# 20
Modern History of Italy
ITALIAN GAINS FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Napoleon conquered most of Italy in the name of the French Revolution in 1797-99.
He consolidated old units and split up Austria's holdings. He set up a series of new republics, complete with new codes of law and abolition of old feudal privileges.
Napoleon's Cisalpine Republic was centered on Milan.
Genoa the city became a republic while its hinterland became the Ligurian Republic.
The Roman Republic was formed out of the papal holdings while the pope himself was sent to France.
The Neapolitan Republic was formed around Naples, but it lasted only five months before the enemy forces of the Coalition recaptured it.
In 1805 he formed the Kingdom of Italy, with himself as king and his stepson as viceroy.
In addition, France turned the Netherlands into the Batavian Republic, and Switzerland into the Helvetic Republic.
All these new countries were satellites of France, and had to pay large subsidies to Paris, as well as provide military support for Napoleon's wars. Their political and administrative systems were modernized, the metric system introduced, and trade barriers reduced.
Jewish ghettos were abolished.
Belgium and Piedmont became integral parts of France.
In 1805, after the French victory over the Third Coalition and the Peace of Pressburg, Napoleon recovered Veneto and Dalmatia, annexing them to the Italian Republic and renaming it the Kingdom of Italy.
Also, that year a second satellite state, the Ligurian Republic (successor to the old Republic of Genoa), was pressured into merging with France.
In 1806, he conquered the Kingdom of Naples and granted it to his brother and then (from 1808) to Joachim Murat, along with marrying his sisters Elisa and Paolina off to the princes of Massa-Carrara and Guastalla.
In 1808, he also annexed Marche and Tuscany to the Kingdom of Italy.
In 1809, Bonaparte occupied Rome, for contrasts with the pope, who had excommunicated him, and to maintain his own state efficiently, exiling the Pope first to Savona and then to France.
After Russia, the other states of Europe re-allied themselves and defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig, after which his Italian allied states, with Murat first among them, abandoned him to ally with Austria.
Defeated at Paris on 6 April 1814, Napoleon was compelled to renounce his throne and sent into exile on Elba.
The resulting Congress of Vienna (1814) restored a situation close to that of 1795, dividing Italy between Austria (in the north-east and Lombardy), the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (in the south and in Sicily), and Tuscany, the Papal States and other minor states in the centre.
However, old republics such as Venice and Genoa were not recreated, Venice went to Austria, and Genoa went to the Kingdom of Sardinia.
On Napoleon's escape and return to France (the Hundred Days), he regained Murat's support, but Murat proved unable to convince the Italians to fight for Napoleon with his Proclamation of Rimini and was beaten and killed.
The Italian kingdoms thus fell, and Italy's Restoration period began, with many pre-Napoleonic sovereigns returned to their thrones.
Piedmont, Genoa and Nice came to be united, as did Sardinia (which went on to create the State of Savoy), while Lombardy, Veneto, Istria and Dalmatia were re-annexed to Austria.
The dukedoms of Parma and Modena re-formed, and the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples returned to the Bourbons.
The political and social events in the restoration period of Italy (1815–1835) led to popular uprisings throughout the peninsula and greatly shaped what would become the Italian Wars of Independence.
All this led to a new Kingdom of Italy and Italian Unification.
Artz emphasizes the benefits the Italians gained from the French Revolution:
For nearly two decades the Italians had the excellent codes of law, a fair system of taxation, a better economic situation, and more religious and intellectual toleration than they had known for centuries.... Everywhere old physical, economic, and intellectual barriers had been thrown down and the Italians had begun to be aware of a common nationality.
With the rise of nationalism and the idea of the nation state in the 19th century, the peninsula was unified in the late 19th century.
The new Kingdom of Italy, established in 1861, quickly modernized and built a large colonial empire, colonizing parts of Africa, and countries along the Mediterranean.
However, many regions of the young nation (notably, the South) remained rural and poor, originating the Italian diaspora.
Unification (1814 to 1861)
The Risorgimento was the political and social process that unified different states of the Italian peninsula into the single nation of Italy.
It is difficult to pin down exact dates for the beginning and end of Italian reunification, but most scholars agree that it began with the end of Napoleonic rule and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and approximately ended with the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, though the last "città irredente" did not join the Kingdom of Italy until the Italian victory in World War I.
As Napoleon's reign began to fail, other national monarchs he had installed tried to keep their thrones by feeding those nationalistic sentiments, setting the stage for the revolutions to come.
