ABSTRACT
The Fascists became especially popular with those who feared disorder and a communist takeover, including some of the most powerful interests in Italy: the captains of industry, bankers, the urban middle classes, wealthy landowners and the Roman Catholic Church. Fascism glorified the use of force and war as the noblest of human activities, and it denounced liberalism, capitalism, democracy, socialism, and communism. Corporativism was Benito Mussolini's plan to integrate professional, trade, and industrial associations into self-sufficient and self-governing corporate bodies. Varieties of fascism had considerable appeal throughout Europe. Mussolini's brand was the first of its kind and had considerable influence giving birth to imitators. The greatest triumph of the creed emerged in Germany. Germany after the war was socially and politically fractious owing to persistent economic problems and the unpopularity of its government, the fledgling democratic Weimar Republic. Fascism and its most virulent German variety were spawned by the collapse of the bourgeois cultural order triggered by the Great War.
