From the NS archive: The Pact of Rome
12 January 1935: Is this agreement a guarantee of peace, or yet “another pious aspiration”?
On 7 January 1935, the Franco-Italian Agreements were signed in Rome by the French foreign minister Pierre Laval and the Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini. The diplomatic offensive intended to contain Hitler’s Germany by a network of alliances, namely by using colonial territories – including Eritrea, Tunisia and Ethiopia – as pawns in European negotiations. In this unsigned piece, a New Statesman correspondent described the pact as “little more than another pious aspiration”. Most importantly, it left Mussolini with “a tolerably good bag of gains” – concessions for which the French hoped for Italian support against German aggression. This did not occur.