Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Last week, we covered the breadth and depth of the Austrian Empire. And as I said, there would be two subsets of the Austrian Empire that would demand much fuller treatment, Italy and Hungary. So this week, we will cover Italy, and then next week, the Kingdom of Hungary, and then with our large circuit of groundwork laid over the first six episodes, we will tie everything back together in Episode 7.7 with the discussion of the general economic depression and social crisis that hit Europe in the mid 1840s. And then, with a little luck, we’ll actually get going with something resembling a plot.

So to introduce Italy, I am going to, yes, organically tie it back to the Storm Before the Storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, forthcoming from public affairs October the 24th, 2017. Thank you so much to everyone who has pre-ordered the book. We are, in fact, well on our way to our goal. And if you haven’t already pre-ordered it, well, now is as good a time as any. I’ll wait for you until you get back.

Okay, did you do it? Fantastic. Thank you very much.

Now, if you listen to that first chapter I released, The Beasts of Italy, I briefly touched on the fact that Italy in the second century BC was not a unified state. It had never been a unified state. The Romans had conquered the peninsula during the Samnite Wars, but rather than annex their defeated enemies, they signed treaties with them that created a Roman-led political confederation. So the Italians were not Roman citizens. They were simply allies. And in chapter two of the book, The Stepchildren of Rome, I break down the hierarchy of citizenship and rights in Roman Italy because the growing dissatisfaction of the allies is one of the major threads of the book. It all explodes into the social war in chapter nine, which is as fascinating as it is exciting, and you should all just go prayer to the book.

Now, spoiler alert, it’s not really a spoiler alert because we already went through all of this in the history of Rome, but the social war results in the political and social unification of Italy. And that unification would persist all the way through the fall of the Western Empire in 476.

And even after that, the unity would continue under the successor kingdom, the Ostrogothic kingdom, but then Italian unification would start to waver during the wars between the Lombards and the Byzantines, which if you want, you can hop over to Robin Pearson’s History of Byzantium podcast for all the details on that. It starts at about episode 33. The upshot is that whatever legal claims of unity were being made by the rival powers in the Western Mediterranean, Italy was quickly dissolving back into disunity. Even by the time Charlemagne has himself crowned King of the Romans in 800, the Italian peninsula was reverting to its original form. Small kingdoms and city states that held local sovereignty in a fractured peninsula. It would remain in that disunited state all through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, and then through the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests, and the Congress of Vienna would then firmly recommit to perpetuating Italian disunity, the specifics of which we’ll get to in a second.

But jumping ahead to our age, we know that there is today this thing called Italy. So when did Italy happen? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s about to start happening right now.

The tumultuous process of modern Italian unification is called Risorgimento, the rebirth, the resurgence, the revival, however you want to translate it. On its broadest possible definition, risorgimento begins in the 1790s with the arrival of Bonaparte and the French armies that swept aside the old order and literally redrew the map of the peninsula. And then its latest possible dating can take it all the way to the end of World War I. But tighter parameters for risorgimento can date it from the beginning of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, or even as late as the 1840s when the idea of Italian nationalism spread from the small clique of intellectuals and activists into the wider Italian population. The end of risorgimento, meanwhile, can be dated as early as 1861 with the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy, or 1871 when the Kingdom of Italy captured Rome and made it the capital. Or, as I just said, you can push it all the way to World War I when the unified Kingdom of Italy received the final pieces of territory up in the north thanks to the Treaty of Versailles.”

But whether you favor a type or a broad definition of risorgimento, the Revolutions of 1848 are included. 1848 acts as a launching pad of sorts for the really active phase of the process. So as in Germany, the Revolutions of 1848 in Italy will not result in a unified Italy. Not yet. But the Revolutions of 1848 were intimately bound up with the growing nationalist desire to create a unified Italy. You cannot spell risorgimento without 1848.

