Eco coined the term Ur-fascism to denote the qualities of political life that were shared by members of the far-flung fascist tribe. While Mussolini’s capital ‘F’ Italian Fascism may have been a ‘beehive of contradictions’, it also embodied underlying commonalities with the members of the broad European, lower-case ‘f’ fascist movement. Much like the family resemblance that is hard to discern by gazing into a single face, the shared features of the fascist physiognomy are clearly visible when the whole clan is brought together.

The Oxford Handbook of Fascism is in the spirit of Eco’s Ur-fascism. With the core focus on Mussolini’s Italy, the volume offers substantial analyses of the outrigger fascist family groupings and the variety of ways in which they were connected to, or separated from, the Italian model. A hefty volume, the Handbook consists of thirty-one essays and covers more than six hundred pages. The editor, Richard Bosworth, a pre-eminent historian of Mussolini and of Italian Fascism, has marshalled a cast of distinguished contributors, most of whom are already well known in the field.

 Robert Paxton, the doyen of the scholars of comparative fascisms, provides telling commentary that rounds out the kaleidoscope of examples in the volume. His conception of the five potential stages through which movements of the New Right may develop offers a dynamic schema from which to make analytical comparisons across national examples and over time. Similarly, a number of the gathered historians take the opportunity to revisit, and in some cases to elaborate, the larger field of their own published research and to reflect on its relation to Italian fascism. Kevin Passmore, drawing on his considerable expertise in the French right and on interwar European gender studies, opens the volume with a clear discussion of the intellectual strands of nineteenth-century political thought that provided the ideological underpinnings of fascism before the Great War. Alan Kramer brings material from his recent powerful study on trauma and culture in World War I to revisit their significance in the formation of a collective European memory of those pulverising years. That terrible experience left an indelible mark on the collective psyche and, in turn, on postwar art and imagining.

Perry Wilson, the author of major studies of Italian women, concludes that Italian women slogged out hard years in the fascist ventennio, despite their being drawn into haphazard processes of modernisation and despite their being the focus of the fascist polemic about females as precious mothers of the nation. Poor women worked as they had always done. And though certain, previously male occupations may have been opened in wartime to middle-class females, most women were forced to negotiate their own and their families’ survivals using whatever resources they could marshal. The state’s organisation for mothers and children (ONMI) assisted some single women to keep their babies, but equally, the emphasis on the importance of modern child rearing had the paradoxical consequence of encouraging other families to restrict their number of births in order to provide a better life for those children already born. Whatever the reason, and despite the state’s urging women to become warriors in the ‘Battle for Births’, the Italian birth rate continued to fall throughout the fascist years. This suggests that, however powerless individual women might have been in confronting an overweening state, within the intimacy of the family they made their own choices about family size and the consequences of sexual relations.

J.F. Pollard, a leading historian of the Vatican and of Catholic thought, examines the relations between fascism and Catholicism. He is also interested in whether there were Catholic anti-fascists. By and large there were not, the religious tending to be drawn to conservative and traditional politics while liberals and the left stumped for secularism. Pollard casts his net wide to take in the minute workings from Mussolini’s ‘marriage of convenience’ with the Vatican in 1929, through to the cooling of marital ardour a decade later. He also tracks the circumstances of the Concordat with Germany and the central role of the Spanish Civil War in galvanising Catholics and clerico-fascists in Europe from East to West.

The great strength of Pollard’s essay is the deft detail that his comparative lens highlights and the fine balance that is maintained between the papacy’s official voice, as revealed in the encyclicals, and developments on the ground in the dioceses and among the lay followers. Not only do we understand what happened in these different arenas, but also the significance of the events. The only disappointment in this fine review is that the author, perhaps understandably, passes over the recent debates about Pius XII’s role as ‘Hitler’s Pope’ and eschews taking a stance on the fraught question of the Vatican’s responsibility, or not, for the Shoah. Pollard concludes, instead, that Pius XII’s silence probably was prompted by a ‘naïve hope of helping to negotiate peace’. This is a fudge that will find little favour with historians such as Robert Marrus and Robert Wistrich, who have more robustly, but equally seriously, examined these matters.

The essays are arranged into five sections. The origins of the movement and the political effect of World War I, as in the studies by Passmore and Kramer among others, lead into the second grouping, which concentrates on the domestic workings of the Italian state. Mimmo Franzinelli traces the phenomenon of squadrismo: the brawling and revolutionary posturing by young men, many ex-arditi, who had served as volunteers in World War I assault units and at war’s end found it impossible to return to the postwar peacetime. They provided the violent shock troops of the early fascist movement, smashing the left and, by their uncontrolled behaviour, laying down the enduring myth of fascist violence and its centrality to fascist masculinity.

