E manuele S ica . Mussolini’s Army in the French Riviera

The Italian occupation of Yugoslavia during the Second World War featured mass executions, burned villages, and lethal concentration camps. In her fine new book Mussolini’s Army in the French Riviera, Emanuele Sica examines why the Italian occupation of France was so different. Despite facing partisan sabotage and attacks, the Italian military rarely engaged in collective punishment or executions in southeastern France. The Italians arrested and interned suspected partisans, and sometimes infuriated the local population. But according to Sica, when “confronted with increasing Resistance activity in the region, Italian military authorities never really hardened their repression” (143). To explain the relatively pacific nature of the occupation, Sica highlights “the cultural and ethnic proximity between occupiers and occupied” (8). Not only did France and Italy share aspects of Latin culture, but, Sica notes, more than 25 percent of the population in departments bordering Italy were ethnically Italian. The book is especially strong in showing how these Italians shaped the occupation. Italian Fascists clamored for the annexation of Savoy, Nice, and Corsica. Antifascists engaged in sabotage. However, Sica argues that on the whole, the majority of local Italians served as conciliatory intermediaries between Italian authorities and the local population—a starkly different relationship from that between occupier and occupied in Yugoslavia, where many Italians viewed Slavs as “feral” and “beasts.”

Ancient history · Annexation · Archaeology · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Geography · Political science · Politics · Population · Riviera · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies