Introduction: Locating Fascism

Abstract

What is ‘new’ about this revised edition of Italian Fascism 1915–1945, which was first published in 1995? Well, the title, for a start. The Fascist movement was formed in 1919. But the starting date for the book has been pushed back to 1915 to reflect the origins of Fascism as a political movement in the interventionist campaign to bring about Italy’s entry to the First World War, Mussolini’s own transition from Socialist to ‘Fascist’ during the period of interventionism and the war itself, and the importance of the war experience to setting Fascist goals and ‘values’. This will emerge more emphatically in Chapter 1, as will an attempt to deal with what some intellectual historians see as the emergence of a kind of ‘prehistoric’ generic fascism and Italian Fascism from the pre-war European matrix of non-conformist ideas and movements.