Quando NIZZA era ITALIANA (PIEMONTESE) e come passò alla FRANCIA

The city of Nice, overlooking the French Riviera, is the fifth-largest municipality in France. For centuries, its inhabitants spoke Italian and were part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Nice was an Italian city. Giuseppe Garibaldi was born here in 1807 when, ironically, the city was under French rule following the revolution. From 1388, the municipality of Nice, acting against the Provençal, placed itself under the protection of the royal family of Savoy, a protection that lasted until 1860. The city quickly became an important maritime base with a massive fleet capable of rivaling the Barbary pirates. Despite this, it was invaded by the Turkish pirate Barbarossa, supported by France. In 1561, Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy abolished the use of Latin as the administrative language and introduced Italian as the official language. Over the centuries, it was besieged numerous times by the French, who managed to conquer it after the French Revolution in 1792. During this period, due to the brutal French occupation, a spontaneous underground resistance movement against France arose among the population of Nice: Barbetismo, a liberation movement strongly rooted in the Catholic faith. On April 23, 1814, the County of Nice returned to the control of the King of Sardinia, a position it remained until the unification of Italy. Nice, in short, was a charming Italian city of the Kingdom of Sardinia. In 1860, the city of Nice was once again, and definitively, annexed to France, along with Savoy, the birthplace of the royal house, following the secret Plombières Accords of 1858 and the Treaty of Turin of 1860, as territorial compensation for France's assistance to the Italian Risorgimento in the war against Austria, which had led to the annexation of Lombardy. The annexation was ratified following a controversial plebiscite that served only to "officialize" the transfer. At that moment, the great exodus of Nice began. A quarter of Nice's population, those families most closely linked to Italy and often the wealthiest, approximately 11,000 people, abandoned the city, giving rise to the Italian irredentism movement in Nice. Those residents of Nice who decided to remain underwent a process of forced Frenchification, with the progressive spread of the French language at the expense of the Italian one. All Italian newspapers were closed down, and surnames were Frenchified. This only fueled discontent with France. Indeed, when the first free elections were held in the county in 1871, the pro-Italian lists led by Garibaldi, committed to repealing the annexation, won a staggering 90.2% of the vote, electing Garibaldi to the National Assembly, where he was subsequently barred from speaking. The Italians then, in a final burst of patriotism, elected three separatist deputies. Garibaldi promoted a popular uprising, the infamous Nice Vespers, from February 8 to 10, 1871, with the clear goal of achieving the reunification of the city of Nice with the Kingdom of Italy. In response, the French Republican government sent 10,000 soldiers to Nice, who imprisoned many Italian irredentists from Nice and crushed the uprising. From then on, in the following decades, until the Second World War, the Italian presence gradually declined, also considering the tumultuous growth of the city, mainly due to tourism, between the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, with the arrival of immigrants from all over France and abroad who supplanted the ancient ethnic nucleus of Nice of clear Italian origin.