The Risorgimento era is closely related to 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.

Italian Unification Map

On the political margins of Europe

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

First Revolutionary War

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

Battle of Novara

At this time, the revolutionary fire had already engulfed the territory of France, Germany and Austrian Empire. 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 moved to decisive action. The scene of the main events was the territory of the Lombardo-Venetian region.

The next round of anti-Austrian protests came in 1859

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

Kingdom of Upper Italy

The next round of anti-Austrian protests came 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 there a Kingdom of Upper Italy completely dependent on France.

Giuseppe Garibaldi

For this, Napoleon III entered into an alliance with the same Piedmont. On April 26, the one hundred thousand army of the Kingdom of Piedmont and the two hundred thousand French army acted as 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 rangers" Garibaldi successfully defeated the regular troops of the Austrians. The victories of the allies ensured the rise of the national movement in central Italy, rulers and dukes fled from their possessions in fear, and power passed to Piedmontese officials.

Garibaldi successfully defeated the regular Austrian troops

At the peak of the liberation struggle of the Italian people, the French Emperor Napoleon III, realizing that in such conditions the creation of a puppet state was impossible, concluded secret world with Austria. Without warning, French troops retreated from the front. The Villafranca truce, which offended the entire Italian people, nevertheless forced them to hastily curtail military operations and make concessions. The successes resulting from the war were insignificant.

Garibaldian thousand

In April 1860, that is, almost immediately after the 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 it down. The unrest then spread to the village and promised to be just another small outbreak of discontent. This would probably have been the case if Garibaldi and a small detachment of his comrades had not come to the aid of the rebels. For his squad, fighting the government and bureaucracy, Garibaldi was able to get only a thousand old, practically unusable guns. Garibaldi's "thousand" - and these are artisans, workers, petty bourgeois and intellectuals from all over Italy - set off from Genoa south to Sicily on two ships. Thus began the legendary Garibaldi epic.

Garibaldi in the square in Palermo

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

With a thousand fighters, Garibald had to defeat an army of 25 thousand

But he was not the right person to stop there - Garibaldi landed in southern Italy and continued his liberation campaign. The soldiers, having heard about the fury of the Garibaldian expedition, surrendered even before the battle. The Bourbon regime was collapsing before our eyes; Garibaldi, 20 days after his invasion of southern Italy, entered a 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.

Risorgimento (Italian il risorgimento - revival, renewal) is a historiographical term denoting the national liberation movement of the Italian people against foreign domination, for the unification of fragmented Italy, as well as the period when this movement took place (late 18th century.

1861); The Risorgimento ended in 1870 with the annexation of Rome to the Italian Kingdom.

In the modern period, the condition of Italy was not easy. A. I. Herzen, who was sympathetic to the struggle of the Italian people for freedom and independence, in the famous “Letters from France and Italy” spoke with bitterness about the historical fate of Italy before its unification. Italy, Herzen wrote, is “a country that lost its political existence three centuries ago, humiliated by all sorts of humiliations, conquered, divided by foreigners, ruined for a century and a half and, finally, completely disappeared from the arena of nations as an active power, an influencing force - a country raised by the Jesuits, lagging behind, bypassed..."

As a result of the dominance of the feudal system and many years of foreign rule on the Apennine Peninsula, Italy remained fragmented for many years. By the time of the French Revolution of 1789, Italy was divided into ten states. The northern part of Italy, Lombardy, was under Austrian domination; the aristocratic Republic of Venice, located west of Lombardy, retained the character of a city-state; nearby is the Sardinian Kingdom (Piedmont), which included Pimont itself and the island of Sardinia; in the south of the Sardinian kingdom there was an aristocratic Genoese Republic; in central Italy were located the duchies of Parma, Modena, Tuscany and the tiny Republic of Luca, as well as the Papal State; the south of the island was occupied by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which included the Kingdom of Naples and the island of Sicily. All states in Central Italy were under the influence of the Austrian Empire and were ruled by its proxies. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was dominated by the Spanish branch of the French Bourbon dynasty, and only the Kingdom of Sardinia was ruled by the “purely Italian” Savoy dynasty.

In addition to national oppression, feudal oppression was also strong. Historical development of Italy in the second half of the 18th century. led to increased opposition among broad sections of society against the existing situation in the Italian states. At the end of the 80s, spontaneous protests by peasants, artisans, and city workers began in Italy. The bourgeoisie demanded political reforms and the unification of the country.

The bourgeois revolution of 1789 in neighboring France further strengthened the desire for political freedom and unification in Italy. The new ideas of the French Revolution increased dissatisfaction with the despotic monarchies that dominated the Apennine Peninsula. When the French revolutionary army entered Savoy in 1792, the people greeted it with enthusiasm and cries of “liberty, equality, fraternity.”

In 1793, the largest Italian states entered into a pan-European coalition against revolutionary France. With the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, almost all of Italy was occupied by Napoleon's troops. Napoleon redrew the map of Italy several times. At first, Italy became covered with “daughter republics” subordinate to French rule; then Napoleon created the Kingdom of Italy in the North under the control of his stepson Beauharnais, in the south - the Kingdom of Naples under the rule of General Murat and almost the rest of Italy annexed to the French Empire.

The turbulent era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars left a deep mark on the history of Italy. During the period of French domination, the feudal-absolutist foundations in Italy were undermined: numerous customs barriers and shop restrictions were eliminated, church lands were secularized, and a unified code was introduced. These were all positive developments.

During the political upheavals and revolutionary uprisings of the masses, the national consciousness and democratic aspirations of the entire Italian people awakened.

Lombards and Neapolitans, Piedmontese and Tuscans gradually began to consider themselves a single nation.

But Napoleon I viewed Italy as a military-strategic springboard for the implementation of his aggressive goals. As a result of the Napoleonic Wars, almost all of Italy turned out to be virtually a semi-colony of France. Napoleon turned it into a monopoly market for French industry and a source of raw materials for it. During the wars, the Italian states had to pay tens of millions of francs in taxes for the maintenance of French troops, and the entire burden of war indemnity fell on the shoulders of the masses. In addition, continuous wars consumed the healthiest and most productive part of the population. “...French policy in Italy,” Engels later wrote, “has always been limited, selfish, exploitative... It is quite well known how Napoleon, his governors and generals in the period from 1796 to 1814 sucked money, food, artistic values ​​and of people…".

After the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire as a result of the victory of the Allied powers over bourgeois France, a period of reaction and restoration of the feudal-absolutist system began in Italy. By the decision of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Italy was divided into 8 states. Almost all Italian states that existed before the establishment of French rule returned to their former rulers. Of the previous 10 states, only the Venetian and Genoese republics were not restored. Genoa joined the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the territory of the former Venetian Republic joined Austria and, together with Lombardy, formed the Lombardo-Venetian region. Most of the states of Italy again fell directly or indirectly into the Austrian sphere of influence. Austrian domination in Italy even intensified, it spread over a larger territory than before. Austria took possession of the richest and most strategically powerful provinces of Italy.

The reactionary governments of Europe helped the rulers of Italy in suppressing the revolutionary movement. In the autumn of 1815, after the final defeat of the Napoleonic Empire, the “Holy Alliance” was created in Vienna, to which almost all European states joined. This union was organized to suppress national liberation movements in Europe, primarily in Italy.

The restoration of feudal-absolutist orders, the consolidation of state fragmentation and foreign oppression had a detrimental effect on the economy of the Italian states. In the 20s XIX century Italy was in a state of deep economic stagnation and was one of the backward countries in Europe. 75-80% of the population was engaged in agriculture. But almost all the lands belonged to the nobility and high clergy. Peasants rented land from landowners on extremely unfavorable terms for themselves. The situation of the workers was also difficult. The working day lasted 12 hours or more, and wages were very low, allowing them to live only from hand to mouth. Child labor was widely used, for which they paid a pittance. The existence of feudal remnants in the countryside and the miserable living conditions of the masses limited domestic demand for goods and hampered the creation of large-scale industry. The development of industry was also hampered by customs barriers between individual Italian states and the lack of an internal Italian market.