So ever since the fall of the Roman Empire and the political fracturing of the peninsula, the idea of Italy, Italia, continued to persist, but only as a literary or poetic expression. And even then, the idea only existed in the minds of a few intellectuals. So during the late Middle Ages, you’ll have Dante and Petrarch mention it as an idea, but not as a part of any political program. Then during the Renaissance, Machiavelli, of course, famously ended the Prince with a call for some noble prince to come reunify the peninsula. But this was a scarcely achievable ambition as the practical Machiavelli knew too well. Because when he published the Prince in the 1530s, Italian politics was defined by nothing so much as intense local rivalry. Venice, Genoa, Florence, Naples, Milan, to say nothing of Rome and the Papal States, these were the units of Italian political identity. And it would have been inconceivable to tell a Florentine and a Neapolitan, hey, you guys are actually the same thing. I mean, they hardly even spoke the same language as regional dialects made even relatively close neighbors all but incomprehensible to each other. And that was even if they bothered to speak quote unquote Italian at all. In the North, there was plenty of French predominating. In the South, there was Spanish, and in Rome, Church Latin.

These intense local city-state rivalries had long been encouraged by the other great powers of Europe who were happy to use the Italian peninsula as the front lines for their own dynastic struggles between the Habsburgs and the Valois and then the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. And far from opposing these foreign intruders, leaders of the various Italian city-states would be the ones inviting them in, hoping to use the might provided by a foreign partner to prosecute their own local rivalries. Because the horror of all horrors was not, oh, we’ll be subservient to the Austrians or the Spanish or the French. The real horror was, oh, we will be subservient to the guys who live a hundred miles up the road. So in mutually reinforcing cycles, the stronger powers of the North used alliances in Italy to wage proxy wars against each other, and the Italians used the great powers to try to dominate each other. As a result of these cycles, the idea of Italian national unity was preposterous. A Florentine was a Florentine, and a Venetian was a Venetian. They wanted to cut each other’s throats, not sing patriotic hymns to the fatherland.

Even as the Enlightenment came along, it still brought with it almost no traceable notion of what would become the two driving engines of 1848 and Risorgimento, liberation and unification. The Italian branch of the Republic of Letters joined in the general reformist milieu of the 1700s, and there was talk of freer trade among the various states, getting rid of the network of customs barriers that plagued all of Europe at the time, whether in Spain or France or the Holy Roman Empire, but not out of any sense of national unity. There were then humanitarian reforms, promoting education, alleviating poverty, reforming feudal laws and arbitrary justice, taxation, and even questioning the supremacy of the Catholic Church. But this was all unfolding in territory ruled by the Habsburgs in the north and the Spanish in the south, without any Italian really saying, oh, hey, and along the way, we should definitely kick these foreigners out and rule ourselves.

As the historian Dennis Mac Smith says repeatedly, “the circle of intellectuals who were interested in political reform at the time wanted good government, but not necessarily self-government. A few Italians did think their disunity was a major obstacle to progress, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to think liberation and unification were actually practical goals.”

The great shock that hit Italy, upended everything, and got some Italians thinking that liberation and unification were actually practical goals was the French invasion that began in 1796. We discussed this all at length during the later episodes of the French Revolution series, Bonaparte’s conquest of the Austrian lands in the north, the movement of the French army south towards Rome on their way to their eventual envelopment of the whole peninsula. Only the islands of Sardinia and Sicily would remain out of French hands thanks to the British Navy. When the French were done, the old order that had ruled Italy for centuries was swept aside and replaced with new sister republics and client kingdoms, the Cisalpine Republic, the Ligurian Republic, a Roman Republic, and even a short-lived Neapolitan Republic.

But this collection of new sister republics was itself only a temporary state of affairs. After First Consul Bonaparte became Emperor Napoleon, Italy was carved up into three large divisions, the Kingdom of Italy in the Northeast, the Kingdom of Naples in the South, and as for the rest, in the North and in the West, outright annexation into France.

