The fascist emblem once decorated republican France and the Lincoln Memorial
Before 1914 the fasces, a bundle of rods bound around an axe, was a favourite symbol of liberals and republicans. France's Marianne was often shown holding one, and it appears on the Lincoln Memorial and Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre. Mussolini's movement then claimed the emblem so thoroughly that it gave the ideology its name.
The Italian fascismo comes from fascio, a bundle, and ultimately from the Latin fasces. In early twentieth-century Italy fasci were political groups somewhat like guilds or unions. Mussolini later dated the first such revolutionary group to 1915, and in 1919 he launched the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan, reorganised as a formal party in 1921. Only afterwards did the movement tie the word to the Roman symbol of authority.
Fascism is a far-right, ultranationalist and authoritarian ideology that emerged in Italy during the First World War and spread across Europe, most notably to Germany. Its founders saw the war as a revolution: total war had blurred the line between soldiers and civilians and shown that a powerful state could mobilise millions. Fascists championed a dictatorial leader, one-party rule, militarism, the suppression of opponents, a supposedly natural social hierarchy and the subordination of individuals to nation or race. They opposed communism, socialism, liberalism and democracy, and favoured a state-directed economy aiming at self-sufficiency.
Defining it has frustrated scholars; the historian Ian Kershaw likened the task to nailing jelly to a wall. An influential school, including Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin and Roger Eatwell, centres on the myth of national rebirth, known as palingenesis. Payne describes fascism through its negations, being anti-liberal, anti-communist and anti-conservative, its goals of a nationalist dictatorship and imperial expansion, and a style of romantic symbolism, mass rallies, glorified violence and youthful, masculine leadership. Griffin boils it down to populist ultranationalism built on myths of decadence and rebirth.
The ideology treated violence and war as tools of national renewal, and it was discredited by the Second World War. Since 1945 few parties have openly called themselves fascist, and the word now serves mostly as an insult. Labels such as neo-fascist and post-fascist are applied to modern parties rooted in the twentieth-century movements.
Source: Fascism
