Rivoluzionari di frontiera: stranieri e patrioti a Nizza (1792-1794)

Most recent studies on the Italian exile community during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era have clearly expressed the need to overcome periodizations and evaluations still influenced by implicit political and national paradigms. In fact, reconstructions of political dynamics in their concrete development and the qualitative attention to biographies push to overcome the “hindsight” of Nation-State centred visions, to put into focus the complex and non-linear development of the parameters of political contemporaneity. The county of Nice between 1792 and 1794 represents an interesting case study to deepen the discourse on the development of revolutionary practices. Although recognized as one of the centres of Italian revolutionary exile (Rao, 1991; Addante, 2024), Nice experienced a considerable migratory flow even before the exodus of Italian patriots in 1794, since its occupation by French troops in October-November 1792. The article aims to overturn the judgment on Italian expatriation in France as a phenomenon exclusively tied to the history of Italian Risorgimento, and to interrogate the experience of national borders in order to understand the revolutionary phenomenon in its transnational dimension. Through the documents of the local institutions and of the Jacobin society of Nice, I will outline the experience of a revolutionary cosmopolitanism worthy of further investigation.