The era of the Risorgimento is closely connected with the Renaissance. At first, these words were even used in one sense, only inXVIIIcentury their meanings diverged. And if the Renaissance remained for us a time of cultural revival, then the Risorgimento became associated with the revival of Italian national identity.

Italy unification map

In the political backyard of Europe

In the era of the industrial revolution, the Italian states entered at about the same time as Russian Empire— in the middle of the 19th century. And then only the most advanced areas participated in the transition to machine labor. In general, the countries of the Apennine Peninsula were economically and politically dependent on the great European powers, like Spain, France or Austria. Naturally, the Italians were not satisfied with this situation, just as they were not satisfied with the semi-feudal remnants that remained in almost all areas. In the states located on the territory of modern Italy, an acute socio-political crisis was brewing.

First War of Independence

Under this name, becoming one of the main episodes of the so-called "Spring of Nations", the revolution of 1848-1849 in Italy was fixed in history.

Battle of Novara

At this time, the revolutionary fire had already engulfed the territory of France, Germany and the Austrian Empire. In order for the revolution to spread to Italian lands, only a small spark was enough - it was the riots in Vienna. Sensing the weakness of their European oppressor, the Austrian Empire, the northern Italian states took decisive action. The scene of the main events was the territory of the Lombardo-Venetian region.

The next round of anti-Austrian speeches came in 1859

Captured at the end of the 18th century by the Austro-French troops, the Venetian Republic was proclaimed again at the beginning of the first War of Independence. Following her, Milan was covered with barricades, whose citizens forced the Austrian generals to flee from the city. Inspired by the idea of ​​creating a northern Italian kingdom, the uprising was supported by Charles Albert, King of Piedmont. So the Italian states for the first time united in the liberation struggle. However, political disagreements among the rulers did not allow the success of the revolution to develop.

Kingdom of Upper Italy

The next round of anti-Austrian speeches came already 10 years later, in 1859. First of all, it was associated with the desire of France to establish hegemony in the territory of northern Italy and create the Kingdom of Upper Italy, completely dependent on France.

Giuseppe Garibaldi

For this, Napoleon III concluded an alliance with the same Piedmont. On April 26, one hundred thousandth army of the kingdom of Piedmont and two hundred thousandth french army formed a united front against the Austrian troops. Already at this time, the future national hero of Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was rampaging on the battlefields. With his "Alpine Jaegers" Garibaldi successfully defeated the regular troops of the Austrians. Allied victories ensured the rise national movement in central Italy, rulers and dukes fled in fear from their possessions, and power passed to the Piedmontese officials.

Garibaldi successfully defeated the regular troops of the Austrians

At the peak of the liberation struggle of the Italian people, the French emperor Napoleon III, realizing that under such conditions the creation of a puppet state was impossible, concluded a secret peace with Austria. Without warning, French troops retreated from the front. The Villafranca truce, which offended the entire Italian people, nevertheless forced them to curtail hostilities in a hurry and make concessions. Successes as a result of the war were insignificant.

Garibaldian thousand

In April 1860, that is, almost immediately after an unsuccessful attempt at unification, a new uprising broke out in Sicily, in the city of Palermo.

Departure of the "thousand" from Genoa

In April 1860, a new uprising broke out in Sicily, in Palermo.

The uprising in the city failed, the army was able to calm him down. The unrest then spread to the village and promised to be just another small outbreak of discontent. It would probably have been so if Garibaldi had not come to the aid of the rebels with a small detachment of his associates. For his detachment, fighting with the government and bureaucracy, Garibaldi was able to get only a thousand old, practically unusable guns. "Thousand" Garibaldi - and these are artisans, workers, petty bourgeois and intellectuals from all over Italy - on two ships set off from Genoa to the south, to Sicily. Thus began the legendary Garibaldi epic.

Garibaldi in the square in Palermo

With a thousand fighters, Garibalda had to defeat the 25,000th army located on the island. Much depended on the first battle. The Garibaldians, dressed in red shirts, with faulty guns, in the first battle rushed into a bayonet attack, defeating the three thousandth corps of the Bourbon troops. Then Garibaldi, having made an incredible maneuver and taking local peasants into his detachment, broke into Palermo and took the city by storm. Supported by the people, Garibaldi was able to completely liberate Sicily.

With a thousand fighters, Garibalda had to defeat a 25,000th army

But he was not the right person to stop there - Garibaldi landed in southern Italy and continued the liberation campaign. Soldiers who had heard about the fury of the Garibaldi expedition surrendered before the battle. The Bourbon regime was collapsing before our eyes, Garibaldi, 20 days after his invasion of southern Italy, entered the jubilant Naples. The commander set his sights on Rome, but the initiators of his own campaign opposed him. Naples and Sicily joined the Sardinian kingdom, and Garibaldi, refusing all awards, left for his small island. Thus, by the end of 1860, Italy was effectively unified.

Hero of the national liberation wars of the Italians against Austria in 1840-1860. was Giuseppe Garibaldi. All these years, he called on oppressed and fragmented Italy to revive the former greatness of the country, which once existed in the form of a powerful ancient rome. Seeing the passivity of many compatriots, especially the Italian nobility, Garibaldi often complained about the "curse of the fallen Ancient Rome", conquered by the barbarians and leaving Italy "a depraved land, always ready to endure the yoke of the conquerors."

Call for true patriots

In early 1849, the Austrians were expelled from the Roman papal state, where the Roman Republic was established. But she was hated by Pope Pius IX, and the French troops who arrived at his call drove the Garibaldians out of the "eternal city". Leaving south, Garibaldi addressed his volunteers: “Soldiers! For those of you who wish to follow me, I offer hunger, cold and heat; no rewards, no barracks and supplies, but forced marches and bayonet charges. In a word, whoever loves the Motherland and glory, let him follow me!”

Giuseppe Garibaldi

What was Garibaldi angry about?

In 1859, Garibaldi fought against the Austrians in the ranks of the army of Piedmont (Sardinian kingdom). The hopes of the Piedmontese king Victor Emmanuel for the help of other Italian kingdoms and duchies were not justified, and Garibaldi resented their indifference and double-dealing. He spoke of the Italian aristocrats: "They are either arrogant or humiliated, but always vile."

"In order to achieve agreement between the Italians, - wrote Garibaldi, - a good stick is needed."

Parting words of the French emperor

In the war of 1859 against Austria, the French emperor Napoleon III was an ally of the Sardinian kingdom. His main goal was to take Savoy and Nice from the Austrians in favor of France. Having achieved this, he was hostile to Garibaldi's desire to continue the war. Upon learning that he again began an armed struggle, Napoleon III exclaimed in his hearts: “If only he got cholera!”

The detachment of Garibaldi in the battle of Calatafimi. 1860

Calatafimi - the pride of Garibaldi

Sardinian King Victor Emmanuel dreamed of uniting all Italian states under his rule, but he was constantly cautious. “I want to threaten, but not act,” the king admitted, fearing Austria and civil war.

Without waiting for the help of the king, Garibaldi in 1860 himself went into action. At the head of a detachment of Alpine shooters ("Thousands"), he landed on the island of Sicily and at Calatafimi defeated the Neapolitan troops, three times his superior. In his Memoirs, Garibaldi later wrote: “Calatafimi! When I, having survived a hundred battles, will be at my last breath and my friends will see a proud smile on my face, then know that, dying, I remembered you, for there was no battle more glorious.

Disobedience for the good of Italy

After the liberation of Sicily, Garibaldi decided to march on Naples against Francis II. Victor Emmanuel asked him not to do this, but the idol of the people answered: “When I free the population from oppression, I will lay my sword at your feet and from that moment I will obey you until the end of my days.”

In September 1860, Garibaldi liquidated the Kingdom of Naples of the Two Sicilies. In March 1861, Victor Emmanuel became the head of the united Italian kingdom.

"Foreigner" in his native country

Just as cautious as King Victor Emmanuel was his minister of war and head of government, K. Cavour. Like many in the king's entourage, he suspected a socialist in Garibaldi and more than once showed dissatisfaction with the actions of the leader of the "Red Shirts". In 1861, General Garibaldi in the Italian Parliament, in the presence of the Minister of War, undertook not to shake hands with him, declaring: "Cavour has made me a foreigner in Italy!"

Monarchs Protect the Pope

Pope Pius IX, who headed the Roman papal state, General Garibaldi has long considered an accomplice of the Austrians. He called the papal clergy "a black reptile" who corrupted the Italians, "so that we, pacified and fallen into idiocy, get used to not noticing the whistle of the vine."

In 1862 Garibaldi marched on Rome without the permission of King Victor Emmanuel. The king, fearing Napoleon III, an ally of the pope, sent regular troops to cut Garibaldi's Red Shirts. Garibaldi forbade his subordinates to shoot at their compatriots, but in Calabria an armed skirmish nevertheless occurred. The main unifier of Italy was wounded (the Russian surgeon N. Pirogov saved his right hand from amputation, mutilated by a bullet) and voluntarily switched to the position of a prisoner of the king. A few months later he was forgiven by Victor Emmanuel.

Pope with and without Napoleon

During the Austro-Italian War of 1866, Garibaldi made another attempt to attack the papal Roman state. As in 1849, French troops came to the aid of the pope, pushing back the Garibaldians from Rome with the fierce fire of the new rifled guns of Chasseau. “Chasses worked wonders,” the French general de Fayi reported to Napoleon III. “Chassesaux pierced my heart of the father and the king,” the Italian king Victor Emmanuel grieved.

Only when Napoleon III lost his throne as a result of the unsuccessful Franco-Prussian war (1870), Victor Emmanuel decided to occupy the territory of the Roman papal state. The unification of Italy was completed.

Garibaldi and France

From the autumn of 1870, Garibaldi fought on the side of France, which overthrew Napoleon III, against Prussia. Victor Hugo spoke in the French Parliament: "Not a single king, not a single state has risen to defend France, which has defended the interests of Europe so many times, only one person has become an exception - Garibaldi!"

France, which lost the war to Prussia, Garibaldi left in February 1871. He rejected the offer of the leaders of the Paris Commune to lead the military forces of the rebellious Paris: he had already fought with the Italians against the Italians, he did not want to fight with the French against the French.

White envy of the king

Glory to Garibaldi in Italy and abroad was enormous. His trip from the island of Caprera, where he lived, to Rome in 1874 turned into a huge celebration for the Romans, who greeted the liberator of Italy with delight. “All Garibaldi and Garibaldi,” King Victor Emmanuel joked. “What have I done wrong against the Romans?”

On the grave of Garibaldi on the island of Caprera, only his surname is engraved. The grave is crowned with a piece of rock with a star engraved on it - a symbol of the detachment of his "Red Shirts" - the famous "Thousands".

The war between Sardinia and Austria was a turning point in the history of Italy. In April 1860, a widespread peasant uprising broke out in Sicily. Garibaldi, at the head of the detachment of volunteers he created - the famous "thousand" - hastened to help the rebels. The detachment of Garibaldi, after landing in Sicily, began to increase rapidly; the people greeted him as a liberator.

On May 15, in the battle with the troops of the Neapolitan king at Calatafimi (near Palermo), Garibaldi's volunteers won a complete victory. The uprising engulfed the entire south of Italy. Garibaldi won a number of new brilliant victories here too. On September 7, he triumphantly entered the capital of the kingdom - Naples.

The Prime Minister of Sardinia, Cavour, officially dissociated himself from Garibaldi's campaign against Naples, but in secret correspondence encouraged him to attack, hoping to overthrow the Neapolitan Bourbons with the hands of the Garibaldians, and then subjugate the entire south of Italy to the power of the Savoy dynasty. After the expulsion of the Bourbons, the government of the Sardinian monarchy moved its troops into the territory of the Kingdom of Naples.

Garibaldi, not wanting a civil war in Italy at this difficult time, after some hesitation did not take the path of separatism and, recognizing the power of the Sardinian monarchy over the Neapolitan possessions, actually removed himself from the role of political leader. His behavior turned out to be the only correct one, since the majority of the people in the elections that took place soon supported the supporters of the annexation of the territory of the former Kingdom of Naples to Sardinia.

The first all-Italian parliament, which met in Turin in March 1861, declared Sardinia, together with all the lands annexed to it, the Kingdom of Italy with a population of 22 million people. King Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of Italy, and Florence became the capital of the kingdom.

However, the unification of the country was not completed. Several million Italians were still under Austrian rule in the Venetian region and under the rule of the Pope, guarded by French troops. In 1862, Garibaldi, at the head of a detachment of two thousand volunteers, undertook a campaign to liberate Rome, but this campaign failed. Garibaldi in the battle of Mount Aspromonte was wounded and taken prisoner.

The new Italian state did not rest on its laurels. The Italians did not give up their attempts to conquer Venice from the Austrian Empire, and at the same time the lands of Trient and Trieste. The Italian army was heavily armed. Italy soon had the opportunity to attack Austria. In 1866, having concluded an agreement with the raising head of Prussia, Italy, together with the Germans, opposed Austria. However, in the very first battles, the Italians were utterly defeated both on land (at Custozza) and at sea (near Lissa). And only thanks to the victory of the Prussian army in the Battle of Sadovaya, the Italians were able to benefit from this mediocre lost war: Austria, under the terms of the peace treaty, was forced to give Italy the Venetian region.

Only Rome and other papal possessions adjacent to it remained outside the Italian state. Pope Pius X stubbornly opposed the inclusion of Rome in the united Italian state. In 1867, Garibaldi, with a detachment of his supporters, tried again to invade the papal possessions. However, Pius X moved the mercenary regiments of the Swiss against the patriots, and they defeated the Garibaldians in the battle of Mentana on November 3, 1867, with the support of the French troops.

And only in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, the creation of a single Italian national state was finally completed. The defeat of France in the war forced Napoleon III to withdraw from Italy french legion, and in early September 1870, Italian troops, as well as a volunteer detachment under the command of a former ally of Garibaldi Bixio, entered the territory of the papal region and occupied Rome on September 20. Pope Pius X was deprived of secular power. The capital of the Italian kingdom in January 1871 was moved from Florence to Rome. This ended the many years of struggle of the Italian people for the reunification of their country.

The rise of the popular movement in the center of Italy threatened the plans of Napoleon III to put a protege of the Bourbons on the throne of Tuscany. The defeat of the Austrians pushed Prussia to support Austria. The military, militaristic circles of Prussia and Bavaria insisted on the entry of their principalities into the war on the side of Austria. On the borders of the Bourbon Empire, a strong, centralized Italian state could appear. The prospect of the formation of a new great Mediterranean power, which would eventually become a rival of France, frightened Napoleon III and the entire French bourgeoisie. Bonapartist France was afraid of the excessive strengthening of Piedmont. Finally, the flames of the popular liberation struggle could spread from Italy to France, which was also burdened by the Bonapartist dictatorship of Napoleon III. On July 8, 1859, Napoleon III, secretly from Camillo Cavour, met in the small town of Villafranca with the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. At this meeting, it was decided that Austria would cede Lombardy to Napoleon III; Napoleon III promised to transfer Lombardy to Piedmont; in Tuscany and Modena, the old duke rulers who fled to the Habsburgs will return. The power of the pope was to be restored in all his former possessions, and Venice remained in the hands of Austria. These conditions were fixed in the preliminary peace treaty between France and Austria. Thus, behind the backs of Cavour and all of Italy, Napoleon III dealt a mortal blow to the cause of the unification of Italy. Having received Savoy and Nice from Piedmont, Napoleon III ended the third war of independence. Only one Lombardy freed itself from Austrian rule and became part of the Sardinian kingdom.

The Truce of Villafranca on July 11, 1859 (the so-called “Villafranca Preliminary, i.e., preliminary, sch agreement”) caused an outburst of indignation throughout Italy. Camillo Cavour has resigned as Prime Minister of Sardinia. A groan of disappointment and indignation swept through Italy. The Piedmontese government made a formal protest to Napoleon III, but still did not dare to continue the war with Austria without a former ally, relying only on the masses. It, like the Bourbons, was also mortally afraid of a people's war and a people's revolution. In November 1859, the French and Piedmontese governments concluded a peace treaty with the Austrian government, according to which Lombardy was included in Piedmont, and Venice remained with Austria.

In the summer and autumn of 1859, Camillo Cavour's policy reached a dead end. The patriotic forces of Italy thought differently and were determined to keep deposed Italian dukes out of their former thrones. The generals who arrived from Piedmont took command of the troops in Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna. It became clear that it would not be possible to impose the old order on the Italians or put a protege of the Bourbons on the throne without armed intervention from outside. Neither France nor Austria dared to unleash a new war on the peninsula. In January 1860, Camillo Cavour returned to power in Sardinia (Piedmont) and announced popular plebiscites (referendums) regarding the fate of the liberated territories. The vast majority of Italians were in favor of merging Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna with the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont). In March 1860, Tuscany, Modena, Parma and part of the Romagna, after a plebiscite held by the provisional governments together with the Piedmontese emissaries, were officially annexed to Piedmont. In accordance with an earlier agreement between Victor Emmanuel II and Napoleon III, Savoy and Nice passed to France from 1860.

Revolution of 1860 in southern Italy. Campaign of the Garibaldian "Thousand". The war between Sardinia and Austria was a turning point in the history of Italy. The popular masses of Italy entered into action. The patriotic forces succeeded in removing the Austrian garrisons from Tuscany, Parma and Modena. The Romagna, part of the territory of the Papal States, revolted, anti-Bourbon demonstrations unfolded in the Kingdom of Naples and especially in Sicily. At the end of 1859, an uprising broke out in Sicily against the Neapolitan monarchy and the Bourbon dynasty that reigned there. This island has long been turned into the "powder magazine" of Italy. Here, feudal remnants and the oppression of bourgeois exploitation were still intertwined, which made the people's need unbearable. In Sicily, the influence of secret Mazzinist organizations was great, the uprising broke out not without their participation. With the aim of liberating Rome, Giuseppe Mazzini and the Mazzini democrats called on the Italians to revolutionary action in the papal possessions and in the Kingdom of Naples. Returning from exile, Mazzini and his entourage turned to Garibaldi with a request to organize a military expedition and provide armed assistance to the rebellious Sicilians. Garibaldi hesitated for a long time, but nevertheless decided to organize a campaign. Democratic Mazzinist organizations launched preparations for a military expedition to Sicily to assist the rebels. Monetary donations were collected (Million Guns Voluntary Fund), volunteers were recruited and trained. In May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi arrived to help the rebellious inhabitants of Sicily with a detachment of volunteers - the famous "thousand Red Shirts" (in fact, there were one thousand two hundred volunteers). The composition of the Garibaldi detachment was heterogeneous: among the "Red Shirts" were students, sailors, workers, fishermen, merchants, carpenters, tailors, small intelligentsia, doctors, hairdressers. Among the Garibaldians there were many foreigners: French, British, Hungarians, Poles, Swiss. Many of the Garibaldians had extensive experience of conspiratorial struggle in secret Mazzinist societies, fought on the bastions of the Roman and Venetian Republics in 1848-1849. The well-known Russian geographer and public figure L.I. Mechnikov, brother of the famous Russian biologist Ivan Mechnikov, took an active part in the liberation campaign of the Garibaldians in Sicily. L.I. Mechnikov was appointed adjutant of Garibaldi and was seriously wounded in one of the battles.

The Piedmontese government knew about Garibaldi's plans and did not approve of them. The preparations for the Sicilian expedition shocked Victor Emmanuel and Camillo Cavour. Even the monarchist slogans of loyalty, devotion to King Victor Emmanuel II and the Savoy dynasty, as well as the prospect of new territorial acquisitions, did not suit the Piedmontese elite. She was seriously afraid of the revolutionary activity of the masses. The campaign of the Garibaldians was actively opposed by Camillo Cavour and moderate liberals. They did not want to spoil relations with Napoleon III, whose troops were stationed in Rome, guarding the secular power of the Pope. Cavour was taken by surprise by the initiative of the Mazzinist democrats and interfered in every possible way with the organization of the campaign. Cavour was afraid to openly oppose Garibaldi - after all, such a position would restore public opinion against him. In addition, the popularity of Garibaldi among the people far exceeded the popularity of the official elite. Therefore, Cavour surreptitiously created various obstacles for the Garibaldians, preventing the expedition from sending to Sicily. The authorities refused to give the Garibaldian volunteers modern weapons purchased with patriotic donations. It was possible to get only a thousand old, almost unusable, guns.

The Garibaldi expedition (slightly more than a thousand volunteers) on two ships sailed in secrecy from Genoa on the morning of May 6, 1860 under the slogan: “Long live a united Italy and the King of Italy Vict about R-Emmanuel!” This was the slogan of the Mazzinist "Italian National Society". At the last moment, Cavour ordered his fleet to stop the expedition in any way. The Garibaldians, aware of Cavour's plans, sailed off in a different way than they had been supposed. The King of Piedmont, Victor Emmanuel II, told the Russian ambassador in Piedmont: “We renounce this expedition. ... Whether Garibaldi will be captured or shot, no one will say anything ... I myself would have shot him in 1849 if he had not run away from me ...”

According to the plan of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the military campaign of the Garibaldian “Thousand Red Shirts” was to bring victory to the uprising in Sicily, from there the detachment was to cross to Southern Italy and liberate it from the power of the Bourbons. After the landing of the Garibaldians in Sicily on May 11, 1860, thousands of local Sicilian residents, peasants and workers began to join them. The legendary Garibaldian epic began. The twenty-five thousandth royal army, led by the most experienced generals, cavalry and police units, and artillery was stationed on the island. Much in such cases depended on the outcome of the first battle. It took place near the town of Calatafimi four days after the landing in Sicily. Garibaldi skillfully used the tactics of mobile combat and guerrilla warfare. The Garibaldians, dressed in red shirts (like their leader), threw back the Bourbon troops in a fierce bayonet attack. The troops of the Neapolitan king Francis (Francesco) II were defeated, and soon all of Sicily was liberated. General Garibaldi was proud of the battle of Calatafimi until the end of his days. By this time, Garibaldi's revolutionary army numbered twenty-five thousand fighters. After such victories, both the Piedmontese monarch Victor Emmanuel and his cunning prime minister Cavour turned a blind eye to the recruitment of volunteers and the collection of money to help the Garibaldian “Thousand Red Shirts”.

Having won an important victory at Calatafimi, the Garibaldians made a skillful, covert maneuver through the mountains and approached Palermo. They were joined by an armed detachment of local peasants of three thousand people; together they broke into Palermo. A popular uprising was already raging there. The Bourbon command requested a truce and left Palermo. Following Palermo, uprisings engulfed many cities in Sicily. Garibaldi's campaign coincided with a broad popular movement that had unfolded in Sicily. The peasants rose to fight in the rear of the royal troops, facilitating the advance of Garibaldi's detachments. Garibaldi felt like a revolutionary dictator of Italy with unlimited powers, establishing a regime of revolutionary dictatorship everywhere. In the liberated regions, measures were taken to win over the masses of the people, including peasants, under the banner of Garibaldi: taxes on grinding grain and on imported foodstuffs were abolished. All those who joined the liberation struggle were promised a plot of communal or royal land. Detachments of armed sharecroppers and farm laborers seized and divided the landlords' lands. However, these measures were not enough to provide Garibaldi with strong support from the peasant masses.

In the summer of 1860, the Italian landlords began to prevent the division of communal lands, then the wave of peasant uprisings rose even higher. The peasants began to seize not only communal, but also private, "own" lands of the landowners. From that moment, fearing the new, she handed over to the landowner land ownership, revolutionary-democratic, but at the same time, bourgeois, the government of Garibaldi began to suppress peasant uprisings. The Garibaldian authorities began to ask for help from the former official authorities. The new revolutionary-bourgeois government resolutely stood up for the inviolability, inviolability and sanctity of the right of private ownership of land. The most severe punitive measures were applied to its violators, up to executions. The landowners themselves created their own national guard and with its help suppressed the centers of peasant resistance. Peasant enthusiasm, caused by the arrival of the Garibaldians, quickly disappeared, the peasants left the Garibaldian detachments. The influx of volunteer peasants from the north to the Garibaldian detachments ceased, the alliance between the revolutionary democrats and the peasant masses showed the first crack.

Having entrusted the management of the island to his assistants, Garibaldi was mainly engaged in military affairs. After the battle of Milazzo on July 20, 1860, the Bourbons were expelled from Eastern Sicily, and Garibaldi began to prepare for a landing on the continent. In its ranks, in addition to the "thousand Red Shirts", there were twenty thousand volunteers who arrived from the cities of Northern Italy, and about three thousand Sicilian peasants who joined him - a total of about twenty-four thousand people. The Sardinian authorities at that time took an ambivalent position. On the one hand, Cavour now counted on the hands of Garibaldi to overthrow the Bourbons and subjugate the kingdom of Naples to the power of the Savoy dynasty. On the other hand, Cavour's plans did not include the proclamation of a republic. In an official letter to Garibaldi, Camillo Cavour instructed him in an orderly tone not to move with troops from the island to the continent, and in an informal letter he suggested that he not stop halfway. An open alliance with the Bourbons would have immediately swept away the Cavour cabinet. King Victor Emmanuel II sent his adjutant to Garibaldi with a personal message not to cross to the continent.

Having liberated all of Sicily and disobeying their king, on August 17 (according to other sources - August 19), 1860, Garibaldi's troops landed in the south of the Apennine Peninsula, in Calabria. Popular uprisings were already blazing there, the soldiers of the Neapolitan king Francis II (Francesco II) threw down their weapons in thousands and surrendered. The government troops were demoralized, the monarchy showed complete impotence in the face of the actions of the lower classes. The weakness and rottenness of the Bourbon regime facilitated the capture of Naples by the Garibaldians. The soldiers themselves surrendered with the words: “Long live Garibaldi!” King Francis II, with the remnants of his troops loyal to him, fled from Naples to the nearby sea fortress of Gaeta. On the twentieth day of the landing in Calabria, September 7, 1860, Garibaldi's army victoriously, without a fight, entered the jubilant Naples. Later, Garibaldi wrote about the entry of his troops into Naples: “On September 7, 1860, the proletarian entered Naples with his friends in red shirts ... The people's liberators occupied the still warm royal nest. Luxurious royal carpets were trampled under the boots of the proletarians…”. And, although Giuseppe Garibaldi was never a proletarian, his victory over the Bourbons was a truly popular victory.

Soon the fortress of Gaeta also fell, the Neapolitan king Francis II (Francesco II) was forced to flee to Rome. The final defeat of the Bourbon troops was inflicted at Volturno in October 1860. The fate of the Bourbon dynasty and the entire Kingdom of Naples was decided. Garibaldi became the de facto dictator of the entire south of Italy. So, the popular revolution in the southern regions of Italy swept away the reactionary-monarchist regime of the Bourbons, a huge contribution to this victory was made by the southern Italian peasantry. Hoping for support from the Garibaldian authorities, the peasants miscalculated. The decree on the transfer of state lands to the peasants was not carried out, self-occupations by the peasants of the landlords' lands were cruelly suppressed, uprisings in the villages were ruthlessly suppressed by punishers.

The confrontation between liberal monarchists and democrats resulted in acute conflict between Cavour and Garibaldi. After the liberation of Sicily, Cavour scattered a was in courtesy to Garibaldi, saying that "Garibaldi rendered Italy the greatest services that only a man can render to his homeland." But, having learned that Garibaldi was in no hurry with the immediate annexation of Sicily to Piedmont, Cavour began to accuse him of "connecting with the people of the revolution, sowing disorder and anarchy in his path." Cavour decided to prevent the march of the Garibaldian "thousand" into Central Italy and began to act ahead of the democrats. He convinced Napoleon III of the need for quick, immediate action to prevent a popular, democratic revolution in Piedmont. Having obtained the consent of the French emperor and in order to prevent the invasion of the Garibaldian "thousand" into the Papal Region, three days after Garibaldi's entry into Naples, the Piedmontese troops, on the command of Cavour, themselves invaded the Papal Region, liberated the provinces of the Marche and Umbria, along the way suppressed the anti-papal movement there. Thus, the possibility of military action by Garibaldi against the Papal States was excluded. In a letter to the Piedmontese ambassador in Paris, Camillo Cavour wrote: “I will make every effort to prevent the Italian movement from becoming revolutionary ... I am ready to do anything for this. If Garibaldi takes possession of the entire Kingdom of Naples, ... we will no longer be able to oppose him. From the Papal States, Piedmontese troops from the north invaded the Kingdom of Naples to interfere with Garibaldi's troops.

Now the revolutionary commander intended to march on Rome and then liberate Venice. His revolutionary army already numbered fifty thousand fighters from the northern and central provinces of the country. Among them were many staunch Republicans. The leading leaders of the Democrats, including Giuseppe Mazzini, gathered in Naples. The Italian democrats - Giuseppe Mazzini and his supporters - advised Garibaldi to retain dictatorial powers and use them to liberate the Papal States, and then Venice, by military means.

Garibaldi was in no hurry to convene a Constituent Assembly in order to seize control of all Italian lands and annex them to Piedmont. But the liberals, surrounded by Camillo Cavour, thwarted his plans and did not allow about more democratization of the emerging Italian state. The growth of revolutionary and republican sentiments in the country would threaten the existence of the Piedmontese monarchy and the Savoy dynasty of Victor Emmanuel II. And after the fall of the Piedmontese monarchy, the question of the elimination of the secular power of the Pope would inevitably arise. Such an undesirable turn of events would inevitably entail the intervention of foreign troops in Italian affairs. Napoleon III was the first to intervene in Italy.

By the autumn of 1860, the situation in the Italian countryside worsened again. The encroachment of landless peasants on the former communal lands frightened the local bourgeoisie of Calabria (they themselves expected to acquire these lands). The southern Italian authorities responded to the growth of the peasant movement with repressions. In response, crowds of peasants committed reprisals against the liberals and the national guard. The half-hearted policy of the government on the agrarian question threw the peasantry back into the feudal camp, the camp of the counter-revolution. The sympathy of the peasants for the Garibaldians was replaced by indifference, and then hostility. The revolution deepened, grew, and under these conditions, the wealthy elite of southern Italy began to demand the speedy merger of Naples with Piedmont. The Savoy monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II acted as a reliable guarantor of the inviolability of private property against the backdrop of a flaring peasant movement. There was also unrest in the cities of Italy, where the young Italian proletariat rose up to fight. King Victor Emmanuel II was literally bombarded with petitions to “restore peace and order.” In response to the petitions, the king turned to the Italians with his petition: “Peoples of Southern Italy! My troops are coming to you to restore order!”

Maintaining power even in the south for Garibaldi was not an easy task. He could never enter into an open conflict with the Piedmontese monarchy and become the leader of a peasant revolution, and he would never go for it. Frightened by the horrors of the “fratricidal war” with Piedmont, Garibaldi agreed to the demands of Victor Emmanuel II to organize a plebiscite on the immediate annexation of Naples to Piedmont and called on the southerners to support the accession. The poor southern Italian peasantry, vaguely aware of what awaited them after the accession, voted in favor of the plebiscite because "don Peppino said so" (as the commoners called Garibaldi). The bourgeois, the liberals and the landed gentry also voted in favor of joining, hoping that the revolution would end there. It was not possible to unite Italy in a revolutionary-democratic way, "from below". The social base of the democratic movement has narrowed. A plebiscite (popular vote) held in Naples on October 21, 1860, overwhelmingly voted in favor of joining Southern Italy to the Sardinian Monarchy (Piedmont). In November, the provinces of Umbria and the Marche became part of it. Thus, by the end of 1860, Italy was actually united (except for Rome with the region of Lazio and Venice).

Relying on an alliance with the liberals with the Savoy dynasty, the “cavurists” gained the upper hand in the fight against the democrats. Garibaldi's request to give him supreme control of southern Italy for a year was rejected by King Victor Emmanuel II. The dictatorship of Garibaldi was abolished, the decrees he had issued were canceled, and his revolutionary army was disbanded. Refusing all honors and awards, in November 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi left for the small, tiny rocky island of Caprera, near Sicily, which he owned (he bought it back in the 1850s). Russian democratic writer Alexander Herzen wrote about Garibaldi's departure from Naples: "He defeated the army with a handful of people, liberated the whole country and was released from it, like a coachman is released when he drove to the postal station." Now, on a “legal basis”, the Piedmontese authorities could take up the “restoration of order”: they canceled all the revolutionary decrees of Garibaldi, disbanded the peasant detachments, sent punishers to the “rebellious” villages.

So, by the beginning of 1861, all of Italy, with the exception of Venice and Rome, was united under the rule of the Sardinian king Vikt about Ra-Emmanuel II. King of Sardinia Victus about r-Emmanuel II solemnly entered Naples, accompanied by Garibaldi. In February 1861 in the capital of Piedmont - the city of Tours and not - the sessions of the first all-Italian parliament were opened. The first all-Italian parliament declared Sardinia, together with all the lands attached to it, the Kingdom of Italy with a population of twenty-two million people. March 14 King Victus about r-Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of Italy. Florence became the capital of the united Italian kingdom. Camillo Cavour died suddenly in April 1861. Garibaldi repeatedly tried to organize new campaigns of volunteers in order to achieve the liberation and annexation of Venice and Rome to the Italian state.

Thus, one of the main tasks of the Risorgimento was solved - the unification of Italy, but without the Papal States and Venice. Comparing the unification of Italy and Germany, it must be emphasized that in Germany the decisive role in the unification was played by wars under the leadership of Prussia. In Italy, a complex interweaving, rivalry with each other of various political forces arose. The revolutionary democratic forces, the republicans, the liberal circles of the nobility and the bourgeoisie - the “party of moderates”, the Sardinian dynasty, which advocated the preservation of the monarchy - the struggle of these currents led to the incompleteness of the Risorgimento, both in terms of social tasks, and in terms of postponing the solution of the issue of accession Papal States and Venice.

However, the unification of Italy was not fully completed, it was not completed. Several million Italians still remained under the rule of Austria in the Venetian region and under the authority of the Pope, guarded by French troops. The unification of Italy was accompanied by unification in legislation, judicial, monetary, customs systems, systems of weights and measures, taxation. In Italy, the rapid construction of railways began (over the decade from 1861 to 1871, their length increased from two and a half thousand - 2.500 kilometers to six thousand two hundred - 6.200 kilometers). The main regions of Italy were interconnected railways which accelerated the formation of a single national market. True, his appearance did not improve the living conditions of the people. The tax burden has grown, and indirect taxes on food have been introduced. As early as the 1840s, the labor movement was born in Italy (mainly in the Kingdom of Sardinia). By the 1860s, self-help societies began to appear in many regions of Italy, which were influenced by moderate liberals and were engaged in improving the material situation of workers. By the early 1870s there were over 1400 such mutual aid societies, compared to 234 in 1860. The labor movement gradually acquired an all-Italian character. In the first half of the 1860s, the influence of Mazzini's supporters prevailed in the workers' organizations. They involved the workers in the struggle for universal suffrage.