The first capitalist enterprises were created in the more developed areas of Northern Italy. Factories equipped with machines appeared, although industry was still dominated by small enterprises using manual labor. The more capitalism developed, the more tangible the foreign fetters became, it became clearer that without the political unification of Italy into a single national state, without the radical destruction of feudal remnants, further economic development countries and improving the lives of the people. An open struggle was needed to liberate the country from the oppression of the Austrian Empire, the abolition of the temporal power of the pope and the abolition of feudal monarchies in Italy.

2. Kamensky A.V. Abraham Lincoln. His life and social activities. URL: http://www.litmir.me/br/?b =114191&p=17 (access date: 02/12/2015). 3. Official website of the US House of Representatives. URL: http://www.house.gov (accessed March 10, 2015). 4. Official website of the US Senate. URL: http://www.senate.gov (accessed March 10, 2015). 5. Official website of the Library of Congress. URL: http://www.loc.gov (accessed March 10, 2015). 6. The problem of constructing the pre-election image of a US presidential candidate (using the example of Abraham Lincoln) // Modern science-intensive technologies. Science Magazine. URL: URL:http://www.rae.ru/snt/?section=content&op= show_article&article_id=5422 (date of access: 02/12/2015). UDC 94(450).08 L.A. Yakubova, A.O. Kislenko Scientific supervisor: Ph.D. ist. Sciences, Associate Professor L.A. Yakubova Nizhnevartovsk, NVGU REASONS AND PREREQUISITES OF RISORGIMENTO IN ITALY XIX century. Risorgimento is a period in the history of Italy, marked by the national liberation struggle of the Italian people against foreign domination and the movement for the unification of Italy in the 19th century. The term was originally attributed to the history of Italian culture during the Renaissance, and it was only through the famous Italian writer Vittorio Alfieri that its meaning began to be applied in relation to the unification of Italy. The process of unifying Italy and liberating it from foreign influence was a long one; we can observe its causes and prerequisites since the end of the 18th century. The relevance of the topic is due to the surge of research interest in unifying and centrifugal tendencies in modern Europe in general and in individual European countries ah in particular. In this regard, studying the history of unification processes in Europe in the 19th century may be in demand at the present stage. There is no consensus among historians regarding the chronology of the Risorgimento period. Most historians (for example, K.F. Misiano) believe that the chronological framework of the Risorgimento is the period from 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic era and the events of the Congress of Vienna) to February 1871 (the transfer of the capital of the kingdom to Rome). However, a significant part of Italian historians (for example, Adolf Omodeo, who was “one of the most ardent supporters of the concept Great War, as the continuation and completion of the War of Independence and the Risorgimento... ") is inclined to attribute the end of the Risorgimento era to 1918, when, after the Treaty of Versailles, the so-called “unliberated lands” were annexed to Italy, thus creating the concept of the “Fourth War of Independence”. Some historians believe that, as a political phenomenon, the Risorgimento covers the period from March 30, 1815 (Proclamation of Rimini) to September 20, 1870 (before the capture of Rome by the troops of the Kingdom of Italy). Others highlight the period between the unrest of 1820–1821 and the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (1861), and the Third War of Independence (1866). Some historians (Stuart George Woolf) see the chronological beginning of the Risorgimento in the reforms in the Italian states of the second half of the 18th century, others, such as Alberto Banti (who considers the period 1796–1799 "the moment when the foundations were laid for the ideal principles that inspired the ideas of the Risorgimento" ) - from the Napoleonic era (1796–1815), from the first Italian campaign (1796–1799). The generally accepted period of the Risorgimento is divided into two stages: The first stage (1815–1848) is the period of the Restoration of feudal-absolutist monarchies, the activities of the Carbonari, the unsuccessful uprising in Naples, as well as uprisings in a number of Italian cities in the 40s. Second stage (1849–1871) – the most important stage Risorgimento, when the uprisings in Italy of 1848–1849 took place, the strengthening of the Sardinian kingdom, the campaign of Garibaldi’s “thousand” in Sicily, the unification of Italy and the fall of the Papal States in 1870. The chronological framework of the Risorgimento, the activities of the main leaders of the Italian unification, the socio-political and economic history of Italy in this period became one of the central topics in Italian historiography. The theme of the Risorgimento is also touched upon in the works of K. Marx, F. Engels, who were contemporaries of this period. 182 Russian historiography is presented much more modestly than foreign ones. However, Risorgimento found a significant response from representatives of the Russian intelligentsia. Such outstanding writers and critics as A.I. Herzen, N.G. Chernyshevsky, N.A. Dobrolyubov wrote about this period in the history of Italy in their works. However, one of the earliest major works on this topic is presented by E.V. Tarle - “History of Italy in modern times”, published in 1901 in St. Petersburg. Enough works on this topic have been prepared by V.E. Nevler (Vilin), S.D. Skazkin, K.F. Misiano, K.E. Kirova. Outstanding figures who made a special contribution to the cause of the unification of Italy subsequently became one of the most famous people history of Italy. These traditionally include: 1. Giuseppe Mazzini (June 22, 1805 - March 10, 1872) - Italian writer and philosopher who played an important role during the first stage of the movement for national liberation. Giuseppe Mazzini was the founder of the Young Italy organization, which played an exceptional role in the unification of Italy. Mazzini believed that Italy should unite into a single state with a republican form of government. He wrote: “Throw away every provincial idea, reject provincial prejudices, be not Piedmontese, not Tuscans, not Romagnolos - be Italians.” 2. Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852) – abbot, one of the ideologists of the Risorgimento, who, in contrast to Giuseppe Mazzini, in his book “On the Spiritual and Civil Primacy of the Italians,” argued that the unification of Italy is possible only on the basis of a union liberal and national movement with the papacy and Catholic clergy. He put forward the idea of ​​a confederation of Italian monarchs under the leadership of the Pope. 3. Camillo Benso di Cavour (August 10, 1810 – June 6, 1861) – statesman, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, who played a major role in the unification of Italy under the rule of the Sardinian monarch. In 1847 he began publishing the newspaper Risorgimento (Renaissance). It was this name that began to be used to designate the period of the struggle for the unification of Italy. 4. Giuseppe Garibaldi (July 4, 1807 – June 2, 1882) - folk hero of Italy, military leader of the Risorgimento, leader of the legendary “thousand” that conquered the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. 5. Filippo Buonarroti (November 11, 1761 – September 17, 1837) – Italian and French politician. He was the leader of the strictly controlled secret “Society of Highly Worthy Masters”, widespread in the central regions of the country. 6. Daniele Manin (May 13, 1804 – September 22, 1857) – Italian lawyer, political and military leader, head of the Risorgimento in Venice. 7. Charles Albert (October 2, 1798 – July 28, 1849) – king of the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1831-1849, father of Victor Emmanuel II. Conducted a series of reforms in the Sardinian kingdom aimed at abolishing the feudal system. 8. Victor Emmanuel II (March 14, 1820 - January 9, 1878) - king of the Kingdom of Sardinia since 1849 from the Savoy dynasty; the first king of a united Italy. Until now, his memory is revered in Italy; in popularity he is almost equal to Giuseppe Garibaldi. Analyzing the research of domestic and foreign historiography, we can identify several reasons for the unification of Italy. The first reason for the unification of Italy is the economic disunity of the Apennine Peninsula. Italy by 1816 was divided into several independent states; part of the territories was part of the Austrian Empire. Customs duties were levied on the territory of each independent state. It was these customs barriers that caused serious damage to the economy of the Italian states, hampered the development of both foreign and domestic trade, and also impeded the development of entrepreneurship. The second reason for the Risorgimento is the dominance of feudal orders on the territory of the Italian states. The nobility did not want to reckon with the bourgeoisie, which was striving for power in order to carry out reforms aimed at developing entrepreneurship. It was the dominance of the remnants of feudalism that held back the economic development of Italy. As a third reason, we can highlight the dependence of almost all states on the Austrian Empire, which sought to maintain the dominance of feudal-absolutist regimes in these states, providing Austria with a dominant political influence on a half-island. It seems possible to observe the early prerequisites of the Risorgimento back in the late 18th - early 19th centuries, when, against the backdrop of mass impoverishment and landlessness of peasants, against the backdrop of the Great French Revolution, uprisings began to occur in different parts Italy. These factors can be regarded as the first prerequisite. It was from the end of the 18th century that the idea of ​​uniting Italy into a single state began to emerge. Thus, Francesco Lomonaco wrote: “It is necessary for Italy to unite in a single government, uniting all its forces. Once this idea is realized, the Italians, having become a nation, will be imbued with the national spirit; having a government, they will become politicians and warriors; having found a homeland, they will be able to enjoy freedom and all the benefits it generates; having united into a large mass of the population - they will be imbued with a sense of strength and public pride - in a word, they will create a power protected from foreign interference." The second prerequisite of the Risorgimento is the activity of the first secret societies on the territory of Italy: the Carbonari, who carried out their activities mainly in the territory of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; "Society of Highly Worthy Masters" in Piedmont, "Italian Federation" in Lombardy. The Carbonari were the driving force in the uprising in Naples in 1820–1821, however, due to disunity between representatives of the bourgeoisie and members of the organization, they were unable to repel the Austrian army aimed at suppressing the uprising. The third, essential prerequisite was the activity of Camillo de Cavour as Prime Minister to strengthen domestic and foreign policy. It was for foreign policy reasons, in search of allies, that the Sardinian kingdom participated in the Crimean War against the Russian Empire. In domestic policy, measures were also taken to strengthen the kingdom. A parliament began to operate in the Sardinian kingdom, and a network of railways was built. All this created excellent conditions for the unification of Italy under the rule of the King of Sardinia. The fourth premise of the Risorgimento was the activities of the Young Italy organization, created by Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the ideologists of the Risorgimento. In historical literature there is no single position regarding the causes and prerequisites of the Risorgimento. Historians tend to highlight various reasons as the main ones. For example, Valerio Lintner in his book “Italy: A History of a Country” wrote: “However, in the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy one cannot see, as some patriots did, a historical inevitability caused by irresistible forces. Rather, it was a series of unrelated and even random events that happily ended with the creation of that historically and in many ways culturally logical and consistent unity that we see now.” It is difficult to agree with the point of view of V. Lintner. The Risorgimento is a natural stage in the history of Italy, meeting the requirements of the time when, with the establishment of the capitalist mode of production, the remnants of the feudal system finally disappeared in many European countries. These processes could not ignore the fragmented Italy and the emerging entrepreneurship there. Austrian domination, alien to the Italians, through virtually puppet governments of states, was a significant impetus for the beginning of the process of unification into a single state, which developed into a war of independence. It is also impossible to agree that a “culturally logical and coherent unity” was formed. Camillo Cavour also wrote: “We created Italy, now we need to create an Italian.” The problem of ethnic unity of the Italian people has not been resolved to this day; It is difficult to meet an Italian who calls himself an Italian (“Sono Italiano”). Despite the great desire for centralization, centuries of fragmentation have made and are making themselves felt. In general, in contrast to linguistic (the presence of a huge number of dialects), economic (differences between Northern and Southern Italy, the desire of Venice to secede), even sometimes ethnic differences between the regions of Italy, the state has remained united for 154 years. Literature 1. Herzen A.I. Complete works in 30 volumes. T. X–XI / A.I. Herzen. – M., 1956–1957. 2. Dobrolyubov N.A. Full composition of writings. T. 5 / N.A. Dobrolyubov. – M., 1941. 3. Kirova K.E. March revolution of 1948 in Italy, the beginning of the national liberation struggle // Revolutions 1848–1849. T. 1. – M., 1957. 4. Kirova K.E. Life of Giuseppe Mazzini / K.E. Kirov. – M.: Nauka, 1981. 5. Lintner V. Italy: history of the country / V. Lintner. – M.: Eksmo; St. Petersburg: Midgard, 2007. 6. Marx K. The question of the unification of Italy / K. Marx, F. Engels. Essays. T. 13. – M.: Politizdat, 1959. 7. Misiano K.F. Some problems of the reunification of Italy / K.F. Misiano - M., 1955. 8. Misiano K.F. History of Italy. In 3 volumes. T. 2 / K.F. Misiano. – M.: Nauka, 1970. 9. Nevler (Vilin) ​​V.E. Giuseppe Garibaldi / V.E. Nevler (Vilin) ​​- M., 1961. 10. Nevler (Vilin) ​​V.E. On the issue of Italian reunification / V.E. Nevler (Vilin). – M., 1936. 11. Skazkin S.D. Cavour and the reunification of Italy // Marxist historian. – 1935 – Nos. 5–6. 12. Tarle E.V. History of Italy in modern times / E.V. Tarle. – St. Petersburg, 1901. 13. Chernyshevsky N.G. Full composition of writings. T. 6, 8 / N.G. Chernyshevsky. – M., 1949–1950. 184 14. Engels F. The liberation struggle in Italy and the reasons for its current failure / K. Marx and F. Engels. Essays. T. 5. - M.: Politizdat, 1956. 15. Storia d "Italia. Einaudi 1974 ed. speciale il Sole 24 Ore. - Milano, 2005. - Vol. 10 (Alberto Asor Rosa, Dall" unità ad oggi). 16. Francesco Lomonaco. Rapporto al cittadino Carno. – Napoli, 1861. 17. Gilles Pécout. Il lungo Risorgimento: la nascita dell "Italia contemporanea (1770–1922). - Pearson Paravia Bruno Mondadori, 1999. 18. Giuseppe Mazzini. Scritti editi ed inediti. V. 2. - Imola, 1906. 19. Il Risorgimento italiano. Dall "età delle riforme all"Italia napoleonica. – Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1981. – Vol. I. 20. Il Risorgimento italiano. – Roma-Bari: Editori Laterza, 2004. 21. Rosario Romeo. Vita di Cavour. – Roma -Bari: Laterza, 1998. UDC 355.124 A.V. Savelyeva, A.A. Soykin Scientific supervisor: Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor A.V. Savelyeva Nizhnevartovsk, NVGU THE DEATH OF THE ENGLISH LINER “LUSITANIA” – THE SECOND DISASTER OF THE BEGINNING XX CENTURY (TO THE CENTENARY OF A HISTORICAL EVENT) As part of the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, problems associated with the causes, stages and results of this event have become topical.Special attention is drawn to military naval battles of 1914–1918, especially those in which non-lethal weapons were used. only surface, but also underwater warships.In this regard, one of the tragic and mysterious historical facts of the early 20th century is of interest - the death of the English liner Lusitania, sunk by the German submarine U-20. In Soviet historical literature, the circumstances of the death of the Lusitania did not become a special object for study. A brief analysis of the events associated with the last voyage of the liner is contained only in the study of the Soviet and Russian American historian E. Ivanyan “The White House: Presidents and Politics” and in essays on the history of British secret operations carried out by the government and the Foreign Office. (Foreign Office) entitled "Britain's Secret Diplomacy". By last work is a Soviet historian and English specialist E. Chernyak. In these studies, the authors express the opinion that the death of the Lusitania was not an accident. They adhere to the point of view according to which the death of the airliner is assessed as a necessary measure to justify the US entry into the First world war(1914–1918). To prove this fact, E. Chernyak provides information that the US political elite did not provide adequate assistance to the Lusitania at the time of the disaster. It is important to note that exactly one hundred years have passed since the death of the liner. For this reason, it is necessary to return to the consideration of this event and recall its main points. Special attention should be paid to the analysis of the fates of the surviving passengers of the English liner. In addition, the event attracts attention because it is another mystery of history. After the death of the liner, and to this day, an opinion is expressed that the disaster occurred due to the presence of ammunition transported to Great Britain on the ship. However, there is no direct evidence of this fact, since not all materials have been declassified, and many important documents have disappeared from the materials available to researchers. As a result, it is impossible to establish the truth. Most likely, this is due to the fact that the reconstruction of the sinking of the Lusitania may cause a public outcry. For this reason, a number of facts are not subject to declassification. The relevance of the topic is also reflected in the fact that many researchers draw historical parallels between the sinking of the Lusitania and the Titanic. This is due to a number of factors. Firstly, these events became maritime disasters of the early 20th century. For example, the death of the Lusitania was the first disaster at sea in military history. Secondly, both ships were British and carried a large number of passengers. Thirdly, these two vessels are comparable in scale. For example, the length of the Lusitania was 240 m, and the Titanic was 269 m. However, the distinctive point is that the Lusitania liner was lost during an attack by the German submarine U-20. This happened on May 7, 1915, near the Irish Islands. The giant liner Lusitania was put into operation in response to the actions of Germany, which in 1897 built the fastest ship in the world, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The commissioning of this vessel dealt a blow to Great Britain’s status as “mistress of the seas.” As a result, when the offensive of German transatlantic companies acquired an aggressive character, the British government decided to create new “prestigious” giant liners capable of taking away the symbolic prize “Blue 185” from the German liner “Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse”.

