Part of a series on |
Fascism |
---|
Core tenets
|
Topics
|
Ideas
|
International organizations
|
History
|
Lists
|
Related topics
|
Fascism portal Politics portal |
Italian Fascism also known as Fascism (Italian: Fascismo) with a capital "F" refers to the original fascist ideology in Italy. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945, the post-war Italian Social Movement, and subsequent Italian neo-fascist movements.
Italian Fascism is based upon Italian nationalism and the restoration of "Italia Irredenta" (claimed unredeemed Italian territories) to Italy as well as territorial expansionism that Italian Fascists deemed necessary for a nation to assert its superiority and strength to avoid succumbing to decay.[1] Italian Fascists claim that modern Italy is the heir to ancient Rome and its legacy, and support the creation of an empire to provide "vital space" for colonization by Italian settlers and establishing control over the Mediterranean Sea as Italy's Mare Nostrum as it had been under the Roman Empire.[2]
Fascism promotes political violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.[3][4] It views violence as a fact of life that is a necessary means to achieve human progress.[5] It exalts militarism as providing positive transformation in society and providing spiritual renovation, education, instilling of a will to dominate in people's character and creating national comradeship through military service.[6] Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violent attacks on opponents or to overthrow a political system.[7] Italian foreign minister and Mussolini's son in law Galeazzo Ciano quoted Mussolini as saying that Italians "must learn to be less 'sympathetic', to become hard, implacable, hateful, i.e. masters", and went on to say that violence would finally change Italians from being at their worst a bunch of undisciplined, chattering "mandolin players" into fearsome, conquering warriors.[8]
Italian Fascism promotes a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in a corporative associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[9] Italian Fascists claim that this economic system resolves and ends class conflict by creating class collaboration.[10]
Italian Fascism was declared by its leadership figures to be opposed to scientific socialism, identifying scientific socialism as originating with utopian socialism and existing in a modern form as Marxism.[11] It was declared to be opposed to liberalism, but made clear that it did not admire the political situation of Europe prior to the entrenchment of liberalism after the French Revolution of 1789, and stated that it was not seeking a reactionary restoration of the pre-1789 world that it considered to have been flawed that had been the cause of the rise of liberalism, but had a forward-looking direction.[12] Italian Fascism was declared to be opposed to the reactionary conservatism developed by Joseph de Maistre.[13]
The ideology was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who combined left-wing and right-wing political views, but fascism gravitated to the right in the early 1920s.[14][15] Mussolini in 1919 described fascism as a movement that would strike "against the backwardness of the right and the destructiveness of the left".[16][17] Italian Fascists described fascism as a right-wing ideology in the political program The Doctrine of Fascism: "We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right,' a fascist century."[18][19] However they also officially declared that although they were "sitting on the right" they were generally indifferent to their position on the left-right spectrum, as being a conclusion of their combination of views rather than an objective, and considering it insignificant to their basis of their views that they claimed could just as easily be associated with "the mountain of the center" as with the right.[20]
Etymologically, Fascismo (Fascism) derives from the Italian fascio (league), derived from the Latin fasces (bundles); the ancient Roman Symbol of Authority. It dates from Mussolini’s January 1915 and the 1921 establishment of the National Fascist Party begun as the fasci di combattimento (combat leagues) popular movement.[21][22][23] The English fascism denotes the league connotation of the Italian fascio (fagot); in the Italian language, in denoting the political philosophy, the proper noun Fascismo (Italian pronunciation: [faʃˈʃizmo]) is upper-case, and the generic, common noun fascismo (fascism) is lower-case.
