ABSTRACT
The situation facing the forces of liberalism and nationalism in Italy in 1830 was apparently more hopeless than that facing the same forces in Germany. The German Confederation, however inadequate as a form of national expression, did at least provide a common meeting place for the delegates of the princes; in Italy there was no such confederation, but all the states were totally independent of each other. In Germany a few states had constitutions; in Italy there was not a single elected assembly in the whole peninsula. In one sense, however, the Italian nationalists were to have a more clear-cut case to fight for than the Germans had. A foreign power, Austria, occupied two of the richest and most Italian of Italian regions – Lombardy and Venetia. Austria made a more convincing common enemy for all Italians than France made for all Germans. But the revolutions which broke out in Italy in 1831 were mainly concerned with the securing of a change of government in the individual states, and were anyhow limited to central Italy. In February there were risings against the rulers of the small duchies of Parma and Modena, and in Bologna and the nearby towns of the Papal Legations, as the outlying northern part of the Papal States was called, there was a movement to abolish the temporal power of the pope. In the duchies some of the revolutionary leaders had vaguely nationalistic aims, but the movement did not spread to Lombardo-Venetia. One of the leaders in Bologna wrote that the revolution must be, ‘in the end, national, not municipal’, but no one in the Papal States was more explicit. The more tangible aim in the legations was to get rid of the pope’s corrupt judicial system.
