Italian Unification
With a revolutionary fervor spreading across Western Europe in 1848, the Italian states found themselves in a precarious situation. All of the Western powers had hoped to retain centralized control around the monarchies through the Congress of Vienna, but the West’s impassioned voices could not be silenced.
During this period, Guiseppe Mazzini gained prominence as a vocal advocate of Italian unification. Arguably his most ambitious move was in creating the Republic of Rome along with his colleague and fellow Italian nationalist Guiseppe Garibaldi. Unfortunately, the Republic of Rome crumbled almost immediately after it was founded. Within a year, the French emperor Louis Napoleon III marched on the city and reinstated the Pope, ending Mazzini’s republic. Even so, he succeeded in shifting the ideology of the people, and Italian nationalism hardly died in 1849.
Guiseppe Garibaldi carried the banner forward along with Count Camillo de Cavour. Contemporaries considered Garibaldi the greatest Italian general, and Count Cavour was by far the most influential nationalist in the Italian Peninsula. Cavour was a personal believer of free-market economics and ruled in accordance with those convictions when he turned towards politics. In 1852, he was elected as the prime minister of Piedmont, which was the most powerful Italian state. He then used his position of power to persuade the people of Piedmont’s potential as a power to unify Italy. Hoping to have France as an ally, he sent 15,000 troops to Louis Napoleon’s aid during the Crimean War against Russia, securing Napoleon III’s friendship. With that support, he successfully baited Lombardy into a military conflict and took it. With Lombardy under Piedmont domain, Cavour then used fraudulent plebiscite to take Tuscany and Romagna. Guiseppe Garibaldi then took 1,000 untrained volunteers and personally led them in a campaign to take Tuscany and Sicily, officially bringing them into the Piedmont-led Italian State. By 1866, Venetia joined. And by 1871, with the addition of the Papal States, Cavour and Garibaldi had succeeded in uniting all of the Italian states into one nation, Italy, except for the Vatican itself.
Asher Sisneros 