Among these monarchs were the viceroy of Italy, Eugène de Beauharnais, who tried to get Austrian approval for his succession to the Kingdom of Italy, and Joachim Murat, who called for Italian patriots' help for the unification of Italy under his rule.
Following the defeat of Napoleonic France, the Congress of Vienna (1815) was convened to redraw the European continent.
In Italy, the Congress restored the pre-Napoleonic patchwork of independent governments, either directly ruled or strongly influenced by the prevailing European powers, particularly Austria.
At the time, the struggle for Italian unification was perceived to be waged primarily against the Austrian Empire and the Habsburgs, since they directly controlled the predominantly Italian-speaking northeastern part of present-day Italy and were the single most powerful force against unification.
The Austrian Empire vigorously repressed nationalist sentiment growing on the Italian peninsula, as well as in the other parts of Habsburg domains. Austrian Chancellor Franz Metternich, an influential diplomat at the Congress of Vienna, stated that the word Italy was nothing more than "a geographic expression."
Artistic and literary sentiment also turned towards nationalism; and perhaps the most famous of proto-nationalist works was Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). Some read this novel as a thinly veiled allegorical critique of Austrian rule. The novel was published in 1827 and extensively revised in the following years. The 1840 version of I Promessi Sposi used a standardized version of the Tuscan dialect, a conscious effort by the author to provide a language and force people to learn it.
Those in favour of unification also faced opposition from the Holy See, particularly after failed attempts to broker a confederation with the Papal States, which would have left the Papacy with some measure of autonomy over the region.
The pope at the time, Pius IX, feared that giving up power in the region could mean the persecution of Italian Catholics.
Even among those who wanted to see the peninsula unified into one country, different groups could not agree on what form a unified state would take.
Vincenzo Gioberti, a Piedmontese priest, had suggested a confederation of Italian states under rulership of the Pope.
His book, Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians, was published in 1843 and created a link between the Papacy and the Risorgimento.
Many leading revolutionaries wanted a republic, but eventually it was a king and his chief minister who had the power to unite the Italian states as a monarchy.
One of the most influential revolutionary groups was the Carbonari (coal-burners), a secret organization formed in southern Italy early in the 19th century.
Inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, its members were mainly drawn from the middle class and intellectuals.
After the Congress of Vienna divided the Italian peninsula among the European powers, the Carbonari movement spread into the Papal States, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchy of Modena and the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia.
The revolutionaries were so feared that the reigning authorities passed an ordinance condemning to death anyone who attended a Carbonari meeting. The society, however, continued to exist and was at the root of many of the political disturbances in Italy from 1820 until after unification.
The Carbonari condemned Napoleon III to death for failing to unite Italy, and the group almost succeeded in assassinating him in 1858.
Many leaders of the unification movement were at one time members of this organization. (Note: Napoleon III, as a young man, fought on the side of the 'Carbonari'.)
Two prominent radical figures in the unification movement were Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi.
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Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1866
The more conservative constitutional monarchic figures included Count Cavour and Victor Emmanuel II, who would later become the first king of a united Italy.
Mazzini's activity in revolutionary movements caused him to be imprisoned soon after he joined. While in prison, he concluded that Italy could – and therefore should – be unified and formulated his program for establishing a free, independent, and republican nation with Rome as its capital.
After Mazzini's release in 1831, he went to Marseille, where he organized a new political society called La Giovine Italia (Young Italy). The new society, whose motto was "God and the People," sought the unification of Italy.
The creation of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of concerted efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula.
The Kingdom of Sardinia industrialized from 1830 onward.
A constitution, the Statuto Albertino was enacted in the year of revolutions, 1848, under liberal pressure.
Under the same pressure, the First Italian War of Independence was declared on Austria.
After initial success the war took a turn for the worse and the Kingdom of Sardinia lost.
Garibaldi, a native of Nice (then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia), participated in an uprising in Piedmont in 1834, was sentenced to death, and escaped to South America. He spent fourteen years there, taking part in several wars, and returned to Italy in 1848.
After the Revolutions of 1848, the apparent leader of the Italian unification movement was Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. He was popular amongst southern Italians.
Garibaldi led the Italian republican drive for unification in southern Italy, but the northern Italian monarchy of the House of Savoy in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia whose government was led by Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour, also had the ambition of establishing a united Italian state.
Though the kingdom had no physical connection to Rome (deemed the natural capital of Italy), the kingdom had successfully challenged Austria in the Second Italian War of Independence, liberating Lombardy-Venetia from Austrian rule.
The kingdom also had established important alliances which helped it improve the possibility of Italian unification, such as Britain and France in the Crimean War.
