The F-W or d: Under standing Italian
Fascism
Revision Guide – suitable for those learning Italian Fascism and modern day far-right politics
as part of a 2nd Year BA History unit.
Conten ts
1. Weekly themes and content summary
2. Scholars: works, theses and where they sit in the field
3. Italian key terms and definitions
4. Advanced theories for a First
5. Primary sources bank
6. How to approach the questions
7. Writing quality and style
1. W eekly them es and content sum m ar y
Each week pairs a Then class on historical Italian Fascism with a Now class on the contemporary far-
right. The synoptic Q2 rewards connection across those weeks rather than a tidy week-by-week list.
So the question to keep asking is e: what thread actually runs through the material?
W eeks 1–2: Defi n in g Fascism an d Violen ce
Core argument. Fascism resists a clean definition. Mussolini’s own 1932 encyclopedia entry pins
the movement down mainly by what it stands against. Saluppo pushes the point harder: violence
was not a by-product of Fascism but part of what the ideology was made of. Squadrismo
reshaped how people experienced space and time, and it built the movement’s founding myth.
• The definitional problem. Fascism reads as anti-liberal, anti-communist and anti-democratic
(Passmore, Morgan). Set Croce’s ‘parenthesis’ view, which treats Fascism as an aberration,
against scholars who root it in pre-WWI nationalist culture and Futurism.
• Key dates. 1919: Fasci di Combattimento founded in Milan. 1921: PNF founded, 35
parliamentary seats. 28 October 1922: March on Rome. 1923: squads formalised. 1924:
Matteotti assassination. 1925: dictatorship.
• Squadrismo. Violence as performance and myth-making. It moves from sporadic (1919), to
organised and symbolic (1920), to institutionalised state policy after 1922. Ras were the local
squad leaders.
• Attacking the head. A symbolic act: an assault on identity, on what the victim was taken to
represent. Castor-oil purges were framed as social cleansing. For Saluppo, rites, rituals and
oaths built commitment.
, • March on Rome. The symbolic capture of the capital. Rome carried national unification, the
Roman Empire, history itself. Tellingly, Mussolini stayed in Milan near an escape route. The
spectacle needed an audience, but it also needed a plan B.
• NOW. CasaPound’s cinghiamattanza, the belt-whipping ritual; the Proud Boys’ memes and
symbolic violence (DeCook); violence-gesturing content that builds collective identity on social
media.
W eeks 3–4: Pr opagan da, Aesthetics an d Rom an ità
Core argument. Fascism was an aesthetic project before it was a policy programme. The regime
manufactured consent through coordinated visual culture, mass media and the deliberate
reshaping of Rome, all of it working to collapse millennia of history into one heroic imperial
myth. This is what Benjamin meant by ‘the aestheticisation of politics.’
• Mass media. Radio sets jumped from 130,000 in 1931 to 1.1 million by 1942. Sonic modernity
reached right into the home. The Ente Radio Rurale broadcast to rural schools.
• Gagliardi. Mass media created ‘publics’ in the plural rather than one uniform consenting bloc.
Even with contradictory messaging it had a stabilising effect, and cinema fed the cult of the
Duce.
• Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (Rome, 1932–34). Four million visitors. Chronological,
architectural, sculptural, ending on the names of the martyrs. Political religion made spatial: an
experience, not passive viewing.
• Romanità. Arthurs reads the excavations as creative destruction, exposing a ‘pure’ Roman past
by stripping away medieval and baroque ‘noise.’ Sventramento is therefore not simple
demolition. It is temporal violence.
• Via dell’Impero. Straight, wide, built for military parades, lined with frescoes of Roman soldiers,
with sightlines to the Colosseum. EUR was the unfinished Fascist utopia planned for the 1942
World Fair.
• Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (1937). Nine arches by six: the number of letters in MUSSOLINI.
Rational limestone architecture built to outlast the regime.
• Theory anchors. Stanley: fascism elevates the irrational over the rational through propaganda.
Cammaerts: differentialist racism and disintermediation in the contemporary far-right.
• NOW. Assassin’s Creed and Viking imagery in far-right culture; White House meme accounts;
fashwave distorting Benjamin’s Angel of History.
W eeks 5–6: Pr im ar y Sou r ce W or kshop an d Histor iogr aphical
Review
Core argument. Kim’s overview tracks the field from elite consensus studies, through Marxist
interpretations, to the cultural turn and everyday history. Knowing where a given scholar sits in
that arc is what demonstrates the methodological awareness a First needs.
, • Croce. Fascism as ‘parenthesis,’ an aberration within Italy’s liberal tradition. Now largely
discredited.
• De Felice (revisionist). Argued that genuine popular consensus existed. Controversial, and it
underpins the brava gente myth, though it also helps distinguish Italian from Nazi antisemitism.
