Situated on the cultural boundary between Occitania and Piedmont, the area extends from Lake Geneva in the north to the Dauphiné in the south and west and to the Aosta Valley in the east.

Following its annexation to France in 1860, the territory of Savoy was divided administratively into two separate departments, Savoie and Haute-Savoie.

The traditional capital remains Chambéry (in Italian: Ciamberì from the Latin: Camberia), on the rivers Leysse and Albane, hosting the castle of the House of Savoy and the Savoyard senate.

The County of Savoy was detached de jure from the Kingdom of Arles by Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor in 1361.

[n 5] On 19 February 1416 Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, made the County of Savoy an independent duchy, with Amadeus VIII as the first duke.

A corps of 1,500 was dispatched from Lyon and invaded Savoy on 3 April, occupying Chambéry (capital city) and proclaiming the annexation to France.

[11] On 21 July 1858 in Plombières-les-Bains, Vosges, the prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, met in secret with Napoleon III to secure French military support against the Austrian Empire during the conflicts associated with the Italian unification.

During the discussion, Cavour promised that Sardinia would cede the County of Nice and Duchy of Savoy to the Second French Empire.

To help reduce the attractiveness of Switzerland, the French government conceded a Free-Trade Zone that maintained the longstanding duty-free relationship of northern Savoyard communes to Geneva.

Voters were not permitted the options of either joining Switzerland, remaining with Italy, or regaining its independence, were the source of some opposition.

With a 99.8% vote in favour of joining France, there were allegations of vote-rigging, notably by the British government, which opposed continental expansion by its traditional French enemy.

The correspondent of The Times in Savoy who was in Bonneville on 22 April called the vote "the lowest and most immoral farce(s) which was ever played in the history of nations".

[14] He finished his letter with those words: I leave you to draw your own conclusions from this trip, which will show clearly what the vote was in this part of Savoy.

The ballot-box in the hands of those very authorities who issued the proclamations; no control possible; even travellers suspected and dogged lest they should pry into the matter; all opposition put down by intimidation, and all liberty of action completely taken away.

On 23 August 1860 and 7 March 1861, two agreements were signed between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia to settle the remaining issues concerning the annexation.

[19] Daniel Rops of the French Academy justified the new title with these words: Savoy has begun to solemnize the feasts in 1960, commemorating the centenary of its incorporation (rattachement) to France.

It is on purpose that the word incorporation (rattachement) is highlighted here: the Savoyards attach great value to it, and it is the only one they have resolved to use in the official terminology of the Centenary.

This explains why in 1858–1859 when rumours ran of the Plombières secret agreement, where Napoleon III and Cavour decided of the fate of Savoy, the Savoyards themselves took the initiative to ask for the incorporation (rattachement).

A very marginal separatist movement has also appeared in Savoy within the past twenty years, most prominently represented by the Ligue Savoisienne, founded in 1994.

[22] In an interview for the newspaper Le Dauphiné Libéré, Sylvain Milbach, a historian at the University of Savoy, qualifies the vote as Napoleonic, but also argues that a completely free and fair vote would not have dramatically changed the outcome, as the majority of Savoyards wished to become French.