The Anti-Risorgimento as a transnational experience

Abstract

The struggle led after 1860 by the Anti-Risorgimento (understood as the conservative opposition to Italian unification) went beyond the frontiers of new Italy. The transnationality of this campaign manifested itself in numerous ways, from international networks of financial support and militancy that were closely associated with counter-revolution and supported by the international structures of the Roman Catholic Church, to forms of transnational mobilisation such as armed volunteerism. This internationalisation of anti-Unity fighting was a conscious strategy of the movement's leaders. They relied on a tradition of solidarity and exchange within the ultraconservative camp – a sort of ‘white international’ – to further the transnational construction of a European identity of counter-revolution. In Italy, the victory of the nationalist movement endowed various anti-liberal forces with a common adversary and common goals; yet the strategy adopted by the Papacy (still a temporal power until 1870), in relation to the cause of the dispossessed sovereigns, was not devoid of ambiguity.