• Griffin’s new consensus. Fascism as an alternative modernity, using modern tools for non-
liberal, mythical ends. Not anti-modern, but seizing modernity and redirecting it.
• Cultural turn (1990s–2000s). Gentile, Ben-Ghiat. Attention shifts to symbols, rituals and
everyday experience rather than institutions or leaders.
• Everyday history turn (2000s onward). Kate Ferris and the ‘grey zone.’ The focus moves from
leaders and events to ordinary Italians, with Fascism understood as a ‘total experience’
reaching into every fold of life.
• Methodological awareness. Language barriers shape anglophone scholarship; archive access
shapes what can be studied at all; and archives themselves reflect what regimes wanted
preserved.
W eeks 7–8: Mascu lin ity, the B ody an d W om en
Core argument. Gender was the organising logic of Fascist biopolitics. The regime needed a
militarised masculinity and a reproductive femininity as two halves of a single project:
manufacturing an imperial race. That logic links the body (W7), reproduction (W8), sexuality
(W10), youth (W9) and race (W15–16).
• Antola Swan. Mussolini’s body as a ‘communicative tool,’ a ‘conscious agent of his own image
before being its interpreter.’ The iconic torso bridges classical tradition and Futurist dynamism,
and photography of his unclothed body ‘embraced the visual formulae pertaining to male and
female realms.’
• New Fascist Man. Strength, discipline, virility, but watch the tension between Futurist
dynamism and classical Romanità. It differs from Nazi masculinity too: Mussolini was
photographed topless doing traditional labour, Hitler in military uniform. Different masculinities
sit side by side.
• Perry Wilson. Women were targeted by employment law. 1923: barred from becoming school
principals. 1926: barred from teaching certain subjects. 1937: factory workers targeted. The
Fasci Femminili wanted more political involvement and ended up state-controlled.
• Victoria De Grazia. Some Fascist interventions paradoxically modernised parts of women’s lives,
a useful complication against any simple victimhood narrative.
• Mussolini’s Ascension Day speech (26 May 1927). ‘If we decline in number, gentlemen, we
cannot create an empire.’ Gender, family and the ethnostate in one primary source.
• Oro alla Patria (1935). Women donating wedding rings to be melted down for the war effort.
The gendered face of mobilisation: sacrifice, domesticity, national service.
• NOW. Bratich on the manosphere and Männerbünde; Leidig on tradwives as a lifestyle brand;
Garvin on the continuity in reproductive policy from Mussolini, through Forza Nuova, to
Meloni’s surrogacy laws.
Fascism
Revision Guide – suitable for those learning Italian Fascism and modern day far-right politics
as part of a 2nd Year BA History unit.
Conten ts
1. Weekly themes and content summary
2. Scholars: works, theses and where they sit in the field
3. Italian key terms and definitions
4. Advanced theories for a First
5. Primary sources bank
6. How to approach the questions
7. Writing quality and style
1. W eekly them es and content sum m ar y
Each week pairs a Then class on historical Italian Fascism with a Now class on the contemporary far-
right. The synoptic Q2 rewards connection across those weeks rather than a tidy week-by-week list.
So the question to keep asking is e: what thread actually runs through the material?
W eeks 1–2: Defi n in g Fascism an d Violen ce
Core argument. Fascism resists a clean definition. Mussolini’s own 1932 encyclopedia entry pins
the movement down mainly by what it stands against. Saluppo pushes the point harder: violence
was not a by-product of Fascism but part of what the ideology was made of. Squadrismo
reshaped how people experienced space and time, and it built the movement’s founding myth.
• The definitional problem. Fascism reads as anti-liberal, anti-communist and anti-democratic
(Passmore, Morgan). Set Croce’s ‘parenthesis’ view, which treats Fascism as an aberration,
against scholars who root it in pre-WWI nationalist culture and Futurism.
• Key dates. 1919: Fasci di Combattimento founded in Milan. 1921: PNF founded, 35
parliamentary seats. 28 October 1922: March on Rome. 1923: squads formalised. 1924:
Matteotti assassination. 1925: dictatorship.
• Squadrismo. Violence as performance and myth-making. It moves from sporadic (1919), to
organised and symbolic (1920), to institutionalised state policy after 1922. Ras were the local
squad leaders.
• Attacking the head. A symbolic act: an assault on identity, on what the victim was taken to
represent. Castor-oil purges were framed as social cleansing. For Saluppo, rites, rituals and
oaths built commitment.
, • March on Rome. The symbolic capture of the capital. Rome carried national unification, the
Roman Empire, history itself. Tellingly, Mussolini stayed in Milan near an escape route. The
spectacle needed an audience, but it also needed a plan B.
• NOW. CasaPound’s cinghiamattanza, the belt-whipping ritual; the Proud Boys’ memes and
symbolic violence (DeCook); violence-gesturing content that builds collective identity on social
media.
