In November 29th, 1913 at a meeting in Paris, the national fencing representatives of France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Bohemia, Holland, Hungary and Norway met and decided to form the Federation International d'Escrime, which has been the governing body of the sport ever since. Later in 1918, the first F.I.E. rule book was published. At present, there are 124 countries affiliated with the Federation. The F.I.E. is striving to make fencing more visual and dynamic through the use of transparent masks, wireless scoring devices and electronic scoring boards.

The first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 included foil and sabre events. In 1900, the epee was also admitted to the Paris Olympic program. Women participated in Olympic foil events for the first time in Paris in 1924.

With the advance of technique has also come the evolution of the equipment. Electrical monitoring for epee was made mandatory for the first time in Budapest in 1934 at the European Championship. Twenty years later it was also applied to the foil and a system was adopted at the World Championships in Rome in 1955 and at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. However, despite the changes and improvements in scoring systems for epee and foil fencing, the sabre event still depended solely on human judgment for scoring. The first official competition using electric sabre equipment was held in 1985 during the World Cup Finals in Dourdan, France. The equipment used then was very different from that used today; it was very sensitive and fragile, but it was a satisfactory experiment. In Rome in 1987, the F.I.E. presented a more refined microprocessor-based scoring system for the electronic judging of hits. The F.I.E. is now committed to the use of electrical sabre in all major events and 1992 marked the first year that an electrical sabre system was used at the Barcelona Olympic Games. Another important change has been the admittance of women's epee into the 1990 World Fencing Championship in Lyon, France. For the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, women's epee has been added to the fencing program without increasing the total number of fencers in the competition. Women's sabre is still in the process of development, but hopefully it will one day be as popular as the present male-dominated version.