Unification of Italy and Germany: Nationalism in Europe

In 1815 neither Italy nor Germany existed as a country. Italy was broken into seven states and Germany into a loose confederation of thirty-nine; both were, in the famous phrase of the Austrian chancellor Metternich, only a geographical expression. By 1871 both were single kingdoms with a capital, a parliament and an army. How that happened is the one chapter of world history that SSC, Railway, State and UPSC papers ask every year, and it is asked as names and dates: who was the soul, the brain and the sword of Italian unity, which three wars Bismarck fought, and where the German Empire was proclaimed.

How nationalism spread in Europe

The idea that people who share a language, a history and a culture should govern themselves came out of the French Revolution of 1789. The revolutionaries replaced the subject with the citizen, gave France a tricolour, an assembly and a uniform system of weights and measures, and carried these ideas across Europe with Napoleon's armies. Napoleon's Civil Code of 1804, usually called the Napoleonic Code, abolished privileges based on birth and secured the right to property, and it survived him in the lands he had conquered. After his defeat the Congress of Vienna of 1815, dominated by Metternich, restored the old monarchies and set up a German Confederation of thirty-nine states to keep the balance of power. Conservatism could not hold: Greece won independence from the Ottoman Empire in a war from 1821, recognised by the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832, and revolutions broke out across Europe in 1830 and again in 1848. Artists gave the new nations female figures, Marianne for France and Germania wearing a crown of oak leaves for Germany, and the French artist Frederic Sorrieu painted his four prints of a world of democratic republics in 1848.

The unification of Italy, 1831 to 1871

Of the Italian states only Sardinia-Piedmont was ruled by an Italian princely house. The north was held by Austria, the centre by the Pope and the south by the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Secret societies called the Carbonari began the struggle; Giuseppe Mazzini, exiled from Italy, founded Young Italy at Marseilles in 1831 and Young Europe at Berne in 1834, and preached a unitary Italian republic. The practical work fell to Count Camillo di Cavour, chief minister of Sardinia-Piedmont, who was neither a revolutionary nor a democrat but a shrewd diplomat. At Plombieres in July 1858 he secured the help of Napoleon III of France, and the war of 1859 took Lombardy from Austria, Nice and Savoy going to France in payment. In May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Genoa with about a thousand volunteers in red shirts, took Sicily and then Naples in his Expedition of the Thousand, and handed the south over to the king instead of keeping it. On 17 March 1861 Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont was proclaimed King of Italy. Venetia followed in 1866, after Austria's defeat by Prussia, and Rome in 1870, when French troops left the city during the Franco-Prussian War; Rome became the capital in 1871.

The unification of Germany under Prussia

Germany's first attempt at unity was made by its middle class. The Zollverein, a customs union formed in 1834 under Prussian leadership, abolished tariff barriers between most German states and built one economic space before the political one. In May 1848 an elected Frankfurt Parliament met in the Church of St Paul, drafted a constitution for a German nation under a monarch answerable to a parliament, and offered the crown to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia; he refused it and the assembly was dissolved. Unity then came from above. Otto von Bismarck became Minister-President of Prussia in 1862 and declared that the question would be settled not by speeches but by blood and iron. He fought three short wars, each gaining territory and each isolating the next enemy: against Denmark in 1864 over Schleswig and Holstein, against Austria in 1866, decided at the Battle of Sadowa, also called Koniggratz, and ended by the Treaty of Prague, and against France from 1870, decided at Sedan where Napoleon III was taken prisoner. On 18 January 1871 Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and the Treaty of Frankfurt gave Germany Alsace and Lorraine. Prussian currency, banking, law and judicial practice were then extended over the new empire.

Dates examiners come back to

Why the two stories are compared

Both nations were made in the same decade and both were built around one strong state, Sardinia-Piedmont in Italy and Prussia in Germany, which supplied the army, the king and the minister. Both used war with Austria as the lever, and both finished at the expense of France. The difference is the part played by popular movements: Italy had Mazzini's republicans and Garibaldi's volunteers, while Germany's unity was the work of a conservative chancellor who deliberately kept liberals out of it. Examiners test that contrast in statement questions, and test the rest as single facts.