What is fascism?

Fascism was a right-wing political movement, which led Italy from 1922 until 1944.

Already organized with the Fasci di Combattimento on the electoral list and defeated in the 1919 elections, it veered from the primitive social demands of the San Sepolcro program to the more markedly bourgeois and anti-Bolshevik ones, becoming the protagonist of the reaction to the red biennium and quickly establishing itself among the middle class and in rural areas.

Fascism entered parliament in 1921 in coalition with nationalists and liberals and formed the National Fascist Party (PNF).

The economic crisis after World War I, rising unemployment and inflation, the demobilization of the army that returned millions of people to civilian life, social conflicts and strikes in the factories of the north, and the advance of the Socialist Party that became the leading party in the 1919 elections, created in the years 1919-1922 the conditions for a serious weakening of state structures and a growing fear on the part of the agrarian and industrial classes of a communist revolution in Italy on the model of the October Revolution of 1917.

The period between the two world wars was marked by strong social tensions, especially with regard to the reintegration of veterans of World War I and particularly in the so-called Biennio Rosso, which in Italy was characterized by a series of workers' and peasants' struggles that had their climax and conclusion with the occupation of factories, especially in the center-north of the country.