The Franco-Italian armistice

On the evening of 24 June 1940, at the Villa Incisa, a country estate at Olgiata on the Via Cassia on the northern outskirts of Rome, Marshal Pietro Badoglio for Italy and General Charles Huntziger for France signed an armistice agreement between the two countries. It ended the war that Benito Mussolini had declared on France on 10 June, when the French army had already been shattered by the Germans, and which the Italians had barely waged for two weeks. Their only large offensive, launched in the Alps on 21 June, had stalled before the French forts after four days. The armistice was surprisingly mild: Italy kept only what it had managed to occupy – Menton and a dozen or so Alpine communes – and instead of Nice, Corsica and Tunisia, of which Fascist propaganda had spoken, it received demilitarised zones and an armistice commission in Turin. The two armistices, German and Italian, came into force simultaneously, at 12.35 a.m. on 25 June.

On the road to the armistice, war chronologies record three events under different dates: the French request to Italy for an armistice (20 June), the Italian offensive in the Alps (21 June) and the signing of the agreement (24 June).

A request through the Vatican

After Paul Reynaud resigned and Marshal Philippe Pétain formed a government on the evening of 16 June, the new government asked Germany that same night, through the Spanish ambassador, to state its terms for a ceasefire. At 12.30 p.m. on 17 June Pétain announced on the radio that “the fighting must stop”. That same day the foreign minister, Paul Baudouin, handed the apostolic nuncio, Valerio Valeri, a note asking the Holy See to transmit to the Italian government as quickly as possible the same request that had been sent to Berlin through the Spaniards, together with the French government’s “desire to seek together the bases of a lasting peace between the two countries”. The French turned to Italy not because they had been beaten by it, but because they knew that Germany would not allow them to make peace with one ally without the other.

The French request is often placed under 20 June. The documents show that the note to Rome was passed on as early as 17 June. 20 June, on the other hand, was the day on which the French delegation under Huntziger set off from Bordeaux to meet the Germans, and on which in Rome Mussolini ordered a general offensive in the Alps, so as to capture something – anything – that could be laid on the negotiating table before the war ended.

Munich: great demands

Adolf Hitler passed the news of the French request to Mussolini on the morning of 17 June and invited him to talks in Munich. For the Duce the news was disastrous: the war he had joined a week earlier, convinced that “a few thousand dead” would be enough to earn him a seat at the victors’ table, was ending before his soldiers had captured anything. On the train to Munich the Italian military men – the staff officer General Mario Roatta, Rear Admiral Raffaele de Courten and General Egisto Perino of the air force – drew up a list of demands. Galeazzo Ciano noted ironically that people around him proposed demanding from France the whole fleet, all the colonies, all the locomotives and the “Mona Lisa” as well.

The memorandum Mussolini presented in Munich on 18 June to Hitler, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Wilhelm Keitel was not much more modest. According to the Italian records, it provided for the demobilisation of the French army, the surrender of its weapons, the occupation of southern France as far as the Rhône with bridgeheads at Lyons, Valence and Avignon, the seizure of Corsica, Tunisia, the Algerian department of Constantine and French Somaliland, of bases at Algiers, Mers-el-Kébir and Casablanca, and the surrender of the fleet and the air force. Hitler received these ideas politely, but objected to the demand for the fleet, since the French would rather hand it over to the British, and made it clear that his own terms would be moderate so that Pétain’s government would be willing to accept them at all. He also promised that France would not obtain an armistice from Germany until it had concluded one with Italy as well. The talks made it plain that Italian claims would carry weight only if they were backed by some military success.

The order to attack

For the first ten days of the war almost nothing happened on the Alpine frontier. Army Group West, formally commanded by the heir to the throne, Umberto, Prince of Piedmont, and in fact by the army chief of staff, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, numbered about 300,000 men in 22 divisions, in General Pietro Pintor’s 1st Army in the south and General Alfredo Guzzoni’s 4th Army in the north. These troops, however, had been deployed for defence, at the mouths of the valleys and in the fortifications of the Alpine Wall, and on 7 June the army command had ordered them to adopt “an absolutely defensive attitude”. There was no plan for an offensive against France. Facing them was General René Olry’s French Army of the Alps, stripped of almost all its mobile units for the northern front: it numbered some 175,000–185,000 men, of whom about 85,000 stood on the frontier itself. It did, however, have well-prepared forts on the Alpine sector of the Maginot Line, strong mountain artillery and 86 platoons of scout-skiers (sections d’éclaireurs-skieurs) trained for high-mountain warfare.

After the fall of the Reynaud cabinet Mussolini ordered an offensive to be prepared within three days, to which Badoglio replied that merely switching the troops from defence to attack would take three weeks. On 17 and 18 June the units received alternating instructions to suspend hostilities and to keep preparing the offensive. On the evening of 19 June Rome ordered them to “make contact with the enemy everywhere”, and the main attack was to begin “as soon as possible, and no later than 23 June”.

On the afternoon of 20 June Mussolini received Badoglio and Graziani in Rome. Badoglio thought an offensive in the Alps pointless; Graziani, convinced that the Germans were already near Grenoble, favoured an attack along the whole front. According to accounts cited by historians, the Duce told Badoglio that he did not want to suffer the shame of the Germans taking Nice and then presenting it to him. That evening an order reached both armies: “Tomorrow, the 21st, beginning operations at 3 a.m., the 4th and 1st Armies are to attack with all their strength along the whole front. Objective: to penetrate as deeply as possible into French territory.” That same evening Mussolini called the offensive off, and then, on learning that the Germans, despite the approaching armistice, were advancing down the Rhône valley towards Chambéry and Grenoble, confirmed it again, shifting the main weight to the northern sector of the front. The commander of the 1st Army, Pintor, convinced his superiors that his troops could not be ready to attack within a few hours, so in the south only smaller forces were to go into action on the first day.

Four days in the Alps

At dawn on 21 June the Italian infantry moved forward across the passes from Mont Blanc to the sea. In many places it marched in close columns straight into the fire of the forts, because the officers had assured the men that French morale was broken. In the north the main thrust of the Alpine Corps through the Little St Bernard Pass was stopped by the Redoute Ruinée, the ruins of an old fort, in which seventy French soldiers with machine guns blocked the road for four days. The Italians took Séez but did not reach Bourg-Saint-Maurice, and the tankettes of the Trieste motorised division got stuck in minefields and wire entanglements. In the Arc valley the Cagliari division took Bramans and Lanslebourg and by the time of the armistice had come to within about five kilometres of Modane, but the forts defending the town remained untouched. Near Briançon, French 280 mm mortars emplaced at the foot of Fort de l’Infernet destroyed, with a few dozen rounds, six of the eight armoured turrets of the Italian fort on the summit of Mont Chaberton, which the French called “the battleship in the clouds”. On the passes the Italians were also harried by blizzards and frost, and soldiers without warm uniforms or mountain boots suffered frostbitten hands and feet in large numbers.

On the coast General Gastone Gambara’s XV Corps was to break through along the Riviera towards Nice. On 21 June an armoured train that came out of the tunnel beneath the Hanbury Gardens at La Mortola to shell the fortifications on Cap Martin was damaged by French counter-battery fire after half an hour and had to withdraw. The small outpost at Pont Saint-Louis, a blockhouse on the coast road right on the border, defended by nine chasseurs alpins under Second Lieutenant Charles Gros, held off attacks from 20 June until the end of the fighting. During the night of 22–23 June, under cover of fog, units of the Cosseria division slipped past the forts and entered the Garavan district of Menton, which the French had evacuated even before the declaration of war. There was fierce fighting in the town, and on 23 June the Italians took the Capuchin monastery on the hill. On 21 June Ciano noted that Mussolini would like to delay the signing of the armistice as long as possible in the hope that Gambara would reach Nice, and added doubtfully: “Will we make it in time?” They did not.

The balance sheet was humiliating for Italy. According to a tally drawn up on 18 July 1940, when many bodies still lay under the snow, the Italians lost 631 killed (642 according to other tallies), 2,631 wounded and 616 missing, most of whom were probably dead, and more than 2,000 soldiers were treated for frostbite. The French Army of the Alps lost, depending on the source, between 32 and 40 killed and about 150 taken prisoner in the fighting with the Italians. The French took more than 1,000 Italians prisoner. “Our troops have not taken a single step forward. Today, too, they have failed to get through and have halted before the first French strongpoint that put up resistance,” Ciano wrote on 21 June, describing Mussolini’s fury. A greater threat to the Army of the Alps came from the German columns advancing from Lyons, but these were held in front of Grenoble until the end of the fighting. On 24 June, as the armistice was being signed in Rome, General Olry was able to write in his report that the defensive battle in the Alps had been won.

Talks at the Villa Incisa

On the evening of 21 June the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri, sent Rome the terms that the Germans had presented to the French at Compiègne that day. They were milder than Mussolini had expected and did not provide for the surrender of the fleet. According to Ciano, the Duce decided that in the face of such terms he would put forward no territorial claims and would hold them back for the peace conference. That same evening he summoned Badoglio and Roatta to the Palazzo Venezia and announced that the Italian occupation zone would cover only the areas actually taken by the army, and that the occupation up to the Rhône, Corsica, Tunisia and the bases in North Africa were being dropped from the draft. Historians explain this change in different ways. Roatta himself attributed it to the Duce’s “chivalry”; others point to the humiliation of the failed first day of the offensive, to fear that overly harsh terms would push Pétain’s government into Hitler’s arms, or simply to embarrassment at reaching for great gains without a fight. Mussolini later spread the story that the Germans had forced him to give up his claims, although Hitler himself considered the Italian demands too modest.

On 22 June at Rethondes Huntziger and Keitel signed the Franco-German armistice. Its Article 23 provided that it would come into force only six hours after the Italian government notified the Germans that it had concluded an armistice with France. Huntziger, who at Rethondes had protested in vain against making the armistice dependent on Italy, is said to have remarked that Italy had declared war on France but had not won it. The government in Bordeaux feared that the Italians would demand more than the Germans. With Pétain’s consent, Admiral François Darlan instructed the fleet commanders to prepare strikes on the Italian coast in case the terms proved unacceptable.

At 3 p.m. on 23 June three German aircraft carrying the French delegation landed at a Rome airfield. It was made up of the same men who had dealt with the Germans: Huntziger; General Maurice Parisot, a friend of Badoglio in peacetime; General Jean Bergeret of the air force; Admiral Maurice Le Luc; Charles Rochat of the Foreign Ministry; and Léon Noël, the former ambassador in Warsaw. Italy was represented by Badoglio, Ciano, the chief of naval staff Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, the chief of air staff General Francesco Pricolo, and Roatta. The first session was held that same day at 7.30 p.m. at the Villa Incisa and lasted a mere twenty-five minutes. Roatta read out the Italian terms, Huntziger asked for an adjournment to consult his government, and Ciano postponed the talks until the next day. During the night Hitler let Mussolini know that he considered the Italian terms too lenient and proposed linking the German and Italian occupation zones, but Roatta persuaded the Duce that it was too late for changes.

On 24 June the talks proceeded in an atmosphere that French participants and historians alike described as businesslike, even courteous. Badoglio accepted a number of French drafting amendments. A few minutes before the signing, Huntziger asked for the deletion of an article obliging France to hand over to Italy the Italian political émigrés on its territory, such as the socialist Pietro Nenni. Badoglio telephoned Mussolini, who agreed. In the German armistice such a clause, Article 19, remained. Having received approval from Bordeaux, Huntziger and Badoglio signed the agreement on the evening of 24 June. The text of the convention gives the time as 7.15 p.m.; some Italian and French studies give 7.35 p.m. Rome time, that is, 6.35 p.m. French time. Badoglio then assured Huntziger that as a soldier he sincerely wished France a revival. Rome notified Berlin, and at 12.35 a.m. French time on 25 June (1.35 a.m. Italian time) silence fell on every French front.

The terms

The convention had 26 articles. Italian troops were to remain on the positions they had reached when the armistice came into force. This created an Italian occupation zone of about 832 km² with just under 28,500 inhabitants, 21,700 of them in Menton. It took in fragments of four departments: Savoie (including Séez, Bramans, Lanslebourg and Termignon), Hautes-Alpes (Montgenèvre, Névache), Basses-Alpes and Alpes-Maritimes (Menton, Fontan and parts of several mountain communes). On the French side a demilitarised belt was created, 50 km wide in a straight line from the border or from the armistice line, which in practice did away with the Alpine fortification line. Similar demilitarised zones were set up in Tunisia and Algeria along the border with Italian Libya, and in French Somaliland, where the Italians obtained the right to use the port of Djibouti and the French section of the railway to Addis Ababa. The naval bases at Toulon, Bizerte, Ajaccio and Oran were to be demilitarised within fifteen days and remain so until the end of the war between Italy and Britain. This clause was demanded at the last moment by Admiral Cavagnari.

French warships were to be assembled in designated ports and disarmed under Italian and German control, and the Italian government declared that it had no intention of using them during the war or of claiming them when peace was made. The French army was to be demobilised and the air force grounded, and the Italians could demand the weapons of the units that had fought against Italy. France was not allowed to hand over equipment to the British Empire. All Italian prisoners were to be released at once. The convention said nothing about French prisoners: some 150 soldiers captured in the Alps were sent to the Fonte d’Amore camp near Sulmona. Implementation of the armistice was to be supervised by the Italian Armistice Commission with France (Commissione Italiana d’Armistizio con la Francia, CIAF), based in Turin, with a French delegation attached to it.

Mussolini made no secret of his disappointment. It was, as he put it, “an armistice more political than military after only fifteen days of war, but it gives us a good document in our hands”. Propaganda spoke of a splendid victory, but many Italians, Fascists among them, were disappointed that Nice and Tunisia were missing from the armistice terms. Ciano judged that the armistice had come just in time to save appearances.

Place in the war

The armistice of the Villa Incisa closed the French campaign and the brief Italo-French war. France, though beaten by Germany, had not been beaten by Italy, and both sides knew it. For Mussolini, who on 10 June had promised the nation spoils and on 26 June had a programme of future claims announced – from Nice, Corsica and Tunisia to Malta and Cyprus – the outcome was the first open proof that his “parallel war” was not backed by the strength of his army. On 1 July the Duce visited the battlefield at Menton, and the town was de facto annexed to Italy: Italian administration and schools were introduced there. For two years the commission in Turin oversaw the disarmament of the French south and of the bases in North Africa.

The most important consequences of the armistice, however, lay beyond the Alps. The fleet clauses contained in both armistices did not convince the British, who on 3 July 1940 attacked French warships at Mers-el-Kébir. The demilitarised bases at Bizerte and Toulon and the almost untouched fleet remained in the hands of the Vichy government, while Italy, which had not even demanded the right to use the ports of Tunisia, had to supply its troops in Libya across a sea on which it was soon losing to the Royal Navy. In the autumn of 1940 Mussolini, looking for the victory he had not found in the Alps, attacked Greece and suffered a defeat there, after which Badoglio resigned at the turn of November and December. Huntziger became war minister in the Vichy government and was killed in an air crash in November 1941. The Italian occupation in France expanded only in November 1942 when, after the Allied landings in North Africa, the Germans and Italians occupied the unoccupied zone (Operation Anton), and Italian troops entered Nice, Corsica and the area east of the Rhône. The armistice of 24 June 1940 ceased to apply in September 1943, when Italy itself capitulated to the Allies – and Badoglio, who had signed it at the Villa Incisa, was by then prime minister and concluding an armistice with the Americans and the British.