Meanwhile, under the popular leader Garibaldi, the southern part of the peninsula had been won for the Italian people in 1860. An Italian Parliament, so called for the first time, was summoned, and the King of Sardinia elected King of Italy, though not yet with a kingship over the whole of what we now call Italy. There were, still outstanding, Venice and the Papal States. As the price of her help, France received the Sardinian provinces of Savoy and Nice.
GARIBALDI.
In 1866, however, this new Italy took the side of Prussia against Austria in their fight over Schleswig-Holstein. Both on land and sea the Italians were defeated, but no doubt they kept employed some of the Austrian force which, but for Italy's help, might have been used against Prussia, and as the recompense that help Italy was given Venice and the Venetian territory at the end of the Seven Weeks' War.
Garibaldi with his followers defeated the Papal troops, and entered Rome in the following year, but the French, again appearing as the Pope's friend, stepped in, recaptured Rome for the Pope, and forced Garibaldi and his army to surrender. It was largely due to Garibaldi's gallant efforts, nevertheless, that the Papal States were shortly afterwards finally incorporated into the kingdom of Italy, and in the following year, that is, in 1871, Rome became the capital of the kingdom and the seat of Government. The temporal power of the Pope was at an end; the national unity of Italy was virtually complete.
France, at that moment, had little enough attention to spare for affairs other than her own. Trouble had arisen between Napoleon III. and the King of Prussia, leader of that Northern Confederation of German States which Bismarck had firmly welded together, over the succession to the Spanish throne. Save for that Franco-German trouble, Spain, since her great days, has made little mark on the Greatest Story. As we have already seen before, so now again, she played her own part, cut off from the main stage behind the barrier formed by the Pyrenees. It was a troubled drama. One king and then another was tried and found wanting. An experiment with a republican form of government had even less success. A solution was found in going back to a representative of the old royal family in 1875; and his successor is on the throne of Spain to-day.
Franco-German War
As to that Franco-German war which resulted in 1870 from the dispute over the Spanish succession, it is still debated whether its actual outbreak was due to the ambition and machinations of Bismarck and the military spirit in Prussia or to the restlessness and ambition of Napoleon. Certain it is that he was very ready to take offence with Prussia which had already baulked him in a design of purchasing from Holland the Duchy of Luxemburg. That project had to be abandoned, and Luxemburg remained a Grand Duchy attached to the throne of Holland, until 1890, when a queen came to the Dutch Crown and Luxemburg passed under the Salic Law to the eldest male of the same family. Napoleon had expected that he would be helped, in the fight against Prussia, by Austria and also by the Southern Confederation of the States of Germany. But he had under-estimated the skill with which Bismarck held all the Teutonic States together. Neither of these came to his assistance when he declared war. And within a very short time after that declaration it became equally certain that he had wholly under-estimated the power and the readiness for action of the Prussian fighting machine.