ABSTRACT
Among the political achievements of the nineteenth century, the emergence of a unitary state in Italy in 1861 must rank among the least likely. The settlement of 1815 had left Italy weak and divided. Lombardy and Venice had been restored to Habsburg rule; the political fortunes of the duchies of Tuscany, Parma and Modena were tied to the Habsburgs through dynastic alliances; meanwhile central and southern Italy endured the exquisite combination of obscurantism tempered only by inefficiency in the restored regimes of the papacy and the Bourbons. Only Piedmont retained its political independence. But as a geographically peripheral state, it displayed little interest in the wider affairs of the Italian peninsula until after 1840. Its ruling class concerned itself rather more with military than with political or administrative matters. And its general culture, so thoroughly French in ethos, gave little indication of the central role it would later play in the formation of an Italian state.
