FASCISM. - Political movement founded by Benito Mussolini (v.). The origins of fascism go back to the period immediately preceding the First World War: to the internal conflicts of Italian socialism and the emergence within it of new tendencies; to the crisis of the country's public opinion in the face of the war between the Central Empires (toward which Italy, although it had concluded the treaty of the Triple Alliance, demanded the satisfaction of vast territorial aspirations for the completion of national unity) and France and Great Britain (toward which it was drawn on the one hand by affinity of culture and language and on the other by the political traditions of the liberals); to the clash between two mentalities and two sets of customs, of which the one felt in the peaceful evolution of political situations the sole source of all civil progress, while the other saw in war and violence and in the school of physical courage other and better values. In that climate of conflicts the political vocation of the founder of the movement of the fasci had been taking shape, his choice inclining toward profoundly innovative solutions, toward syndicalist socialism, the overturning of the alliances, intervention in the war in order to conquer through sacrifice those aspirations that seemed as though they might be satisfied by diplomatic transactions.
With the end of the war of 1914-18, the enthusiasm aroused by victory and the disappointments suffered in the diplomatic negotiations for peace, the return of the combatants to civilian occupations and the demobilization of the great war industry had aroused further conflicts and further hardships in Italian public opinion: into these conflicts and these hardships the fascist movement came to insert itself, a movement which, founded in Milan in March 1919, claimed both the necessity of governmental action aimed at defending the Italian contribution to the war and the necessity of a decorous and orderly return to work for the veterans.
Around these two themes men of different origin and background could easily gather, and in reality did gather, many of whom seemed to join the new political movement not on the strength of conscious rational elements, but rather as dictated by the liveliness of the action that the leader of the movement prescribed, by the unscrupulousness with which an entire political world was attacked—a world to which the Italian youth grown up in the war seemed irremediably alien—and by the possibility of perpetuating in civil life that military tone and those military habits acquired in the formative years of youth. That indistinct and predominantly critical program allowed fascism, on the other hand, to gather the support of forces that were able to bring it the contribution of greater political experience and of financial resources.
The quality of the men who made up the fascist movement, their aspirations and the immediacy of action soon placed fascism as the strongest element of reaction against the spread of socialism. In order to check the violence, the strikes and the disorders which, emboldened by the victories in Russia, the socialists had unleashed in the country, the action squads were formed; and, in a predominantly anti-socialist function, fascism, in the political elections of May 1921, formed a bloc with other right-wing parties and obtained its first representation in Parliament. With this first electoral affirmation one witnesses the expansion of the movement from the great industrial cities of northern Italy to central and southern Italy, and one witnesses its transformation from a movement of elites (as it itself liked to describe itself) into a movement and organization of ever vaster masses: the first workers' unions arise, propaganda spreads through the countryside, the movement is framed into a party: the National Fascist Party.
Strong in its new organization and in the successes obtained in the cities and countryside against socialism, the fascist party demanded to participate actively in the government of the country; upon the refusal put forward by the governmental majority, the party decided to exert resolute pressure to achieve its aim: the demonstrations of October 1922 (culminating in the "March on Rome") advised the king to entrust Mussolini with the task of forming a cabinet. From here begins the history of fascism in power: at first together with other political representatives and, subsequently, alone.
At this point the history of fascism as a political movement seems to be absorbed into the history of the fascist State, the State over which fascism had placed itself at the head and which it guided through its own men; the concealed internal political dissensions (from the Matteotti murder to the conduct of the war in Abyssinia; from the alliance with Germany to the war at its side) are, more than disagreements within the party, disagreements and conflicts within the Italian political class in government.
Having come to power, fascism turned actively to the reform of the State and of Italian public life and to foreign and colonial policy, translating the impulses that had identified its action from its very first emergence: the affirmation of a strong State at home and abroad, the recognition of the function of labor in discipline and order.