So as had happened in the German states, at first, liberal-minded Italians cheered on the French Revolution and welcomed Bonaparte and the French as the bringers of light and justice into an Italy that still slaved under the darkness of feudal oppression. And the French brought with them the ideas of the Revolution, liberty, equality, fraternity, republicanism, even a sprinkling of atheism. And those were just the ideological currents. The French also brought with them more tangible innovations, French-style administration and bureaucracy, the rational metric system that sliced through a thousand local weights in measure, the abolition of most of the old feudal laws, the breaking of the independent power of the Catholic Church. Plenty of educated Italians rushed in to join the ranks of the civil service of these new French regimes as the old conservative aristocracy was pushed aside. The Revolution had come to Italy, and it was the dawning of a new age.

But as was the case with nearly everyone who fell to the French during these years, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans, it did not take long for the harsh reality of French rule to reveal themselves. The domains quote unquote liberated by the French were in fact just there to feed the war and enrich France. As he did nearly everywhere he went, Napoleon arrived with compliments and kisses and grandiose promises. And then when he moved on, what he left in his wake was heavy taxes, mass conscription, and the looting of national treasures.

And in Italy, the treasure hunting was particularly intense as the great cities of the peninsula housed some of the best artifacts and treasures from classical antiquity to say nothing of the total output of the Renaissance. In particular, the papal collection was second to none. Napoleon had it all catalogued, boxed up, and shipped to Paris, which is why so much of it today is still sitting in the Louvre, all of which was, and still is, pretty offensive to the Italians.

So the experience of French imperial rule helped kickstart the engines of what would become Risorgimento. The patriotic brand of nationalism that the French espoused about the glory of their own fatherland could not help but trigger an Italian corollary. And as we saw in Germany, this positive exposure to the idea of la nación, that patriotic nationalism, was good and noble. Well, it was joined by the shared negative experience of being under French rule. Now, there had always been foreign rulers in Italy, but as I said, they were always rival factions. Right, Austrians here, Spanish there, but now it was just the French everywhere. There was no power the local Italians could turn to to check French rule. So, as we discussed in Episode 6.8d, underground movements like the Carbonari started to form. They had deliberate pan-Italian membership, and held a common goal of maybe expelling the French, and perhaps even beyond that, joining the peninsula together, and leaving Italy to be ruled by the Italians. So, this is the very earliest sparks of liberation and unification.

But as we’ve already seen from a couple of different angles, when Napoleon was finally defeated, and the French were driven from Italy, liberation and unification was not on the agenda of the Congress of Vienna. And before I get too far down this road, though, I do want to stress that at this point Italian nationalists, the people who would be disappointed by the return of old-style, disunited Italy, were confined to a tiny set of intellectuals. There was no real popular strain of nationalism, this wasn’t like the multitudes were yearning to breathe free air. A Florentine was still a Florentine, a Venetian was still a Venetian. So only a handful really carried the nationalist candle in the days after the Congress of Vienna. But that candle would not go out, and would in fact start glowing brighter, because one of the traditional facets of old, disunited unity was not brought back by the Congress of Vienna.

As I said, the local Italians had always been able to play the great powers off each other, while just as the triumph of the French had put an end to that, the defeat of the French meant it wasn’t coming back. Placed firmly in the driver’s seat by the Congress of Vienna, Austria would now be acting as the single great foreign overlord of the entire peninsula, and it would be against Austria that the fight for liberation and unification would be principally waged.

Now, as we touched on in our little run through the Austrian Empire, only the far northeast of Italy was directly annexed into the Empire in the form of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, a new kingdom that mashed together the territories of the old duchies of Milan and Mantua and the Republic of Venice. The political capitals of the kingdom were Milan and Venice, but there was very little in the way of local political autonomy. The Italian territories were among those in the Austrian Empire most under direct Austrian rule. The King of Lombardy-Venetia was Emperor Francis of Austria. It was just another title he held in his long list of additional titles.

In the years after the Congress of Vienna, Metternich had tried to integrate the region and people more completely into the Empire by creating a chancellery specifically focused on Italian matters and hopefully staffed with plenty of Italian notables. It would not be participatory government in the sense that they would have a real say, but it would be participatory in that they would be participating in the administration. But Metternich’s grand recommendations were never put into place.

So thanks to this neglect and mismanagement, the Austrians would have trouble in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia in part because they were alienating both the elite and the common peasants and giving them both a good reason to hate the Austrians.

