Republic of the Escartons information

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (August 2016) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,434 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:République des Escartons]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|République des Escartons}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The Republic of the Escartons (Italian: Repubblica degli Escartons; French: République des Écartons) was a collection of mountain territories located around Mount Viso in the Briançonnais, with territory between Marseille and Turin. It consisted of a set of mountain territories in what is now the French department of Hautes-Alpes, the province of Turin and province of Cuneo. It was named after its capital. Escarton corresponds to an Occitan term for a small region, and in French 'écarter' means 'to divide', specifically 'to divide taxes into quarters'.

The republic enjoyed fiscal and political privileges from the French and although not very large, it had more than forty thousand inhabitants. Every year the leaders of various countries forming the Republic met in council to elect a consul as its leader.

Guigues VII of Viennois conceded the inhabitants of Briançon a charter of liberty in 1244, which was confirmed as a grand charter on 29 May 1343^[1][2] by his successor Humbert II of Viennois at Beauvoir-en-Royans - he signed it with 18 representatives of the Alpine valleys. This gave birth to the Escartons republic, made up of five separate valleys – Briançonnais, Oulx, Casteldelfino, Val Chisone, and Queyras. The charter was later confirmed by letters patent from all the kings of France from Charles V of France to Louis XVI of France – after the Treaty of Utrecht, this continued until 4 August 1789 for the parts of the Republic which remained French territory.