R4.5 Unification of Germany and Italy (1815–1871)

Between 1815 and 1871 two new great powers appeared in the centre of Europe. In 1815 "Germany" and "Italy" were names for regions divided among many rulers; by 1871 each was a single state with its own monarch, parliament and army. How this happened, and how far it was the work of nationalism, of the ambitions of Piedmont and Prussia, or of war and diplomacy, is the subject of this study.

Germany and Italy in 1815: the Congress of Vienna

The Congress of Vienna met from September 1814 to June 1815 to redraw the map of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna was dominated by the four powers that had defeated France (Austria, Prussia, Russia and Britain); its Final Act was signed on 9 June 1815. Its decisions about Germany and Italy set the framework that nationalists spent the next fifty years trying to break.

The legacy of Napoleon

Napoleon had already changed both regions. In Germany he abolished the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and cut the number of German states from more than 300 to about 40. In Italy he created a Kingdom of Italy in the north and a Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples in the south. Both regions received the Napoleonic Code, which made citizens equal before the law, and a modern administration run by trained officials.

Napoleonic rule also provoked resistance. German writers called the campaign of 1813 against France the War of Liberation, and Italian secret societies that later fought Austria first organised against French rule. The historian Thomas Nipperdey began his history of nineteenth-century Germany with the words "In the beginning was Napoleon", because the French conquest destroyed the old order and gave Germans their first experience of a national cause.

The principles of the settlement

The peacemakers wanted to prevent another French war and another revolution. They worked from four principles. Legitimacy meant restoring the rightful (pre-revolutionary) dynasties where possible. The balance of power meant that no single state should be strong enough to dominate Europe. Containment meant surrounding France with strong buffer states. Compensation meant that the victors took territory in return for their efforts or for land given up elsewhere.

These principles were not applied to nations. The peacemakers thought in terms of dynasties and territories, and the wishes of peoples did not count. This was the main reason the settlement was later attacked by nationalism, the belief that each nation should have its own state, and by liberalism, the belief in constitutional government, the rule of law and individual rights such as a free press.

The settlement in Germany

The Congress replaced the Holy Roman Empire with the German Confederation (Bund) of 39 states, including four free cities. Its only common institution was the Federal Diet at Frankfurt, a meeting of envoys appointed by the princes, not an elected parliament. Austria held the presidency. The Austrian and Prussian lands outside the old empire, such as Hungary and East Prussia, were outside the Confederation.

Prussia gained the Rhineland, Westphalia and about two-fifths of Saxony. The Rhineland was given to Prussia to guard the frontier with France, but it turned out to be the most important gain of the settlement: it contained the coal of the Ruhr and the Saar and some of the most advanced industry in Germany. It also split Prussia into two separate blocks of territory, which gave Prussia a strong interest in linking them economically.

Article 13 of the German Federal Act of 8 June 1815 stated that "Estates constitutions will occur in all German states". The promise was vague and Austria and Prussia did not keep it. Only some southern and central states (Baden, Bavaria and Württemberg in 1818–1819, and others) granted constitutions, which became models for liberals elsewhere.

The settlement in Italy

Austria received Lombardy and Venetia directly, as the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. Habsburg relatives were restored or installed in Tuscany and Modena, and Napoleon’s wife Marie-Louise received Parma. The Pope regained the Papal States across central Italy, and the Bourbon king Ferdinand returned to Naples, which was joined with Sicily as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1816. In the north-west, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, ruled by the House of Savoy, was strengthened by the former Republic of Genoa as a buffer against France.

The diagram of the settlement shows why Austria became the main obstacle to change in both regions. Austria presided over the German Confederation, ruled the richest part of northern Italy, and was linked by marriage and treaty to the rulers of the Italian duchies. Treaties signed in 1815 allowed Austrian troops to garrison towns in the Papal States, and an alliance of 1815 bound the King of the Two Sicilies not to introduce changes that Austria opposed.

Metternich, the Holy Alliance and the Congress System

Klemens von Metternich was Austria’s foreign minister from 1809 and its chancellor from 1821 until the revolution of March 1848. His aim was to preserve the Habsburg Empire, a state of many nationalities (Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Croats and others) that national movements threatened to break apart. For Metternich, liberalism and nationalism were one danger: both came from the French Revolution, and both would destroy Austria if they spread.

The alliances of 1815

Two alliances were made in the autumn of 1815. The Holy Alliance of September 1815, proposed by Tsar Alexander I of Russia and signed by the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia, bound them to govern according to Christian principles and to help each other. Britain refused to join, and Metternich privately thought the text meaningless, but it became the name for the cooperation of the three conservative eastern monarchies.

The Quadruple Alliance of November 1815 (Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia) was a practical agreement to uphold the peace settlement and keep France in check. Its sixth article provided for regular meetings of the powers. These meetings became the Congress System, also called the Concert of Europe: the great powers managing European affairs together through conferences.

The table of congresses shows that the system worked best for Austria in Italy. The Troppau Protocol claimed for the eastern powers a right of intervention: any state that changed its government by revolution could be brought back "into the bosom of the Great Alliance", by force if necessary. Britain rejected this principle, and after Verona the congress meetings stopped, but Austria continued to act in Italy on the same principle, sending troops again in 1831.

Metternich’s system in Germany

In Germany the main threat came from students and professors. The Burschenschaften, student fraternities founded at Jena in 1815, wanted a united, constitutional Germany. At the Wartburg Festival of October 1817 about 500 students marked the anniversary of the victory over Napoleon at Leipzig and the Reformation by burning books they regarded as reactionary. In March 1819 Karl Sand, a theology student and member of a radical Burschenschaft, murdered the conservative writer August von Kotzebue, whom nationalists believed to be a Russian spy.

Metternich used the murder to call a conference of the main German states at Carlsbad in August 1819. The Carlsbad Decrees were passed by the Federal Diet on 20 September 1819. They placed a government agent at every university to watch teachers and students, dissolved the Burschenschaften, imposed censorship on newspapers and short publications, and set up a central commission at Mainz to investigate "revolutionary plots".

So long as this decree shall remain in force no publication which appears in the form of daily issues, or as a serial not exceeding twenty sheets of printed matter, shall go to press in any state of the union without the previous knowledge and approval of the state officials.

The Carlsbad Decrees, Press Law, Article 1, adopted by the Federal Diet of the German Confederation, 20 September 1819 (translation in J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History, 1906). The legal language shows how Metternich worked: through the Diet, so that censorship became an obligation of every German state, not just of Austria. Twenty printed sheets equalled 320 pages, so the law aimed at newspapers, pamphlets and journals, the forms in which political ideas reached the public.

The Final Act of Vienna (1820) confirmed that the princes held all sovereign power and that no state constitution could limit their duties to the Confederation. After the July Revolution of 1830 in France, unrest spread again. At the Hambach Festival in May 1832, about 30,000 people gathered at a castle in the Palatinate under black, red and gold flags to demand a united, free Germany. The Diet replied in June 1832 with the Six Articles, which allowed it to override state parliaments that refused taxes or criticised the Confederation, and the Ten Articles of July 1832, which banned political associations and public meetings.

Metternich’s own view

Metternich set out his beliefs in a memorandum for Tsar Alexander I in December 1820, at the time of the congresses of Troppau and Laibach. He blamed the unrest of his day on "presumption", the belief of educated people that they could remake society by reason.

Union between the monarchs is the basis of the policy which must now be followed to save society from total ruin.... The first principle to be followed by the monarchs, united as they are by the coincidence of their desires and opinions, should be that of maintaining the stability of political institutions against the disorganised excitement which has taken possession of men’s minds.

Klemens von Metternich, "Political Confession of Faith", secret memorandum to Tsar Alexander I, December 1820 (translation from Metternich’s published memoirs, via the Fordham Internet Modern History Sourcebook). Written to persuade the Tsar, whose support Austria needed for intervention in Naples, it presents the alliance of monarchs as the defence of society itself. Its value is that it states openly the principle behind Troppau and Laibach; its limit is that it was a private argument for a particular policy, not a description of how the system worked in practice.

How effective was Metternich’s system?

In the short term the system worked. Every Italian rising between 1820 and 1844 was defeated, mostly by Austrian troops, and German liberal and national movements were driven underground or abroad. Censorship and police surveillance made organised national politics very difficult in both countries until 1848.

The system also had clear limits. It could suppress organisations but not ideas: national literature, history writing, gymnastic and choral societies, and scientific congresses spread a sense of German and Italian nationhood that police could not easily control. The south German states kept their constitutions, and Britain and, after 1830, France would not support intervention. Most importantly, Metternich could not stop Prussia from building the Zollverein, which tied most of Germany economically to Prussia and not to Austria.

Nationalism and liberalism in Italy, 1815–1848

The Risorgimento ("resurgence" or "revival") is the name Italians gave to the movement for national unity and independence in the nineteenth century. Before 1848 it was a movement of ideas and small conspiracies more than a mass movement. Most Italians were peasants who spoke local dialects, could not read, and identified with their town, region or Church more than with "Italy".

Intellectual origins

Italian nationalism had three main roots. The first was the Napoleonic experience: twenty years of French rule had shown that the old states could be swept away, and the Kingdom of Italy (1805–1814) had given northern Italians a shared administration, army and flag, the green, white and red tricolour. The second was a long literary tradition. Writers since Dante and Machiavelli had called for Italian unity, and in the early nineteenth century the poets Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi and the playwright Vittorio Alfieri wrote of Italy’s past greatness and present humiliation.

The third root was Romanticism, the cultural movement that valued emotion, history and the distinct character of each people. Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827), set in Lombardy under seventeenth-century Spanish rule, was read as a story about foreign oppression; Manzoni rewrote it in the Florentine language for the 1840–1842 edition so that it could serve as a model of a common Italian. From 1839 annual congresses of Italian scientists met in different cities and became meeting places for educated people from all the states.