The situation in Italy in the 1860s was extremely tense. The young kingdom of Italy faced many difficult problems. One of them was the uprising of the Neapolitan peasantry. Not having received the promised land, the rural masses of southern Italy rose up against the new power, which was now in the hands of the new bourgeois masters. On January 1, 1861, the new authorities adopted a decree on the division of former communal lands (which the peasant classes had long dreamed of), but soon abandoned its implementation. The remnants of the overthrown Bourbon dynasty set the peasants against the new authorities, played on the naive faith of the peasants in the Bourbons as intercessors and defenders of the rural people. Repeated attempts were made to restore the deposed Bourbons to the throne instead of the ruling Savoy dynasty. The reaction hoped to rouse the Italian countryside to revolt and restore the Bourbons. The reaction was supported by former soldiers and officers of the dispersed Bourbon troops, dissatisfied with the dominance of the new "liberals" in the countryside. Later, official historians considered this movement “gangster”, “mafia”, simply explaining everything by the inclination of the southerners to solve all problems by force, their “innate” love for robbery and terror. It was from the middle of the 19th century that the role of the mafia began to increase in Sicily - criminal, criminal formations operating under the guise of local authorities and administrations, in connection with local oligarchs. The mafia planted an atmosphere of arbitrariness, violence, political assassinations and racketeering (extortion). In fact, in reality, this social movement had social roots and expressed the social protest of the village lower classes against poverty and oppression. There was no “commitment” of the southerners to the overthrown Bourbon dynasty. The fight against mafia banditry dragged on for many decades.

Since the summer of 1861, the situation in southern Italy was reminiscent of a civil war: pogroms of municipalities, destruction of court and debt documents, reprisals against liberals, land seizures, imposition of rich indemnities. Government troops engaged in battles with the rebel detachments of the southerners, carried out executions and repressions. One hundred and twenty thousand (120 thousand) government army was concentrated in the south of Italy. Only by 1865 the peasant movement in the south was suppressed. Over the years, more than five thousand Italians were killed and wounded.

The process of forming a unified Italian state was also difficult and difficult in other regions of Italy, although there was no such sharpness as in the south. The introduction of new, bourgeois legal norms, the tax system, church law took 1860-1870s. The unification of Italy was accompanied by unification in legislation, judicial, monetary, customs systems, systems of weights and measures, taxation. In Italy, the rapid construction of railways began (over the decade from 1861 to 1871, their length increased from two and a half thousand - 2.500 kilometers to six thousand two hundred - 6.200 kilometers). The main regions of Italy were interconnected by railroads, which accelerated the formation of a single national market. Stormy banking activity was accompanied by unprecedented speculation, shady deals, which laid the foundation for large oligarchic fortunes and powerful financial and industrial clans. True, these changes did not improve the living conditions of the people. The tax burden has grown, and indirect taxes on food have been introduced. As early as the 1840s, the labor movement was born in Italy (mainly in the Kingdom of Sardinia). By the 1860s, self-help societies began to appear in many regions of Italy, which were influenced by moderate liberals and were engaged in improving the material situation of workers. By the early 1870s there were over 1400 such mutual aid societies, compared to 234 in 1860. The labor movement gradually acquired an all-Italian character. In the first half of the 1860s, the influence of Mazzini's supporters prevailed in the workers' organizations. They involved the workers in the struggle for universal suffrage.

Socio-economic and political development Italian states in the middle of the 19th century. In the early 1850s, Italy was a series of independent states: the Papal States, Tuscany, Sardinia (Piedmont), Lombardy, Venice, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Kingdom of Naples), Modena, Parma and Lucca. The northeastern Italian territories (Lombardy and Venice) were still under the rule of the Austrian Empire. In Rome, there were French occupying troops, in Romagna, which was part of the Papal States, Austrian troops. Only the south of Italy remained relatively free. The bourgeois revolution of 1848-1849 in Italy did not solve the main task of uniting the Italian lands into a single national state. As a result of the defeat of the revolution, Italy remained fragmented into a number of separate states, loosely connected with each other. The task of liberation from foreign oppression also remained unresolved. The constitutional and parliamentary orders established in the Italian states during the revolution of 1848-1849 were destroyed everywhere.

The main centers of reaction in Italy were the Kingdom of Naples (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), where brutal police brutality reigned, and the Roman state, in which such a relic of the medieval past as the secular power of the Pope was restored. In Lombardy and Venice, the occupying Austrian troops brutally cracked down on participants in the national revolutionary movement 1848 - 1849. Hundreds and thousands of Italian patriots languished in the terrible fortress of Spielberg and in other Austrian and Italian prisons.

After the suppression of the revolution of 1848-1849, the absolutist order was restored, with the constitutional gains of 1848 in Naples, Tuscany, and the Papal State, it was over. Thousands of people were subjected to cruel repressions, intimidation and despotic police arbitrariness became the main methods of government of absolute monarchies, the army and police - their main support. Especially raged in Naples, King Ferdinand II, nicknamed the “king-bomb” for the cruel reprisals against the participants in the revolution of 1848-1849 in Sicily. Churchmen again reigned in papal possessions, the influence of the Jesuits increased.

Austria, the bulwark of all the reactionary forces on the Apennine Peninsula, brought Lombardy and Venice under a harsh military regime. Austrian troops occupied Tuscany until 1855 and remained indefinitely in Romagna, one of the papal provinces. The Pope also insisted that the French troops not leave Rome. Glorified in 1847-1848 as the "spiritual leader" of the national movement, Pope Pius IX has now turned into its bitterest, implacable opponent. Because of the fear of revolution, the absolutist regimes refused to carry out any reforms. Their reactionary economic policy was one of the reasons for the economic stagnation or slow development of the economy of most Italian states in the 1850s.

Against this background, the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) acted as a contrast, the main center of liberalism. It was the only Italian kingdom in which a constitutional arrangement survived. King Victor Emmanuel II, fearing new revolutionary upheavals, preferred to maintain cooperation with the liberals. The Savoy dynasty reigning in Piedmont, striving to expand its possessions, in need of the support of the local bourgeoisie and the bourgeois nobility, pursued an anti-Austrian policy. Piedmont had a relatively strong army, the constitution introduced in 1848 was preserved, liberal cabinets were in power. Attempts by local reactionaries, as well as by Austria, to have them abolished failed. The Sardinian kingdom (Piedmont), the only one in all of Italy, had a moderately liberal constitution that limited the power of the king to a parliament consisting of two chambers dominated by large aristocratic landowners and the largest capitalists. In Piedmont, new textile enterprises arose, railways were built, banks were opened, and agriculture acquired a capitalist character.

In the 1850s, the constitutional-parliamentary order was gradually strengthened, in large measure thanks to the activities of the head of the moderate liberals of Piedmont, Count Camillo Benzo Cavour (1810-1861). Count Camillo Cavour was Minister of Agriculture from 1850-1851 and Prime Minister of Piedmont from 1851-1861. Outwardly, he was not a charismatic person, he did not have the ancient beauty of Giuseppe Mazzini or the charming smile of Giuseppe Garibaldi. This short, plump man, with an amiable smile on his whiskered face, who irritated his interlocutors with the habit of rubbing his hands, was one of the most important political figures in Italy in the middle of the 19th century. A bourgeois landowner who introduced the latest inventions of agricultural technology on his lands, was engaged in industrial activities and skillfully played on the stock exchange, Camillo Cavour headed the Piedmontese government for a whole decade (from 1851 to 1861). A brilliant politician and a master of parliamentary compromises, he managed, relying on the liberal majority in parliament, to neutralize the pressure on the king of the reactionary forces. He, more than other politicians of contemporary Italy, understood the importance of a strong economy for the state. With his characteristic energy, Cavour modernized Piedmont, just as he modernized his own estate. Cavour made his capital in the production and sale of artificial fertilizers. The Cavour estate was considered a model of a diversified commodity economy that supplied wool, rice, and fine-fleeced sheep to the market. Cavour entered into profitable trade agreements with neighboring states, reformed legislation, laid irrigation canals, built railways, stations, sea ports. about mouths. Favorable conditions were created for the development of the merchant fleet, agriculture, and the textile industry; foreign trade, finance, and the credit system of Piedmont expanded. Cavour acted as a tireless propagandist of the principle of free trade (free trade), which, in the conditions of a fragmented Italy, meant the struggle for the destruction of customs barriers between the Italian states. Cavour advocated the need to introduce a unified system of measures, weights and banknotes throughout Italy. As a shareholder, Cavour was one of the first to promote private investment in railway construction. These measures contributed to the capitalist development of agriculture, which still remained the basis of the Piedmontese economy, and intensified the restructuring of industry. A supporter of the liberal-bourgeois system, Camillo Cavour considered the accelerated growth of the capitalist economy, stimulated by the policy of free trade, the active development of means of transport and the banking system, to be a necessary condition for its approval.

In the first half of the 1850s, plans to create a unified Italian state seemed to Count Camillo Cavour still an unrealizable utopia, he even called calls for the unification of the country “stupidity”. He considered the real goal of the expulsion of the Austrian barbarians from Lombardy and Venice, the inclusion of Lombardy, Venice, Parma, Modena in the Kingdom of Sardinia - the most powerful state of Italy in economic and military terms. Coming from an old aristocratic family, Camillo Cavour advocated a parliamentary constitution like the English one and argued that its adoption could prevent a popular revolution. In 1848 he published an article directed against socialist and communist ideas. Cavour denied the path of the revolutionary popular struggle for the independence of Italy. His plans did not go beyond the creation of the Kingdom of Northern Italy under the auspices of the Savoy dynasty, the rallying of the Italian people around the throne of King Victor Emmanuel II. Cavour was pushed to this by the Piedmontese industrialists and bourgeois, who dreamed of new markets for raw materials and the sale of their products. In 1855, England and France pushed Piedmont to participate in the Crimean (Eastern) War against Russia. The participation of Piedmont in it was reduced to sending fifteen thousandth (according to other sources - eighteen thousandth) military corps of Italian troops to the Crimea. Cavour hoped to get closer to England and France - he considered the "great European powers" as potential allies of Italy. There were no serious disagreements between Italy and Russia then. After the end of the war, Cavour took part in the signing of the Paris Peace. He succeeded in getting the "Italian Question" included in the agenda of the congress. Speaking at the Paris Peace Congress of 1856 with a fiery speech, Cavour spoke passionately about the suffering of Italy, fragmented and occupied by foreign troops, groaning under the yoke of Austria. The discussion of the "Italian question" proved fruitless, but made a great impression on public opinion in Italy. It also drew the attention of the European powers to Piedmont as the spokesman for all-Italian interests.

So, Italy faced the main task: to eliminate the foreign presence and put an end to the fragmentation of the country into small appanage principalities, kingdoms and duchies. Instead, they should have created a single centralized Italian state, but not through the revolutionary struggle of the masses, but through diplomatic agreements. The period or era of the unification of Italy is called the Risorgimento. Piedmont became the spokesman for all-Italian interests.

In the 1850s and 1860s, after the end of the crisis of 1847-1848, Italy experienced a marked shift in the direction of capitalization of its economy. The economic recovery was most fully manifested in Lombardy and Piedmont. The northern territories of Italy, where the industrial revolution had already taken place, were considered the most economically developed. New factories sprang up in Lombardy and Piedmont, and the production of silk and cotton fabrics grew. Textile (especially cotton) production was the main industry, the basis of the economy of Lombardy and Piedmont.

The economic revival also affected metallurgy and engineering, in which the number of workers employed in production over the twenty years of 1840-1860 increased six to seven times and reached ten thousand workers. Railroad construction grew. In 1859, the length of the railways in Piedmont by 1859 increased to nine hundred kilometers (in 1848 it was only eight kilometers (!), An increase of more than a hundred times). The turnover of domestic and foreign trade expanded. Thus, by the 1850s, Piedmont began to develop much faster than most Italian states. But progress in the development of the economy did not affect the southern regions of Italy, which lagged far behind the advanced north and center of the country. The south of Italy has always been distinguished by a slow type of development. Naples was considered especially backward, a significant part of which were lumpen proletarians, people without fixed occupations, who survived by odd jobs (in Italy they were called “lazzaroni”, i.e. “tramps”).

The weak purchasing power of the masses of the people (especially the peasantry), along with the political fragmentation of the country and some feudal remnants, retarded the capitalist development of Italy. In most of the country (especially in the south), the industrial revolution has not yet been fully completed. Small handicraft workshops, widespread even in the countryside, where labor was much cheaper than in cities, quantitatively prevailed over large centralized manufactories or factories.

The position of the working people was very difficult. In an effort to catch up with the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries of Europe, the Italian capitalists brutally exploited factory workers and non-guild artisans employed at home, to whom they provided raw materials and paid wages. The working day lasted 14–16 (fourteen–sixteen) hours, and sometimes more. Wages were extremely low. The workers ate from hand to mouth, huddled in damp basements, in cramped closets, in attics. Epidemics claimed thousands of human lives, and infant mortality was especially high. Rural laborers, agricultural workers and the rural rich were exploited even more cruelly. In winter, rural laborers found themselves on the verge of starvation. The conditions were not the best for the small peasant tenants, entangled in duties and debts in favor of the state, landowners and clergy. The terms of the lease were enslaving: polovnichestvo prevailed (for half the harvest). Life was especially hard for the peasants in Sicily. On the richest island, generously gifted by nature, buried in orchards and vineyards, all the land belonged to a handful of landed oligarchs. The owners of sulfur mines in Sicily raged: thousands of people worked there in nightmarish conditions. It was Sicily that during almost the entire 19th century was one of the centers of the revolutionary movement in Italy.

The struggle of two directions in the national liberation movement in Italy. There were two directions in the Italian national liberation movement: revolutionary-democratic and moderate-liberal. The advanced workers, artisans, peasants, progressive circles of the intelligentsia, the democratic strata of the petty and middle bourgeoisie stood for the unification of the Italian lands "from below" - by revolutionary means. The democratic wing of the national liberation movement in Italy sought the destruction of the monarchical system and all feudal remnants, the complete liberation of the country from foreign oppression, and the transformation of Italian territories into a single bourgeois-democratic republic. The main political leaders, ideological leaders of the national revolutionary direction remained: the founder of the Young Italy movement, the republican Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) and the well-known representative of the national revolutionary movement Giuseppe Garibaldi. The moderate-liberal direction was headed by the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Count Camillo Cavour (1810-1861). His supporters - the liberal bourgeoisie and the liberal nobility of Italy - stood for the unification of the country "from above", without a revolution, by conspiracy between the bourgeoisie and the nobility behind the backs of the people.

The defeat of the 1848 revolution forced the democrats to analyze the reasons for its defeat. Some Democrats have come to the conclusion that the Republicans' lack of a program of deep social transformation and the provision of land to the peasants was the main reason for the non-participation of broad sections of the people in the revolution. One of the military leaders of the Roman Republic in 1849, the utopian socialist Carlo Pisacane (1818-1857), saw the solution of the agrarian issue in Italy in the elimination of large land ownership, the socialization of all land and its transfer to the peasantry. Radical democrats C. Pisacane, D. Montanelli, D. Ferrari argued that the national movement must be combined with social reorganization that meets the interests of the masses and therefore is capable of attracting the people to the liberation struggle. From such positions, they sharply criticized Giuseppe Mazzini and sought to push him out of the control of the republican camp. But most moderate democrats rejected the idea of ​​a peasant revolution out of fear for the fate of the landed property that belonged to the mass of the rural and urban bourgeoisie. Giuseppe Mazzini was sharply criticized in a letter to Weidemeier dated September 11, 1851 by Karl Marx, who wrote: “Mazzini ignores the material needs of the Italian rural population, from which all the juices are squeezed out. ... The first step towards the independence of Italy consists in the complete emancipation of the peasants and in the transformation rent to free bourgeois property…”. The weak side of the Mazzinists was also that they combined the national liberation movement with Catholicism. The slogan "God and the people!" put forward by Mazzini was both erroneous and harmful to the revolutionary movement. The frozen dogmas of Mazzini's concept suited the revolutionary democrats less and less.

Mazzini himself did not heed these criticisms. He was still convinced that the Italian Revolution should only allow national problem and that the people are ready to rise to the struggle at any moment. Mazzini energetically created a revolutionary underground network, organized conspiracies, prepared uprisings. In the course of this activity, the Mazzinists managed to rely on the first workers' organizations and societies in northern Italy - in Lombardy and Liguria. However, an attempt to raise an uprising in Milan in February 1853 ended in complete failure, despite the exceptional courage shown by artisans and workers in the fight against the Austrian occupying forces. This failure of the Mazzinist efforts caused a deep crisis in the Republican camp.

The revolutionary underground organizations began to split, many democrats broke ideologically and organizationally with Giuseppe Mazzini, accusing him of needless sacrifices. Then in 1855, Giuseppe Mazzini proclaimed the creation of the “Party of Action”, designed to unite all supporters of the continuation of the revolutionary struggle for the national liberation of Italy. This could not stop the split among the Democrats, some of them went for rapprochement with the Piedmontese moderate liberals. Piedmont became a refuge for tens of thousands of liberals, revolutionaries, patriots who fled here from all Italian states and principalities after the suppression of the 1848 revolution. They supported the idea of ​​turning the Sardinian kingdom (Piedmont) into a support for the national liberation movement.

The leader of the Venetian revolution of 1848-1849, D. Manin, became the spokesman for this approach - to turn Piedmont into a support for the unification movement. In 1855-1856, he called on the democrats to make a "sacrifice": to renounce the revolutionary-republican program, break with Mazzini and fully support the monarchical Piedmont as the only force capable of leading Italy to independence and unification. Manin also proposed the creation of a “national party” in which both democrats who rejected republicanism and liberal monarchists would rally for the sake of uniting the country. The leader of the moderate liberals, Camillo Cavour, also favorably reacted to this project of D. Manin. With his consent, in Piedmont in 1857, the “Italian National Society” began to operate, the slogan of which was the unification of Italy, led by the Savoy dynasty. The leaders of the "Italian National Society" offered Giuseppe Garibaldi to join it, meaning to use the personality of a popular, charismatic folk hero for their own political purposes. The name of Garibaldi, who lost faith in the tactics of Mazzinist conspiracies and uprisings, attracted many democrats, yesterday's Mazzinists and Republicans into the ranks of society. Garibaldi took over as vice-chairman of the society, but retained his republican convictions, as he said, was "a republican in his heart." Garibaldi always believed that in the name of the unification of Italy, he was ready to sacrifice the establishment of a republican system in it. The unification of the country under the auspices of the Piedmontese (Savoy) monarchy seemed to many republicans a guarantee of a “material improvement” in the situation of the people of Italy and the implementation of major social reforms.

Formally, the "Italian National Society" was an independent political organization. In fact, it was used by moderate liberals led by K. Cavour - through the branches of the "Society", scattered outside of Piedmont, throughout the country, the liberals strengthened their influence among the masses. After the revolution of 1848-1849, their influence among the masses fell seriously. The plan of the liberals to establish an alliance with the monarchs and involve them in the national movement - has suffered a complete collapse. The liberal-minded bourgeoisie and nobles in these states began to orient themselves more and more towards the Savoy dynasty and leaned towards the leading role of the Piedmontese liberals. Thus, the creation of the "Italian National Society" put the Piedmontese liberals in leadership of the entire moderate-liberal movement throughout Italy. The unification of Italy on a monarchical basis, under the rule of the Savoy dynasty, went beyond the Sardinian kingdom and acquired an all-Italian character.

The most resolute democrats did not want to accept the transfer of leadership of the national movement into the hands of liberal monarchists. For the sake of the revolution, the radicals were ready to make any sacrifice. In 1857, Carlo Pisacane (1818-1857), acting in contact with Mazzini, landed near Naples with a group of like-minded people with the aim of raising a popular uprising. The courageous, heroic attempt of Pisacane to raise the population of southern Italy to fight ended in the death of Pisacane himself and many of his comrades. The tragic outcome of this attempt to "export the revolution from outside" deepened the split in the democratic camp. Many revolutionaries who hesitated in their choice began to adjoin the "Italian National Society". The political positions of the liberals - Cavourists were strengthening, the initiative remained in their hands. By the end of the 1850s, Piedmont had become the leading force in the national liberation movement. To most liberals and republicans, private ownership of land was sacred and inviolable.

Foreign policy of the Savoy Monarchy set itself the goal of reconciling dynastic interests with the cause of national liberation and the unification of Italy. Camillo Cavour always sought to enlist the support of the "great powers" in the fight against the Austrian Empire. Cavour understood that the forces of the Sardinian kingdom alone would not be enough for the political unification of the country. With the Paris Congress of 1856, which put an end to the Crimean (Eastern) War, Italy began to move closer to the Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III in France. Napoleon III, feeling how the imperial throne was swaying under him, found it useful for himself to play the role of "defender of Italian independence and unity." France has always sought to oust Austria from Italy and to establish French supremacy in it. In January 1858, in Paris, Napoleon III was assassinated by the Italian patriot, revolutionary Felice Orsini, an active participant in the defense of the Roman Republic in 1849. Orsini hoped that the elimination of Napoleon III - one of the stranglers of the Italian revolution - would clear the way for the liberation struggle, sweep away the decrepit, dilapidated papal regime in Italy. After the execution of Orsini, Napoleon III decided to play the role of "patron of the Italian national movement" in order to neutralize the Italian revolutionaries and at the same time establish French hegemony in Italy.

At the initiative of Napoleon III, in the summer of 1858, in the French resort of Plombieres, a secret meeting of the French emperor with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia Camillo Cavour took place, during which the Franco-Piedmontese military-political alliance was formalized, and in January 1859 a secret treaty was signed between both countries . Napoleon III undertook to enter the war against Austria and promised that in the event of victory, Lombardy and Venice would be annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia. In turn, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Camillo Cavour, agreed to the annexation of Nice and Savoy to France (the majority of the population of these two provinces spoke French; Savoy and Nice were part of France in 1792-1814).

At the very beginning of 1859, France concluded a secret agreement on Russian support in the war with Austria. The Russian emperor Alexander II promised Napoleon III not to interfere with the unification of Italy and tried to tie down the forces of the Austrians by moving several corps of Russian troops to the Russian-Austrian border. The secret treaty with Napoleon III provided for the liberation of Lombardy and Venice from the Austrians, the annexation of these areas to Piedmont and the creation in this way of the Kingdom of Upper (Northern) Italy. Piedmont pledged to put up a hundred thousand soldiers, and France - two hundred thousand. Having received the French-speaking Nice and Savoy, Napoleon III also hoped to create in the center of Italy, on the basis of Tuscany, a kingdom headed by his cousin Prince Napoleon Bonaparte (“State of Middle Italy”), and to put his protege, Prince Mur, on the Neapolitan throne. a ta son of King Joachim Muir a that. The Pope was given the role of nominal head of the future federation of four Italian states. Their sovereigns would have to lose their thrones. Thus, according to the plans and calculations of Napoleon III, Italy would still remain fragmented and hand and foot would be connected with France, with the Bourbon monarchy. Austrian influence in Italy would be replaced by French. Cavour was well aware of the secret intentions of Napoleon III, but he had no other choice, and real events could interfere with the implementation of ambitious Napoleonic plans, cross them out.

After the collusion of France with Sardinia and the accession of Russia to their alliance, the war with Austria became inevitable. On April 23, 1859, Austria, having learned about the conspiracy, after the ultimatum, was the first to speak out against France and Sardinia. The Austrians demanded the complete disarmament of Piedmont. Military operations unfolded on the territory of Lombardy. At the Battle of Magenta (June 4, 1859), the French and Piedmontese troops inflicted a serious defeat on the Austrians. On June 8, 1859, Milan was liberated, and the Piedmontese King Victor Emmanuel II and French Emperor Napoleon III solemnly entered Milan. In the battles of Solferino (June 24, 1859) and San Martino (end of June), the Austrian troops suffered a second heavy defeat. Lombardy was completely liberated from Austrian troops. The possibility of moving the Franco-Italian troops to the neighboring Venetian region was opened. The war caused the rise of the national liberation struggle throughout Italy, the inhabitants of Lombardy, Sardinia, Venice, Parma, Modena and Romagna joined the war against Austria. The war with Austria turned out to be the external impetus that helped to pour out popular discontent. Anti-Austrian uprisings took place in Tuscany and Emilia. Provisional governments were created here, expressing their readiness for voluntary accession to Piedmont. In Tuscany, Modena, Parma, Romagna (Papal States), popular meetings and demonstrations turned into revolutions. Volunteer detachments began to form in many places. Twenty thousand volunteers came to Piedmont to join the war. One of the corps of Alpine riflemen operating in the mountainous regions of the Alps was commanded by Giuseppe Garibaldi. Garibaldi was offered a general position in the Piedmontese army, where he led the three thousand volunteer corps. Garibaldi's corps included many participants in the heroic defense of Rome and Venice in 1849. Garibaldi's corps recaptured city after city from the enemy.

The war aroused extraordinary enthusiasm among the common people and the rise of the national movement in Central Italy. Supporters of the "Italian National Society" led a large patriotic demonstration in Florence, the army supported the people. The Duke of Tuscany had to urgently leave Tuscany. It created a provisional government dominated by moderate liberals. In the first half of June 1859, in a similar situation of popular unrest, the rulers of Parma and Modena left their possessions, and governors appointed from Piedmont stood at the head of the administration of these states. At the same time, in Romagna, after the departure of the Austrian troops, the people began to overthrow the papal authorities, and their place was taken by representatives of the Piedmontese king Victor Emmanuel II. Mortally frightened by the magnitude of the popular movement, the dukes and the papal legate fled from Italy under the protection of the Austrian Habsburgs.

The rise of the popular movement in the center of Italy threatened the plans of Napoleon III to put a protege of the Bourbons on the throne of Tuscany. The defeat of the Austrians pushed Prussia to support Austria. The military, militaristic circles of Prussia and Bavaria insisted on the entry of their principalities into the war on the side of Austria. On the borders of the Bourbon Empire, a strong, centralized Italian state could appear. The prospect of the formation of a new great Mediterranean power, which would eventually become a rival of France, frightened Napoleon III and the entire French bourgeoisie. Bonapartist France was afraid of the excessive strengthening of Piedmont. Finally, the flames of the popular liberation struggle could spread from Italy to France, which was also burdened by the Bonapartist dictatorship of Napoleon III. On July 8, 1859, Napoleon III, secretly from Camillo Cavour, met in the small town of Villafranca with the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. At this meeting, it was decided that Austria would cede Lombardy to Napoleon III; Napoleon III promised to transfer Lombardy to Piedmont; in Tuscany and Modena, the old duke rulers who fled to the Habsburgs will return. The power of the pope was to be restored in all his former possessions, and Venice remained in the hands of Austria. These conditions were fixed in the preliminary peace treaty between France and Austria. Thus, behind the backs of Cavour and all of Italy, Napoleon III dealt a mortal blow to the cause of the unification of Italy. Having received Savoy and Nice from Piedmont, Napoleon III ended the third war of independence. Only one Lombardy freed itself from Austrian rule and became part of the Sardinian kingdom.

The Truce of Villafranca on July 11, 1859 (the so-called “Villafranca Preliminary, i.e., preliminary, sch agreement”) caused an outburst of indignation throughout Italy. Camillo Cavour has resigned as Prime Minister of Sardinia. A groan of disappointment and indignation swept through Italy. The Piedmontese government made a formal protest to Napoleon III, but still did not dare to continue the war with Austria without a former ally, relying only on the masses. It, like the Bourbons, was also mortally afraid of a people's war and a people's revolution. In November 1859, the French and Piedmontese governments concluded a peace treaty with the Austrian government, according to which Lombardy was included in Piedmont, and Venice remained with Austria.

In the summer and autumn of 1859, Camillo Cavour's policy reached a dead end. The patriotic forces of Italy thought differently and were determined to keep deposed Italian dukes out of their former thrones. The generals who arrived from Piedmont took command of the troops in Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna. It became clear that it would not be possible to impose the old order on the Italians or put a protege of the Bourbons on the throne without armed intervention from outside. Neither France nor Austria dared to unleash a new war on the peninsula. In January 1860, Camillo Cavour returned to power in Sardinia (Piedmont) and announced popular plebiscites (referendums) regarding further fate liberated territories. The vast majority of Italians were in favor of merging Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna with the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont). In March 1860, Tuscany, Modena, Parma and part of the Romagna, after a plebiscite held by the provisional governments together with the Piedmontese emissaries, were officially annexed to Piedmont. In accordance with an earlier agreement between Victor Emmanuel II and Napoleon III, Savoy and Nice passed to France from 1860.

Revolution of 1860 in southern Italy. Campaign of the Garibaldian "Thousand". The war between Sardinia and Austria was a turning point in the history of Italy. The popular masses of Italy entered into action. The patriotic forces succeeded in removing the Austrian garrisons from Tuscany, Parma and Modena. The Romagna, part of the territory of the Papal States, revolted, anti-Bourbon demonstrations unfolded in the Kingdom of Naples and especially in Sicily. At the end of 1859, an uprising broke out in Sicily against the Neapolitan monarchy and the Bourbon dynasty that reigned there. This island has long been turned into the "powder magazine" of Italy. Here, feudal remnants and the oppression of bourgeois exploitation were still intertwined, which made the people's need unbearable. In Sicily, the influence of secret Mazzinist organizations was great, the uprising broke out not without their participation. With the aim of liberating Rome, Giuseppe Mazzini and the Mazzini democrats called on the Italians to revolutionary action in the papal possessions and in the Kingdom of Naples. Returning from exile, Mazzini and his entourage turned to Garibaldi with a request to organize a military expedition and provide armed assistance to the rebellious Sicilians. Garibaldi hesitated for a long time, but nevertheless decided to organize a campaign. Democratic Mazzinist organizations launched preparations for a military expedition to Sicily to assist the rebels. Monetary donations were collected (Million Guns Voluntary Fund), volunteers were recruited and trained. In May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi arrived to help the rebellious inhabitants of Sicily with a detachment of volunteers - the famous "thousand Red Shirts" (in fact, there were one thousand two hundred volunteers). The composition of the Garibaldi detachment was heterogeneous: among the "Red Shirts" were students, sailors, workers, fishermen, merchants, carpenters, tailors, small intelligentsia, doctors, hairdressers. Among the Garibaldians there were many foreigners: French, British, Hungarians, Poles, Swiss. Many of the Garibaldians had extensive experience of conspiratorial struggle in secret Mazzinist societies, fought on the bastions of the Roman and Venetian Republics in 1848-1849. The well-known Russian geographer and public figure L.I. Mechnikov, brother of the famous Russian biologist Ivan Mechnikov, took an active part in the liberation campaign of the Garibaldians in Sicily. L.I. Mechnikov was appointed adjutant of Garibaldi and was seriously wounded in one of the battles.

The Piedmontese government knew about Garibaldi's plans and did not approve of them. The preparations for the Sicilian expedition shocked Victor Emmanuel and Camillo Cavour. Even the monarchist slogans of loyalty, devotion to King Victor Emmanuel II and the Savoy dynasty, as well as the prospect of new territorial acquisitions, did not suit the Piedmontese elite. She was seriously afraid of the revolutionary activity of the masses. The campaign of the Garibaldians was actively opposed by Camillo Cavour and moderate liberals. They did not want to spoil relations with Napoleon III, whose troops were stationed in Rome, guarding the secular power of the Pope. Cavour was taken by surprise by the initiative of the Mazzinist democrats and interfered in every possible way with the organization of the campaign. Cavour was afraid to openly oppose Garibaldi - after all, such a position would restore public opinion against him. In addition, the popularity of Garibaldi among the people far exceeded the popularity of the official elite. Therefore, Cavour surreptitiously created various obstacles for the Garibaldians, preventing the expedition from sending to Sicily. The authorities refused to give the Garibaldian volunteers modern weapons purchased with patriotic donations. It was possible to get only a thousand old, almost unusable, guns.

The Garibaldi expedition (slightly more than a thousand volunteers) on two ships sailed in secrecy from Genoa on the morning of May 6, 1860 under the slogan: “Long live a united Italy and the King of Italy Vict about R-Emmanuel!” This was the slogan of the Mazzinist "Italian National Society". At the last moment, Cavour ordered his fleet to stop the expedition in any way. The Garibaldians, aware of Cavour's plans, sailed off in a different way than they had been supposed. The King of Piedmont, Victor Emmanuel II, told the Russian ambassador in Piedmont: “We renounce this expedition. ... Whether Garibaldi will be captured or shot, no one will say anything ... I myself would have shot him in 1849 if he had not run away from me ...”

According to the plan of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the military campaign of the Garibaldian “Thousand Red Shirts” was to bring victory to the uprising in Sicily, from there the detachment was to cross to Southern Italy and liberate it from the power of the Bourbons. After the landing of the Garibaldians in Sicily on May 11, 1860, thousands of local Sicilian residents, peasants and workers began to join them. The legendary Garibaldian epic began. The twenty-five thousandth royal army, led by the most experienced generals, cavalry and police units, and artillery was stationed on the island. Much in such cases depended on the outcome of the first battle. It took place near the town of Calatafimi four days after the landing in Sicily. Garibaldi skillfully used the tactics of mobile combat and guerrilla warfare. The Garibaldians, dressed in red shirts (like their leader), threw back the Bourbon troops in a fierce bayonet attack. The troops of the Neapolitan king Francis (Francesco) II were defeated, and soon all of Sicily was liberated. General Garibaldi was proud of the battle of Calatafimi until the end of his days. By this time, Garibaldi's revolutionary army numbered twenty-five thousand fighters. After such victories, both the Piedmontese monarch Victor Emmanuel and his cunning prime minister Cavour turned a blind eye to the recruitment of volunteers and the collection of money to help the Garibaldian “Thousand Red Shirts”.

Having won an important victory at Calatafimi, the Garibaldians made a skillful, covert maneuver through the mountains and approached Palermo. They were joined by an armed detachment of local peasants of three thousand people; together they broke into Palermo. A popular uprising was already raging there. The Bourbon command requested a truce and left Palermo. Following Palermo, uprisings engulfed many cities in Sicily. Garibaldi's campaign coincided with a broad popular movement that had unfolded in Sicily. The peasants rose to fight in the rear of the royal troops, facilitating the advance of Garibaldi's detachments. Garibaldi felt like a revolutionary dictator of Italy with unlimited powers, establishing a regime of revolutionary dictatorship everywhere. In the liberated regions, measures were taken to win over the masses of the people, including peasants, under the banner of Garibaldi: taxes on grinding grain and on imported foodstuffs were abolished. All those who joined the liberation struggle were promised a plot of communal or royal land. Detachments of armed sharecroppers and farm laborers seized and divided the landlords' lands. However, these measures were not enough to provide Garibaldi with strong support from the peasant masses.

In the summer of 1860, the Italian landlords began to prevent the division of communal lands, then the wave of peasant uprisings rose even higher. The peasants began to seize not only communal, but also private, "own" lands of the landowners. From that moment on, fearing a new transfer of landed property to the landlords, the revolutionary-democratic, but at the same time, bourgeois, government of Garibaldi began to suppress peasant uprisings. The Garibaldian authorities began to ask for help from the former official authorities. The new revolutionary-bourgeois government resolutely stood up for the inviolability, inviolability and sanctity of the right of private ownership of land. The most severe punitive measures were applied to its violators, up to executions. The landowners themselves created their own national guard and with its help suppressed the centers of peasant resistance. Peasant enthusiasm, caused by the arrival of the Garibaldians, quickly disappeared, the peasants left the Garibaldian detachments. The influx of volunteer peasants from the north to the Garibaldian detachments ceased, the alliance between the revolutionary democrats and the peasant masses showed the first crack.

Having entrusted the management of the island to his assistants, Garibaldi was mainly engaged in military affairs. After the battle of Milazzo on July 20, 1860, the Bourbons were expelled from Eastern Sicily, and Garibaldi began to prepare for a landing on the continent. In its ranks, in addition to the "thousand Red Shirts", there were twenty thousand volunteers who arrived from the cities of Northern Italy, and about three thousand Sicilian peasants who joined him - a total of about twenty-four thousand people. The Sardinian authorities at that time took an ambivalent position. On the one hand, Cavour now counted on the hands of Garibaldi to overthrow the Bourbons and subjugate the kingdom of Naples to the power of the Savoy dynasty. On the other hand, Cavour's plans did not include the proclamation of a republic. In an official letter to Garibaldi, Camillo Cavour instructed him in an orderly tone not to move with troops from the island to the continent, and in an informal letter he suggested that he not stop halfway. An open alliance with the Bourbons would have immediately swept away the Cavour cabinet. King Victor Emmanuel II sent his adjutant to Garibaldi with a personal message not to cross to the continent.

Having liberated all of Sicily and disobeying their king, on August 17 (according to other sources - August 19), 1860, Garibaldi's troops landed in the south of the Apennine Peninsula, in Calabria. Popular uprisings were already blazing there, the soldiers of the Neapolitan king Francis II (Francesco II) threw down their weapons in thousands and surrendered. The government troops were demoralized, the monarchy showed complete impotence in the face of the actions of the lower classes. The weakness and rottenness of the Bourbon regime facilitated the capture of Naples by the Garibaldians. The soldiers themselves surrendered with the words: “Long live Garibaldi!” King Francis II, with the remnants of his troops loyal to him, fled from Naples to the nearby sea fortress of Gaeta. On the twentieth day of the landing in Calabria, September 7, 1860, Garibaldi's army victoriously, without a fight, entered the jubilant Naples. Later, Garibaldi wrote about the entry of his troops into Naples: “On September 7, 1860, the proletarian entered Naples with his friends in red shirts ... The people's liberators occupied the still warm royal nest. Luxurious royal carpets were trampled under the boots of the proletarians…”. And, although Giuseppe Garibaldi was never a proletarian, his victory over the Bourbons was a truly popular victory.

Soon the fortress of Gaeta also fell, the Neapolitan king Francis II (Francesco II) was forced to flee to Rome. The final defeat of the Bourbon troops was inflicted at Volturno in October 1860. The fate of the Bourbon dynasty and the entire Kingdom of Naples was decided. Garibaldi became the de facto dictator of the entire south of Italy. So, the popular revolution in the southern regions of Italy swept away the reactionary-monarchist regime of the Bourbons, a huge contribution to this victory was made by the southern Italian peasantry. Hoping for support from the Garibaldian authorities, the peasants miscalculated. The decree on the transfer of state lands to the peasants was not carried out, self-occupations by the peasants of the landlords' lands were cruelly suppressed, uprisings in the villages were ruthlessly suppressed by punishers.

The confrontation between liberal monarchists and democrats resulted in a sharp conflict between Cavour and Garibaldi. After the liberation of Sicily, Cavour scattered a was in courtesy to Garibaldi, saying that "Garibaldi rendered Italy the greatest services that only a man can render to his homeland." But, having learned that Garibaldi was in no hurry with the immediate annexation of Sicily to Piedmont, Cavour began to accuse him of "connecting with the people of the revolution, sowing disorder and anarchy in his path." Cavour decided to prevent the march of the Garibaldian "thousand" into Central Italy and began to act ahead of the democrats. He convinced Napoleon III of the need for quick, immediate action to prevent a popular, democratic revolution in Piedmont. Having obtained the consent of the French emperor and in order to prevent the invasion of the Garibaldian "thousand" into the Papal Region, three days after Garibaldi's entry into Naples, the Piedmontese troops, on the command of Cavour, themselves invaded the Papal Region, liberated the provinces of the Marche and Umbria, along the way suppressed the anti-papal movement there. Thus, the possibility of military action by Garibaldi against the Papal States was excluded. In a letter to the Piedmontese ambassador in Paris, Camillo Cavour wrote: “I will make every effort to prevent the Italian movement from becoming revolutionary ... I am ready to do anything for this. If Garibaldi takes possession of the entire Kingdom of Naples, ... we will no longer be able to oppose him. From the Papal States, Piedmontese troops from the north invaded the Kingdom of Naples to interfere with Garibaldi's troops.

Now the revolutionary commander intended to march on Rome and then liberate Venice. His revolutionary army already numbered fifty thousand fighters from the northern and central provinces of the country. Among them were many staunch Republicans. The leading leaders of the Democrats, including Giuseppe Mazzini, gathered in Naples. The Italian democrats - Giuseppe Mazzini and his supporters - advised Garibaldi to retain dictatorial powers and use them to liberate the Papal States, and then Venice, by military means.

Garibaldi was in no hurry to convene a Constituent Assembly in order to seize control of all Italian lands and annex them to Piedmont. But the liberals, surrounded by Camillo Cavour, thwarted his plans and did not allow about more democratization of the emerging Italian state. The growth of revolutionary and republican sentiments in the country would threaten the existence of the Piedmontese monarchy and the Savoy dynasty of Victor Emmanuel II. And after the fall of the Piedmontese monarchy, the question of the elimination of the secular power of the Pope would inevitably arise. Such an undesirable turn of events would inevitably entail the intervention of foreign troops in Italian affairs. Napoleon III was the first to intervene in Italy.

By the autumn of 1860, the situation in the Italian countryside worsened again. The encroachment of landless peasants on the former communal lands frightened the local bourgeoisie of Calabria (they themselves expected to acquire these lands). The southern Italian authorities responded to the growth of the peasant movement with repressions. In response, crowds of peasants committed reprisals against the liberals and the national guard. The half-hearted policy of the government on the agrarian question threw the peasantry back into the feudal camp, the camp of the counter-revolution. The sympathy of the peasants for the Garibaldians was replaced by indifference, and then hostility. The revolution deepened, grew, and under these conditions, the wealthy elite of southern Italy began to demand the speedy merger of Naples with Piedmont. The Savoy monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II acted as a reliable guarantor of the inviolability of private property against the backdrop of a flaring peasant movement. There was also unrest in the cities of Italy, where the young Italian proletariat rose up to fight. King Victor Emmanuel II was literally bombarded with petitions to “restore peace and order.” In response to the petitions, the king turned to the Italians with his petition: “Peoples of Southern Italy! My troops are coming to you to restore order!”

Maintaining power even in the south for Garibaldi was not an easy task. He could never enter into an open conflict with the Piedmontese monarchy and become the leader of a peasant revolution, and he would never go for it. Frightened by the horrors of the “fratricidal war” with Piedmont, Garibaldi agreed to the demands of Victor Emmanuel II to organize a plebiscite on the immediate annexation of Naples to Piedmont and called on the southerners to support the accession. The poor southern Italian peasantry, vaguely aware of what awaited them after the accession, voted in favor of the plebiscite because "don Peppino said so" (as the commoners called Garibaldi). The bourgeois, the liberals and the landed gentry also voted in favor of joining, hoping that the revolution would end there. It was not possible to unite Italy in a revolutionary-democratic way, "from below". The social base of the democratic movement has narrowed. A plebiscite (popular vote) held in Naples on October 21, 1860, overwhelmingly voted in favor of joining Southern Italy to the Sardinian Monarchy (Piedmont). In November, the provinces of Umbria and the Marche became part of it. Thus, by the end of 1860, Italy was actually united (except for Rome with the region of Lazio and Venice).

Relying on an alliance with the liberals with the Savoy dynasty, the “cavurists” gained the upper hand in the fight against the democrats. Garibaldi's request to give him supreme control of southern Italy for a year was rejected by King Victor Emmanuel II. The dictatorship of Garibaldi was abolished, the decrees he had issued were canceled, and his revolutionary army was disbanded. Refusing all honors and awards, in November 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi left for the small, tiny rocky island of Caprera, near Sicily, which he owned (he bought it back in the 1850s). Russian democratic writer Alexander Herzen wrote about Garibaldi's departure from Naples: "He defeated the army with a handful of people, liberated the whole country and was released from it, like a coachman is released when he drove to the postal station." Now, on a “legal basis”, the Piedmontese authorities could take up the “restoration of order”: they canceled all the revolutionary decrees of Garibaldi, disbanded the peasant detachments, sent punishers to the “rebellious” villages.

So, by the beginning of 1861, all of Italy, with the exception of Venice and Rome, was united under the rule of the Sardinian king Vikt about Ra-Emmanuel II. King of Sardinia Victus about r-Emmanuel II solemnly entered Naples, accompanied by Garibaldi. In February 1861 in the capital of Piedmont - the city of Tours and not - the sessions of the first all-Italian parliament were opened. The first all-Italian parliament declared Sardinia, together with all the lands attached to it, the Kingdom of Italy with a population of twenty-two million people. March 14 King Victus about r-Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of Italy. Florence became the capital of the united Italian kingdom. Camillo Cavour died suddenly in April 1861. Garibaldi repeatedly tried to organize new campaigns of volunteers in order to achieve the liberation and annexation of Venice and Rome to the Italian state.

Thus, one of the main tasks of the Risorgimento was solved - the unification of Italy, but without the Papal States and Venice. Comparing the unification of Italy and Germany, it must be emphasized that in Germany the decisive role in the unification was played by wars under the leadership of Prussia. In Italy, a complex interweaving, rivalry with each other of various political forces arose. The revolutionary democratic forces, the republicans, the liberal circles of the nobility and the bourgeoisie - the “party of moderates”, the Sardinian dynasty, which advocated the preservation of the monarchy - the struggle of these currents led to the incompleteness of the Risorgimento, both in terms of social tasks, and in terms of postponing the solution of the issue of accession Papal States and Venice.

However, the unification of Italy was not fully completed, it was not completed. Several million Italians still remained under the rule of Austria in the Venetian region and under the authority of the Pope, guarded by French troops. The unification of Italy was accompanied by unification in legislation, judicial, monetary, customs systems, systems of weights and measures, taxation. In Italy, the rapid construction of railways began (over the decade from 1861 to 1871, their length increased from two and a half thousand - 2.500 kilometers to six thousand two hundred - 6.200 kilometers). The main regions of Italy were interconnected by railroads, which accelerated the formation of a single national market. True, his appearance did not improve the living conditions of the people. The tax burden has grown, and indirect taxes on food have been introduced. As early as the 1840s, the labor movement was born in Italy (mainly in the Kingdom of Sardinia). By the 1860s, self-help societies began to appear in many regions of Italy, which were influenced by moderate liberals and were engaged in improving the material situation of workers. By the early 1870s there were over 1400 such mutual aid societies, compared to 234 in 1860. The labor movement gradually acquired an all-Italian character. In the first half of the 1860s, the influence of Mazzini's supporters prevailed in the workers' organizations. They involved the workers in the struggle for universal suffrage.

