Risorgimento (redirected from Italian unification)

Risorgimento (rēsôr'jēmĕn`tō) [Ital.,=resurgence], in 19th-century Italian history, period of cultural nationalism and of political activism, leading to unification of Italy.

Roots of the Risorgimento

The Risorgimento's roots lie in 18th-century Italian culture in the works of such people as Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Vittorio Alfieri, and Antonio Genovesi. Italy had not been a single political unit since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th cent., and from the 16th through the 18th cent. foreign domination or influence was virtually complete. During the French Revolutionary Wars and the period dominated by Napoleon I, the temporary expulsion of Austrian and other repressive regimes and the formation of new states in Italy (see Cisalpine Republic) encouraged hopes for unification.

Early Years and Factions

Secret societies such as the Carbonari appeared and carried on revolutionary activity after the restoration of the old order by the Congress of Vienna (1814–15). The Carbonari engineered uprisings in the Two Sicilies (1820) and in the kingdom of Sardinia (1821). Despite severe reprisals inspired by the Holy Alliance, new uprisings occurred in 1831 in the Papal States, Modena, and Parma. Italian literature of this period, especially the novels of Alessandro Manzoni and the marchese d'Azeglio and the poetry of Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi, did much to stimulate Italian nationalism.

The Risorgimento was primarily a movement of the middle class and the nobility; since economic issues were virtually ignored, the peasantry remained indifferent to its ideals. Political activity was carried on by three groups. Giuseppe Mazzini led the radical faction through his secret society Giovine Italia [young Italy], founded in 1831. Its program was republican and anticlerical; it vaguely alluded to social and economic reforms. The conservative and clerical elements among the nationalists generally advocated a federation of Italian states under the presidency of the pope. The moderates—the propertied bourgeoisie and the north Italian promoters of industry—favored unification of Italy under a king of the house of Savoy. This monarch, as it later turned out, was Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia.

The Fight for Unification

Sardinia assumed the leadership of the Risorgimento in 1848 when the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom rose against Austrian rule and King Charles Albert intervened in favor of the rebels. After initial victories Charles Albert was defeated by the Austrians at Custoza and was forced to sign an armistice and withdraw his forces. Renewing his attack in 1849, he was again defeated by the Austrians at Novara and abdicated in favor of his son, Victor Emmanuel II, who made peace. Meanwhile, revolutions were suppressed in Venice (under Daniele Manin), Parma, Modena, Tuscany, the Two Sicilies, and the Papal States, where a short-lived Roman Republic was proclaimed under the leadership of Mazzini.

The liberal movement gradually coalesced around Victor Emmanuel II and the policies of his minister Camillo Benso di Cavour. Cavour realized that Sardinia could not defeat Austria without foreign aid. He set out to win French support and British sympathy by introducing sweeping social reforms within Sardinia, by inaugurating a free-trade policy, and by joining (1855) the allies in the Crimean War. Emperor Napoleon III met Cavour at Plombières (1858) and promised military aid against Austria.

War broke out in 1859. The French and Sardinians defeated the Austrians at Magenta and caused them to retreat at Solferino. These victories were so costly, however, that Napoleon signed a separate armistice at Villafranca di Verona (ratified by the Treaty of Zürich). Austria retained Venetia, and Sardinia gained only Lombardy. It was also stipulated that Tuscany, Modena, Parma, Bologna, and the Romagna, where revolutionists had organized provisional governments, were to return to their former rulers. This provision was not fulfilled; plebiscites were held (Mar., 1860) in these states, which voted for union with Sardinia. In return for recognizing these plebiscites, Napoleon received Savoy and Nice. The spectacular conquest of the Two Sicilies (1860) by Giuseppe Garibaldi was followed by Sardinia's annexation of Umbria and the Marches. After the Two Sicilies had voted for union with Sardinia, the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in Mar., 1861.

The remaining territorial objectives of the Risorgimento were Venetia, still in Austria's possession, and Rome and Latium, which the pope was able to retain because of French protection. Through its alliance with Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Italy obtained Venetia. Italy seized the remainder of the papal possessions in 1870 when France withdrew its troops during the Franco-Prussian War. Italian unification was then complete, but unsatisfied nationalism continued to exist in the form of irredentism.

Bibliography

See D. M. Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento (1971); C. M. Lovett, Carlo Cattaneo and the Politics of the Risorgimento (1972), and the several works on the subject by G. M. Trevelyan.

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Risorgimento

(Italian; “Rising Again”)

Nineteenth-century movement for Italian unification. Reforms introduced by France into its Italian states in the Napoleonic period remained after the states were restored to their former rulers in 1815 and provided an impetus for the movement. Secret groups such as Young Italy advocated Italian unity, and leaders such as Camillo Cavour, who founded the journal Il Risorgimento (1847), Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Giuseppe Mazzini called for liberal reforms and a united Italy. After the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, leadership passed to Cavour and Piedmont, which formed an alliance with France against Austria (1859). The unification of most of Italy in 1861, followed by the annexation of Venetia (1866) and papal Rome (1870), marked the end of the Risorgimento.

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Risorgimento 

a national liberation movement of the Italian people against Austrian oppression with the goal of unifying the small, fragmented Italian states into a single national state. The Risorgimento is also understood as the period during which this movement occurred—from the late 18th century to 1861. The movement culminated in 1870 with the annexation of Rome to the kingdom of Italy.

The Risorgimento reflected the objective historical necessity that had developed in the Italian states for destroying the obsolete feudal-absolutist order and establishing a bourgeois system. The bourgeoisie headed a broad antifeudal front of class forces. Heterogeneous in its social composition, the bourgeoisie comprised two principal political currents. The first was a moderately liberal one, reflecting the interests of the big landowning, commercial-usurious, and industrial bourgeoisie, who acted in alliance with the gentry turned bourgeois; the other current was a democratic one, which reflected the interests of the petite and middle bourgeoisie. These political currents advocated fundamentally divergent programs for the social reorganization of the country. While the liberals were seeking to create a unified Italy headed by the pope or a monarch from the House of Savoy, the democrats were fighting for a unified Italy in the form of a democratic republic.

Taking on greater and greater sweep in scope during the course of its development, the Risorgimento movement at the moments of its greatest surges turned into bourgeois and bourgeois-democratic revolutions—the Neapolitan Revolution of 1820–21, the revolution in Piedmont in 1821, the Revolution of 1831 in central Italy, the Italian Revolution of 1848–49, and the Revolution of 1859-60. Revolutionary actions by the popular masses were significant and at certain stages decisive (the Roman Republic of 1848-49 and the revolutionary events of 1859-60, especially in southern Italy). Italy, as noted by F. Engels, was unified, in contrast to Germany, not “from above” by dynastic wars and diplomatic maneuvers but by revolution (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 21, p. 430). However, in the course of the complex process of the Risorgimento, the democratic, republican current proved unable to carry out a bourgeois-democratic reorganization of the country because of the class limitations of the bourgeois democrats. The democrats dared not initiate a broad peasant movement aimed at effecting a radical break in feudal agrarian relations. Moreover, they even hampered the revolutionary action of the urban poor to a certain extent. The liberal current took over the political leadership of the movement, and as a result, the unified Italian state created in 1861 was a constitutional monarchy. A capitalist socioeconomic structure was established that preserved a number of feudal vestiges.

The liberation struggle against Fascism waged by the Italian people in the years 1943-45 during World War II is referred to as the second Risorgimento.

K. F. MIZIANO