I'm going to assume you mean is it purely a 20th century (1900's) concept, or does it predate that.

I'm going to mostly be pulling from Robert O. Paxton's book entitled The Anatomy of Fascism. In it he writes that

Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain. The other major currents of modern Western political culture - conservatism, liberalism, socialism - all reached mature form between the late eighteenth century and the mid-ninteenth century. Fascism, however, was still unimagined as late as the 1890s

So the short answer is no: fascism does not predate the 20th century.

Fascismo as a term wasn't coined until the end of World War 1, where it was used by Mussolini to describe the ideology of the small band of nationalist ex-soldiers and pro-war syndicalists revolutionary that had begun to gather around him.

Officially, Fascism was born in Milan on Sunday, March 23, 1919. That morning, somewhat more than a hundred persons, including war veterans, syndicalists who had supported the war, and Futurist intellectuals, plus some reporters and the merely curious, gathered in the meeting room of the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance, overlooking the Piazza San Sepolero, to "declare war against socialism... because it has opposed nationalism." Now Mussolini called his movement the Fasci Di Combattimento, which means, very approximately, "fraternities of combat"

Two months later The Fascism program was issues which called for fulfilling Italian expansionist aims in the Balkans and around the Mediterranean that had been frustrated a few months before at the Paris Peace Conference. It also called for some seemingly progressive propositions such as women's suffrage, voting age being 18, the need for a new constitution, the eight-hour work day, an increased roll for the Italian working class in directing the economy, and a heavy progressive tax on capital.

If you wanted to look to some of the precursors to Fascism, it would be a good idea to look at syndicalist and social democratic groups that were pro-war during the lead up and throughout World War 1. You could also find traces of what would become fascism in the Futurist movement. Even so, most of the direct precursors the fascism still weren't apparent until the very late 1800's. Fascism is a very young concept, but part of the point of it as a reactionary movement is to valorize a mythological past in contrast to the degradation of modernity on a people. It both looks backwards (sort of) and forwards (sort of) at the same time, and as such you can see echoes of the past all over fascism

Periodization – as well as the identification of broad social and political phenomenons – are bound to involve a certain degree of arbitrariness, depending on what issues are drawing the observer's attention. With that said, our periodization of the Fascist phenomenon certainly can't abstract from the fact that we have a sort of hard cap to contend with whenever we attempt to push it back (and forward, some may argue) in time: that Fascism was, first (if not foremost) a political movement which existed in Italy from March 1919 until April 1945, being in control of the Italian State – to varying degrees and under various forms – from the end of 1922 to the last weeks of the Second World War.

If this is a brief, but self-sufficient, definition of Italian Fascism, it's understandably destined to be of little use for those historians, sociologists, political scientists, etc. who aspire to investigate other, and diverse social and political phenomenons more or less directly tied to Italian Fascism, which have come to be (whether appropriately or not) commonly referenced to as "fascism", or even intend to create such an interpretation themselves. In this regard, I am at least of the opinion that the original "intrinsic" periodization should always be kept in mind, since – as noted for instance by R. Paxton – an evaluation of the fascist phenomenon needs to keep sight of the practical evolution of Fascism. And this not just for a matter of historical convenience.

The syncretic, frequently ill-defined and certainly vague ideological contents of Fascism, its own ambiguity on otherwise fundamental issues – its "anti-prejudicial" character, as Mussolini would say – or, in other words, its ability to state one thing and to do the opposite, need alert us not to rely fully and acritically on a presumed, abstract Fascist ideological identity.

In this sense, it's obvious that certain ideological elements of Fascism could be pushed back into the past in search for analogues almost at will; and that the legitimacy of such an operation is not really something that can be argued conclusively and absolutely without examining the specific perspective and purpose of one's research. Indeed, Fascist historiography was probably the first to seek ways to evade its narrowest natural boundaries, looking for antecedents of Fascism in the past greatness of Rome, not only in aspirational but properly (let's say, academical) historical terms, and thus to draw a parallel between the social policies of Augustus and those of Mussolini's Regime.

One can, of course, scoff at the weakest attempts which painted Italy's racial legislation as a continuation of the "very similar" policies adopted by the first founder of the Roman Empire. Yet various authors have examined, from a far more legitimate angle, the Fascist aspiration to develop a “national religion” - or better, a “religion of the nation” - with its own liturgy and symbology. An aspiration which is not exclusive to Fascism, as it links back to an established tradition connecting Mazzini's Terza Italia and the ancient myths of the Roman institutions.

From this point of view, the question whether Fascism was deliberately misrepresenting the history and institutions of ancient Rome to build its own mythology is not the only relevant one, since those myths, ideas and interpretations of the past were a relevant portion of the self-representation of Fascism. In other words, the fact that we can dismiss the idea that August was objectively “fascist”, or that we may reject the idea that Mazzini's thought represented an anticipation of the fascist phenomenon, doesn't mean that we should also dismiss any investigation into those different historical phenomenons and their possible relations with Fascism. Especially if we consider that those ideal analogues were in themselves a portion of the Fascist attempt at an ideological construction. And, in this regard, we shouldn't necessarily let the aforementioned syncretism deter us from an examination of the ideological contents of Fascism.

That said, there is one general rule one should keep in mind when drawing far reaching and sprawling historical analogues: that a thorough, detailed, comprehensive command of one historical period is already quite hard to muster. And for an author – even a professional one – a discussion of Fascism across the centuries is always at risk of turning into a game of shadows, where one projects the features of their main focus onto other, apparently similar yet dissimilar formations, or ends up walking their way back to the familiar idol of the French Revolution, of her greatest son, or lesser nephew (indeed, both Napoleons have been suggested as antecedents of the Fascist phenomenon).

This may be an inescapable danger in these kinds of investigation; one which, again, does not allow us to dismiss them out of hand, but should probably advise in favor of caution when we test the boundaries of history.

Last, there are more concrete aspects that – at least from my specific perspective – limit our ability to push those boundaries. Italian Fascism was closely related to the experience of the Great War, to the affirmation of mass movements in the early XX Century (at least in Italy), to the development of new interpretation of those contemporary social phenomenons (Sorel, Pareto, Sighele, Le Bon, etc.), to the experience of a certain climate of “national radicalism”, to the expansion of national press, to the incomplete formation of a national conscience in Italy after the unification, to the definition of a particular concept of “absolute rechtsstaat” promoted by the Nationalists, etc. All these aspects somewhat constrain Fascism to early XX Century Italy; and, while I can see good reasons to look at Nazi Germany under a similar perspective (not that all Italian scholars of Fascism agree on this point), I am less inclined to look for fascism elsewhere.

 

De Felice, R. - Le interpretazioni del fascismo

Gentile, E. - Le origini dell'ideologia fascista (1918-25)

Gentile, E. - Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell'Italia fascista

Gentile, E. - Fascismo, storia e interpretazione

Griffin, R. - Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler

Nolte, E. - Fascism in its epoch

Payne, S.G. - Fascism

Paxton, R. - The anatomy of Fascism

Vivarelli, R. - Storia delle origini del Fascismo

I live in France and have an interest in La Belle Époque (after the franco prussian war and before ww1).

Everyone here thinks Vichy was fascist but I don't see the difference between what they believed and what the books I have from La Belle Époque preach. These books and magazines I have from this period are super nationalist / patriotic and have a fake (or just wrong) linear view of French history.

I assume there is a similar type of thing going on in Italy and Germany. What is the difference between 1880s say super nationalism and 1930s fascism?