Contents |
The Doctrine of Fascism (La dottrina del fascismo, 1932), by the Actualist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, is the official formulation of Italian Fascism, published under Benito Mussolini’s name in 1933.[24] Gentile was intellectually influenced by Hegel, Plato, Benedetto Croce, and Giambattista Vico, as such, his Actual Idealism philosophy was the basis for Fascism.[24] Hence, the Doctrine’s Weltanschauung proposes the world as action in the realm of Humanity — beyond the quotidian constrictions of contemporary political trend, by rejecting “perpetual peace” as fantastical, and accepting Man as a species continually at war; those who meet the challenge, achieve nobility.[24] To wit, Actual Idealism generally accepted that conquerors were the men of historical consequence, e.g. the Roman Julius Caesar, the Greek Alexander the Great, the German Charlemagne, and the French (Corsican) Napoleon; the philosopher–intellectual Gentile was especially inspired by the Roman Empire (27 BC – AD 476, 1453), from whence derives Fascism, thus:[24]
“ | The Fascist accepts and loves life; he rejects and despises suicide as cowardly. Life as he understands it means duty, elevation, conquest; life must be lofty and full, it must be lived for oneself but above all for others, both near bye and far off, present and future. | ” |
—Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 1933.[25] |
Therefore, in 1925, Benito Mussolini assumed the title Duce (Leader), derived from the Latin dux (leader), a Roman Republic military-command title. Moreover, although Fascist Italy (1922–43) is historically considered an authoritarian–totalitarian dictatorship, it retained the original “liberal democratic” government façade: the Grand Council of Fascism remained active as administrators; and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy could — at his Crown’s risk — discretionarily dismiss Mussolini as Italian Prime Minister, as, in the event, he did.[26]
La dottrina del fascismo proposed an Italy of greater living standards under a single-party Fascist system, than under the multi-party liberal democratic government of 1920.[27] As the Leader of the National Fascist Party (PNF — Partito Nazionale Fascista), Benito Mussolini said that democracy is “beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy”,[28] and spoke of celebrating the burial of the “putrid corpse of liberty”.[27] In 1923, to give Deputy Mussolini control of the pluralist parliamentary government of the Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946), an economist, the Baron Giacomo Acerbo proposed — and the Italian Parliament approved — the Acerbo Law, changing the electoral system from proportional representation to majority representation. The party who received the most votes (provided they possessed at least 25 per cent of cast votes), won two-thirds of the parliament; the remaining third was proportionately shared among the other parties — thus the Fascist manipulation of liberal democratic law that rendered Italy a single-party State.
In 1924, the National Fascist Party won the election with 65 per cent of the votes;[29] yet the United Socialist Party of Italy refused to accept such a defeat — especially Deputy Giacomo Matteotti who, on 30 May 1924, in Parliament formally accused the PNF of electoral fraud, and reiterated his denunciations of PNF Blackshirt political violence, and was publishing The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination, a book substantiating his accusations.[29][30] Consequently, on 24 June 1924, the Ceka (PNF secret police) assassinated the Parliament Deputy; of the five men arrested, Amerigo Dumini, aka Il Sicario del Duce (The Leader’s Assassin), was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, yet served only eleven months, and was freed under amnesty from King Victor Emmanuel III. Moreover, when the King supported Prime Minister Mussolini, the socialists cried “Foul!”, and unwisely quit Parliament in protest — leaving the Fascists to govern Italy.[31] In that time, assassination was not yet the modus operandi norm; the Italian Fascist Duce usually disposed of opponents in the Imperial Roman way: political arrest punished with island banishment.[32]
After the First World War (1914–18), despite the Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946) being a full-partner Allied Power against the Central Powers, Italian nationalism claimed Italy was cheated in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919), thus the Allies had impeded Italy’s progress to becoming a “Great Power”.[31] Thenceforth, the National Fascist Party (PNF — Partito Nazionale Fascista) successfully exploited that “slight” to Italian nationalism, in presenting Fascism as best-suited for governing the country, by successfully claiming that democracy, socialism, and liberalism were failed systems. The PNF assumed Italian government in 1922, consequent to the Fascist Leader Mussolini’s oratory and Blackshirt paramilitary political violence.
