The Piedmontese ruling circles tried to prevent the convening of an all-Italian Constituent Assembly and to unite through a simple territorial expansion of the Sardinian Kingdom, inviting the population of the liberated regions to vote for their accession to Piedmont. The plebiscite, held on October 21 in the South, approved the merger of Naples and Sicily with the Sardinian Kingdom; In November, as a result of plebiscites, Umbria and Marche also joined it.
Establishing Italy
Thus, by the end of 1860, Italy was united, with exception to Rome and the regions of Lazio and Venice. The general Italian parliament assembled in Turin on March 17, 1861, announced the creation of an Italian kingdom led by the Piedmontese King Victor Emmanuel II. The constitutional order that existed in Piemont was extended to the new state.
The unification of the country was accompanied by the unification of legislation, judicial, monetary and customs systems, a system of measures and weights, and taxation. This opened the way for an economic rapprochement of the disunited territories. Thanks to the rapid construction of railways, the main areas of Italy were linked together. As a result, there were favorable opportunities for a more rapid folding of the single national market.
The unification of the country contributed to the development of the labor movement. It originated in the 1840s , when a few dozen workers’ mutual assistance societies arose. Initially, they were influenced by moderate liberals, and their only goal was to improve the material condition of the workers. In the 1860s, mutual aid societies began to appear in many areas of Italy. Delegates from various regions of the country began to gather at congresses of societies. Thus the workers’ movement began to acquire an all-Italian character.
Uprisings & Rome
The situation in Italy in the 1860s was tense. The newly emerged Italian state faced serious problems. One of them was the widespread uprising of the Neapolitan peasantry. The collapse of hopes for resolving the issue of communal lands pushed the rural masses of the South into action against the new government, now in the hands of the nobles and the landed bourgeoisie, which especially widely plundered communal lands. Under their pressure, the Italian government refused to enforce its decree of the 1st of January 1861 on the division of communal lands, which the peasants so much desired. In this situation, the Bourbon supporters fomented the discontent of the rural masses, playing on their long-established belief in the overthrown dynasty as an intercessor of the peasants. The South was flooded with numerous armed detachments, some of them numbered thousands. Their backbone was made up of soldiers and non-commissioned officers of the disintegrated Bourbon army, who on their return to the village were often subjected to oppression by the liberals. The insurgents ravaged the municipalities, burned the archives, dealt with the liberals, seized their lands, and taxed many landowners with indemnities.
From the summer of 1861, the situation in the South of the country resembled a civil war: the villages burned, government forces entered into fierce battles with mobile detachments of the insurgents, and carried out mass executions. The Italian government, without taking any measures in the interests of the peasants, decided to act solely by force, concentrating the 120,000-strong army in the South. The movement was suppressed only in 1865 , but its individual outbreaks continued until the end of the 1860s . During this time, more than 5,000 insurgents were killed and wounded.
The papacy became the bulwark of all the reactionary forces that linked the southern uprising with the hope of destroying the young Italian state. In Rome, the Neapolitan Bourbons were found, and the remains of loyal troops, which, together with clerical volunteers from other European countries, made pogroms from the papal territory to the regions of the uprising. Pius IX refused to recognize the Italian government, rejected all his proposals for reconciliation and did not want to hear about Rome to become the capital of Italy. In response to the hostility of the Vatican, the Italian government confiscated and put into sale the property of 40,000 different church organizations – 750,000 hectares of land, which was transferred mainly to the hands of the bourgeoisie. These and other measures contributed to the weakening of the economic and political influence of the church. However, while the pope retained power in Rome, which was maintained only thanks to the presence of the soldiers of Napoleon III, Italy inevitably remained dependent on France. Thus, the solution of the “Roman question” was a vital problem of the country’s development.
Fight Against Rome and The Third Fight for Independence
In the summer of 1862 Garibaldi arrived in Sicily and began to call for a campaign against Rome. Soon he crossed with volunteers to Calabria. Napoleon III, constantly looking in his Italian policy on the French clerics, said that he would not allow the removal of the pope from Rome. Then the Italian government, first taking a wait-and-see attitude, moved troops against Garibaldi. In August, at Aspromonte, they met his detachment with rifle fire. Garibaldi was seriously wounded, taken into custody, and many of his men were arrested.
Having suppressed the revolutionary initiative as a means of final unification of the country, the liberal government sought the opportunity to implement it through military-diplomatic maneuvers. In 1866, with the aim of liberating Venice, it accepted Bismarck’s proposal to enter into a military alliance with Prussia against Austria, starting the “third war for the independence of Italy”.
Garibaldi, who was again invited to lead the corps of volunteers, remained true to himself: leading heavy fights in the mountains of Tyrol, he forced the Austrian troops to retreat. The regular army, because of the incompetence of the Italian command, lost the battle of Kustotsi, and the fleet failed in the Adriatic Sea in the battle near the island of Lissa. As a result, Italy imposed a humiliating procedure for obtaining Venice from the hands of Napoleon III, to whom it was handed over by the Austrian defeated by the Prussians. After the annexation of the Venetian region, Garibaldi, with several thousand volunteers in the fall of 1867, again rushed to liberate Rome. In a stubborn battle with poorly armed fighters, they encountered French battalions equipped with new rapid-fire rifles, and this led to the defeat of Garibaldi. Garibaldi himself was arrested by the Italian government and sent to the island of Caprera.
The Huge Impact on France
In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War began, the French corps was finally recalled from Rome. Following the collapse of the empire of Napoleon III, the Italian troops on September 20, after a short battle, entered Rome, which, from the summer of 1871, became the capital of Italy. The pope, who retained the Vatican Palace, declared himself an “eternal prisoner” of the Italian state.
The ceremonial entry into Rome of King Victor Emmanuel II took place on July 2, 1871 . The process of unification of Italy was complete. Risorgimento’s movement as a whole contributed to the formation of the Italian nation, it became an impetus for the development of industrialization as well as the establishment of capitalist social relations, and it also contributed to the formation of the national market and the transformation of Italy into an independent subject of international politics.
However, the Italian government faced many unresolved problems. Because of the high property qualification, the voter layer remained very narrow, which threatened to a certain extent the principles of constitutionalism and parliamentarism; The Roman question was a serious concern, since the Pope urged believers not to take part in the political life of Italy, that is, confirmed the principle of non expedit proclaimed in 1867 (not proper); it was difficult to foresee in the near future the problem of varying levels of development in the North and South of Italy.
Sources:
Walter Maturi. Interpetazioni del Risorgimento. Torino, 1962.
Giorgio Candeloro. The history of modern Italy
New history of Europe and America: First period