are radical authoritarian nationalist one-party states.^[224] Due to Ba'athism's anti-Western stances it preferred the Soviet Union in the Cold War and admired and adopted certain Soviet organisational structures for their governments, but the Ba'athist regimes have persecuted communists.^[224] Like fascist regimes, Ba'athism became heavily militarised in power.^[224] Ba'athist movements governed Iraq in 1963 and again from 1968 to 2003 and in Syria from 1963 to 2024. Ba'athist heads of state such as Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein created personality cults around themselves portraying themselves as the nationalist saviours of the Arab world.^[224]

Ba'athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein pursued ethnic cleansing or the liquidation of minorities, pursued expansionist wars against Iran and Kuwait and gradually replaced pan-Arabism with an Iraqi nationalism that emphasised Iraq's connection to the glories of ancient Mesopotamian empires, including Babylonia.^[226] Historian of fascism Stanley Payne has said about Saddam Hussein's regime: "There will probably never again be a reproduction of the Third Reich, but Saddam Hussein has come closer than any other dictator since 1945".^[226]

Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner (left), the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, served for decades as the advisor of Ba'athist dictator Hafez al-Assad (right) in building Syria's secret police and security apparatus.^[227]^[228] Brunner is reported to have died in Damascus in 2001^[229] or 2010.^[228]

Ba'athist Syria under the Assad dynasty granted asylum, protection and funding for the internationally wanted Nazi war-criminal Alois Brunner for decades. An SS officer under the command of Adolf Eichmann, Brunner directly oversaw the abduction and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust. For decades, Brunner provided extensive training to the Syrian Mukhabarat on Nazi torture practices and re-organised the Ba'athist secret police on the model of the SS and Gestapo.^[230]^[228]^[231] Extreme antisemitic sentiments have been normalised in Syrian society through the pervasive Ba'athist propaganda system. The Assad regime was also the only regime in the world that granted asylum to Abu Daoud, the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre. In his notorious book Matzo of Zion, Syrian Minister of Defense Mustafa Tlass accused the Jews of blood libel and harbouring "black hatred against all humankind and religions".^[232]

Antisemitic canards and conspiracies have also been promoted as a regular feature in the state TV shows during the reign of Bashar al-Assad.^[232] Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, some neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups have supported the Assad regime, including CasaPound, Golden Dawn, Black Lily, the British National Party, National rebirth of poland, and Forza Nuova.^[233] The affinity shown by some neo-Nazis to the leftist-oriented Syrian Ba'ath party is commonly explained as part of the former's far-right worldview rooted in Islamophobia, admiration for totalitarian states and perception that the Ba'athist government is against Jews. British-Syrian activist Leila al-Shamy states this could also be due to doctrinal similarities:

"the ideological roots of Baathism, which definitely incorporates elements of fascism... took inspiration from European fascism, particularly how to build a totalitarian state."^[233]

In the 1990s, Stanley Payne claimed that the Indian Hindutva organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) holds strong resemblances to fascism, including its use of paramilitaries and its irredentist claims calling for the creation of a Greater India.^[234] Dean McHenry in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia describes the ideology of the RSS as "fascism with Sanskrit characters" – a unique Indian variant of fascism.^[235] McHenry notes that there is evidence that the RSS held direct contact with Italy's Fascist regime and admired European fascism,^[235] a view with some support from A. James Gregor.^[236] However, these views have been met with criticism from some scholars of the field that do not subscribe to the view the RSS is fascist, notably among them Christophe Jaffrelot,^[237] A. James Gregor^[236] and Chetan Bhatt.^[238] They argue this on the basis of an apparent absence of charismatic leadership, a desire on the part of the RSS to differentiate itself from European fascism, and cultural differences between the RSS and European fascists, alongside factionalism within the Sangh Parivar.^[237]

Contemporary fascism (2008–present)

Since the Great Recession of 2008, fascism has seen an international surge in popularity, alongside closely associated phenomena like xenophobia, antisemitism, authoritarianism and euroskepticism.^[239]^{[page needed]}

Greece

After the onset of the Great Recession and economic crisis in Greece, a movement known as the Golden Dawn, widely considered a neo-Nazi party,^[240] soared in support out of obscurity and won seats in Greece's parliament,^[241] espousing a staunch hostility towards minorities, illegal immigrants and refugees.^[242] In 2013, after the murder of an anti-fascist musician by a person with links to Golden Dawn, the Greek government ordered the arrest of Golden Dawn's leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos and other members on charges related to being associated with a criminal organisation.^[243]^[244] On 7 October 2020, Athens Appeals Court announced verdicts for 68 defendants, including the party's political leadership. Nikolaos Michaloliakos and six other prominent members and former members of parliament (MPs) were found guilty of running a criminal organisation.^[245] Guilty verdicts were delivered on charges of murder, attempted murder, and violent attacks on immigrants and left-wing political opponents.^[246]