In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, the Allies compelled the Kingdom of Italy to yield to Yugoslavia the Croatian seaport of Fiume (Rijeka), a mostly-Italian city of little nationalist significance, until early 1919. Moreover, elsewhere, Italy then was excluded from the wartime secret Treaty of London (1915) it had concorded with the Triple Entente;[33] wherein Italy was to leave the Triple Alliance and join the enemy, by declaring war against the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, in exchange for territories, at war’s end, upon which the Kingdom of Italy held claims. (see Italia irredenta)
In September 1919, the nationalist response of outraged war hero Gabriele d'Annunzio was declaring the establishment of the Italian Regency of Carnaro.[34] To his independent Italian state, he installed himself as the Regent Duce (Leader), and promulgated the Carta del Carnaro (Charter of Carnaro, 8 September 1920 ), a politically-syncretic constitutional amalgamation of right-wing and left-wing anarchist, proto-fascist, and democratic republican politics, which much influenced the politico-philosophic development of early Italian Fascism. Consequent to the Treaty of Rapallo (1920) the metropolitan Italian military deposed the Regency of Duce D’Annunzio on Christmas 1920. In the development of the fascist model of government, Gabriele d’ Annunzio was a nationalist, not a fascist, whose legacy of political–praxis (“Politics as Theatre”) was stylistic (ceremony, uniform, harangue, chanting), not substantive, which Italian Fascism artfully developed as a government model.[34][35]
Given Italian Fascism’s pragmatic political amalgamations of left-wing and right-wing socio-economic policies, discontented workers and peasants proved an abundant source of popular political power, especially because of peasant opposition to socialist agricultural collectivism. Thus armed, the former socialist Benito Mussolini oratorically inspired and mobilized country and working-class people: “We declare war on socialism, not because it is socialist, but because it has opposed nationalism. . . . ” Moreover, for campaign financing, in the 1920–21 period, the National Fascist Party also courted the industrialists and (historically-feudal) landowners, by appealing to their fears of left-wing socialist and Bolshevik labor politics and urban and rural strikes; the Fascists promised a good business climate of cost-effective labor, wage, and political stability; the Fascist Party was en route to power; the historian Charles F. Delzell reports:
At first, the Fascists [PNF] were concentrated in Milan and a few other cities. They gained ground quite slowly, between 1919 and 1920; not until after the scare, brought about by the workers “occupation of the factories” in the late summer of 1920 did fascism become really widespread. The industrialists began to throw their financial support to it. Moreover, toward the end of 1920, fascism began to spread into the countryside, bidding for the support of large landowners, particularly in the area between Bologna and Ferrara, a traditional stronghold of the Left, and scene of frequent violence. Socialist and Catholic organizer of farm hands in that region, Venezia Giulia, Tuscany, and even distant Apulia, were soon attacked by [Black Shirt] squads of Fascists, armed with castor oil, blackjacks, and more lethal weapons. The era of Squadrismo, and nightly expeditions to burn Socialist and Catholic labor headquarters had begun.
The First World War (1914–18) inflated Italy’s economy with great debts, unemployment (aggravated by thousands of demobilised soldiers), social discontent featuring strikes, organised crime,[31] and anarchist, Socialist, and Communist insurrections.[36] When the elected Italian Liberal Party Government could not control Italy, the Fascist Revolutionary Party (FRP) Leader Benito Mussolini took matters in hand, combating those societal ills with the Blackshirts, paramilitary squads of Great War veterans and ex-socialists; Prime Ministers such as Giovanni Giolitti allowed the Fascist’s taking the law in hand.[37] The Liberal Government preferred Fascist class collaboration to the Communist Party of Italy’s bloody class conflict, should they assume government, as had Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the recent Russian Revolution of 1917.[37] The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle (June 1919) of the FRP presented the politico-philosophic tenets of Fascism; it included women's suffrage, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, and reorganisation of public transport.[38] Appeasing its initially strong feminist wing, the Fascist party actually bowed in November 1925, allowing the introduction of limited women's suffrage, much to the dismay of Fascist feminists.[39]
By the early 1920s, popular support for the Fascist Revolutionary Party’s fight against Bolshevism numbered some 250,000 people. In 1921, the Fascisti (Fascists) metamorphosed into the National Fascist Party, and achieved political legitimacy when Benito Mussolini was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1922.[31] Although the Liberal Party retained power, the governing prime ministries proved ephemeral, especially that of the fifth Prime Minister Luigi Facta, whose government proved vacillating.[31] To depose the weak parliamentary democracy, Deputy Mussolini (with military, business, and liberal right-wing support) launched the PNF March on Rome (27–29 October 1922) coup d’État, to oust Prime Minister Facta, and assume the government of Italy, to restore nationalist pride, re-start the economy, increase productivity with labor controls, remove economic business controls, and impose law and order.[31] On 28 October, whilst the “March” occurred, King Victor Emmanuel III withdrew his support of Prime Minister Facta, and appointed PNF Leader Benito Mussolini as the Sixth Prime Minister of Italy. the March on Rome became a victory parade, the Fascists believed their success was revolutionary and traditionalist.[40][41]
Until 1925, when the liberal economist Alberto de Stefani ended his tenure as Minister of Economics (1922–25), after having re-started the economy and balanced the national budget, the Italian Fascist Government’s economic policies were aligned with classical liberalism principles; inheritance, luxury, and foreign capital taxes were abolished;[42] life insurance (1923),[43] and the state communications monopolies were privatised, et cetera. Yet such pro-business enterprise policies apparently did not contradict the State’s financing of banks and industry.
