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.