Italian Unification

Italy in 1850 was a patchwork: Austria held Lombardy and Venetia, the Pope ruled central Italy, a Bourbon king sat in Naples, and Piedmont-Sardinia was the one state with its own constitution and a reform-minded minister, Count Cavour. Cavour knew Piedmont could not beat Austria alone, so in 1858 he secretly struck a deal with Napoleon III of France: French troops would help fight Austria if Austria could be made to declare war first, making France look like a defender rather than an aggressor. Cavour provoked Austria into doing exactly that in 1859, won Lombardy with French help, and watched as nationalist uprisings added Tuscany, Modena, Parma, and Romagna to Piedmont through plebiscites by 1860.

While Cavour worked the diplomatic chessboard in the north, Giuseppe Garibaldi took matters into his own hands in the south. In 1860 he landed in Sicily with about a thousand volunteers wearing red shirts, defeated the Bourbon army there, crossed to the mainland, and took Naples. Rather than set up his own government, Garibaldi handed Sicily and Naples over to King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont, prioritizing a unified Italy under one crown over his own republican sympathies. The kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861; Venetia joined in 1866 after a war with Austria, and Rome fell in 1870 once French troops protecting the Pope withdrew.

Rome's capture left a bitter aftermath. Pope Pius IX refused to accept Italian rule over the city, declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican, and the question of church and state in Italy stayed open for decades. That unresolved tension, alongside Germany's own unification under Bismarck in the same years, shows two very different paths to the same nineteenth-century goal: the nation-state.