Secret societies and the attempted revolutions, 1820–1844

Under the restored rulers, opposition could only be organised in secret. The largest secret society was the Carbonari ("charcoal burners"), which had spread through southern Italy during French rule and later in the north. Its members were mainly army officers, officials, lawyers and other professional men. They wanted constitutions and an end to foreign rule, but they had no common programme for Italy as a whole.

The vertical timeline of the risings shows a repeated pattern. In July 1820, army officers linked to the Carbonari forced Ferdinand I of Naples to grant a constitution modelled on the Spanish Constitution of Cádiz of 1812. Ferdinand went to the Congress of Laibach, asked for help, and returned with an Austrian army that defeated the constitutionalists at Rieti in March 1821. A rising in Piedmont in March 1821, which hoped for the support of the young prince Charles Albert, was crushed by Austrian and loyal Piedmontese troops at Novara in April 1821.

In February 1831 risings broke out in Modena, Parma and the Papal Legations around Bologna, encouraged by the July Revolution in France. They expected French support, which did not come. Austrian troops restored the rulers within weeks, and the Modenese leader Ciro Menotti was executed. Each revolution was confined to one state, and the revolutionaries of different states did not help each other.

Giuseppe Mazzini and Young Italy

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), a Genoese lawyer and former Carbonaro, drew the lesson that the secret societies had failed because they were local, aristocratic and had no clear national aim. Exiled in 1831, he founded Young Italy (Giovine Italia) in Marseille the same year. It aimed at a single, independent, democratic Italian republic, to be achieved by the Italian people themselves through education and insurrection.

To dedicate myself wholly and forever to the endeavor with them to constitute Italy one and free, independent, republican nation; to promote by every means in my power--whether by written or spoken word, or by action--the education of my Italian brothers towards the aim of Young Italy.

Giuseppe Mazzini, oath taken by members of Young Italy, 1831 (English translation in Joseph Mazzini: His Life, Writings, and Political Principles, New York, 1872). The oath shows the three features that made Mazzini different from the Carbonari: one Italy (not a federation of states), a republic (not constitutional monarchies), and a duty to educate the people. Its religious language ("In the name of God and Italy" begins the oath) shows his belief that nationhood was a moral mission, which helps explain why his followers were willing to die for it.

Mazzini claimed that Young Italy had about 50,000–60,000 members by 1833, a figure that cannot be checked and was probably exaggerated. Its practical record was a series of failures: a plot in the Piedmontese army was discovered in 1833 and twelve conspirators were executed; an invasion of Savoy in 1834 collapsed; and in 1844 the brothers Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, Venetian officers in the Austrian navy, landed in Calabria with a small band, found no popular support, and were captured and shot.

Mazzini spent most of his life in exile in London, writing and organising. His importance lay in his ideas and propaganda: he made the idea of a united Italy, with Rome as its capital, the aim of a generation of young patriots, including Giuseppe Garibaldi, who joined Young Italy in 1833. His founding of Young Europe in 1834 also linked Italian nationalism to a wider vision of a Europe of free, democratic nations.

The moderates: Gioberti, Balbo and d’Azeglio

Mazzini’s republicanism and his reliance on insurrection frightened most educated, propertied Italians. In the 1840s a group of moderate liberals offered alternatives that did not require revolution. The most popular was Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians, 1843). Gioberti, a Piedmontese priest in exile, argued that Italy’s greatness came from its Catholic civilisation and proposed a confederation of the existing Italian states under the presidency of the Pope. This idea became known as neo-Guelphism, after the medieval Guelph party that had supported the papacy against the emperors.

Cesare Balbo, a Piedmontese nobleman, replied in Delle speranze d’Italia (On the Hopes of Italy, 1844) that a federation could not work while Austria ruled Lombardy-Venetia. Austria had to be expelled first, and the only Italian state with an army capable of doing it was Piedmont. Massimo d’Azeglio, a painter and novelist who later became Piedmont’s prime minister, publicised reform in the Papal States and the case for Piedmontese leadership in Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (On the Recent Events in the Romagna, 1846).

The table of programmes shows that before 1848 nationalists disagreed about the shape of a future Italy as much as about how to reach it. Even the moderates did not yet expect a single state covering the whole peninsula: most thought in terms of a federation or a northern kingdom. Unity under one king, the eventual result, was the aim of almost nobody in the 1840s.

The role of the papacy

The Pope was both the spiritual head of the Catholic Church and the ruler of the Papal States, a strip of territory across central Italy from Rome to Bologna with about three million people. Under Gregory XVI (pope 1831–1846) the Papal States were among the worst-governed in Europe: run by clergy, with no railways (Gregory reportedly opposed them) and with Austrian troops called in to put down revolts in 1831–1832.

The election of Pius IX in June 1846 seemed to make Gioberti’s dream real. Pius granted an amnesty to political prisoners in July 1846, relaxed censorship, allowed a civic guard in 1847 and appointed laymen to his government. Across Italy crowds cheered "Viva Pio Nono". When Austria reinforced its garrison in the papal town of Ferrara in 1847, Pius protested, and he appeared to be a national leader against Austria. As the Italian revolutions of 1848 would show, this was a misunderstanding: Pius was a reforming ruler, not an Italian nationalist, and as head of a universal Church he could not lead a war against Catholic Austria.

Economic and social conditions

Economic divisions reinforced political ones. Each state had its own tariffs, currency, weights and measures: goods carried from Turin to Venice crossed several customs frontiers. Communications were poor, and the first railway in Italy, from Naples to Portici, opened only in 1839 and was only about 7 km long. The north had commercial agriculture, silk production and some industry; the south was overwhelmingly rural, with large estates and very poor peasants. Some liberals, especially in Lombardy and Piedmont, supported unity because they wanted a larger market, free trade and railways, but this group was small.

Nationalism and liberalism in Germany, 1815–1848

Germans in 1815 shared a written language and a literary culture, but they lived in 39 states, followed different religions (Protestants in the north and east, Catholics in the south and west and in Austria) and had very different political traditions. The years from 1815 to the revolution of March 1848 are called the Vormärz ("pre-March"), a name that reflects how later Germans saw the period: as the build-up to 1848.

Intellectual origins

German nationalism began as cultural nationalism. In the late eighteenth century the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder argued that every people (Volk) had its own spirit (Volksgeist), expressed in its language, songs and customs, and that these deserved respect. Herder did not demand a German state, but his idea that the nation was defined by language and culture shaped everything that followed. Germans used the term Kulturnation for a nation united by culture but not by a state.

The defeat of Prussia by Napoleon in 1806 turned cultural pride into political feeling. Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1807–1808), delivered in French-occupied Berlin, called for a national education to revive the German spirit. In his song Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? (What is the German’s Fatherland?, 1813) the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt answered that it was the whole area where German was spoken, and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn founded the gymnastics movement (Turnen) in 1811 to train young Germans physically for national liberation. Many students and volunteers who fought in the War of Liberation of 1813 expected that victory would bring a united, free Germany.

Scholars gave the nation a history and a language. The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected German folk tales (from 1812) and began a great dictionary of the German language (from 1838) as records of the German people’s shared culture. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, professor in Berlin from 1818, taught that the state was the highest expression of a people’s spirit, an idea that encouraged some Germans to look to a strong state, and to Prussia in particular, to realise the nation.

The disappointment of 1815 produced the Burschenschaften and the Wartburg Festival, and later the Hambach Festival of 1832, where the radical journalist Johann August Wirth made the main speech.

The country that speaks our language, the country where our hope dwells, where our love revels, where our joys thrive ... this beautiful land is being ravaged and plundered, torn and enervated, gagged and disgraced. Rich in all the resources of nature, it should be the home of joy and contentment for all its children; but sucked dry by thirty-four kings, it is the abode of hunger, misery, and poverty for the majority of its residents.

Johann August Wirth, speech at the Hambach Festival, May 1832 (translation from German History in Documents and Images). Wirth defines Germany by language, as Herder and Arndt had done, but turns the cultural idea into a political attack on the princes, whom he blames for both division and poverty. The speech was made to a mass open-air audience in the Bavarian Palatinate, one of the more liberal parts of Germany; it shows that by 1832 nationalism and radical democracy were joined for some Germans, which is exactly why Metternich and the Diet responded with the Six Articles.

National feeling grew sharply during the Rhine crisis of 1840, when French politicians demanded the Rhine as France’s eastern frontier. Patriotic songs written in reply, such as "Die Wacht am Rhein" ("The Watch on the Rhine"), became hugely popular, and in 1841 August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote the "Lied der Deutschen" ("Song of the Germans"), later the German national anthem. Choral societies, gymnastic clubs and national monuments, such as the campaign from 1842 to complete Cologne Cathedral, gave many middle-class Germans their first experience of national activity.

The nature of monarchy in the Vormärz

The German monarchies fell into two groups. In the south, the rulers of Baden, Bavaria and Württemberg issued constitutions in 1818–1819 with elected lower houses. Their parliaments were weak, but they gave liberals experience of debate, budgets and elections, and the Baden chamber in particular became a centre of liberal opinion.

Austria and Prussia remained absolute monarchies. In Austria, Francis I (emperor 1792–1835) and his son Ferdinand I (1835–1848), who suffered from epilepsy and could not govern, left power to Metternich and a cautious bureaucracy. In Prussia, Frederick William III (1797–1840) twice promised a constitution during the wars against Napoleon and never granted one. His son Frederick William IV (1840–1861) was a romantic who dreamed of a Christian, medieval-style German empire. In 1847 he called a United Diet of the provincial assemblies to approve a loan for a railway to East Prussia, but when its liberal members demanded regular meetings and real powers in return, he dismissed it.

