Fascist Era

The Fascist Era is a political calendar idea that presents Fascism not merely as a government but as the beginning of a new historical age. Its shorthand, E.F., appears beneath Benito Mussolini’s signature, and the new era is publicly attached to the opening of Parliament on May 24, 1924. Across these scenes, the calendar’s force lies in its promise to replace a discredited past with a future defined by national renewal, mass mobilization, and Fascist power.

The abbreviation and its claim

The designation enters the narrative through a small act of inscription. After a killing has disrupted the day, Cesare Rossi brings Benito Mussolini photographs to sign for two admirers. Mussolini writes the dedication with a square-tipped fountain pen associated with Gabriele D’Annunzio, then adds the abbreviation “Year II—E.F.” Rossi asks what it means. Mussolini answers, “Year two, Fascist Era. We must start moving forward in time.” The mark makes the political claim tangible: a signature now carries not only the leader’s name but a new measure of historical time.

The exchange does not explain a system of date conversion or set out the calendar’s practical rules. Instead, it stresses the intention behind the designation. To start time anew is to present Fascist rule as a rupture with what came before, and to treat the regime’s own chronology as the one by which the future should be understood.

A new age against the old order

This temporal ambition belongs to a broader postwar story of replacement. The narrative describes Europe as a stage emptied by the war and facing millions of returning veterans. In that account, the old political class is exhausted, while the coming struggle divides those who belonged to the past from those who will shape what follows. The Fascist Era gives this contrast a political form: history is not simply continuing after catastrophe but being declared anew.

At a party congress, Mussolini’s program joins national unity to imperial ambition. Within Italy, it imagines regional identities giving way to a single Italian identity; beyond the borders, it invokes empire as necessary to national greatness. The calendar’s promise of a new age thus accompanies a project that seeks to reorganize both the nation and its place in the world.

Public ritual and political time

The same idea is staged in Piazza Belgioioso, where Mussolini returns to a place associated with his first Fascist rally. Four years earlier, a few hundred had gathered; now thousands stand beneath the balcony of a princely palazzo. The square becomes a kind of urban sundial, measuring political time through the transformation of the crowd and the setting. Mussolini’s speech describes a movement grown from small groups into legions, a people becoming a nation and a nation becoming a state that pursues expansion. The audience answers his appeal to endure greater sacrifices with a resounding yes.

The ceremony makes the calendar’s abstract promise collective and theatrical. The new era is presented not as a neutral change in dating but as a visible passage from a small, embattled movement to a mass formation claiming the authority to define the nation’s future.

The gap between proclamation and reality

On May 24, 1924, Parliament is inaugurated on the ninth anniversary of Italy’s entry into the Great War, a date chosen to mark the beginning of the new Fascist era. Yet the opening is troubled. Socialists leave the chamber in protest against electoral irregularities, and their empty benches interrupt the triumphal display. From the government benches, Mussolini watches impassively as the king welcomes the newly elected as the generation of Victory; insults and threats are directed at the absent opposition.

The contrast exposes the strain inside the promise of a clean historical beginning. The regime names a new era and stages its inauguration, but political conflict has not vanished with the old chronology. The Fascist Era therefore functions both as an instrument of political self-mythology and as a recurring claim whose ceremonies reveal the opposition and instability they seek to overmaster.