Nizzardo Italians

Nizzardo Italians were the Italian- and Ligurian-speaking populations of the County of Nice ("Nizza"), who formed the majority of the county's population until the mid-19th century.Fact|date=June 2008 The term was coined by Italian Irredentists who sought the unification of all Italian peoples within the Kingdom of Italy. During the Risorgimento, in 1860, the Savoy government allowed France to annexe the region of Nice from the Kingdom of Sardinia in exchange for French support of its quest to unify Italy. Consequently, the Nizzardo Italians were shunned from the Italian unification movement and the region has since become primarily French-speaking.

History

The "Contea di Nizza" (as the area of Nice had been called in Italian since medieval times) was populated by Ligurian tribes up to the occupation by the Romans. These tribes were conquered by Augustus and were fully romanized (according to Theodore Mommsen) by the fourth century, when the barbarian invasions began.

The Franks conquered the region after the fall of Rome, and the local Romance populations became integrated within the growing City State, the Republic of Genoa. In 1388, the commune of Nice fell under the protection of the Duchy of Savoy, and Nice continued to be controlled, directly or indirectly, by Savoy right up until 1860.

During this time, the maritime strength of Nice rapidly increased until it was able to cope with the Barbary pirates. Fortifications were largely extended by the rulers of Savoy and the roads of the city and surrounding region improved. Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, abolished the use of Latin and established the Italian language as the official language of Nice in 1561.Fact|date=June 2008

Conquered in 1792 by the armies of the First French Republic, the County of Nice was part of France until 1814; but after that year it was placed under the protection of the Kingdom of Sardinia by the Congress of Vienna.

By a treaty concluded in 1860 between the Sardinian king and Napoleon III, the County of Nice was again ceded to France, along with Savoy, as a territorial reward for French assistance in the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, which saw Lombardy unified with Piedmont-Sardinia.

Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice, strongly opposed the cession to France, arguing that the plebiscite that ratified the treaty was not "universal" and contained irregularities. In 1872 there were popular riots in the city, promoted by the "Garibaldini" in favour of unification with the Kingdom of Italy.Fact|date=June 2008 More than 11,000 Nizzardo Italians refused to be French and moved to Italy (mainly Turin and Genoa) after 1861. The French government closed the Italian language newspapers "Diritto di Nizza" and "Voce di Nizza" in 1861, and "Il Pensiero di Nizza" in 1895.

The Italian Irredentists long considered the annexation of Nice to be of their main targets. In 1942, during the Second World War, the former County of Nice was occupied and administered by Italy until 1943. The area was returned to France following the war and in 1947, the areas of the county (Briga and Tenda) which had remained Italian after 1860 were ceded to France. Thereafter, one-fourth of the Nizzardo Italians living in that mountainous area moved to Piedmont and Liguria in Italy (mainly from Val di Roia and Tenda).Fact|date=June 2008

Today, after a sustained process of Francization conducted since 1861, the former county is predominantly French-speaking. Only along the coast around Menton and in the mountains around Tende are there still native Italian speakers.Fact|date=June 2008

Currently the area is part of the Alpes-Maritimes department of France.

Language

Augustus conquered the Nizzardo, populated by Ligurian people, and left a monument (Trophy of the Alps) with the names of the Ligurian tribes: these names are the first evidences of the "Italic" language spoken in the County of Nice. The Ligurians were fully Romanized in the following centuries and their Latin language became an Italic, Western Romance language during the Middle Ages.

Before the year 1000 the area of Nice was part of the Ligurian League, under the Republic of Genoa, and the population spoke the dialect common to Liguria.Fact|date=June 2008 The medieval writer Dante Alighieri wrote, in his Divine Comedy, that the river Var, near Nice, was the western limit of the Italian Liguria.

Around the twelfth century Nice came under the French House of Anjou, who favoured the immigratrion of peasants from Provence who brought their Occitan language.Fact|date=June 2008 In those years, the people of the mountainous areas of the upper Var valley started to lose their Ligurian linguistic characteristics and began to adopt Provençal influences. From 1388 to 1860 the County of Nice was under the Savoyard rule and remained connected to the Italian dialects and peninsula. In those centuries the local dialect of Nice, known as Niçard, was similar to Monegasque (of the Principality of Monaco) but with more Occitan influences. Most scholars today classify Niçard a dialect of Occitan and Monegasque of Ligurian.