The situation in Italy in the 1860s was extremely tense. The young kingdom of Italy faced many difficult problems. One of them was the uprising of the Neapolitan peasantry. Not having received the promised land, the rural masses of southern Italy rose up against the new power, which was now in the hands of the new bourgeois masters. On January 1, 1861, the new authorities adopted a decree on the division of former communal lands (which the peasant classes had long dreamed of), but soon abandoned its implementation. The remnants of the overthrown Bourbon dynasty set the peasants against the new authorities, played on the naive faith of the peasants in the Bourbons as intercessors and defenders of the rural people. Repeated attempts were made to restore the deposed Bourbons to the throne instead of the ruling Savoy dynasty. The reaction hoped to rouse the Italian countryside to revolt and restore the Bourbons. The reaction was supported by former soldiers and officers of the dispersed Bourbon troops, dissatisfied with the dominance of the new "liberals" in the countryside. Later, official historians considered this movement “gangster”, “mafia”, simply explaining everything by the inclination of the southerners to solve all problems by force, their “innate” love for robbery and terror. It was from the middle of the 19th century that the role of the mafia began to increase in Sicily - criminal, criminal formations operating under the guise of local authorities and administrations, in connection with local oligarchs. The mafia planted an atmosphere of arbitrariness, violence, political assassinations and racketeering (extortion). In fact, in reality, this social movement had social roots and expressed the social protest of the village lower classes against poverty and oppression. There was no “commitment” of the southerners to the overthrown Bourbon dynasty. The fight against mafia banditry dragged on for many decades.

Since the summer of 1861, the situation in southern Italy was reminiscent of a civil war: pogroms of municipalities, destruction of court and debt documents, reprisals against liberals, land seizures, imposition of rich indemnities. Government troops engaged in battles with the rebel detachments of the southerners, carried out executions and repressions. One hundred and twenty thousand (120 thousand) government army was concentrated in the south of Italy. Only by 1865 the peasant movement in the south was suppressed. Over the years, more than five thousand Italians were killed and wounded.

The process of forming a unified Italian state was also difficult and difficult in other regions of Italy, although there was no such sharpness as in the south. The introduction of new, bourgeois legal norms, the tax system, church law took 1860-1870s. The unification of Italy was accompanied by unification in legislation, judicial, monetary, customs systems, systems of weights and measures, taxation. In Italy, the rapid construction of railways began (over the decade from 1861 to 1871, their length increased from two and a half thousand - 2.500 kilometers to six thousand two hundred - 6.200 kilometers). The main regions of Italy were interconnected by railroads, which accelerated the formation of a single national market. Stormy banking activity was accompanied by unprecedented speculation, shady deals, which laid the foundation for large oligarchic fortunes and powerful financial and industrial clans. True, these changes did not improve the living conditions of the people. The tax burden has grown, and indirect taxes on food have been introduced. As early as the 1840s, the labor movement was born in Italy (mainly in the Kingdom of Sardinia). By the 1860s, self-help societies began to appear in many regions of Italy, which were influenced by moderate liberals and were engaged in improving the material situation of workers. By the early 1870s there were over 1400 such mutual aid societies, compared to 234 in 1860. The labor movement gradually acquired an all-Italian character. In the first half of the 1860s, the influence of Mazzini's supporters prevailed in the workers' organizations. They involved the workers in the struggle for universal suffrage.

The most reactionary force in Italy was still the papacy. It hoped, relying on the southerners, to destroy the young Italian kingdom. All the unfinished reactionaries fled to Rome, the Neapolitan Bourbons, the remnants of their troops, clerics from neighboring European states. From the territory of the Papal States, the reaction made forays into the regions of peasant revolts and uprisings. Pope Pius IX refused to recognize the young Italian kingdom, rejected proposals for a truce and did not want to hear about the transfer of the capital of Italy from Florence to Rome. In response to this hostile attitude, the new Italian authorities confiscated and put on sale the property of more than forty thousand church organizations, land areas of about seven hundred and fifty thousand hectares of land (750,000 hectares). All this movable and immovable property of the Catholic Church quickly passed into the hands of the new bourgeois masters. Political and economic influence the papacy was drastically weakened in the country, however, the pope still retained political power in Rome, being protected by French troops. Italy still remained dependent on the French Bourbons and the soldiers of Napoleon III. Thus, the solution of the "Roman question" was vital for the fate of young Italy, the further development of the country depended on it.

The second stage of Italian unification. In the summer of 1862, Giuseppe Garibaldi again arrived in Sicily and began to call for a campaign against Rome in order to free him from the power of the pope and reunite with the rest of Italy. Having recruited a detachment of two thousand volunteers, he crossed to Calabria. Napoleon III, who always supported his French Catholics, declared that he would not allow the removal of the Pope from Rome. The Italian government first waited, and then moved government troops against Garibaldi. It feared the establishment of a republic in Italy. In the battle of Mount Aspromonte, the Italian royal troops blocked the way for the Garibaldians to Rome and met his volunteer detachment with rifle fire. Garibaldi was seriously wounded, taken into custody, and many of his fighters were arrested. The hero of the Risorgimento was sent into exile for life on his island of Caprera, which remained the residence of the general until his death in 1882. Thus, the revolutionary initiative "from below" for the final unification of the country was suppressed.

The shameful treatment by the government of the Italian King Victor Emmanuel II of the celebrated folk hero of Italy caused an uproar among the progressive circles of the public, both in Italy and abroad. The famous Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov arrived in Italy and performed an operation on the wounded Garibaldi. The popularity of the folk hero was very high. When Garibaldi arrived in London in 1864 to ask for money loans for Italy, the population of the English capital gave the outstanding revolutionary an enthusiastic reception. But the English government of Lord Palmerston flatly refused to help the Italian patriots. It did not want the unification of Italy on a democratic basis and did not support the revolutionary wing of the liberation movement in Italy. A strong democratic Italy could significantly change the balance of power in the Mediterranean region and weaken Austria's foreign policy positions in it. British diplomacy has always regarded Austria as a counterbalance to Russia's influence in the Balkans and the Middle East.

Russian revolutionary democrats-immigrants gave Garibaldi a fraternal welcome. The banquet hosted in his honor by Alexander Herzen was attended by Democratic leader Giuseppe Mazzini, writer Nikolai Ogarev, and several Italian revolutionaries. In response, Garibaldi made a speech in which he welcomed the struggle of the Polish and Russian revolutionaries and proclaimed a toast “to young Russia, which suffers and fights and will win; for the new people of Russia, who, having defeated tsarist Russia, will be called to play great role in the fate of Europe. Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov devoted their articles to the Garibaldi movement. “The wondrous energy expressed by Garibaldi's volunteers was an expression of the people's forces of Italy…”, N.G. Chernyshevsky wrote. Garibaldi was criticized for separating the Mazzinists from the broad masses of the people, for wavering and making mistakes. N. Dobrolyubov exposed the self-serving policy of the Savoy dynasty, anti-democratic actions and ambitious intrigues of Camillo Cavour.

K. Marx and F. Engels in a number of articles about the events of 1859-1861 in Italy noted that Garibaldi “proved himself not only as a brave leader and a clever strategist, but also as a scientifically trained general”, an outstanding commander. K. Marx and F. Engels exposed the aggressive plans of the Second Empire of Napoleon III, which sought to make Italy a vassal of France, showed the intrigues of the ruling circles of the Sardinian monarchy, the conspiracy of Camillo Cavour with the French emperor Napoleon III, directed against the revolutionary movement of the masses. The republican-democratic ideas of Mazzini and Garibaldi undermined the position and influence of the papacy and inspired European writers, poets and composers to create patriotic works.

Having suppressed the revolutionary initiative as a means of finally uniting the country, the liberal government was looking for an opportunity to carry it out through military-diplomatic maneuvers. The Italian government did not abandon attempts to recapture Venice from the Austrian Empire, and at the same time the lands of Trieste and Trient. The Italian army was heavily armed. Soon Italy had an opportunity to attack Austria. In 1866, in order to liberate Venice, the Italian government accepted the proposal of Otto von Bismarck to enter into a military alliance with Prussia against Austria. General Garibaldi was again asked to lead the volunteer corps. The people's commander remained true to himself: he fought hard battles in the mountains of Tyrol, forcing the Austrians to retreat. Due to the mediocrity of the Italian command, the regular Italian army lost the battle on land at Custozza, and the fleet failed in the Adriatic Sea in the battle near the island of Lissa. But the Prussian army victoriously defeated the Austrians in the battle of Sadovaya on July 3, 1866. In this battle, the victory of the Prussians was brought by a more perfect organization and higher technical equipment of the Prussian army, where, shortly before the battle, a new, needle gun was introduced. Under the terms of the peace treaty with Prussia, Austria transferred the Venetian region to Italy. As a result, Italy was forced to humiliatingly receive Venice from the hands of Prussia as a result of the Austro-Prussian war, since it was an ally of Prussia. Despite the diplomatic humiliation suffered by Italy, the accession to the kingdom of Venice and the Venetian region in 1866 took place quite calmly, without conflicts and revolutionary upheavals.

Outside the Italian state, only Rome and the papal possessions adjoining it remained. Pope Pius IX stubbornly opposed the incorporation of Rome into the united Kingdom of Italy. In the autumn of 1867, General Garibaldi, with several thousand volunteers, tried to invade the papal possessions and liberate Rome from the dictates of the pope. Pope Pius IX moved against the Garibaldian patriots, well-armed with new rapid-fire rifles, well-trained French and Swiss mercenaries. On November 3, 1867, at the battle of Mentana, papal mercenaries defeated Garibaldi's poorly armed fighters. The general himself was arrested by the Italian government and sent to his island of Caprera. It took another three years before Rome became the capital of a united Italy. In 1870, the Franco-Prussian (Franco-German) war took place, which led to the collapse of the regime of the Second Empire of Napoleon III in France. Defeated by Prussia, Napoleon III was forced to withdraw the French legion from Rome. In early September 1870, Italian troops and a volunteer battalion of Garibaldi's former ally Bixio, after a short battle, entered the territory of the Papal States and on September 20, 1870 solemnly entered Rome. Pope Pius IX was deprived of secular power, retaining the Vatican Palace as the papal residence. The Pope declared himself a "perpetual prisoner" of the Italian state. The capital of the Italian kingdom by the summer of 1871 was moved from Florence to Rome. Soon the Italian state gained wide diplomatic recognition, became an important European entity international relations second half of the 19th century.

Historical results and significance of the unification of Italy. Such a significant event - the liberation of Rome - ended a broad national liberation movement - the Risorgimento. It was finished with the national oppression and secular power of the Pope, the Catholic Church. Both the papacy and Catholicism for many centuries had a detrimental effect on the historical destinies of Italy. The papacy has always secured political fragmentation and economic backwardness of Italy. Solving the main, fateful problem historical development young Italy - the problem of the unification of the country - it was possible to start economic transformations, reforms in the field of culture, to promote the formation of a single Italian nation. Thousands of ordinary Italians made their invaluable contribution to the liberation of the country from foreign dependence; by their self-sacrifice they laid down the revolutionary and patriotic traditions of the Italian people.

The struggle for the unification of Italy dragged on for eight decades (!) due to the weakness of the national movement, outside of which the Italian peasants remained. The predominance among the Italian bourgeoisie of landowners and peasant agrarians, drawn into the exploitation of the rural laboring masses, made even a short-term alliance between the peasantry and the bourgeoisie impossible. This land conflict played a negative role in the final