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Essay on Risorgimento
In Italian history, as in Italian politics, the Risorgimento has played a central role. Like the experience of the French Revolution or German unification, the Risorgimento is considered to be a defining moment in Italy’s history, the period when Italy becomes a ‘nation’ and enters the ‘modern’ world. Through the Risorgimento, the modern Italian state acquires it’s ‘founding fathers’ (Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi) and its political ideals (liberalism, nationalism, republicanism). Conceptually, the Risorgimento has also been crucial to Italian historiography. It describes a number of different transformations—the collapse of the ancien régime and the development of a parliamentary system, the breakdown of traditional rural society and the birth of modern, urban life, the transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy and the replacement of local or regional identities by a single national culture—all of which have been central to present-day understanding of historical change. The political, social, economic and cultural experiences of Italians from 1815 to 1945 (and, arguably, beyond) are explained, interpreted and assessed on the basis of these ‘modernizing’ processes.
The functional importance of the Risorgimento to both Italian politics and Italian historiography has made this short period (1815-60) one of the most contested and controversial in modern Italian history. Just as politicians have squabbled, from 1861 onwards, over the Risorgimento’s political legacies, so have historians of the Risorgimento quarreled about the primary determinants of change and modernization.
At the centre of these debates is a set of rhetorical devices first employed by Risorgimento liberals to denigrate the governments of Restoration Italy? The term ‘Risorgimento’, literally translated, means ‘resurgence’ and refers to a common, idealized past as well as to a less than perfect present. Mazzinian democrats were particularly successful in offering a series of heroic alternatives against which the everyday realities of Restoration Italy could be judged.........