Socio-economic and political development of Italian states in the middle of the 19th century. In the early 1850s, Italy was a number of independent states: the Papal State, 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 domination of the Austrian Empire. There were French occupation troops in Rome, and Austrian troops in Romagna, which was part of the Papal State. Only the south of Italy remained relatively free. The bourgeois revolution of 1848–1849 in Italy did not resolve 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 order established in the Italian states during the revolution of 1848–1849 was 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 dealt with participants in the national revolutionary movement of 1848–1849. Hundreds and thousands of Italian patriots languished in the terrible fortress of Spielberg and in other Austrian and Italian prisons.

Following the suppression of the revolution of 1848–1849, absolutist orders were restored, and the constitutional gains of 1848 in Naples, Tuscany, and the Papal State were ended. Thousands of people were subjected to brutal repression, intimidation and despotic police brutality became the main methods of governing absolute monarchies, the army and police were their main support. King Ferdinand II, nicknamed the “Bomb King” for his brutal reprisal against participants in the revolution of 1848–1849 in Sicily, was especially rampant in Naples. The clergy again reigned in the papal possessions, and the influence of the Jesuits increased.

Austria, the stronghold of all reactionary forces on the Apennine Peninsula, subjected Lombardy and Venice to 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 French troops not leave Rome. Celebrated in 1847–1848 as the “spiritual leader” of the national movement, Pope Pius IX now turned into its bitter, implacable enemy. Because of fear of revolution, absolutist regimes refused to carry out any reforms. Their reactionary economic policies were one of the reasons for the economic stagnation or slow economic development of most Italian states in the 1850s.

Against this background, in contrast, the main center of liberalism was the Sardinian Kingdom (Piedmont). It was the only Italian kingdom in which the constitutional structure survived. King Victor Emmanuel II, fearing new revolutionary upheavals, chose to maintain cooperation with the liberals. The Savoy dynasty reigning in Piedmont, seeking to expand its possessions, needing 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, and liberal cabinets of ministers were in power. Attempts by local reaction, as well as Austria, to achieve their abolition failed. In the only Sardinian kingdom in all of Italy (Piedmont), a moderately liberal constitution was in force, limiting the power of the king to a parliament consisting of two chambers, dominated by large landowners - aristocrats 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 gradually strengthened, largely thanks to the activities of the head of the moderate liberals of Piedmont, Count Camillo Benzo Cavour (1810–1861). Count Camillo Cavour was a minister in 1850–1851 Agriculture, and in 1851–1861 he was Prime Minister of Piedmont. Outwardly he was not a charismatic person, he did not have antique beauty Giuseppe Mazzini or the charming smile of Giuseppe Garibaldi. This short, plump man with an amiable smile on his sideburned face, who irritated his interlocutors with his habit of rubbing his hands, was one of the most prominent political figures in Italy in the mid-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 compromise, he managed, relying on the liberal majority in parliament, to neutralize the pressure on the king from reactionary forces. More than other political figures in contemporary Italy, he 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 from 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-wool sheep to the market. Cavour negotiated profitable trade agreements with neighboring states, reformed legislation, laid irrigation canals, built railways, stations, sea ports O mouths. Were created favorable conditions for the development of the merchant fleet, agriculture, and textile industry, foreign trade, finance and the credit system of Piedmont expanded. Cavour acted as a tireless promoter of the principle of free trade (free trade), which in the conditions of fragmented Italy meant the struggle for the elimination of customs barriers between Italian states. Cavour defended 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 free trade policy, 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 to be an unrealizable utopia; he even called calls for the unification of the country “stupidity”. He considered the real goal to be the expulsion of the Austrian barbarians from Lombardy and Venice, the inclusion of Lombardy, Venice, Parma, Modena into the Sardinian Kingdom - the most powerful state in Italy economically and militarily. 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 against socialist and communist ideas. Cavour denied the path of the revolutionary people's struggle for Italian independence. His plans did not go further than 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 Piedmontese industrialists and bourgeoisie, who dreamed of new markets for raw materials and sales of their products. In 1855, England and France pushed Piedmont to participate in the Crimean (Eastern) War against Russia. Piedmont's participation in it was reduced to sending a fifteen thousand (according to other sources - eighteen thousand) military corps of Italian troops to the Crimea. Cavour hoped to get closer to England and France - he considered the “great European powers” ​​to be potential allies of Italy. There were no serious disagreements between Italy and Russia at that time. After the end of the war, Cavour took part in the signing of the Paris Peace. He managed to get the “Italian question” included on the agenda of the congress. Giving a fiery speech at the Paris Peace Congress of 1856, 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” was inconclusive, but made a great impression on public opinion in Italy. This also attracted the attention of European powers to Piedmont as a spokesman for all-Italian interests.

So, Italy faced the main task: to eliminate the foreign presence and end the fragmentation of the country into small specific principalities, kingdoms and duchies. Instead, a single centralized Italian state should have been created, 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-1860s, after the end of the crisis of 1847-1848, Italy experienced a noticeable 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 occurred, were considered the most economically developed. New factories arose in Lombardy and Piedmont, and the production of silk and cotton fabrics increased. Textile (especially cotton) production was the main industry, the basis of the economy of Lombardy and Piedmont.

The economic revival also affected metallurgy and mechanical engineering, in which the number of workers employed in production over the twenty years of the 1840-1860s increased six to seven times and reached ten thousand workers. Railway construction grew. In 1859, the length of railways in Piedmont had increased to nine hundred kilometers by 1859 (in 1848 it was only eight kilometers (!), the increase was 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 economic development 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 characterized by a slow type of development. Naples was considered especially backward, a significant part of which were lumpen proletarians, people without specific occupations, who did odd jobs (in Italy they were called “lazzaroni”, i.e. “tramps”).

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

The situation of the working people was very difficult. In an effort to catch up with the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries of Europe, Italian capitalists brutally exploited factory workers and non-shop 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. Wage was extremely low. The workers ate from hand to mouth, huddled in damp basements, cramped closets, and attics. Epidemics claimed thousands of lives, and child mortality was especially high. Rural farm laborers, agricultural workers and rural rich people were even more brutally exploited. In winter, rural farm laborers found themselves on the verge of starvation. Conditions were not the best for small peasant tenants, entangled in duties and debts in favor of the state, landowners and clergy. The terms of the lease were enslaving: poaching prevailed (for half the harvest). Life was especially difficult for peasants in Sicily. On the richest island, generously endowed by nature, buried in gardens and vineyards, all the land belonged to a handful of land oligarchs. The owners of the sulfur mines in Sicily were rampant: thousands of people worked there in terrible conditions. It was Sicily that for almost the entire 19th century was one of the hotbeds of the revolutionary movement in Italy.

The struggle of two directions in the national liberation movement of Italy. There were two directions in the Italian national liberation movement: revolutionary democratic and moderate liberal. Advanced workers, artisans, peasants, progressive circles of the intelligentsia, democratic layers of the petty and middle bourgeoisie stood for the unification of the Italian lands “from below” - in a revolutionary way. 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 and ideological leaders of the national revolutionary movement remained: the founder of the Young Italy movement, the republican Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) and the famous 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 revolution, through an agreement 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 came to the conclusion that the Republicans' lack of a program of deep social reforms and the provision of land to 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 of 1849, the utopian socialist Carlo Pisacane (1818-1857), saw the solution to the agrarian question 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 reconstruction that meets the interests of the masses and is therefore capable of attracting the people to the liberation struggle. From such positions they sharply criticized Giuseppe Mazzini and sought to push him away from the leadership of the republican camp. But most moderate democrats rejected the idea of ​​a peasant revolution out of fear for the fate of land property owned by the mass of the rural and urban bourgeoisie. Giuseppe Mazzini was sharply criticized in a letter to Weydemeyer dated September 11, 1851 by Karl Marx, who wrote: “Mazzini ignores the material needs of the Italian rural population, from which all the juice has been squeezed out... The first step towards Italian independence consists in the complete emancipation of the peasants and the transformation of the sharecropping system rent into free bourgeois property...” Weak side The Mazzinists also had the fact 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 listen to this criticism. He remained convinced that the Italian revolution should solve only the national problem, and that the people were ready to rise up to fight at any moment. Mazzini energetically created a revolutionary underground network, organized conspiracies, and 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 battle with the Austrian occupying forces. This failure of the Mazzinists' efforts caused a deep crisis in the republican camp.

