This book charts the evolution of Italian Fascism from its inconspicuous beginnings as an anti-party movement in 1919 to its equally inauspicious ending as a Nazi German satellite in 1945. It shows how and why Fascism came to power in 1922 as a mass movement of middle class reaction against socialism and parliamentary liberal policies in a period of serious postwar political and social crisis, and how the attempt to implant a totalitarian new order culminated in a Fascist war which exposed the pretensions and inadequacies of 'fascistization' and dissolved the Fascist consensus.