Fascism
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50 free Fascism trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Fascism reshaped the twentieth century in barely two decades. It began at a single meeting in Italy in 1919, took power three years later, and inspired imitators from Madrid to Bucharest before collapsing in the ruins of the Second World War. This quiz follows that story. It covers where the word and its symbols came from, how Benito Mussolini rose and how his regime worked, the dictators and movements that borrowed his methods in Germany, Spain and beyond, the writers and fighters who opposed them, and the way books and films have remembered the era since. The questions suit history students revising the rise of fascism, teachers building a lesson, and anyone curious about how democracies fail. Every answer comes with a short explanation and was checked against a reliable source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The fasces, the ancient emblem that gave fascism its name, appears on the reverse of which old American coin?
Mercury dime
The Mercury dime, minted from 1916 to 1945, shows the bundle of rods with an axe as a sign of unity and strength. Its design predates Mussolini's movement, which later made the emblem notorious.
Q 02Before founding the Fascist movement, Benito Mussolini edited Avanti!, the newspaper of which Italian political party?
The Socialists
The Socialists expelled Mussolini for urging Italy to enter the First World War. He was called up in 1915, was wounded in 1917, and came home to build a movement that fought his old comrades.
Q 03Benito Mussolini is popularly, but wrongly, credited with making which Italian service run on time?
The trains
The trains owed most of their repairs to work done before Mussolini took power in 1922. Their famous punctuality under his rule was more propaganda than reality.
Q 04The 1929 Lateran Treaty, signed by Benito Mussolini's government, created which tiny independent state?
Vatican City
Vatican City settled a quarrel that had run since Italy annexed Rome in 1870, leaving popes who refused to recognise the kingdom. The deal won Mussolini the goodwill of many Catholics.
Q 05A stiff-arm salute Americans dropped in 1942, as it looked fascist, had accompanied which patriotic recital?
The Pledge of Allegiance
The Pledge of Allegiance was recited with an outstretched arm, known as the Bellamy salute, from 1892. Congress replaced the gesture with a hand over the heart in December 1942.
Q 06Which English novelist was shot in the throat by a sniper while fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War?
George Orwell
George Orwell was wounded in 1937 while serving with a small Marxist militia on the Aragon front. He told the story in Homage to Catalonia, which ends with his escape to France.
Q 07Which Picasso painting protests the 1937 bombing of a Basque town by German and Italian aircraft?
Guernica
Guernica was first shown at the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris exposition. It then stayed abroad, mostly at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and reached Spain only in 1981.
Q 08Which New York venue hosted a pro-Nazi German American Bund rally of more than 20,000 people in February 1939?
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden's stage carried a huge portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. Outside, protesters tried three times to break through the police lines guarding the rally.
Q 09Benito Mussolini's Italy hosted and won which sporting tournament in 1934, exploiting it as propaganda?
FIFA World Cup
The FIFA World Cup of 1934 ended with Italy beating Czechoslovakia 2–1 in the final. Holders Uruguay stayed away, the only time the reigning champions have not taken part.
Q 10Which Italian anti-fascist folk song, dedicated to the wartime partisans, found new fame through the series Money Heist?
Bella Ciao
Bella Ciao may descend from a protest song of the women who weeded northern Italy's rice fields. The partisan version became widespread only after the Second World War had ended.
Q 11Which nickname, taken from the colour of their uniform, was given to Benito Mussolini's paramilitary squads?
Blackshirts
The Blackshirts modelled their dress on the Arditi, Italy's elite assault troops of the First World War. In 1923 the squads were turned into an official state militia.
Q 12Which African country did Benito Mussolini's forces invade in 1935, driving Emperor Haile Selassie into exile?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia was overrun with the help of mustard gas dropped from aircraft, in breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Resistance never stopped, and the country was liberated in 1941.
Q 13Which title did Benito Mussolini use as the leader of Fascist Italy?
Il Duce
Q 21Benito Mussolini's blacksmith father named him after Benito Juárez, a reforming president of which country?
Mexico
Mexico's liberal hero appealed to the elder Mussolini, a committed left-wing radical. The boy's middle names, Amilcare and Andrea, honoured two Italian politicians of the same stripe.
Q 22Which greeting did Fascist Italy's party secretary denounce as bourgeois, urging a Roman salute instead?