Southern Question
The transition was not smooth for the south (the "Mezzogiorno").
The entire region south of Naples was afflicted with numerous deep economic and social liabilities. Transportation was difficult, soil fertility was low with extensive erosion, deforestation was severe, many businesses could stay open only because of high protective tariffs, large estates were often poorly managed, most peasants had only very small plots, and there was chronic unemployment and high crime rates.
Cavour decided the basic problem was poor government, and believed that it could be remedied by strict application of the Piedmonese legal system.
The main result was an upsurge in brigandage, which turned in a bloody civil war that lasted almost ten years. The insurrection reached its peak mainly in Basilicata and northern Apulia, headed by the brigands Carmine Crocco and Michele Caruso.
With the end of the southern riots, there was a heavy outflow of millions of peasants in the Italian diaspora, especially to the United States and South America. Others relocated to the northern industrial cities such as Genoa, Milan and Turin, and sent money home.
Liberal Italy (1861–1922)
Italy became a nation-state belatedly—on 17 March 1861, when most of the states of the peninsula were united under king Victor Emmanuel II of the House of Savoy, which ruled over Piedmont.
The architects of Italian unification were Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the Chief Minister of Victor Emmanuel, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, a general and national hero.
In 1866 Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck offered Victor Emmanuel II an alliance with the Kingdom of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War.
In exchange Prussia would allow Italy to annex Austrian-controlled Venice. King Emmanuel agreed to the alliance and the Third Italian War of Independence began.
The victory against Austria allowed Italy to annex Venice.
The one major obstacle to Italian unity remained Rome.
In 1870, Prussia went to war with France starting the Franco-Prussian War. To keep the large Prussian army at bay, France abandoned its positions in Rome in order to fight the Prussians.
Italy benefited from Prussia's victory against France by being able to take over the Papal State from French authority.
Italian unification was completed, and shortly afterward Italy's capital was moved to Rome.
Rome itself remained for a decade under the Papacy, and became part of the Kingdom of Italy only on 20 September 1870, the final date of Italian unification.
The Vatican City is now, since the Lateran Treaty of 1929, an independent enclave surrounded by Italy, as is San Marino.
In Northern Italy, industrialisation and modernisation began in the last part of the 19th century.
The south, at the same time, was overpopulated, forcing millions of people to search for a better life abroad. It is estimated that around one million Italian people moved to other European countries such as France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Parliamentary democracy developed considerably in the 20th century.
The Sardinian Statuto Albertino of 1848, extended to the whole Kingdom of Italy in 1861, provided for basic freedoms, but the electoral laws excluded the non-propertied and uneducated classes from voting.
Italy's political arena was sharply divided between broad camps of left and right which created frequent deadlock and attempts to preserve governments, which led to instances such as conservative Prime Minister Marco Minghetti enacting economic reforms appease the opposition such as the nationalization of railways.
In 1876, Minghetti lost power and was replaced by the Democrat Agostino Depretis, who began a period of political dominance in the 1880s, but continued attempts to appease the opposition to hold power.
Depretis began his term as Prime Minister by initiating an experimental political idea called Trasformismo (transformism).
The theory of Trasformismo was that a cabinet should select a variety of moderates and capable politicians from a non-partisan perspective.
In practice, trasformismo was authoritarian and corrupt, Depretis pressured districts to vote for his candidates if they wished to gain favourable concessions from Depretis when in power.
The results of the 1876 election resulted in only four representatives from the right being elected, allowing the government to be dominated by Depretis.
Despotic and corrupt actions are believed to be the key means in which Depretis managed to keep support in southern Italy.
Depretis put through authoritarian measures, such as the banning public meetings, placing "dangerous" individuals in internal exile on remote penal islands across Italy and adopting militarist policies.
Depretis enacted controversial legislation for the time, such was abolishing arrest for debt, making elementary education free and compulsory while ending compulsory religious teaching in elementary schools.
The first government of Depretis collapsed after his dismissal of his Interior Minister, and ended with his resignation in 1877.
The second government of Depretis started in 1881.
Depretis' goals included widening suffrage in 1882 and increasing the tax intake from Italians by expanding the minimum requirements of who could pay taxes and the creation of a new electoral system called which resulted in large numbers of inexperienced deputies in the Italian parliament.
In 1887, Depretis was finally pushed out of office after years of political decline.
In 1887, Depretis cabinet minister and former Garibaldi republican Francesco Crispi became Prime Minister.
Crispi's major concerns during his reign was protecting Italy from their dangerous neighbour Austria-Hungary.
