FASCISM
(RISE OF MUSSOLINI AND HITLER)

INTRODUCTION:
• The socio-economic and socio-political upheavals that resulted at the end of First World War fused the various attitudes like elitism, racism and anti-modernism that characterized the radical right of the early years of the century into a cohesive political movement known as fascism
• Fascism was nurtured in the atmosphere of chaos, uncertainty, disillusionment, and rebellion that swept the world in 1919



HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:
• The word fascism has its root in the Italian fascio, literally a bundle or sheaf. More remotely, the word recalled the Latin fasces, an axe encased in a bundle of rods that was carried before the magistrates in Roman public processions to signify the authority and unity of the state
• Before 1914 the symbolism of the Roman fasces was usually appropriated by the Left. Marianne, symbol of the French Republic, was often portrayed in the nineteenth century carrying the fasces to represent the force of Republican solidarity against her aristocratic and clerical enemies
• Italian revolutionaries used the term fascioin the late nineteenth century to evoke the solidarity of committed militants. The peasants who rose against their landlords in Sicily in 1893–94 called themselves the FasciSiciliani