Daily life in the Vormärz is often called the Biedermeier period: a culture of home, family, music and private comfort among the middle classes. Some historians see it as a sign that many Germans withdrew from politics under censorship; others point out that the same years saw rapidly growing reading societies, newspapers and associations, which created a public sphere in which political ideas spread.

The rise of Prussia

Prussia’s rise rested on reforms made after its defeat by Napoleon. Between 1807 and 1819 ministers such as Karl vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg abolished serfdom (1807), freed trade and occupations, gave towns self-government and emancipated Jews (1812). The army reformers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau introduced universal military service and promotion by merit. Prussia remained an autocracy dominated by the Junkers, the landowning nobility of the east, but its state was one of the best administered in Europe.

The territorial settlement of 1815 then gave Prussia the Rhineland and Westphalia, with the coalfields of the Ruhr and the Saar. Over the following decades these became the heart of German heavy industry. The first German railway, from Nuremberg to Fürth in Bavaria, opened in December 1835; by 1847 a continuous line ran from Berlin to Cologne in the Rhineland. Prussian coal and iron output, railway building and engineering grew faster than Austria’s, and Prussian businessmen and officials had every reason to want a large, open market.

The Zollverein

In 1818 Prussia abolished internal customs duties within its own territory and introduced a single, low external tariff, the Maassen tariff, named after the finance official Karl Georg Maassen. The aim was revenue and administrative efficiency, not German unity: Prussia’s two separated blocks of territory were surrounded by small states whose goods passed through Prussian customs. One by one these states found it cheaper to join Prussia’s system than to stay outside it.

The Zollverein (customs union) came into force on 1 January 1834, uniting 18 states with about 23 million people. Goods moved between member states without duties, there was one external tariff, and customs revenue was shared according to population. Members met in a General Congress where each state had a veto. Rival unions in the south and centre of Germany broke up and their members joined Prussia; Hanover, the main holdout in the north, joined in 1854.

The Zollverein had important political effects. It linked the economies of most German states to Prussia, accustomed their officials to cooperating with Berlin, and gave smaller states a direct financial interest in Prussian leadership. Austria stayed outside. Metternich recognised that the union strengthened Prussia’s position in Germany, but Austria’s high protective tariffs, which protected its own industries, made it impossible to join a low-tariff union.

The economist Friedrich List, whose National System of Political Economy (1841) argued for a protected national market and a national railway network, saw the Zollverein as a step towards national unity. However, its political limits were clear later. Membership did not make the south German states pro-Prussian: in 1866 Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Saxony, all Zollverein members, fought on Austria’s side against Prussia.

Social and economic change before 1848

The population of the German states (excluding Austria) grew by more than a third between 1815 and 1845, faster than jobs or food. Rural poverty, called pauperism by contemporaries, spread among landless labourers and craftsmen whose trades were undercut by factory goods. In June 1844 the handloom weavers of Peterswaldau and Langenbielau in Silesia rioted against merchants who had cut their pay; the Prussian army crushed the revolt, but it became a symbol of the "social question".

Potato blight in 1845–1846 and the grain harvest failure of 1846 caused the "hungry forties": food prices rose sharply, in places doubling, and there were food riots in Berlin in April 1847 (the "Potato Revolution"). A trade depression followed in 1847. These hardships did not create the national movement, but they gave the revolutions of 1848 their mass support in the towns and countryside.

The revolutions of 1848–1849 in Italy

In 1848 revolutions broke out across Europe, from Paris to Vienna, Berlin, Budapest and Milan. Historians explain this wave by a combination of long-term pressures (liberal and national ideas, population growth, the decline of crafts) and short-term crises (the harvest failures of 1845–1847 and the trade depression of 1847), triggered by the February Revolution in Paris, which overthrew King Louis-Philippe on 24 February 1848. Italy’s revolution actually began first, in Sicily in January.

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The spring of 1848

On 12 January 1848 a rising in Palermo demanded the restoration of Sicily’s constitution of 1812 and separation from Naples. Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies granted a constitution at the end of January, and the rulers of Tuscany, Piedmont and the Papal States followed in February and March. In Piedmont, King Charles Albert issued the Statuto Albertino on 4 March 1848, a constitution with a two-chamber parliament, a lower house elected on a narrow property franchise, and ministers appointed by the king.

News of the revolution in Vienna and Metternich’s fall set off risings in Austrian Italy. In the Five Days of Milan (18–22 March 1848), citizens fighting from barricades forced Field Marshal Radetzky to withdraw his army to the fortresses of the Quadrilateral (Mantua, Peschiera, Verona and Legnago). In Venice, the lawyer Daniele Manin proclaimed the Republic of St Mark on 22 March. On 23 March Charles Albert declared war on Austria, and troops from Tuscany, Naples and the Papal States marched north to join him.

Division and defeat

The vertical timeline of 1848–1849 shows how quickly the national front broke up. On 29 April Pius IX declared in an Allocution that, as the father of all Catholics, he could not make war on Catholic Austria. The papal troops were recalled, the neo-Guelph programme collapsed, and in May Ferdinand II used a clash in Naples to recall his army as well. Charles Albert’s motives were also doubted: he wanted to annex Lombardy and Venetia to Piedmont, which alarmed republicans in Milan and Venice and the other Italian rulers.

Charles Albert’s army was defeated by Radetzky at Custoza on 24–25 July 1848 and signed an armistice in August. The movement then passed to the democrats. In Rome the Pope’s chief minister, Pellegrino Rossi, was assassinated in November 1848 and Pius fled to Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples. A Roman Republic was proclaimed on 9 February 1849, governed from March by a triumvirate led by Mazzini. Charles Albert renewed the war in March 1849 and was crushed at Novara on 23 March; he abdicated that night in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel II.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the newly elected president of the French Republic, wanted Catholic support at home and influence in Italy, so he sent an army under General Oudinot to restore the Pope. Rome was defended for two months by volunteers under Giuseppe Garibaldi before surrendering at the beginning of July 1849. Garibaldi escaped north with a few thousand men, pursued by four armies; his wife Anita died during the retreat. Venice, besieged and stricken by cholera, surrendered to Austria in August 1849.

Why did the Italian revolutions fail?

The slogan of 1848 was "Italia farà da sé" ("Italy will do it by herself"), meaning that Italians would win independence without foreign help. Its failure was the main lesson of the revolution. Piedmont’s army was not strong enough to beat Austria, the Pope and the King of Naples put their own states first, and the revolutionaries were divided between moderates who wanted constitutional monarchy and democrats who wanted a republic. Most peasants stayed out of a struggle led by urban middle classes and nobles, and in parts of Lombardy some peasants welcomed the Austrians back.

The failure had lasting consequences. Neo-Guelphism was dead: the Pope had shown he would never lead an Italian war. Mazzini’s republicans had fought bravely in Rome and Venice and given the movement martyrs and a legend, but they had shown that they could not win. Piedmont, alone of the Italian states, kept its constitution and its tricolour flag, and in the 1850s became the refuge of thousands of exiles from the rest of Italy. These results made Piedmont the natural leader of the next attempt.

The revolutions of 1848–1849 in Germany

In Germany the revolution began in the south-west. In late February and early March 1848 crowds in Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and other states demanded the "March demands": freedom of the press, trial by jury, a citizens’ militia and a German parliament. Most rulers gave way at once and appointed liberal "March ministries". In Vienna, demonstrations on 13 March forced Metternich to resign and flee to England.

In Berlin, fighting broke out on 18 March between troops and crowds behind barricades, and several hundred civilians were killed. Frederick William IV then withdrew the army from the city, honoured the dead and rode through Berlin wearing the black, red and gold colours, announcing that Prussia would merge into Germany. He promised a constitution and called a Prussian National Assembly.

The Frankfurt Parliament

A Pre-Parliament of liberal and democratic leaders met at Frankfurt at the end of March and arranged elections across the German Confederation, in which most adult men could vote, though states applied the rules differently. The Frankfurt Parliament (German National Assembly) opened in St Paul’s Church, Frankfurt, on 18 May 1848. Its members were overwhelmingly educated and middle-class: lawyers, judges, civil servants, professors and teachers dominated, and only a handful of members were craftsmen or peasants. It was soon nicknamed the "parliament of professors".

The Parliament had no army, no civil service and no tax income of its own. In June 1848 it appointed Archduke John of Austria as Imperial Regent with a provisional central government, but the ministers had to rely on the troops of the individual states. This weakness was exposed over Schleswig-Holstein. When Denmark tried to incorporate Schleswig, the Parliament backed a war fought by Prussian troops; but in August 1848 Prussia, under pressure from Britain and Russia, signed the armistice of Malmö without consulting Frankfurt. The Parliament first rejected and then accepted the armistice, and radical riots in Frankfurt in September were put down by Prussian and Austrian troops.

Grossdeutsch or kleindeutsch?

The Parliament spent months on two great questions: the rights of German citizens and the borders of the new Germany. The Basic Rights of the German People, passed in December 1848, guaranteed equality before the law, freedom of speech, the press, religion and assembly, abolished noble privileges and remaining feudal obligations, and gave Jews equal civil rights. The borders were harder. A grossdeutsch ("greater German") solution would include the German-speaking lands of Austria; a kleindeutsch ("smaller German") solution would exclude Austria and be led by Prussia.

Austria settled the question itself. Under its new chief minister, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, Austria declared in March 1849 a centralised constitution for the whole Habsburg Empire, including its non-German lands, so it could not join a German nation-state without breaking itself apart. The Frankfurt majority therefore turned to the kleindeutsch solution. On 28 March 1849 it passed an Imperial Constitution, with a hereditary emperor and a parliament elected by universal male suffrage, and elected Frederick William IV of Prussia "Emperor of the Germans".

The crown refused

On 3 April 1849 Frederick William told the Parliament’s delegation that he could not accept the crown without the agreement of the German princes, and he formally rejected it later that month. Privately he despised a crown offered by an elected assembly: in his letters he described it as tainted by revolution, and he believed that only the princes could legitimately make an emperor. Accepting would also have meant war with Austria and possibly Russia.

The refusal ended the Frankfurt experiment. Austria and Prussia withdrew their deputies, and a radical rump moved to Stuttgart, where Württemberg troops dispersed it in June 1849. Uprisings in defence of the constitution in Saxony (May 1849, where the composer Richard Wagner took part in the Dresden uprising) and in Baden and the Palatinate were crushed by Prussian troops; the last revolutionary army surrendered at the fortress of Rastatt in July 1849.

Prussia then tried to unite Germany on its own terms. Its minister Joseph von Radowitz organised the Erfurt Union, a league of German princes under Prussian leadership, with a parliament that met at Erfurt in 1850. Schwarzenberg revived the old Confederation, and when the two powers clashed over a constitutional dispute in Hesse-Kassel, Austria, backed by Russia, threatened war. In the Punctation of Olmütz (29 November 1850), Prussia abandoned the Erfurt Union and accepted the restoration of the German Confederation. Prussians remembered Olmütz as a humiliation.

Why did the German revolutions fail?

The diagram of reasons for failure groups the explanations historians give for both countries. In Germany the revolutionaries were divided between liberals, who wanted a constitutional monarchy, and democrats and republicans, who wanted popular sovereignty and social reform. The middle classes were frightened by workers’ demands and by rural violence, and so looked to the princes for order. The national question divided them further: grossdeutsch against kleindeutsch, and Germans against Danes, Poles and Czechs whose lands they also claimed.

Above all, the old rulers never lost control of their armies. Once the peasants had what they wanted (the end of feudal dues, granted quickly in many states), the countryside stopped supporting revolution, and the troops could be used against the towns. The historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote in The Course of German History (1945) that in 1848 "German history reached its turning-point and failed to turn". Historians since have questioned whether 1848 was really a lost chance for a liberal Germany, since the revolutionaries were never as strong as the princes.

The impact of the 1848 revolutions

The revolutions failed to unite either country, but they changed the politics of both. Their impact can be examined under four headings: new ideas, the role of the middle classes and intellectuals, the political settlement that followed, and social and cultural change.

The emergence of new ideas

The revolutions brought new political ideas into public debate for the first time on a large scale. Democracy, meaning government based on universal male suffrage and popular sovereignty, moved from small radical circles to the centre of politics: the Frankfurt elections and the Imperial Constitution of 1849 both used a broad male franchise, and democratic clubs and newspapers spread across Germany and Italy.

Socialism also appeared as an organised force. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in London in February 1848, opening with the claim that "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." The Manifesto had little influence on events in 1848, but Marx edited the radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in 1848–1849, and workers’ associations such as Stephan Born’s Workers’ Brotherhood (1848) showed that a labour movement separate from middle-class liberalism was emerging.

Women took part in the revolutions in new ways: in clubs, demonstrations, nursing and journalism. In Saxony, Louise Otto-Peters founded the Frauen-Zeitung (Women’s Newspaper) in April 1849, with the motto Dem Reich der Freiheit werb’ ich Bürgerinnen ("For the realm of freedom I am recruiting women citizens"), and argued that women had a duty to take part in the life of the state. In Rome in 1849 the Milanese princess Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso organised the hospitals of the besieged republic, and in Venice and Milan women raised money and made uniforms. None of the constitutions of 1848–1849 gave women the vote, and after the defeat laws in Prussia and other states banned women from political associations.

The revolutions also advanced Jewish emancipation. The Frankfurt Basic Rights made civil and political rights independent of religion, and Gabriel Riesser, a Jewish lawyer from Hamburg, was elected a vice-president of the Frankfurt Parliament. Most of the Basic Rights were cancelled by the restored Confederation in 1851, but several states kept the principle of equal rights, and it was written into the law of the North German Confederation in 1869.

The most influential new idea came from the defeat itself. In 1853 the journalist August Ludwig von Rochau, a former radical who had supported the revolution, published Grundsätze der Realpolitik (Foundations of Realpolitik). He argued that politics is governed by power, not by principles or constitutions on paper, and that liberals who wanted national unity had to work with the real forces in society, including the state and its army. The word Realpolitik came to mean politics based on practical power rather than ideals, and it described the approach of both Cavour and Bismarck.

The role of the middle classes and intellectuals

The revolutions of 1848 were led by the educated middle classes: lawyers, officials, teachers, journalists, students and professors, with some liberal nobles, especially in Italy. Their numbers in the Frankfurt Parliament and their leadership of the Italian provisional governments in Milan and Venice show that they provided the ideas and the leaders. Their weakness was that they wanted constitutional, orderly change. Once artisans and workers demanded jobs and social reforms, and peasants attacked manor houses, many middle-class liberals preferred to compromise with the princes rather than risk social revolution.

In 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (1944), the historian Lewis Namier argued that the liberal intellectuals failed because they were unpractical and because their nationalism was already aggressive towards other peoples: Frankfurt deputies supported the war against Denmark and claimed Polish and Czech lands. Later historians such as Jonathan Sperber, in The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (1994), shifted attention from the intellectuals in parliaments to the mass of ordinary people in towns and villages, showing that the revolutions had wide popular participation and a strong social side.

Political impact: the return of autocracy

By 1850 the old rulers were back in power almost everywhere. In Austria, Schwarzenberg’s government abolished the constitution altogether at the end of 1851 and ruled through the army, the bureaucracy and the Catholic Church, a period known as neo-absolutism. In Italy the rulers of Naples, Tuscany and the Papal States revoked their constitutions, with Austrian and French troops in support. The restored German Confederation cancelled the Basic Rights in 1851 and used new police cooperation to watch democrats.

The return of autocracy was not complete. In Prussia, Frederick William IV dissolved the elected assembly in December 1848 but imposed a constitution of his own, revised in 1850. It gave Prussia a parliament (the Landtag) with a lower house elected by the three-class franchise of 1849, in which voters were divided into three classes by the taxes they paid, each class choosing a third of the electors. The richest few per cent of voters thus chose as many electors as the poorest majority. The king kept control of the army and the government, but parliament had to approve the budget, a point that became central in the 1860s.

In Italy, Victor Emmanuel II kept the Statuto despite Austrian pressure. In the Proclamation of Moncalieri (November 1849) he dissolved a parliament that refused to approve the peace treaty with Austria and called on voters to elect a more moderate one, which they did. The Statuto survived, and Piedmont became the only constitutional state in Italy.

The comparison table shows that the two revolutions failed for similar reasons but left different legacies. In Italy the main result was to make Piedmont the leader of the national cause; in Germany it was to show that the national question would be decided by Prussia and Austria, not by a parliament.

Social and cultural impact

The most lasting social change of 1848 was the end of feudal obligations in the countryside. The Austrian parliament abolished the robot (compulsory labour service owed by peasants to their lords) and other feudal dues in September 1848, a reform that the restored government kept, with compensation paid to landowners. In other German states, peasants’ remaining dues were converted into money payments during and after 1848. This freed peasants from their lords but often left them in debt, and it removed one of the main sources of rural revolt.

Defeat and repression drove many radicals abroad. Between 1848 and the mid-1850s tens of thousands of Germans emigrated each year, mostly for economic reasons; among them were several thousand political exiles, the Forty-Eighters, such as Carl Schurz, who later became a United States senator and cabinet member. Italian exiles gathered in Turin, London and Paris. In the 1850s many disappointed liberals in both countries turned away from revolutionary politics to business, science and local government, or to a more practical nationalism such as the German National Association (1859) and the Italian National Society (1857).

Culturally, the revolutions created symbols and memories that later governments used: the black, red and gold flag of 1848, the tricolour carried in Milan, the defence of Rome by Garibaldi, and martyrs such as Robert Blum, a Frankfurt deputy executed in Vienna in November 1848. Composers and writers were drawn in: Giuseppe Verdi wrote the patriotic opera La battaglia di Legnano for Rome in January 1849, and the German nationalist songs of the 1840s became part of everyday culture.

Piedmont and Cavour, 1849–1858

After 1849 Piedmont-Sardinia was the only Italian state with a constitution, a national flag and an army that had fought Austria. Its new king, Victor Emmanuel II (reigned 1849–1878), was no liberal by conviction, but he kept the Statuto, and in the 1850s Piedmont became a model of liberal government and economic progress that attracted nationalists from across Italy.

Liberal reform in Piedmont

The Siccardi laws of 1850 abolished the separate Church courts and the right of criminals to sanctuary in churches, and limited the Church’s ability to acquire property. They began a long conflict between the Piedmontese state and the Church, which grew in 1855 when a law dissolved many monastic orders. For liberals elsewhere in Italy, this conflict showed that Piedmont was a modern state; for the Pope, it showed that Piedmont was an enemy of religion.

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810–1861), was a Piedmontese nobleman who had travelled in France and Britain and admired British parliamentary government, free trade and industry. He ran a modern agricultural estate, invested in banks and railways, and in 1847 founded the moderate newspaper Il Risorgimento. He entered the government in 1850 as minister of agriculture and commerce, and became minister of finance in 1851.

In 1852 Cavour made an agreement with Urbano Rattazzi, leader of the centre-left, to form a parliamentary majority of moderate liberals of the centre-right and centre-left, excluding both the clerical right and the radical left. This alliance was nicknamed the connubio ("marriage"). It gave Cavour a secure majority, and he became prime minister in November 1852, holding the post with one break until his death in 1861.

Economic modernisation

As minister and then prime minister, Cavour made Piedmont the most economically advanced Italian state. He signed free trade treaties with France, Britain and Belgium, reduced tariffs, and encouraged foreign investment, especially from France and Britain. The state built and supported railways, so that Piedmont had about 800 km of line by 1859, more than any other Italian state. He also reformed the national bank and the tax system and modernised the army and the port of Genoa.