W eeks 3–4: Pr opagan da, Aesthetics an d Rom an ità
Core argument. Fascism was an aesthetic project before it was a policy programme. The regime
manufactured consent through coordinated visual culture, mass media and the deliberate
reshaping of Rome, all of it working to collapse millennia of history into one heroic imperial
myth. This is what Benjamin meant by ‘the aestheticisation of politics.’
• Mass media. Radio sets jumped from 130,000 in 1931 to 1.1 million by 1942. Sonic modernity
reached right into the home. The Ente Radio Rurale broadcast to rural schools.
• Gagliardi. Mass media created ‘publics’ in the plural rather than one uniform consenting bloc.
Even with contradictory messaging it had a stabilising effect, and cinema fed the cult of the
Duce.
• Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (Rome, 1932–34). Four million visitors. Chronological,
architectural, sculptural, ending on the names of the martyrs. Political religion made spatial: an
experience, not passive viewing.
• Romanità. Arthurs reads the excavations as creative destruction, exposing a ‘pure’ Roman past
by stripping away medieval and baroque ‘noise.’ Sventramento is therefore not simple
demolition. It is temporal violence.
• Via dell’Impero. Straight, wide, built for military parades, lined with frescoes of Roman soldiers,
with sightlines to the Colosseum. EUR was the unfinished Fascist utopia planned for the 1942
World Fair.
• Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (1937). Nine arches by six: the number of letters in MUSSOLINI.
Rational limestone architecture built to outlast the regime.
• Theory anchors. Stanley: fascism elevates the irrational over the rational through propaganda.
Cammaerts: differentialist racism and disintermediation in the contemporary far-right.
• NOW. Assassin’s Creed and Viking imagery in far-right culture; White House meme accounts;
fashwave distorting Benjamin’s Angel of History.
W eeks 5–6: Pr im ar y Sou r ce W or kshop an d Histor iogr aphical
Review
Core argument. Kim’s overview tracks the field from elite consensus studies, through Marxist
interpretations, to the cultural turn and everyday history. Knowing where a given scholar sits in
that arc is what demonstrates the methodological awareness a First needs.
, • Croce. Fascism as ‘parenthesis,’ an aberration within Italy’s liberal tradition. Now largely
discredited.
• De Felice (revisionist). Argued that genuine popular consensus existed. Controversial, and it
underpins the brava gente myth, though it also helps distinguish Italian from Nazi antisemitism.
• Griffin’s new consensus. Fascism as an alternative modernity, using modern tools for non-
liberal, mythical ends. Not anti-modern, but seizing modernity and redirecting it.
• Cultural turn (1990s–2000s). Gentile, Ben-Ghiat. Attention shifts to symbols, rituals and
everyday experience rather than institutions or leaders.
• Everyday history turn (2000s onward). Kate Ferris and the ‘grey zone.’ The focus moves from
leaders and events to ordinary Italians, with Fascism understood as a ‘total experience’
reaching into every fold of life.
• Methodological awareness. Language barriers shape anglophone scholarship; archive access
shapes what can be studied at all; and archives themselves reflect what regimes wanted
preserved.
W eeks 7–8: Mascu lin ity, the B ody an d W om en
Core argument. Gender was the organising logic of Fascist biopolitics. The regime needed a
militarised masculinity and a reproductive femininity as two halves of a single project:
manufacturing an imperial race. That logic links the body (W7), reproduction (W8), sexuality
(W10), youth (W9) and race (W15–16).
• Antola Swan. Mussolini’s body as a ‘communicative tool,’ a ‘conscious agent of his own image
before being its interpreter.’ The iconic torso bridges classical tradition and Futurist dynamism,
and photography of his unclothed body ‘embraced the visual formulae pertaining to male and
female realms.’
• New Fascist Man. Strength, discipline, virility, but watch the tension between Futurist
dynamism and classical Romanità. It differs from Nazi masculinity too: Mussolini was
photographed topless doing traditional labour, Hitler in military uniform. Different masculinities
sit side by side.
• Perry Wilson. Women were targeted by employment law. 1923: barred from becoming school
principals. 1926: barred from teaching certain subjects. 1937: factory workers targeted. The
Fasci Femminili wanted more political involvement and ended up state-controlled.
• Victoria De Grazia. Some Fascist interventions paradoxically modernised parts of women’s lives,
a useful complication against any simple victimhood narrative.
• Mussolini’s Ascension Day speech (26 May 1927). ‘If we decline in number, gentlemen, we
cannot create an empire.’ Gender, family and the ethnostate in one primary source.
• Oro alla Patria (1935). Women donating wedding rings to be melted down for the war effort.
The gendered face of mobilisation: sacrifice, domesticity, national service.
• NOW. Bratich on the manosphere and Männerbünde; Leidig on tradwives as a lifestyle brand;
Garvin on the continuity in reproductive policy from Mussolini, through Forza Nuova, to
Meloni’s surrogacy laws.
