Annexation To France
The County was annexed to France in 1860, during the Italian Wars of Independence. By an 1858 secret agreement concluded at Plombières between Napoleon III of France and Sardinian prime minister Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, France agreed to support Piedmont in a war against Austria in order to wrest the provinces of Lombardy and Venetia from Austrian rule. In exchange for French military assistance, Piedmont was to cede Nice and Savoy to France. The annexation was temporarily put into doubt after the Italian war of 1859, during which Napoleon III concluded a separate peace with Austria before Venetia could be captured. In March 1860, however, as Piedmont was in the process of annexing Parma, Modena, and the Marches, Napoleon III agreed to sanction Piedmont's Italian acquisitions in exchange for Nice and Savoy. France annexed the provinces by the provisions of the Treaty of Turin, signed on 24 March 1860. The treaty was followed by plebiscites in Nice on 15 and 16 April and in Savoy on 22 and 23 April by which the vast majority of the inhabitants of the two territories voted to approve the treaty and join France. France took formal possession of Nice and Savoy on 12 June 1860.
Nevertheless, the Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was born in Nice, strongly opposed the cession of his home city to France, arguing that the County of Nice was essentially Italian and should not be sold as a "ransom" to French expansionism.
Though not among the most prized territories coveted by Italian nationalists after 1860, some Italian nationalists considered the County of Nice as part of "Italia irredenta," Italy's "unredeemed territories." During World War II, when Italy occupied parts of southwestern France, Nice was included administratively in the Kingdom of Italy.
As the County was too small to form its own département, the government added it to the arrondissement of Grasse, detached from the neighboring Var department, to create the Alpes-Maritimes department. Since 1860 the County has been largely coterminous with the Arrondissement of Nice, one of two arrondissements of the Alpes-Maritimes, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Nevertheless the term County of Nice is still used today to identify the territory as a distinct cultural and historical region, particularly to distinguish it from neighboring Provence.
The historical language used by inhabitants of the County of Nice was Niçard, though it has been almost entirely supplanted by French since 1860.
Population amounted to 506,694 inhabitants in 1999.
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