“'Fascism' emerged everywhere in Europe spontaneously, in very diverse forms, from this vital, total and general need for renovation: renovation of the state, strong, authoritarian, having time for itself and the possibility of being surrounded by competent people, avoiding the vagaries of political anarchy; renovation of society, detached from the suffocating conservatism of the gloved and hard-necked bourgeois, without perspective, flushed with excessively rich food and excessively rich Burgundy, intellectually closed, sentimentally and especially financially, to every idea of reform; social renovation, or more exactly social revolution, liquidating paternalism, so dear to the rich who played lightly with calculated tremolos on the hearts and preferred to the recognition of legal rights the condescending distribution of limited and supported charities; social revolution, relegating capital to its place as a material instrument, the people, the living substance, becoming once again the essential basis, the primordial element, of the life of the fatherland; moral renovation, finally, in teaching the nation, the youth especially, to raise itself up and look after itself.
There is not one European country which, between 1930 and 1940, did not hear this call.”
