Fig. 1
Map of Italy. Reference: Adapted from a historical map of Europe used. Courtesy of www.d-maps.com [https://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=6029&lang=en, accessed 1 July 2018]
One of the many misconceptions common in modern European history is that the Unification of Italy occurred between 1859 and 1861. The joining of most of northern and southern Italy into a single kingdom during this period was widely regarded as a major historical watershed by contemporary spectators, and it has often been treated as such by historians. It is commonplace to think about and to write of history as though it were easily divisible into conveniently distinct eras separated by fixed turning points. While such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center of 2001, the Arab Spring of 2011, and both the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and the United States’ election of Donald Trump in 2016 have all been presented as historical watersheds in contemporary media, it is possible that in time they will come to appear as mere flashpoints within a more prolonged period of global change that began with the end of the Cold War. Likewise, the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the French Revolution beginning but by no means ending in 1789 are all examples of dates frequently treated as historical watersheds, but which can be more accurately described as flashpoints within much longer patterns of historical development. The same might even be said of ‘Year Zero’ itself, otherwise known as 1945. This treatment has been applied to various dates from the nineteenth century, most notably the Vienna Settlement of 1815, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and also to what is traditionally regarded as the Unification of Italy between 1859 and 1861.
Although the two-year period between 1859 and 1861 witnessed the joining of most of the Italian peninsula and islands into a centralised entity, which was officially proclaimed as the Kingdom of Italy, it could be argued that the process by which the country was unified actually began in 1713, if not even earlier. In many ways, the grouping together of ancient regions into composite and somewhat artificial states like the Kingdom of Sardinia (Sardinia, Piedmont, and later Liguria) and what would eventually become known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Sicily, Campania, Lucania/Basilicata, Calabria, Puglia, Abruzzo, and modern-day Molise) anticipated the union in 1861. Insofar as it did take place during the mid-nineteenth century, it is more accurate to date the unification process as having commenced with either the forced allocation of Liguria to Piedmont by the Allies who defeated Napoléon in 1814, or the creation of a ‘perfect fusion’ between the administrative and legal systems of Piedmont and the island of Sardinia in 1847, which Martin Clark has described as ‘the first voluntary annexation of the Risorgimento’.1 It is just as appropriate to describe the events of 1859 and 1860 as witnessing the annexation of Lombardy, the Duchies and Papal States of central Italy, Sicily, and the whole of the southern mainland to Piedmont, as it is to talk of national unification. The same goes for the cession of Venice and its hinterland to Piedmont (via France), forced upon Austria by the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and the Italian invasion of the Patrimony of St Peter—the city of Rome and most of modern-day Lazio—in 1870. What occurred in 1861, therefore, was the proclamation of a new state, rather than a sudden and straightforward unification of the Italian peninsula. Furthermore, the traditional focus on the turning point of 1861 serves to obscure the fact that most of the existing institutions and practices of Piedmont-Sardinia were extended throughout that country’s newly acquired territories, rather than created as anything genuinely new; the new Italy created between 1859 and 1861 was very much a continuation—albeit in a greatly aggrandised form—of the old Kingdom of Sardinia. That the supposedly new state included neither Rome nor Venice—the former being the country’s natural capital, and the latter surely the most iconic of Italian cities—signifies that Italy was not truly unified before 1870. Even then, Italy had to wait until the twentieth century to obtain possession of unquestionably Italian Trieste, and the territories now known as Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige. The Italian state has, since 1870, won and lost possession of Istria, and it has never succeeded in completing the unification of all Italianate lands by securing the inclusion of the ancient republic of San Marino, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, and the more-Italian-than-French island of Corsica. These realities make it possible to suggest that Italy’s national unification was a far more lengthy and complex process than a simple union of northern and southern Italian states taking place between 1859 and 1861. It could even be argued that the Italy created was a state without a nation, or that it has never really been unified at all.2 For this reason, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of the ‘unifying of Italy’, implying a partial and ongoing process which did not begin in 1859 and which was not completed by 1870, than to use the formal and traditionally capitalised term the ‘Unification of Italy’ most commonly attached and confined to the two years before 1861.
