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They were fed up with the king, so they declared independence. Some pushed for a new constitution, though others opposed. They invaded Peru with their forces. They counter attacked, but in the end the royalists lost. Argentina was independent, though a chunk split off.

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Argentinian Independence | 3 Minute History

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Italy was very separated, many rulers ruling different areas. Some started rebellions, allowing them to take over, making alliances with each other. They would defeat Austria together as well. Garibaldi, owning the bottom portion of Italy gave it over to surround the French in Rome, making the Kingdom of Italy

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Germany was far too scattered, many countries in it. During the war with France, they fought together, making them unite to fight Napoleon. This created the German confederacy and eventually they made a united constitution. Though the south wanted to side with Austria and the north wanted to side with Prussia

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The Argentine War of Independence (Spanish: Guerra de Independencia de Argentina) was a secessionist civil war fought from 1810 to 1818 by Argentine patriotic forces under Manuel Belgrano, Juan José Castelli, Martin Miguel de Guemes and José de San Martín against royalist forces loyal to the Spanish crown. On July 9, 1816, an assembly met in San Miguel de Tucumán, declaring independence with provisions for a national constitution.

The territory of modern Argentina was part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, with its capital city in Buenos Aires, seat of government of the Spanish viceroy. Modern Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia were also part of the viceroyalty, and began their push for autonomy during the conflict, becoming independent states afterwards. The vast area of the territory and slow communications led most populated areas to become isolated from each other. The wealthiest regions of the viceroyalty were in Upper Peru (modern-day Bolivia). Salta and Córdoba had closer ties with Upper Peru than with Buenos Aires. Similarly, Mendoza in the west had closer ties with the Captaincy General of Chile, although the Andes mountain range was a natural barrier. Buenos Aires and Montevideo, who had a local rivalry, located in the La Plata Basin, had naval communications allowing them to be more in contact with European ideas and economic advances than the inland populations living in provinces such as Tierra del Fuego and Chaco. Paraguay was isolated from all other regions.[citation needed ]

In the political structure most authoritative positions were filled by people designated by the Spanish monarchy, most of them Spanish people from Europe, also known as peninsulares, without a strong commitment for South American problems or interests. This created a growing rivalry between the Criollos, white people born in Latin America, and the peninsulares, Spanish people who arrived from Europe (the term "Criollo" is usually translated to English as "Creole", despite being unrelated to most other Creole peoples). Although they were all considered Spanish, and there were no legal distinctions between Criollos and Peninsulares, most Criollos thought that Peninsulares had undue influence in political matters. The ideas of the American and French Revolutions, and the Age of Enlightenment, promoted desires of social change among the criollos. The full prohibition imposed by Spain to trade with other nations was also seen as damaging to the viceroyalty's economy.[citation needed ]

The population of Buenos Aires was highly militarized during the British invasions of the Río de la Plata, part of the Anglo-Spanish War. Buenos Aires was captured in 1806, and then liberated by Santiago de Liniers with forces from Montevideo. Fearing a counter-attack, all the population of Buenos Aires capable of bearing arms was arranged in military bodies, including slaves. A new British attack in 1807 captured Montevideo, but was defeated in Buenos Aires, and forced to leave the viceroyalty. The viceroy Rafael de Sobremonte was successfully deposed by the criollos during the conflict, and the Regiment of Patricians became a highly influential force in local politics, even after the end of the British threat.

The transfer of the Portuguese Court to Brazil generated military concern. It was feared that the British would launch a third attack, this time allied with Portugal. However, no military conflict took place, as when the Peninsular War started Britain and Portugal became allies of Spain against France. When the Spanish king Ferdinand VII was captured, his sister Carlota Joaquina sought to rule in the Americas as regent, but nothing came out of it because of the lack of support from both the Spanish Americans and the British. Javier de Elío created a Junta in Montevideo and Martín de Álzaga sought to make a similar move by organizing a mutiny in Buenos Aires, but the local military forces intervened and thwarted it. Spain appointed a new viceroy, Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros, and Liniers handed the government to him without resistance, despite the proposals of the military to reject him.

The May Revolution forced the viceroy to resign. He was replaced by a government Junta, the Primera Junta.

Cornelio Saavedra, president of the "Primera Junta".

The military conflict in Spain worsened by 1810. The city of Seville had been invaded by French armies, which were already dominating most of the Iberian Peninsula. The Junta of Seville was disestablished, and several members fled to Cádiz, the last portion of Spain still resisting. They established a Council of Regency, prelude to the Cortes of Cadiz, with political tendencies closer to Liberalism and Popular sovereignty than the former Junta of Seville. This began the May Revolution in Buenos Aires, as soon as the news was known. Several citizens thought that Cisneros, appointed by the disestablished Junta, did not have the right to rule anymore, and requested the convening of an open cabildo to discuss the fate of the local government. The military gave their support to the request, forcing Cisneros to accept. The discussion ruled the removal of viceroy Cisneros and his replacement with a government junta, but the cabildo attempted to keep Cisneros in power by appointing him president of such junta. Further demonstrations ensued, and the Junta was forced to resign immediately. It was replaced by a new one, the Primera Junta.

Buenos Aires requested the other cities in the viceroyalty to acknowledge the new Junta and send deputies. The precise purpose of these deputies, join the Junta or create a congress, was unclear at the time and generated political disputes later. The Junta was initially resisted by all the main locations around Buenos Aires: Córdoba, Montevideo, Paraguay and the Upper Peru. Santiago de Liniers came out of his retirement in Córdoba and organized an army to capture Buenos Aires, Montevideo had naval supremacy over the city, and Vicente Nieto organized the actions at the Upper Peru. Nieto proposed to José Fernando de Abascal y Sousa, viceroy of the Viceroyalty of Peru at the North, to annex the Upper Peru to it. He thought that the revolution could be easily contained in Buenos Aires, before launching a definitive attack.

Buenos Aires was declared a rogue city by the Council of Regency, which appointed Montevideo as capital of the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, and Francisco Javier de Elío the new viceroy. However, the May Revolution was not initially separatist. Patriots supported the legitimacy of the Juntas in the Americas, while royalists supported instead the Council of Regency; both acted on behalf of Ferdinand VII. All of them believed that, according to the retroversion of the sovereignty to the people, in the absence of the rightful king sovereignty returned to the people, which would be capable to appoint their own leaders. They did not agree on who was that people, and which territorial extension had the sovereignty. Royalists thought that it applied to the people on European Spain, who had the right to rule over all the Spanish empire. The leaders of the May Revolution thought that it applied to all the capitals of Spanish kingdoms. José Gervasio Artigas would lead later a third perspective: the retroversion applied to all regions, which should remain united under a confederative system. The three groups battled one another, but the disputes about the national organization of Argentina (either centralist or confederal) continued in Argentine Civil War, for many years after the end of the war of independence.

Battle of San Nicolás.

The Primera Junta sent military campaigns to the viceroyalty, in order to secure support to the new authorities and retain the authority held as the capital of the viceroyalty. The victories and defeats of the military conflict delimited the areas of influence of the new United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. With the non-aggression pact arranged with Paraguay early on, most of the initial conflict took place in the north, in Upper Peru, and in the east, in the Banda Oriental. In the second half of the decade, with the capture of Montevideo and the stalemate in Upper Peru, the conflict moved to the west, to Chile.

The first two military campaigns ordered by the revolutionary Junta in Buenos Aires were launched against Cordoba, where former Viceroy Santiago de Liniers organized a counter-revolution, and the Intendency of Paraguay, which did not recognize the outcome of events at the May Revolution.

Castelli then proposed to the Buenos Aires Junta to cross the Desaguadero River, taking the offensive into the Viceroyalty of Peru domains, but his proposal was rejected. His army and Goyeneche's stationed near the frontier, while negotiating. Goyeneche advanced and defeated Castelli at the Battle of Huaqui, whose forces dispersed and left the provinces. The resistance of patriot republiqueta guerrillas of Upper Peru, however, kept the royalists at bay, preventing them from advancing south:

First Banda Oriental campaign (1811)

Horse riding in Asencio

The undesired outcomes of the Paraguay and Upper Peru campaigns led the Junta to be replaced by an executive Triumvirate in September 1811. This new government decided to promote a new campaign to the Upper Peru with a reorganized Army of the North and appointed José de San Martín, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had recently arrived from Spain, as lieutenant colonel. San Martín was ordered to create the professional and disciplined cavalry unit known as Regiment of Mounted Grenadiers ( Spanish: Granaderos a caballo):

General Manuel Belgrano was appointed as the new commander of the Army of the North. Facing the overwhelming invasion of a royalist army led by General Pío de Tristán, Belgrano turned to scorched-earth tactics and ordered the evacuation of the people of Jujuy and Salta, and the burning of anything else left behind to prevent enemy forces from getting supplies or taking prisoners from those cities. This action is known as the Jujuy Exodus.

The Spanish navy then sought to evade the land blockade by raiding nearby populations on the west bank of the Uruguay river. On 31 January 1813, Spanish troops from Montevideo landed near the town of San Lorenzo, Santa Fe Province, but it was absolutely defeated by the Granaderos unit led by San Martín on February 3. The Battle of San Lorenzo ended further Spanish raids on the west bank of the Paraná river and the Triumvirate awarded San Martín the rank of general.

One of the first actions of Posadas was to create a naval fleet from scratch, which was to be financed by Juan Larrea, and appointed William Brown as lieutenant colonel and chief commander of it, on March 1, 1814. Against all the odds, on 14 May 1814 the improvised patriot navy engaged the Spanish fleet and defeated it three days later. This action secured the port of Buenos Aires and allowed the fall of Montevideo, which could not stand the siege any more, on 20 June 1814.

