The term fascism (pronounced [fa.ʃism], copied from the Italian pronunciation [faˈʃizmo]; or more rarely [fa.sism]) applies in the narrow sense to the Mussolini period of Italian history and in the broad sense to a political system with characteristics inspired by the Italian example but which may have taken on different aspects depending on the country. Debates exist between historians as to the qualification of certain regimes (Vichy France, Francoist Spain, etc.). The very term (in Italian fascismo) comes from the word "fascio" ("beam") designating the collection of rifles at rest or the attribute of the lictor in ancient Rome. The difference between fascism and totalitarianism is the subject of much debate. Fascism is an authoritarian political system that combines populism, nationalism and totalitarianism in the name of a supreme collective ideal. Both revolutionary and conservative, he is head-on opposed to parliamentary democracy and the liberal state that guarantees individual rights. Stemming from various components of nineteenth-century European philosophy11, fascism found in the economic and historical circumstances of the post-First World War the context which enabled it to come to power, first in Italy in the years 1920 with Mussolini, then under an accentuated variant, militarist and terrorist, in Germany in the 1930s with Nazism and Hitler.
