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When linked to fascism, the association conservation-revolution is probably the most intriguing and perverse characteristic employed to define this phenomenon. Fascists took it for granted, and what's more, they casually recurred to it in order to explain the reasons behind the birth of the regime. For instance, when prefacing his collection of essays titled Guerra Dopoguerra Fascismo (1928) (War Postwar Fascism), fascist historian Gioacchino Volpe describes the movement as "a force of conservation and revolution."¹ In the entry for the Enciclopedia Italiana (Italian Encyclopedia) Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile summarize the political doctrine of fascism by stressing this unity of contraries: "The fascist State is … not reactionary but revolutionary, for it provides solutions to a number of universal problems," yet at the same time it is also traditionalist because "in the moral domain it promotes order, discipline, obedience to the moral dictates of the fatherland."² Likewise, Sergio Pannunzio, a major theoretician of the Italian fascist movement, acknowledged that "in its dual character, fascism is revolutionary and conservative."³ Finally in recent years, this counterintuitive union has begun to gain a large following, even among contemporary historians who are more and more interested in exploring how "fascism was revolutionary in its own right."⁴ Given that the conservative aspect of fascism does not seem to raise any questions, the real issue here is spelling out why one would apply the category of revolution to such a reactionary and tragic social experiment.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137476869_1

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