It was by way of such arguments that fascism arrived at that new man and new society so admirably characterized by Marcel Deat: ‘the total man in the total society, with no clashes, no prostration, no anarchy.’ There can be no doubt that fascism’s successes were in part due to man’s longing to be merged with the collective soul and his exaltation at feeling, living, and acting in harmony with the whole. Fascism was a vision of a coherent and reunited people, and it was for this reason that it placed such great emphasis on march-pasts, parades, and uniforms — on a whole communal liturgy, in fact — and that it waged an implacable war against anything tending to divide or differentiate, or which stood for diversity or pluralism: liberalism, democracy, parliamentarism, multi-party system. This unity finds its most perfect expression in the quasi -sacred figure of the leader. The cult of a leader who embodied the spirit, will, and virtues of the people, and who was identified with the nation, was the keystone of the fascist liturgy.
For this romantic and mystic conception of life, fascism is a great adventure, an adventure one lives with all his being, a ‘fever,’ Robert Brasillach used to say. But long before him, d’Annunzio had written about the heightening of the meaning of life attained through sacred objects, the symbols of a secular religion: instruments of a cult around which human thought and imagination revolve, and which lift these to idealistic heights . This new religion was a product of the change in the nature of politics which had taken place at the end of the nineteenth century.
Fascism A Reader’s Guide. Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography by Walter Laqueur
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