Epilogue

In the early part of the period covered by this book, although Italy was being reformed and modernized, this was the work of rulers, and mostly of foreign ones. Such progress owed very little to Italian national feeling, although it encouraged it. After the stagnant period of the Restoration there occurred a flowering of Italian reformism, liberalism and nationalism, which in the end imposed themselves on the rulers. This was the greatest age of the Risorgimento proper, only comparable to the recasting of the national consciousness in the years 1943–48 (the Resistance and the creation of the Republic). The national movement was advancing ahead of the governments of Italy. However, for Unification, the significance of the upheaval of 1848–49 was largely negative. It demolished the credibility and legitimacy of the old regime, discredited the republican democrats, and it taught nationalists and patriots what not to do. From 1849 to 1859 the cause of the political Risorgimento made little progress outside the Kingdom of Sardinia. Then, in the two critical years of the actual unification, the international situation permitted Italy's political development to outrun its social and cultural growth, allowing representatives of the national movement to play important parts. A long period of what in the case of Germany was called Gleichschaltung, ‘political coordination’, had to follow. ‘Believe me,’ said Azeglio, ‘to make an Italy out of Italians one must not be in a hurry: there will be worse to come, but we shall not see the end.’ ¹ He was quite right, of course, and there was nothing strange about his prediction: after all, older nations, such as Britain, France and Spain, had been effectively unified and integrated over the years, by the development of the functions of the fiscal-military state. Exactly the same would happen in Germany in and after the 1870s. ² The action of the state was all the more important in Italy because, unlike other countries, she did not have either a ‘national’ aristocracy or a bourgeoisie, but only a collection of regional realities: for this reason the formation of the central bureaucracy (consisting of prefects, provincial treasury officials, university professors and high-school teachers and clerks) was an important step towards the peninsula's effective ‘nationalization from above’.