The unifying of Italy—insofar as it occurred between 1859 and 1870—was part of a wider political, economic, and social reorganisation of Europe, which included the independence of Greece in the 1820s, the not dissimilar unifying of Germany by 1871, and the creation of a raft of new states at the Versailles peace conference in 1919; all of these developments contributed to the gradual replacement of the continent’s old multinational empires with new nation-states over the course of a whole century.3 The Italian contribution to this wider and longer restructuring of Europe was as surprising as it was dramatic. At face value, it appeared to be the achievement of a patriotic movement whose leaders, most notably the popular hero Giuseppe Garibaldi and the political philosopher Giuseppe Mazzini, had spent decades campaigning for a single democratic republic to be created between the natural frontiers of the Alps and the Mediterranean. But the kind of unified state that emerged in Italy between 1859 and 1870, and the manner in which it was created, was very different from the Mazzinian ideal.4 The Italy which emerged from the exciting events of 1859–61 was far more the creation of Count Cavour, the Piedmontese prime minister who presided over a succession of improvised and opportunist moves which brought about process of change controlled ‘from above’ as much as it was spurred by revolution ‘from below’.5 Beginning under his leadership in 1859, and continuing after his death through the acquisition of Venice in 1866 and Rome in 1870, the unifying of Italy can be described as an effective conquest of the rest of Italy by the north-western region of Piedmont, almost irrespective of the wishes of the population it transformed officially but not emotionally into ‘Italians’. Perhaps the greatest irony is that, unlike Mazzini and Garibaldi, Cavour had considered the unity of such a large portion of Italy to be fantasy almost until it became a fait accompli in 1860.6
Prior to national unification, the term ‘Italy’ was generally used in reference to territory rather than people, and Denis Mack Smith has suggested that there was some truth in Count Metternich’s famous dismissal of the term as merely a ‘geographical expression’.7 The population of the peninsula spoke a plethora of different languages and dialects, and were divided by age-old rivalries as much as by the formidable array of geographical frontiers which had led to experience what Roger Absalom has described as ‘centuries of disparate experience’.8 Indeed, it can be contended that there were ‘several Italies’ in existence prior to 1861, and the challenge presented to the small clique of mainly Piedmontese liberals who were charged with uniting them all was enormous. Rather than innovate, they believed that the extension of the existing administration of the old Kingdom of Sardinia state across the rest of Italy would be the quickest and easiest route towards harmonising Italian politics and bridging Italian economic and social divisions. However, the determination of the first king of Italy to retain his dynastic title of Vittorio Emanuele II—rather than styling himself more appropriately as Vittorio Emanuele I—and the opening of the first all-Italian parliament as the eighth rather than the first of his reign, indicated the extent to which Italy’s new rulers were inclined to view national unification not so much as a new beginning, but rather as the continuation of their version of Italy—the Piedmontese one, which had overcome the others. One of the most obvious signifiers of continuity between the old Italy and the new was the fact that Turin passed with scarcely any question from being the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia to being the capital of Italy, irrespective of the fact that it was too distant to deal effectively with the many problems presented by its newly acquired possessions. Moreover, the ‘Piedmontisation’ of Italy decided upon by the country’s new leaders was undertaken rapidly, arbitrarily, and often forcibly. Despite being endorsed by regional plebiscites, the practical manner in which most of Italy was united by 1861, and then consolidated by 1870, sparked a crisis of legitimacy. It created a mutual resentment between northerners and southerners, which has compromised the Italian state ever since. Nowhere was any appreciation of the scale of the challenge better expressed than the famous—if perhaps apocryphal—declaration attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio: ‘We have made Italy: now we must make Italians.’ Nick Carter was apt to describe the efforts of Italian leaders to bridge the chasm that existed between the Cavourian state and the various populations of the new Italy as ‘wholly inadequate’,9 but there was no lack of will. In the hope of forging a sense of national consciousness, and aiming to overcome the country’s ancient geographical, economic, cultural, and emotional divides, the Italian government committed itself immediately to a policy of somehow securing possession of Rome and Venice, embarked upon an ambitious programme of public works aimed at physically pulling the country together, and sought to propagate a myth surrounding the Risorgimento and its protagonists.10
Nowhere in Europe was anyone more eager to subscribe to this myth than in Great Britain. The unifying of Italy was a defining moment in the history of Victorian Britain, and in the history of Victorian foreign policy in particular. British sympathies for the Italian national cause had been anticipated during the struggle to liberate Greece during the 1820s, and Italian affairs played an important role in British domestic politics during 1859 and 1860. What the Victorians saw happening in Risorgimento Italy coincided with their dominant, self-congratulatory Whig-Protestant ideology. There are obvious parallels between the Piedmontese treatment of its newly acquired possessions and the British rule of Ireland, both in terms of how governments in Turin and London made mistakes at the same time as undertaking what each no doubt thought of as ‘civilising missions’. Nonetheless, A. N. Wilson has remarked that while British misrule of Ireland represented the dark side of Victorian Britain, the British interest in and support for Italian unification represented its progressive and optimistic lighter side.11 For British enthusiasts, the aggrandisement of Piedmont within Italy meant the creat...