Introduction
The ‘accidental' battles of Magenta and Solferino changed the face of Europe. And they sprang from Orsini's failed attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in the winter of 1858. This attack by a terrorist/carbonaro upon the very model of conservative, pro-papal politics, was apparently the spur which made the French emperor positive to the idea of Italian independence, leading him thereupon to adopt an anti-Austrian policy (like his uncle before him).
Napoleon I
One of perhaps the most surprising features of this campaign is the marriage of Italian minds in the pursuance of the goal of independence (which led, almost despite the desires of the main actors, to unification). The many different states in the Italian peninsula had since 1796 seen different types of polity come and go. Italy's three-year Jacobin period (1797-1799) saw revolutionary republics spring up throughout the territory. But alongside these republican structures there remained the archetypal ancien régime administrations in Piedmont, the Papal States and the Bourbon Habsburg lands around Parma and in Etruria. Grass-roots republicanism (as seen in French administrative structures and legal systems) was to spread throughout the land during the consular period and empire periods, encouraged by residual republicanism in places such as Lucca and Florence. Italians of all sorts, throughout the annexed departments and the lands of the Kingdom of Italy, were to feel the dead hand of the state in the shape of the prefects, the gendarmes and the law courts. And yet this revolutionary republicanism was amalgamated with elements of the ancien régime, Napoleon himself contributing to the political ambiguity by making his sister Elisa Grand Duchess of Tuscany and his stepson and brother-in-law, kings of Italy and Naples respectively. The collaborating figures of the administration of the Kingdom of Italy, Melzi and Marescalchi, were for administrative modernism on the one hand and yet committed to Italian independence under a monarchical figure, as soon as this should become feasible.
The ‘inter-Napoleon’ years
Against this status quo of right-leaning politics with yearnings for independence under a king stood hard core republicanism. Mazzini was to make unsuccessful attempts to install revolutionary republican regimes, notably in Savoy (1833-1834), and republican/revolutionary fault lines remained in Italian political culture and would surface vehemently in times of adversity, notably during the first great cholera epidemics in the 1830s and the financial crises of the 1840s. There were furthermore geographical tensions caused by the settlement of 1815. The increase in certain territories (Piedmont/Sardinia, Venetia and the Papal States) incited a certain amount of persistent local antagonism in the key dates of 1820-21, 1831, and 1848. And within this context, the Carbonari movements (often seen as revolutionary) were in fact quite ‘conservative' in their aims. How else could the young Louis Napoléon have got involved in a plot to put the King of Rome onto to his ‘rightful' throne in 1830? A certain sort of continental old-world liberalism had emerged, largely acceptable to the centre and conservative minded middling types, though antagonistic to the republican/revolutionary tendencies in Italy.
Piedmont
And so in the decade of huge struggle (1848-1858), it was the kingdom of Piedmont Sardinia which came to the forefront and led the way to independence. After the catastrophe of the battle of Novi in 1849, when Austria reasserted its territorial rights over the peninsula, it was a cosmopolitan, ‘liberal' statesman, Camillo Benso Cavour, who led Piedmont to financial stability, a position in the diplomatic world as a lesser power, and a ‘special relationship' with France (teasing Napoleon III away from the papacy). It was Cavour who presided over the cross-party effort (known in Italian as the connubio or marriage of all across the political spectrum) to put a king upon a throne of an Italy.
The results?
Italy was a largely unified, mostly independent royal Italy, political differences having been put aside for the greater good. Austria had been driven out of a great deal of Italy and the influence of the Austrian empire was on the wane and that of Prussia (though not directly involved in the crisis here) was on the rise. France had established a debt of gratitude to the young Italian state and received the territories of Savoy and Nice. Napoleon III had succeeded (where his uncle had failed) to remodel France sustainably according to her natural frontiers (at least in the south east; the Belgian question to the north was to prove a much more intractable problem and indeed finally to bring the Second Empire down). And the massive loss of life at the battle of Solferino was to be the spur for the creation of the Red Cross. The thirteen years from 1848-1861 had laid the foundations of history of the 20th century!