Fascism

The Decisive Influence of World War I

The first common feature lies in relation to war. In Europe, World War I is indeed the cradle of fascism. It represents a critical element of context, for both the birth of fascist leaders and the organizational and ideological forms that characterized this political movement. Whether in Italy or in Germany, the most committed elements of fascism and National Socialism were, for the most part, young veterans for whom the war proved to be a fundamental initiation experience. Like their respective leaders, Mussolini and Hitler, they supported the war and, above all, gloried in the “spirit of the trenches”; they also suffered from postwar demobilization. Their political trajectory, their values, the ideology they claimed, the political organizations they would frame, and the regimes they sometimes succeeded in creating cannot be understood outside of this initial context: The Great War led to the brutalization of societies.

The influence of the war could already be seen in the type of partisan organizations set up by those who would become fascist leaders. First in Italy, then in Germany and other European countries, they forged a new type of organization: the militia party. This organizational model was a synthesis of the mass party, previously unique to the labor movement, and of the military organization systems developed in the front lines of World War I. The result was a form of political organization unlike any other, driven by agents who, in the case of Italy, came mainly from the middle class, often fought in the ranks of the extreme Left (left-wing Socialist Party, revolutionary syndicalism), and were most often veterans of the Italian Army elite troops (Arditi). This militia party was designed to assemble an avant-garde group organized around a military model: uniforms, strict hierarchical organization, inculcation of discipline, and maintenance of military sociability modeled on the camaraderie of the front. Thanks to this organization, the fascists introduced methods of war into the political arena. In the context of latent civil war that characterized immediate postwar Italy and parts of Europe in the 1920s as well as the climate of political radicalization caused by the crisis of the early 1930s, the fascist militias (including death squads, Storm Troopers, green shirts, etc.) carried out violent attacks on labor movement organizations, which included attacks on the Socialist and Communist parties' public meetings, ransacking of left-wing municipalities, burning down local trade union offices, and intimidating the red league of farmers. During this fierce struggle against labor organizations, the fascists won the sympathy and even the active support of some economic elites and ruling circles, a development that would greatly facilitate their coming to power in a coalition government with Center and Right traditional parties.

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