‘Watersheds’ and ‘turning points’ are two standard literary devices for addressing the question of direction in history. Once that direction is determined, one is able to survey the roads not taken, sorting out the possible and the probable from the unavoidable. This paper forswears the vocabulary of turning points, but it owes something to the idea such language expresses. Put cryptically, our discussions of the origins of the Second World War could afford to pay closer attention to Franco-Italian relations in the 1930s. Next to the Manchurian, Rhenish, Spanish, Austrian, Czech and Polish crises of that decade, the crisis within the ephemeral alliance between Paris and Rome has been given short shrift. Even within the context of the Ethiopian crisis there is a tendency to measure the implications against Anglo-French, Anglo-Italian and Italo-German relations. The net effect is to downplay the importance of relations between France and Italy. And from that, to choose but one example, comes an exaggerated sense of the ease with which the French fell into line with British policy in the Mediterranean, and with which the Italians subsequently received German overtures respecting Austria and Central Europe.
