Italian fascism

• 1. Introduction

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  Italian fascism named itself after a bundle of sticks. The Latin word fasces described a rod-and-axe arrangement carried by magistrates' attendants in ancient Rome, a symbol of civic authority. Benito Mussolini chose it deliberately. A single rod breaks easily; the bundle does not. That image of strength through unity became the emblem of an ideology that would govern Italy from 1922 to 1945, inspire movements across Europe, and reshape the meaning of the word "fascism" for the rest of the world.

  What exactly was Italian fascism? Where did it come from, and what did it actually believe? The answers are stranger than most people expect. The movement began on the political left, borrowed from syndicalism, courted both workers and industrialists, and then transformed itself into something that declared war on liberalism, socialism, and conservative tradition alike. Giovanni Gentile, a philosopher steeped in Plato and Hegel, wrote its founding text. Mussolini published it under his own name. The doctrine called fascism a "religious conception of life." It offered empire, youth, and the rebirth of Rome.

  By 1938, the regime that had initially dismissed antisemitism as a "German vice" was publishing the Manifesto of Race. By 1939, fascist Italy had achieved the highest rate of state ownership of any economy in the world outside the Soviet Union. And by 1945, the movement that had begun with a Milanese street organization of a few hundred people had left hundreds of thousands dead in Ethiopia and Libya alone. This is the story of how that happened.

• 2. Roots in Revolution

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  On the 5th of October 1914, the Italian national syndicalist Alceste De Ambris and the left-wing interventionist Filippo Corridoni published a programmatic manifesto that would directly inspire the first fascist political organization. Mussolini, then still working as a journalist, founded the Fasces of Revolutionary Action the following year, in 1915. The movement drew on ultra-nationalism, national syndicalism, and the militarist tradition of Italian irredentism, the drive to reclaim territories regarded as historically Italian.

  In 1919, Mussolini founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan. Its co-founders included the Futurist poet and art theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the WWI veteran and poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. Their manifesto was divided into four sections covering political, social, military, and financial objectives. Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell later noted that "most syndicalist leaders were among the founders of the fascist movement," many of whom went on to hold key positions in Mussolini's government.

  Mussolini himself expressed great admiration for the French philosopher Georges Sorel, whom he credited with shaping the core principles of early fascism. Historian J. L. Talmon argued that fascism presented itself "not only as an alternative, but also as the heir to socialism." The American political scientist and historian Robert Paxton observed that the fasces symbol, before 1914, had been widely used by left-wing and liberal movements. Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, was often portrayed in the nineteenth century carrying the fasces to represent republican solidarity.

  Enrico Corradini, one of the early influences on Mussolini's thinking and later a member of his administration, wrote in 1910 that Italy was "the proletarian people in respect to the rest of the world" and that "nationalism is our socialism." Mussolini would later echo this framing almost word for word.

• 3. The Doctrine and Its Philosopher

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  Giovanni Gentile wrote The Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1932 under Mussolini's name. Gentile was an actualist philosopher who had been intellectually shaped by Plato, G. W. F. Hegel, Benedetto Croce, and Giambattista Vico. He defined fascism as explicitly anti-positivist and anti-intellectual, grounded in faith rather than reason.

  The doctrine proposed that the world was permanently defined by human action, not by fixed laws or perpetual peace. It presented great conquerors as the men of historical consequence: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon. Fascism, in Gentile's framework, was a "religious conception of life" that formed a "spiritual community" in direct opposition to bourgeois materialism.

  The text declared: "For the Fascist, everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state." The doctrine justified colonialism and imperialism on spiritual grounds, quoting itself: "An empire is not only a territorial or military or mercantile concept, but a spiritual and moral one."

  Fascist slogans captured this orientation directly. Credere, Obbedire, Combattere translated as "Believe, Obey, Fight." The party's political anthem was called Giovinezza, meaning "Youth." Mussolini denounced democracy as "beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy" and spoke publicly of celebrating the burial of the "putrid corpse of liberty." The doctrine held that Italian fascism was the legitimate heir to the Risorgimento of 1815-1871 and that liberal-led governments had abandoned its goals.

• 4. Power and Its Seizure

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  World War I left Italy with enormous debts, thousands of demobilized soldiers, widespread unemployment, general strikes, and organized crime. The liberal-led Giolitti governments struggled to contain communist and anarchist insurrections spreading across Europe between 1917 and 1923. In this climate, Mussolini organized the Blackshirts, paramilitary squads of WWI veterans and former socialists who attacked socialist and Catholic labor organizations in the countryside.

  Historian Charles F. Delzell noted that fascism spread slowly between 1919 and 1920, and only accelerated after workers occupied factories in the late summer of 1920. Industrialists began providing financial support to Mussolini after he renamed his party and withdrew his previous support for Lenin and the Russian Revolution. By the early 1920s, popular support for the fascist movement's anti-Bolshevik campaign had reached approximately 250,000 people.

  In 1923, the Italian economist Giacomo Acerbo, a baron, proposed a new electoral law to parliament. The law changed the system from proportional representation to majority representation: any party winning at least 25 percent of the vote would automatically receive two-thirds of parliamentary seats. Parliament approved it. In the 1924 election, the National Fascist Party won 65 percent of the vote.

