[LINK] "La Savoie : entre mondialisation et repli tribal"

[rfmcdonald]

Jean-Marc Seigneur's extended essay of the same name (French-language) takes a look Savoy, once heartland of the House of Savoy and possessed of its own dialects of the Franco-Provençal language, since 1860 a fully integrated part of France that suffers from the standard marginalization of peripheral regions, in this case a mountainous one. Seigneur makes a convincing case that Savoy can best remain itself while modernizing as an autonomous part of the French state separated from the region of Rhône-Alpes, not as an independent state doomed to isolation nor as a neglected outlying periphery.