In February 1928, the founder and president of the Fascist Institute of Culture of Milan (Istituto Fascista di Cultura) Dino Alfieri proposed to the PNF a retrospective exhibition to mark the tenth anniversary (Decennale) of Fascism. His proposal for an âExhibition of Fascismâ (Mostra del Fascismo), approved by Mussolini, concerned an event that chronicled the events from the outbreak of World War I through the post-war crisis to the eventual âvictoryâ of Fascism and the forging of the Fascist state. Yet Alfieriâs choice of location for the exhibition (the Castello Sforzesco in Milan) and preferred date (1929) divulged his intention to refract the historical narrative through the lens of Fascismâs trajectory from agitation to power. Milan, as he put it, was the âcradle of Fascismâ and the source of the âspiritual renaissance of the Italian nationâ. As for the anniversary occasion, Alfieri considered the small meeting that took place at the Piazza San Sepolcro in central Milan on the morning of 23 March 1919 as the âcombative dawnâ of the movement, setting in motion a chain of events that culminated in the 1922 March on Rome.1
The exhibition eventually took placeâbut not in the form, place or time that Alfieri had envisaged in 1928. The Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista was hosted in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni of Rome and opened its doors in 1932, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the March and not of the founding of the Fasci di Combattimento at Piazza San Sepolcro.2 In the process, it also changed name, mutating into a Mostra della Decennale or the more widely used Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascistaâa shift that underlined the sense of revolutionary rupture that came with the seizure of power.3 And yet the 1919 gathering very soon gained mythological status in the historical imaginaries of Fascism, as a gesture of audacious defiance and a rallying cry that was about to grow louder and stronger in the years to follow. To be known as someone who had attended the 1919 meeting bestowed the coveted honour of âfascist of the first hourâ (fascista della prima ora). Mussolini presented the meeting as the symbolic moment when a host of dissident nationalist groupsâthose who agitated in favour of intervento in 1914â1915, the Arditi, the legionaries, the national syndicalists, the Futuristsâjoined forces to launch fascism avant la lettre.
A century later, the conventional association of the San Sepolcro gathering with the idea of âbirthâ of f(F)ascism has persisted in historical accounts and analyses.4 To be sure, the event has been dissected and scaled down in significance. It barely registered on the national press at the time, with the exception of Mussoliniâs Popolo dâItalia and some staunchly nationalist journals.5 Renzo De Felice described the meeting as
[less] a real congress constituting a new political movement [than] a gathering of politically related people who vowed on that occasion to make their relations more stable and in practice agreed on a negative program, very loosely oriented ⌠towards a ânew orderâ that even they did not know yet how to figure out.6
This was no turning point in the fortunes of what became known as the Fascist movement either. The year that followed provided a harsh reality check for Mussolini and his hopeful followers in electoral terms.7 Meanwhile many of the headline radical ideological pronouncements of the programme that Mussolini had announced in March 1919 were soon to be abandoned or diluted beyond recognition.8 No matter how Alfieri wished to present the history of Fascism in 1928, there was obvious no political path dependency from San Sepolcro to the March on Rome.
In his first major published work The Nature of Fascism (1991), Roger Griffin came to a similar conclusion about the significance of the March 1919 gathering that launched the Fasci di Combattimento.9 When he revisited the event in his later work, however, he conferred fresh intellectual significance to it. In Modernism and Fascism (2007), he argued that it was
intended as the first step to perpetuating the revolutionary momentum attributed by modernist nationalists to the war from the very beginning. The idea was to launch not a political party but what we have seen cultural anthropologists describe as an âanti-structureâ, the embryo of the new communitas. ⌠[Mussolini] intended the Fasci to form the cells of revolutionary national consciousness that were the first stage towards realizing his vision of the âtrenchocracyâ, a new elite infused with modernist resolve to inaugurate a new world, led not by a politician but by a âhealerâ who would âbuild the house again and start time anewâ.10
In this respect, the San Sepolcro meeting mattered enormously for the history of f(F)ascismânot as a stepping stone to political success or as a âdisjunctive momentâ.11 Such moments tend to make more sense retrospectively, only once and if the extreme, dissident forces that they shaped and unleashed have gathered momentum through both agency and contingency. Disjunctions sustain mythologies of birth and rebirth, even as their direction or destination remains fuzzy, uncertain and rooted in a mirage of intoxicating collective agency that lies ahead.12 In March 1919, Mussolini launched a daring bid to re-unite the disparate dissident nationalist forces of the intervento into a new protean revolutionary project that heârather than the radical nationalists of the Italian Nationalist Association or Gabriele DâAnnunzioâhoped to lead. The myth of rebirthâof the ânew blood that would regenerateâ the nation and the state13âwas to prove f(F)ascismâs mighty mobilising premise of making history, endowing it with âextraordinary affective and destructive powerâ.14
Aiming for the Sky: The Nature of Fascism (1991)
This volume aims at exploring the current state and prospects of fascism studies, a hundred years from its birth, using as a vantage point Roger Griffinâs work on the topic and the numerous debates, additions and reformulations it stirred in the scholarly community. Born in 1948 and educated at Oxford University (Ph.D. in 1990), Roger Griffin is currently an Emeritus Professor in Modern History in the School of History, Philosophy and Culture at Oxford Brookes University. Griffinâs research and teaching career on fascism has spanned over three decades. He has published four major books on fascism (The Nature of Fascism, 1991; A Fascist Century, 2008), modernism (Modernism and Fascism, 2007) and terrorism (Terroristâs Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning, 2012); edited major collections of articles on fascism (International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus, 1998; Fascism, Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right, 2014), two anthologies of primary and secondary sources (Fascism, 1995; Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, 2003), two concise introductions into fascism studies (Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies, 2018; Fascism: A Quick Immersion, 2020), and over 120 chapters and articles on fascism, extremism, religious politics, political religion, terrorism, radicalisation, populism, political modernism, identity, and the psychology of fanaticism.
Griffin made his entry into fascism studies in the early 1990s, at a time when a new wave of scholarship had already started engaging with fascism as an intellectually distinct and complex phenomenon. Back in 1979, Gilbert Allardyceâs call to âde-model, de-ideologize, de-mystify and, above all, de-escalateâ the concept of âfascismâ15 had provided a timely corrective to the over-extension and distortion of the term. Ever since it appeared in the political vocabulary of the 1920s, believers and foes alike had displayed an inclination to read something deeper, bigger, generic, and trans-/international in âfascismâ. Allardyce likened such an over-extension âwithout conceptual boundariesâ to the âlogic of a cancer cellâ; he also doubted that even the use of more rigorous criteria of analysis could give the concept any heuristic utility whatsoever. For him, âfascismâ had no meaning outside interwar Italy and it could thus never be a generic concept; what is more, it possessed no distinct ideology either. âLike the search for the black cat in a dark roomâ, he argued, seeking a generic fascism was an âact of faith ⌠pursued by reasonâ as it âpresumes that there is something to be found in the dark voidâ.16 Allardyce was not the first to evince this critique. A decade earlier, writing about the abuse of the term in the context of the persisting âsocial fascistâ discourse, Theodore Draper had called it a case of âextreme divorce between ideology and realityâ.17 At around the same time, Stuart Woolf had prefaced a comparative study of âfascismsâ in Europe with a call to âbanâ the term as âit has been so misused that it has lost its original meaningâ.18
What original meaning though? In a brief reply appended to Allardyceâs article, Stanley Payne argued that âhistorical understanding requires us to identif...