Unification of Italy

Cavour first waged war against Austria in 1859 with French support, then ceded Savoy and Nice to France afterward as compensation for that support. The Battle of Solferino on June 24, 1859, delivered a decisive Franco-Piedmontese victory that shattered Austrian military confidence and cracked open the door to territorial consolidation across the northern peninsula. Cavour's gambit-trading French muscle for French real estate-proved shrewd realpolitik. It also signaled that unification would be neither spontaneous nor purely ideological, but rather the product of hard-nosed diplomacy married to military force.

The southern campaign arrived with less polish but greater romance. On May 11, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail from Genoa with roughly 1,100 volunteers to invade Sicily, launching what would become the rapid conquest of southern Italy. His expedition compressed months of expected campaigning into weeks. By September 20, Garibaldi entered Naples after racing across Sicily, consolidating control of the southern territories with a speed that alarmed the cautious Cavour in Turin. Garibaldi's vision tilted republican; Cavour's favored monarchy. The tension between these two architects of unification never fully dissolved, though events would settle the argument in Cavour's favor. The plebiscite of October 21, 1860, in Sicily and the Two Sicilies handed Cavour his decisive political trump. Voters approved union with the Piedmontese crown, and the prime minister had outmaneuvered Garibaldi's republican aspirations with the blunt instrument of popular consent.

Parliament declared Victor Emmanuel II king of a unified Italy on March 17, 1861, and the proclamation stood as formal completion of most of the peninsula. Yet "most" was not yet all. Venetia remained in Austrian hands until the Austro-Prussian War created the opening Italy needed; on October 26, 1866, Venetia joined the kingdom following Italian victory, filling in a major territorial gap that had nagged at the young state's map. Rome itself remained beyond reach as long as French troops garrisoned the Papal States on behalf of Pope Pius IX. Not until September 20, 1870, when French forces withdrew to face Prussian invasion in Europe, did Italian troops march into Rome. The papal temporal power collapsed, and Italian unification reached its definitive form.

The reverberations echoed across European chancelleries. Cavour, who did not live to see Rome's capture, had declared that "Italy is made. Now we must make Italians"-a sober acknowledgment that territorial unity and national identity were not synonymous. Garibaldi, his military labor complete, reflected that he had done his duty and that Italy was one, leaving the rest to God and the people. Pope Pius IX felt only dispossession, denouncing his confinement to the Vatican and the loss of his ancient dominions to what he termed revolutionary violence. The Times of London hailed the birth of a nation of thirty millions and the triumph of national sentiment over dynastic jealousy. Vienna's foreign ministry registered the shift with cold clarity: the balance of power in Europe had moved, and Austrian dominion in Italy was ended. The peninsula had become a kingdom, and Europe's map had been redrawn by the force of nationalist will.