France and Italy together account for close to half the Union's budget. In 2021 they signed a treaty that nothing obliges them to leave dormant. And between Genoa and Marseille they have a city, founded by Greeks, that spent more centuries Italian than French.
There is a lazy way of talking about the Franco-Italian pairing: say it could replace the Franco-German one, and stop there. That is not what this file does.
What the argument actually claims
Henri de Grossouvre advances three distinct propositions, and they need to be kept apart.
The first is an observation about Germany. Since reunification, he writes, the Franco-German reflex has weakened — not out of ill will, but because Berlin has pursued its own interests. He documented this elsewhere, in his 2024 analysis for Revue Conflits, where he describes a Germany that outsourced its energy to Russia, its security to the United States and part of its growth to China.
The second is an institutional proposal. The Quirinal Treaty, signed in 2021, occupies for the Franco-Italian pairing the place the Élysée Treaty occupies for the Franco-German one. It exists, it is in force, and it is barely used. It is an available resource, not a hypothesis.
The third is an argument about capabilities. An axis is measured not by its declarations but by what it lets two countries do together: Mediterranean routes, defence industry, energy, digital infrastructure, capital. France and Italy jointly control close to half the Union’s budget. That is executive weight, not symbolism.
Why Nice
The choice of Nice is not decorative. Founded by the Greeks in the third century BC, then Roman, then Piedmontese, the city remained culturally Italian for several centuries before its annexation to France in 1860. It is, strictly speaking, a point of contact — and the author consistently looks for points of contact rather than centres.
The op-ed rests on two local dynamics: the role of Éric Ciotti in strengthening ties with Liguria, and the leadership of the Mediterranean University Centre by Professor Bernard Asso. These belong to the author’s argument; this site reports them, it does not endorse them.
An argument older than its moment
What gives this file its solidity is chronological. In November 2021, in an interview with the Club Italie-France, Henri de Grossouvre was already arguing that France and Italy share more common interests in financial matters than either does with Germany and the northern countries. He named space and transport as priority fields for cooperation, and stated that Rome remains the spiritual and cultural heart of Europe.
Five years before the op-ed. This is therefore not a position adopted in the light of events: it is a position built, and then published once it had become legible.
Italy was already in the vanguard
One detail often goes unnoticed, and it is worth pointing out. When Henri de Grossouvre
describes, in late 2019 in the Revue Politique et Parlementaire, the political vanguard
that could carry European strategic autonomy, he gives the list: France, Germany,
Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg.
Italy appears there twelve years after the Forum Carolus’s first collective work, where
the proposed vanguard brought together France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hungary and
Austria — without it. Between the two, something changed in his analysis: Italian
industrial and budgetary weight becomes an asset rather than a risk.
What the axis would have to do
The op-ed avoids a wish list. It names five fields on which a Paris-Rome axis would be
measured.
Mediterranean routes first, because an axis that does not control its supply lines is
only a declaration. Then the defence industry, where both countries have bases capable
of joint programmes. Energy, where interconnections and gas terminals already trace a
Franco-Italian geography few people look at. Digital infrastructure, which connects
directly to the sovereignty-technologies file. And capital, where the author argued as
early as 2021 that the two countries share more common interests with each other than
either does with Germany and the northern countries.
None of those five fields is symbolic. That is characteristic of his method: an axis is
judged by what it lets you do, not by what it lets you celebrate.
The underlying political model
One clarification is needed, because it is often lost. The framework claimed here is not federal: it is a Europe of nations in the Gaullist tradition, built on concrete cooperation between states rather than on a transfer of sovereignty. That was already the explicit framework of Paris, Berlin, Moscow in 2002. The axis changes direction; the method does not.