The Second Italian War of Independence and the Battle of Solferino
- Date
- April–July 1859
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Northern Italy (Lombardy)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
The Second Italian War of Independence (April–July 1859) was the decisive military step that made Italian unification possible.
The Sardinian premier Camillo di Cavour secured a secret alliance with Napoleon III of France at Plombières in 1858, then manoeuvred Austria into declaring war on the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in April 1859. The Franco-Sardinian armies defeated the Austrians at Magenta on 4 June and, decisively, at the Battle of Solferino on 24 June, one of the bloodiest engagements of the century, with tens of thousands of casualties. The carnage at Solferino so horrified the Swiss observer Henri Dunant that he campaigned for the relief of wounded soldiers, leading directly to the founding of the Red Cross and, in 1864, the first Geneva Convention. Napoleon III, alarmed by the casualties and by Prussian mobilisation, made a separate Armistice of Villafranca with Austria on 12 July, disappointing Italian nationalists. Nonetheless, the war delivered Lombardy to Sardinia and triggered a wave of plebiscites in the central Italian states that voted to join Piedmont. Combined with Garibaldi's southern campaign the following year, the war of 1859 set in motion the rapid consolidation of the peninsula and the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
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Empires active in April–July 1859
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related military & conflict events
- American Civil War and the abolition of slavery1861–1865 (Emancipation Proclamation 1 January 1863; 13th Amendment ratified 6 December 1865)
- The Taiping Rebellion1850–1864
- The Franco-Prussian War, German unification and the Paris Commune19 July 1870 – 10 May 1871; German Empire proclaimed 18 January 1871
- First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking1839–1842 (Treaty of Nanking, 29 August 1842)
- Battle of Waterloo18 June 1815
- Russo-Japanese War and Japan's Rise as a Great Power1904–1905
Further reading
The wider story
Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire
Fast-paced narrative of Portugal's seaborne empire.
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