The rise of fascism and Benito Mussolini's Partito Nazionale Fascista

ITALY has given the world many wonderful things, but fascism is not one of them. Though it had its antecedents in small groups founded during the First World War, the formal foundation of Benito Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista, the PNF, took place 100 years ago today.

The PNF was the first nationwide party anywhere to call itself fascist. It would also become the first fascist party to achieve power in a democracy. If fascism has a birthday, then it is 100 today.

WHO GOT THE PARTY STARTED?

AN autodidact with considerable rhetorical and organisational skills, the former socialist politician and journalist Mussolini had served in the Italian Army and had been seriously wounded by a mortar bomb that killed four fellow soldiers in a training exercise in February, 1917. Mussolini had 44 bomb fragments removed from his body, and spent six months in hospital – an indication of how close Italy came to never coming under his baleful influence.

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Mussolini went home from hospital to Milan and there took up a cause that he had embraced prior to Italy’s entry into the war in 1915. A year earlier he had founded the Band of Revolutionary Action, the Fascio d’Azione Rivoluzionaria , and it was Mussolini who gave that group its dreaded name – fascio.

The well-read Mussolini knew that in ancient Rome, the symbol of authority was the fasces, a bundle of wooden rods strapped together with leather and enclosing a single axe. The fasces was a largely ceremonial symbol, carried wherever priests and office-bearers such as lictors went, but the axe could be used for executions and was thus associated with the control of the people.

The 1914 Fascio group had split over whether Italy should join the war and also whether to join the Allies or the Central Powers, eventually plumping for the former.

Discharged because of his wounds, Mussolini went back to the newspaper he had founded, Il Popolo D’Italia, and began to agitate for Italian nationalism.

In 1919, espousing extreme nationalism and right wing policies, Mussolini got together with some of his old Fascio colleagues and founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, translatable as the Italian Fascist Fighters.

They were hammered at the polls by Mussolini’s former socialist colleagues, but he played on the slights to Italy by their former allies, and they began to gain popularity.

Socialists soon came under attack from organised Fasci mobs and local groups across the country who had been whipped into a frenzy of anti-Bolshevik violence.

During the third conference of the Fasci in Rome, on November 9, 1921, Mussolini dramatically formed a new party, the Partito Nazionale Fascista.

Benito Mussolin

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

THE shaven-headed Mussolini wasted no time in starting a facet of fascism everywhere – the cult of personality. He had already overseen the introduction of black-shirted guards and now as Il Duce, the leader, he spread his blackshirts far and wide and they smashed newspaper and trade union offices, even local council chambers, while Mussolini cleverly portrayed himself as the man who could bring back peace and prosperity, a stance which won him the backing of the army, police and middle classes.

His voice became all too familiar on the radio, and despite having only 35 Deputies (MPs) out of 275 in the ruling coalition, it was clear Mussolini was the leader in waiting. In October, 1922, he directly challenged the authorities with his March on Rome in which 25,000 fascists headed for the Italian capital. The Prime Minister, Luigi Facta, asked for martial law, but instead King Victor Emmanuel III summoned Mussolini to take over.

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Within a few years, Mussolini had established a one party state with himself as dictator, and ended democracy. Incidentally, it was he who devised the straight arm salute that Adolf Hitler adopted for the Nazis.

WHO THOUGHT FASCISM WAS A GOOD THING?

ADOLF Hitler, obviously, but a very large number of people across the world looked on admiringly as Mussolini took power and asserted his control. Fascism played directly to those who believed in a strong and benevolent ruler, especially one with the charisma and theatricality of Mussolini.

Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, all wrote approvingly of him at first. Under the influence of the besotted American poet Ezra Pound, our own Hugh MacDiarmid flirted with fascism, but gave up when he realised it was not socialist.

IT COULDN’T HAPPEN AGAIN COULD IT?

A LARGE man with a strange hairstyle becomes a populist ranter and wins power against feeble opponents, then subverts democracy and tries to shut down Parliament/wreck the Capitol.

Go figure.