Risorgimento (Italian Unification Movement)

Risorgimento (Italian Unification Movement) names the struggle to unite the Italian peninsula, a movement that transforms the political setting of The Leopard while remaining an object of guarded literary judgment. Its military victories and plebiscites bring the Bourbon state to an end, but the novel’s treatment of the upheaval resists the celebratory rhetoric of national concord: political change is real, yet it does not dissolve the distance between Sicily and its invaders.

Historical Setting

The movement had been gathering force after the Napoleonic Wars, when Austria occupied the north of the peninsula, and had already reached a crisis in 1848. By the time the novel opens, the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was approaching its end. Leadership of the unification cause had passed chiefly to Piedmont, the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel II, with Cavour as prime minister. The political future was therefore shaped not by a single campaign but by an expanding struggle in which Piedmont’s state power and Garibaldi’s popular following played different, sometimes competing, parts.

Early in May 1860, Garibaldi set out from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers, acting against Cavour’s wishes and aiming to wrest Sicily from Bourbon rule. The volunteers, known as the Garibaldini, landed at Marsala and defeated Bourbon troops at Calatafimi. Within three weeks they had occupied Palermo. The speed of this advance turned a landing by a relatively small force into a decisive challenge to the existing government, and Garibaldi was hailed as Dictator of Sicily.

Campaign and Political Settlement

After gathering additional volunteers in Sicily, Garibaldi crossed to the mainland, advanced up the coast, and entered Naples in triumph. In the autumn, Bourbon forces were defeated on the Volturno, while Piedmontese troops besieged Francis II in Gaeta. Garibaldi then handed southern Italy to Victor Emmanuel II and withdrew from public life. The transfer joined military conquest to a settlement under the monarchy: Garibaldi’s revolutionary campaign helped bring the south into the new political order, but the resulting authority rested with the king.

Plebiscites registered support for joining the united kingdom throughout the peninsula, with the Papal States the exception. They remained outside it, protected by troops sent by Napoleon III for reasons of French internal politics. The unresolved status of Rome led Garibaldi, in 1862, to attempt another march, this time to force the issue of the city. On the slopes of Aspromonte in Calabria, Piedmontese troops routed his men and wounded him. The confrontation made plain that forces of the new Italian government could now suppress a revolutionary leader whose earlier campaign had helped achieve unification.

That action ended the revolutionary phase of the movement. Its political culmination came later, with the official declaration of Rome as Italy’s capital in 1870. The sequence—Garibaldi’s victories, the plebiscites, the defeat at Aspromonte, and Rome’s eventual designation—thus distinguishes the movement’s insurgent phase from the state-building process that followed it.

Unification in The Leopard

The political upheavals provide the historical frame for The Leopard, but the novel does not present them as a sustained pageant of national triumph. Its positive comments on unification survive chiefly in the structure of the fiction and only seldom interrupt its close attention to Sicily, represented as a mineral world of animate and inanimate fossils. The contrast places political transition beside a society depicted as enduringly resistant to change: the state may be remade, while the novel’s Sicilian landscape and social condition appear to retain their own deep continuity.

A song makes that distance audible. Brancaccio describes La bella Gigougìn as sung by Garibaldini at the capture of Milazzo and as a hymn to national concord. In The Leopard, the melody returns during the campaign for the plebiscite, sung by mainland rascals at Donnafugata. Rather than confirming a shared national feeling, its recurrence becomes evidence that Sicilians and their invaders have little to say to one another. A tune associated with patriotic unity is thus placed in a scene of estrangement, turning the promise of concord into a measure of the gap between those who arrive and those whose island is being incorporated.

Ideology and Political Rhetoric

The critical account distinguishes the ideology of Risorgimento from its rhetoric. Lampedusa is described as approving the ideology, while finding its rhetoric distasteful. His Stendhalian admiration for ideologies that had demonstrated their effectiveness extended, in private, even to the October Revolution. That disposition does not make the novel a celebration of political slogans. Rather, its historical perspective allows it to register unification after the ideological drive has already been followed by undesirable outcomes, and its writing seeks to correct the lapses of taste that ideology can bring with it.

This distinction helps explain why the novel can acknowledge the historical effectiveness of unification without granting its patriotic language unqualified authority. In the comparison with Brancaccio, Tancredi’s emphatic political manner is treated as potentially artificial, and the novel’s critical perspective checks such rhetoric rather than surrendering to it. The Risorgimento therefore matters in two connected ways: as the force that ends Bourbon rule and establishes a united political framework, and as an ideal whose public language the novel tests against the particular realities of Sicily. Its achievement is not erased, but neither is national unity allowed to stand as proof that Sicily and its new rulers have become one.