Privatisation — One of Prime Minister Mussolini’s first acts was the 400-million-Lira financing of Gio. Ansaldo & C., one of the country’s most important engineering companies. Subsequent to the 1926 deflation crisis, banks such as the Banco di Roma (Bank of Rome), the Banco di Napoli (Bank of Naples), and the Banco di Sicilia (Bank of Sicily) also were state-financed.[44] In 1924, a private business enterprise established the Unione Radiofonica Italiana (URI — Italian Radiophonic Union), as part of the Marconi group, to which the Italian Fascist Government granted official radio-broadcast monopoly; after the Second World War, URI became the Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI — Italian Radio Audience, 1954–54), then the Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI — Italian Radiotelevision).
Agriculture — To strengthen the domestic Italian production of grain, in 1925, the Fascist Government established protectionist policies that ultimately failed (see: the Battle for Grain); historian Denis Mack Smith reports that: “Success in this battle was . . . another illusory propaganda victory, won at the expense of the Italian economy in general, and consumers in particular. . . Those who gained were the owners of the Latifondia, and the propertied classes in general . . . [Mussolini’s] policy conferred a heavy subsidy on the Latifondisti.”[45]
Industry — The Fascist Government countered the Great Depression with public works programs, such as the draining of the Pontine Marshes, hydroelectricity development, railway improvement, and rearmament.[46] In 1933, the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI — Institute for Industrial Reconstruction) was established to subsidize failing companies, and soon controlled important portions of the national economy via government-linked companies, among them Alfa Romeo. The Italian economy’s Gross National Product increased 2 per cent; automobile production was increased, especially that of the Fiat motor company,[47] and the aeronautical industry was developing.[31] Prime Minister Mussolini also advocated agrarianism as part of the battles for Land, the Lira, and Grain. As Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini physically participated with the workers in doing the work; the “politics as theatre” legacy of Gabriele D’ Anunzio yielded great propaganda images of Il Duce as “Man of the People”.[48][49]
In 1929, as Italian Head of State, Benito Mussolini concluded the unresolved Church–State conflict of the Roman Question (La Questione romana, pending since the Risorgimento, 1815–71) with the Lateran Treaty (February 1929), between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See, establishing the Vatican City microstate in Rome. In exchange for diplomatic recognition of the Vatican City and compensated territorial losses, the Fascist Government established Roman Catholic religious education in every education level; the Vatican would diplomatically recognize the Italian Fascist State.[27][50]
Moreover, to render the Italian people cosmopolitan, the Fascist Government applied every cultural artefact — from postage stamps to monumental architecture to sculpture — in making every social class conscious of Italy's cultural heritage, namely the Roman, Mediæval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, and the Modern age.[51] The Fascist Government combated organised crime and the Mafia with violence and vendetta (honour).[52] Mussolini’s establishment of law and order to Italy and its society was praised by Winston Churchill,[53] Sigmund Freud,[54] George Bernard Shaw,[55] and Thomas Edison.[56]
Influenced by the Roman Empire, Il Duce, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, perceived himself as a contemporary Roman Emperor, and set to establishing a new Italian Empire.[57] With an expansionist and militarian agenda, Italian colonialism penetrated Africa in competition with the British and French empires.[58] The first Italian Fascist colony was Eritrea, in East Africa; then Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia.[58] The Fascists ruled via authoritarian government, especially in combating insurgents and guerrillas attempting to expel the Italians from their colonized countries; Omar Mukhtar was a notable Libyan example.