Revolutionary underground organizations began to split, many democrats ideologically and organizationally broke 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 moved towards rapprochement with the Piedmontese moderate liberals. Piedmont became a refuge for tens of thousands of liberals, revolutionaries, and patriots who fled here from all Italian states and principalities after the suppression of the 1848 revolution. They supported the idea of ​​​​transforming 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 exponent of 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 monarchical Piedmont as the only force capable of leading Italy to independence and unification. Manin also proposed creating a “national party” in which both democrats who rejected republicanism and liberal monarchists would unite to unite the country. The leader of moderate liberals, Camillo Cavour, also reacted favorably to this project of D. Manin. With his consent, the “Italian National Society” began to operate in Piedmont in 1857, whose slogan was the unification of Italy led by the Savoy dynasty. The leaders of the “Italian National Society” proposed that Giuseppe Garibaldi join it, intending to use the personality of a popular, charismatic folk hero for their own political purposes. The name of Garibaldi, who had 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 the post of vice-chairman of the society, but retained his republican convictions, as he said, he 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 to be a guarantee of “material improvement” for 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 C. Cavour - through branches of the “Society” scattered outside Piedmont throughout the country, the liberals strengthened their influence among the masses. After the revolution of 1848-1849, their influence among the masses seriously declined. The liberals' plan to establish an alliance with the monarchs and involve them in the national movement was a complete failure. The liberal-minded bourgeoisie and nobles in these states began to increasingly focus on the Savoy dynasty and leaned towards the leading role of the Piedmontese liberals. Thus, the creation of the “Italian National Society” promoted the Piedmontese liberals to leadership over the entire moderate liberal movement throughout Italy. The unification of Italy on a monarchical basis, under the leadership of the Savoy dynasty, went beyond the framework of the Sardinian kingdom and acquired an all-Italian character.

The most determined democrats did not want to come to terms with 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 self-sacrifice. In 1857, Carlo Pisacane (1818–1857), acting in contact with Mazzini, landed with a group of like-minded people near Naples with the aim of stirring up a popular uprising. Pisacane's brave, heroic attempt to rouse 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 revolution from outside” strengthened the split in the democratic camp. Many revolutionaries who hesitated in their choice began to join the Italian National Society. The political positions of the liberals-Kavurists grew stronger, the initiative remained in their hands. By the end of the 1850s, Piedmont had become a leading force in the national liberation movement. To most liberals and republicans, private ownership of land was considered sacred and inviolable.

Foreign policy of the Savoy Monarchy set as its goal to reconcile dynastic interests with the cause of national liberation and 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. The Paris Congress of 1856, which put an end to the Crimean (Eastern) War, began the rapprochement of Italy with the Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III in France. Napoleon III, feeling the imperial throne swaying beneath him, found it useful to act as “defender of Italian independence and unity.” France has always strived 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 and 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 and 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.

On the initiative of Napoleon III, in the summer of 1858, in the French resort of Plombières, 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 agreement was signed between both countries . Napoleon III pledged 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 entered into a secret agreement on Russian support in the war with Austria. Russian Emperor Alexander II promised Napoleon III not to interfere with the unification of Italy and tried to fetter the forces of the Austrians by moving several corps of Russian troops to the Russian-Austrian border. A secret agreement with Napoleon III provided for the liberation of Lombardy and Venice from the Austrians, the annexation of these regions to Piedmont and thus the creation of the Kingdom of Upper (Northern) Italy. Piedmont pledged to field one hundred thousand soldiers, and France two hundred thousand. Having received French-speaking Nice and Savoy, Napoleon III also hoped to create a kingdom in the center of Italy, based on Tuscany, led by his cousin Prince Napoleon Bonaparte (“State of Central Italy”), and place his protege, Prince Mur, on the Neapolitan throne A ta, son of King Joachim Muir A ta. The Pope was assigned the role of the nominal head of the future federation of four Italian states. Their rulers would have to lose their thrones. Thus, according to the plans and calculations of Napoleon III, Italy would still remain fragmented and would be linked hand and foot 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 Napoleonic’s ambitious plans and cross them out.

After France agreed with Sardinia and Russia joined their alliance, war with Austria became inevitable. On April 23, 1859, Austria, having learned about the agreement, was the first to act against France and Sardinia after the ultimatum. The Austrians demanded the complete disarmament of Piedmont. Military operations took place in Lombardy. At the Battle of Magenta (4 June 1859), French and Piedmontese troops inflicted a serious defeat on the Austrians. On June 8, 1859, Milan was liberated; Piedmontese King Victor Emmanuel II and French Emperor Napoleon III solemnly entered Milan. In the battles of Solferino (June 24, 1859) and San Martino (late June), Austrian troops suffered a second heavy defeat. Lombardy was completely liberated from Austrian troops. The opportunity opened up for the advance of Franco-Italian troops into the neighboring Venetian region. The war caused a rise in the national liberation struggle throughout Italy; residents of Lombardy, Sardinia, Venice, Parma, Modena and Romagna joined the war against Austria. The war with Austria turned out to be the external push that helped popular discontent spill out. Anti-Austrian protests took place in Tuscany and Emilia. Provisional governments were created here, expressing their readiness to voluntarily join Piedmont. In Tuscany, Modena, Parma, Romagna (Papal States), popular rallies and demonstrations grew into revolutions. Volunteer groups began to be created 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's position in the Piedmontese army, where he led a three-thousand-strong 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 caused 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 with a predominance of 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 took charge of the administration of these states. At the same time, in Romagna, after the Austrian troops left there, the people began to overthrow the papal authorities, and their place was taken by the representatives of the Piedmontese king Victor Emmanuel II. Mortally frightened by the scale of the popular movement, the dukes and the papal legate fled from Italy under the protection of the Austrian Habsburgs.

The rise of a popular movement in the center of Italy threatened Napoleon III's plans to place a Bourbon protege on the throne of Tuscany. The defeat of the Austrians prompted Prussia to support Austria. The military and militaristic circles of Prussia and Bavaria insisted on their principalities entering the war on the side of Austria. A strong, centralized Italian state could emerge on the borders of the Bourbon empire. The prospect of the formation of a new great Mediterranean power, which would eventually turn into a rival of France, frightened Napoleon III and the entire French bourgeoisie. Bonapartist France feared the excessive strengthening of Piedmont. Finally, the flame of the people's 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 with the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph in the small town of Villafranca. At this meeting it was decided that Austria would cede Lombardy to Napoleon III; Napoleon III promised to transfer Lombardy to Piedmont; The old ducal rulers who fled to the Habsburgs will return to Tuscany and Modena. 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 recorded in the preliminary peace treaty between France and Austria. So, behind the back of Cavour and all of Italy, Napoleon III dealt a mortal blow to the cause of Italian unification. Having received Savoy and Nice from Piedmont, Napoleon III ended the third war of independence. Only Lombardy was freed from Austrian rule and became part of the Sardinian kingdom.

The Villafranca Truce of July 11, 1859 (the so-called “Villafranca Preliminary, i.e., preliminary, agreement”) caused an explosion of indignation throughout Italy. Camillo Cavour resigned as Prime Minister of Sardinia. A groan of disappointment and indignation swept across 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 people's war and 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 policies reached a dead end. The patriotic forces of Italy thought differently and were determined to prevent the deposed Italian dukes from returning to their former thrones. Generals arriving from Piedmont took command of 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 place a Bourbon protege on the throne without armed intervention from outside. Untie new war neither France nor Austria decided on the peninsula. In January 1860, Camillo Cavour returned to power in Sardinia (Piedmont) and announced nationwide plebiscites (referendums) regarding the future fate of the liberated territories. The vast majority of Italians supported the merger of Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna with the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont). In March 1860, Tuscany, Modena, Parma and part of Romagna, after a plebiscite held by the provisional governments together with Piedmontese emissaries, were officially annexed to Piedmont. In accordance with the previously reached agreement between Victor Emmanuel II and Napoleon III, Savoy and Nice passed to France from 1860.