The handshake
The handshake was meant to vanish from Italian life, and party secretary Achille Starace praised the raised arm as more hygienic. No ancient Roman text actually describes such a salute.
Q 23Which Ernest Hemingway novel follows an American volunteer sent to blow up a bridge in the Spanish Civil War?
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Il Duce is a cognate of the English word duke. Admirers had given the same title to Giuseppe Garibaldi during Italian unification in 1860, long before Mussolini made it his own.
Q 14Which 1997 film set in Fascist Italy stars Roberto Benigni as a Jewish father shielding his son in a camp?
Life Is Beautiful
Life Is Beautiful won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Benigni. The story drew partly on his own father's two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Q 15Which worldwide economic slump fuelled the extremism that carried Adolf Hitler to power in 1933?
The Great Depression
The Great Depression pushed German unemployment to nearly 30 per cent, because the country depended heavily on American loans. Hitler's party took office in January 1933.
Q 16Adolf Hitler's failed 1923 coup, inspired by Mussolini's March on Rome, began in what kind of Munich venue?
A beer hall
A beer hall called the Bürgerbräukeller held 3,000 people listening to Bavaria's leader when Hitler and his men marched in. By the next morning the putsch was going nowhere, and it ended in gunfire.
Q 17Which Asian empire joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact, signed in Berlin in September 1940?
Japan
Japan's envoy Saburō Kurusu signed beside the German and Italian foreign ministers while Hitler looked on. Several smaller European states added their names in the months that followed.
Q 18Which German democracy, informally named after the city where its assembly met, did the Nazis dismantle in 1933?
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic got its nickname because the national assembly gathered there to escape street fighting in the capital. Its official name was simply the German Reich.
Q 19Benito Mussolini gave 'Iron Prefect' Cesare Mori sweeping powers in 1925 to crush which criminal organisation?
The Mafia
The Mafia faced mass arrests once Mori took up his post in Palermo, with some 11,000 attributed to his rule. He stayed in office until 1929 and is still known in Italy by that nickname.
Q 20In which city, the 1919 birthplace of the Fascist movement, was Benito Mussolini's body hung upside down in 1945?
Milan
Milan's Piazzale Loreto was the square where fifteen partisans had been shot and left on display in August 1944. The dictator's body hung from the girder of a service station there.
For Whom the Bell Tolls grew out of Hemingway's time covering the war as a newspaper reporter. Its hero, Robert Jordan, is a Spanish teacher from Montana working with anti-fascist guerrillas.
Q 24Which 2006 Guillermo del Toro fantasy is set in Francoist Spain in 1944, with a brutal army captain as villain?
Pan's Labyrinth
Pan's Labyrinth follows ten-year-old Ofelia, whose stepfather Captain Vidal hunts the guerrillas still resisting the regime. The film won three Academy Awards.
Q 25Which former Labour minister, later a villain in Peaky Blinders, founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932?
Oswald Mosley
Oswald Mosley had sat in Parliament as a Conservative, an independent and a Labour member before turning to fascism. He was interned without charge during the Second World War.
Q 26Which prince did Francisco Franco name in 1969 as his successor, only for him to steer Spain to democracy?
Juan Carlos
Juan Carlos was chosen over his own father, whom Franco thought too liberal. Once king, he helped dismantle the dictatorship he had been picked to preserve.
Q 27António Salazar's authoritarian Estado Novo, often likened to fascism, ruled which country until 1974?
Portugal
Portugal's regime fell to the Carnation Revolution, a coup by left-wing army officers on 25 April 1974. Salazar had rejected the mass-mobilising party that marked truly fascist states.
Q 28Which Italian city's film festival, the oldest in the world, once gave a top prize called the Mussolini Cup?
Venice
Venice launched its festival in August 1932 under a founder who belonged to the Fascist Party. The Mussolini Cup was the top award from 1934 to 1942, for both Italian and foreign films.
Q 29Which world body voted sanctions on Italy over its 1935 African invasion, yet left oil off the list?
League of Nations
The League of Nations never fully applied its sanctions, and Italy ignored them and walked out of the organisation. The crisis is generally regarded as having discredited the body.
Q 30Which king's refusal to sign a state-of-siege order in 1922 cleared Benito Mussolini's path to power?
Victor Emmanuel III
Victor Emmanuel III feared bloodshed and overruled his prime minister, Luigi Facta. He kept his throne through two decades of dictatorship and abdicated only in 1946.