Post-Soviet Russia

Marlene Laruelle, a French political scientist, contends in Is Russia Fascist? that the accusation of "fascist" has evolved into a strategic narrative of the existing world order.^[247] Geopolitical rivals might construct their own view of the world and assert the moral high ground by branding ideological rivals as fascists, regardless of their real ideals or deeds.^[248] Laruelle discusses the basis, significance, and veracity of accusations of fascism in and around Russia through an analysis of the domestic situation in Russia and the Kremlin's foreign policy justifications; she concludes that Russian efforts to brand its opponents as fascist is ultimately an attempt to determine the future of Russia in Europe as an antifascist force, influenced by its role in fighting fascism in World War II.^[249]

According to Alexander J. Motyl, an American historian and political scientist, Russian fascism has the following characteristics:^[250]^[251]

An undemocratic political system, different from both traditional authoritarianism and totalitarianism;
Statism and hypernationalism;
A hypermasculine cult of the supreme leader (emphasis on his courage, militancy and physical prowess);
General popular support for the regime and its leader.^[252]

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has stated, "Putin's regime is ... the world center of fascism" and has written an article entitled "We Should Say It: Russia Is Fascist".^[253] Oxford historian Roger Griffin compared Putin's Russia to the World War II-era Empire of Japan, saying that like Putin's Russia, it "emulated fascism in many ways, but was not fascist".^[254] Historian Stanley G. Payne says Putin's Russia "is not equivalent to the fascist regimes of World War II, but it forms the nearest analogue to fascism found in a major country since that time" and argues that Putin's political system is "more a revival of the creed of Tsar Nicholas I in the 19th century that emphasised 'Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality' than one resembling the revolutionary, modernising regimes of Hitler and Mussolini".^[254] According to Griffin, fascism is "a revolutionary form of nationalism" seeking to destroy the old system and remake society, and that Putin is a reactionary politician who is not trying to create a new order "but to recreate a modified version of the Soviet Union". German political scientist Andreas Umland said genuine fascists in Russia, like deceased politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky and activist and self-styled philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, "describe in their writings a completely new Russia" controlling parts of the world that were never under tsarist or Soviet domination.^[254] According to Marlene Laurelle writing in The Washington Quarterly, "applying the "fascism" label ... to the entirety of the Russian state or society short-circuits our ability to construct a more complex and differentiated picture."^[255]

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, collecting the opinions of experts on fascism, said that while Russia is repressive and authoritarian, it cannot be classified as a fascist state for various reasons, including Russia's government being more reactionary than revolutionary.^[254] In 2023, Oleg Orlov, the chairman of the Board of Human Rights Center "Memorial", claimed that Russia under Vladimir Putin had descended into fascism and that the army is committing "mass murder" in the Russo-Ukrainian war.^[256]^[257] On 7 March 2024, in his 2024 State of the Union Address, American President Joe Biden compared Russia under Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler's conquests of Europe.^[258]

United States

While initially composed of distinctive movements, in the 21st century, many U.S. Neo-Nazi groups have moved towards more decentralised organisation and online social networks with a terroristic focus.^[259] After the election of Donald Trump, fascist groups began coalescing around his right-wing populism to take advantage of it.^[260] In 2017, the Unite the Right rally^[261] saw marchers come together from a variety of far-right groups and movements, including members of the alt-right,^[262] neo-Confederates,^[263] neo-fascists,^[264] white nationalists,^[265] neo-Nazis,^[266] Klansmen,^[267] and far-right militias.^[268] Around this period, a number of prominent fascist groups were also founded, including the Proud Boys and Patriot Front.^[269]^[270]^[271]

Other neo-Nazi groups that were created in the 20th century still operate in the United states, including the National Alliance, the American Nazi Party, and the Institute for Historical Review, which publishes negationist literature of an antisemitic nature.^[272]

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^ New Voice of Ukraine (2024).
^ Southern Poverty Law Center (2021).
^ Berger (2025), pp. 177–179.
^ Berger (2025), p. 186.
^ Stapley (2017).
^ Weill (2018).
^ Gunter (2017).
^ Kelkar (2017).
^ Wootson (2017).
^ Park (2017).
^ Early (2018).
^ Berger (2025), p. 190.
^ Cruz & Sawyer (2021), pp. 247–249.
^ Belam & Gabatt (2020).
^ Levin (2018).

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