Italian occupation of France

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italian occupation of France ran from 1940 to 1943. It covered part of the south-east, together with Monaco, and it sat alongside the German occupation rather than inside it. The German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, took his grievance about it straight to Mussolini. In his words, "Italian military circles... lack a proper understanding of the Jewish question." That complaint raises a puzzle. Why would an occupying army allied with Germany become a shelter for people the Nazis wanted? The answer sits inside a larger story. Where did Italian authority really begin and end on the map? What did Rome hope to keep for good once the war was won? And what did a submarine base far from the Mediterranean have to do with any of it?

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• 2. Two Zones

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  On the 10th of June 1940, Italy declared war on France and Britain. Ten days later, the Italian army invaded. The fighting ended quickly, and on the 24th of June 1940 Italy and France signed the Franco-Italian Armistice, which set out an Italian zone of occupation. That signing came two days after the cessation of hostilities between France and Germany, following the Fall of France.

  The first Italian zone was small. It measured 832 square kilometres and held 28,500 inhabitants. Its largest town was Menton, and Italy treated the whole area as de facto annexed. Around it lay a demilitarized strip stretching 50 km from the former border with the Italian Alpine Wall. The main city inside that strip was Nice.

  November 1942 redrew the map. Germany launched Case Anton, its occupation of Vichy France, and the Royal Italian Army, the Regio Esercito, widened its own zone at the same moment. Italian forces took Toulon and all of Provence as far as the river Rhône. They also took the island of Corsica. Yet the tidy borders on paper concealed a messier reality, one that a collection of old letters would later help expose.

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• 3. Drawing the Line

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  A postal historian named Trapnell published a study in 2014 that reopened a basic question about the occupation. Which parts of south-eastern France did the Italians truly hold? Earlier accounts left the answer disputed.

  The study turned to mail that the occupying power had censored. Those censorship marks revealed who controlled which places. According to the findings, the Italians held the eastern part of the region, up to a line joining Toulon, Gap, Grenoble, Chambéry, Annecy and Geneva. West of that line, Italian-held places were few or transitory. Behind the line, in the places that were securely Italian, stood a sizeable army.

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• 4. The Garrison

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  By November 1942, four infantry divisions of the Italian army were stationed in southern France. They numbered 136,000 soldiers and 6,000 officers. Corsica received its own force of 66,000 soldiers and 3,000 officers.

  The local reaction was quiet. Virtually no guerrilla war was waged against the Italians in France until the summer of 1943. Part of the reason lay with the Vichy regime, which governed the rest of southern France. Vichy was friendly toward Italy. It pursued concessions from Rome of a kind that Germany would never have granted within its own zone.

  Italy's ambitions for the land beneath those boots went well beyond a mere garrison.

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• 5. Plans for Annexation

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  In 1940, the Italian Armistice Commission with France, known by its Italian initials CIAF, produced two detailed plans for the occupied territories. Plan A called for Italian military occupation all the way to the river Rhône. France would keep its territorial integrity under that plan, apart from Corsica and Nizza, the Italian name for Nice.

  Plan B was far bolder. Its author was senator Francesco Salata, who directed a section of the ISPI devoted to Italian territorial claims. He proposed annexing the Alpes Maritimes, including the Principality of Monaco, along with parts of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Hautes Alpes and Savoie. The new territory would form an Italian region called Alpi Occidentales in spirit and Alpi Occidentali in name, with the town of Briançon, called Brianzone in Italian, as its provincial capital.

  Behind such schemes stood Italian irredentists, who wanted territory with Italian ties brought into Italy. Local groups such as the Nizzardo Italians and the Corsican Italians shared the cause. Menton had been annexed in 1940, and Nice and Corsica were meant to follow. That never happened, because Italy signed its armistice with the Allies in September 1943.

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• 6. Refuge

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  Angelo Donati, an Italian Jewish banker, played an important role in persuading Italian civil and military authorities to protect Jews from French persecution. His efforts mattered because of how many people were seeking safety. Many thousands of Jews moved into the Italian zone to escape Nazi persecution in Vichy France. After November 1942, nearly 80 percent of the 300,000 French Jews still in the country took refuge there. Robert O. Paxton's book Vichy France, Old Guard, New Order describes the Italian zone as exactly this kind of refuge.

  The Italian authorities acted on that protection. In January 1943, they refused to cooperate with the Nazis in rounding up Jews living in the zone. In March, they stopped the Nazis from deporting Jews from their territory.

  The protection ended abruptly. After the Italians signed the armistice with the Allies, German troops invaded the former Italian zone on the 8th of September 1943 and began brutal raids. Alois Brunner, the SS official for Jewish affairs, was put in charge of units formed to hunt for Jews. Within five months, 5,000 Jews had been caught and deported. German Wehrmacht forces held the abandoned areas until the Liberation, which arrived with Operation Dragoon in 1944.

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• 7. Submarines at Bordeaux

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  In August 1940, the Italian Royal Navy, the Regia Marina, established a submarine base at Bordeaux. The city lay outside Italian-occupied France, on the Atlantic coast. The base was known as BETASOM, short for Bordeaux Sommergibile.

  Thirty-two Italian submarines took part in the Battle of the Atlantic while operating from it. They sank 109 Allied merchant ships, totalling 593,864 tons, and 18 warships totalling 20,000 tons. Eleven of the submarines were lost. Those figures run up to September 1943, the same month that Italy's armistice reshaped the whole southern occupation.

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• 8. On the Screen

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  The 1961 French film Léon Morin, Priest shows Alpini and Bersaglieri occupying a French Alpine town. Those were the Italian army's mountain troops and its light infantry. The film also refers to the Italians fighting the Germans in that town after the Italian armistice with the Allies.

  The director, Jean-Pierre Melville, belonged to the Resistance himself. He once called Beatrix Beck's autobiographical novel "the most accurate picture I have read of life under the Occupation." That praise came from a man who had lived the period rather than imagined it.

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