Moreover, Italian Fascism was (officially) neither atheist nor racist — provided the colonized folk agreed to Italianisation and swore fealty to Il Duce, (See: Racial classification).[57] Just as Italian Jews were allowed membership in the National Fascist Party, in metropolitan Italy,[59][60] in the Libyan colony, Muslims were Fascist Party members via the Muslim Association of the Lictor.[61] In a unity ceremony, a Libyan chief awarded Prime Minister Mussolini an ancient Yemeni Sword of Islam artefact.[62] East Africans were allowed to serve with Italians in the MVSN Colonial Militia.[63]
To fulfil Italian unification, Fascist imperialism included the Italia irredenta (Irredentist Italy) demand of Italian ethnic integrity — recovering all lands previously annexed to the states incorporated to Italy.[64] Said revanchism included the County of Nice, part of the Kingdom of Sardinia until 1860, the Duchy of Savoy,[65] Corsica, part of the Republic of Genoa until 1768,[66] Dalmatia, part of the Republic of Venice until 1797, and the island of Malta, part of the Kingdom of Sicily until 1530.[67]
To prepare the Italians for military conquest, Mussolini's agenda became radical in the 1930s; seeking a physically fit and psychologically tough imperialist people to establish a modern Italian Empire, like the Roman Empire, he advocated discarding formalities of language, thought, and action; a coarse mind and hard body suited for aggressive war. The radical social change to Italian society signalled greater ideologic affinity with Nazi Germany in international diplomacy, given Nazi approval of Italian Fascist imperial ambitions. Moreover, whilst in Germany, on 27 January 1938, an impressed Mussolini observed Wehrmacht soldiers march in goose-step. Upon returning to Italy, he adopted that marching style for his military, and also promulgated legal Anti-Semitism in the Manifesto of Race in July 1938, stripping Jews of Italian citizenship and with it any position in the government or previously held professions. The changes were partly unwelcome, because the Italians were not especially hateful of Jews, and thus were wary of such a cultural imposition, because of a strong German Nazi–Italian Fascist relations. Despite parallels between Nazi Germany’s racist domestic and foreign policies with those of Italy, Il Duce Mussolini was inconsistent about the application of racism in society. Despite, in the 1920s, having emphasized the importance of “race”, speaking in racialist terms about white–coloured relations, stating that the races are in continual competition:
“ | [When the] city dies, the nation — deprived of the young life, [the] blood of new generations — is now made up of people who are old and degenerate and cannot defend itself against a younger people which launches an attack on the now unguarded frontiers. . . . This will happen, and not just to cities and nations, but on an infinitely greater scale: the whole White race, the Western race can be submerged by other coloured races which are multiplying at a rate unknown in our race. | ” |
—Benito Mussolini, 1928.[68] |
Yet in the 1933–34 period, when political tensions between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany occurred over Austrian independence, PM Mussolini opportunistically contradicted his earlier claims about the importance of race, by dismissing it as insignificant:
“ | Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. . . . National pride has no need of the delirium of race. | ” |
—Benito Mussolini, 1933.[69] |
The Italian Fascism government model was very influential beyond Italy; in the twenty-one-year intermarium of the First and Second world wars, many political scientists and philosophers sought ideologic inspiration from Italy. Italian Fascism was copied by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, the Russian Fascist Organization, the Romanian National Fascist Movement (the National Romanian Fascia, National Italo-Romanian Cultural and Economic Movement), the Dutch fascists based upon the Verbond van Actualisten journal of H. A. Sinclair de Rochemont and Alfred Haighton. The Sammarinese Fascist Party established an early Fascist government in San Marino, their politico-philosophic basis essentially was Italian Fascism.
Switzerland — pro-Nazi Colonel Arthur Fonjallaz of the National Front, became an ardent Mussolini admirer after visiting Italy in 1932. He advocated the Italian annexation of Switzerland, whilst receiving Fascist foreign aid.[70] The country was host for two Italian politico-cultural activities: the International Centre for Fascist Studies (CINEF — Centre International d’ Études Fascistes), and the 1934 congress of the Action Committee for the Universality of Rome (CAUR — Comitato d’ Azione della Università de Roma).[71]
Spain — The writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero, in Genio de España (The Genius of Spain, 1932) called for the Italian annexation of Spain, led by Mussolini presiding an international Latin Roman Catholic empire. He then progressed to close associated with Falangism, leading to discarding the Spanish annexation to Italy.[72]
Some Italian Fascism mottoes and slogans that taught the fascist citizen to abide responsibility to the State:
History of Italy | |
---|---|
This article is part of a series |
|
Ancient history | |
Prehistoric Italy | |
Etruscan civilization (12th–6th c. BC) | |
Magna Graecia (8th–7th c. BC) | |
Ancient Rome (8th c. BC–5th c. AD) | |
Ostrogothic domination (5th–6th c.) | |
Middle Ages | |
Italy in the Middle Ages | |
Byzantine reconquest of Italy (6th–8th c.) | |
Lombard domination (6th–8th c.) | |
Italy in the Carolingian Empire and HRE | |
Islam and Normans in southern Italy | |
Maritime Republics and Italian city-states | |
Early modern period | |
Italian Renaissance (14th–16th c.) | |
Italian Wars (1494–1559) | |
Foreign domination (1559–1814) | |
Italian unification (1815–1861) | |
Modern history | |
Monarchy (1861–1945) | |
Italy in World War I (1914–1918) | |
Fascism and Colonial Empire (1918–1945) | |
Italy in World War II (1940–1945) | |
Republic (1945–present) | |
Years of lead (1970s–1980s) | |
Topics | |
Historical states | |
Military history | |
Economic history | |
Genetic history | |
Citizenship history | |
Fashion history | |
Postal history | |
Railway history | |
Currency history | |
Musical history | |
Italy Portal |