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Italian and German Unification: Crash Course European History #27

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Impression

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The foremost military figure and popular hero of the age of Italian unification known as the Risorgimento with Cavour and Mazzini he is deemed one of the makers of Modern Italy.

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Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-1882)

Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-1882) The foremost military figure and popular hero of the age of Italian unification known as the Risorgimento with Cavour and Mazzini he is deemed one of the makers of Modern Italy. Cavour is considered the "brain of unification," Mazzini the "soul," and Garibaldi the "sword." For his battles on behalf of freedom in Latin America, Italy, and later France, he has been dubbed the "Hero of Two Worlds." Born in Nice, when the city was controlled by France, to Domenico Garibaldi and Rosa Raimondi, his family was involved in the coastal trade. A sailor in the Mediterranean Sea, he was certified a merchant captain in 1832. During a journey to Taganrog in the Black Sea, he was initiated into the Italian national movement by a fellow Ligurian, Giovanni Battista Cuneo. In 1833 he ventured to Marseilles where he met Mazzini and enrolled in his Giovane Italia or Young Italy. Mazzini had a profound impact on Garibaldi, who would always acknowledge this patriot as "the master."

In February 1834 he participated in an abortive Mazzinian insurrection in Piedmont, was sentenced to death in absentia by a Genoese court, and fled to Marseilles. The exile sailed first to Tunisia eventually finding his way to Brazil, where he encountered Anna Maria Ribeiro da Silva, "Anita," a woman of Portuguese and Indian descent, who became his lover, companion in arms, and wife. With other Italian exiles and republicans he fought on behalf of the separatists of the Rio Grande do Sul and the Uruguayans who opposed the Argentinean dictator Jan Manuel do Rosas. Calling on the Italians of Montevideo, Garibaldi formed the Italian Legion in 1843, whose black flag represented Italy in mourning while the volcano at its center symbolized the dormant power in their homeland. It was in Uruguay that the legion first sported the red shirts, obtained from a factory in Montevideo which had intended to export them to the slaughter houses of Argentina. It was to become the symbol of Garibaldi and his followers. The formation of his force of volunteers, his mastery of the techniques of guerilla warfare, his opposition to Brazilian and Argentinean imperialism, and his victories in the battles of Cerro and Sant'Antonio in 1846 not only assured the freedom of Uruguay but made him and his followers heroes in Italy and Europe. The fate of his patria continued to preoccupy Garibaldi.

The election of Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti as Pope Pius IX in 1846 led many to believe he was the liberal pope prophesied by Gioberti, who would provide the leadership for the unification of Italy. From his exile Mazzini applauded the first reforms of Pio Nono. In 1847 Garibaldi offered the apostolic nuncio at Rio de Janeiro Bedini, the service of his Italian Legion for the liberation of the peninsula. News of the outbreak of revolution in Palermo in January 1848, and revolutionary agitation elsewhere in Italy, encouraged Garibaldi to lead some sixty members of his legion home. He offered his services to Charles Albert and the Piedmontese who initiated the first war for the liberation of Italy, but found his effort spurned. Rebuffed by the Piedmonese, he and his followers crossed into Lombardy where they offered assistance to the provisional government of Milan.

Frank J. Coppa

Bibliography

Cecchini, Ezio. "Le Campagne di Garibaldi. 1849." Rivista Militare 105 (1982, n.2), 197-205.

Coppa, Frank J. The Origins of the Italian Wars of Independence. London and New York: Longman, 1992.

Gariba ldi, Giuseppe. Autobiography, trans. A Werner. New York: Howard Fertig, 1971.

Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Memoire, ed. Ugoberto Alfessio Grimaldi. Verona: Bertani editore, 1972.

Ridley, Joseph. Garibaldi. New York: Viking, 1976.

Trevelyan, George Macaulay. Garibaldi and the Thousand. New York: Longman, 1948.

Ugolini, Romano. Garibaldi. Genesi di un mito. Rome: Ateneo, 1982.

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jgc this file ( http://www.ohiou.edu/~chastain/dh/gari.htm) on September 27, 2004.

Please E-mail comments or suggestions to chastain@www.ohiou.edu

© 1998, 2004 James Chastain.

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Table of Contributors Table of Contents Return to Encyclopedia Home Page Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-1882) The foremost military figure and popular hero of the age of Italian unification known as the Risorgimento with Cavour and Mazzini he is deemed one of the makers of Modern Italy.

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Italian and German Unification: Crash Course European History #27

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Impressionism

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Germany became a modern, unified nation under the leadership of the Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), who between 1862 and 1890 effectively ruled first Prussia and then all of Germany.

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born:

April 1, 1815, Schönhausen, Altmark, Prussia [Germany]

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died:

July 30, 1898, Friedrichsruh, near Hamburg (aged 83)

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Early years

Bismarck was born at Schönhausen, in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Ferdinand von Bismarck-Schönhausen, was a Junker squire descended from a Swabian family that had ultimately settled as estate owners in Pomerania. Ferdinand was a typical member of the Prussian landowning elite. The family's economic circumstances were modest-Ferdinand's farming skills being perhaps less than average-and Bismarck was not to know real wealth until the rewards flowed in after the achievement of German unification. His mother, Wilhelmine Mencken, came from an educated bourgeois family that had produced a number of higher civil servants and academics. She had been married to Ferdinand von Bismarck at age 16 and found provincial life confining. When her son Otto was seven, she enrolled him in the progressive Plamann Institute in Berlin and moved to the capital to be near him. The young Bismarck resented exchanging an easy life in the country for a more circumscribed life in a large city, where in school he was pitted against the sons of Berlin's best-educated families. He spent five years at the school and went on to the Frederick William gymnasium for three years. He took his university entrance examination ( Abitur) in 1832.

