Niçard Italians
They often speak the Ligurian language after Nice joined the Genoa league formed by the cities of Liguria at the end of the 7th century.
[1] On 25 October 1561, following the Edict of Rivoli, Italian replaced Latin as the language for drafting official documents of the County of Nice.
After the Treaty of Turin was signed in 1860 between the Sardinian king and Napoleon III as a consequence of the Plombières Agreement, the county was again and definitively ceded to France as a territorial reward for French assistance in the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, which saw Lombardy united with the Kingdom of Sardinia.
King Victor-Emmanuel II, on April 1, 1860, solemnly asked the population to accept the change of sovereignty, in the name of Italian unity, and the cession was ratified by a regional referendum.
[5] This was the result of a masterful operation of information control by the French and Piedmontese governments, in order to influence the outcome of the vote in relation to the decisions already taken.
Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice, tenaciously opposed the cession of his hometown to France, arguing that the Plebiscite he ratified in the treaty was vitiated by electoral fraud.
The French government sends 10,000 soldiers to Nice, closes the Italian newspaper Il Diritto di Nizza and imprisons several demonstrators.
On February 13, Garibaldi was not allowed to speak at the French parliament meeting in Bordeaux to ask for the reunification of Nice to the newborn Italian unitary state, and he resigned from his post as deputy.
[14] The failure of Vespers led to the expulsion of the last pro-Italian intellectuals from Nice, such as Luciano Mereu or Giuseppe Bres, who were expelled or deported.
Many intellectuals from Nice took refuge in Italy, such as Giovan Battista Bottero who took over the direction of the newspaper La Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin.
Many intellectuals from Nice took refuge in Italy, such as Giovan Battista Bottero who took over the direction of the newspaper La Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin.
[22] Another reduction of Niçard Italians took place after the Second World War, when Italy's defeat in the conflict led to the cession of other territories in the area to France following the Paris treaties.
[17] Il Pensiero di Nizza ("The Thought of Nice") was founded after the fall of Napoleon; it was suppressed by the French authorities in 1895 (35 years after the annexation) on charges of irredentism, while it was almost exclusively autonomist.
[26] Il Pensiero di Nizza was revived after the Second World War as a periodical and as the voice of the Italian-speaking Nice people by Giulio Vignoli, a Genoese scholar of Italian minorities.
