More Divided than United. To what extent is this an accurate judgement of the Kingdom of Italy 1861- - page 1
Keywords: italian unification, 1961-70, italy
By ROYDS on 29/09/2008
Level: A Level (Year 12) / AS Level
Page Number: 1 of 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
More Divided than United. To what extent is this an accurate judgement of the Kingdom of Italy 1861-1870?
March 1861 The kingdom of Italy was proclaimed and in May Victor Emanuel II was announced king of Italy. Officially Italy was now united and Risorgimento, the ‘re-birth’ complete. However such a kingdom, it could be suggested, was only united superficially, on the surface and that there was still a lot left to do towards unifying the Italian people. Before making a decision all the other aspects of Italian society in this period politically, socially and economically must be looked at and judged as to whether Italy was united or in fact there were wide disparities that left Italy still divided by 1870.
Politically there were factors that do indeed suggest Italy was united. The new kingdom of Italy formed not a federation under the Pope as Gioberti and later Cavour and Napoleon III had proposed a Plombiers nor a republic as the infamous Mazzini had hoped but a constitutional monarchy, which was based on Charles Albert’s 1848 statuto, taking a small amount of absolute power away from the king and granting a portion of the kings (now V.E) power to government officials. Indeed under the new constitution there was one centralised government that officially united the whole peninsular. However political unification was not as successful as it seemed. The constitutional monarchy was not really a true democracy and described my Mazzini as a “sham democracy.” Such an opinion from Mazzini would be expected but there is evidence to support his criticism of the new regime and he was not alone in his discontent. It was as if the constitution set up in 1861 was merely a safeguard for Victor Emmanuel’s and Piedmont’s power. Most members of government were of Piedmontese nobility, appointed using bribery and bias, in fact Victor Emmanuel himself declared in 1861 “there are only two ways of governing Italians, by bayonets and by bribery.” It appeared to many other people in Italy at the time as if Victor Emmanuel had conquered all the other states other that Venetia in 1861 and the whole country was being ruled by Piedmontese law with no other political parties as an option; not as it should have been in a ‘united’ Italy with a democracy, Italian law and the right to vote for change. Furthermore the only people that could vote were tax paying, literate
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