![]() While the notion of an Italian nation spread during the years of Napoleonic domination (1796-1814), it struggled to maintain momentum during the restoration. For all that, the movement should be understood as a longer-term process whose beginnings stretch back to the late eighteenth century. The movement that its own actors referred to as the Risorgimento from the 1840s onward-that was the name of the newspaper founded by Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810-1861) in Turin in December 1847-consisted of a call to “resurrect” Italy, and was shrouded in strong religious legitimacy. In a context that saw the restoration of the traditional monarchies of the Italian states in 1815, the construction of the Italian nation was firstly that of an imagined community united by converging cultural and historical dynamics. The case of Italy helps to better grasp the methods, temporalities, and limits of national construction in Europe at the time. The construction of nation states was one of the primary political dynamics of the nineteenth century in Europe, in a diplomatic context highly determined by the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815). The actors that the Risorgimento mobilized, in addition to its chronology and limits, were connected to powerful transnational dynamics, and were emblematic of the processes on which the construction of European nation states were based during the nineteenth century. However, the limits of this national movement, revealed by the numerous conflicts that marked the Italian peninsula during the 1860s, called the national policy of a united Italy into question opposing the monarchy’s efforts, which were deemed insufficient, were the development of alternative conceptions of the nation that sought to defend its role in the highly recomposed international order of the late nineteenth century. Initially driven by patriots opposed to the European order of the Congress of Vienna, it was later harnessed by the Piedmontese monarchy, which in 1848 transformed a community-based project into a territory-based one, with itself at the head. ![]() The construction of the Italian nation state was one of the primary national movements in Europe during the nineteenth century. ![]()
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