The Unification of Italy and the Risorgimento

Introduction

Few episodes in the history of modern Europe carry as much drama, intellectual richness, or political complexity as the unification of Italy. Known in Italian as the Risorgimento — a word meaning "resurgence" or "resurrection" — this decades-long process transformed a peninsula long divided into competing kingdoms, duchies, and papal territories into a single, sovereign nation-state. The process unfolded across roughly half a century, from the post-Napoleonic settlement of 1815 to the capture of Rome in 1870, and it involved a remarkable cast of historical actors: idealists and realists, monarchs and republicans, soldiers and statesmen, poets and patriots. The Risorgimento is, above all, a story of competing visions of what Italy was and what it could become, and of the messy, violent, and often disappointing ways in which historical idealism encounters the hard truths of power.

For students of AP European History, the unification of Italy is a critical case study in the dynamics of nineteenth-century nationalism. It illustrates the interplay between liberal ideology, romantic nationalism, Realpolitik, and great-power diplomacy. It shows how nationalist movements depend not only on popular enthusiasm but on military force, diplomatic calculation, and the exploitation of international rivalries. It demonstrates the gap between the ideals proclaimed by nationalist movements and the realities of the states they create. And it provides an indispensable comparison with the near-simultaneous unification of Germany under Bismarck — a comparison that reveals both the common patterns and the distinctive features of nineteenth-century nation-building.

This article covers the full arc of Italian unification in exhaustive depth: the post-1815 settlement that fragmented the peninsula; the early nationalist movements of the Carbonari and Mazzini's Young Italy; the failed revolutions of 1848; the Piedmontese strategy under Count Cavour; the wars of 1859 and the diplomatic revolution that followed; Garibaldi's extraordinary Expedition of the Thousand in 1860; the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861; the subsequent acquisitions of Venetia (1866) and Rome (1870); the profound problems that plagued the new state — the Southern Question, the Roman Question, the problem of mass illiteracy and poverty; and the long-term legacy of the Risorgimento for Italy and for European history.

The Italian Situation After 1815

The Congress of Vienna and the Reconstruction of Italy

When the statesmen of Europe gathered at Vienna in 1814 and 1815 to reconstruct the political order shattered by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Italy occupied a central place in their deliberations. The peninsula had been profoundly transformed by two decades of French domination. Napoleon had reorganized most of northern and central Italy into the Kingdom of Italy (under his stepson Eugene de Beauharnais as viceroy) and the Kingdom of Naples (under his brother-in-law Joachim Murat), while annexing the northwestern coastal strip directly to France. These administrative reorganizations had brought with them the Napoleonic Code, the abolition of feudalism, the suppression of many monasteries and religious orders, the reorganization of taxation, and the construction of new roads and administrative infrastructure. They had also, crucially, stimulated a nascent Italian national consciousness among educated elites who, for the first time, administered a unified territory under consistent laws.