Italian Unification
The Risorgimento — the unification of an Italy long fragmented into kingdoms, duchies, papal lands and Austrian-ruled provinces — was achieved between 1859 and 1871, chiefly by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia under its shrewd prime minister, Count Camillo di Cavour. Rather than rely on popular revolution, which had failed in 1848, Cavour used diplomacy and great-power arms: an alliance with Napoleon III's France expelled Austria from Lombardy in 1859, and adroitly managed plebiscites annexed the central Italian states. In 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi and his thousand Redshirts conquered Sicily and Naples and handed the south to the Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel II, who was proclaimed King of Italy in 1861. Venetia was won from Austria in 1866 as a by-product of the Austro-Prussian War, and Rome — held for the Pope by a French garrison — was finally taken in 1870 when that garrison withdrew for the Franco-Prussian War, completing unification. Like Germany, Italy was made by the power of a strong regional state rather than by a unified national movement, leaving a new kingdom split between a developed north and an impoverished, alienated south.
- Year: 1859 CE
- Category: Political