Now, for the peasants, this would always be more bread and butter issues, the declining standards of living and then eventually privation and famine. The elite, meanwhile, were treated with a very high hand by their Austrian masters. Austrians were always favored for civil service jobs, either locally or in Vienna, if you care to try your luck there. And the old Italian nobility found themselves always treated one grade lower than they had been back at home. So an Italian Duke visiting Vienna would be treated like a Count, a Count like a Baron. And in the world of noble etiquette, which was after all supposed to be making a big comeback in the restored world after the fall of Napoleon, well, this was all very insulting and degrading.

But though the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia was the only region directly ruled by the Austrians, the other states of the peninsula were deliberately established to be subservient to the Habsburgs, to the point where they could be considered little more than client kingdoms. All of them had secret treaties to support Austria in everything, and to allow Austrian troops to enter their territory basically whenever they wanted. Every Duke and King in Italy was in power thanks to Austria, and knew that staying in power meant staying in Austria’s good graces.

So moving south down the peninsula from the Kingdom of Lombardy Venetia, there was a collection of minor duchies that were created to satisfy the dignity of the various royal houses at the Congress of Vienna. So the Duchy of Parma was given to Napoleon’s Austrian ex-wife Marie-Louise, and she would rule as Duchess of Parma until her death in 1847. The Duchy of Modena, meanwhile, was ruled by Duke Francis IV, who was a grandson of Empress Maria Theresa, and as we’ll see in a minute, had secret ambitions about a title bump from Duke to King.

Then there was the very tiny Duchy of Lucca, which was carved out for the Bourbon Maria Luisa, the sister of King Ferdinand VII of Spain, the allegedly desired one, while she had been Queen of Etruria before Napoleon had dissolved her kingdom, and she had come to the Congress of Vienna expecting to be given the new Duchy of Parma, and when she wasn’t, they carved out this little thing called the Duchy of Lucca as compensation. This is seriously how these things got worked out.

South of this little collection of duchies was the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which was the old dominions of Florence, the territories that had been brought under Florentine domination by the Medici back during the Renaissance. Most of the cities of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany continued to resent the hell out of Florentine domination.

Tuscany was ruled by Grand Duke Ferdinand III, who just so happened to be the younger brother of Austrian Emperor Francis I. Now an old man, Ferdinand had once upon a time been an enlightened young man. After taking over as Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1790, he earned the distinction of being the first monarch in Europe to recognize the first French Republic in 1792. But his attempts at peaceful coexistence with the French came to naught, and he was eventually dispossessed and had his territories annexed into France. Restored by the Congress of Vienna, the Grand Duke passed his liberal instincts on to his son, Leopold II, who would succeed him in 1824 and who would then go on to cause the Austrians heartburn in the 1840s for being so dang accommodating to calls for liberal reform and a constitution.

The center of Italy was dominated by Rome and the Papal States, which covered territory that straddled the land between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Adriatic Sea, creating a physical divide between north and south. Rome was of course the seat of Catholicism, and as such had enormous social, cultural, and economic heft, not just in Italy, but across post-Napoleonic Europe. Pope Pius VII had been pope all through the Napoleonic period. He concluded the Concordat of 1802 with First Consul Bonaparte that finally healed the French Catholic wounds. He presided over Napoleon’s coronation in 1804, and then when Napoleon had invaded the Papal States in 1808, Pius VII had excommunicated the emperor, and for his trouble was taken prisoner. He lived long enough to see his revenge, though, and freed from captivity in 1814, he returned home, and Pius VII died at the age of 80 in 1824.

He was followed by a succession of popes we don’t really need to concern ourselves with until we get to 1846 and the elevation of Pope Pius IX. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Catholic Church and the history of Risorgimento knows that Pope Pius IX is a very big deal, and we will discuss him in detail when we get into the actual course of the Revolutions of 1848.

South of the Papal States was the largest political unit in Italy, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Now we don’t need to talk too much about the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies because we talked all about them in Episode 6.8d when we introduced the Carbonari. But just as a little refresher, the Kingdom covered all of southern Italy and Sicily and was ruled from Naples by a cadet branch of the Spanish Bourbons. But don’t let that fool you. Like every other ruler in Italy, they were in the pocket of the Austrian Habsburgs.

