As Italian wealth and influence grew during the Middle Ages, many Florentine, Genoese and Venetian traders, bankers and artisans settled, usually through family branches, throughout France.

Italian artists, writers and architects were called upon by the French monarchy and aristocrats, leading to a significant interchange of culture, but it was not a massive immigration of popular classes.

The 17th and 18th centuries were the era of the Italian dancers, musicians, commedia dell'arte troupes and actors of the theatre Hôtel de Bourgogne.

Under the gallicised version of her name, Catherine de Médicis, became Queen consort of France when Henry ascended to the throne in 1547.

Several months later, both Cadillac and Tonty brought their wives to the fort, making them the first European women to travel into the interior of North America.

Henri de Tonti, involved in La Salle's exploration of the Mississippi River and the establishment of the first settlement in Arkansas, was his older son.

Napoleon Bonaparte, French emperor and general, was ethnically Italian of Corsican origin, whose family was of Genoese and Tuscan ancestry.

The main causes were the economic recession that characterized the French economy in this period and the poor diplomatic relations between the two countries, due to the Tunisian question.

The eastern suburbs of Paris, for example, were distinguished by a very high concentration of Italians in Clichy, Levallois-Perret, Puteaux and Suresnes.

In 1938, the French section of the National Fascist Party had only 3,000 members,[17] represented by Nicola Bonservizi, assassinated in 1924 by an Italian anarchist in exile.

The fascist regime intended to preserve the "Italian character" of the immigrants, wanting to prevent the assimilation of their compatriots by France.

On the contrary, the anti-fascists encouraged immigrants to integrate into French society by participating in social and political struggles alongside trade union organizations.

[15] In 1931, the Italian community in France numbered over 800,000 residents, but the flow was cut short by the outbreak of World War II.

From the end of the 19th century until the eve of World War II, the Italian regions that provided the largest number of migrants were those of the North, first of all Piedmont, followed in order by Tuscany, Lombardy, Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Emilia-Romagna.

In contrast, Italian immigration after World War II saw a growth in the migratory component from the Southern regions, particularly Sicily, Calabria and Apulia.

The areas of greatest concentration of Italian immigration to France were the departments of Normandy, Alsace, Rhône, Loire, Isère, Moselle, Île-de-France (mainly in Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-d'Oise and Val-de-Marne), Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Bouches-du-Rhône, Savoie and Haute-Savoie, Lot-et-Garonne, Var, Alpes-Maritimes and Corsica.

[23] On the other hand, Italian immigrant workers were at times the object of violent hostility on the part of the local populations for reasons of labor competition.

At the time of the great Italian migratory waves, France had a rather rigid assimilation policy, which forced most of the immigrants and their descendants to abandon their mother tongue in favor of French.

Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican, which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan.