Franco-Italian Agreement

The Franco-Italian Agreement (called often Mussolini-Laval accord) of 7 January 1935 was signed in Rome by the French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval and Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini.

After the victory in World War I it was agreed that Italy was not going to receive territories from the defeated German colonial empire (that was divided between France and Great Britain) but later would be rewarded some bordering areas from the British and French empires. This was felt by the Italians to be very little compensation for their sacrifices in the bloody war and was one of the reasons of the rise to power in Italy of Mussolini's fascism. The British ceded Oltre Giuba from Kenya to Italian Somalia in 1925, but the French delayed some years until the mid 1930s: they agreed only in 1935, under Foreign Minister Laval's leadership, to give only a small amount of territory in eastern Africa and a desert area in the French Sahara.

Pierre Laval had succeeded Louis Barthou as Foreign Minister after the latter's assassination in Marseilles on October 9, 1934, at the side of the Alexander I King of Yugoslavia. He borrowed from his predecessor the idea of a system of collective security intended to contain the threat of Hitler in Europe. On January 4, 1935, Pierre Laval went to Rome, capital of Fascist Italy, to meet Mussolini. It was the beginning of a diplomatic offensive intended to enclose Adolf Hitler's Germany in a network of alliances.

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