Militant Anti-Fascism. M. Testa
Ibid., 34.
11 Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), 35.
12 Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 244.
13 Smith, Mussolini, 42–45.
14 Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 59.
15 Ibid., 60.
16 Ibid., 168.
17 Ibid., 163.
18 Ibid., 169.
19 Ibid., 189.
20 Ibid.
21 Anarchist Federation, Resistance to Nazism (London: AFED, 2008), 26.
22 Forgas, Rethinking Italian Fascism, 56.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 73–74.
25 Ibid., 75.
26 Ibid.
27 de Agostini, Prisoners & Partisans, 7.
28 Rivista Anarchica, Red Years, Black Years: Anarchist Resistance to Fascism in Italy (London: ASP, 1989), 6.
29 Ibid., 19.
30 Ibid., 20.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 21.
33 Ibid., 35.
34 Ibid.
35 Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 267.
36 Rivista Anarchica, Red Years, Black Years, 43.
37 de Agostini, Prisoners & Partisans, 8.
38 Ibid., 11.
39 F.W. Deakin, The Last Days of Mussolini (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 167.
40 Smith, Mussolini, 362.
41 Deakin, The Last Days of Mussolini, 207.
42 Ibid., 156.
43 Ibid., 177.
44 Ibid., 187.
45 Ibid., 221.
46 Smith, Mussolini, 357.
47 Ibid.
48 Deakin, The Last Days of Mussolini, 199.
49 Ibid., 234.
50 de Agostini, Prisoners & Partisans, 32.
France: A New Acceptance of Violence
The brutalization of political life in many parts of Europe was accompanied by a new acceptance of violence.
—Stanley G. Payne in A History of Fascism 1914–45
Fascism did not spring out of nowhere in the aftermath of the First World War but had clear precedents in a number of groups across Europe that were authoritarian, anti-Semitic, racist, ultra-nationalist and violent in various degrees. The ideas represented by these groups along with the effects of the First World War helped create the early fascist parties. The fetishism of uniforms, war and patriotism alongside borrowings from syndicalism, socialism, republicanism and monarchism presented a fetid potpourri of possibilities for disillusioned ex-soldiers who added national grievances and personal bitterness to these often contrary ideologies. The successes and failures of these parties varied in some countries, like France and Romania, some being particularly strong and other groups being co-opted or suppressed by governments.
In France, Le Faisceau was founded by Georges Valois, a former member of Action Française ( AF) who eventually moved to the Resistance and died in a concentration camp: in a rather grim irony, the fascism that he sought to establish eventually did him in. Members of Le Faisceau were subject to violent assaults from the left but also from AF, which ran a vehement campaign against them. On one occasion the AF stormed a meeting and attacked Valois putting him on his arse. The Patriot Youth were a ten-thousand-strong right-wing movement that emerged around 1924 and, after a large and bloody clash with the communists in 1925, ended up with four fatalities, creating martyrs for the sake of increased Patriot Youth membership. In the 1930s, there was militant opposition to right-wing events in France and ‘because of frequent violent clashes provoked by the presence of counter demonstrators at such political rallies, the police occasionally banned public meetings or parades where the threat of violence was great’.51 Several extremists displayed the usual far-right-wing penchant for individual terrorism and were caught up in bomb plots and illegal arms caches with the Cagoule group. Various other patriotic leagues and organizations