To challenge the threat, Crispi worked to build Italy as a great world power through increased military expenditures, advocation of expansionism, and trying to win Germany's favor even by joining the Triple Alliance which included both Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1882 which remained officially intact until 1915.
While helping Italy develop strategically, he continued trasformismo and was authoritarian, once suggesting the use of martial law to ban opposition parties.
Despite being authoritarian, Crispi put through liberal policies such as the Public Health Act of 1888 and establishing tribunals for redress against abuses by the government.
The overwhelming attention paid to foreign policy alienated the agricultural community in Italy which had been in decline since 1873.
Both radical and conservative forces in the Italian parliament demanded that the government investigate how to improve agriculture in Italy.
The investigation which started in 1877 and was released eight years later, showed that agriculture was not improving, that landowners were swallowing up revenue from their lands and contributing almost nothing to the development of the land.
There was aggravation by lower class Italians to the break-up of communal lands which benefited only landlords.
Most of the workers on the agricultural lands were not peasants but short-term labourers who at best were employed for one year.
Peasants without stable income were forced to live off meager food supplies, disease was spreading rapidly, plagues were reported, including a major cholera epidemic which killed at least 55,000 people.
The Italian government could not deal with the situation effectively due to the mass overspending of the Depretis government that left Italy in huge debt.
Italy also suffered economically because of overproduction of grapes for their vineyards in the 1870s and 1880s when France's vineyard industry was suffering from vine disease caused by insects.
Italy during that time prospered as the largest exporter of wine in Europe but following the recovery of France in 1888, southern Italy was overproducing and had to split into which caused greater unemployment and bankruptcies.
In 1913 male universal suffrage was allowed.
The Socialist Party became the main political party, outclassing the traditional liberal and conservative organisations.
Starting from the last two decades of the 19th century, Italy developed its own colonial Empire. Italian colonies were Somalia and Eritrea; an attempt to occupy Ethiopia failed in the First Italo–Ethiopian War of 1895–1896.
In 1911, Giovanni Giolitti's government sent forces to occupy Libya and declared war on the Ottoman Empire which held Libya.
Italy soon conquered and annexed Tripoli and the Dodecanese Islands. Nationalists advocated Italy's domination of the Mediterranean Sea by occupying Greece as well as the Adriatic coastal region of Dalmatia.
19th century
| Year | Date | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 1848 | Fuelled by the revolutionary republican ideology of Giuseppe Mazzini, uprisings lead to revolutionary governments being briefly installed in Rome, Milano and Venezia, and a Constitution being established in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Takeover by reactionary forces and the defeat of Piedmont-Sardinia by Austria lead to a failure in the First Italian War of Independence. | |
| 1859 | After having allied with France, under the lead of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia provokes Austria to war and secure the takeover of Milan and Lombardy (Second Italian War of Independence). Plebiscites subsequently guarantee the annexation of Tuscany, Emilian dukedoms, and Papal-controlled central Italy. Savoy and Nice are ceded to France in exchange for recognition. (to 1860) | |
| 1861 | 17 March | Proclamation of Italy, following the Expedition of the Thousand, lead by Giuseppe Garibaldi, and the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: most of the states of the Italian peninsula are united under king Victor Emmanuel II of the Savoy dynasty, crowned king of Italy. |
| 1865 | The capital of Italy is moved from Turin to Florence, in order to approach it to Rome, considered the natural capital, but still under Papal rule and French protection. | |
| 1866 | 19 June | Italy declares war on Austrian Empire as alPrussia. It's the Third Italian War of Independence, which paralleled the Austro-Prussian War. |
| 3 October | After some heavy losses, like Custoza and Lissa, and few wins (most of them by Giuseppe Garibaldi), thanks to Prussian victories the Kingdom of Italy gains Veneto and western Friuli by the Treaty of Vienna. Trento and Trieste remains “irredeemed”. | |
| 1870 | 20 September | Following the defeat of Napoleon III in the French-Prussian War, Italian forces occupy Roma, which becomes the new capital of Italy the following year. The Italian Army breaks into the walls of Rome by the breach of Porta Pia. |
| 2 October | Rome replaces Florence as the capital city of Italy. | |
| 1878 | 3 January | King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy dies |
| 9 January | His son, Umberto I, succeeds to throne | |
| 1882 | 5 July | The bay of Assab (Eritrea) becomes officially the first Italian colonial possession in Africa |
| 1889 | Somalia is established as the second Italian colony in Africa | |
| 1895 | 21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi invents the radio. |
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