Chapter forty described how both German and Italian unification were attempted, and failed, in 1848, through liberal, parliamentary and popular means. The men who succeeded a decade or two later drew a specific and deliberate lesson from that failure.
Camillo di Cavour became prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1852, and Otto von Bismarck became minister-president of Prussia in 1862. Neither man was, in any straightforward sense, a liberal nationalist idealist in the mould of the Frankfurt Parliament's delegates. Both were conservative aristocrats who nonetheless concluded that unification, once it happened, would serve their own state's power and their own class's interests, and both set about achieving it through diplomacy and calculated war rather than through popular assemblies.
It is worth adding, before the wars begin, what the two men actually looked like as politicians. Cavour was a pragmatic modernising liberal, comfortable with railways, free trade and constitutional government, who saw unification chiefly as a project of economic and diplomatic engineering. Bismarck was a landed Junker aristocrat from Prussia's conservative heartland, deeply suspicious of liberalism and of elected assemblies, who saw unification chiefly as a project for extending Prussian monarchical power over a wider Germany. Their methods looked similar. Their reasons for wanting the same outcome did not.
Bismarck stated the method with unusual bluntness in a speech shortly after taking office, telling the Prussian parliament that the great questions of the age would be decided not by speeches and majority votes, the mistake of 1848, but by iron and blood. The phrase, later shortened in popular memory to blood and iron, became a fair summary of his entire method.
Cavour built Piedmont-Sardinia into a state capable of leading Italian unification through careful economic modernisation, railway building, and, crucially, by cultivating French support against Austria, the power that controlled much of northern Italy directly and dominated the rest indirectly through allied rulers.
He secured that French support through a secret agreement with Napoleon the Third, nephew of the earlier emperor and ruler of France since 1852, engineering a war with Austria in 1859 in which combined French and Piedmontese forces defeated Austrian armies in Lombardy, though Napoleon, alarmed at the scale of the fighting and at Prussian mobilisation on France's own border, made peace earlier than Cavour wanted, leaving the job of unification only partly done.
The remaining work was completed less by Cavour's own careful diplomacy than by a genuinely independent revolutionary force: Giuseppe Garibaldi, a lifelong nationalist adventurer, landed in Sicily in 1860 with barely a thousand volunteers, the famous Thousand, and through a combination of local popular support, tactical daring and the collapse of resistance from an unpopular Bourbon monarchy, conquered the entire Kingdom of the Two Sicilies within months.
Garibaldi then did something Cavour had not expected and might not have trusted him to do: rather than establish his own rule over southern Italy, he handed his conquests over to King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont, enabling the proclamation of a unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861 under a single monarch, a handover often remembered as a moment of remarkable personal restraint from a man who could plausibly have kept power for himself.
The new kingdom was not complete even in 1861. Venice remained under Austrian control until 1866, transferred to Italy only as a side effect of the Austro-Prussian war examined below, in which Italy fought alongside Prussia against Austria and gained Venice as its reward despite losing most of its own battles.
Rome itself remained under papal rule, protected by French troops, until 1870, when the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war examined below forced France to withdraw those troops to fight Prussia, allowing Italian forces to occupy Rome and complete unification by seizing the city from the Pope, who refused to recognise the loss and declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican, a standoff between the Italian state and the papacy that was not formally resolved until 1929.
The unified kingdom that resulted was, in practice, less a merger of equals than an extension of Piedmontese law, administration and monarchy over the rest of the peninsula, and the gap between the industrialising north and the poorer, largely agricultural south, which unification did little to close and some historians argue actively worsened, produced a regional divide, and a large southern emigration to the Americas in the following decades, that remains a live political issue in Italy today.
Bismarck's path to German unification ran through three short, deliberately provoked wars over eight years, each one carefully calculated to serve a specific diplomatic purpose.
The first, against Denmark in 1864, was fought jointly with Austria over the disputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and served mainly to demonstrate Prussian military competence while creating a joint Austro-Prussian administration of the conquered territories that Bismarck could then use as a pretext for the second, larger war he had already begun planning.
The second, against Austria itself in 1866, settled the question the Frankfurt Parliament had failed to resolve in 1848: whether German unification would include Austria or exclude it. Prussia's decisively modern military, using railways for rapid mobilisation and breech-loading rifles that could be reloaded far faster than Austria's older muskets, crushed the Austrian army within weeks at the Battle of Königgrätz, and Bismarck, against the wishes of his own king and generals who wanted to press the advantage and humiliate Austria further, insisted on a lenient peace, understanding correctly that he would need Austria's acquiescence, if not its friendship, later.