  Deputy Giacomo Matteotti of the United Socialist Party formally accused the PNF of electoral fraud in parliament on the 30th of May 1924. He was also publishing a book called The Fascists Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination. On the 10th of June 1924, Matteotti was assassinated by the Ceka, a party secret police modelled on the Soviet Cheka. Of five men arrested, Amerigo Dumini was sentenced to five years for murder but served only eleven months before being freed under an amnesty from King Victor Emmanuel III. The remaining opposition parties quit parliament in protest through what became known as the Aventine Secession.

• 5. Empire, Race, and Expansion

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  Italian fascists claimed that modern Italy was the rightful heir to ancient Rome and identified the fascist state as a "Third Rome." Ancient Rome was the first; Renaissance Italy was the second. This imperial framework justified a sweeping set of territorial ambitions across Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean.

  To the east, the regime claimed Dalmatia on the basis of its Venetian cultural heritage and outrage over the 1919 revocation of the 1915 Treaty of London. The fascist regime imposed mandatory Italianization on German and South Slavic populations inside Italy's borders, abolishing minority-language schools, shutting down newspapers, and forcibly changing geographical and family names. Approximately 327,000 Slovenes out of a total population of 1.3 million found themselves subject to this policy. To the north, in November 1938, Mussolini told the Grand Fascist Council: "We shall bring our border to the Gotthard Pass."

  The regime claimed Malta on the basis that the Maltese language was a dialect of Italian. Italian had been one of Malta's official languages until 1937, when Britain abolished its status in response to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. In January 1939, Italy formally annexed Libya's four coastal provinces of Tripoli, Misurata, Benghazi and Derna as an integral part of metropolitan Italy, designating them Italy's "Fourth Shore."

  On race, Mussolini's position shifted dramatically over time. In a 1932 interview at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, he stated: "Race? It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling." He had earlier described antisemitism as a "German vice" and written that Italy knew no antisemitism and he believed it never would. By 1938, he endorsed the Manifesto of Race, published on the 14th of July 1938, acknowledging that he did so "entirely for political reasons," in deference to Nazi Germany. Leading members of his own party, including Dino Grandi and Italo Balbo, reportedly opposed the racial laws. In 1943, shortly after the fall of his regime, Mussolini expressed regret, saying the endorsement could have been avoided.

• 6. The Economy of the State

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  Mussolini declared fascist economics a "Third Position" between capitalism and Marxism. In 1935, he told his chamber that orthodox capitalism no longer existed in Italy. The system organized employers and employees into corporative associations that collectively represented economic sectors and set policy alongside the state. All wages were set by the government. Strikes by workers and lockouts by employers were both criminalized as acts prejudicial to the national community.

  In the early phase of fascist rule, the liberal economist Alberto de' Stefani served as Minister of Economics from 1922 to 1925 and balanced the national budget by applying classical liberal policies: abolishing inheritance, luxury, and foreign capital taxes and privatizing life insurance in 1923. Political scientist Franklin Hugh Adler described this coalition period as "Liberal-Fascism, a hybrid, unstable, and transitory regime type."

  One of Mussolini's first acts as prime minister was a 400-million-lira financing of Gio. Ansaldo and C., one of Italy's most important engineering companies. After the Great Depression, the government established the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, or IRI, in 1933 to subsidize failing companies. The IRI rapidly took control of major banks and industries, including Alfa Romeo. A year after the IRI's creation, Mussolini boasted to his chamber: "Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state."

  By 1939, fascist Italy had achieved the highest rate of state ownership of any economy in the world outside the Soviet Union. The Italian state controlled over four-fifths of the country's shipping and shipbuilding, three-quarters of its pig iron production, and almost half its steel output. In 1924, the government had granted Unione Radiofonica Italiana a radio-broadcast monopoly; after the defeat of fascism in 1944, that organization became Radio Audizioni Italiane, eventually renamed RAI with the arrival of television in 1954.

• 7. Resistance and Aftermath

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  Anti-fascist opposition took many forms across the duration of Mussolini's rule. In 1925, the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce published his Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. The movement Giustizia e Libertà, or Justice and Freedom, operated as an underground resistance organization from 1929 to 1945. Among its leaders were Carlo Rosselli, Ferruccio Parri, who later became Prime Minister of Italy, and Sandro Pertini, who later became President of Italy.

  The Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni, who had exiled himself to Argentina after the 1922 March on Rome, organized bombings against the Italian fascist community abroad. Between 1920 and 1943, the Slovene and Croat insurgent organization TIGR carried out sabotages and attacks on fascist representatives in the territories Italy had annexed after World War I. The Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism dismantled most of TIGR's underground structure in 1940 and 1941.

  King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Mussolini as Prime Minister on the 25th of July 1943, as his own constitution, the Statuto Albertino, gave him authority to do so. German forces rescued Mussolini from arrest, and he then founded the Italian Social Republic, governed by the Republican Fascist Party from 1943 to 1945. In his first public address after his rescue, on the 18th of September 1943, Mussolini stated: "It is not the regime that has betrayed the monarchy, it is the monarchy that has betrayed the regime."

  Mussolini was shot by Italian partisans three days before the 25th of April 1945, the date the National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy declared the anti-fascist insurgency complete and which Italy now commemorates as Liberation Day. The current Constitution of the Italian Republic was ratified and promulgated on the 27th of December 1947 and came into force on the 1st of January 1948. The document was revised 170 times by the Constituent Assembly before its approval, drafted by representatives of all the anti-fascist partisan forces that had fought during the Liberation of Italy from 1943 to 1945.