1860s, nearly 80% of the national population could speak French. After the Treaty of Turin was signed in 1860 between the Victor Emmanuel II and Napoleon III as a consequence of the Plombières Agreement, the County of Nice was ceded to France as a territorial reward for French assistance in the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, which saw Lombardy united with Piedmont-Sardinia. The Italian language was the official language of the County of Nice, used by the Church, at the town hall, taught in schools, used in theaters and at the Opera, was immediately abolished and replaced by French. The French government implemented a policy of Francization of society, language and culture of the County of Nice. The toponyms of the communes of the ancient County have been francized, which acted as a bank to the obligation to use French in Nice, as well as certain surnames (for example the Italian surname "Bianchi" was francized into "Leblanc", and the Italian surname "Del Ponte" was francized into "Dupont"). By 1900, French had become the mother tongue of the majority of adults in France. Jules Ferry introduced free, compulsory education during the French Third Republic, and openly tried to strengthen the centralised state by instilling a French national identity in the population. French was presented as the language of modernity, as opposed to regional languages such as Breton or Basque, labelled as barbaric or tribal. Pupils caught speaking these languages were punished by making them display tokens of shame. In Occitan-speaking areas that school policy was called the vergonha. Historically, no official language was recognized by the French Constitution. In 1994, French was declared constitutionally to be the language of the French Republic. In 1998, France became a signatory of the European Charter on Minority Languages; however, it has yet to ratify it, with general agreement among the political class that supportive measures are neither popular enough to attract wide support nor banal enough to be uncontroversial, with concerns specifically about courts forcing the state to act if the rights enshrined in the charter are recognised. Initiatives to encourage the use of minority languages are limited by the refusal of the French Government to recognize them, on the basis of the French Constitution, which states that "The language of the Republic of France is French". This view was upheld in 2021, when Deputy Paul Molac unexpectedly won a majority vote