Italian Language in Exile in France in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

International audienceDuring the Risorgimento, Italian politic exiles contributed to the dissemination of Italian culture and literature abroad by their pedagogical, journalistic, and editorial activity. This paper examines the exiles’ strategies to maintain and spread the Italian language (italofonia), especially by editing in France reviews, books, and teaching methods to learn Italian, in order to support the formation of Italian identity and of the Italian State. While Revolutionary exiles (Jacobins), the first generation of patriots, opened the edition market to didactic books to learn Italian and to Italian classics series edited by French publishing houses, the second generation of Italian exile faced the problem of reconciling the Italian written language with the spoken language, promoting a common language and modern Italian literature. This new generation of “committed critics” published important bilingual or Italian reviews in Paris and modern dictionaries to replace the linguistic purism of the Accademia della Crusca; they incremented the “desire for Italy” of the French Romantic generation and prepared the Franco-Italian alliance in the Second Italian War of Independence