National Unification and the National State, 1848--1871

QFocus Question: What actions did Cavour and Italian peninsula. Naples, and with it the
Bismarck take to bring about unification in Italy Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, fell in early
and Germany, respectively, and what role did September in 1860. Ever the patriot, Garibaldi
war play in their efforts? chose to turn over his conquests to Cavour’s
Piedmontese forces. On March 17, 1861, the
The revolutions of 1848 had failed, but within
new kingdom of Italy was proclaimed under a
twenty-five years, many of the goals sought by
centralized government subordinated to the
liberals and nationalists during the first half of
control of Piedmont and King Victor Emmanuel
the nineteenth century were achieved. Italy and
II of the house of Savoy. The task of unification
Germany became nations, and many European
was not yet complete, however. Venetia in the
states were led by constitutional monarchs.
north was taken from Austria in 1866. The
The Unification of Italy Italian army annexed the city of Rome on
September 20, 1870, and it became the new
The Italians were the first people to benefit capital of the united Italian state.
from the breakdown of the Concert of Europe.
In 1850, Austria was still the dominant power The Unification of Germany
on the Italian peninsula. After the failure of the
After the failure of the Frankfurt Assembly to
revolution of 1848--1849, more and more
achieve German unification in 1848--1849,
Italians looked to the northern Italian state of
more and more Germans looked to Prussia for
Piedmont, ruled by the royal house of Savoy, as
leadership in the cause of German unification.
their best hope to achieve the unification of
Prussia had become a strong, prosperous, and
Italy. It was, however, doubtful that the little
authoritarian state, with the Prussian king in
state could provide the leadership needed to
firm control of both the government and the
unify Italy until King Victor Emmanuel II (1849--
army. In 1862, King William I (1861--1888)
1878; 1861--1878 as king of Italy) named Count
appointed a new prime minister, Count Otto
Camillo di Cavour (1810--1861) prime minister
von Bismarck (1815--1898). Bismarck has often
in 1852. As prime minister, Cavour pursued a
been portrayed as the ultimate realist, the
policy of economic expansion that increased
foremost nineteenth-century practitioner of
government revenues and enabled Piedmont to
Realpolitik---the ‘‘politics of reality.’’ He said,
equip a large army. Cavour, allied with the
‘‘Not by speeches and majorities will the great
French emperor, Louis Napoleon, defeated the
questions of the day be decided---that was the
Austrians and gained control of Lombardy.
mistake of 1848--1849---but by iron and blood.’’
Cavour’s success caused nationalists in some
Opposition to his domestic policy determined
northern Italian states (Parma, Modena, and
Bismarck on an active foreign policy, which led
Tuscany) to overthrow their governments and
to war and German unification. After defeating
join Piedmont. Meanwhile, in southern Italy,
Denmark with Austrian help in 1864 and gaining
Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807--1882), a dedicated
control over the duchies of Schleswig and
Italian patriot, raised an army of a thousand
Holstein, Bismarck created friction with the
volunteers called Red Shirts because of the
Austrians and goaded them into a war on June
color of their uniforms. Garibaldi’s forces swept
14, 1866. Though the Austrians were barely
through Sicily and then crossed over to the
defeated at Koeniggraetz on July 3, Prussia
mainland and began a victorious march up the
proceeded to organize the German states north
of the Main River into the North German
Confederation. The southern German states,
largely Catholic, remained independent but
signed military alliances with Prussia due to
their fear of France, their western neighbor.
Prussia now dominated all of northern
Germany, but problems with France soon arose.
Bismarck realized that France would never be
content with a strong German state to its east
because of the potential threat to French
security. Bismarck goaded the French into
declaring war on Prussia on July 15, 1870. The
Prussian armies advanced into France, and at
Sedan, on September 2, 1870, they captured an
entire French army and the French emperor
Napoleon III himself. Paris capitulated on
January 28, 1871. France had to give up the
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the new
German state, a loss that left the French
burning for revenge. Even before the war had
ended, the southern German states had agreed
to enter the North German Confederation. On
January 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors in Louis
XIV’s palace at Versailles, William I was
proclaimed kaiser (emperor) of the Second
German Empire (the first was the medieval Holy
Roman Empire). German unity had been
achieved by the Prussian monarchy and the
Prussian army. The Prussian leadership of
German unification meant the triumph of
authoritarian, militaristic values over liberal,
constitutional sentiments in the development of
the new German state. With its industrial
resources and military might, the new state had
become the strongest power on the Continent.
A new European balance of power was at hand.
