I.

Introduction

Fascism, form of totalitarianism that seeks the strict regimentation of national and individual existence in accordance with nationalist and often militarist ideals; conflicting interests being adjusted by total subordination to the service of the state and unquestioning loyalty to its leader. In contrast to the left-wing totalitarianisms identified with Communism, fascism draws its ideas and form from extreme conservatism. Fascist regimes often resemble—and sometimes change into—dictatorships, military governments, or authoritarian tyrannies, but fascism itself is distinguishable from any of these as a specifically political movement and doctrine often maintained by political parties out of power.

Fascism emphasizes nationalism, but its appeal has been international. It first flourished between 1919 and 1945 in several countries, mainly Italy, Germany, and Spain. In a narrow sense, the word Fascism applies only to the Italian party that originally coined it, but it has been expanded to cover any comparable political ideology. Japan similarly endured in the 1930s a militarist regime exhibiting strong fascist characteristics. Fascist regimes also existed for varying lengths of time in many other countries. Even such liberal democracies as France and England had important fascist movements during the 1920s and 1930s. After the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, Fascism suffered a long eclipse, but it has recently resurfaced in various more or less overt forms in modern Western democracies, particularly France and Italy.

II.

Fascist Doctrines

Before World War I, several writers, among them the celebrated Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, and the French thinkers Georges Sorel, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, and Comte Joseph de Gobineau, expressed fascist ideas. They all opposed the Enlightenment values of individualism, democracy, and secular rationalism; and their ideas as a whole have been represented as a reaction to these values that the French Revolution had embodied. (The Italian Fascisti answered the revolutionary ideals of “liberty, equality, fraternity” with the exhortation “Believe! Obey! Fight!”) In general they venerated strength: the heroic will of the great leader, the vital force of the state, the mystique of paramilitary uniforms and formations, and the unrestrained use of violence to secure and further political power. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, though misinterpreted by most fascists, provided powerful ideas and slogans for fascism, notably the “triumph of the will” and the “superman”. Some fascists appealed to Christianity as a conservative force, while others rejected Christian morality as an emasculating curb on the will. Many adopted ideas from social Darwinism of competitive struggle within and between states, and of the evolutionary obligation of the strong to crush the weak: these ideas often involved racism. Most fascist theoreticians espoused extreme nationalism, which in some (Gobineau, Barrès, Maurras) included anti-Semitism. As part of their antirationalism, some proposed a mystical cult of tradition and of the state.

Benito Mussolini's “battle for births” typified the fascist view of the role of women, as passive home-makers and mothers of future personnel for the armed forces. “Woman”, wrote the Italian Fascist Ferdinando Loffredo, “must return under the subjection of man—father or husband—and must recognize therefore her own spiritual, cultural, and economic inferiority”. Associating militant feminism with Marxism and class struggle, fascists called for conciliation between the sexes as well as between economic classes—but on male terms. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, a French novelist who later became an apologist for the Nazi occupation, damned feminism as a “pernicious doctrine” and claimed that women, lacking the spiritual qualities of men, were a source of decadence. Despite this, many women have supported fascism, notably Alessandra Mussolini, the grandaughter of Mussolini prominent in the Italian neo-fascist party the National Alliance.

III.

Origins

The Dreyfus Affair in France created the first full-blown fascist movement, as conservatives united with monarchists and other opponents of republican government against the left-wing heirs of French revolutionary values who were trying to overturn the conviction for treason of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus. Charles Maurras formed the political group Action Française, with a violent youth wing called the Camelots du Roi and an ideology furnished by himself and Barrès. Republicanism dominated France in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, but Maurras and Barrès had provided a pattern for future movements. Economic dislocation after World War I and the threat of communism arising from the Russian Revolution of 1917, led to the resurgence of fascism as a serious political force. Powerful feelings of grievance over defeat, or insufficiently rewarded victory, in World War I created support for future military adventures. Fascism drew support from all sections of society, but principally from members of the middle class who feared the threat of Communist revolution, business leaders with similar fears, discharged veterans who had failed to adjust to civilian life, and violent young malcontents.

IV.

Italian Fascism

The actual term Fascism was first used by Benito Mussolini in 1919 and referred to the ancient Roman symbol of power, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound to an axe, which represented civic unity and the authority of Roman officials to punish wrongdoers. Mussolini, the founder of the Italian Fascist Party, began his political career as a Marxist. In 1912, as the editor of Italy's leading socialist newspaper, Avanti!, he opposed both capitalism and militarism. By 1914, however, he had changed his attitude, calling on Italy to enter World War I and moving towards the political right. Influenced by Sorel and Nietzsche, he glorified “action” and “vitality”. After the war, when a series of socialist-backed urban and rural strikes broke out in Italy Mussolini put his movement at the service of conservative business and landlord interests that, together with the Roman Catholic Church and the army, wanted to check the “red wave”. Mussolini's about-face brought him the political and financial backing he needed, and his own considerable oratorical powers did the rest (like Hitler in Germany, he was a highly effective demagogue). His Action Squads, first set up in 1919 and called “Blackshirts” after the example of the Redshirts of Giuseppe Garibaldi gave the movement effective muscle and set a fashion for fascist paramilitary style. In 1922 Mussolini seized control of the Italian government, threatening a coup d'état if his demands were refused. At first governing constitutionally at the head of a cross-party coalition, he soon shook off remaining curbs on his authority and established a dictatorship. All political parties except the Fascist Party, were banned, and Mussolini became Il Duce—the leader of the party. Labour unions were abolished, strikes were forbidden, and political opponents were silenced.

