Assessing European fascism: The view from Mussolini's Italy

This thesis considers the question of the nature and homogeneity of European fascism from the perspective of Fascist Italy, the home of the original fascist movement and regime. During the 1930s, a group of fascists within the Italian movement undertook the most systematic effort in interwar Europe to conceptualize fascism as a universal phenomenon. The "universalists" also represented the most prominent, thoughtful and committed figures among Italian fascists to assess the character of a series of European proto-fascist movements. The Italian universalist movement, however, appears in the historiography of fascism only as the failed effort to establish a formal fascist International. While this thesis considers the role of the universalists in this regard, it focuses on the other two virtually unexamined dimensions---of conceptualization and assessment---of the work of the Italian fascists, universalists and non-universalists alike. It seeks to reconstruct the Italian fascists' collective conception of fascism, first, as revealed in the universalists' reflections on fascism as an international phenomenon and, second, as elaborated in the Italian fascists' extensive but scattered assessments of the character and potential of a wide range of "fascist" movements in Europe from 1929 to 1940. This investigation concentrates on the movements in the four nations to which the Italians directed most of their attention: France's Francisme, Croix de Feu, Parti Populaire Francaise and neosocialism Britain's British Union of Fascists Spain's Falange Espanola and two lesser proto-fascist phenomena Germany's Nazi Party.This thesis argues that although the Italian fascists neither spoke with a single voice nor encapsulated their outlook in a central statement, they shared a coherent multidimensional vision of European fascism. This vision rested on a distinctive worldview, from which in their view a fascist ideology and the organizational and mobilizational traits that they identified as characteristics of fascist movements followed.