Now sharp-eared listeners out there might be asking themselves, hey, wait a minute, we just went from north to south, and I think you skipped one. And indeed I did, I saved it for last, to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Now the old duchy of Piedmont covered the mainland portion of northwestern Italy. It was ruled by the House of Savoy, an ancient dynasty that traced itself back to the ten hundreds, and who had acquired unified control of Piedmont during the 1500s. Then in 1720, the sitting Duke of Savoy had acquired dynastic title also to the island of Sardinia, and joined the mainland and island territories together into a single realm, and he was given permission by the other European powers to elevate himself from Duke to King.

The kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia then briefly entered into our story during Bonaparte’s early Italian campaigns, right? They were the ones who had so ably held back the French in the backwater Italian theater of the French Revolutionary Wars, until General Bonaparte came along in 1796 and blew through them in about a day and a half. When Bonaparte reorganized northern Italy, Piedmont stayed on the map, but labored under an utterly subservient treaty to the French. And then eventually it was just erased and annexed directly into France in 1802. The dispossessed house of Savoy meanwhile managed to hold on to Sardinia thanks to the British Navy. And the Congress of Vienna restored the kingdom of Piedmont Sardinia in 1815, and for good measure also gifted them the domains of the Old Republic of Genoa.

The strongest of the post-Napoleonic Italian states, the Kings of Piedmont Sardinia had long had greater ambitions, as they said, to peel away territory like the leaves of an artichoke. And many of the budding intellectuals evangelizing liberation and unification suspected that it would only be possible through the ambition and power of Piedmont Sardinia. Someone, after all, was going to have to fight the Austrians.

Setting aside the political divisions of Italy, economically the peninsula fit the same pattern as the rest of central and southern Europe. No matter who their sovereign was, the inhabitants were largely rural and agrarian. Mostly subsistence farmers, with a mix of things like olives and grapes and citrus fruit for export. There was also some very super nascent industrialization in the far north, but in the main the Italian economy was still very traditional, so much so that in many places there wasn’t even any kind of middle class to speak of. It was a few noble landlords or very rich common landlords, and a bunch of poor peasants. And they were feeling that population pressure we talked about in Episode 7.1, where the population was rising and putting pressure on the land. This would lead to periodic local uprisings, mostly against rent or taxes or feudal dues, the feudal dues that had come back, and were now demanding much, just as there seemed to be so much less to give. Our future revolutionaries will do their best to harness these local uprisings and try to graft onto them a political program. But a lot of the time it really was just angry people with local grievances who could have cared less about the wider goals of liberation and unification.

Now, there were middle class professionals in the cities, of course, and especially up in the north. And they would be the ones who were fanning the flames of Risorgimento, along with a smattering of liberal nobles. Many of the families who would produce these budding revolutionaries had done well in the Napoleonic Empire. They had been clerks, local officials and functionaries, junior army officers. All of them had been respected, respectable and prosperous during French rule, but then were unceremoniously dumped after the Congress of Vienna. They were joined by all the students and ex-students who had been raised to expect a career in the imperial civil service and then found no jobs waiting for them. And that’s a recurring theme across all our revolutionary regions, educated men for whom there was no work that they had been educated to do.

It was inside this group that the revolutionary ideas of liberation, unification and nationalism started to take root, if not yet exactly flourish. These ideas, the idea of Italy, was still confined to literary works after the Congress of Vienna, especially since it was dangerous to talk too openly about anything, what with Metternich’s spies everywhere. All that surveillance, though, did help foster the Italian habit of forming secret societies, and in the years between 1815 and 1848, there were the Carbonari, who we’ve already discussed at length, but also the Federati in Piedmont-Sardinia, who were mostly liberal monarchists, and the liberal Catholic neo-Guelphs in the north. And then the ones who will really get our attention? Young Italy, a group considered so dangerous that even knowing a member and not reporting it was tantamount to treason.

