Summary

This historical ethnography of the Roya valley, on the border between Italy and France, offers a point of entry into the tangle of the border: it involves unfolding the different lines that make up a state border, almost perfectly superimposed to the point where their plurality becomes invisible 'from the air', but also following the processes during which these limits of different orders of activity (commercial exchanges, linguistic uses, etc.) come to be aligned with the border. In this way, the border zone provides a means of grasping the local consistency of state membership.

With its unique history, the Roya is an open-air laboratory for the realignment effects that a border shift (here in 1947) has on a territory and its people. It also reveals the specific work of the State at its borders - all the more intense when it comes to claiming a new territory at the end of the Second World War, and more recently to resuming the filtering of human mobility within the Schengen area or reasserting its presence after the storm of 2020 - and its links with all the political mobilisations of which the Roya has been the object over the course of its history.