Was Italian Unification National Liberation or Dynastic Conquest?

The Making of the Modern World: Thirty Lectures on Nineteenth-Century European History · Article 16

When the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, its parliament declared Victor Emmanuel II king. The apparently routine title contained a problem. He did not become Victor Emmanuel I of a new country; he retained the number he had used as king of Sardinia. Was Italy the political expression of a nation that had at last liberated itself, or an enlarged Piedmont ruled by the House of Savoy? Both descriptions identify genuine features of the Risorgimento, yet neither is adequate alone. Unification removed foreign rule and several old regimes, and it mobilised sincere ideals of nationality and citizenship. It also extended Piedmontese institutions, debts and armed power across populations that had little opportunity to determine the terms of their incorporation.

The most convincing answer, therefore, depends less on choosing a heroic or cynical label than on separating three questions. Who wanted Italy, and what did they mean by it? How did a national movement acquire the military and diplomatic capacity to win? And how was the resulting state experienced by people whose hopes differed from those of its founders? Viewed this way, liberation and conquest were not mutually exclusive outcomes. They were intertwined processes whose balance varied by region, class and political allegiance.

A national movement confronted a divided peninsula

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Italy was primarily a geographical, cultural and historical expression. The peninsula’s inhabitants spoke many dialects, and political loyalties generally attached to a city, region, church or ruler. After the Congress of Vienna, Austria governed Lombardy–Venetia directly and exercised powerful influence over several central duchies. The pope ruled the Papal States, the Bourbons controlled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the Savoy dynasty governed the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose political centre was Piedmont. Literary memories and the administrative experience of the Napoleonic era supplied materials for national imagination, but they did not dictate a single national program.

National liberation was consequently a political project, not a dormant fact waiting to reveal itself. Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy sought a united republic and treated the nation as a moral community of active citizens. Secret societies, exiles, journalists and the revolutionaries of 1848 spread that vocabulary. Their declarations, correspondence and sacrifices are evidence that national conviction was real; later patriotic commemorations are not proof that everybody shared it. Nationalists disagreed over republic or monarchy, federation or centralisation, popular insurrection or diplomatic war. The failures of 1848–49 demonstrated especially clearly that cultural affinity did not automatically create common military power or an agreed political will.

Nor should the peninsula be imagined as politically motionless until Piedmont intervened. Municipal patriotism, constitutional liberalism, Catholic reform and social protest all offered ways of remaking public life. Some proponents of an Italian federation hoped the pope might preside over it; radicals expected national independence to inaugurate democracy. These abandoned futures matter because the state created in 1861 later presented itself as the natural destination of every earlier aspiration. That retrospective view turns a contested field into a straight road.

Cavour converted state interest into a national cause

Count Camillo di Cavour, Piedmont’s dominant minister during the 1850s, was not a Mazzinian revolutionary. He promoted railways, commerce and limited parliamentary government while seeking to make Piedmont a credible European power. Participation in the Crimean War gave him an opportunity to place the ‘Italian question’ before the great powers. His secret agreement with Napoleon III in 1858 secured anticipated French assistance against Austria at the price of Nice and Savoy. The war of 1859 brought Lombardy to Piedmont, although Napoleon’s early armistice prevented the northern settlement Cavour had expected. Provisional governments in central Italy subsequently organised plebiscites for annexation. Those votes registered substantial support, but officials and local elites managed the process and offered a tightly restricted choice.

This was not simply nationalism displaced by diplomacy. Each depended on the other. Cavour needed patriotic mobilisation to enlarge the kingdom and justify territorial change; moderate nationalists needed Piedmont’s army, credit, constitution and international recognition. French military assistance, Austrian decisions and British acceptance were indispensable. That contingency is important evidence against deterministic narratives. Success did not prove that a unified kingdom had always been inevitable, or that all Italians had always wanted the same one.

Cavour’s achievement lay partly in making a dynastic state appear the practical vessel of a broader cause. Piedmont possessed the peninsula’s surviving constitutional monarchy after 1849, and its Statuto offered moderate liberals more protection than absolutist governments did. Yet Piedmont did not dissolve itself into a constituent Italian nation. Its monarch, legal framework and administrative habits became those of the new kingdom. What looked from Turin like institutional continuity could look elsewhere like annexation.

Garibaldi enlarged unification and redirected it

In 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with his volunteer Expedition of the Thousand and landed in Sicily. The force was initially tiny, but Bourbon military errors, local revolt and arriving volunteers enabled it to advance. Sicilian participants did not all fight for the same future. Some embraced the national cause; some hoped for land, lower burdens or relief from local oppression. Garibaldi governed in Victor Emmanuel’s name, crossed to the mainland and entered Naples, confronting Europe with the rapid collapse of the southern monarchy.

