Victor Emmanuel Crowned King: Italian Unification

Victor Emmanuel II became King of Italy on February 18, 1861, ruling a country that did not yet include its own capital. Rome remained under papal control, guarded by French troops. Venice belonged to Austria. The kingdom that Parliament proclaimed in Turin that winter was an incomplete nation, stitched together from a patchwork of former duchies, papal states, and Bourbon territories by war, diplomacy, and the extraordinary efforts of three men who agreed on almost nothing except that Italy should exist. The unification of Italy — the Risorgimento — had been a dream of Italian intellectuals since Napoleon’s conquests briefly united the peninsula in the early 1800s. The three architects of actual unification were Count Cavour, the pragmatic Piedmontese prime minister who manipulated European great-power politics; Giuseppe Garibaldi, the revolutionary guerrilla who conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with a thousand volunteers; and Giuseppe Mazzini, the republican idealist whose vision inspired a generation. Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia-Piedmont, provided the constitutional monarchy around which they could all reluctantly unite. Cavour engineered a French alliance that drove Austria out of Lombardy in 1859. Garibaldi invaded Sicily in May 1860 with his Redshirts and swept through southern Italy, handing his conquests to Victor Emmanuel in a famous meeting at Teano on October 26, 1860. Plebiscites across the former Italian states voted overwhelmingly for annexation to Piedmont. On March 17, 1861, the Italian Parliament in Turin proclaimed Victor Emmanuel "King of Italy by the grace of God and the will of the nation." The new kingdom faced staggering challenges. Northern and southern Italy were economically and culturally different worlds. Illiteracy exceeded 75 percent in the south. Banditry required military suppression that killed more Italians than the wars of unification. Cavour, who might have managed the transition, died three months after unification. Rome was not incorporated until 1870, when the withdrawal of French troops during the Franco-Prussian War allowed Italian forces to breach the city walls. Italy was unified before Italians existed — as Massimo d’Azeglio reportedly said, "We have made Italy; now we must make Italians."