The nationalisation of the Italian masses from 1861 went through the worshiping of Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini and Victor-Emmanuel II, who were leading political actors of the Italian political scene from the 1848 revolution. A later reconstruction of their actions, carried out by the new State, showed them having fought jointly to lead to the unity of the peninsula under the authority of the House of Savoy.This syncretic vision of the past which removed the deep ideological divides between those protagonists, aims to defuse the strong rate of political conflictwhich the new State had to face by trying to create a consensus around the political form which had prevailed once the unitarian process achieved.From the crushing of the Roman republic by the troops of General Oudinot in 1849 to the breach of Porta Pia in 1870, this unitarian process always had to reckon with France. If the specifically political and diplomatic aspects of the role played by France in Italy are well-known, the different perceptions of the peninsula going around in the French political field have not been studied a lot until now. On the basis of the analysis of texts of all kinds (brochures, biographies, songs, poems, essays, historical accounts etc.) and of print titles published from 1948 onwards and until 1914, that is the period when all the European states tried to integrate their masses into their political game, this work intends to analyse what conflicting representations go around in France of the ones that Italy ends up considering as her “ founding fathers”. This study allows us to see how the Italian national position was comprehended in France and what distortion it suffers viewed in a political context different from its original place of elaboration. It permits to unveil the different political cultures confronting to impose a prevailing line in the public space and tries to demonstrate how the position on the national construction of the Italian ‘other', if it has evolved, has always been a position on the French political identity, in terms of both domestic and foreign matters. That way, it aims at proving that the look on others has thus always been a pretext to work out a position on oneself