With his mother's encouragement, he took up the study of law at the University of Göttingen in the kingdom of Hanover. Evidently Bismarck was a mediocre student who spent much of his time drinking with his comrades in an aristocratic fraternity. After a brief stint at the university in Berlin, he entered the Prussian civil service, where he was plagued by boredom and an inability to adhere to the hierarchical principles of the bureaucracy. His mother's death in 1839 gave him the opportunity of resigning in order to come to the assistance of his father, who was experiencing financial difficulties in the management of his estate. From 1839 to 1847 Bismarck lived the ordinary life of a Prussian country squire. Subsequently he romanticized these years on the land and wondered why he had abandoned an idyllic existence for the insecurities of a life in politics. This frequently expressed nostalgia may have been more guise than reality.

During this period he met and married Johanna von Puttkamer, the daughter of a conservative aristocratic family famed for its devout pietism. While courting Johanna, Bismarck experienced a religious conversion that was to give him inner strength and security. A subsequent critic was to remark that Bismarck believed in a God who invariably agreed with him on all issues. There is no question that the marriage was a very happy one. In fact, Bismarck's last words before dying in 1898 expressed the wish that he would once again see Johanna, who had passed away some years earlier.

His politics during the 1840s did not diverge substantially from those of a typical country squire. If anything, his politics were more conservative. He believed in a Christian state that received its sanction ultimately from the deity. The existing social and political order was to be defended in order to prevent a Hobbesian chaos of all against all. Given his views, Bismarck was welcomed as a member of the religious conservative circle around the brothers von Gerlach, who were stout defenders of the noble estate against the encroachments of bureaucratic centralization. Bismarck had nothing but sarcasm for aristocratic liberals who viewed England as a model for Prussia. In 1847 he attended the Prussian United Diet, where his speeches against Jewish emancipation and contemporary liberalism gained him the reputation of a backwoods conservative, out of touch with the dynamic forces of his age.

Bismarck's response to the liberal revolution that swept through Europe in 1848 confirmed his image as a reactionary. He opposed any concessions to the liberals and expressed contempt for the king's willingness to bargain with the revolutionaries. He even considered marching his peasants to Berlin to free Frederick William IV from the baneful influence of the rebels. With other archconservatives, including Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, he began contributing to the Kreuzzeitung newspaper (1848) as an organ of antirevolutionary sentiment.

For Bismarck's future role, it is important to understand his analysis of the revolution. He identified the forces of change as confined solely to the educated and propertied middle class. The vast majority of Prussians, however, were peasants and artisans, who, in Bismarck's view, were loyal monarchists. The task of the forces of order was to confirm the loyalty of these two groups by means of material concessions. The economic policies of the urban middle-class radicals were rooted in pure self-interest, he maintained. The radicals would spur industrial growth at the expense of the lower middle class and the farm population. Ultimately, even the middle class itself might be won over by tactical concessions and success in foreign policy. This strategic and opportunist thinking distanced Bismarck from the ideological conservatives, who were wedded to traditional concepts of authority. His vision of a manipulative state that sustained its power by rewarding obedient groups remained with him throughout his political career.

Early career

In 1849 he was elected to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies (the lower chamber of the Prussian Diet) and moved his family to Berlin. At this stage he was far from a German nationalist. He told one of his fellow conservatives, "We are Prussians, and Prussians we shall remain.... We do not wish to see the Kingdom of Prussia obliterated in the putrid brew of cosy south German sentimentality." In 1851 Frederick William IV appointed Bismarck as the Prussian representative to the federal Diet in Frankfurt, a clear reward for his loyalty to the monarchy.

With the defeat of the revolution in central Europe, Austria had reasserted its supremacy in the German Confederation, and Bismarck, being an archconservative, was assumed to support the status quo, which included Austrian hegemony. He lived in Frankfurt for eight years, where he experienced a commercial and cultural environment quite different from that of a Prussian estate.

It was in Frankfurt that Bismarck began to reassess his view of German nationalism and the goals of Prussian foreign policy. Not only did he find the constant deference to the Austrians in Frankfurt demeaning, but he also realized that the status quo meant acceptance of Prussia as a second-rate power in central Europe. In 1854 he opposed close cooperation with Austria, arguing that it entailed "binding our spruce and seaworthy frigate to the wormy old warship of Austria." Gradually he began to consider the options that would make Prussia the undisputed power in Germany. A vision of a Prussian-dominated northern Europe and a redirection of Austrian power to the Slavic areas in the south took shape in his mind. If necessary, a war with Austria to destroy its hegemony was not to be excluded. Implementation of such a policy would be anything but conservative because it would entail radical changes in the map of Europe as it had been drawn by the conservative powers at Vienna, Austria, in 1815.

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Otto von Bismarck | Biography, Significance, Accomplishments, & Facts

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Otto von Bismarck, prime minister of Prussia (1862-73, 1873-90) and founder and first chancellor (1871-90) of the German Empire whose time in office took Prussia from the weakest of the five European powers to, as the unified German Empire, the foremost military and industrial power on the Continent.

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Realistic

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Dom Pedro II - Victor Meirelles - Google Arts & Culture

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Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.