The fall of Montevideo eliminated the royalist menace from the Banda Oriental and meant the actual end of the Spanish Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. Soon afterwards, William Brown was awarded the rank of admiral, and Carlos María de Alvear, who was put in charge of the siege of Montevideo just a few days before the surrender of the city, succeeded his uncle Gervasio Posadas as the Supreme Director of the United Provinces, on January 11, 1815. Alvear, however, was resisted by the troops, so he was quickly replaced, on April 21, by Ignacio Álvarez Thomas through a mutiny. Álvarez Thomas then appointed Alvear as general of the Northern Army, in replacement of José Rondeau, but the officiality did not recognize this and remained loyal to Rondeau:

In 1815, the Northern Army, unofficially commanded by José Rondeau, started another offensive campaign in the Upper Peru, without the formal authorization of Supreme Director Álvarez Thomas. Lacking official support, however, the army was faced with anarchy. Moreover, soon after it would lose as well the aid of the Provincial Army of Salta, commanded by Martín Miguel de Güemes. After the defeats of Venta y Media (October 21) and Sipe-Sipe (November 28), the northern territories of the Upper Peru were effectively lost to the United Provinces. However, the Spanish Army could not advance further south as they were successfully stopped at Salta by the Güemes guerrillas from then on.

The unsuccessful outcome of the third Upper Peru campaign would spread rumors in Europe that the May Revolution was over. Furthermore, King Ferdinand VII was restored to the Spanish throne on 1813, so an urgent decision was needed regarding the political status of the United Provinces.

On July 9, 1816, an assembly of representatives of the Provinces (including three Upper Peru departments but excluding representatives from Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Corrientes and the Banda Oriental, united into the Federal League) met at the Congress of Tucumán and declared the Independence of the United Provinces in South America from the Spanish Crown, with provisions for a national Constitution.

Army of the Andes (1814-1818)

San Martín wrapped in the flag.

San Martín asked to become the Governor of the Province of Cuyo, where he prepared the Chile campaign. Installed in the city of Mendoza, San Martín reorganized the Granaderos cavalry unit into the Army of the Andes, which he created out of patriots from both the United Provinces and exiles from Chile.

On March 18, 1818, Osorio led a surprise attack on the joint Argentine-Chilean army, which had to retreat to Santiago, with heavy losses. In fact, among the confusion, Supreme Director O'Higgins was thought to be killed, and panic seized the patriot camp. Crippled after his defeat at Cancha Rayada, O'Higgins delegated the command of the troops entirely to San Martín in a meeting on the plains of Maipú. Then, on April 5, 1818, San Martín inflicted a decisive defeat on Osorio in the Battle of Maipú, after which the depleted royalists retreated to Concepcion, never again to launch a major offensive against Santiago.

The Chile campaign is generally considered to be the conclusion of the Argentine War of Independence, as the further actions of the United Army into Peru were carried on under the authority of the Chilean government, not the United Provinces. However, defensive actions continued to be carried on in the northern frontier of the United Provinces until the 1825 Battle of Ayacucho, which ended the royalist threat from the Upper Peru.

The Día de la Revolución de Mayo ( May Revolution Day) on May 25 is an annual holiday in Argentina to commemorate the First National Government (and the creation of the Primera Junta), one of the significant events in the history of Argentina. These and other events of the week leading to this day are referred to as the Semana de Mayo (May Week).

Camogli, Pablo; Luciano de Privitellio (2005). Batallas por la Libertad. Buenos Aires: Aguilar. ISBN 987-04-0105-8.

Luna, Félix (2003). La independencia argentina y americana (in Spanish). Buenos Aires: Planeta. ISBN 950-49-1110-2.

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Argentine War of Independence - Wikipedia

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The Argentine War of Independence (Spanish: Guerra de Independencia de Argentina) was a secessionist civil war fought from 1810 to 1818 by Argentine patriotic forces under Manuel Belgrano, Juan José Castelli, Martin Miguel de Guemes and José de San Martín against royalist forces loyal to the Spanish crown.

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Native name

Risorgimento

Date

1848-1871

Location
Italy

Participants

Italian society, Kingdom of Sardinia, Provisional Government of Milan, Republic of San Marco, Kingdom of Sicily, Roman Republic, Carboneria, French Empire, Red Shirts, Hungarian legion, Southern Army, United Provinces of Central Italy, Kingdom of Italy

Outcome

The unification of Italy ( Italian: Unità d'Italia, Italian: [uniˈtaddiˈtaːlja]), also known as the Risorgimento (, Italian: lit.[risordʒiˈmento];  'Resurgence'), was the 19th-century political and social movement that resulted in 1861 in the consolidation of various states of the Italian Peninsula and its outlying isles into a single state, the Kingdom of Italy. Inspired by the rebellions in the 1820s and 1830s against the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, the unification process was precipitated by the Revolutions of 1848, and reached completion in 1871 after the capture of Rome and its designation as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.

Even after 1871, many ethnic Italian-speakers (such as Trentino-Alto Adigan Italians, Istrian Italians, and Dalmatian Italians) remained outside the borders of the Kingdom of Italy, planting the seeds of Italian irredentism. Individuals who played a major part in the struggle for unification and liberation from foreign domination included King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Giuseppe Mazzini.

Some of the states that had been envisaged as part of the unification process ( terre irredente) did not join the Kingdom until after Italy defeated Austria-Hungary in the First World War, culminating in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920. Some historians see the Risorgimento as continuing to that time, which is the view presented at the Central Museum of the Risorgimento at Altare della Patria in Rome.

Italy was unified by the Roman Republic in the latter part of the third century BC. For 700 years, it was a de facto territorial extension of the capital of the Roman Republic and Empire, and for a long time experienced a privileged status but was not converted into a province. Under Augustus, the previous differences in municipal and political rights were abolished and Roman Italy was subdivided into administrative regions ruled directly by the Roman Senate.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy remained united under the Ostrogothic Kingdom and after 568 was disputed between the Kingdom of the Lombards and the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, losing its unity for centuries. Following conquest by the Frankish Empire, the title of King of Italy merged with the office of Holy Roman Emperor; however, the emperor was an absentee German-speaking foreigner who had little interest in governing Italy and indeed never controlled the entire peninsula. As a result, Italy gradually developed into a system of city-states. Southern Italy was governed by the long-lasting Kingdom of Sicily or Kingdom of Naples, which had been established by the Normans. Central Italy was governed by the Pope as a temporal kingdom known as the Papal States.

This situation persisted through the Renaissance but began to deteriorate with the rise of modern nation-states in the early modern period. Italy, including the Papal States, then became the site of proxy wars between the major powers, notably the Holy Roman Empire (including Austria), Spain, and France. Harbingers of national unity appeared in the treaty of the Italic League, in 1454, and the 15th-century foreign policy of Cosimo de' Medici and Lorenzo de' Medici. Leading Renaissance Italian writers Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli and Guicciardini expressed opposition to foreign domination. Petrarch stated that the "ancient valour in Italian hearts is not yet dead" in Italia Mia. Machiavelli later quoted four verses from Italia Mia in , which looked forward to a political leader who would unite Italy "to free her from the barbarians".

The Italian Wars saw 65 years of French attacks on some of the Italian states, starting with Charles VIII's invasion of Naples in 1494. However, the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) saw parts of Italy fall under the direct or indirect control of the Spanish Habsburgs. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 formally ended the rule of the Holy Roman Emperors in Italy. However, the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg, which ruled the Spanish Empire, continued to rule Southern Italy and the Duchy of Milan until the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). Following this war the Austrian Habsburgs struggled for dominance with the Spanish Bourbons until the end of the War of the Austrian Succession.

A sense of Italian national identity was reflected in Gian Rinaldo Carli's Della Patria degli Italiani, written in 1764. It told how a stranger entered a café in Milan and puzzled its occupants by saying that he was neither a foreigner nor a Milanese. "'Then what are you?' they asked. 'I am an Italian,' he explained."

The French Republic spread republican principles, and the institutions of republican governments promoted citizenship over the rule of the Bourbons and Habsburgs and other dynasties. The reaction against any outside control challenged Napoleon Bonaparte's choice of rulers. As Napoleon's reign began to fail, the rulers he had installed tried to keep their thrones (among them Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, and Joachim Murat, King of Naples) further feeding nationalistic sentiments. Beauharnais tried to get Austrian approval for his succession to Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, and on 30 March 1815, Murat issued the Rimini Proclamation, which called on Italians to revolt against their Austrian occupiers.

During the Napoleonic era, in 1797, the first official adoption of the Italian tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France, took place, on the basis of the events following the French Revolution (1789-1799) which, among its ideals, advocated the national self-determination. This event is celebrated by the Tricolour Day. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time on a tricolour cockade in 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion in 1796.

Reaction (1815-1848)

After Napoleon fell (1814), the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) restored the pre-Napoleonic patchwork of independent governments. Italy was again controlled largely by the Austrian Empire, as they directly controlled the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and indirectly the duchies of Parma, Modena and Tuscany.

With the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the absolutist monarchical regimes, the Italian tricolour went underground, becoming the symbol of the patriotic ferments that began to spread in Italy and the symbol which united all the efforts of the Italian people towards freedom and independence. The Italian tricolour waved for the first time in the history of the Risorgimento on 11 March 1821 in the Cittadella of Alessandria, during the revolutions of 1820s, after the oblivion caused by the restoration of the absolutist monarchical regimes.

An important figure of this period was Francesco Melzi d'Eril, serving as vice-president of the Napoleonic Italian Republic (1802-1805) and consistent supporter of the Italian unification ideals that would lead to the Italian Risorgimento shortly after his death. Meanwhile, artistic and literary sentiment also turned towards nationalism; Vittorio Alfieri, Francesco Lomonaco and Niccolò Tommaseo are generally considered three great literary precursors of Italian nationalism, but the most famous proto-nationalist work was Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), widely read as thinly veiled allegorical criticism of Austrian rule. Published in 1827 and extensively revised in the following years, the 1840 version of I Promessi Sposi used a standardized version of the Tuscan dialect, a conscious effort by the author to provide a language and force people to learn it.

Three ideals of unification appeared. Vincenzo Gioberti, a Piedmontese priest, had suggested a confederation of Italian states under the leadership of the Pope in his 1842 book Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians. Pope Pius IX at first appeared interested but he turned reactionary and led the battle against liberalism and nationalism.

Giuseppe Mazzini and Carlo Cattaneo wanted the unification of Italy under a federal republic, which proved too extreme for most nationalists. The middle position was proposed by Cesare Balbo (1789-1853) as a confederation of separate Italian states led by Piedmont.

Animated map of the Italian unification from 1829 to 1871

One of the most influential revolutionary groups was the Carbonari, a secret political discussion group formed in Southern Italy early in the 19th century. After 1815, Freemasonry in Italy was repressed and discredited due to its French connections. A void was left that the Carbonari filled with a movement that closely resembled Freemasonry but with a commitment to Italian nationalism and no association with Napoleon and his government. The response came from middle-class professionals and businessmen and some intellectuals. The Carbonari disowned Napoleon but nevertheless were inspired by the principles of the French Revolution regarding liberty, equality and fraternity. They developed their own rituals and were strongly anticlerical. The Carbonari movement spread across Italy.

The first meeting between Garibaldi and Mazzini at the headquarters of Young Italy in 1833.

Many leading Carbonari revolutionaries wanted a republic, two of the most prominent being Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Mazzini's activity in revolutionary movements caused him to be imprisoned soon after he joined. While in prison, he concluded that Italy could − and therefore should − be unified, and he formulated a program for establishing a free, independent, and republican nation with Rome as its capital. Following his release in 1831, he went to Marseille in France, where he organized a new political society called La Giovine Italia (Young Italy), whose mottos were " Dio e Popolo" (God and People) and " Unione, Forza e Libertà" (Union, Strength and Freedom), which sought the unification of Italy.

Many of the key intellectual and political leaders operated from exile; most Risorgimento patriots lived and published their work abroad after successive failed revolutions. Exile became a central theme of the foundational legacy of the Risorgimento as the narrative of the Italian nation fighting for independence. The exiles were deeply immersed in European ideas, and often hammered away at what Europeans saw as Italian vices, especially effeminacy and indolence. These negative stereotypes emerged from Enlightenment notions of national character that stressed the influence of the environment and history on a people's moral predisposition. Italian exiles both challenged and embraced the stereotypes and typically presented gendered interpretations of Italy's political "degeneration". They called for a masculine response to feminine weaknesses as the basis of national regeneration and fashioned their image of the future Italian nation firmly in the standards of European nationalism.

In 1820, liberal Spaniards successfully revolted, demanding a Constitution, which influenced the development of a similar movement in Italy. Inspired by the Spaniards, a regiment in the army of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, commanded by Guglielmo Pepe, a Carbonaro (member of the secret republican organization), mutinied, conquering the peninsular part of Two Sicilies. The king, Ferdinand I, agreed to enact a new constitution. The revolutionaries, though, failed to court popular support and fell to Austrian troops of the Holy Alliance. Ferdinand abolished the constitution and began systematically persecuting known revolutionaries. Many supporters of revolution in Sicily, including the scholar Michele Amari, were forced into exile during the decades that followed.

The Arrest of Silvio Pellico and Piero Maroncelli, Saluzzo, civic museum

The leader of the 1821 revolutionary movement in Piedmont was Santorre di Santarosa, who wanted to remove the Austrians and unify Italy under the House of Savoy. The Piedmont revolt started in Alessandria, where troops adopted the green, white, and red tricolore of the Cisalpine Republic. King Victor Emmanuel I abdicated in response, and the regent for the new king, Prince Charles Albert, approved a new constitution to appease the revolutionaries, but when King Charles Felix returned he disavowed the constitution and requested assistance from the Holy Alliance. Di Santarosa's troops were defeated, and the would-be Piedmontese revolutionary fled to Paris.

Denis Mack Smith argues:

Few people in 1830 believed that an Italian nation might exist. There were eight states in the peninsula, each with distinct laws and traditions. No one had had the desire or the resources to revive Napoleon's partial experiment in unification. The settlement of 1814-15 had merely restored regional divisions, with the added disadvantage that the decisive victory of Austria over France temporarily hindered Italians in playing off their former oppressors against each other. ... Italians who, like Ugo Foscolo and Gabriele Rossetti, harboured patriotic sentiments, were driven into exile. The largest Italian state, the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with its 8 million inhabitants, seemed aloof and indifferent: Sicily and Naples had once been ruled by Spain, and it had always been foreign to the rest of Italy. The common people in each region, and even the intellectual elite, spoke their mutually unintelligible dialects, and lacked the least vestiges of national consciousness. They wanted good government, not self-government, and had welcomed Napoleon and the French as more equitable and efficient than their native dynasties,

many of which had died out in the 18th century.

Ciro Menotti and his compatriots clashed with the army

After 1830, revolutionary sentiment in favour of a unified Italy began to experience a resurgence, and a series of insurrections laid the groundwork for the creation of one nation along the Italian peninsula.

At the same time, other insurrections arose in the Papal Legations of Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Forlì, Ancona and Perugia. These successful revolutions, which adopted the tricolore in place of the Papal flag, quickly spread to cover all the Papal Legations, and their newly installed local governments proclaimed the creation of a united Italian nation. The revolts in Modena and the Papal Legations inspired similar activity in the Duchy of Parma, where the tricolore flag was adopted. The Parmese duchess Marie Louise left the city during the political upheaval.

In early 1831, the Austrian army began its march across the Italian peninsula, slowly crushing resistance in each province that had revolted. This military action suppressed much of the fledgling revolutionary movement, and resulted in the arrest of many radical leaders.

Revolutions of 1848-1849 and First Italian War of Independence

In 1844, two brothers from Venice, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, members of Young Italy, planned to make a raid on the Calabrian coast against the Kingdom of Two Sicilies in support of Italian unification. They assembled a band of about twenty men ready to sacrifice their lives and set sail on their venture on 12 June 1844. Four days later they landed near Crotone, intending to go to Cosenza, liberate the political prisoners, and issue their proclamations. Tragically for the Bandiera brothers, they did not find the insurgent band they were told awaited them, so they moved towards La Sila. They were ultimately betrayed by one of their party, the Corsican Pietro Boccheciampe, and by some peasants who believed them to be Turkish pirates. A detachment of gendarmes and volunteers were sent against them, and after a short fight, the whole band was taken prisoner and escorted to Cosenza, where a number of Calabrians who had taken part in a previous rising were also under arrest. The Bandiera brothers and their nine companions were executed by firing squad; some accounts state they cried " Viva l'Italia!" ("Long live Italy!") as they fell. The moral effect was enormous throughout Italy, the action of the authorities was universally condemned, and the martyrdom of the Bandiera brothers bore fruit in the subsequent revolutions.

Holographic copy of 1847 of Il Canto degli Italiani, the Italian national anthem since 1946

In this context, in 1847, the first public performance of the song Il Canto degli Italiani, the Italian national anthem since 1946, took place. Il Canto degli Italiani, written by Goffredo Mameli set to music by Michele Novaro, is also known as the Inno di Mameli, after the author of the lyrics, or Fratelli d'Italia, from its opening line.

Soon, Charles Albert, the King of Sardinia (who ruled Piedmont and Savoy), urged by the Venetians and Milanese to aid their cause, decided this was the moment to unify Italy and declared war on Austria ( First Italian Independence War). After initial successes at Goito and Peschiera, he was decisively defeated by Radetzky at the Battle of Custoza on 24 July. An armistice was agreed to, and Radetzky regained control of all of Lombardy-Venetia save Venice itself, where the Republic of San Marco was proclaimed under Daniele Manin.

While Radetzky consolidated control of Lombardy-Venetia and Charles Albert licked his wounds, matters took a more serious turn in other parts of Italy. The monarchs who had reluctantly agreed to constitutions in March came into conflict with their constitutional ministers. At first, the republics had the upper hand, forcing the monarchs to flee their capitals, including Pope Pius IX.

Initially, Pius IX had been something of a reformer, but conflicts with the revolutionaries soured him on the idea of constitutional government. In November 1848, following the assassination of his Minister Pellegrino Rossi, Pius IX fled just before Giuseppe Garibaldi and other patriots arrived in Rome. In early 1849, elections were held for a Constituent Assembly, which proclaimed a Roman Republic on 9 February. On 2 February 1849, at a political rally held in the Apollo Theater, a young Roman priest, the Abbé Carlo Arduini, had made a speech in which he had declared that the Temporal power of the Holy See was a "historical lie, a political imposture, and a religious immorality". In early March 1849, Giuseppe Mazzini arrived in Rome and was appointed Chief Minister. In the Constitution of the Roman Republic, religious freedom was guaranteed by article 7, the independence of the pope as head of the Catholic Church was guaranteed by article 8 of the Principi fondamentali, while the death penalty was abolished by article 5, and free public education was provided by article 8 of the Titolo I.

Before the powers could respond to the founding of the Roman Republic, Charles Albert, whose army had been trained by the exiled Polish general Albert Chrzanowski, renewed the war with Austria. He was quickly defeated by Radetzky at Novara on 23 March 1849. Charles Albert abdicated in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel II, and Piedmontese ambitions to unite Italy or conquer Lombardy were, for the moment, brought to an end. The war ended with a treaty signed on 9 August. A popular revolt broke out in Brescia on the same day as the defeat at Novara, but was suppressed by the Austrians ten days later.

Garibaldi and Cavour making Italy in a satirical cartoon of 1861

Morale was of course badly weakened, but the dream of Risorgimento did not die. Instead, the Italian patriots learned some lessons that made them much more effective at the next opportunity in 1860. Military weakness was glaring, as the small Italian states were completely outmatched by France and Austria.

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810-1861) provided critical leadership. He was a modernizer interested in agrarian improvements, banks, railways and free trade. He opened a newspaper as soon as censorship allowed it: Il Risorgimento called for the independence of Italy, a league of Italian princes, and moderate reforms. He had the ear of the king and in 1852 became prime minister. He ran an efficient active government, promoting rapid economic modernization while upgrading the administration of the army and the financial and legal systems. He sought out support from patriots across Italy.

In 1855, the kingdom became an ally of Britain and France in the Crimean War, which gave Cavour's diplomacy legitimacy in the eyes of the great powers.

In 1857, Carlo Pisacane, an aristocrat from Naples who had embraced Mazzini's ideas, decided to provoke a rising in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. His small force landed on the island of Ponza. It overpowered guards and liberated hundreds of prisoners. In sharp contrast to his hypothetical expectations, there was no local uprising and the invaders were quickly overpowered. Pisacane was killed by angry locals who suspected he was leading a Romani band trying to steal their food.

The Austrians were defeated at the Battle of Magenta on 4 June and pushed back to Lombardy. Napoleon III's plans worked and at the Battle of Solferino, France and Sardinia defeated Austria and forced negotiations; at the same time, in the northern part of Lombardy, the Italian volunteers known as the Hunters of the Alps, led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, defeated the Austrians at Varese and Como. On 12 July, the Armistice of Villafranca was signed. The settlement, by which Lombardy was annexed to Sardinia, left Austria in control of the Veneto and Mantua. The final arrangement was ironed out by "back-room" deals. This was because neither France, Austria, nor Sardinia wanted to risk another battle and could not handle further fighting. All of the sides were eventually unhappy with the outcome of the Second War of Italian Unification and expected another conflict in the future. In fact, Napoleon III and Cavour were mutually indebted: the first because he had withdrawn from the Second Italian War of Independence before the expected conquest of Venice, the second because he had allowed the uprisings to spread to the territories of central-northern Italy, thus going beyond what was agreed with the Plombières Agreement.

Sardinia annexed Lombardy from Austria; it later occupied and annexed the United Provinces of Central Italy, consisting of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchy of Parma, the Duchy of Modena and Reggio and the Papal Legations on 22 March 1860. Sardinia handed Savoy and Nice over to France at the Treaty of Turin, a decision that was the consequence of the Plombières Agreement, on 24 March 1860, an event that caused the Niçard exodus, which was the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was elected in 1871 in Nice at the National Assembly where he tried to promote the annexation of his hometown to the newborn Italian unitary state, but he was prevented from speaking. Because of this denial, between 1871 and 1872 there were riots in Nice, promoted by the Garibaldini and called " Niçard Vespers", which demanded the annexation of the city and its area to Italy. Fifteen Nice people who participated in the rebellion were tried and sentenced.

Giuseppe Garibaldi, celebrated as one of the greatest generals of modern times[57] and as the "Hero of the Two Worlds",[58] who commanded and fought in many military campaigns that led to the unification of Italy

Thus, by early 1860, only five states remained in Italy - the Austrians in Venetia, the Papal States (now minus the Legations), the new expanded Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and San Marino.

In the meantime, Giuseppe Garibaldi, a native of Nice, was deeply resentful of the French annexation of his home city. He hoped to use his supporters to regain the territory. Cavour, terrified of Garibaldi provoking a war with France, persuaded Garibaldi to instead use his forces in the Sicilian rebellions. On 6 May 1860, Garibaldi and his cadre of about a thousand Italian volunteers (called ), steamed from Quarto near Genoa, and, after a stop in Talamone on 11 May, landed near Marsala on the west coast of Sicily.

With Palermo deemed insurgent, Neapolitan general Ferdinando Lanza, arriving in Sicily with some 25,000 troops, furiously bombarded Palermo nearly to ruins. With the intervention of a British admiral, an armistice was declared, leading to the Neapolitan troops' departure and surrender of the town to Garibaldi and his much smaller army.

This resounding success demonstrated the weakness of the Neapolitan government. Garibaldi's fame spread and many Italians began to consider him a national hero. Doubt, confusion, and dismay overtook the Neapolitan court - the king hastily summoned his ministry and offered to restore an earlier constitution, but these efforts failed to rebuild the people's trust in Bourbon governance.

Six weeks after the surrender of Palermo, Garibaldi attacked Messina. Within a week, its citadel surrendered. Having conquered Sicily, Garibaldi proceeded to the mainland, crossing the Strait of Messina with the Neapolitan fleet at hand. The garrison at Reggio Calabria promptly surrendered. As he marched northward, the populace everywhere hailed him, and military resistance faded: on 18 and 21 August, the people of Basilicata and Apulia, two regions of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, independently declared their annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. At the end of August, Garibaldi was at Cosenza, and, on 5 September, at Eboli, near Salerno. Meanwhile, Naples had declared a state of siege, and on 6 September the king gathered the 4,000 troops still faithful to him and retreated over the Volturno river. The next day, Garibaldi, with a few followers, entered by train into Naples, where the people openly welcomed him.

People cheering as Garibaldi enters Naples

Though Garibaldi had easily taken the capital, the Neapolitan army had not joined the rebellion en masse, holding firm along the Volturno river. Garibaldi's irregular bands of about 25,000 men could not drive away the king or take the fortresses of Capua and Gaeta without the help of the Royal Sardinian Army. The Sardinian army, however, could only arrive by traversing the Papal States, which extended across the entire center of the peninsula. Ignoring the political will of the Holy See, Garibaldi announced his intent to proclaim a "Kingdom of Italy" from Rome, the capital city of Pope Pius IX. Seeing this as a threat to the domain of the Catholic Church, Pius threatened excommunication for those who supported such an effort. Afraid that Garibaldi would attack Rome, Catholics worldwide sent money and volunteers for the Papal Army, which was commanded by General Louis Lamoricière, a French exile.

It was in this situation that a Sardinian force of two army corps, under generals Manfredo Fanti and Enrico Cialdini, marched to the frontier of the Papal States, its objective being not Rome but Naples. The Papal troops under Lamoricière advanced against Cialdini, but were quickly defeated at the Battle of Castelfidardo and besieged in the fortress of Ancona, finally surrendering on 29 September. On 9 October, Victor Emmanuel arrived and took command. There was no longer a Papal army to oppose him, and the march southward proceeded unopposed.

Garibaldi distrusted the pragmatic Cavour since Cavour was the man ultimately responsible for orchestrating the French annexation of the city of Nice, which was his birthplace. Nevertheless, he accepted the command of Victor Emmanuel. When the king entered Sessa Aurunca at the head of his army, Garibaldi willingly handed over his dictatorial power. After greeting Victor Emmanuel in Teano with the title of King of Italy, Garibaldi entered Naples riding beside the king. Garibaldi then retired to the island of Caprera, while the remaining work of unifying the peninsula was left to Victor Emmanuel.

The progress of the Sardinian army compelled Francis II to give up his line along the river, and he eventually took refuge with his best troops in the fortress of Gaeta. His courage boosted by his resolute young wife, Queen Marie Sophie, Francis mounted a stubborn defence that lasted three months. But European allies refused to provide him with aid, food and munitions became scarce, and disease set in, so the garrison was forced to surrender. Nonetheless, ragtag groups of Neapolitans loyal to Francis fought on against the Italian government for years to come.

The fall of Gaeta brought the unification movement to the brink of fruition - only Lazio and Venetia remained to be added. On 18 February 1861, Victor Emmanuel assembled the deputies of the first Italian Parliament in Turin. On 17 March 1861, the Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel King of Italy, and on 27 March 1861 Rome was declared capital of Italy, even though it was not yet in the new kingdom.

Borrowing from the old Latin title Pater Patriae of the Roman emperors, the Italians gave to King Victor Emmanuel II the epithet of Father of the Fatherland ( Italian: Padre della Patria). Three months later Cavour died, having seen his life's work nearly completed. When he was given the last rites, Cavour purportedly said: "Italy is made. All is safe."

The disapproval of the various European states culminated in the direct participation of the Sardinian army in the Expedition of the Thousand. In reaction, Spain and the Russian Empire interrupted diplomatic relations with the Kingdom of Sardinia, while the Austrian Empire, which had not maintained relations with this country since 1859, after the Second Italian War of Independence, sent its troops to the Mincio border. France made no hostile statements, but recalled its ambassador. Queen Victoria and her prime minister John Russell convinced the Kingdom of Prussia not to hinder the ongoing process of Italian unification. On 26 October 1860, the same day as the meeting in Teano between the king and Garibaldi, Austria organized a congress in Warsaw to apply measures against the Kingdom of Sardinia, without success; held back by this crisis, Cavour was unable to be present at Teano.

After the creation of the Kingdom of Italy, the United Kingdom and the Swiss Confederation were the first to recognize the new state (30 March 1861), followed by the United States on 13 April. France negotiated the presence of French troops in Rome and recognized the Kingdom of Italy on 15 June, shortly after Cavour's death. It will then be Portugal's turn on 27 June, followed by Greece, the Ottoman Empire and the Scandinavian countries. The recognition of the Netherlands and Belgium occurred in two phases: they recognized the new title of Victor Emmanuel II in July, then the kingdom in November, after a long clash between conservatives and liberals in the Belgian parliament over the latter.

Nonetheless, Garibaldi believed that the government would support him if he attacked Rome. Frustrated at inaction by the king, and bristling over perceived snubs, he came out of retirement to organize a new venture. In June 1862, he sailed from Genoa and landed again at Palermo, where he gathered volunteers for the campaign, under the slogan o Roma o Morte ("either Rome or Death"). The garrison of Messina, loyal to the king's instructions, barred their passage to the mainland. Garibaldi's force, now numbering two thousand, turned south and set sail from Catania. Garibaldi declared that he would enter Rome as a victor or perish beneath its walls. He landed at Melito on 14 August and marched at once into the Calabrian mountains.

The Injured Garibaldi in the Aspromonte Mountains (oil on canvas), credited to Gerolamo Induno

Meanwhile, Victor Emmanuel sought a safer means to the acquisition of the remaining Papal territory. He negotiated with the Emperor Napoleon for the removal of the French troops from Rome through a treaty. They agreed to the September Convention in September 1864, by which Napoleon agreed to withdraw the troops within two years. The Pope was to expand his own army during that time so as to be self-sufficient. In December 1866, the last of the French troops departed from Rome, in spite of the efforts of the pope to retain them. By their withdrawal, Italy (excluding Venetia and Savoy) was freed from the presence of foreign soldiers.

Third War of Independence (1866)

In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Austria contested with Prussia the position of leadership among the German states. The Kingdom of Italy seized the opportunity to capture Venetia from Austrian rule and allied itself with Prussia. Austria tried to persuade the Italian government to accept Venetia in exchange for non-intervention. However, on 8 April, Italy and Prussia signed an agreement that supported Italy's acquisition of Venetia, and on 20 June Italy issued a declaration of war on Austria. Within the context of Italian unification, the Austro-Prussian war is called the Third Independence War, after the First (1848) and the Second (1859).

Victor Emmanuel hastened to lead an army across the Mincio to the invasion of Venetia, while Garibaldi was to invade the Tyrol with his Hunters of the Alps. The Italian army encountered the Austrians at Custoza on 24 June and suffered a defeat. On 20 July the Regia Marina was defeated in the Battle of Lissa. The following day, Garibaldi's volunteers defeated an Austrian force in the Battle of Bezzecca, and moved toward Trento.

Meanwhile, Prussian Minister President Otto von Bismarck saw that his own ends in the war had been achieved, and signed an armistice with Austria on 27 July. Italy followed, officially laying down its arms on 12 August. Garibaldi was recalled from his successful march and resigned with a brief telegram reading only " Obbedisco" ("I obey").

Prussia's success on the northern front obliged Austria to cede Venetia (present-day Veneto and parts of Friuli) and the city of Mantua (the last remnant of the Quadrilatero). Under the terms of a peace treaty signed in Vienna on 12 October, Emperor Franz Joseph had already agreed to cede Venetia to Napoleon III in exchange for non-intervention in the Austro-Prussian War, and thus Napoleon ceded Venetia to Italy on 19 October, in exchange for the earlier Italian acquiescence to the French annexation of Savoy and Nice.

In the Treaty of Vienna, it was written that the annexation of Venetia would have become effective only after a referendum - taken on 21 and 22 October - to let the Venetian people express their will about being annexed or not to the Kingdom of Italy. Historians suggest that the referendum in Venetia was held under military pressure, as a mere 0.01% of voters (69 out of more than 642,000 ballots) voted against the annexation.

Austrian forces put up some opposition to the invading Italians, to little effect. Victor Emmanuel entered Venice and Venetian land, and performed an act of homage in the Piazza San Marco.

Before the defeat at Mentana on 3 November 1867, Enrico Cairoli, his brother Giovanni, and 70 companions had made a daring attempt to take Rome. The group had embarked in Terni and floated down the Tiber. Their arrival in Rome was to coincide with an uprising inside the city. On 22 October 1867, the revolutionaries inside Rome seized control of the Capitoline Hill and of Piazza Colonna. Unfortunately for the Cairoli and their companions, by the time they arrived at Villa Glori, on the northern outskirts of Rome, the uprising had already been suppressed. During the night of 22 October 1867, the group was surrounded by Papal Zouaves, and Giovanni was severely wounded. Enrico was mortally wounded and bled to death in Giovanni's arms.

With Cairoli dead, command was assumed by Giovanni Tabacchi who had retreated with the remaining volunteers into the villa, where they continued to fire at the papal soldiers. These also retreated in the evening to Rome. The survivors retreated to the positions of those led by Garibaldi on the Italian border.

At the summit of Villa Glori, near the spot where Enrico died, there is a plain white column dedicated to the Cairoli brothers and their 70 companions. About 200 meters to the right from the Terrazza del Pincio, there is a bronze monument of Giovanni holding the dying Enrico in his arm. A plaque lists the names of their companions. Giovanni never recovered from his wounds and from the tragic events of 1867. According to an eyewitness, when Giovanni died on 11 September 1869:

In the last moments, he had a vision of Garibaldi and seemed to greet him with enthusiasm. I heard (so says a friend who was present) him say three times: "The union of the French to the papal political supporters was the terrible fact!" he was thinking about Mentana. He called Enrico many times, that he might help him, then he said: "but we will certainly win; we will go to Rome!"

The Pope's reception of San Martino (10 September 1870) was unfriendly. Pius IX allowed violent outbursts to escape him. Throwing the King's letter upon the table he exclaimed, "Fine loyalty! You are all a set of vipers, of whited sepulchres, and wanting in faith." He was perhaps alluding to other letters received from the King. After, growing calmer, he exclaimed: "I am no prophet, nor son of a prophet, but I tell you, you will never enter Rome!" San Martino was so mortified that he left the next day.

The Royal Italian Army, commanded by General Raffaele Cadorna, crossed the Papal frontier on 11 September and advanced slowly toward Rome, hoping that a peaceful entry could be negotiated. The Italian Army reached the Aurelian Walls on 19 September and placed Rome under a state of siege. Although now convinced of his unavoidable defeat, Pius IX remained intransigent to the bitter end and forced his troops to put up a token resistance. On 20 September, after a cannonade of three hours had breached the Aurelian Walls at Porta Pia, the Bersaglieri entered Rome and marched down Via Pia, which was subsequently renamed Via XX Settembre. Forty-nine Italian soldiers and four officers, and nineteen papal troops, died. Rome and Latium were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy after a plebiscite held on 2 October. The results of this plebiscite were accepted by decree of 9 October.

The Quirinal Palace in Rome became the official residence (royal residence of the Kings of Italy and after the Italian constitutional referendum, 1946 residence and workplace for the Presidents of the Italian Republic)

Initially the Italian government had offered to let the pope keep the Leonine City under the Law of Guarantees, but the Pope rejected the offer because acceptance would have been an implied endorsement of the legitimacy of the Italian kingdom's rule over his former domain. Pius IX declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican, although he was not actually restrained from coming and going. Rather, being deposed and stripped of much of his former power also removed a measure of personal protection - if he had walked the streets of Rome, he might have been in danger from political opponents who had formerly kept their views private. Officially, the capital was not moved from Florence to Rome until July 1871.

Historian Raffaele de Cesare made the following observations about Italian unification:

The Roman question was the stone tied to Napoleon's feet - that dragged him into the abyss. He never forgot, even in August 1870, a month before Sedan, that he was a sovereign of a Catholic country, that he had been made Emperor, and was supported by the votes of the Conservatives and the influence of the clergy; and that it was his supreme duty not to abandon the Pontiff.

For twenty years Napoleon III had been the true sovereign of Rome, where he had many friends and relations.... Without him the temporal power would never have been reconstituted, nor, being reconstituted, would have endured.

Unification was achieved entirely in terms of Piedmont's interests. Martin Clark says, "It was Piedmontization all around." Cavour died unexpectedly in June 1861, at 50, and most of the many promises that he made to regional authorities to induce them to join the newly unified Italian kingdom were ignored. The new Kingdom of Italy was structured by renaming the old Kingdom of Sardinia and annexing all the new provinces into its structures. The first king was Victor Emmanuel II, who kept his old title.

National and regional officials were all appointed by Piedmont. A few regional leaders succeeded to high positions in the new national government, but the top bureaucratic and military officials were mostly Piedmontese. The national capital was briefly moved to Florence and finally to Rome, one of the cases of Piedmont losing out.

However, Piedmontese tax rates and regulations, diplomats and officials were imposed on all of Italy. The constitution was Piedmont's old constitution. The document was generally liberal and was welcomed by liberal elements. However, its anticlerical provisions were resented in the pro-clerical regions in places such as around Venice, Rome, and Naples - as well as the island of Sicily. Cavour had promised there would be regional and municipal, local governments, but all the promises were broken in 1861.

The first decade of the kingdom saw savage insurrections in Sicily and in the Naples region. Hearder claimed that failed efforts to protest unification involved "a mixture of spontaneous peasant movement and a Bourbon-clerical reaction directed by the old authorities".

The pope lost Rome in 1870 and ordered the Catholic Church not to co-operate with the new government, a decision fully reversed only in 1929. Most people for Risorgimento had wanted strong provinces, but they got a strong central state instead. The inevitable long-run results were a severe weakness of national unity and a politicized system based on mutually hostile regional violence. Such factors remain in the 21st century.

From the spring of 1860 to the summer of 1861, a major challenge that the Piedmontese parliament faced on national unification was how they should govern and control the southern regions of the country that were frequently represented and described by northern Italian correspondents as "corrupt", "barbaric", and "uncivilized". In response to the depictions of southern Italy, the Piedmontese parliament had to decide whether it should investigate the southern regions to better understand the social and political situations there or it should establish jurisdiction and order by using mostly force.

The dominance of letters sent from the Northern Italian correspondents that deemed Southern Italy to be "so far from the ideas of progress and civilization" ultimately induced the Piedmontese parliament to choose the latter course of action, which effectively illustrated the intimate connection between representation and rule. In essence, the Northern Italians' "representation of the south as a land of barbarism (variously qualified as indecent, lacking in 'public conscience', ignorant, superstitious, etc.)" provided the Piedmontese with the justification to rule the southern regions on the pretext of implementing a superior, more civilized, "Piedmontese morality".

Italian unification is still a topic of debate. According to Massimo d'Azeglio, centuries of foreign domination created remarkable differences in Italian society, and the role of the newly formed government was to face these differences and to create a unified Italian society. Still today the most famous quote of Massimo d'Azeglio is, "L'Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani" ( Italy has been made. Now it remains to make Italians).

The economist and politician Francesco Saverio Nitti criticized the newly created state for not considering the substantial economic differences between Northern Italy, a free-market economy, and Southern Italy, a state protectionist economy, when integrating the two. When the Kingdom of Italy extended the free-market economy to the rest of the country, the South's economy collapsed under the weight of the North's. Nitti contended that this change should have been much more gradual in order to allow the birth of an adequate entrepreneurial class able to make strong investments and initiatives in the south. These mistakes, he felt, were the cause of the economic and social problems which came to be known as the Southern Question ( Questione Meridionale).

The politician, historian, and writer Gaetano Salvemini commented that even though Italian unification had been a strong opportunity for both a moral and economic rebirth of Italy's Mezzogiorno ( Southern Italy), because of a lack of understanding and action on the part of politicians, corruption and organized crime flourished in the South. The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci criticized Italian unification for the limited presence of the masses in politics, as well as the lack of modern land reform in Italy.

Revisionism of Risorgimento produced a clear radicalization of Italy in the mid-20th century, following the fall of the Savoy monarchy and fascism during World War II. Reviews of the historical facts concerning Italian unification's successes and failures continue to be undertaken by domestic and foreign academic authors, including Denis Mack Smith, Christopher Duggan, and Lucy Riall. Recent work emphasizes the central importance of nationalism.

It can be argued that Italian unification was never truly completed in the 19th century. Even after the Capture of Rome (1871), the final event of the unification of Italy, many ethnic Italian speakers ( Trentino-Alto Adigan Italians, Savoyard Italians, Corfiot Italians, Niçard Italians, Swiss Italians, Corsican Italians, Maltese Italians, Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) remained outside the borders of the Kingdom of Italy and this situation created the Italian irredentism.

The Corsican revolutionary Pasquale Paoli was called "the precursor of Italian irredentism" by Niccolò Tommaseo because he was the first to promote the Italian language and socio-culture (the main characteristics of Italian irredentism) in his island; Paoli wanted the Italian language to be the official language of the newly founded Corsican Republic.

The term risorgimento (Rising again) refers to the domestic reorganization of the stratified Italian identity into a unified, national front. The word literally means "Rising again" and was an ideological movement which strove to spark national pride, leading to political oppositionalism to foreign rule and influence. There is contention on its actual impact in Italy, some Scholars arguing it was a liberalizing time for 19th century Italian culture, while others speculate that although it was a patriotic revolution, it only tangibly aided the upper-class and bourgeois publics without actively benefitting the lower classes.

Italia irredenta (unredeemed Italy) was an Italian nationalist opinion movement that emerged after Italian unification. It advocated irredentism among the Italian people as well as other nationalities who were willing to become Italian and as a movement; it is also known as "Italian irredentism". Not a formal organization, it was just an opinion movement that claimed that Italy had to reach its "natural borders", meaning that the country would need to incorporate all areas predominantly consisting of ethnic Italians within the near vicinity outside its borders. Similar patriotic and nationalistic ideas were common in Europe in the 19th century.

Residents of Fiume cheering Gabriele D'Annunzio and his Legionari in September 1919, when Fiume had 22,488 (62% of the population) Italians in a total population of 35,839 inhabitants

At the beginning, Italian irredentism promoted the annexation to Italy of territories where Italians formed the absolute majority of the population, but retained by the Austrian Empire after the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866. During World War One the main "irredent lands" ( terre irredente) were considered to be the provinces of Trento and Trieste and, in a narrow sense, irredentists referred to the Italian patriots living in these two areas.

The term was later expanded to also include multilingual and multiethnic areas, where Italians were a relative majority or a substantial minority, within the northern Italian region encompassed by the Alps, with German, Italian, Slovene, Croatian, Ladin and Istro-Romanian population, such as South Tyrol, Istria, Gorizia and Gradisca and part of Dalmatia. The claims were further extended also to the city of Fiume (see Impresa di Fiume), Corsica, the island of Malta, the County of Nice and Italian Switzerland.

Many Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians looked with sympathy towards the Risorgimento movement that fought for the unification of Italy. However, after the Third Italian War of Independence (1866), when the Veneto and Friuli regions were ceded by the Austrians to the newly formed Kingdom Italy, Istria and Dalmatia remained part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, together with other Italian-speaking areas on the eastern Adriatic. This triggered the gradual rise of Italian irredentism among many Italians in Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia, who demanded the unification of the Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia with Italy. The Italians in Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia supported the Italian Risorgimento: as a consequence, the Austrians saw the Italians as enemies and favored the Slav communities of Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia. During the meeting of the Council of Ministers of 12 November 1866, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria outlined a wide-ranging project aimed at the Germanization or Slavization of the areas of the empire with an Italian presence:

Austrian linguistic map from 1896. In green the areas where Slavs were the majority of the population, in orange the areas where Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians were the majority of the population. The boundaries of Venetian Dalmatia in 1797 are delimited with blue dots.

His Majesty expressed the precise order that action be taken decisively against the influence of the Italian elements still present in some regions of the Crown and, appropriately occupying the posts of public, judicial, masters employees as well as with the influence of the press, work in South Tyrol, Dalmatia and Littoral for the Germanization and Slavization of these territories according to the circumstances, with energy and without any regard. His Majesty calls the central offices to the strong duty to proceed in this way to what has been established.

-  Franz Joseph I of Austria, Council of the Crown of 12 November 1866

Istrian Italians were more than 50% of the total population of Istria for centuries, while making up about a third of the population in 1900. Dalmatia, especially its maritime cities, once had a substantial local ethnic Italian population ( Dalmatian Italians), making up 33% of the total population of Dalmatia in 1803, but this was reduced to 20% in 1816. In Dalmatia there was a constant decline in the Italian population, in a context of repression that also took on violent connotations. During this period, Austrians carried out an aggressive anti-Italian policy through a forced Slavization of Dalmatia. According to Austrian census, the Dalmatian Italians formed 12.5% of the population in 1865. In the 1910 Austro-Hungarian census, Istria had a population of 57.8% Slavic-speakers (Croat and Slovene), and 38.1% Italian speakers. For the Austrian Kingdom of Dalmatia, (i.e. Dalmatia), the 1910 numbers were 96.2% Slavic speakers and 2.8% Italian speakers.

The Italian population in Dalmatia was concentrated in the major cities. In the city of Split in 1890 there were 1,969 Dalmatian Italians (12.5% of the population), in Zadar 7,423 (64.6%), in Šibenik 1,018 (14.5%), in Kotor 623 (18.7%) and in Dubrovnik 331 (4.6%). In other Dalmatian localities, according to Austrian censuses, Dalmatian Italians experienced a sudden decrease: in the twenty years 1890-1910, in Rab they went from 225 to 151, in Vis from 352 to 92, in Pag from 787 to 23, completely disappearing in almost all the inland locations. In 1909 the Italian language lost its status as the official language of Dalmatia in favor of Croatian only (previously both languages were recognized): thus Italian could no longer be used in the public and administrative sphere.

Territories promised to Italy by the Treaty of London (1915), i.e. Trentino-Alto Adige, the Julian March and Dalmatia (tan), and the Snežnik Plateau area (green). Dalmatia, after the WWI, however, was not assigned to Italy but to Yugoslavia

Italy entered into the First World War in 1915 with the aim of completing national unity: for this reason, the Italian intervention in the First World War is also considered the Fourth Italian War of Independence, in a historiographical perspective that identifies in the latter the conclusion of the unification of Italy, whose military actions began during the revolutions of 1848 with the First Italian War of Independence.

During the post-unification era, some Italians were dissatisfied with the current state of the Italian Kingdom since they wanted the kingdom to include Trieste, Istria, and other adjacent territories as well. This Italian irredentism succeeded in World War I with the annexation of Trieste and Trento, with the respective territories of Julian March and Trentino-Alto Adige.

The Kingdom of Italy had declared neutrality at the beginning of the war, officially because the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary was a defensive one, requiring its members to come under attack first. Many Italians were still hostile to Austria's continuing occupation of ethnically Italian areas, and Italy chose not to enter. Austria-Hungary requested Italian neutrality, while the Triple Entente (which included Great Britain, France and Russia) requested its intervention. With the Treaty of London, signed in April 1915, Italy agreed to declare war against the Central Powers in exchange for the irredent territories of Friuli, Trentino, and Dalmatia (see Italia irredenta).

Map of the three Italian provinces of the Governorate of Dalmatia (1941-1943): province of Zara, province of Spalato and province of Cattaro

Italian irredentism obtained an important result after the First World War, when Italy gained Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and the cities of Zara and Pola after the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920. Some historians see the Risorgimento as continuing to that time, which is the view presented at the Central Museum of the Risorgimento at Altare della Patria in Rome. But Italy did not receive other territories promised by the Treaty of London, such Dalmatia, so this outcome was denounced as a " Mutilated victory". The rhetoric of "Mutilated victory" was adopted by Benito Mussolini and led to the rise of Italian Fascism, becoming a key point in the propaganda of Fascist Italy. Historians regard "Mutilated victory" as a "political myth", used by fascists to fuel Italian imperialism and obscure the successes of liberal Italy in the aftermath of World War I.

During the Second World War, after the Axis attack on Yugoslavia, Italy created the Governatorate of Dalmatia (from 1941 to September 1943), so the Kingdom of Italy annexed temporarily Split (Italian Spalato), Kotor ( Cattaro), and most of coastal Dalmatia. From 1942 to 1943, Corsica and Nice (Italian Nizza) were temporarily annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, nearly fulfilling in those years the ambitions of Italian irredentism.

For its avowed purpose, the movement had the "emancipation" of all Italian lands still subject to foreign rule after Italian unification. The Irredentists took language as the test of the alleged Italian nationality of the countries they proposed to emancipate, which were Trentino, Trieste, Dalmatia, Istria, Gorizia, Ticino, Nice (Nizza), Corsica, and Malta. Austria-Hungary promoted Croatian interests in Dalmatia and Istria to weaken Italian claims in the western Balkans before the First World War.

Istrian Italians leave Pola in 1947 during the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus

Under the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947, Istria, Kvarner, most of the Julian March as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara was annexed by Yugoslavia causing the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus, which led to the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 of local ethnic Italians ( Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians), the others being ethnic Slovenians, ethnic Croatians, and ethnic Istro-Romanians, choosing to maintain Italian citizenship.

The Istrian-Dalmatian exodus started in 1943 and ended completely only in 1960. According to the census organized in Croatia in 2001 and that organized in Slovenia in 2002, the Italians who remained in the former Yugoslavia amounted to 21,894 people (2,258 in Slovenia and 19,636 in Croatia).

After World War II, Italian irredentism disappeared along with the defeated Fascists and the Monarchy of the House of Savoy. After the Treaty of Paris (1947) and the Treaty of Osimo (1975), all territorial claims were abandoned by the Italian Republic (see Foreign relations of Italy). The Italian irredentist movement thus vanished from Italian politics. The 1947 Constitution of Italy established five autonomous regions ( Sardinia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sicily, Aosta Valley and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol), in recognition of their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness.

Italy celebrates the anniversary of the unification every fifty years, on 17 March (the date of proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy). The anniversary occurred in 1911 (50th), 1961 (100th), 2011 (150th) and 2021 (160th) with several celebrations throughout the country. While remaining a working day, 17 March is considered a "day promoting the values linked to national identity".

In art, this period was characterised by the Neoclassicism that draws inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome. The main Italian sculptor was Antonio Canova who became famous for his marble sculptures that delicately rendered nude flesh. The mourning Italia turrita on the tomb to Vittorio Alfieri is one of the main works of Risorgimento by Canova. By this time, in sculpture, a veiled woman in the style of the Veiled Rebecca of Benzoni had become an allegory for Italian unification.

Francesco Hayez was another remarkable artist of this period whose works often contain allegories about Italian unification. His most known painting aims to portray the spirit of the Risorgimento: the man wears red, white and green, representing the Italian patriots fighting for independence from the Austro-Hungarian empire while the girl's pale blue dress signifies France, which in 1859 (the year of the painting's creation) made an alliance with the Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia enabling the latter to unify the many states of the Italian peninsula into the new kingdom of Italy. Hayez's three paintings on the Sicilian Vespers are an implicit protest against the foreign domination of Italy.

Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni (1841) by Francesco Hayez

The most well known writer of Risorgimento is Alessandro Manzoni, whose works are a symbol of the Italian unification, both for its patriotic message and because of his efforts in the development of the modern, unified Italian language. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed (orig. Italian: I Promessi Sposi) (1827), generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature.

Vittorio Alfieri, was the founder of a new school in the Italian drama, expressed in several occasions his suffering about the foreign domination's tyranny.

Ugo Foscolo describes in his works the passion and love for the fatherland and the glorious history of the Italian people; these two concepts are respectively well expressed in two masterpieces, The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis and Dei Sepolcri.

Vincenzo Monti, known for the Italian translation of the , described in his works both enthusiasms and disappointments of Risorgimento until his death.

Giovanni Berchet wrote a poetry characterized by a high moral, popular and social content; he also contributed to Il Conciliatore, a progressive bi-weekly scientific and literary journal, influential in the early Risorgimento that was published in Milan from September 1818 until October 1819 when it was closed by the Austrian censors; its writers included also Ludovico di Breme, Giuseppe Nicolini, and Silvio Pellico.

Giacomo Leopardi was one of the most important poets of Risorgimento thanks to works such as Canzone all'Italia and Risorgimento.

Niccolò Tommaseo, the editor of the Italian Language Dictionary in eight volumes, was a precursor of the Italian irredentism and his works are a rare examples of a metropolitan culture above nationalism; he supported the liberal revolution headed by Daniele Manin against the Austrian Empire and he will always support the unification of Italy.

Francesco de Sanctis was one of the most important scholars of Italian language and literature in the 19th century; he supported the Revolution of 1848 in Naples and for this reason he was imprisoned for three years; his reputation as a lecturer on Dante in Turin brought him the appointment of professor at ETH Zürich in 1856; he returned to Naples as Minister of Public Education after the unification of Italy.

The writer and patriot Luigi Settembrini published anonymously the Protest of the People of the Two Sicilies, a scathing indictment of the Bourbon government and was imprisoned and exiled several times by the Bourbons because of his support to Risorgimento; after the formation of the Kingdom of Italy, he was appointed professor of Italian literature at the University of Naples.

Ippolito Nievo is another main representative of Risorgimento with his novel Confessioni d'un italiano; he fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand.

The Risorgimento was also depicted in famous novels: The Leopard written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, by Edmondo De Amicis, and Piccolo mondo antico by Antonio Fogazzaro.

Verdi's bust outside the Teatro Massimo in Palermo

Risorgimento won the support of many leading Italian opera composers. Their librettos often saw a delicate balance between European romantic narratives and dramatic themes evoking nationalistic sentiments. Ideas expressed in operas stimulated the political mobilisation in Italy and among the cultured classes of Europe who appreciated Italian opera. Furthermore, Mazzini and many other nationalists found inspiration in musical discourses.

In his L'italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers), Gioachino Rossini expressed his support to the unification of Italy; the patriotic line Pensa alla patria, e intrepido il tuo dover adempi: vedi per tutta Italia rinascere gli esempi d'ardir e di valor ("Think about the fatherland and intrepid do your duty: see for all Italy the birth of the examples of courage and value") was censored in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies.

Vincenzo Bellini was a secret member of the Carbonari and in his masterpiece I puritani (The Puritans), the last part of Act 2 is an allegory to Italian unification. Another Bellini opera, , was at the center of an unexpected standing ovation during its performance in Milan in 1859: while the chorus was performing Guerra, guerra! Le galliche selve (War, war! The Gallic forests) in Act 2, the Italians began to greet the chorus with loud applause and to yell the word "War!" several times towards the Austrian officers at the opera house.

Patriots scrawling "Viva VERDI" on walls

Historians vigorously debate how political were the operas of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). In particular, the chorus of the Hebrew slaves (known as " Va, pensiero") from the third act of the opera was intended to be an anthem for Italian patriots, who were seeking to unify their country and free it from foreign control in the years up to 1861 (the chorus's theme of exiles singing about their homeland, and its lines such as O mia patria, si bella e perduta - "O my country, so lovely and so lost" - were thought to have resonated with many Italians). Beginning in Naples in 1859 and spreading throughout Italy, the slogan "Viva VERDI" was used as an acronym for D' Italia ( Viva Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), referring to Victor Emmanuel II.

Franco Della Peruta argues in favour of close links between the operas and the Risorgimento, emphasizing Verdi's patriotic intent and links to the values of the Risorgimento. Verdi started as a republican, became a strong supporter of Cavour and entered the Italian parliament on Cavour's suggestion. His politics caused him to be frequently in trouble with the Austrian censors. Verdi's main works of 1842-49 were especially relevant to the struggle for independence, including Nabucco (1842), I Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843), (1844), (1846), (1847), and La battaglia di Legnano (1848). However, starting in the 1850s, his operas showed few patriotic themes because of the heavy censorship of the absolutist regimes in power.

Verdi later became disillusioned by politics, but he was personally active part in the political world of events of the Risorgimento and was elected to the first Italian parliament in 1861. Likewise Marco Pizzo argues that after 1815 music became a political tool, and many songwriters expressed ideals of freedom and equality. Pizzo says Verdi was part of this movement, for his operas were inspired by the love of country, the struggle for Italian independence, and speak to the sacrifice of patriots and exiles. On the other side of the debate, Mary Ann Smart argues that music critics at the time seldom mentioned any political themes. Likewise Roger Parker argues that the political dimension of Verdi's operas was exaggerated by nationalistic historians looking for a hero in the late 19th century.

The final scene of the opera Risorgimento! (2011) by Lorenzo Ferrero

Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco and the Risorgimento are the subject of a 2011 opera, Risorgimento! by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Italian unification.

The Leopard is a film from 1963, based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and directed by Luchino Visconti. It features Burt Lancaster as the eponymous character, the Prince of Salina. The film depicts his reaction to the Risorgimento, and his vain attempts to retain his social standing.

There are other movies set in this period:

Ascoli, Albert Russell and Krystyna Von Henneberg, eds. Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (2001) online

Beales, Derek; Biagini, Eugenio (2003). The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (2 ed.). Longman. ISBN 978-0-582-36958-0.

Carter, Nick, ed., Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 233 pp

Clark, Martin. The Italian Risorgimento (2nd ed. 2009); 146 pp

Collier, Martin, Italian Unification, 1820-71 (Heinemann, 2003); textbook, 156 pages excerpt

Davis, John A., ed. (2000). Italy in the nineteenth century: 1796-1900. London: Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 29 June 2011.

De Mattei, Roberto. Pius IX (2004).

Gilmour, David.The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (2011). excerpt

Hearder, Harry. Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento 1790-1870 (1983) excerpt

Holt, Edgar. The Making of Italy 1815-1870, (1971).

Körner, Axel. America in Italy: The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763-1865 (Princeton UP, 2017)

Mendola, Louis. The Kingdom of Sicily 1130-1860 (2015).

Mowat, R.B. A history of European diplomacy, 1815-1914 (1922) pp 115-63 online free

Patriarca, Silvana, and Lucy Riall, eds. The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13 essays on specialized topics by scholars excerpt; review

Pearce, Robert, and Andrina Stiles. Access to History: The Unification of Italy 1789-1896 (4th rf., Hodder Education, 2015), textbook. excerpt

Pozzo, Barbara (2013). "Masculinity Italian style". Nevada Law Journal. 13 (2): 15.

Procacci, Giuliano. History of the Italian People (Pelican, London, 1973) Trans Anthony Paul.

Rapone, Danilo. Religion and politics in the Risorgimento. Britain and the new Italy, 1861-1875 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3012 pp.

Riall, Lucy. The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society, and National Unification (Routledge, 1994) online

Riall, Lucy. Garibaldi: Invention of a hero (Yale UP, 2008).

Riall, Lucy (1998). "Hero, saint or revolutionary? Nineteenth-century politics and the cult of Garibaldi". Modern Italy. 3 (2): 191-204. doi:10.1080/13532949808454803. S2CID 143746713.

Ridley, Jasper. Garibaldi (1974), a standard biography.

Sarlin, Simon (2009). "Fighting the Risorgimento: foreign volunteers in southern Italy (1860-63)". Journal of Modern Italian Studies. 14 (4): 476-490. doi:10.1080/13545710903281987. S2CID 144416217.

Smith, Denis Mack. Cavour (1985)

Smith, Denis Mack. Mazzini (1995) excerpt

Smith, Denis Mack. Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento (Oxford University Press, 1971)

Thayer, William Roscoe (1911). The Life and Times of Cavour vol 1. old interpretations but useful on details; vol 1 goes to 1859]; volume 2 online covers 1859-62

Trevelyan, George Macaulay (1911). Garibaldi and the making of Italy. Longmans, Green and Company. garibaldi trevelyan.

Wawro, Geoffrey. "Austria versus the Risorgimento: A New Look at Austria's Italian strategy in the 1860s." European History Quarterly 26#1 (1996): 7-29.

Woolf, Stuart Joseph. The Italian Risorgimento (1969).

Woolf, Stuart. A History of Italy 1700-1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change (1960), 519 pp

Wright, Owain (2012). "British foreign policy and the Italian occupation of Rome, 1870". The International History Review. 34 (1): 161-176. doi:10.1080/07075332.2012.668343. S2CID 154971989.

Massimo Colella, Luigi Russo interprete di Vincenzo Cuoco. Un inedito corso universitario, in "Otto/Novecento", 2020, pp. 153-187.

Alio, Jacqueline. Sicilian Studies: A Guide and Syllabus for Educators (2018), 250 pp.

