The other was insurgency, epitomized in the immediate aftermath of the war by Benito Mussolini. In Milan in March 1919 he launched his Fascist Party by denouncing the emerging new order as ‘a solemn “swindle” of the rich’, by which he meant Britain, France and America, ‘against the proletarian nations’, by which he meant Italy, ‘to fix forever the actual conditions of world equilibrium . . .’21 Instead of a reversion to an imaginary ancien régime, he held out the promise of further escalation.
