post-war Europe. It differed from the pre-1914
variety in that it was not just expansionist; it also
was fed by the fury felt at the injustices real and
imagined.
Among the victorious nations the Italians par-
ticularly suffered from this malaise. They referred
to the ‘mutilated’ peace that had not given them
what they believed they deserved. The Ottoman
Empire had been defeated by the Allies, but the
Greeks, British and French were the intended
principal beneficiaries. The sorest point of all was
that Italy, despite its sacrifices in the war, had not
replaced the Habsburgs as the paramount Balkan
power. At the peace conference the flashpoint of
Italian resentment came when Italian claims to
the Italian-speaking port of Fiume, formerly in
the Habsburg Empire, were rejected by its allies.
Gabriele D’Annunzio, poet and professional
patriot, thereupon took the law into his own
hands and with government connivance and indi-
cations of royal support in 1919 seized Fiume at
the head of an army of volunteers. The outburst
of super-patriotism, bravado and violence, the
dictatorial rabble-rousing techniques of balcony-
oratory that D’Annunzio adopted made him the
duce on whom Mussolini modelled his own polit-
ical style.
Whenever representative institutions had no
established hold there was a tendency towards
authoritarian forms of government that promised
to meet the multiplicity of problems. The partic-
ular movement which became known to the
world as fascism first reached power in post-war
Italy. It developed in response to problems and
opportunities facing the West in the twentieth
century and arose out of the Great War. But its
success, at the same time, has to be studied in
purely Italian terms. The form that fascism later
took varied so much from one country to another
as the movement spread in the 1930s to Austria,
Hungary, Romania, France, Portugal and Spain
that historians dispute the usefulness of applying
a common label.
What can it be said to have had in common
before the Second World War? Fascism was a
movement designed to secure the support of the
masses for a leader without the intermediary of a
democratically elected parliament. It was a substi-
tute for democracy, giving the masses the illusion
of power without the reality. Thus, though vio-
lently anti-communist, fascism appeared to sup-
port the existing social and economic hierarchy of
society and so appealed to the right. Fascism made
a virtue of destroying the powers of parties and
divisions in the state. It stood for ‘strength
through unity’ at the expense of civil liberties. The
cult of the leader was fostered, above all, by the
leader and his principal lieutenants. Fascism was a
chauvinist male-oriented movement assigning
women to the role of child-bearing and raising a
family. It was stridently nationalist. The leader,
with virtually unlimited powers, stood at the apex
of a party, a private army and a bureaucracy.
Violence against opponents cowed possible oppo-
sition. The fascist army and bureaucracy, of
course, ensured that tens of thousands would have
a vested interest in preserving the fascist state.
Here loyalty to the movement, not social stand-
ing, provided an avenue of advancement to the
unscrupulous and the ambitious.
In Italy, as elsewhere, fascism derived its
strength as much from what it was against as from
what it was for. In detail this varied according to
the tactical need of the movement to attain and
then retain power. It was a totalitarian response
to new social forces and to change and to dis-
contents real and imagined, both personal and
national. Parliamentary government had func-
tioned very imperfectly already before the war.
The conduct of the war did not enhance parlia-
ment’s prestige. The disaster of the battle of
Caporetto was blamed on civilian mismanage-
ment. The mass of impoverished Italians in the
south, and the agricultural and the urban workers
in the north, half a century after unification still
did not identify themselves with the parliamentary
state set up by Piedmont, depending as it did on
local favours and corruption.
Government was by personalities rather than
by leaders of parties. Manhood suffrage, intro-
duced in 1912, and proportional representation
in 1919, undermined the way in which parliament
and government had previously been managed.
The two biggest parties, which emerged from the
elections of 1919 with more than half the seats
between them, the Catholic Popular Party (100