Guido Bonsaver casts an acerbic eye over Italian intellectuals and their political posturing, not just in terms of their behaviour during Mussolini’s reign but in terms of its consequences in conditioning the cultural memory of the era. The latter, manifest in a popular nostalgia for the good old days, ignores the absurdity of forcing a national literary and linguistic policy in a country like Italy, where multiple regional languages are the norm. More tellingly, Bonsaver reminds us that the collective memory of postwar Italy swept under the carpet all references to state racial policy and the complicit intellectuals who carried it out. He also surveys the place of youth within the cultural mission of fascism, while Patrizia Dogliania lays out the specifications of a project that can provide a proper analysis of Italian youth in a generational study of fascism and state socialisation.

At the core of popular and academic fascist studies is the comparison between German Nazism and Italian fascism. In popular and scholarly discussions, the author’s assessment of the source of Italian racism serves as a benchmark to the analysis overall. Italian nationalists have tended to argue that Italian racial policy between the wars was imported from Germany and therefore was never an indigenous Italian phenomenon. More sceptical critics point to the barbarity of Mussolini’s colonial incursions in East Africa and to the violent treatment of Slovenes and Croatians, not to mention the full-blown anti-Semitism of the Italian state after 1938. Robert S.C. Gordon, whose recent research deals with Primo Levi and the fatal burden that Holocaust survival brought him, concludes that, although the ‘scale and intensity’ of German racial violence was greater than that of Italy, fascism and the sorts of sister regimes that embraced intense nationalism have also produced racism of a similar order. Indeed, Gordon postulates that the modern nation, such as that to which Mussolini aspired for Italy, created ‘others’ who were normalised as racially beyond the pale of the modernised state.

Section Four of the volume comprises essays on eleven associated fascist examples. They include the usual suspects in Spain, France, Hungary and Yugoslavia, as well as Bob Moore’s study of the Netherlands under German occupation and after the war, up to and including the Dutch anti-foreigner movements that began in the early 1970s and culminated in 2002 with the murder of the anti-immigration campaigner Pim Fortuyn. Martin Pugh expands on his well-known research on the British Union of Fascists (BUF) to make a sweep through the Empire. Within many sections of the BUF, women comprised between a quarter and a third of the membership, and were always active in leadership positions. Pugh challenges the conventional assumption that BUF enlistments fell away abruptly after the rally at Olympic Stadium, when ordinary British men and women supposedly rejected Mosley’s blackshirted ‘biff boys’ and their violence. Instead, Pugh finds that a certain breed of new recruits was attracted to these displays of raw violence. In his travels through the empire, Pugh suggests that the Australian New Guard was not fascist but that ‘its anti-democratic and anti-communist views enabled it to occupy the ground’ that, had it existed, a fully fledged Australian fascist party would have filled.

At first glance, the two essays that bracket the section on national examples of fascism seem surprising inclusions, but both add to the richness and breadth of the possible comparisons. Roger Markwick examines the relationship between the Soviet Union of Stalin and Mussolini’s Italian state. Cold War theories of totalitarianism elided the examples of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, but Markwick’s pairing produces a startlingly different picture. While both states shared totalitarian aspirations, Markwick finds two systems that were ‘essentially antonyms’. Even further out of field is Rikki Kersten’s study of Japanese fascism, an inspired choice, not only because Barrington Moore used Japan as the third leg in his classic study of The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). Kersten’s thoughtful consideration as to whether Asian nations can be fitted into what has traditionally been a European model of fascism raises profound questions about the nature of fascism itself.

Bosworth is an iconoclast rather than an ideological follower of a single school of history. He tells us that as an editor he is a ‘weak dictator’, not unlike Mussolini himself at the helm of the Italian state. Clearly, the range of approaches, and the variety of authorial presumptions about continuity and historical change, fit no straitjacket. Though it may be churlish to say so, if I were Giovanni Gentile to Bosworth’s Mussolini I would have urged him to extend his editorial reach even further to include two additional historians. The first would be Emilio Gentile, not just because, in the spirit of Italian Fascist nepotism, I would be helping a member of my extended family, but because so many of the essays in this volume, including Bosworth’s own introduction, take as a point of contention Gentile’s notion that fascism ‘sacralised’ the Italian state. In this Handbook, with essays that come at fascism from every imaginable point of view, Gentile’s inclusion would be useful.

The ‘historian’ for whom I would barrack most loudly, however, is Charlie Chaplin. The Great Dictator (1940) is both primary source and sophisticated secondary interpretation. It begins with the little Jewish barber being pulverised in the trenches. As with many veterans, the comrade whose life he saves never forgets the ties that bound men at the front. But it is in the rivalry between the dictators Adenoid Hynkel of Tomania and Benzino Napaloni of Bacteria that we see Chaplin the inspired historian. Hynkel, supported by his generals Herring and Garbitch, the latter working on Tomania’s secret war weapon (the still-to-be-perfected bullet-proof jumpsuit and an equally unreliable self-opening parachute), plans an Anschluss with Osterlich, the land that falls between the territories of the two dictatorships. When Benzino and Mama come to Berlin in their special train to visit the nervous Hynkel, all kinds of historical contingences and unforeseen events are played out. If there were space in this volume for only one extra historian, I would opt for Charlie Chaplin.