The bar chart of railways shows how far Piedmont had moved ahead. Modernisation had political purposes: it made Piedmont attractive to the liberal middle classes of Lombardy and central Italy, and it paid for a stronger army. It also had costs. Public debt rose steeply in the 1850s, and higher taxes made Cavour unpopular with some Piedmontese.

Cavour’s aims

Historians debate what Cavour wanted. Before 1860 he did not aim at a united Italy covering the whole peninsula: like Balbo, he wanted to drive Austria out of northern Italy and to create a strong, liberal Kingdom of Upper Italy under the House of Savoy, perhaps with a federation of states in the centre and south. He regarded Mazzini’s republicanism as a danger, and he had little knowledge of the south, which he never visited. His priorities were Piedmontese interests and the defeat of revolution as much as Italian nationality.

Diplomacy: the Crimean War and the Congress of Paris

Cavour understood the lesson of 1848: Piedmont could not defeat Austria alone and needed a great-power ally, and the only possible one was France. In January 1855 Piedmont joined Britain and France in the Crimean War against Russia and sent about 18,000 troops. The decision was controversial in Piedmont, since it had no quarrel with Russia, but it earned Piedmont a place at the Congress of Paris in 1856.

At Paris Cavour gained no territory, but he was able to raise the "Italian question" before the powers, criticising Austrian occupation and the misgovernment of the Papal States and Naples. He won the sympathy of the British government and, more importantly, the interest of Napoleon III. In 1857 the Italian National Society was founded by Giuseppe La Farina, with Daniele Manin and Garibaldi among its leaders; former republicans accepted its programme of "Italy and Victor Emmanuel", and it built support for Piedmontese leadership across the peninsula.

The war of 1859 and the unification of the north and centre

Napoleon III and the Plombières agreement

Napoleon III, emperor of the French since 1852, had personal sympathy for Italian nationalism: as a young man he had joined the 1831 rising in the Papal States. He also wanted to weaken Austria, to replace Austrian influence in Italy with French influence, and to undo the Vienna settlement of 1815 that had been made against his uncle. On 14 January 1858 Felice Orsini, an Italian nationalist, threw bombs at the emperor’s carriage in Paris, killing eight people. Before his execution Orsini wrote to Napoleon urging him to free Italy, and the emperor allowed the letter to be published.

On 20–21 July 1858 Napoleon and Cavour met secretly at the spa of Plombières in eastern France. They agreed that France would help Piedmont fight Austria, provided Austria could be made to appear the aggressor. After victory, Piedmont would form a Kingdom of Upper Italy with Lombardy, Venetia, the duchies and the Romagna; central Italy would become a separate kingdom; the Pope would keep Rome; and the four Italian states would form a confederation under the Pope’s presidency. France would receive Nice and Savoy, and Victor Emmanuel’s daughter Clotilde would marry the emperor’s cousin, Prince Napoleon. A formal treaty followed in January 1859.

The plan shows that neither man intended a united Italy. In January 1859 Victor Emmanuel told the Piedmontese parliament that Piedmont was "not insensible to the cry of pain (grido di dolore) that rises towards us from so many parts of Italy". The speech was drafted by Cavour, and Napoleon III is reported to have reworded the passage; it was meant to provoke Austria.

The war of 1859

Cavour mobilised the Piedmontese army and recruited volunteers, including a corps under Garibaldi. Austria, believing it could defeat Piedmont before France arrived, sent an ultimatum on 23 April 1859 demanding that Piedmont disarm, then invaded. This made Austria the aggressor, as Plombières required. French and Piedmontese forces won at Magenta (4 June) and Solferino (24 June 1859), battles in which the French army did most of the fighting. Solferino was so bloody, with about 40,000 casualties on both sides, that the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who saw its aftermath, was inspired to found the Red Cross.

On 11 July 1859 Napoleon III suddenly made an armistice with Franz Joseph at Villafranca without consulting Cavour. Austria gave Lombardy to France, which passed it to Piedmont, but kept Venetia, and the rulers of the central duchies were to be restored. Napoleon stopped because of the losses, the risk that Prussia would join Austria by attacking France on the Rhine, Catholic opinion in France, and fear that a large Italian kingdom might not remain under French influence. Cavour resigned in fury.

The annexation of central Italy, 1860

Villafranca could not be enforced. During the war, the rulers of Tuscany, Modena and Parma had fled and the Papal Legations (the Romagna) had rebelled, and provisional governments led by moderate liberals and members of the National Society, such as Bettino Ricasoli in Tuscany, refused to accept the return of their rulers. Britain, under Palmerston and Lord John Russell, supported the right of the central Italians to decide their own future and opposed any restoration by force.

Cavour returned to power in January 1860 and made a new bargain with Napoleon III: France would accept the annexation of central Italy to Piedmont, and Piedmont would give Nice and Savoy to France. Plebiscites held in March 1860 in Tuscany and Emilia (the duchies and the Romagna) produced huge majorities for annexation, and the Treaty of Turin (24 March 1860) transferred Nice and Savoy to France, confirmed by plebiscites there in April. Garibaldi, born in Nice, never forgave Cavour for "selling" his birthplace.

Garibaldi and the conquest of the south, 1860

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) was born in Nice, served as a sailor, joined Young Italy and was condemned to death for his part in a Mazzinian plot in 1834. He escaped to South America, where for twelve years he fought in revolutionary wars in Brazil and Uruguay and learned guerrilla warfare. His defence of the Roman Republic in 1849 made him famous across Europe. By 1860 he had accepted the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, but he remained a democrat at heart, distrusted Cavour and wanted Rome as Italy’s capital.

The Expedition of the Thousand

In April 1860 a rising broke out in Palermo against the Bourbon government of the young king Francis II. Sicilian exiles and Mazzinian democrats such as Francesco Crispi urged Garibaldi to lead an expedition to support it. Garibaldi sailed from Quarto, near Genoa, on the night of 5–6 May 1860 with about 1,089 volunteers, most of them young men from the northern cities (students, professionals, craftsmen), in red shirts. This was the Expedition of the Thousand. Cavour did not stop the expedition, but he did not support it openly either, and the volunteers sailed with old muskets.

The Thousand landed at Marsala in western Sicily on 11 May, protected in part by the presence of British warships in the harbour. Garibaldi proclaimed himself dictator of Sicily in the name of Victor Emmanuel. He defeated a Bourbon force at Calatafimi on 15 May, and entered Palermo on 27 May, helped by a popular rising in the city; the Bourbon army there agreed to withdraw in early June. Sicilian peasants joined him in thousands, attracted by his promises to abolish the hated grist tax and to divide common lands.

Peasant support had limits that soon became clear. In August 1860 peasants at Bronte, in eastern Sicily, attacked and killed local landowners and officials. Garibaldi’s lieutenant Nino Bixio restored order by a summary trial and had five men shot. Garibaldi’s government needed the support of the landowning classes, and the episode showed that the revolution in the south would not become a social revolution.

From Sicily to Naples

In August 1860, against Cavour’s wishes, Garibaldi crossed the Straits of Messina to the mainland; Britain had refused a French proposal to block the crossing with a joint naval force. The Bourbon army, demoralised and badly led, disintegrated as he advanced. Francis II left Naples, and Garibaldi entered the city by train on 7 September 1860, almost alone, to a huge welcome. He announced that he would next march on Rome.

An attack on Rome would have meant war with the French garrison that protected the Pope, and possibly with Austria. Cavour also feared that Garibaldi and the democrats around him would set up a rival government in the south, possibly a republic, and that the national movement would slip out of Piedmontese control. He persuaded Napoleon III to accept a Piedmontese invasion of the Papal States, arguing that it was the only way to stop Garibaldi and protect Rome itself.

The Piedmontese army entered the Papal provinces of the Marche and Umbria, defeated the Pope’s army at Castelfidardo on 18 September 1860, and marched south, leaving Rome and the area around it to the Pope. Meanwhile Garibaldi defeated the remaining Bourbon army in the battle of the Volturno on 1–2 October. On 21 October plebiscites in Naples and Sicily asked whether "the people want Italy one and indivisible with Victor Emmanuel as constitutional king and his legitimate descendants". In the mainland provinces the official result was 1,302,064 votes for and 10,312 against.

On 26 October 1860 Garibaldi met Victor Emmanuel at Teano, north of Naples, and greeted him as King of Italy. He handed over his conquests, asked only that his volunteers be taken into the national army (a request largely refused), and retired to his farm on the island of Caprera with a sack of seed corn. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed by the new national parliament in Turin on 17 March 1861. Cavour died suddenly less than three months later, on 6 June 1861.

The Punch cartoon presents the events of 1860 as Garibaldi’s gift to the king, and that is how Victor Emmanuel and the moderates wanted them remembered. Many democrats remembered them differently: as a revolution from below that the Piedmontese state had taken over, sent home and failed to reward.

Completing unification: Venetia and Rome, 1861–1871

After 1861 the "Roman question" and the "Venetian question" dominated Italian politics. The government, now led by Cavour’s moderate successors, wanted both territories but could not risk war with France or Austria alone. The democrats, led by Garibaldi, tried to force the issue with volunteers.

In 1862 Garibaldi raised volunteers in Sicily with the cry "Rome or death" and crossed to Calabria. The government, afraid of French intervention, sent the army, which stopped him at Aspromonte on 29 August 1862; Garibaldi was wounded in the foot and briefly imprisoned. In the September Convention of 1864, Italy promised France that it would not attack Rome, and France agreed to withdraw its garrison within two years; as a sign of good faith, the Italian capital was moved from Turin to Florence in 1865.