But the aims of these groups and the forms of nationalism taking root in Italy could vary wildly. The most famous of the Italian nationalists, and probably the most prototypical nationalists of this whole era of European history, was Giuseppe Mazzini, who I’ll introduce in full once we get into the guts of the story. But briefly, Mazzini and the group he created, Young Italy, wanted the liberation and unification of Italy to be followed by the creation of a republic, which put Mazzini on the more radical edge, as his other liberal counterparts would have been just fine with a constitutional monarchy.

Agreeing with Mazzini’s call for liberation and unification were the neo-Guelphs, but these guys were Catholic theocrats, albeit of a particularly liberal variety. They wanted a united Italian kingdom under the rule of Rome and the Pope. Then a third major strain were partisans of Piedmont-Sardinia, who saw a practical path forward for that kingdom in particular to envelop and annex Italy until the whole peninsula was under its sovereignty and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia would simply transform into the Kingdom of Italy.

More practical revolutionaries of all stripes, meanwhile, looked to Piedmont for some leadership, as everyone understood, no matter what your preferred endgame was, that liberation and unification meant war with Austria. And Piedmont-Sardinia was the one Italian kingdom who could plausibly challenge them on the battlefield.

So we’ll wrap up today’s episode with a quick look at the revolutionary insurrections that were orchestrated by these men in the years between 1815 and 1848, of which there were two pretty big waves, one in 1820-1821 and the other in 1830-1831. Both of them flamed out pretty quickly, and by that I mean were stomped out by the Austrian army.

Now, one of these revolts we’ve already discussed in pretty good detail. That was the brief revolution in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies in 1820-1821 that was masterminded by the Carbonari. If you want, you should go back and listen to Episode 6.8d again. But brief refresher, after the liberal mutiny of Cadiz in 1820, the demand for constitutional government migrated over to Naples. And briefly, the Carbonari were able to force King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies to accept a constitution. But then the King called for help, the unity of the Carbonari broke down, and the Austrian army marched south, and that was that. Most of the revolutionaries fled into exile, as did, for example, the Carbonari General Guillermo Pepe, who we will be meeting again down the road.

But that was not the only revolt that year, and in fact, it was supposed to have been coordinated with secret groups in Piedmont-Sardinia, some of them Carbonari, others Federati. As in Naples, the idea here was to force the King, in this case, Victor Emmanuel I, to adopt a constitution. To help them pull this off, the conspirators enlisted the help of the King’s 23-year-old cousin Charles Albert. Charles Albert. You’re going to want to remember that name. In March of 1821, the conspirators hatched a scheme whereby the revolutionaries would mobilize under arms, surround the royal palace in Torino, and make ominous demands upon the King. Then Charles Albert would step in and offer to broker a settlement, whereby the King would promulgate a constitution based on the Spanish Constitution of 1812. And once that was done, they further planned to pressure the King into declaring war on Austria, as the next phase of the broader plan to liberate Italy from Austrian rule and unify the peninsula under the House of Savoy.

But the night before the Revolution was set to launch, Charles Albert got cold feet and would not go through with it. The frustrated revolutionaries decided to keep going, dutifully surrounded the palace in Torino, and raised the green, white, and red tri-color flag that had once been the colors of the Italian Cisalpine Republic and which were now officially on their way to becoming the national colors of Italy. The revolutionaries were surprised when King Victor Emmanuel I abdicated the throne in favor of his brother, Charles Felix. Charles Felix was at that moment not in the kingdom, so either by design or coincidence, young Charles Albert, the guy who had gotten cold feet, was made temporary regent.

Now as much at the mercy of the revolutionaries as in cahoots with them, Charles Albert went ahead and promulgated a liberal constitution. But his cousin Charles Felix was an intent and committed absolutist and sent up an order for Charles Albert to annul the decree, I will not recognize any such constitution! Then he sent word to the Austrians of the situation and they dispatched forces.