V.

Fascism Elsewhere

Mussolini's regime provided the model for fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. The Great Depression, and the failure of democratic governments to tackle the consequent economic hardship and mass unemployment, fuelled fascist movements worldwide. However, fascism in other countries differed from the Italian variety in certain respects. German National Socialism was more racist; in Romania, fascism was allied with the Orthodox Church rather than the Roman Catholic Church. In Spain, the radical fascist Falange was originally hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, although later, on the direction of the dictator Francisco Franco, it merged with reactionary and pro-Catholic elements. Authoritarian military rule in Japan was closely akin to that of Nazi Germany. Led by the military, it emphasized the traditional warrior virtues and an absolute dedication to the divine emperor. Like their German counterparts, the Japanese launched a fanatic drive for expansion by military conquest. In France fascism was divided into several movements. Whereas fascism in most cases flourished in countries that were economically backward or marked by strong authoritarian political traditions, French fascism made headway in one of Europe's best-established democracies. In 1934 an estimated 370,000 people belonged to the various French fascist organizations, such as the Jeunesses Patriotes, the Solidarité Française, the Croix de Feu, the Action Française, and the Francistes. More than 100,000 of these were concentrated in Paris.

In Great Britain, the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley enjoyed a brief heyday of publicity from its formation in 1932 to its effective collapse in 1936 when paramilitary uniforms were banned, but had little public support. Belgian fascism likewise saw its highpoint in the early to mid-1930s, and was only briefly reanimated during World War II under the German occupation. Fascism in Norway attracted a few notorious sympathizers, notably Vidkun Quisling and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Knut Hamsun, but likewise needed German occupation to bring it any political power.

Fascism enjoyed greater inter-war success in eastern and southern Europe. In Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor from 1932, dissolved the Austrian Republic and led a proto-fascist regime in alliance with Mussolini until his assassination in 1934 by National Socialists seeking union with Nazi Germany. The personal rule which Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya established in Hungary in 1920 actually preceded Mussolini's Italy as the first inter-war nationalist dictatorship, but Horthy himself was not a thoroughgoing fascist, and Hungary's fascists only held power briefly under the German occupation from 1944 to 1945. In Romania, strong native anti-Semitism inspired a violent movement called the Iron Guard, which convulsed Romanian politics from the 1920s until its annihilation by the Romanian army under Ion Antonescu in the civil strife which followed the abdication of King Carol II in 1940. Intense religious and cultural antagonisms in Croatia and Bosnia fuelled the Ustaše, a Catholic fascist group which, under Axis auspices, carried out terrible pogroms of Jews and Orthodox Serbs from 1941 to 1945. The dictatorial regime established by António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal in 1932 had strongly fascist characteristics, without exhibiting the extreme totalitarianism of Nazism or other movements elsewhere.

VI.

Post-War Fascism and Neo-Fascism

The defeat of Germany and Italy in World War II essentially discredited fascism in Europe in the post-war period. The only remotely fascist government to take power in the post-war period, that of Juan Domingo Perón, who was elected president of Argentina in 1946, had a broadly popular working-class base and little in common with pre-war European fascism. Countries like Spain and Portugal whose fascist governments remained in power after the war went from totalitarianism to authoritarianism, their fascist traits diffusing. Post-war economic recovery removed the social discontent which had helped fuel pre-war fascism, and in most democratic countries fascism seemed destined to permanent exile on a despised political fringe.

The 1980s and 1990s brought an unexpected revival of fascism in some Western democracies, usually dubbed neo-fascism. This had various forms and fortunes in different countries, but exhibited a general racist antipathy towards immigrants from the developing world, and a general disillusionment with established political parties. This disenchantment increased with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the post-war political order, when the ruling establishments in many European countries crumbled and many voters sought populist alternatives. The result was a growth of the extreme right.

Western European neo-fascism seems more a negative reaction to failures in the mainstream political establishment than a purposeful programme with any particular chances of success. However, overall, there has been an increase in support for strongly nationalist and sometimes overtly racist groups, whether or not labelled specifically as fascist or neo-Nazi, across the world. It appears that, despite its bloody and disastrous record, fascism is by no means dead as a political force, and at the beginning of the 21st century is taking new forms and adapting to new conditions.