Philippe Berthelot and the Rome Agreements of January 1935

Abstract

In 1970 Esmonde Robertson rightly took Geoffrey Warner to task for having failed, in his biography of Pierre Laval, to outline the background to the Rome Agreements of January 1935 between France and Italy which preceded the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. Basing his argument upon published French and Italian sources, Robertson showed that the statement of French disinterest in Ethiopia made to Mussolini by Laval in 1935 had antecedents which stretched back as far as 1932. In a more recent work Robertson has added to the picture of Franco-Italian relations in the early 1930s from unpublished sources, perhaps most notably in demonstrating that as early as July 1931 Pierre Laval raised the matter of an Italian occupation of Ethiopia in a favourable sense with the then Italian foreign minister, Count Dino Grandi. Robertson's lead in establishing the importance of these developments has been followed by Lowe and Marzari in their study of Italian foreign policy in the period 1870–1940, although another scholar in a recent survey of Mussolini's aspirations makes no mention of them at all.