Franco-Italian Agreement

The French-Italian Agreement ( Laval-Mussolini Pact ) was signed on January 7, 1935 in Rome by the French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval and the Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini . It consisted of several protocols, some of which were secret, which concerned numerous areas of mutual political and economic relations. Its importance consisted on the one hand in the opening of the possibility of a Franco-Italian alliance to curb German expansion efforts in the wake of the German-Italian alienation after the Dollfuss Putsch and the competitive relationship between Mussolini and Hitler . On the other hand, it served to prepare for the Italian war against Ethiopia . For this purpose, Italy waived claims in Tunisia , while France Italy u. a. provided passive assistance to the Italian colonization of Ethiopia through concessions in French Somaliland .

Italy's army actually attacked Ethiopia on October 3, 1935 and was able to overthrow and annex the country within a few months. The agreement, however, had no consequences with regard to the planned containment of Germany , as the British government did not ally with France against Germany (→ German-British naval agreement ) and Mussolini entered into an alliance with Germany in 1936 (→ Berlin-Rome axis ).

See also

• Stresa front
• Hoare Laval Pact
• Eritrean-Djiboutian border conflict

literature

• G. Bruce Strang: Imperial Dreams: The Mussolini-Laval Accords of January 1935. In: The Historical Journal. Vol. 44, No. 3, September 2001, ISSN  0018-246X , pp. 799-809, doi: 10.1017 / S0018246X01002011 .
• Donald C. Watt : The secret Laval-Mussolini agreement of 1935 on Ethiopia. In: The Middle East Journal. Vol. 15, No. 1, 1961, ISSN  0026-3141 , pp. 69-78, JSTOR 4323317 .