the Italian Liguria. Around the 12th century, Nice came under the control of the French Capetian House of Anjou, who favored the immigration of peasants from Provence that brought with them their Occitan language. From 1388 to 1860, the County of Nice came under Savoyard rule and remained connected to the Italian dialects and peninsula. In the fantastic linguistics and historical inventions of the Italian fascists, in this era, the people of the mountainous areas of the upper Var Valley started to lose their former Ligurian linguistic characteristics and began to adopt Provençal influences. They believe that in those centuries the local Niçard dialect became distinct from the Monégasque of the Principality of Monaco. Traditionally, Italian linguists maintained that Niçard originated as a Ligurian dialect. Before the annexation of the county of Nice to France in 1860, all the historical texts and archives of the city were written either in the Ligurian language, or in Italian. On the other hand, French linguists argue that Niçard is a dialect of Occitan while conceding that Monégasque is a dialect of Ligurian. However, Sue Wright notes that before the Kingdom of Sardinia ceded the County of Nice to France, "Nice was not French-speaking before the annexation but underwent a shift to French in a short time... and it is surprising that the local Italian dialect, the Nissart, disappeared quickly from the private domain." She also wrote that one of the main reasons of the disappearance of the Italian language in the County was because "(m)any of the administrative class under Piedmont-Savoy ruler, the soldiers; jurists; civil servants and professionals, who used Italian in their working lives, moved [back] to Piedmont, after the annexation and their places and roles were taken by newcomers from France". Indeed, immediately after 1861, the French government closed all the Italian language newspapers, and more than 11,000 Niçard Italians moved to the Kingdom of Italy. The sheer scale of the Niçard exodus can be inferred from the fact that in the Savoy census of 1858, Nice had only 44,000 inhabitants. In 1881, The New York Times wrote, "Before the French annexation, the Niçois were quite as much Italian as the Genoese and their dialect was if anything, nearer the Tuscan, than is the harsh dialect of Genoa. Giuseppe Garibaldi defined his "Nizzardo" as an Italian dialect, albeit with strong similarities to Occitan and with some French influences, and for