WHAT IF…
What if… Garibaldi hadn’t unified Italy?
Professor Lucy Riall and Nige Tassell examine how Europe might have looked had the various states of the Italian peninsula not become a united kingdom
In 1861 in Turin, following a decades-long struggle and two wars of Italian independence, the first Italian parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel as the first king of the new state of Italy. While Victor Emmanuel II, the king of Sardinia, was a significant figure in the construction of this new state, Italy wouldn’t have been constructed without the campaign led by Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Overseeing an army whose numbers kept increasing and increasing, the general annexed the whole of southern Italy as he and his forces moved north, an irresistible tide of nationalist revolutionaries. Aided initially by France (to whom the territories of Savoy and Nice were given in return for its military might against the Austrians), the struggle was unstoppable. By 1866, Austria had ceded the state of Venezia after another war; four years later, the kingdom took Rome from papal hands.
IN CONTEXT
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the Italian peninsula was made up of a number of smaller states, from Piedmont in the north to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. A growing appetite for a single state was embodied by the general Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose nationalist army sought to bring this about – and to strong effect. The new state began to take shape, whether by bigger states annexing smaller ones (for instance, Sardinia annexing the duchies of Tuscany and Parma), or the influence of certain foreign powers, notably that of the Austro-Hungarian empire, being reduced or removed. Unification was eventually declared in 1861.
Garibaldi was a charismatic leader of men, as Lucy Riall, professor of history at the European University Institute in Florence and author of Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (Yale University Press, 2007), explains. “It’s very difficult to imagine anyone else in Europe being able to amass such numbers for their armies. The Garibaldi archives in Milan and Rome are full of letters from admirers pleading to come and fight with him. Garibaldi’s genius lay in his ability to embody the cause of Italian freedom, so that people saw Italy in this one man. Nobody else in his lifetime was able to accomplish this with quite the same success.
“There was nothing inevitable about Italian unification and it’s difficult to imagine it happening without Garibaldi. It was his name that provoked men to volunteer to fight, and it was to Garibaldi that people all over Europe, and indeed the world, gave money to support the cause of unification.”
Had there been no Garibaldi, and thus no unification, would Austria have continued to feel its influence on the Italian peninsula? “Austria was more or less out of the picture after its defeat by the coalition between France and Piedmont in 1859. France continued to intervene more actively until 1870 well have survived as a separate by occupying Rome to protect the Pope from the efforts of Italian nationalists to make the city the capital of Italy. If Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel and the Count of Cavour [prime minister of Sardinia, and later Italy] had not been successful, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south might state, and central Italy – in the shape of the Papal States – would have been the focus of Great Power rivalry. If Garibaldi had failed, Europe might have seen a dangerous face-off between France and Britain for control over the peninsula.”
“His genius lay in his ability to embody the cause of Italian freedom, so that people saw Italy in this one man”
Potential civil war
Garibaldi handed over power to Victor Emmanuel in late 1860 and retired to his winter island home. The subsequent events are likely to have been notably different had he fancied being head of state himself. “There may have then been a brutal civil war,” suggests Professor Riall, “between the new Kingdom of Northern Italy headed by Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi’s supporters and Republicans. If such a war had taken place, France would probably have intervened, and Britain might have felt obliged to get more involved to counter the growing French influence. All of this could have produced a major conflagration which might have changed the future of Europe, and even prevented the unification of Germany 10 years later.
“It is more than possible that, even with some version of World War I taking place, without Italian and German unification, the Austro-Hungarian empire would have survived into the 20th century and beyond, which means that the Europe we live in today would look and feel very different.”
The Garibaldi-led unification resulted in a monarchy; the popular appetite at the time wasn’t for a French-style republic. However, if – without Garibaldi – unification didn’t arrive for another 50 or 60 years, might the revolutionaries have taken inspiration from what was happening in Russia in 1917? “I think the answer is yes. From the 1870s onwards, there was a powerful socialist movement in Italy that took inspiration from events elsewhere in Europe. The biennio rosso [‘two red years’] of 1919-20, which saw factory occupations, strikes and workerpeasant uprisings across northern and central Italy was a direct response to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.”
A Fascist-free future?
Had Italian unification not occurred, the rise of Benito Mussolini might have been non-existent. “Mussolini claimed to be finishing the work of Italian unification,” Professor Riall concludes, “by bringing Italians together and making Italy strong and powerful. Indeed, he used the rhetoric of earlier Italian nationalists like Garibaldi. But any continuities were just that: purely rhetorical. Mussolini divided Italians by creating imaginary enemies within – socialists, for example, or feminists. Hence the need for coercion and propaganda to create an image of unity to mask the problems of Fascist rule.”
DID YOU KNOW?
COME ON YOU REDS
Nottingham Forest FC have played in ‘Garibaldi red’ since the club’s formation in 1865. The name comes from the distinctive red shirts worn by members of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s volunteer army, who the football club ’s founders greatly admired.
LISTEN
Misha Glenny explores the unification of Italy in his BBC Radio 4 series How to Invent a Country: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06xfntp