Italian Unification
The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March 1861, and its capital was Turin, its constitution was Piedmontese, and it did not include Rome or Venice. The unification was made by three forces that distrusted each other. Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont, wanted a north Italian kingdom under his own king and manoeuvred France into providing an army for it in 1859 in exchange for Nice and Savoy. Mazzini's republicans wanted a democratic republic and had been rising and failing since the 1830s. Garibaldi wanted Italy and did not much mind who ruled it. The decisive event was not planned by any government. Garibaldi sailed from Genoa in May 1860 with about a thousand volunteers in red shirts, landed in Sicily, beat a Bourbon army many times his size at Calatafimi and Palermo, crossed to the mainland, and took Naples — a kingdom of nine million people — in five months. Cavour, alarmed that Garibaldi would march on Rome and bring France into a war, sent the Piedmontese army south through the Papal States to get in front of him. Garibaldi met Victor Emmanuel II at Teano in October, handed him southern Italy, declined every reward, and went home to farm on Caprera. Plebiscites ratified it. Venice came in 1866 as a result of the Prussian war and Rome in 1870 when the French garrison left. Massimo d'Azeglio's line about having made Italy and now needing to make Italians is what everyone quotes. What was created was also a conquest. The south was administered by northerners under martial law for a decade against a rising the government called brigandage, which cost more lives than all the wars of unification together, and the southern question has been on the Italian agenda ever since.
- Year: 1859 CE
- Category: Political