Revolution of 1860 in southern Italy. March of the Garibaldi Thousand. The war between Sardinia and Austria became a turning point, a “fateful” moment in the history of Italy. The masses of Italy took action. Patriotic forces achieved the removal of Austrian garrisons from Tuscany, Parma and Modena. Romagna, part of the territory of the Papal States, rebelled, and anti-Bourbon protests 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. Feudal remnants and the oppression of bourgeois exploitation were still intertwined here, which made the people's need unbearable. The influence of secret Mazzinist organizations was great in Sicily, and the uprising broke out not without their participation. With the goal of liberating Rome, Giuseppe Mazzini and the Mazzinist democrats called on the Italians to take revolutionary action in the papal dominions 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 rebel Sicilians. Garibaldi hesitated for a long time, but still decided to organize the campaign. Democratic Mazzinist organizations began preparing a military expedition to Sicily to assist the rebels. Monetary donations were collected (the “Million Guns” voluntary fund), and volunteers were being recruited and trained. In May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi arrived with a detachment of volunteers - the famous “thousand red shirts” (actually there were one thousand two hundred volunteers) to help the rebels of Sicily. The composition of Garibaldi's detachment was heterogeneous: among the “red shirts” there were students, sailors, workers, fishermen, traders, carpenters, tailors, petty intellectuals, doctors, and hairdressers. Among the Garibaldians there were many foreigners: French, English, Hungarians, Poles, Swiss. Many of the Garibaldians had extensive experience in clandestine warfare in secret Mazzinist societies and fought on the bastions of the Roman and Venetian republics in 1848–1849. The famous 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 monarchical 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, protecting the temporal power of the Pope. Cavour was taken by surprise by the initiative of the Mazzinist democrats and in every possible way interfered 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, Garibaldi's popularity among the people far exceeded that of the official elite. Therefore, Cavour secretly created various obstacles for the Garibaldians, preventing them from sending the expedition to Sicily. The authorities refused to give the Garibaldian volunteers modern weapons purchased with patriotic donations. It was possible to obtain only a thousand old, almost unusable, guns.

The Garibaldi expedition (just over a thousand volunteers) on two ships, in secrecy, sailed from Genoa on the morning of May 6, 1860 under the slogan: “Long live a united Italy and King Victo of Italy.” O R-Emmanuel!” This was the slogan of the Mazzinist “Italian National Society”. At the last moment, Cavour gave the order to his fleet to stop the expedition by any means. The Garibaldians, knowing about Cavour's plans, sailed by a different route than expected. King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont told the Russian ambassador in Piedmont: “We renounce this expedition... Whether Garibaldi is captured or shot, no one will say anything... I myself would have shot him in 1849 if he had not escaped from me...”

According to the plan of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the military campaign of Garibaldi’s “thousand red shirts” was supposed to bring victory to the uprising in Sicily, from there the detachment was supposed to cross to Southern Italy and liberate it from the power of the Bourbons. After the Garibaldians landed in Sicily on May 11, 1860, thousands of local Sicilians, peasants and workers began to join them. The legendary Garibaldian epic began. A twenty-five thousand strong royal army led by the most experienced generals, cavalry and police units, and artillery were stationed on the island. Much in such cases depended on the outcome of the first battle. It occurred near the town of Calatafimi four days after the landing in Sicily. Garibaldi skillfully used the tactics of maneuver combat and guerrilla warfare. The Garibaldians, dressed in red shirts (like their leader), drove 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 Garibaldi’s “thousand red shirts.”

Having won an important victory at Calatafimi, the Garibaldians made a skillful, hidden maneuver through the mountains and approached Palermo. They were joined by an armed detachment of local peasants of three thousand people; together they stormed 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 unfolding in Sicily. The peasants rose up to fight in the rear of the royal troops, facilitating the advance of Garibaldi's troops. Garibaldi felt like the revolutionary dictator of Italy with unlimited powers, establishing a regime of revolutionary dictatorship everywhere. In the liberated areas, measures were taken to win over the masses of the people, including peasants, under the Garibaldi banner: taxes on grain grinding and on imported food products 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 captured and divided the landowners' lands. However, these measures were not enough to provide Garibaldi with strong support from the peasant masses.

In the summer of 1860, Italian landowners began to interfere with 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 a new transfer of land ownership to the landowners, the revolutionary-democratic, but at the same time bourgeois, government of Garibaldi began to suppress peasant uprisings. The Garibaldi authorities began to ask for help from the former official authorities. The new revolutionary bourgeois government resolutely stood up to defend the inviolability, inviolability and sanctity of the right to private ownership of land. The most severe punitive measures were applied to its violators, including executions. The landowners themselves created their own national guard and with its help suppressed pockets of peasant resistance. The peasant enthusiasm caused by the arrival of the Garibaldians quickly evaporated, the peasants left the Garibaldian detachments. The influx of volunteer peasants from the north into the Garibaldian detachments ceased; the alliance of revolutionary democrats with the peasant masses showed its first crack.

Having entrusted the management of the island to his assistants, Garibaldi was mainly involved 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 landing on the continent. In its ranks, in addition to “a 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 hoped to overthrow the Bourbons with the help of Garibaldi and subordinate 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 ordered him in a commanding tone not to move with his troops from the island to the continent, and in an unofficial letter he invited him not to stop halfway. An open alliance with the Bourbons would immediately sweep away Cavour's 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 disobeyed 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. There, popular uprisings were already in full swing; the soldiers of the Neapolitan king Francis II (Francesco II) threw down their weapons in the thousands and surrendered. Government troops were demoralized, the monarchy showed complete powerlessness in the face of uprisings from the lower classes. The weakness and rottenness of the Bourbon regime made it easier for the Garibaldians to capture Naples. The soldiers themselves surrendered with the words: “Long live Garibaldi!” King Francis II with the remnants of his loyal troops fled from Naples to the neighboring sea fortress of Gaeta. On the twentieth day of the landing in Calabria, September 7, 1860, Garibaldi's army victoriously, without a fight, entered jubilant Naples. Later, Garibaldi wrote this 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. The 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 Gaeta fortress also fell, and the Neapolitan king Francis II (Francesco II) was forced to flee to Rome. The final defeat of the Bourbon troops came 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-monarchical regime of the Bourbons, and the southern Italian peasantry made a huge contribution to this victory. Hoping for support from the Garibaldian authorities, the peasants miscalculated. The decree on the transfer of state lands to the peasants was not implemented, the seizure of landowners' lands by peasants was brutally suppressed, and uprisings in the villages were mercilessly suppressed by punitive forces.

The confrontation between liberal monarchists and democrats resulted in a sharp conflict between Cavour and Garibaldi. After the liberation of Sicily, Cavour scattered A expressed pleasantries 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 to immediately annex Sicily to Piedmont, Cavour began to accuse him of “closing ranks with the people of the revolution, sowing disorder and anarchy in his path.” Cavour decided to prevent the march of Garibaldi’s “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 Garibaldi’s “thousand” into the Papal States, three days after Garibaldi entered Naples, Piedmontese troops, at the command of Cavour, themselves invaded the Papal States, liberated the provinces of Marche and Umbria, and simultaneously 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 resist him.” From the Papal States, Piedmontese troops from the north invaded the Kingdom of Naples to thwart 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. Leading Democratic leaders, including Giuseppe Mazzini, gathered in Naples. 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 the 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 him to O greater democratization of the nascent 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 eliminating the temporal 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 had worsened again. The encroachment of landless peasants on former communal lands frightened the local bourgeoisie of Calabria (they themselves hoped to acquire these lands). The southern Italian authorities responded to the growth of the peasant movement with repression. In response, crowds of peasants carried out reprisals against liberals and the National Guard. The government's half-hearted policy on the agrarian issue threw the peasantry into the feudal camp, the camp of counter-revolution. The sympathy of the peasants for the Garibaldians gave way to indifference, and then hostility. The revolution deepened and grew, and under these conditions the propertied 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 the flaring up peasant movement. There was also unrest in the cities of Italy, where the young Italian proletariat rose to fight. King Victor Emmanuel II was literally bombarded with petitions to “restore peace and order.” In response to the petitions, the king addressed the Italians with his petition: “People of Southern Italy! My troops are coming to you to restore order!”

Maintaining power even in the south was not an easy task for Garibaldi. He would never have been able to enter into open conflict with the Piedmontese monarchy and become the leader of the peasant revolution, and he would not have agreed to do so. 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 annexation, voted in support of the plebiscite because “Don Peppino said so” (as Garibaldi was called by the commoners). The bourgeois, liberals and noble landowners also voted for annexation, hoping that this would end the revolution. It was not possible to unite Italy through revolutionary-democratic means “from below.” The social base of the democratic movement has narrowed. A plebiscite (popular vote) held in Naples on October 21, 1860 overwhelmingly favored the annexation of Southern Italy to the Sardinian Monarchy (Piedmont). In November, it included the provinces of Umbria and Marche. Thus, by the end of 1860, Italy was virtually unified (except for Rome with the region of Lazio and Venice).

Based on the alliance between the liberals and the Savoy dynasty, the “Cavourists” gained the upper hand in the fight against the democrats. Garibaldi's request to transfer to him the supreme control of Southern Italy for a year was rejected by King Victor Emmanuel II. Garibaldi's dictatorship was abolished, his decrees were repealed, his revolutionary army was disbanded. Refusing all honors and awards, in November 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi left for his small, tiny rocky island of Caprera, near Sicily (he bought it back in the 1850s). The Russian democratic writer Alexander Herzen wrote about Garibaldi’s departure from Naples: “He and a handful of people defeated the army, liberated the whole country and was released from it, as a coachman is released when he has driven to the post station.” Now, on a “legal basis,” the Piedmontese authorities could set about “restoring order”: they canceled all the revolutionary decrees of Garibaldi, disbanded the peasant detachments, and sent punitive forces 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 Victus O Ra-Emmanuel II. King Victus of Sardinia O R-Emmanuel II solemnly entered Naples, accompanied by Garibaldi. In February 1861 in the capital of Piedmont - the city of Tours And not - the meetings of the first all-Italian parliament opened. The first all-Italian parliament declared Sardinia, together with all the lands annexed to it, as the Kingdom of Italy with a population of twenty-two million people. March 14th King Vict O R-Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of Italy. Florence became the capital of the united Italian kingdom. In April 1861, Camillo Cavour died suddenly. 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.

This was how 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 of various political forces emerged, competing with each other. Revolutionary democratic forces, republicans, liberal circles of the nobility and bourgeoisie - the “moderate party”, the Sardinian dynasty, which advocated the preservation of the monarchy - the struggle of these movements led to the incompleteness of the Risorgimento, both in terms of social tasks and in terms of postponing the decision on 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 Austrian rule in the Venetian region and under the rule of the Pope, protected by French troops. The unification of Italy was accompanied by unification in legislation, judicial, monetary, customs systems, systems of weights and measures, and taxation. In Italy, 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 connected by 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 increased and indirect taxes on food were introduced. Back in the 1840s, a labor movement emerged in Italy (mainly in the Sardinian kingdom). By the 1860s, mutual aid societies began to appear in many regions of Italy, which were influenced by moderate liberals and were engaged in improving the financial situation of workers. By the beginning of the 1870s, there were more than one thousand four hundred such mutual aid societies, compared to two hundred and thirty-four 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 workers' organizations. They involved workers in the struggle for universal suffrage.

The situation in Italy in the 1860s was extremely tense. The young Italian kingdom faced difficult problems. One of them was the uprising of the Neapolitan peasantry. Having not received the promised land, the rural masses of southern Italy rose up against the new government, which now found itself 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 lower peasantry had long dreamed of), but soon abandoned its implementation. The remnants of the overthrown Bourbon dynasty set the peasants against the new authorities, playing 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,” simplistically explaining everything by the southerners’ tendency to solve all problems by force, their “innate” love of robbery and terror. It was from the middle of the 19th century that the role of the mafia began to increase in Sicily - criminal groups operating under the guise of local authorities and administrations, in connection with local oligarchs. The mafia instilled an atmosphere of tyranny, violence, political murders 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 lasted for many decades.

Since the summer of 1861, the situation in southern Italy resembled a civil war: pogroms of municipalities, destruction of court and debt documents, reprisals against liberals, land seizures, imposition of indemnities on the rich. Government troops entered into battles with rebel groups of southerners, carried out executions and repressions. A government army of one hundred and twenty thousand (120,000) was concentrated in southern Italy. Only by 1865 was the peasant movement in the south managed to be suppressed. Over the years, more than five thousand Italians were killed and wounded.

The process of forming a unified Italian state was also complex and difficult in other regions of Italy, although it was not as acute as in the south. The introduction of new, bourgeois legal norms, the tax system, and church law took the 1860-1870s. The unification of Italy was accompanied by unification in legislation, judicial, monetary, customs systems, systems of weights and measures, and taxation. In Italy, 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 connected by railways, which accelerated the formation of a single national market. Rapid banking activity was accompanied by unprecedented speculation and shady transactions, 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 increased and indirect taxes on food were introduced. Back in the 1840s, a labor movement emerged in Italy (mainly in the Sardinian kingdom). By the 1860s, mutual aid societies began to appear in many regions of Italy, which were influenced by moderate liberals and were engaged in improving the financial situation of workers. By the beginning of the 1870s, there were more than one thousand four hundred such mutual aid societies, compared to two hundred and thirty-four 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 workers' organizations. They involved 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 undead reactionaries, the Neapolitan Bourbons, the remnants of their troops, and clerics from neighboring European states fled to Rome. From the territory of the Papal States, the reaction made forays into areas of peasant riots and uprisings. Pope Pius IX refused to recognize the young Kingdom of Italy, 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 such a hostile position, the new Italian authorities confiscated and put on sale the property of more than forty thousand church organizations, land with an area 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 owners. The political and economic influence of the papacy weakened sharply in the country, however, the Pope still retained political power in Rome, being under the protection of French troops. Italy remained dependent on the French Bourbons and the soldiers of Napoleon III. Thus, the solution to the “Roman question” was vital for the fate of young Italy, and depended on it further development countries.

The second stage of the unification of Italy. In the summer of 1862, Giuseppe Garibaldi returned to Sicily and began to call for a campaign against Rome to free it from the power of the pope and reunite it 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 Pope to be removed 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 Garibaldians' path 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 lifelong exile on his island of Caprera, which remained the general's residence until his death in 1882. Thus, the revolutionary initiative “from below” for the final unification of the country was suppressed.

The disgraceful treatment of the celebrated folk hero of Italy by the government of the Italian King Victor Emmanuel II caused an uproar among the leading sections of the public, both in Italy and abroad. The famous Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov arrived in Italy and performed surgery on the wounded Garibaldi. The popularity of the folk hero was very great. When Garibaldi arrived in London in 1864 to ask for cash loans for Italy, the population of the English capital gave the outstanding revolutionary an enthusiastic reception. But the British government of Lord Palmerston flatly refused to help the Italian patriots. It did not want the unification of Italy 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 position in it. British diplomacy has always viewed Austria as a counterweight to Russian influence in the Balkans and the Middle East.

