Franco-Italian Agreement of 1935

• 1. Introduction

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  The Franco-Italian Agreements, often called the Mussolini-Laval Accord, were signed in Rome on the 7th of January 1935. Two men put their names to the pages: French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval and Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini.

  On paper, France was giving away stretches of African territory and a patch of desert. In return, it hoped to win a partner against a rising threat in Europe. Why would a victorious power pay Italy in colonial land? What did Italy feel it was owed after the First World War? And why would a treaty approved by two parliaments still be described by a later international court as never completed?

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• 2. A Victory Without Spoils

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  After the First World War, Italy was told it would receive none of the lands taken from the defeated German colonial empire. Those territories were to be split among France, Japan and the British Empire. Italy was promised only some bordering areas from British and French colonial possessions.

  Italians judged this to be very little for the sacrifices of a bloody war. The source names that resentment as one of the reasons Mussolini's fascist regime rose to power in Italy.

  In 1924, Britain paid its share by ceding Oltregiuba, today called Jubaland, from Kenya to Italian Somalia. France was slower. It delayed its contribution for years, and in the end gave only a small amount of territory in eastern Africa plus a desert area in the French Sahara.

  The French minister who finally settled that debt had inherited his post only months earlier.

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• 3. Laval Inherits a Plan

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  On the 9th of October 1934, in Marseille, French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou was assassinated. King Alexander I of Yugoslavia died in the same attack. Pierre Laval took over Barthou's office.

  Laval also took over Barthou's idea: a system of collective security meant to contain the threat of Hitler in Europe. On the 4th of January 1935, he travelled to Rome to meet Mussolini face to face.

  That visit was the start of what the source calls a diplomatic offensive. Its aim was to hem in Nazi Germany with a network of alliances, and Italy was to be one link in that chain.

  The price of that link would be paid in Africa.

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• 4. The Price in Africa

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  In French Somaliland, the colony now known as Djibouti, Laval proposed that disputed areas be defined as part of Italian Eritrea. The final text handed over a small territory south of the Eritrean place called Rahayta.

  In French Tunisia, the proposal redefined the official status of the Italians living there.

  The most consequential term concerned Abyssinia. During the Abyssinia Crisis, the French government gave Italy a mainly free hand to occupy it.

  Finally, the village of Aozou and the surrounding Aouzou Strip were to move from French Chad to Italian Libya.

  Of all these items, the strip of desert in Chad would prove to have the longest afterlife.

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• 5. A Deal Left Unfinished

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  Italian support against German aggression was what France hoped to buy with these concessions. According to the source, that support did not occur.

  On the 26th of March 1935, a law of the French Parliament confirmed the agreements. Both the French and the Italian Parliaments ratified the agreement. Yet the instruments of ratification were never exchanged. For that reason, the International Court of Justice later named the agreement "Non-ratified".

  The Aouzou Strip question outlived the treaty itself. It carried implications in World War II and in the later Toyota War between Libya and Chad.

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