The article argues that many of the factors which eventually produced Italian fascism should be identified not in the divisions of the war years nor in the conflicts of the immediate postwar period but in the period 1900–15 and in the failure of Giovanni Giolitti's reformist strategy. The increasing popular disaffection with parliamentary politics before the war reflected the inability of Giolitti to widen the political base of liberalism through significant social reform. It was this failure which made the experience of the First World War especially disastrous in Italy. In particular, it is argued that liberal governments totally failed to understand the kind of social conflict which was developing in the large estates of the Po valley – the area which would provide the specific context for the explosion of Fascism in late 1920. The essay links Fascism, therefore, less to an often cited ‘working class revolutionary threat’ in 1919–20 than to unresolved long-term structural problems in certain areas of rural Italy. Alexander De Grand offers a critical commentary on Paul Corner's conclusions and the author gives his response.