I am indebted to Alexander De Grand for taking the time and trouble to comment on my article, although I am sorry that he seems to have read it principally as an attack on Giolitti and Giolittian policies. While I can see that it is possible to read this into the paper, it was certainly not my intention to lay the responsibility for the development of Fascism at Giolitti's door. My concern was rather to seek to identify some of the reasons for the dramatic clash between left and right in 1920 and 1921 which led to the affirmation of Fascism; it was in this light that I attempted to assess the Giolittian period, which has always seemed to me the great moment of democratic possibilities between one form of repressive government and another. I agree, of course, that the great radicalising and polarising event in Italy was the First World War. My point – put very simply – was that the experience of the war might have been much less devastating for Italy if the political situation in 1914–15 had not already been characterised by profound lacerations within Italian society. To put it another way, I was interested in seeing why, as De Grand himself says, ‘the great hopes for reform that marked that [Giolittian] period gave rise to little structural reform’ and in assessing the consequences of that lack of reform for the subsequent period. The central question of the article, therefore, is that of Fascism as breach or continuity rather than the culpability of Giolitti.