Nationalism and Reform: The
European National State at Mid-
Century
Unlike nations on the Continent, Great Britain
managed to avoid the revolutionary upheavals
of the first half of the nineteenth century. In the
early part of the century, Great Britain was
governed by the aristocratic landowning classes
that dominated both houses of Parliament. But
in 1832, to avoid turmoil like that on the
Continent, Parliament passed a reform bill that
increased the number of male voters, chiefly by
adding members of the industrial middle class.
By allowing the industrial middle class to join
the landed interests in ruling Britain, Britain
avoided revolution in 1848. In the 1850s and
1860s, the British liberal parliamentary system
made both social and political reforms that
enabled the country to remain stable. One of
the other reasons for Britain’s stability was its
continuing economic growth. After 1850,
middle-class prosperity was at last coupled with
some improvements for the working classes as
real wages for laborers increased more than 25
percent between 1850 and 1870. The British
sense of national pride was well reflected in
Queen Victoria (1837--1901), whose sense of
duty and moral respectability reflected the
attitudes of her age, which has ever since been
known as the Victorian Age. Events in France
after the revolution of 1848 moved toward the
restoration of monarchy. Four years after his
election as president, Louis Napoleon restored
an authoritarian empire. On December 2, 1852,
Louis Napoleon assumed the title of Napoleon
III (the first Napoleon had abdicated in favor of
his son, Napoleon II, on April 6, 1814). The
Second Empire had begun. The first five years of
Napoleon III’s reign were a spectacular success.
He took many steps to expand industrial
growth. Government subsidies helped foster
the rapid construction of railroads as well as
harbors, roads, and canals. The major French
railway lines were completed during Napoleon
III’s reign, and iron production tripled. In the
midst of this economic expansion, Napoleon III
also undertook a vast reconstruction of the city
of Paris. The medieval Paris of narrow streets
and old city walls was destroyed and replaced
by a modern Paris of broad boulevards,
spacious buildings, an underground sewage
system, a new public water supply, and
gaslights. In the 1860s, as opposition to his rule
began to mount, Napoleon III began to liberalize
his regime. He gave the Legislative Corps more
say in affairs of state, including debate over the
budget. Liberalization policies worked initially;
in a plebiscite in May 1870 on whether to
accept a new constitution that might have
inaugurated a parliamentary regime, the French
people gave Napoleon III a resounding victory.
This triumph was short-lived, however. War
with Prussia in 1870 brought Napoleon III’s
ouster, and a republic was proclaimed.
Although nationalism was a major force in
nineteenth-century Europe, one of the region’s
most powerful states, the Austrian Empire,
managed to frustrate the desire of its numerous
ethnic groups for self-determination. After the
Habsburgs had crushed the revolutions of 1848-
-1849, they restored centralized, autocratic
government to the empire. But Austria’s defeat
at the hands of the Prussians in 1866 forced the
Austrians to deal with the fiercely nationalistic
Hungarians. The result was the negotiated
Ausgleich, or Compromise, of 1867, which
created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.
Each part of the empire now had its own
constitution, its own legislature, its own
governmental bureaucracy, and its own capital
(Vienna for Austria and Budapest for Hungary).
Holding the two states together were a single
monarch---Francis Joseph (1848--1916) was
emperor of Austria and king of Hungary---and a
common army, foreign policy, and system of
finances. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Russia was overwhelmingly rural,
agricultural, and autocratic. The Russian
imperial autocracy, based on soldiers, secret
police, and repression, had withstood the
revolutionary fervor of the first half of the
nineteenth century.
Defeat in the Crimean War in 1856, however,
led even staunch conservatives to realize that
Russia was falling hopelessly behind the
western European powers. Tsar Alexander II
(1855--1881) decided to make serious reforms.
Serfdom was the most burdensome problem in
tsarist Russia. On March 3, 1861, Alexander
issued his emancipation edict. Peasants were
now free to own property and marry as they
chose. But the system of land redistribution
instituted after emancipation was not that
favorable to them. The government provided
land for the peasants by purchasing it from the
landlords, but the landowners often chose to
keep the best lands. The Russian peasants soon
found that they had inadequate amounts of
good arable land to support themselves. Nor
were the peasants completely free. The state
compensated the landowners for the land given
to the peasants, but the peasants were
expected to repay the state in long-term
installments. To ensure that the payments were
made, peasants were subjected to the authority
of their mir or village commune, which was
collectively responsible for the land payments
to the government. And since the village
communes were responsible for the payments,
they were reluctant to allow peasants to leave
their land. Emancipation, then, led not to a free,
landowning peasantry along the Western model
but to an unhappy, land-starved peasantry that
largely followed the old ways of agricultural
production.