Venetia, 1866

Venetia came through Prussia. In April 1866 Italy made an alliance with Prussia, agreeing to attack Austria if Prussia went to war within three months; in return Italy would receive Venetia. In the war of June–July 1866 the Italian army was defeated at Custoza (24 June) and the navy at Lissa (20 July), while Garibaldi’s volunteers had some success in the Trentino. Prussia’s victory at Königgrätz decided the war. Austria handed Venetia to Napoleon III, who passed it to Italy, and a plebiscite in October 1866 confirmed the transfer.

The way Venetia was won was humiliating for many Italians: a territory gained after two defeats, handed over by the French emperor. The Trentino and Trieste, which had Italian-speaking populations, stayed Austrian; Italian nationalists later called them the terre irredente ("unredeemed lands").

Rome, 1867–1871

French troops left Rome in December 1866 under the September Convention. In 1867 Garibaldi led another volunteer invasion of the Papal States, and Napoleon III sent troops back; at Mentana (3 November 1867) French soldiers armed with the new chassepot rifle defeated Garibaldi. The French garrison stayed until the summer of 1870, when Napoleon III needed every soldier for the war against Prussia.

After the French defeat at Sedan in September 1870, Italian troops entered Rome through a breach in the walls at Porta Pia on 20 September 1870, after a short bombardment. A plebiscite in October approved annexation, and Rome became the capital of Italy in 1871. The Law of Guarantees (May 1871) offered the Pope the status of a sovereign, possession of the Vatican and an annual payment. Pius IX rejected it, refused to recognise the Kingdom of Italy, and called himself a "prisoner in the Vatican". The conflict between Church and state continued until the Lateran Treaty of 1929.

The chain of stages shows the role of foreign powers in every step. Italian forces won only two of the stages directly (Garibaldi’s conquest of the south and the occupation of Rome after the French had gone), and both of those depended on foreign powers staying out.

Social and economic factors in Italian unification

Economic forces before 1861

Economic change helped unification less in Italy than in Germany. There was no Italian equivalent of the Zollverein: plans for an Italian customs league in 1847–1848 came to nothing. However, the liberal economic programme of the 1840s and 1850s (free trade, railways, a larger market) attracted landowners, merchants and professionals in the north and centre to the idea of a united state, and Piedmont’s economic success in the 1850s gave it prestige and the resources for war.

The peasants and the south

Most Italians were peasants, and for them unification brought few benefits in the short term. The new state extended Piedmont’s laws, taxes, administration and military service across the country, a process called Piedmontisation (piemontesizzazione). Conscription, unknown in Sicily under the Bourbons, took young men from the land for years. Taxes rose to pay for the debts of the wars, and the sale of Church and common lands mostly benefited those who could buy them, not the landless.

In the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies resentment exploded into brigandage (brigantaggio), a guerrilla war from 1861 to about 1865. Bands of former Bourbon soldiers, deserters, peasants avoiding conscription and outlaws attacked landowners, officials and troops, sometimes encouraged by the exiled Bourbon court and the Church. The government treated it as crime and rebellion: it sent tens of thousands of troops, and the Pica Law of August 1863 placed the affected provinces under military courts. A commonly cited tally from army records for 1861–1864 gives about 2,400 "brigands" killed in fighting and about 1,000 executed after capture, with about 600 soldiers killed. These figures are approximate, and neo-Bourbon writers since have claimed far higher numbers.

Historians describe the brigands’ war in different ways: as banditry, as a peasant revolt against landowners, as a civil war between supporters of the Bourbons and of the new state, or as resistance to conquest. The northern officials who arrived in the south often saw southerners as backward and lawless, and the gap in wealth, literacy and infrastructure between north and south became a permanent political issue known as the Southern Question.

Making Italians

The new kingdom had about 22 million people in 1861. About three-quarters of them could not read or write. Most spoke local dialects, and the linguist Tullio De Mauro estimated that only about 2.5 per cent of the population could use standard Italian (other estimates are higher, but still small). Only about 2 per cent of the population could vote in the first national elections of 1861, because the Piedmontese property and literacy franchise was extended to the whole country.

The former Piedmontese prime minister Massimo d’Azeglio wrote in his memoirs, I miei ricordi (published 1867), that "pur troppo s’è fatta l’Italia, ma non si fanno gl’Italiani" ("unfortunately Italy has been made, but Italians are not being made"). The phrase is usually quoted in a later, shortened form, "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians", which d’Azeglio did not write in those words. Both versions express the same problem: political unification had come before a shared national identity among most of the population.

Weighing the roles: Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini and foreign powers

Questions about Italian unification often ask which individual or factor mattered most. The answer depends on which stage is being judged and on what "unification" means: the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, its completion in 1870, or the creation of a nation with a shared identity.

The table of roles suggests a judgement about how the factors fitted together. Mazzini supplied the idea, Cavour the diplomacy and the state, Garibaldi the conquest of the south, and foreign powers the military force that defeated Austria. Without Cavour and Piedmont, Garibaldi’s conquests would have had no state to join; without Garibaldi, Cavour would probably have stopped at a northern kingdom; without France and Prussia, neither could have defeated Austria.

Prussia and Austria after 1849: the balance shifts

Olmütz restored Austrian leadership of the German Confederation, but over the next decade the balance of power between Austria and Prussia turned. The change came from economics and diplomacy before it came from war.

The economic contest

Austria tried to break Prussia’s economic hold on Germany. Its minister of commerce, Karl Ludwig von Bruck, proposed a central European customs union of the whole Habsburg Empire and the German states. Prussia blocked it by persuading Hanover to join the Zollverein and by insisting on low tariffs that Austria could not accept. When the Zollverein was renewed in 1853, Austria had to settle for a commercial treaty with it and remained outside. In 1862 Prussia signed a free trade treaty with France and made the other Zollverein members accept it in the renewal of 1865, which again kept protectionist Austria out.

The 1850s and 1860s were a period of very fast industrial growth in Prussia and the other Zollverein states. Coal output, iron and steel production and railway building all grew rapidly, especially in the Ruhr, the Saar and Silesia, and companies such as Krupp of Essen began producing steel guns. The Prussian state benefited through taxes, and the army through railways and modern weapons. Austria’s economy also grew, but more slowly, and its public finances were weakened by heavy military spending and by the cost of the war of 1859.

The line graph of railway building shows the scale of the change. Railways mattered politically as well as economically: they created a German national market across state borders, and the Prussian General Staff planned its wars around them.

Diplomatic change: the Crimean War and 1859

The Crimean War (1853–1856) damaged Austria’s international position. Russia had helped Austria crush the Hungarian revolution in 1849 and had backed it at Olmütz, but in the war Austria stayed neutral while threatening Russia and occupying the Danubian principalities. The Russians regarded this as betrayal, and the alliance of the conservative eastern powers that had protected Austria since 1815 was broken. Prussia’s neutrality, by contrast, kept Russian goodwill.

In 1859 Austria lost Lombardy to France and Piedmont. Prussia mobilised on the Rhine but demanded command of the German federal forces as its price for helping Austria, which Austria refused. The defeat exposed Austria’s weakness, and the success of Italian nationalism encouraged German nationalists. In September 1859 liberals founded the German National Association (Nationalverein), modelled on the Italian National Society, which campaigned for a kleindeutsch federal state under Prussian leadership with an elected national parliament.

Military reorganisation and the constitutional conflict, 1858–1866

William I and the army reforms

In 1858 Frederick William IV, incapacitated by strokes, was replaced as regent by his brother William, who became king as William I in 1861. William was a professional soldier who believed that Prussia’s army was too small and too unreliable for a great power: the mobilisation of 1859 had gone badly. He appointed Albrecht von Roon as war minister in December 1859, and relied on Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the General Staff since 1857.

The army bill presented to the Prussian parliament in 1860 proposed to increase the annual intake of conscripts from about 40,000 to about 63,000, to keep three years of full-time service (liberals wanted two), and to reduce the role of the Landwehr, the reserve militia of older men with its own, often middle-class officers, which liberals saw as a citizens’ army. The reforms would almost double the size of the regular army and place it more firmly under the king and its aristocratic officer corps.

The constitutional conflict

The liberal majority in the Prussian lower house agreed to fund the expansion provisionally in 1860 and 1861 but would not make it permanent without changes. In 1861 left liberals founded the German Progress Party (Fortschrittspartei), which won the elections of December 1861 and of May 1862. When parliament refused the army budget in September 1862, William considered abdicating. Roon persuaded him instead to appoint Otto von Bismarck as minister-president on 23 September 1862.

Bismarck (1815–1898) was a Junker, born on his family’s estate at Schönhausen in Brandenburg, and a conservative who had opposed the revolution in 1848. As Prussia’s envoy to the Federal Diet in Frankfurt from 1851 to 1859 he became convinced that Austria would never share leadership of Germany with Prussia. He then served as ambassador in St Petersburg and briefly in Paris. One week after his appointment, he spoke to the budget committee of the Prussian parliament.

Germany is not looking to Prussia’s liberalism, but to its power; Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden may indulge liberalism, and yet no one will assign them Prussia’s role; Prussia has to coalesce and concentrate its power for the opportune moment, which has already been missed several times ... it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided—that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.

Otto von Bismarck, speech to the budget committee of the Prussian House of Deputies, 30 September 1862, as recorded in the committee’s summary of proceedings (translation from German History in Documents and Images). The record is a stenographer’s report in indirect speech, so the wording is close to, but not exactly, what Bismarck said. The speech was made to persuade liberal deputies, many of them nationalists, to accept the army budget by appealing to their wish for unity; its most famous phrase, usually remembered as "blood and iron", shocked them instead and was widely attacked in the press.

The deputies did not give way. From 1862 to 1866 Bismarck governed without a legal budget, using the "gap theory": the constitution did not say what should happen if king and parliament disagreed, so, he argued, the government could continue to collect taxes and spend them. He censored the press and purged liberal officials. The army reforms were carried out regardless of parliament.

