Savoy gave Italy its royal family and then became part of France
Italy's kings came from the House of Savoy, an Alpine dynasty named after a region that now sits in France. The swap happened in 1860: to win French help in unifying Italy, Savoy's rulers handed their ancestral homeland to Napoleon III while keeping Piedmont. Their capital had long since moved to Turin.
Savoy occupies the Western Alps between Lake Geneva and the Dauphiné, bordering the Aosta Valley to the east. The Romans subdued its Gallic inhabitants, the Allobroges, in 121 BC. Its name goes back to Late Latin Sapaudia, a fir-forest country that originally lay further north, and probably ultimately to a Gaulish word for fir. After passing through Francia, Middle Francia and the Kingdom of Burgundy, the land became the power base of the House of Savoy, whose county grew steadily from 1003 and gained Nice in 1388.
In 1416 Emperor Sigismund raised the county to a duchy under Amadeus VIII. Poor, rural and thinly urbanised, it mattered for geography: straddling the Alps, it offered France a gateway to Italy and Spain a buffer. The dukes moved their capital from Chambéry to Turin in 1563, and in the 18th century their state became first the Kingdom of Sicily and then, from 1720, the Kingdom of Sardinia, still ruled from Turin.
French revolutionary troops occupied Savoy from 1792 to 1815, after which it returned to Sardinia as a buffer against France. A French force of 1,500 tried to seize Chambéry in April 1848 and was driven off by local people. The decisive move came in secret on 21 July 1858, when Cavour promised Napoleon III both Nice and Savoy in return for help against Austria. The Treaty of Turin was signed on 24 March 1860, and a plebiscite followed; to make Switzerland less tempting to the northern districts, France allowed a duty-free zone with Geneva.
France later broke the deal's terms, ending Savoy's promised neutrality and the free-trade zone in 1919, and an international court condemned it in 1932. By the 1960 centenary the word annexation had turned sour, so officials called it an incorporation, citing 130,889 yes votes out of 135,449. Today Savoy forms the Savoie and Haute-Savoie departments.
Source: Savoy