In these directions fascism began the constitutional transformation of the State with the proclamation of the "Charter of Labor" as the fundamental law of labor, with the creation of the Grand Council of Fascism (an organ that comprised the highest hierarchies of fascism and of the government and that thus ensured, institutionally, the connection between the party and the government), with the appointment of the secretary of the fasci as a minister of the Kingdom, and finally with the abolition of the Chamber of Deputies and the creation of a Chamber of Fasci and Corporations composed of the representatives of the fascist political organizations and of the organizations of production. These transformations were accompanied by a vast legislative activity which, among other things, carried out the reform of the Civil Code, of the Code of Civil Procedure, of the Penal Code and of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Alongside these reforms, which aimed at a profound transformation of that liberal and secular State which fascism had found upon assuming the government, one must recall the conclusion of the Lateran Treaty and of the Concordat with the Holy See: by the former the Roman Question was resolved with the recognition of the State of Vatican City; by the latter it was intended to regulate the conditions of religion and of the Catholic Church in Italy, renouncing the secularization of the State and rendering active the 1st article of the Albertine Statute, opening the way, also in Italian legislation, to what is the right and mission of the Church. This was to lead to a whole orientation aimed at recognizing the prerogatives and the mission of the Catholic Church, especially in the field of the so-called mixed matters, after the respective limits had been con-
defined in juridical formulas. But the backlash that the Lateran Pacts had in the more anti-Catholic fascist currents, with the consequent justification of them given in Parliament by the head of government at the price of heretical affirmations, irreverences and unscrupulousness, refuted and stigmatized by Pius XI in the message to Cardinal Gasparri of 30 May 1929, and above all the "totalitarian" conception of the life of the State, of which fascism soon showed it did not know how to divest itself even in regard to the Church and on mutually agreed points, impoverished the scope of the agreements and indeed opened the way to the sudden kindling of polemics and the irruption of episodic violence. The harshest conflict broke out in the winter of 1930 over Catholic Action, which had nonetheless received its official recognition from the State in art. 43 of the Concordat. On 2 June the order came for the immediate dissolution of all youth associations; but fascism had to bow before the pontifical authority, comforted by the conscience of the Catholic world, and it did so with the agreements of Sept. 1930.
Fascism introduced profound innovations in the field of labor with the organization of trade unions as public-law bodies, with the judicial resolution of collective disputes, with a vast network of insurance for workers, with the corporative regulation of production. In the field of production fascism strove to direct the expansion of Italian industry toward the southern regions and strove to intensify agricultural production by completing vast land-reclamation works in central and southern Italy. It then aimed to coordinate public and private interest in order to set the country on the path to economic self-sufficiency.
These reforms carried out by fascism in the social, economic and cultural life of the country looked more to the State than to the individual, more to the people and to the vision than to the single person. The policy of fascism appears dominated by the idea of an authoritarian and hierarchical State in whose name the freedom of the individual could be sacrificed up to a certain point. Thus dissent found no way to be manifested or could be rapidly stifled through administrative sanctions (police confinement), thus criticism was tolerated only insofar as it was carried out within the ambit of the party ("constructive" criticism), thus work in the professions, in the bureaucracy, in the factories, was monopolized by unions of a political character.
This policy of authority at home was accompanied, in the field of international relations, by a policy of intransigence and prestige; prestige and protection of Italians abroad (schools and Italian houses in the major foreign cities, strengthening of the work of the "Dante Alighieri", resistance against the policy of assimilation of Italian emigrants), claims of the rights of the Italian victory in the 1914-18 war especially for colonial compensation, claiming for Italy the role of a great power, a policy of penetration in Albania (ended with the proclamation of the Italo-Albanian personal union), colonial expansion and the campaign against Ethiopia, a policy of Italy's presence in the most important international affairs. This policy of active Italian participation in international life ultimately led fascism to take part, alongside Germany, in the Second World War.
In the domestic field and in the foreign field the political activity of fascism, the realization of its program of government, were comforted by the declaration of an official "doctrine" of the party: a doctrine of the authoritarian and corporative State as opposed to the democratic and liberal State. But more than being driven by a doctrine of its own and original, fascism seems to have been guided by more immediate and contingent exigencies that it carried with it from its very first rise: on the one hand the criticism of liberal and democratic political institutions, which, already in the aftermath of the 1914-18 war, had revealed themselves impotent to guide the ever heavier machinery of the internal State with the enormous complex of services and functions that it has taken upon itself, on the other hand the awareness of the values of the Italian nation in the world.
These two motives of fascism (the criticism of liberal society and of democratic institutions and the valorization of the national tradition) were such that they could easily assert themselves even outside Italy: around Italian fascism one thus witnesses, in the period between the two wars, the affirmation of fascist and fascist-derived movements in Europe (Germany, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Romania, Greece) and outside it (Turkey, Argentina, Brazil); this expansion of fascism beyond the borders of Italy reveals that, apart from the intrinsic value of the formula, it presented itself as an attempt to overcome a crisis that was in progress between 1920 and 1940.