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The 1848 Revolutions in the Italian states, part of the wider Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, were organized revolts in the states of the Italian peninsula and Sicily, led by intellectuals and agitators who desired a liberal government. As Italian nationalists they sought to eliminate reactionary Austrian control.

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The first of the Revolutions of 1848 erupted in Palermo on January 9. Starting as a popular insurrection, it soon took on overtones of Sicilian separatism and spread throughout the island. Piecemeal reforms proved inadequate to satisfy the revolutionaries, both noble and bourgeois, who were determined to have a new and more liberal constitution. Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was the first to grant one (January 29, 1848). Other rulers were compelled to follow his example: Leopold II on February 17, Charles Albert on March 4, and Pope Pius IX on March 14. The Austrian government, on the other hand, did not yield to popular pressure. Instead, it reinforced its garrisons in Lombardy-Venetia, arrested opposition leaders in Venice and Milan, and suppressed student demonstrations in the university cities of Padua and Pavia. By March 22-23, when revolution had also reached Budapest and Vienna, Venetian and Milanese insurgents moved to depose their Austrian overlords. Within a few days the Austrian army lost nearly all of Lombardy-Venetia and retreated into the Quadrilateral (the region between Mantua, Peschiera, Verona, and Legnago).

On March 23 Charles Albert of Sardinia-Piedmont declared war on Austria. It was a risky decision, but prospects for a national war seemed promising, and he wanted to seize the initiative to preclude republican and democratic domination of the insurgency. After annexing Parma and Modena, whose rulers had been driven out by insurgents, the Piedmontese won a few more victories before suffering reverses. Pius IX, Leopold II, and Ferdinand II, all of whom had initially sent troops to northern Italy to support the Piedmontese army, hastily withdrew their forces. The pope's address to the cardinals on April 29 revealed his reluctance to back national movements against Austria and did much to discredit him among patriots. Lombardy and Venetia, though not without internal opposition, accepted merger with Piedmont. Nevertheless, the Piedmontese army was unable to withstand the Austrian counteroffensive. After a series of defeats, Charles Albert's forces withdrew from Milan and on August 6 left the city and its insurgents to the mercy of the returning Austrians. Accusations of royal treachery, formulated by Lombard democrats at that moment, long survived in Italian political debates. By the terms of the Salasco armistice (August 9, 1848), the Piedmontese army abandoned Lombardy. In Piedmont the new constitution, the Statuto Albertino (Albertine Statute), remained in force, and democratic ideas survived.

Throughout Europe the forces of reaction were triumphant. The Revolutions of 1848 were suppressed in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Paris. In Naples the king regained power in a coup on May 15 and went on to reconquer Sicily. Meanwhile, in Rome the papacy reintroduced a range of obscurantist policies. Venice, however, under the dictatorship of Daniele Manin, refused to accept the Salasco armistice and resisted the Austrian siege. Leopold II of Tuscany took refuge in the Bourbon fortress of Gaeta in February 1849, when the democrats Giuseppe Montanelli and Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi were on the verge of taking control of the government and proclaiming an Italian constituent assembly. In Rome the minister Pellegrino Rossi, a former member of the Carbonari who had promoted conciliatory policies after returning from exile in France, was assassinated on November 15, 1848. This event triggered a democratic insurgency and caused Pius IX to flee to the safety of Gaeta. A constituent assembly elected by universal male suffrage proclaimed the Roman Republic on February 5, 1849.

The Italian revolution seemed to have been reborn. However, Charles Albert, pressed by Piedmontese democrats to resume his war with Austria (March 20, 1849), saw his army routed at Novara three days later. On the same day, March 23, he abdicated and went into exile. His successor, Victor Emmanuel II, was granted an honourable armistice because the Austrians did not want a weakened Savoy monarchy that could be exploited to the advantage of its democratic opponents. The defeat of Piedmont made the position of the democratic and republican opposition untenable in other parts of Italy as well. In Tuscany moderates recalled the grand duke, whose Austrian protectors crushed an insurrection in radical Livorno (May 1849). In Lombardy the Austrian reconquest of Brescia in March, after 10 days of fighting, left Venice isolated, though the city resisted enemy forces until August. The Roman Republic, led by Mazzini and Garibaldi, held out until July 3 against a French army sent by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the new president of the French Republic (later the emperor Napoleon III), whose restoration of the papacy repaid his Roman Catholic supporters. The returning sovereigns rapidly set about abrogating constitutions, disbanding parliaments, and, especially in the south, filling the prisons.

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Italy - Revolutions, 1848, Unification: The first of the Revolutions of 1848 erupted in Palermo on January 9. Starting as a popular insurrection, it soon took on overtones of Sicilian separatism and spread throughout the island. Piecemeal reforms proved inadequate to satisfy the revolutionaries, both noble and bourgeois, who were determined to have a new and more liberal constitution.

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The movement to unite Italy into one cultural and political entity was known as the Risorgimento (literally, "resurgence"). ... In 1858, he formed an alliance with France, one that included a pledge of military support if necessary, against Austria, Italy's major obstacle to unification.

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Italian 1848 Revolutions | 3 Minute History

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On September 7, 1822, Prince Dom Pedro declared Brazil's independence from Portugal, founding the Empire of Brazil, which led to a two-year war of independence. Formal recognition came with a treaty signed by both Brazil and Portugal in late 1825.

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King John IV moved to Brazil and because of political things he had to move back to Portugal. He left his son in charge of Brazil and he asked if he could be independent and he said yes.

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Many German wanted a nation that was united, powerful, and influential. Unification took place on 18 January 1871. At the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, the German princes proclaimed the German nation in Versailles, France, at the Hall of Mirrors. Unification joined together the many independent German states.

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Germany - Revolutions, 1848-49: The hard times that swept over the Continent in the late 1840s transformed widespread popular discontent in the German Confederation into a full-blown revolution. After the middle of the decade, a severe economic depression halted industrial expansion and aggravated urban unemployment. At the same time, serious crop failures led to a major famine in the area from Ireland to Russian Poland. In the German states, the hungry 1840s drove the lower classes, which had long been suffering from the economic effects of industrial and agricultural rationalization, to the point of open rebellion. There were sporadic hunger riots and violent disturbances

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Otto was a Representative in the Prussian Government. Liberals wanted to get a new constitution and Bismarck said no but the king was starting to agree. Then the kings conveniently died so Otto took over. Prussia and Germany then got into a battle with the Germans.

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How Otto von Bismarck Reshaped Europe | Tooky History