Cavour feared that a revolutionary march on Rome would provoke French intervention and that democrats might control the national movement. Piedmontese troops therefore entered papal territory and moved south. At Teano, Garibaldi transferred authority over his conquests to the king. Patriotic memory made the meeting an image of national reconciliation, but it also marked the defeat of a republican alternative. The southern plebiscites supplied a ceremony of consent, though not an open negotiation over the constitution, land distribution or local autonomy. Garibaldi was genuinely a liberator of astonishing popular appeal. He also channelled revolutionary action into a monarchical settlement whose terms he did not control.

His campaign reveals why the opposition between popular nation and dynastic conquest is too tidy. Volunteers, local insurgents, defecting officials and a northern state all contributed to victory. The Bourbon regime had lost loyalty and effectiveness, but its collapse did not amount to unanimous approval of what followed. A population may welcome the end of one government without having authorised every institution of its successor.

The southern experience exposed the element of conquest

After annexation, Piedmontese laws, administrative divisions, taxation and conscription spread rapidly. The government grouped diverse armed resistance under the name ‘brigandage’ and deployed a large military force against it during the 1860s. The insurgents included former Bourbon soldiers, bandits, peasants and local political networks; clerical and Bourbon interests also assisted resistance. It would be misleading to romanticise all their violence as a national war of liberation. It is equally misleading to dismiss it as ordinary criminality. The conflict is evidence that the state lacked trust and local legitimacy, while land inequality, taxation and compulsory service made national promises collide with everyday grievances.

The resulting ‘Southern Question’ was often framed as the difficulty of integrating a backward region into a modern nation. That language could conceal political choices. The new state prioritised a single market, fiscal credibility, administrative uniformity and a national army, but did not address land relations, mass education and local representation with equal urgency. Northern society was not a single bloc of beneficiaries, and the south contained committed liberals and patriots; class and urban–rural divisions cut through each region. Nevertheless, dynastic continuity, rigid centralisation and coercive pacification give ‘conquest’ analytical substance. It is not merely the insult of defeated loyalists.

Venice and Rome reveal the international limits of liberation

The kingdom proclaimed in 1861 lacked both Venice and Rome. Italy allied with Prussia against Austria in 1866. Although Italian forces suffered defeats at Custoza and Lissa, Prussia’s victory led to the transfer of Venetia. Rome became available only in 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War compelled Napoleon III to withdraw the French garrison protecting the pope. Italian troops then breached the city’s defences. In both cases, the national map depended upon the European balance of power as much as upon an expression of popular will.

The seizure of Rome also prolonged a deep conflict. Pope Pius IX rejected the loss of temporal sovereignty, while the kingdom placed church property, education and marriage within a new legal order. To anticlerical liberals, a secular state promised citizenship independent of ecclesiastical authority. To many faithful Catholics, that state appeared confiscatory and illegitimate. This was not a simple encounter in which modernity defeated tradition. Two authorities claiming wide allegiance—the sovereign nation and the universal Church—were competing to organise moral and social life.

Connection to intellectual history: did the nation make the state?

Italian unification unsettles the familiar sequence in which a pre-existing nation demands and obtains its state. Schools taught a standard language that many pupils did not use at home. Conscription placed young men from distant regions in one institution. Railways, post, elections, maps, monuments and anniversaries made the kingdom tangible. The recurring problem of ‘making Italians’ acknowledged that political unification had preceded complete nationalisation. The state did not manufacture identity from nothing, but it selected, standardised and disseminated particular versions of it.

Several nineteenth-century intellectual traditions met uneasily in this process. Liberalism supplied constitutional rule, civil equality and property; Romantic historicism supplied memories, heroes and sacrifice; republicanism demanded participatory citizenship; dynastic politics supplied an available machinery of sovereignty. Their combination was not a philosophical synthesis. The limited electorate excluded most men and all women, while the centralised administration restricted the local self-government that some liberals valued. Mazzini’s nation as a duty-bearing community differed from Cavour’s nation as a viable European state. The victorious settlement preserved traces of each but fulfilled neither completely.

Italian unification was thus neither an immaculate liberation nor merely a Piedmontese plot. It ended Austrian authority and vulnerable dynastic regimes, created more uniform legal and representative institutions, and realised an objective for which many people had conspired, fought and gone into exile. Those achievements give national liberation real content. Yet the method narrowed the futures that Italians could choose: republicanism, federalism and social reform were subordinated to monarchical continuity, while southerners in particular bore the coercive costs of integration. The most defensible judgement is that a liberating national objective was accomplished through a state expansion that contained important features of conquest. Its legitimacy cannot be read from the completed map alone. It must also be judged by who defined the nation, who participated in the settlement, and who paid for unity.

### Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: The unification of Italy
• Italian Senate: Historical institute and archives of the Risorgimento
• Italian Senate: The tricolour, liberty and national unification

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