Russian revolutionary emigrant democrats gave Garibaldi a fraternal welcome. The banquet given in his honor by Alexander Herzen was attended by the leader of the democrats Giuseppe Mazzini, the 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 declared a toast “to young Russia, which suffers and fights, and will win; for the new people of Russia, who, having overcome Tsarist Russia, will be called upon to play a great role in the destinies of Europe.” Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov devoted their articles to the Garibaldi movement. “The marvelous energy expressed by Garibaldi’s volunteers was an expression of the people’s forces of Italy...” wrote N.G. Chernyshevsky. Garibaldi was criticized for separating the Mazzinists from the broad masses, for hesitation and mistakes. N. Dobrolyubov exposed the selfish policies of the Savoy dynasty, anti-democratic actions and the ambitious machinations 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 a brave leader and a clever strategist, but also 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 dependent on 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 final unification of the country, the liberal government sought the opportunity to implement it through military-diplomatic maneuvers. The Italian government did not give up attempts to recapture Venice from the Austrian Empire, and at the same time the lands of Trieste and Triente. The Italian army was heavily arming itself. Soon Italy had an opportunity to attack Austria. In 1866, in order to liberate Venice, the Italian government accepted Otto von Bismarck's proposal 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 heavy battles in the mountains of Tyrol, forcing the Austrians to retreat. The regular Italian army, due to the incompetence of the Italian command, lost the battle on land at Custozza, and the fleet failed in the Adriatic Sea in the battle of 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 for the Prussians was brought about by a more advanced 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 Prussia as a result of the Austro-Prussian War, since it was an ally of Prussia. Despite the diplomatic humiliation suffered by Italy, the annexation of Venice and the Venetian region to the kingdom in 1866 occurred quite calmly, without conflicts or revolutionary upheavals.

Outside the Italian state there remained only one Rome and the papal possessions adjacent to it. Pope Pius IX stubbornly opposed the inclusion of Rome in the united Italian kingdom. In the fall of 1867, General Garibaldi, with several thousand volunteers, tried to invade the papal possessions and free Rome from the dictatorship of the Pope. Pope Pius IX sent against the patriotic Garibaldians, well-armed with new rapid-firing rifles and 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 occurred, which led to the collapse of the regime of the Second Empire of Napoleon III in France. After being defeated by Prussia, Napoleon III was forced to recall the French legion from Rome. At the beginning of September 1870, Italian troops and a volunteer battalion of Garibaldi’s former comrade-in-arms, 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 temporal power, retaining the Vatican Palace as the papal residence. The Pope declared himself an “eternal captive” of the Italian state. By the summer of 1871, the capital of the Kingdom of Italy was moved from Florence to Rome. Soon the Italian state gained wide diplomatic recognition and became an important European subject of international relations. half of the 19th century century.

Historical results and significance of the unification of Italy. Such a significant event - the liberation of Rome - ended the broad national liberation movement - the Risorgimento. It was an end to national oppression and the secular power of the Pope and the Catholic Church. Both the papacy and Catholicism had a detrimental influence on the historical destinies of Italy for many centuries. The papacy always perpetuated the political fragmentation and economic backwardness of Italy. Having solved the main, fateful problem historical development young Italy - the problem of unifying the country - it was possible to begin economic transformations, reforms in the cultural sphere, and promote the formation of a unified Italian nation. Thousands of ordinary Italians made their invaluable contribution to the liberation of the country from foreign dependence; with their self-sacrifice they laid the revolutionary 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, from which the Italian peasants remained outside. The predominance of landowners and agrarian peasants among the Italian bourgeoisie, drawn into the exploitation of the rural labor masses, made even a short-term alliance between the peasantry and the bourgeoisie impossible. This land conflict played a negative role in the final

In the 1830s - 40s. In the political life of Italy, a new national liberation movement arose, called Risorgimento (Resurrection). His goal was the liberation of Italy from Austrian oppression and the unification of the country. The leaders of this movement abandoned Carbonara methods, that is, military conspiracies in individual Italian states. However, there was no unity among them on the issue of means, methods and even forms of unification of Italy. The Risorgimento movement was divided into two movements: revolutionary democratic and moderate liberal.

Giuseppe Mazzini (1809-72) becomes the leader of the revolutionary movement. He was born in Genoa in the family of a doctor, studied at the Faculty of Law of the University of Genoa, and published articles in literary magazines. In 1830, on suspicion of Carbonarism, he was arrested and deported abroad. Mazzini devoted his entire subsequent life to the cause of national liberation and unification of Italy. According to contemporaries, Mazzini was a man of deep intelligence, strong will and energy, high morality and fanatical faith in the final victory of his cause, and had outstanding oratorical abilities. All this attracted many supporters to him and aroused respect even among his opponents.

Immediately after arriving in France, in 1831 in Marseille, where there were many emigrant youth, Mazzini created the Young Italy organization, the purpose of which was to fight for the liberation of Italy from Austrian oppression and the unification of the country. At the same time, he began publishing the newspaper “Young Italy”, in which he promoted his views. Mazzini saw the main obstacle to the unification of Italy in the separatism of the monarchs, who held on to their thrones with all their might. Therefore, the program of Young Italy was the unification of the entire country in the form of a republic, and its slogan was “Unity and the Republic.”

The unification of the country in the form of a republic was possible only after the overthrow of all Italian monarchs from their thrones. And for this it was necessary to carry out a revolution with the broad participation of the masses. Mazzini envisioned “through education and example to instill in 20 million Italians the consciousness of their nationality, so that the uprising will find them quite ready to rise up against the oppressors.” He believed that the revolution should be all-Italian, “by the people and for the people.” This meant the intention to give the Italian national liberation movement a mass base, which it still lacked. The newspaper Young Italy, leaflets and brochures outlining these views were smuggled from Marseille to the Apennine Peninsula by Italian sailors associated with Mazzini. Clandestine Mazzinist organizations arose in many cities in Italy. Mazzini's printed publications were read mainly by the intelligentsia, but the secret societies of Young Italy also included artisans and separate groups of peasants.

At this time, Garibaldi became one of the members of the Young Italy society, whose name is associated with the completion of the unification of Italy. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-81), the son of a sailor, served in the Sardinian navy, met the Mazzinists and joined the Young Italy organization. Involved in an unsuccessful conspiracy in 1834, fleeing persecution, he was forced to flee to France, then went to South America. Having created partisan detachments from Italian emigrants, Garibaldi took part in the struggle for independence of the Republic of Rio Grande, and then the Uruguayan Republic. In 1847 Garibaldi returned to his homeland. He intended to use his experience as a military leader in the struggle for independence and unification of Italy.

The Young Italy program provided for lengthy preparatory work, but in practice many of its members turned out to be incapable of it and took the path of conspiracies. Mazzini was forced to participate in their preparation and implementation, although theoretically he was against conspiratorial tactics. In Genoa in 1833, the uprising of the Ruffini brothers took place, which was mercilessly suppressed and led to a merciless reaction throughout Piedmont. In 1834, a group of revolutionaries unsuccessfully tried to cross the border from France to Savoy in order to raise the peasants. After the failure of the uprising, its leader Rumorino, Mazzini’s best friend, committed suicide so as not to betray his comrades if he was arrested under torture. In Calabria in 1844, an attempt was made to revolt under the leadership of the Bandiera brothers. With a small detachment they landed on the peninsula, but were captured and shot. Members of the Young Italy society were arrested, tortured, starved, shot, Mazzini was sentenced to death in absentia. However, the agitation of the Mazzinists contributed to the spread of the idea of ​​national liberation and unification of Italy among wide circles of the population of the entire Apennine Peninsula.

The leaders of the moderate liberal movement were Gioberti and D'Azeglio. Gioberti was a Catholic priest, the author of several major works on philosophy. For his connections with Mazzini, he was persecuted and forced to emigrate, living in Brussels. In 1843, he published the book "Primato", which gained great fame, in which he outlined his views. He saw the solution to the Italian question in the unification of all Italian states into one union under the political and moral supremacy of the Pope. He hoped to unite Italy without civil wars or revolutions. Gioberti's program attracted patriots from among the liberal nobility and bourgeoisie due to its moderation and hope for a peaceful solution to the issue.

Another well-known leader of the moderate-liberal movement, an aristocrat by birth, an officer by profession, an artist, writer, and patriot, D’Azeglio, propagated the idea that in expelling the Austrians, the Italians should count on the Savoy dynasty, which could lead the unification of Italy. He was a friend and adviser to Charles Albert, who ascended the Piedmontese throne in 1831.

Both the Mazzinists, who advocated the revolutionary overthrow of all monarchs and the unification of Italy in the form of a republic, and the moderate liberals, who hoped to unite Italy through reforms from above in the form of a federation of monarchies under the leadership of the Pope or the Sardinian king, were patriots hostile to Austria. But their differences weakened the Italian national liberation movement.