The third and decisive war came against France in 1870, provoked partly by a genuine dynastic dispute over the Spanish throne and partly by Bismarck's own deliberate editing of a diplomatic telegram, the Ems Dispatch, to make an exchange between the Prussian king and the French ambassador sound more insulting to France than it had actually been, a calculated provocation designed to make France declare war first, which it obligingly did.
The Franco-Prussian war was a rout. Prussian and allied German forces, again using superior mobilisation and artillery, defeated the French army decisively within weeks, capturing Napoleon the Third himself at the Battle of Sedan in September 1870, an event that ended his own Second Empire almost immediately and led to the declaration of a new French Republic even as the war continued.
Paris itself endured a four-month siege over the following winter, with the city's population reduced to eating rats, cats and zoo animals before finally capitulating in January 1871, a humiliation that fed directly into the radical anger behind the Paris Commune examined in the previous chapter, which erupted within weeks of the siege's end.
In a deliberately symbolic act, calculated to maximise French humiliation, the German princes proclaimed King Wilhelm of Prussia as Emperor of a newly unified German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles itself, the very heart of French royal grandeur, in January 1871, while the siege of Paris was still technically ongoing.
The peace terms compounded the humiliation. France ceded the border territories of Alsace and much of Lorraine to the new German Empire, and paid an enormous war indemnity. The loss of Alsace-Lorraine became a running grievance in French politics for the following forty-three years, a wound that historians widely regard as one of the underlying causes of the war examined in chapter forty-five.
One human detail is worth adding to the story of the Versailles proclamation, because it undercuts the triumphant image that later German nationalism built around it.
King Wilhelm of Prussia, the man being proclaimed emperor, reportedly did not want the title at all. He was, by temperament and conviction, a Prussian king first, and regarded the imperial title as a diminishment rather than an honour, since Prussia's own royal dynasty had a longer and, in his own eyes, prouder history than any invented pan-German crown could confer.
Accounts from those present describe him as visibly reluctant during the ceremony itself, and he is said to have refused, for years afterward, to celebrate the anniversary of his own coronation, a detail almost entirely absent from the triumphant nationalist retellings of German unification that dominated German popular memory for the following half-century, which preferred a simpler story of a nation finally achieving its long-deserved unity.
The reluctance mattered politically as well as personally. It left Bismarck, who had engineered the entire process, as the figure most identified with the new empire's creation and character, rather than the emperor in whose name it had technically been proclaimed, a dynamic that persisted through the rest of Wilhelm's reign and shaped the young empire's politics considerably.
Both unifications produced nations, but not the liberal, popularly constituted nations the Frankfurt Parliament and the Italian revolutionaries of 1848 had imagined.
Germany's new constitution gave real, entrenched power to the Prussian monarchy and its army, which remained answerable to the emperor rather than to the elected parliament, the Reichstag, which had a real vote on the budget and on legislation but no power to appoint or dismiss the chancellor, who served entirely at the emperor's pleasure. Universal male suffrage for the Reichstag, genuinely progressive for its time, coexisted with a political system in which the military, the bureaucracy and the monarchy retained the decisive levers of actual power.
Italy's monarchy was somewhat more constrained by its own constitution, but the new kingdom's parliament was elected on a narrow property franchise that excluded the great majority of the population for decades, and the practice of trasformismo, in which governments were assembled through shifting personal and regional patronage networks rather than coherent party programmes, produced a political culture many Italians themselves regarded, then and later, as corrupt and disconnected from ordinary life.
Both new states, in other words, achieved the nationalist goal of unification while sidestepping the liberal, constitutional goal that had originally accompanied it in 1848, a divergence between nationhood and liberty that would matter a great deal, in both countries, in the following century.
Firm: the military campaigns, the diplomatic negotiations, and the constitutional texts of both new states, extensively documented in government archives, military records and the parliamentary proceedings of the period.
Firm: the Ems Dispatch episode, since Bismarck himself later described, with evident satisfaction, exactly how he had edited the telegram to provoke war, in his own memoirs.
Contested: how much credit Cavour and Bismarck each deserve as master strategists executing a long-planned design, as opposed to skilled improvisers who took advantage of opportunities as they arose. Bismarck's own later self-presentation, like Napoleon's exile memoirs examined in chapter thirty eight, tends to make his own foresight look more complete and deliberate than the actual, often improvised, diplomatic record fully supports.
A caution about inevitability. It is tempting, knowing that Germany and Italy did unify, to treat their unification as somehow bound to happen sooner or later. The historical record instead shows a series of specific, contingent choices, by particular statesmen, exploiting particular and not entirely predictable circumstances, any of which could plausibly have gone differently, producing a considerably different map of nineteenth century Europe.