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What Was the Main Reason for Italian Unification

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What Was the Main Reason for Italian Unification
What was the main reason for Italian Unification?

In 1815 after the battle of waterloo and the end of the Napoleonic wars, the victorious powers met to discuss what to do to at what became to be known as the Congress of Vienna. To ensure that war on the same scale never broke out again they decided to make very little changes to the current map of Europe, except strengthening all of France’s neighbours. I was agreed at the conference that the ruling powers should meet in the future whenever a situation arose that could possibly threaten the peace in Europe. The president of the congress was the Austrian Chancellor Metternich, an extreme conservative who believed that everything should be kept the way it was, with the aristocracy in control and the rest of the population with little or no power. Metternich once described the area we know today as Italy, back then a disunited group of various states, as a ‘Geographical Expression’. At the time the disunited group of states were economically backwards compared to the rest of Europe, there was little trade between them and a slow developing industry. Despite the disunity amongst the states there had been a growth in Nationalism brought on my French occupation of the states during the Napoleonic era and the Austrian domination of the two most northern states of Lombardy and Venetia. Out of this small growth in Nationalism came the first secret organizations like the Carbonari. The period between 1815 – 1848 is known as the Risorgimento or rebirth or resurgence in Italian. It was during this time the Carbonari existed, against their chief enemy, Austria. They were mostly made up of Doctors, Lawyers, and Teachers, the middle class. However the middle class made up such a small fraction of the population, 90% of the population of the disunited states were peasants and Peasants had no interest in the Unification of the states, as it did not benefit them. In 1820 the resentment of the Congress of Vienna and a settlement

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