Prior to when the Kingdom of Savoy ceded the County of Nice to France, "Nice was not French-speaking before the annexxation but underwent a shift to French in a short space of time...and is surprising that the local Italian dialect, the Nissart, disappeared quickly from the private domain". [ [http://books.google.com/books?id=2WyS7i9UxowC&dq=italian+speaking+population+in+nice&pg=PA91&ots=DEU9qd7QJS&sig=4Ykq5z6N_Vq3EHjBvnwgmIDcJBE&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26ned%3Dus%26q%3Ditalian%2Bspeaking%2Bpopulation%2Bin%2Bnice%26btnmeta%253Dsearch%253Dsearch%3DSearch%2Bthe%2BWeb&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=3&cad=legacy#PPA91,M1 Beyond Boundaries: Language and Identity in Contemporary Europe] ] She also wrote that one of the main reasons of the disappearance of the Italian language in the County was because "(m)any of the administrative class under Piedmont-Savoy ruler, the soldiers, jurists, civil servants and professionals who used Italian in their working lives, moved after annexxation to Piedmont. Their places and roles were taken by incomers from France". Immediately after 1861, the French government closed all the newspapers in Italian and more than 11,000 Nizzardo Italians moved to the Kingdom of Italy. The dimension of the "exodus" can be deducted by the fact that in the Savoy census of 1858, Nice had only 44,000 inhabitants. In 1881 the New York Times wrote that before the French annexation the Nizzards were quite as much Italians as the Genoese, and their dialect was, if anything, nearer the Tuscan than is the harsch dialect of Genoa. [ http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9800E5DE133CEE3ABC4151DFB566838A699FDE&oref=slogin New York Times, 1881 ]

In twenty years the Nizzardo Italians were reduced to a small minority and even Niçard was increasingly assimilated by Occitan, with many French words loanworded (Modern day linguists usually hold that Niçard is an Occitan dialect). [Bec, Pierre. "La Langue Occitane". pag 58]

Giuseppe Garibaldi defined his "Nizzardo" as an Italian dialect, albeit with very strong similarities to Occitan and French influences, and for this reason promoted the union of Nice to the Kingdom of Italy.

Even today some scholars (like the German Werner Forner, the French Jean-Philippe Dalbera and the Italian Giulia Petracco Sicardi) agree that the Niçard has some characteristics (phonetical, lexical and morphological) that are typical of the western Ligurian language. The French scholar Bernard Cerquiglini pinpoints in his "Les langues de France" the actual existence of a ligurian minority in Tende, Roquebrune and Menton, a remnant of a bigger medioeval "ligurian" area that included Nice and most of the coastal County of Nice.

Another reduction in the number of the Nizzardo Italians happened after WWII, when the defeated Italy was forced to surrender to France the small mountainous area of the County of Nice that had retained in 1860. From the "Val di Roia", Tenda and Briga one quarter of the local population moved to Italy in 1947.

In the century of nationalism between 1850 and 1950, the Nizzardo Italians were reduced from the 70% majority [Amicucci, Ermanno. "Nizza e l’Italia". pag 126] of the 125,000 living in the County of Nice at the time of the French annexation to the actual minority of nearly two thousand (in the area of Tende and Menton) today.

See also

* Italia irredenta
* Giuseppe Garibaldi
* Monegasque
* Mentonasque
* Ligurian language (Romance)

External links

* [http://www.irredentismo.it/Pagine%20web/nizzardo.htm Nice and Italian Irredentism (in Italian)]
* [http://www.lexilogos.com/france_carte_dialectes.htm Map of the Languages of France, with reference to the Niçard and Genoese (in French)]
* [http://www.liguri.net/portappennini/rnidaigura.htm#Brigaschi Magazine about Briga and Tenda (in Italian)]

Bibliography

* Amicucci, Ermanno. "Nizza e l’Italia". Ed. Mondadori. Milano, 1939.

* Barelli Hervé, Rocca Roger. "Histoire de l'identité niçoise". Serre. Nice, 1995. ISBN 2-84410-223-4

* Bec, Pierre. "La Langue Occitane". Presses Universitaires de France. Paris, 1963

* Gray, Ezio. "Le terre nostre ritornano... Malta, Corsica, Nizza". De Agostini Editoriale. Novara, 1943

* Holt, Edgar. "The Making of Italy 1815–1870," Atheneum. New York, 1971

* Stuart, J. Woolf. "Il risorgimento italiano". Einaudi. Torino, 1981

* Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Centre Histoire du droit. "Les Alpes Maritimes et la frontière 1860 à nos jours". Actes du colloque de Nice (1990). Ed. Serre. Nice,1992

References