The new Prussian army

The reorganised army had advantages that went beyond numbers. The General Staff under Moltke planned wars in detail in advance and trained an elite of staff officers to apply common principles. Moltke used railways and the telegraph to mobilise and concentrate troops faster than any rival, moving separate armies by different lines and uniting them on the battlefield. The infantry carried the Dreyse needle gun, a breech-loading rifle adopted in the 1840s that could be fired several times faster than the Austrian muzzle-loaders and reloaded lying down.

The army had weaknesses too: its artillery was weaker than Austria’s in 1866, many commanders ignored instructions, and the plans often went wrong in practice. Prussian victories owed much to the mistakes of opponents. Even so, the reforms gave Prussia an army that could fight short, decisive wars, which was exactly what Bismarck’s diplomacy needed.

Bismarck’s diplomacy and the wars of unification, 1862–1871

Between 1864 and 1871 Prussia fought three short wars: against Denmark (1864), Austria and its German allies (1866) and France (1870–1871). The vertical timeline of the wars of unification shows that each war followed a period of diplomacy in which Bismarck isolated the opponent, and that each war created the conditions for the next.

Preparing the ground, 1863

When Poles in Russian Poland rebelled in January 1863, Bismarck offered Russia cooperation in the Alvensleben Convention (February 1863), allowing Russian troops to pursue rebels across the Prussian border. The convention angered Britain and France and liberal opinion in Prussia, but it won the gratitude of Tsar Alexander II at a time when Austria and France were criticising Russia. In August 1863 Franz Joseph of Austria invited the German princes to a Congress of Princes at Frankfurt to reform the Confederation under Austrian leadership. Bismarck persuaded a reluctant William I not to attend, and without Prussia the plan collapsed.

The Danish War, 1864

The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were ruled by the King of Denmark but were not part of the Danish kingdom; Holstein, with a German population, was a member of the German Confederation, while Schleswig had a mixed Danish and German population. In November 1863 the new Danish king, Christian IX, signed a constitution that incorporated Schleswig into Denmark, breaking the London Protocol of 1852. German nationalists demanded that the duchies be separated from Denmark under a German prince, the Duke of Augustenburg.

Bismarck did not want a new middle-sized German state. He persuaded Austria to act with Prussia as a European power enforcing the 1852 treaty, not on behalf of the Confederation or of nationalism. Austrian and Prussian armies invaded in February 1864, and the Prussians stormed the Danish fortifications at Düppel on 18 April. Britain sympathised with Denmark but would not fight without an ally, and France and Russia stayed out. In the Treaty of Vienna (October 1864) Denmark ceded both duchies to Austria and Prussia jointly.

Joint rule of two territories far from Austria and next to Prussia created constant friction. The Gastein Convention of August 1865 gave Prussia the administration of Schleswig and Austria that of Holstein, a temporary arrangement that Bismarck could use to pick a quarrel when it suited him.

The Austro-Prussian War, 1866

In 1865–1866 Bismarck prepared for war with Austria. At Biarritz in October 1865 he met Napoleon III, who gave the impression that France would stay neutral, probably expecting a long war that would let him gain territory as a mediator. In April 1866 Prussia made an alliance with Italy, which would attack Austria from the south. Bismarck also proposed to reform the Confederation with a national parliament elected by universal male suffrage, a move meant to win German nationalists and to show Austria as the enemy of national unity.

When Austria brought the question of the duchies before the Federal Diet in June 1866, Prussian troops entered Holstein. The Diet voted to mobilise federal forces against Prussia on 14 June, with most of the middle states, including Saxony, Hanover, Bavaria and Württemberg, siding with Austria. Prussia declared the Confederation dissolved and invaded Saxony, Hanover and Hesse-Kassel.

The war lasted seven weeks. Moltke’s three armies, moving separately by railway, converged on the main Austrian army in Bohemia and defeated it at Königgrätz (Sadowa) on 3 July 1866. Austrian losses, including prisoners, were roughly 40,000–45,000, against about 9,000 Prussian. The needle gun, Moltke’s concentration of forces and the slowness of the Austrian commander, Ludwig von Benedek, all contributed.

Bismarck then insisted on a lenient peace, against the wishes of William I and the generals, who wanted to march on Vienna and annex Austrian land. He wanted to end the war before France could intervene, and to avoid making Austria a permanent enemy. By the Treaty of Prague (23 August 1866), Austria paid a small indemnity, gave up Venetia (to Italy, through France) and agreed to the dissolution of the German Confederation and its own exclusion from Germany. Austria lost no territory to Prussia.

The North German Confederation and the Indemnity Bill

Prussia annexed Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, the free city of Frankfurt and Schleswig-Holstein, joining its eastern and western territories for the first time. The 22 states north of the river Main formed the North German Confederation (1867), with the King of Prussia as president, Bismarck as federal chancellor, a Bundesrat of the state governments and a Reichstag elected by universal male suffrage. The four southern states (Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt south of the Main) stayed independent, but signed secret military alliances with Prussia in August 1866 and remained in the Zollverein.

In September 1866 Bismarck asked the Prussian parliament to pass an Indemnity Bill that approved, after the event, the government’s spending without a budget since 1862. Victory had changed the minds of many liberals: the bill passed by 230 votes to 75. The liberals split. Those who put national unity first formed the National Liberal Party, which supported Bismarck for the next decade; the Progressives remained in opposition. The constitutional conflict ended with the government’s victory, and with the principle that parliament controlled the budget accepted only in words.

The Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871

Napoleon III had expected compensation for his neutrality in 1866, but Bismarck gave him nothing. In 1867 Napoleon tried to buy Luxembourg from the King of the Netherlands; Bismarck stirred up German nationalist protest, and a conference in London made Luxembourg a neutral state instead. French opinion increasingly saw Prussia as a threat, and many Germans saw France as the obstacle to completing unity.

The crisis of 1870 began in Spain, where the throne was vacant after a revolution in 1868. The Spanish government offered it to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a Catholic relative of William I. Bismarck secretly encouraged Leopold to accept. When the candidature became public in early July 1870, France protested that it would be surrounded by Hohenzollern rulers, and on 12 July Leopold withdrew. The French government then went further: its ambassador, Count Benedetti, approached William I at the spa of Ems on 13 July and demanded a promise that the candidature would never be renewed. William politely refused and sent Bismarck a telegram reporting the meeting.

Bismarck published a shortened version of the Ems telegram that made the exchange sound like a curt insult: the king had refused to see the ambassador again and "had nothing further to say". In his memoirs, he described explaining his edit to Roon and Moltke that evening.

If in execution of his Majesty’s order I at once communicate this text, which contains no alteration in or addition to the telegram, not only to the newspapers, but also by telegraph to all our embassies, it will be known in Paris before midnight, and not only on account of its contents, but also on account of the manner of its distribution, will have the effect of a red rag upon the Gallic bull.

Otto von Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen (Reflections and Reminiscences), vol. 2, 1898 (translation in T. S. Hamerow, ed., The Age of Bismarck, 1973). Bismarck wrote this nearly thirty years later, after his dismissal in 1890, when he was shaping his reputation as the founder of the empire. The passage presents him as the man who chose the moment for war, which suits that purpose, and it insists he made "no alteration in or addition to" the telegram, which was true in the narrow sense that he only cut words. Historians use the memoirs with caution, but the original and edited texts of the telegram survive and confirm that the edit changed its effect.

French newspapers and crowds demanded war, and on 19 July 1870 France declared war on Prussia. Because France appeared to be the aggressor, the south German states honoured their alliances and joined Prussia, and the other powers stayed neutral: Russia was friendly to Prussia, Austria was not ready to fight again, Italy was waiting to take Rome, and Britain was alienated when Bismarck published a draft French proposal of 1866 to annex Belgium.

The German armies, about 1.2 million men once mobilised, moved faster and were better led than the French. One French army was trapped in Metz; another, with Napoleon III, was surrounded at Sedan and surrendered on 2 September 1870, and the emperor and more than 100,000 men were taken prisoner. A republic was proclaimed in Paris on 4 September. The new Government of National Defence fought on, and Paris was besieged from September 1870 until an armistice on 28 January 1871.

The proclamation of the German Empire

During the war Bismarck negotiated separately with the south German governments, offering them special rights: Bavaria and Württemberg kept their own armies in peacetime, postal services and railways. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose support was needed, was persuaded to write a letter inviting William to take the imperial title, and he received secret payments from a Prussian fund in return. On 18 January 1871, the anniversary of the crowning of the first Prussian king in 1701, William I was proclaimed German Emperor (Kaiser) in the Hall of Mirrors at the palace of Versailles.

By the Treaty of Frankfurt (10 May 1871), France ceded Alsace and part of Lorraine, including the city of Metz, to Germany and agreed to pay an indemnity of 5 billion francs, with German troops occupying northern France until it was paid. The annexation was justified by German nationalists on grounds of language and history, and by the army on strategic grounds, and it left France with a lasting grievance.

The British opposition leader Benjamin Disraeli told the House of Commons on 9 February 1871 that the war "represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of last century", and that "the balance of power has been entirely destroyed". His judgement shows how contemporaries saw the result: a new great power at the centre of Europe, created in seven years.

The constitution of 1871

The constitution of the German Empire, adopted in April 1871, extended the North German constitution to the south. The diagram of the 1871 constitution shows how power was divided.

Germany was a federation of 25 states, but Prussia held about two-thirds of its territory and population, and its 17 votes in the Bundesrat were enough to block any change to the constitution. The King of Prussia was always the Kaiser, and the chancellor was normally also the Prussian minister-president. The Reichstag was elected by all men over 25, one of the widest franchises in Europe, and its approval was needed for laws and the budget, but it could not appoint or dismiss the government. Historians have described the new empire both as a Prussian conquest of Germany and as a compromise between the Prussian monarchy and the liberal national movement.

The decline of Austria

The unification of both Italy and Germany required the defeat of Austria, and the decline of Austrian power between 1848 and 1866 is a cause of unification in its own right. The diagram of Austria’s decline groups the reasons.

