Borderline on Mont Blanc
The exact course of the border on Mont Blanc between the neighboring states of France and Italy has not yet been clarified. The course of the border depends on whether the summit of Mont Blanc ( 4810 m ), as claimed by France, lies entirely on French territory, or, according to the Italian perspective, the border runs exactly over the summit. In the second case, Italy could designate Mont Blanc as the highest point of its national territory , otherwise Mont Blanc de Courmayeur ( 4748 m slm ) , located 500 meters southeast, would be a kind of almost border summit, namely the highest mountain in Italy, but without its summit, which in turn is entirely in France.
At the time of the Kingdom of Sardinia
The border question did not arise until the coalition wars. Since the Middle Ages , the French Savoy and the Aosta Valley belonged to the Duchy of Savoy ( Kingdom of Sardinia from 1720 ) , which also comprised large parts of Piedmont, and there was no international border.
With the Treaty of Paris of 1796 , Savoy was taken over by the Sardinian King Viktor Amadeus III. ceded to France and Mont Blanc became a border area. In the First Peace of Paris in 1814, after Napoleon Bonaparte went into his first exile in Elba , Savoy was reassigned to Sardinia. On Sardinian maps from 1823 and 1854, the internal border between the Duchies of Aosta and Savoy runs exactly over the summit of Mont Blanc.
After the Italian unification
In the Treaty of Turin of 1860, the Duchy of Savoy, together with the County of Nice , was ceded by Sardinia to France. In several additional protocols, reference was made to the previously mapped border course, the border running over the summit of Mont Blanc. For the first time in 1865, a border was shown on a French general staff map, which ascribed the entire summit of Mont Blanc to France. This borderline was later adopted by the civil French institute geographique national .
After the Second World War
On September 21, 1946, the prefect of the Haute-Savoie department regulated the disputed border course between the French communes of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains , Les Houches and Chamonix . In his order it is clear that he assumes that the entire summit is French territory. France sees the approximately 15 hectare , fully glaciated disputed area as an exclave of the municipality of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, while the rest of the mountain is included in the municipality of Chamonix.
After the Second World War , at the Paris Peace Conference in 1946, the course of the national borders at four locations between France and Italy was corrected in favor of the victorious power of France with regard to Mont Blanc. According to this, the Treaty of Turin of 1860 applies both in France and in Italy with its cartographically drawn border over the secondary summit of Mont Blanc de Courmayeur. The main summit is therefore entirely on French territory.
On French maps the border line is shown according to the Treaty of Turin and the Peace Conference of 1946 (as shown on the map of 1865), while on Italian maps from the Military Geographic Institute the border runs over the highest point of Mont Blanc.
See also
literature
- Laura Aliprandi and Giorgio Aliprandi: La frontière italo-française du mont Blanc: deux solutions pour le mêmeproblemème. Valdotaine, Aosta 1988.
- Edoardo Girola: È italiana a metà la vetta del Bianco. In: Corriere della Sera , February 27, 1996. Text online
- Henri Onde: Le Mont-Blanc: limite administrative et frontière politique de l'époque du cadastre sarde à nos jours. In: Cahiers de Savoie , 1947, pp. 32-37.
- Dario Rivolta: L'eclatante caso del Monte Bianco. In: Corriere della Sera, January 2, 2006. ( PDF )
- Joseph Vallot : Le Capitaine Mieulet et la carte du Mont-Blanc. In: La Montagne , 1905.
- NN: Le grandi mappe di montagna. Quanto fascino in quei contorni. In: Repubblica , January 31, 2005. [1]
Individual evidence
- ^ Contract text in French
- ↑ Text of the contract for Italy ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 45 ° 49 ′ 57 ″ N , 6 ° 51 ′ 51.5 ″ E