ABSTRACT
On 23 March 1919 the almost forgotten Benito Mussolini presided over the foundation in Milan of a new political movement, the Fascio di Combattimento (Combat Group). Those present at this obscure event – estimates of the audience’s size range from around 120 to just over 200 – comprised mainly war veterans (notably ex-Arditi), Futurists and assorted dissident leftists like Mussolini himself. The movement’s name harked back to the interventionist Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria of 1915, which Mussolini had vainly hoped to keep together as a vehicle for post-war revolution. The term fascio, once the preserve of the left, was by now commoner on the right, for whose authoritarian devotees it connoted the fasces, the bound rods borne by the ‘lictors’ or magistracy of Republican Rome, and the notion of ‘strength through unity’ they were held to symbolize.
