Mont Blanc

“I saw myself on The Central Mountain of The World, the highest place. 

And I had a vision, because I was seeing in a sacred manner, of The World.

But the central mountain is everywhere.”

The border between Italy and France passes through the summit of Mont Blanc, making it both French and Italian.89

Since the French Revolution, the issue of the ownership of the summit has been debated. From 1416 to 1792, the entire mountain was within the Duchy of Savoy. In 1723, the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, acquired the Kingdom of Sardinia. The resulting state of Sardinia was to become preeminent in the Italian unification.10 In September 1792, the French revolutionary Army of the Alps under Anne-Pierre de Montesquiou-Fézensac seized Savoy without much resistance and created a department of the Mont-Blanc. In a treaty of 15 May 1796, Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia was forced to cede Savoy and Nice to France. In article 4 of this treaty it says: “The border between the Sardinian kingdom and the departments of the French Republic will be established on a line determined by the most advanced points on the Piedmont side, of the summits, peaks of mountains and other locations subsequently mentioned, as well as the intermediary peaks, knowing: starting from the point where the borders of Faucigny, the Duchy of Aoust and the Valais, to the extremity of the glaciers or Monts-Maudits: first the peaks or plateaus of the Alps, to the rising edge of the Col-Mayor”. This act further states that the border should be visible from the town of Chamonix and Courmayeur. However, neither is the peak of the Mont Blanc visible from Courmayeur nor is the peak of the Mont Blanc de Courmayeur visible from Chamonix because part of the mountains lower down obscure them.

A Sardinian Atlas map of 1869 showing the summit lying two thirds in Italy and one third in France.11

After the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna restored the King of Sardinia in Savoy, Nice and Piedmont, his traditional territories, overruling the 1796 Treaty of Paris. Forty-five years later, after the Second Italian War of Independence, it was replaced by a new legal act. This act was signed in Turin on 24 March 1860 by Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, and deals with the annexation of Savoy (following the French neutrality for the plebiscites held in Tuscany, Modena, Parma and Romagna to join the Kingdom of Sardinia, against the Pope’s will). A demarcation agreement, signed on 7 March 1861, defined the new border. With the formation of Italy, for the first time Mont Blanc was located on the border of France and Italy.

The 1860 act and attached maps are still legally valid for both the French and Italian governments.12 One of the prints from the 1823 Sarde Atlas13 positions the border exactly on the summit edge of the mountain (and measures it to be 4,804 m (15,761 ft) high). The convention of 7 March 1861 recognises this through an attached map, taking into consideration the limits of the massif, and drawing the border on the icecap of Mont Blanc, making it both French and Italian.14 Watershed analysis of modern topographic mapping not only places the main summit on the border, but also suggests that the border should follow a line northwards from the main summit towards Mont Maudit, leaving the southeast ridge to Mont Blanc de Courmayeur wholly within Italy.

Although the Franco-Italian border was redefined in both 1947 and 1963, the commission made up of both Italians and French ignored the Mont Blanc issue. The area from the Torino Hut to the summit is under the control of the Italian authority. NATO uses Italian military maps to operate. In the early 21st century, administration of the mountain is shared between the Italian town of Courmayeur and the French town of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, although the larger part of the mountain lies within the commune of the latter.

In 2015, press reports suggested that claims by Italian mountaineers and cartographers on the disputed territory were still ongoing.

Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

                                    I 

Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

                                    I 

The everlasting universe of things 

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, 

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— 

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs 

The source of human thought its tribute brings 

Of waters—with a sound but half its own, 

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume, 

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, 

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, 

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river 

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. 

                                     II 

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine— 

Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale, 

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail 

Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, 

Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, 

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame 

Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie, 

Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, 

Children of elder time, in whose devotion 

The chainless winds still come and ever came 

To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging

To hear—an old and solemn harmony; 

Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep

Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil 

Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep

Which when the voices of the desert fail 

Wraps all in its own deep eternity; 

Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion, 

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; 

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, 

Thou art the path of that unresting sound— 

Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee 

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange 

To muse on my own separate fantasy, 

My own, my human mind, which passively 

Now renders and receives fast influencings, 

Holding an unremitting interchange 

With the clear universe of things around; 

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings 

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest 

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, 

In the still cave of the witch Poesy, 

Seeking among the shadows that pass by 

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, 

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast 

From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! 

                                     III 

Some say that gleams of a remoter world 

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber, 

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.—I look on high; 

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd 

The veil of life and death? or do I lie 

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep 

Spread far around and inaccessibly 

Its circles? For the very spirit fails, 

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep 

That vanishes among the viewless gales! 

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, 

Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene; 

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms 

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between 

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, 

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread 

And wind among the accumulated steeps; 

A desert peopled by the storms alone, 

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, 

And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously 

Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high, 

Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young 

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea 

Of fire envelop once this silent snow? 

None can reply—all seems eternal now. 

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue 

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, 

So solemn, so serene, that man may be, 

But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd; 

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal 

Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood 

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good 

Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel. 

                                     IV 

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, 

Ocean, and all the living things that dwell 

Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, 

Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, 

The torpor of the year when feeble dreams 

Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep 

Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound 

With which from that detested trance they leap; 

The works and ways of man, their death and birth, 

And that of him and all that his may be; 

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound 

Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. 

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity, 

Remote, serene, and inaccessible: 

And this, the naked countenance of earth, 

On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains 

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep 

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, 

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice 

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power 

Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, 

A city of death, distinct with many a tower 

And wall impregnable of beaming ice. 

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin 

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky 

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing 

Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil 

Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down 

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown 

The limits of the dead and living world, 

Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place 

Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; 

Their food and their retreat for ever gone, 

So much of life and joy is lost. The race 

Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling 

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream, 

And their place is not known. Below, vast caves 

Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam, 

Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling 

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, 

The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever 

Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves, 

Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air. 

                                     V 

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there, 

The still and solemn power of many sights, 

And many sounds, and much of life and death. 

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, 

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend 

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, 

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, 

Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend 

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath 

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home 

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes 

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods 

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things 

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! 

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, 

If to the human mind's imaginings 

Silence and solitude were vacancy?