In 1815, Napoleon was finally defeated. The powers of Europe met at the Congress of Vienna to decide what came next.
The men in the room — mainly from Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Britain — did not want a united Italy or a united Germany. They wanted a stable, monarchical Europe where revolutions like France's could never happen again.
The three guiding principles: Legitimacy — put the 'rightful' old royal families back on their thrones.
Balance of power — make sure no single state (especially France) could dominate Europe again.
Restoration — reverse Napoleon's changes and rebuild the old order, including borders that ignored what ordinary people wanted.
For Italy, this meant no unification at all. The peninsula was carved back into separate states: the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the north-west, the Papal States running across the centre, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south, and several small duchies.
- Lombardy-Venetia — placed under direct Austrian rule, giving Vienna a firm grip on rich, industrious northern Italy.
- Tuscany, Modena, Parma — restored under rulers from the Habsburg family, Austria's own royal dynasty, so effectively controlled by Vienna at arm's length.
- Papal States — restored to the Pope's direct rule, a large block of central Italy kept deliberately conservative and Church-run.
- Piedmont-Sardinia — the one significant Italian state genuinely free of Austrian troops, which is exactly why it would matter so much later.
The Austrian chancellor Metternich summed up the mood with a famous, dismissive line: Italy, he said, was merely 'a geographical expression' — not a nation, just a name on a map.
Germany fared little better. Instead of one nation, the Congress created the German Confederation, chaired by Austria through a Diet (assembly) that met in Frankfurt.
Why this matters for your essay: 1815 didn't just fail to create Germany and Italy — it actively built structures (Austrian-controlled Lombardy-Venetia, the Austrian-chaired Confederation) designed to make unification hard. That is the starting point for any argument about causes of unification: you are explaining how nationalism eventually overcame this deliberately fragmented system.
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Klemens von Metternich was the dominant figure in European diplomacy from 1815 until 1848. His goal was simple: protect Austria's power by stopping liberal and nationalist ideas from spreading.
Austria had the most to lose from nationalism. It was a multi-ethnic empire — Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Slavs, and more, all ruled from Vienna. If 'nations' had the right to rule themselves, Austria itself could fall apart.
Diplomacy — the Congress System
Metternich pushed the great powers to meet regularly (Congresses at Aachen 1818, Troppau 1820, Laibach 1821, Verona 1822) and agree to intervene together whenever a revolution threatened a monarchy.
The Holy Alliance
Russia, Austria, and Prussia pledged in 1815 to rule as Christian monarchs and to help each other crush revolution — giving Metternich powerful allies for armed intervention.
Censorship and surveillance
The 1819 Carlsbad Decrees, passed through the German Confederation after student nationalist Karl Sand assassinated a conservative writer, banned nationalist student groups and put newspapers and universities under close watch.
Military intervention
Austrian troops physically crushed revolutions in Naples (1821) and Piedmont (1821), showing states across Italy that Vienna would use force rather than allow change.
Talk (Congresses) → Team up (Holy Alliance) → Watch (censorship) → Crush (troops) — Metternich's four tools, in order of escalation.
| Congress | Year | Key decision |
|---|---|---|
| Aachen | 1818 | France re-admitted to the 'club' of great powers after paying war reparations |
| Troppau | 1820 | Austria, Russia, Prussia agree the 'Troppau Protocol' — the right to intervene against revolutions |
| Laibach | 1821 | Approval given for Austrian troops to crush the Naples revolution |
| Verona | 1822 | Approval given for French troops to crush the Spanish revolution; Britain refuses to back further interventions |
A debate you can actually argue: Historians disagree on how strong Metternich's system really was. One view: it was highly effective — it crushed every revolt between 1815 and 1848 and kept Italy and Germany divided for over 30 years. The counter-view: it was a fragile, reactive system that only ever suppressed symptoms (individual revolts) without solving the underlying problem — it never made people stop wanting change, and Britain's 1822 withdrawal from Verona showed the 'great power unity' behind it was already cracking.
This tension — real short-term control versus a system that could never be permanent — is exactly the kind of argument a Paper 3 essay rewards you for exploring, rather than just describing what Metternich did.
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Even under Austrian control, new ideas were spreading in Italy. Educated Italians had lived through the changes Napoleon brought — shared laws, shared institutions, a hint of what a more unified Italy could look like — and some began imagining an Italian nation for the first time.
Where the ideas came from: Napoleonic legacy — Napoleon had briefly merged Italian states and introduced the Code Napoléon, giving people a taste of shared institutions across the peninsula.
Romanticism — a cultural movement celebrating language, folklore, and a shared Italian past and glory (ancient Rome, the Renaissance) fed pride in italianità (Italian identity).
Secret societies — groups like the Carbonari organised underground opposition to Austrian and monarchical rule from the 1810s onward.
The Carbonari launched the first wave of revolts. In 1820-21, uprisings broke out in Naples and Piedmont, demanding constitutions that would limit royal power. Both were crushed fast by Austrian troops, acting under the Congress System's approval.
A second wave came in 1831, when revolts flared in the central Italian duchies of Modena, Parma, and parts of the Papal States, again inspired by the Carbonari and again put down by Austrian forces within weeks.
Giuseppe Mazzini — unite by revolution
- Founded Young Italy in 1831 after the failed Carbonari revolts convinced him secret plotting wasn't enough.
- Demanded a united, independent, republican Italy — no kings at all, chosen by ordinary Italians themselves.
- Believed unification had to come from the people rising up together — a popular revolution, not a deal between rulers.
- Inspired huge numbers of young Italians with his passionate writing, but his own revolts (Savoy 1834, and others) all failed.
Vincenzo Gioberti — unite around the Pope
- A priest who proposed a very different path in his 1843 book, arguing for a federation of existing Italian states.
- Wanted the Pope to lead this federation — a 'neo-Guelph' solution, keeping monarchs and the Church in charge rather than sweeping them away.
- Believed this was more realistic: it worked with existing power structures (rulers, the Church) instead of against them.
- His ideas seemed to gain real hope in 1846 when a new Pope, Pius IX, briefly looked like a reforming liberal.
The last of the early revolts came in 1843-44: small, poorly organised uprisings (including the Bandiera brothers' failed landing in Calabria in 1844) that were crushed almost immediately.
Why every early revolt (1820-1844) failed: They were local, not national — a revolt in Naples didn't spread to Piedmont. They relied on secret societies with little mass support among ordinary peasants. And whenever one broke out, Austria (backed by the Congress System) simply marched in and crushed it before it could spread.
- The papacy's role — under Pope Gregory XVI (1831-46), the Papal States were fiercely conservative, banning railways and gas lighting as dangerous 'modern' innovations, and firmly opposing nationalism.
- A brief hope — his successor, Pius IX (elected 1846), granted an amnesty to political prisoners and eased censorship early in his reign, briefly making Gioberti's neo-Guelph vision look realistic — before Pius reversed course after the 1848 revolutions frightened him.
- The deeper problem — the papacy could never truly lead unification because a Pope ruling Italy would still answer to the Catholic Church across Europe, not just to Italians, and could never accept losing the Papal States' independence.