Roman salute

The Roman salute, also known as the Fascist salute, is a gesture in which the right arm is fully extended, facing forward, with palm down and fingers touching. In some versions, the arm is raised upward at an angle; in others, it is held out parallel to the ground. In contemporary times, the gesture is typically associated with fascism and far-right politics, although it originated during the 18th century French Revolution and is pseudohistorically associated with ancient Rome.^[1]

According to an apocryphal legend, the fascist gesture was based on a customary greeting which was claimed to have been used in ancient Rome.^[2] However, no Roman text describes such a gesture, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern "Roman" salute.^[2] The salute had in fact originated more than a millennium later, in Jacques-Louis David's painting The Oath of the Horatii (1784), and it quickly developed a historically inaccurate association with Roman republican and imperial culture. The gesture and its identification with Roman culture were further developed in other neoclassic artworks. In the United States, a similar salute for the Pledge of Allegiance known as the Bellamy salute was created by James B. Upham to accompany the Pledge, written by Francis Bellamy in 1892. The gesture was further elaborated upon in popular culture during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in plays and films that portrayed the salute as an ancient Roman custom. These included the 1914 Italian film Cabiria whose intertitles were written by the nationalist poet Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1919, d'Annunzio adopted the cinematographically depicted salute as a neo-imperial ritual when he led an occupation of Fiume.

Through d'Annunzio's influence, the gesture soon became part of the rising Italian Fascist movement's symbolic repertoire and began to be gradually adopted by the Fascist regime in 1923. It was then adopted in Germany by the Nazi Party in 1926 which utlised it with a Sieg Heil! chant (see Nazi salute), gaining national prominence with the Nazi regime that began in 1933. During this interwar period, the Roman salute was also adopted by other fascist, far right, and ultranationalist movements, including the regimes of Spain (Franco) and Greece (Metaxas). The gesture fell out after the end of World War II, which included the defeat of the Axis powers that made compulsory use of it. Since then, displaying the salute with a Nazi intent has been a criminal offence in Germany, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland. Legal restrictions on its use in Italy are more nuanced and use there has generated controversy.^[3][4]

The Roman salute gesture and its variations continue to be used today in neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and Falangist contexts. Outside of these, it is used officially (and without fascist intents) in Mexico as a civilian, military and political pledge of allegiance, in countries including Portugal, Brazil and Chile only as a military oath, and in Taiwan strictly as an oath of office.^[5][6][7]