In conjunction with the armies they were sending down to repacify the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, another Austrian army moved over to Piedmont and quickly suppressed the rebels. The whole thing was over in less than a month. But just to push forward a bit, young Charles Albert remained loyal to the new King Charles Felix under an absolutist and very pro-Austrian regime that in fact allowed an Austrian garrison to remain in the country until 1823. Well, when Charles Felix died in April of 1831, he designated Charles Albert his heir. Charles Albert would then spend the next decade continuing to hew to this pro-Austria, pro-absolutist line until things got dicey around Europe in the mid-1840s, at which point he would return to the revolutionary dreams he had abandoned as a youth and allow himself to listen to talk of an Italy liberated from the Austrians and united under the House of Savoy.

So things were pretty quiet in Italy for the next ten years, but then along came the July Revolution in France and a new wave of Italian insurrections. The first hit the Duchy of Modena in 1831, which ran out of steam swiftly thanks to the betrayal of the sovereigns who supposedly supported the revolution, but who then turned their backs on it.

As I mentioned, Francis IV, Duke of Modena, was an ambitious sovereign, and after the Congress of Vienna, he harbored a far-fetched dream of acquiring more territory for his duchy, getting himself elevated to King, and then uniting the whole peninsula under his personal rule. In furtherance of this plan, he turned a blind eye to Carbonari organizers in his realm, the leader of which was Ciro Menotti. And after the failed insurrections of 1820-1821, the duchy of Modena became something of a safe haven. After the sudden inspirational success of the July Revolution in France, Menotti received assurances from King Louis-Philippe that if the Italians were to follow France’s lead and go after constitutional monarchism, that Louis-Philippe would have their backs. Francis IV seemed amenable right up to the last minute. But at that last minute, when Menotti led the Carbonari revolutionaries out into the open in February of 1831, Francis decided it was too risky, turned on them all, revealed everything to the Austrians, and arrested the principal leaders. King Louis-Philippe then refused to follow through on his old promises of support after receiving a withering death stare from Metternich, implying that interfering in Italy would mean war with Austria. Prioritizing the stability of his own shaky regime to adventures in world revolution, King Louis-Philippe backed off. And it was added to the list of early bitter disappointments for the more radical French supporters of the July monarchy. The aborted revolution having come to nothing, Menotti was executed by firing squad in May of 1831 and became an early martyr for Risorgimento. Garibaldi would in fact name one of his sons Menotti in his honor.

Concurrent with Menotti’s revolt in Modena, a network of liberal revolutionaries in the Papal States also declared themselves in revolution and raised the green, white, and red in at least eight of the Papal legations. But as the Austrians were coming down anyway in March of 1831, everything was stomped out without too much difficulty.

So all of these experiences might have left many with the impression that revolution in Italy was a hopeless flight of fancy. And another Carbonari-led revolt in Piedmont-Sardinia in 1834 that collapsed so quickly it’s hardly worth mentioning, only proved that point further.

But the failures of the 1820s and 1830s actually helped foster the cause of Italian nationalism and the dream of liberation and unification among the network of revolutionary exiles who now hunkered down in the various European capitals and as far afield as South America. They would get together and continue to talk and plot and dream.

“Concurrent with Menotti’s revolt in Modena, a network of liberal revolutionaries in the Papal States also declared themselves in revolution and raised the green, white, and red in at least eight of the Papal legations. But as the Austrians were coming down anyway in March of 1831, everything was stomped out without too much difficulty. So all of these experiences might have left many with the impression that revolution in Italy was a hopeless flight of fancy.

And another carbonari-led revolt in Piedmont Sardinia in 1834 that collapsed so quickly it’s hardly worth mentioning, only proved that point further. But the failures of the 1820s and 1830s actually helped foster the cause of Italian nationalism and the dream of liberation and unification among the network of revolutionary exiles who now hunkered down in the various European capitals and as far afield as South America. They would get together and continue to talk and plot and dream.

And thus, when in the mid-1840s, Europe was hit with a destabilizing economic and social crisis, they would come back stronger, more passionate, and more united than ever. And hopefully when the time came, this time it would be more than a handful of hopeless romantics, it would be a full-blown national uprising. Hopefully, the true beginning of Risorgimento

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