Timeline
Dates carry the argument on this site more than is obvious: the gap between the March on Rome and the Italian dictatorship, the four months of the Legionary State, and the reversals of the 2020s each anchor a classification. Entries link to the pages where each date is sourced and argued.
1915 to 1918. The war assembles the materials: mass mobilization, brutalization, collapse of empires. Origins.
1919. Fasci di Combattimento founded in Milan. Italy.
1920 to 1922. Squadrismo in the Po valley; the movement becomes useful. October 1922, the March on Rome: Mussolini appointed, not victorious. Italy.
1923. Munich putsch fails; the Nazi turn to electoral strategy follows. Germany.
1925 to 1926. The Italian dictatorship actually built, three years after power. Italy.
1929 to 1933. Depression; parliamentary deadlock in Germany; January 30, 1933, Hitler appointed by the conservatives who believed they had hired him. Germany, the five stages.
1932 to 1938. The movement wave crests worldwide: Integralism in Brazil, the BUF, the Iron Guard, the Falange; the para-fascist regimes consolidate in Portugal, Austria, Greece; almost every movement is contained, co-opted, or crushed. The spread, movements, beyond Europe.
1936 to 1939. Spanish Civil War; the Falange merged and subordinated, 1937. Franco’s Spain.
1938. Italian racial laws; Anschluss ends the Ständestaat; German radicalization visible. Tier A, Austria.
1939 to 1941. War. The client fascisms arrive by German power: Slovakia 1939, the Legionary State September 1940 to January 1941, Croatia 1941. Tier A.
1941 to 1945. Radicalization and annihilation; the Holocaust; total defeat. Salò 1943 to 1945; Arrow Cross October 1944. Defeat.
1946. MSI founded by Salò veterans; Orwell has already written that the word is degrading into an epithet. The postwar tail, why the word matters.
1958 to 1995. The American postwar tail: Birch Society 1958, Wallace 1968, the white power turn of the late 1970s, Ruby Ridge 1992, Waco 1993, Oklahoma City 1995. The US postwar page.
1974 to 1975. The para-fascist survivors end: Portugal’s revolution 1974, Franco’s death 1975. Defeat.
1980 to 2010. The scholarly frameworks are built: Payne 1980, Griffin 1991, Payne’s history 1995, Linz 2000, Paxton and Mann 2004, Mudde 2007, Levitsky and Way 2010. The definitions.
2012 to 2020. Golden Dawn in the Greek parliament, 2012; convicted as a criminal organization, October 2020. Movements.
2020 to 2024. January 6, 2021; Paxton’s reversal on the American case follows five days later, on January 11, 2021, and is restated at length in an October 2024 profile. The US debate.
2023 to 2026. Both directions at once, in the data: Poland’s 2023 turn; V-Dem’s 2026 report lists the US, UK, and Italy among new autocratization episodes; Hungary’s April 2026 election ends the era’s type case of competitive authoritarianism; the Dutch far right falls from government to exclusion; Romania’s far right topples a government without entering one. The contemporary landscape, the intensity gradient.
The timeline’s shape is the site’s argument in miniature: movements everywhere, regimes rarely; arrival by invitation, not conquest; and, in the recent decades, motion in both directions, which is why no entry above ends with an arrow pointing anywhere.