Mussolini had been a socialist and obsessively and tediously anti-clerical, before the experience of the First World War converted him to the idea of extreme nationalism, and captured in his mind the need for the heroic ideal. The Polish-Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell argued in The Birth of Fascist Ideology that fascism was a revolutionary movement, emerging from the radical Left but ‘which became fused with “blood and soil nationalism”’.