Bouchard, Norma, ed. Risorgimento in modern Italian culture: revisiting the nineteenth-century past in history, narrative, and cinema. (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2005).

De Francesco, Antonino. The antiquity of the Italian nation: the cultural origins of a political myth in modern Italy, 1796-1943 (Oxford UP, 2013).

Isabella, Maurizio (2012). "Rethinking Italy's Nation-Building 150 Years Afterwards: The New Risorgimento Historiography". Past & Present (217): 247-268. doi:10.1093/pastj/gts028. JSTOR 23324209.

Manenti, Luca G., "Italian Freemasonry from the Eighteenth Century to Unification. Protagonists, Metamorphoses, Interpretations", in History of the Grand Orient of Italy, edited by E. Locci (Washington D.C., Westphalia Press, 2019), pp. 27-60.

Ramm, Agatha (1972). "The Risorgimento in Sicily: Recent Literature". English Historical Review. 87 (345): 795-811. doi:10.1093/ehr/LXXXVII.CCCXLV.795. JSTOR 562204.

Rao, Anna Maria. "Napoleonic Italy: Old and New Trends in Historiography." in Ute Planert, ed., Napoleon's Empire (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016). pp 84-97.

Salsini, Laura A. "Re-envisioning the Risorgimento: Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti's Amore mio uccidi Garibaldi." Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 42#1 (2008).

Alio, Jacqueline. Sicilian Studies: A Guide and Syllabus for Educators (2018), 250 pp.

Bacchin, Elena. Italofilia. Opinione pubblica britannica e il Risorgimento italiano 1847-1864 (Turin, Carocci editore, 2014), 266 pp

Banti, Alberto Mario. La nazione del Risorgimento: parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell'Italia unita. Torino, Einaudi, 2000

Banti, Alberto Mario. Il Risorgimento italiano. Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2004 (Quadrante Laterza; 125)

Ghisalberti, Carlo. Istituzioni e società civile nell'età del Risorgimento. Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2005 (Biblioteca universale Laterza; 575)

Della Peruta, Franco. L'Italia del Risorgimento: problemi, momenti e figure. Milano, Angeli, 1997 (Saggi di storia; 14)

Della Peruta, Franco. Conservatori, liberali e democratici nel Risorgimento. Milano, Angeli, 1989 (Storia; 131)

De Rosa, Luigi. La provincia subordinata. Saggio sulla questione meridionale, Bari, Laterza, 2004

Guerra, Nicola (2009). Eclettica (ed.). Controrisorgimento. Il movimento filoestense apuano e lunigianese. Nicola Guerra. ISBN 978-8890416804.

Guerra, Nicola (October 2011). "Le due anime del processo di unificazione nazionale: Risorgimento e Controrisorgimento. La necessità di un nuovo approccio di ricerca ancora disatteso". Chronica Mundi: 53-68. ISSN 2239-7515.

Scirocco, Alfonso. L'Italia del risorgimento: 1800-1860. (vol. 1 di Storia d'Italia dall'unità alla Repubblica), Bologna, Il mulino, 1990

Scirocco, Alfonso. In difesa del Risorgimento. Bologna, Il mulino, 1998 (Collana di storia contemporanea)

Tomaz, Luigi. Il confine d'Italia in Istria e Dalmazia, Presentazione di Arnaldo Mauri, Conselve, Think ADV, 2008.

Carlo Cardia, Risorgimento e religione, Giappichelli, Torino, 2011, ISBN 978-88-348-2552-5.

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Native name Risorgimento Date 1848-1871 Location Italy Participants Italian society, Kingdom of Sardinia, Provisional Government of Milan, Republic of San Marco, Kingdom of Sicily, Roman Republic, Carboneria, French Empire, Red Shirts, Hungarian legion, Southern Army, United Provinces of Central Italy, Kingdom of Italy Outcome The unification of Italy ( Italian: Unità d'Italia, Italian: [uniˈtaddiˈtaːlja]), also known as the Risorgimento (, Italian: lit.

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The German Empire was founded on January 18, 1871, in the aftermath of three successful wars by the North German state of Prussia. Within a seven-year period Denmark, the Habsburg monarchy, and France were vanquished in short, decisive conflicts. The empire was forged not as the result of the outpouring of nationalist feeling from the masses but through traditional cabinet diplomacy and agreement by the leaders of the states in the North German Confederation, led by Prussia, with the hereditary rulers of Bavaria, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Württemberg. Prussia, occupying more than three-fifths of the area of Germany and having approximately three-fifths of the population, remained the dominant force in the nation until the empire's demise at the end of another war in 1918.

At its birth Germany occupied an area of 208,825 square miles (540,854 square km) and had a population of more than 41 million, which was to grow to 67 million by 1914. The religious makeup was 63 percent Protestant, 36 percent Roman Catholic, and 1 percent Jewish. The nation was ethnically homogeneous apart from a modest-sized Polish minority and smaller Danish, French, and Sorbian populations. Approximately 67 percent lived in villages and the remainder in towns and cities. Literacy was close to universal because of compulsory education laws dating to the 1820s and '30s.

Domestic concerns

From its origins in 1871, the empire was governed under the constitution designed four years earlier by Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister, for the North German Confederation. This constitution reflected the predominantly rural nature of Germany in 1867 and the authoritarian proclivities of Bismarck, who was a member of the Junker landowning elite. There were two houses: the Reichstag, to represent the people, and the Bundesrat, to represent the 25 states. The former comprised 397 members elected by universal manhood suffrage and a secret ballot. The constituencies established in 1867 and 1871 were never altered to reflect population shifts, and rural areas thus retained a vastly disproportionate share of power as urbanization progressed. In theory the Reichstag's ability to reject any bill seemed to make it an important reservoir of power; in practice, however, the power of the lower house was circumscribed by the government 's reliance on indirect taxes and by the parliament's willingness to approve the military budget every seven (after 1893, every five) years. Most legislative proposals were submitted to the Bundesrat first and to the Reichstag only if they were approved by the upper house. Although members of the Reichstag could question the chancellor about his policies, the legislative bodies were rarely consulted about the conduct of foreign affairs. Imperial ministers were chosen by and were responsible to the emperor rather than to the legislature.

A problem that was to plague the empire throughout its existence was the disparity between the Prussian and imperial political systems. In Prussia the lower house was elected under a restricted three-class suffrage system, an electoral law that allowed the richest 15 percent of the male population to choose approximately 85 percent of the delegates. A conservative majority was always assured in Prussia, whereas the universal manhood suffrage resulted in increasing majorities for the political centre and left-wing parties in the imperial parliament. William I was both German emperor (1871-88) and king of Prussia (1861-88). Apart from two brief instances the imperial chancellor was simultaneously prime minister of Prussia. Thus, the executives had to seek majorities from two separate legislatures elected by radically different franchises. A further problem was that government ministers were generally selected from the civil service or the military. They often had little experience with parliamentary government or foreign affairs.

The constitution had been designed by Bismarck to give the chancellor and monarch primary decision-making power. Universal manhood suffrage had been proposed because of Bismarck's belief that the rural population would vote for either the Conservative or Free Conservative parties. (Female suffrage had not been proposed because politics was considered a male preserve at the time.) The Progressives, a left-wing liberal party, were expected to do poorly in the two-thirds of Germany that was rural in 1867. Bismarck had not counted on new parties such as the Centre Party, a Roman Catholic confessional party, or the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD), both of which began participating in imperial and Prussian elections in the early 1870s. The Centre generally received 20-25 percent of the total vote in all elections. The SPD grew from 2 seats in the first imperial election to 35 by 1890, when the SPD actually gained a plurality of votes. Bismarck termed the Centre and SPD along with the Progressives Reichsfeinde ("enemies of the empire") because he believed that each sought in its own way to change the fundamental conservative political character of the empire.

Beginning in 1871, he launched the Kulturkampf ("cultural struggle"), a campaign in concert with German liberals against political Catholicism. Bismarck's aim was clearly to destroy the Centre Party. Liberals saw the Roman Catholic church as politically reactionary and feared the appeal of a clerical party to the more than one-third of Germans who professed Roman Catholicism. Both Bismarck and the liberals doubted the loyalty of the Catholic population to the Prussian-centred and, therefore, primarily Protestant nation. In Prussia the minister of ecclesiastical affairs and education, Adalbert Falk, introduced a series of bills establishing civil marriage, limiting the movement of the clergy, and dissolving religious orders. All church appointments were to be approved by the state. As a result hundreds of parishes and several bishoprics were left without incumbents. Clerical civil servants were purged from the Prussian administration.

The Kulturkampf failed to achieve its goals and, if anything, convinced the Roman Catholic minority that their fear of persecution was real and that a confessional party to represent their interests was essential. By the late 1870s Bismarck abandoned the battle as a failure. He now launched a campaign against the SPD in concert with the two conservative parties and many National Liberals. Fearing the potential of the Social Democrats in a rapidly industrializing Germany, Bismarck found a majority to outlaw the party from 1878 to 1890, although constitutionally it could not be forbidden to participate in elections. Party offices and newspapers were closed down and meetings prohibited. Many socialists fled to Switzerland and sought to keep the party alive in exile. During the 1880s Bismarck also sought to win the workers away from socialism by introducing legislation granting them modest pensions, accident insurance, and a national system of medical coverage. Like the Kulturkampf, the campaign against the SPD was a failure, and, when the 1890 elections showed enormous gains for the Reichsfeinde, Bismarck began to consider having the German princes reconvene, as in 1867, to draw up a new constitution. The new emperor, William II, saw no reason to begin his reign (1888-1918) with a potential bloodbath and asked for the 74-year-old chancellor's resignation. Thus, Bismarck, the architect of German unity, left the scene in a humiliating fashion, believing that his creation was fatally flawed. Indeed, his policy of supporting rapid social and economic modernization while avoiding any reform of the authoritarian political system did lead to an atmosphere of persistent crisis.

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Germany - Unification, Imperialism, WWI: The German Empire was founded on January 18, 1871, in the aftermath of three successful wars by the North German state of Prussia. Within a seven-year period Denmark, the Habsburg monarchy, and France were vanquished in short, decisive conflicts.