ABSTRACT
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic occupation of much of Italy greatly enhanced national sentiments in the peninsula and generated ‘a sharp confrontation between frightened conservatives and a new generation of liberals’. This was played out in the conflict between the papacy and the forces of liberalism and nationalism throughout the five decades preceding the unification of Italy. When Vittorio Emanuele II became King of Sardinia-Piedmont in 1849, he was a relatively young man of twenty-nine, and was only forty-one when he became king of a virtually united Italy in 1861, but by the time his forces incorporated Rome within the Italian state in 1871 he was fifty-one and only had seven more years to live. Though the populations of Italy, the United Kingdom, France and Germany varied to an extent, being respectively 25.8, 36.9, 31.6 and 40.8 million in 1870, the population of their capital cities were substantially different, largely as an outcome of variations in economic activity.
