Unifying Italy

Background

  • “Italy” comprised of more than a dozen states

  • Grassroots disgust for most leaders

  • Desire for a liberal, national state

  • Italian Risorgimento (resurgence) - return to the past glories (Renaissance and Rome)

  • Joseph Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi the dances of Italian national republicanism

Camillo di Cavour

  • Prime Minister of Piedmont

    • Sardinia and Savoy

  • Piedmont under constitutional monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II

  • Focus: progress, efficiency, fair government

    • Constitutional and parliamentary

    • Built infrastructure

    • Free trade

    • Anti-clerical: stripped Church of landed and legal privilege

    • Liberal constitutional monarchist. Not a revolutionary, radical republican like Mazzini

  • Joined Crimean War to get seat at Paris

France: the perfect suitor

  • Historic enmity between France and Habsburg Austria

  • Napoleon III

    • Ambitious and unscrupulous

    • As emperor- “doctrine of nationalities

      • Consolidation of nation the way of the future

    • Fight Austria to liberate Italy would placate liberals at home

      • Whom he was also repressing

  • French Army crossed over the Alps in April 1859

War: Short-lived

  • Two battles

  • Revolutions erupt throughout Italy

    • Napoleon in a bind

      • Not a fan of popular-revolution

      • Pope and papal lands threatened (French army in Rome)

    • Napoleon cuts a separate deal with Austria

      • Piedmont got Lombardy but Austria kept Venetia

      • Rest of Italian states under a federal union ruled by Pope

    • People said no thank you

French Help: desired for military purposes, but not political

  • Revolutions continued across north Italy

    • Rulers driven out and plebiscites showed interest in annexation to Piedmont

    • Reps met at capital (Turin) and Britain and France recognized an enlarged Piedmont

    • At this point, Italy comprised of Piedmont and Venetia (Austria) in the north, papal states in the middle and the Kingdom of two Sicilies (ruled by a Bourbon king in Naples) in the south

Giuseppe Garibaldi

  • Piedmontese

  • Organized the Red Shirts

    • 1,150 man army)

  • Landed on Sicily, crossed to mainland and was joined by revolutionaries

  • Bourbon government collapsed and Guiseppe advanced toward Rome

    • Cavour convinced him to stop short of Rome 

      • French army still this

    • Plebiscites confirmed annexation to Piedmont

Unification (1870)

  • Venetia added in 1866 as a reward for helping Prussia in war with Austria

  • Rome annexed after Franco-Prussian War

    • Church lost territory it had held for 1,000 years

    • Italy and Vatican at odds until 1929