{"id":18744,"date":"2022-09-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-28T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistoryrevealed\/?post_type=purple_issue&p=18744"},"modified":"2022-10-03T15:47:14","modified_gmt":"2022-10-03T13:47:14","slug":"what-if-garibaldi-hadnt-unified-italy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistoryrevealed\/2022\/09\/29\/what-if-garibaldi-hadnt-unified-italy\/","title":{"rendered":"What if\u2026 Garibaldi hadn\u2019t unified Italy?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WHAT IF\u2026<\/span><\/h4>\n\n

What if\u2026 Garibaldi hadn\u2019t unified Italy?<\/span><\/h2>\n\n

Professor Lucy Riall <\/strong>and Nige Tassell <\/strong>examine how Europe might have looked had the various states of the Italian peninsula not become a united kingdom <\/p>\n\n

\"\"
A painting depicting the 1859 battle of Varese, in which 3,000 Italian volunteers fended off an Austrian attack in Lombardy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

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\u2019t have been constructed without the campaign led by Giuseppe Garibaldi. <\/p>\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
\n

IN CONTEXT <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Garibaldi enters the port city of Messina during his conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 1860 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/section>\n\n
\"\"
Giuseppe Garibaldi pictured in 1860 \u2013 the year before Italian unification was proclaimed <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n

Garibaldi was a charismatic leader of men, as Lucy Riall, professor of history at the European University Institute in Florence and author of Garibaldi: <\/em>Invention <\/em>of <\/em>a <\/em>Hero <\/em>(Yale University Press, 2007), explains. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n

\u201cThere was nothing inevitable about Italian unification and it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Had there been no Garibaldi, and thus no unification, would Austria have continued to feel its influence on the Italian peninsula? \u201cAustria 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 <\/span>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 <\/span>state, and central Italy \u2013 in the shape of the Papal States \u2013 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\u201cHis genius lay in his ability to embody the cause of Italian freedom, so that people saw Italy in this one man\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

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A depiction of the meeting in Teano, Campania, in which Garibaldi shook hands with Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia and hailed him king of Italy <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n
Potential civil war <\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

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. \u201cThere may have then been a brutal civil war,\u201d suggests Professor Riall, \u201cbetween the new Kingdom of Northern Italy headed by Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi\u2019s 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 <\/span>which might have changed the future of Europe, and even prevented the unification of Germany 10 years later.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\u201cIt 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

The Garibaldi-led unification resulted in a monarchy; the popular appetite at the time wasn\u2019t for a French-style republic. However, if \u2013 without Garibaldi \u2013 unification didn\u2019t arrive for another 50 or 60 years, might the revolutionaries have taken inspiration from what was happening in Russia in 1917? \u201cI 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 <\/span>biennio <\/em>rosso <\/em>[\u2018two red years\u2019] 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n

A Fascist-free future?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

Had Italian unification not occurred, the rise of Benito Mussolini might have been non-existent. \u201cMussolini claimed to be finishing the work of Italian unification,\u201d Professor Riall concludes, \u201cby 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 \u2013 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
\n

DID YOU KNOW?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

COME ON YOU REDS <\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Nottingham Forest FC have played in \u2018Garibaldi red\u2019 since the club\u2019s formation in 1865. The name comes from the distinctive red shirts worn by members of Giuseppe Garibaldi\u2019s volunteer army, who the football club \u2019s founders greatly admired.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>\n\n

LISTEN <\/strong><\/h5>\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n

Misha Glenny explores the unification of Italy in his BBC Radio 4 series How <\/em>to <\/em>Invent <\/em>a <\/em>Country: <\/em>bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/p06xfntp<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n\n

<\/p>\n\n

GETTY IMAGES X4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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