Thread 216456150

In the first half of the 1800s, Northern Italy was very poor, especially in the northeast and mountain regions. This poverty caused mass emigration, mostly to South America, France, and Switzerland. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies/Naples was still by far the richest country on the peninsula and one of the richest in the world, even though the French occupation at the beginning of the century and the 1848 revolts had weakened it. There were virtually no emigrants from the South.
The British Empire had occupied and annexed Malta from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the Napoleonic Wars and continued to keep it, but it wasn't enough: they wanted to control the whole island of Sicily. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had the largest military and commercial navy in the entire Mediterranean, and it was seen as a potential threat to British control of the sea lanes that went to India through the Mediterranean. The kings of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies pursued policies of strict neutrality, no alliances, and no external interference in other countries' affairs. They saw their country as an "island": "My country is surrounded by sea water on three sides and by holy water on the other" (meaning the Papal States, of which the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was by far the strictest ally, being the most Catholic country in the world).
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies always resisted repeated British advances to become a sort of Portugal-style protectorate, and this sealed its fate.

>>216456150 (OP)
A massive anti-Duosicilian propaganda campaign started from England, depicting the kingdom as poor, corrupted, and a place where people lived like animals under the control of priests, monks, and medieval superstition. Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda was widely spread during this period. Their ally was Piedmont, a country ruled by a dynasty with strong links to international masonry and anti-religious sentiments. Turin, their capital, is still considered a vertex of both the white magic triangle (with Lyon and Prague) and the black magic triangle (with London and San Francisco). The head of the international masonry, sitting in London, was a certain Piedmontese called Mazzini (whom those of you that are familiar with Italian "unification" know). The Piedmontese were so deep into masonry and anti-clerical policies that their dynasty even got excommunicated by the Pope (the excommunication was never removed, even to this day).
Piedmont was a country that was split between a French-speaking and an Italian-speaking part. The Savoy, a French dynasty that spoke French and didn't know Italian, decided to focus their expansionist goals on the Italian peninsula (which was the only part where they could realistically expand). Therefore, they decided to ally with France, ruled by Napoleon III. Napoleon III was a member of the Carbonari secret society in his youth, and this affiliation significantly influenced his foreign policy towards Italy, culminating in his involvement in the Italian Wars of Independence. The secret society, active in fighting for Italian unity, independence, and the establishment of liberal regimes, had been founded by Jacobins some decades before and was very strong in Piedmont.

>>216456165
When Napoleon III was younger, in 1831, he participated with his brother in the revolutionary uprisings in the Papal States, fighting against the Papal and Austrian troops. When he managed to become Emperor of France, all of this seemed to be part of a forgotten past, but the Carbonari considered him a traitor for not pursuing the objectives of the society now that he had a position of power. So the Carbonari, ruled by Mazzini from London, organized an assassination attempt on his life by the Carbonari member Felice Orsini in 1858. He threw three grenades at Napoleon's carriage. The attack caused a massacre, with 8 dead and 156 wounded, but Napoleon III was protected by the carriage, which had been providentially armored by the manufacturer with steel plates, and therefore remained unharmed, as did the Empress Eugenie, even though she was thrown onto the pavement and completely covered in the blood of the victims. There was a trial, and Orsini was sentenced to death.
Before his execution, Orsini wrote letters urging Napoleon III to intervene on behalf of Italy ("Until Italy is independent, the tranquility of Europe and yours will be nothing but a chimera."). The event and the threats shook the emperor and spurred him to take concrete action: he allied with the Prime Minister of Piedmont, the Freemason Cavour, and they secretly met to organize a war against Austria-Hungary, which controlled Northern Italy at the time. Piedmont would annex Northern Italy, and in exchange, it would give Savoy and Nice to France, and the Carbonari would no longer pose a threat to Napoleon's safety. This happened; Austria-Hungary was defeated, and Piedmont was in control of Northern Italy.

Now Britain feared the presence of a Piedmont/Italy that was too linked to France and was becoming too strong, and therefore decided to help them too in order to bring them more to the British side, by helping them invade its "rival" in the Mediterranean, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papal States (invading the latter would have caused friction with France, which historically defended them).
Piedmont had a huge debt from its previous wars of expansion and from the unhealthy policies of the House of Savoy, while the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had more than two times the gold of the other pre-unification states combined, plus it still used gold coins.
Britain therefore unleashed a new wave of anti-Duosicilian propaganda and financed Piedmont/Italy in order to invade. They also played a huge role with their warships protecting weak ships from Piedmont against the much stronger Duosicilian military marine, allowing Piedmontese forces to disembark in Sicily and Calabria. They also worked hard to bribe and corrupt Neapolitan officers. Piedmontese leaders, who had no official reason to invade and did not want to declare war on the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies because of fear of popular revolt of the Catholic masses, resorted to a fake invasion, similar to the Crimean invasion of Russia in recent times, using as leader of the insurrection Garibaldi, a criminal and the right-hand man of Mazzini.

>>216456224
The post-unification period saw a severe civil war in the South (referred to as the fight against "brigandage" in official history), a brutal suppression, even a genocide, of the southern people and their resistance to the new centralized rule imposed from Turin. For every Piedmontese soldier who was killed by so-called "brigands", the Piedmontese army used to take revenge on the common population where that happened; many villages were razed to the ground and the whole population killed, leading many common peasants to join the "brigands". The civil war lasted more than 10 years and resulted in at least 250,000 deaths. The economic policies implemented by the new Italian state deliberately underdeveloped the South to favor northern industrialization. This created the macro-regional divide that persists today.
The results of all of this (and more) were huge emigration from Southern Italy, mainly to the USA and the rest of the Americas and also to Northern Italy, while emigration from the North was almost irrelevant (the opposite of the pre-invasion period).
Also the Mafia was created during the Italian unification when:
• The collapse of the Bourbon monarchy left a power vacuum in Southern Italy.
• The new Piedmontese authorities allied with local strongmen and criminal elements to maintain control and suppress resistance (who were ironically called "brigands").
• This collaboration formalized organized crime as an unofficial tool of the state to manage a hostile and exploited population. The South's economy was deliberately underdeveloped, creating systemic conditions for the Mafia to flourish and for people to turn to local strongmen for "protection" for decades to come.