Staff profile

I am a historian of France and southern Europe in the long nineteenth century, working at the intersection between socio-cultural, political and intellectual history. My work problematises established understandings of the rise and development of such political ideologies as nationalism, conservatism and liberalism by putting France in dialogue with its southern neighbours and Paris in contact with its provinces and borderlands.

My first book, entitled Inventing the Modern Region: Basque Identity and the French Nation-State (MUP, 2024), analysed the transnational creation of a regional identity in the French Basque country between 1789 and 1914. It claimed that French cultural regions, as we experience them as tourists today, were a product of the ‘modern’ age of nationalism. They were a response to France’s new homogenising policies of state- and nation-building after the French Revolution of 1789, which challenged the country’s cultural and linguistic diversity through hierarchical and exclusive theories of ‘progress’, ‘modernity’ and ‘civilisation’.

I am currently developing two new projects. I am working on my second monograph, which explores the transnational history of the French counterrevolutionary movement from 1830 to 1914. The book challenges the dominant historiographical claim that, after being ousted from power in 1830, ultra-royalists embarked on a period of ‘internal emigration’. Instead, the project maintains that ultra-royalists remained active both internationally, in support of reactionary and Catholic causes across southern Europe, and locally in the French countryside, where they developed a new environmental, agrarian and anti-industrial doctrine. Far from being irrelevant, then, the book claims that the decades after 1830 were a crucial time for a definition of a French reactionary ideology, which paved the way for the foundation of France’s far-right political culture in the twentieth century.

Further, I am working on a second project that traces the significance of personal relationships, in particular friendship, love and grief, in the creation of transnational liberal theory across nineteenth-century Europe.

Down the line, I am hoping to write a history of poverty in late nineteenth-century France from the point of view of dance.

Born and raised in Italy, I happily live in Britain as an expat in love with France. Before joining Durham, I did my PhD at King's College London and held research fellowships at St. Antony's College, Oxford and Yale University.

Authored book

• Inventing the Modern Region: Basque Identity and the French Nation-State
  
  Ilacqua, T. (2024). Inventing the Modern Region: Basque Identity and the French Nation-State. Manchester University Press.

Chapter in book

• An Open Border for Two Bordered States: Basque Disputes and the Remaking of the Franco-Spanish Frontier, 1829-56
  
  Ilacqua, T. (2025). An Open Border for Two Bordered States: Basque Disputes and the Remaking of the Franco-Spanish Frontier, 1829-56. In A. Ross & C. Aliprantis (Eds.), State-Making in an Age of Revolution, 1830–1880 (pp. 139–159). The British Academy. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.31510199.10

Journal Article

• French Legitimists and Spanish Carlists: Transnational Ultra-Conservative Solidarity during Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–1840
  
  Ilacqua, T. (2025). French Legitimists and Spanish Carlists: Transnational Ultra-Conservative Solidarity during Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–1840. European History Quarterly, 55(2), 263-286. https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914251323829
• Tourism, Nation-Building and Regional Identities in the French Basque Country, 1830–1870
  
  Ilacqua, T. (2022). Tourism, Nation-Building and Regional Identities in the French Basque Country, 1830–1870. French Historical Studies, 45(4), 657–682. https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-9933007
• Territory and the Politics of Identity in the Basque Country during the French Revolution
  
  Ilacqua, T. (2017). Territory and the Politics of Identity in the Basque Country during the French Revolution. French History.

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Basque Identity and French Unity: Fearing the Loss of Regional Identity, the French Invented a Cultural Tradition – but Did that Make Them a Threat to National Unity?
  
  Ilacqua, T. (2025, September 1). Basque Identity and French Unity: Fearing the Loss of Regional Identity, the French Invented a Cultural Tradition – but Did that Make Them a Threat to National Unity? History Today, 75(9), 28–39.