Long-term weaknesses

The Habsburg Empire was a dynastic state of many nationalities. German nationalism threatened it as much as Italian nationalism did, because a German nation-state including Austria’s German lands would have split the empire. This is why Austria could never lead the national movement in Germany as Prussia did after 1862. Austria’s economy grew more slowly than Prussia’s, its high tariffs kept it outside the Zollverein, and its government ran deficits for most of the period. After 1849 its neo-absolutist system also lost the support of liberals and of the Hungarians.

Diplomatic isolation

Austria’s policy in the Crimean War lost it Russian friendship without gaining British or French support. As a result, Austria fought alone in 1859 against France and Piedmont, and again in 1866 against Prussia and Italy, while Russia stood aside and France stayed neutral. Metternich’s system had depended on the cooperation of the conservative powers; by 1866 nothing was left of it.

Military defeat and its consequences

Austria’s defeats in 1859 and 1866 were partly the result of poor leadership and outdated tactics, and partly of fighting enemies who were better prepared and, in 1859, larger. Each defeat brought internal change. After 1859 Franz Joseph introduced a limited constitution (1860–1861); after 1866 he had to make the Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867 with Hungary, which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, with separate governments for Austria and Hungary under one monarch. Austria’s attention now turned to the Balkans, which is part of the background to the First World War.

Historians weigh these factors differently. Some stress Prussian strength and Bismarck’s skill; others argue that Austria’s defeat in 1866 was not inevitable, since its army won in Italy at Custoza and the outcome at Königgrätz depended on battlefield decisions on the day. Most agree that Austria’s isolation, not only its weakness, made the defeats of 1859 and 1866 possible.

Germany and Italy compared

The unifications of Italy and Germany happened at the same time, influenced each other directly (the war of 1866 was fought by both against Austria, and the war of 1870 opened Rome) and are often compared. The comparison shows a common pattern and important differences.

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The comparison table shows the main similarity: in both countries unification was achieved by the expansion of one state at the expense of Austria, using war, secret diplomacy and the national idea, not by the national movements on their own. In both, the national parliaments and constitutions that resulted owed more to the leading state than to the liberals of 1848.

The differences are as important. Germany was unified by a great power that controlled every stage, and the result was a federal empire that kept the princes and gave Prussia a dominant position. Italy was unified by a small state that depended on foreign armies and on a volunteer conquest it had not planned, and the result was a centralised kingdom that extended Piedmont’s laws to regions very different from it. Italian unification also produced a deeper conflict with the Catholic Church and a sharper social divide.

Perspectives and debates

Metternich: reactionary or European statesman?

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Metternich was seen as the symbol of reaction, the man who held back liberalism and nationalism and so made the explosions of 1848 more violent. Liberal and nationalist historians in Italy and Germany presented his system as repression that delayed the inevitable.

Others have judged him more positively. Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored (1957) praised the Vienna settlement for keeping the peace among the great powers for a generation. Wolfram Siemann’s biography Metternich: Strategist and Visionary (2016; English translation 2019) argues that Metternich was a modern, European-minded statesman who sought a stable international order, was interested in economic and administrative reform, and was often blocked by his own emperor. Critics reply that, whatever his intentions, the Carlsbad Decrees and the interventions in Italy were real repression.

1848: a failed revolution?

Lewis Namier (1944) blamed the liberal intellectuals of 1848 for impractical politics and for a nationalism that already trampled on the rights of other peoples. A. J. P. Taylor saw 1848 as the moment when Germany "failed to turn" towards liberal democracy. Both views shaped the later idea of a German Sonderweg ("special path"), developed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in The German Empire, 1871–1918 (1973): the argument that Germany’s failure to have a successful liberal revolution left power with the Junkers, the army and the bureaucracy, and that this helps explain the path to 1933.

David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, in The Peculiarities of German History (1984), challenged the Sonderweg idea, arguing that the German middle classes achieved many of their goals (law, markets, local power) without a revolution, and that there was no "normal" path from which Germany deviated. Jonathan Sperber (1994) and Christopher Clark in Revolutionary Spring (2023) stress how much the revolutions changed: they ended feudal obligations, made constitutions and parliaments normal, and brought new political forces into being, even though they failed to create nation-states.

Cavour, Garibaldi and the nature of Italian unification

Nineteenth-century Italian writers presented the Risorgimento as a story of national heroes working together: Mazzini the prophet, Garibaldi the sword, Cavour the brain and Victor Emmanuel the king. The British historian Denis Mack Smith challenged this in Cavour and Garibaldi 1860 (1954) and later works. He argued that Cavour did not plan the unification of the whole of Italy, that he was often reacting to Garibaldi and the democrats, and that his main aim in 1860 was to stop them; the full unity of 1860 was, in this view, largely the result of Garibaldi’s initiative.

The Italian historian Rosario Romeo, in his three-volume Cavour e il suo tempo (1969–1984), defended Cavour as the architect of a liberal Italy, a statesman of European stature whose diplomacy and economic policy made unification possible and who chose the right moment to act. Lucy Riall, in Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (2007), studies how Garibaldi’s fame was deliberately built through newspapers, images and his own writings, showing that his political influence came partly from a carefully managed public image. Derek Beales and Eugenio Biagini, in The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (2nd edition 2002), stress how small the national movement was and how much unification depended on international circumstances.

The Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, writing in prison in 1929–1935, called the Risorgimento a "passive revolution": the moderate liberals led by Cavour absorbed the democrats and kept control of the process, and because there was no agrarian revolution to give land to the peasants, the new state never won the support of the masses. Christopher Duggan, in The Force of Destiny (2007), develops the theme that the problem of creating Italians was never solved, which helps explain later Italian politics.

The table of historians of Italian unification shows that the disagreement is partly about evidence and partly about values: whether historians judge unification by the state it created (Romeo), by the process (Mack Smith, Riall) or by its failure to include the majority (Gramsci).

Bismarck: master planner or opportunist?

Bismarck’s own memoirs, and many German historians after 1871, presented him as a genius who planned unification step by step, using each war to prepare the next. In Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (1955), A. J. P. Taylor argued the opposite: Bismarck was an improviser who exploited opportunities created by others, often without knowing where they would lead. Bismarck himself sometimes encouraged this view, saying that a statesman could only wait until he heard the footsteps of God through history and then try to catch hold of the hem of his coat (a remark recorded by others and quoted in many versions).

Otto Pflanze, in Bismarck and the Development of Germany (1963; revised in three volumes, 1990), proposed a middle view: Bismarck had a consistent aim, the expansion of Prussian power in Germany, but pursued it through a "strategy of alternatives", keeping several options open (cooperation with Austria, a division of Germany along the river Main, or war) and choosing whichever circumstances made possible. Lothar Gall’s Bismarck: The White Revolutionary (1980) presents him as a conservative who used revolutionary means, such as universal suffrage and wars against legitimate monarchs, to preserve the Prussian monarchy. Jonathan Steinberg’s Bismarck: A Life (2011) stresses Bismarck’s extraordinary personal power over others and his ruthlessness.

Blood and iron, or coal and iron?

Another debate concerns the weight of economic forces against politics and war. In 1919 the economist John Maynard Keynes, writing about the Treaty of Versailles, observed that the German Empire "has been built more truly on coal and iron than on blood and iron". Helmut Böhme, in Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht (Germany’s Path to Great Power, 1966), argued that the Zollverein and Prussian economic power, and the interests of Prussian industry and agriculture, explain the outcome better than Bismarck’s diplomacy: Austria had already lost the economic contest before it lost the war.

Critics of the economic interpretation point out that Zollverein members fought against Prussia in 1866 and that southern voters rejected closer union in 1868, so economic ties did not create political loyalty. Thomas Nipperdey and Christopher Clark, in Iron Kingdom (2006), give weight to both economic foundations and to political decisions and contingency: unification as a kleindeutsch empire was one of several possible outcomes, and it took war to decide it.

The table of interpretations suggests how the debates can be weighed. Economic power explains why Prussia was able to unify Germany; Bismarck’s diplomacy and Moltke’s army explain how and when it happened; and the opportunist and planner views are two ends of a scale on which most historians now place Bismarck somewhere in the middle.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

The questions that follow are written in the style of Paper 3. They cover the Congress System, the revolutions of 1848, the unification of Italy and the unification of Germany, and use both types of claim: a claim that one factor was the most significant, and a claim about the impact or character of an event.

Paper 3: Metternich and the Congress System

Paper 3: the revolutions of 1848

Paper 3: the unification of Italy

Paper 3: the unification of Germany

Paper 3: the impact of 1848

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain the principles of the Vienna settlement and describe its terms for Germany and Italy.

• To do:

  I can explain how Metternich used the Holy Alliance, the Congress System and the German Confederation, and evaluate how effective his system was.

• To do:

  I can describe the intellectual origins of nationalism in Italy and Germany, including Romanticism and cultural nationalism.

• To do:

  I can explain why the Italian risings of 1820–1844 failed.

• To do:

  I can compare the programmes of Mazzini, Gioberti and Balbo, and assess Mazzini’s impact.

• To do:

  I can explain the role of the papacy before and during 1848, including Pius IX’s Allocution.

• To do:

  I can describe the nature of monarchy in the Vormärz in Austria, Prussia and the southern states.

• To do:

  I can explain the rise of Prussia and the creation and significance of the Zollverein.

• To do:

  I can narrate and explain the revolutions of 1848–1849 in Italy and in Germany, and why they failed.

• To do:

  I can assess the impact of 1848: new ideas, the role of the middle classes and intellectuals, the return of autocracy, and social and cultural change.

• To do:

  I can explain Cavour’s domestic and foreign policies and his aims.

• To do:

  I can explain the role of Napoleon III, Britain and Prussia in Italian unification.