Italian unification

This post owed a considerable debt to Robert Gildea's textbook, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2003) and to David Gilmour's very revisionist The Pursuit of Italy: A History of the Land, its Regions and their Peoples (Allen Lane, 2011.)

You might be interested to learn more about the wonderfully operatic Italian national anthem, Fratelli d'Italia. Here is its history. You can hear it on youtube.
 
Cavour and Napoleon III

Count Camillo Benso di Cavour  (1810-61)

Giuseppe Mazzini

With Austria weakened by the Crimean War, Cavour, the Prime Minister of Piedmont (above), aimed at expelling the Austrians from Italy and annexing the northern provinces of Lombardy and Venetia under Victor Emmanuel II. But neither he nor the king wanted a united Italy, which would be harder to control and might fall prey to democrats and nationalists. The man they most feared was Mazzini (left) who commanded a revolutionary corps of conspirators, organizing a National Party in London in 1850.


Nationalists increasingly recognized that Austria still remained a great power and could only be removed from Italy by military force, and that this would have to be under Piedmontese leadership with French assistance. In 1857 the veteran nationalists Garibaldi and Manin established the Italian National Society which cut itself off from Mazzini’s doctrinaire republicans.

Austrian coronations

On Wednesday 10 December the Society for Court Studies will be hosting a presentation by Dr William Godsey of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His subject is Coronations and Royal Inaugurations in the Austrian Monarchy 1790-1848, a topic that is clearly of interest to our course. The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. at New York University, 6 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA, room 102.

The website can be found here.

Thanks to Audrey Heard for drawing this to my attention.

Napoleon III

This post owes a good deal to James F. McMillan, Napoleon III (Longman, 1991)

Early Life
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1808, the son of Napoleon’s brother, Louis King of Holland, and Hortense de Beauharnais, the daughter of Josephine. After 1815 he was brought up in Switzerland but as a young man he settled in Italy and became involved with Carbonari politics. With the death of Napoleon’s son, the duke of Reichstadt in 1832, he became the heir to the to the Bonaparte dynasty.

Europe post 1848: conservatism and change

This post and the subsequent ones are indebted to two text-books in particular: Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, 3rd edn. (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Michael Rapport, Nineteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave, 2005).

Europe post 1848: the New Conservatism

After 1848 the conservative order re-asserted itself, but it did not simply restore the old order. The growing pace of economic and social change made this impossible. The international scene also grew more threatening. Between 1848 and 1878 a series of wars reshaped Europe and destroyed the Vienna settlement.

For Napoleon III, see subsequent post.

The Second Republic

The group of moderates who formed the provisional government was acclaimed by the crowd at the Hôtel de Ville on 24 February. Alphonese de Lamartine became the Foreign Minister, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin Minister of the Interior. As a gesture to radicals, Louis Blanc was included. By midnight the two factions were able to produce the statement: ‘The Provisional Government gives its vote to the Republic, subject to ratification by the People, who will be consulted forthwith’.

The Second Republic had come into being almost by accident and at a time of collapsing businesses and food shortages. Under pressure from the radicals inside the government and from the Parisian crowds, the government introduced some hasty reforms: it reduced the daily working hours to ten in Paris and eleven in the provinces, recognized the ‘right to work’ and set up ‘National Workshops’ to provide work and poor relief. This was an expensive measure, and to fund it, taxes had to be raised by 45%.

The French Franc and the German Mark

Austrian vereinsthaler of 1866

In answer to questions raised in class about the currencies of France and Germany I have found the following very informative websites.

See here for the franc and here for the mark. See here and here for the older currencies, the thaler and the vereinsthaler.

The Revolutions of 1848

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Much of the information for this post is taken from Jonathan Sperber, Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850 (Longman, 2000) and Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2003). The pictures above are of the proclamation of the Roman Republic in the Piazza deo Popolo and the Frankfurt Parliament (see below).

The revolutions of 1848 ignited the countries of Europe in a way that would not be repeated until 1989. Violence broke out because legal and parliamentary movements for change were frustrated. The only countries were revolution was avoided were those were adequate concessions were made in time (Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands) of where opposition was negligible and repression total (Russia).