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FRENCH HISTORY

France, Italy or Switzerland – which country is Mont Blanc in?

Towering majestically in the Alps, the mountain of Mont Blanc is naturally completely indifferent to political disputes over borders - but that doesn't stop the three countries arguing over it.

France, Italy or Switzerland - which country is Mont Blanc in?
Is Mont Blanc in France, Italy or Switzerland? Photo by OLIVIER CHASSIGNOLE / AFP

At least 30 million years old, it’s fair to say that Mont Blanc definitely predates the existence of France, Italy and Switzerland, which means that as those countries were being created and drawn onto maps, they had to decide who got Europe’s highest mountain.

Asking which country Mont Blanc is in is a more complicated question than you might think.

The basic answer is that it’s on the French-Italian border, with the majority of the mountain’s bulk falling on the French side. However at least some of the mountain is in Italy and the Swiss canton of Valais also lays claim to some of the lower slopes.

France and Italy have been arguing about Mont Blanc (known as Monte Bianco in Italy) since the 18th century, with the Italians claiming that the border divides the summits of both Mont Blanc and neighbouring Dôme de Goûter equally between France and Italy, while the French insist that the border in fact bypasses both summits, placing the mountains in France.

In total around 75 hectares of land is disputed territory.  

Before that, France was arguing with the independent Duchy of Savoy, within which the mountain stood. Eventually Savoy ceased to be an independent state and its territories have been subsumed into the French départements of Savoie and Haute-Savoie, the Italian regions of Aosta and Piedmont and the Swiss canton of Geneva.

But it’s not just borders that move, the mountain also shifts a bit and in fact the climate crisis is accelerating that process as the Mont Blanc glacier melts, along with surrounding snowfalls, leading to changes is the shape of the mountain range.

The dispute largely involves slightly different looking maps in the different countries though, and it seems unlikely that either side is about to go to war.

Famously-neutral Switzerland is also unlikely to launch a war over this issue, but it is in dispute with Italy over the location of a nearby mountain lodge, which has recently shifted position due to melting snows and glaciers.

While this might sound like something that is only of interest to cartographers, the ski industry is a lucrative one to all three countries, and the mountain lodge dispute has been the subject of diplomatic discussion since 2018.

Signs at the Mont Blanc glacier show visitors how it is receding year by year. Photo by PHILIPPE DESMAZES / AFP

Increasing changes to the entire mountain range due to rising temperatures mean that these disputes are likely to become more common in the future.

For the moment, however, the dispute remains largely good-humoured – as seen in this Twitter exchange between the French and Swiss embassies during the Euros football tournament. 

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FRENCH HISTORY

French parliament condemns the ‘forgotten’ massacre of Paris

The French parliament's lower house on Thursday approved a resolution condemning as "bloody and murderous repression" the killing by Paris police of dozens protesters in 1961.

French parliament condemns the 'forgotten' massacre of Paris

Dozens of peaceful demonstrators died during a crackdown by Paris police on a protest by Algerians in 1961. The scale of the massacre was covered up for decades by French authorities before President Emmanuel Macron condemned it as “inexcusable” in 2021.

The massacre

The killings, which the French historian Emmanuel Blanchard called the most deadly repression in Western Europe since World War II, took place as Algeria was in the seventh and penultimate year of its fight for independence from colonial master France. At the time a bombing campaign targeting mainland France was carried out by pro-independence militants.

The peaceful demonstration on October 17th, 1961, of some 30,000 Algerians – mostly living in shanty towns around the French capital – was called by Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN), and was intended to protest at a curfew that only affected Algerians.

As they marched, around 10,000 police officers charged into the crowd, hurling some into the river. Witnesses said that police also opened fire on the demonstrators, throwing the bodies of those killed into the Seine.

“Many victims died under the blows of the police, dozens of others were thrown into the Seine and several died of suffocation after being thrown to the ground and covered by heaps of bodies,” according to the Immigration Museum in Paris, which has helped catalogue the event.

It later emerged that some police had been influenced by erroneous reports that their colleagues had been shot dead during the demonstration.

The man who gave the command was Maurice Papon, who despite having collaborated with the Nazis during World War II had risen to become head of the Paris police.

Papon was later convicted of war crimes for deporting 1,600 Jews to the death camps, but never stood trial over the Paris massacre.

Many Algerians were grabbed by police long before the protest began, rounded up as they got off the Metro. Some 12,000 were arrested and bused to internment camps, prepared in advance, where they were beaten or expelled to Algeria, with the lucky ones eventually allowed to go home.

Latest resolution

The bill approved on Thursday in the Assemblée nationale was put forward by Greens lawmaker Sabrina Sebaihi and ruling Renaissance party MP Julie Delpech, and was approved by 67 lawmakers, with 11 against.

The text of the resolution stressed the crackdown took place “under the authority of police préfet Maurice Papon” and also called for the official commemoration of the massacre.

The term “state crime” however does not appear in the text of the resolution, which was jointly drafted by Macron’s party and the Elysée Palace.

Sebaihi said the vote represented the “first step” towards the “recognition of this colonial crime, the recognition of this state crime.”

Acknowledgement

On the 60th anniversary of the killings in 2021, Macron acknowledged that several dozen protesters had been killed, “their bodies thrown into the River Seine.”

The precise number of victims has never been made clear and some activists fear several hundred could have been killed.

In 2012, then president François Hollande paid “tribute to the victims” of a “bloody crackdown” on the men and women demonstrating for “the right to independence”.

In 2019, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo unveiled a memorial artwork next to the Seine, featuring dozens of silhouettes to represent the unknown number of people who died that day.

“Let us spare a thought here today for these victims and their families, who have been hit hard by the spiral of violence”, Dominique Faure, the minister for local and regional authorities, said on Thursday.

However, Faure expressed reservations about establishing a special day to commemorate the massacre, pointing out that three dates already existed to “commemorate what happened during the Algerian war”.

“I think it is important to let history do the work before considering a new day of commemoration specifically for the victims of October 17, 1961.”

France has made several attempts over the years to heal the wounds with Algeria, but it refuses to “apologise or repent” for the 132 years of often brutal rule that ended in 1962.

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