Editing Napoleon III (section)

===Italian Campaign===
====Early years====
On the evening of 14 January 1858, Napoleon and the Empress escaped an [[Orsini affair|assassination attempt]] unharmed. A group of conspirators threw three bombs at the imperial carriage as it made its way to the opera. Eight members of the escort and bystanders were killed and over one hundred people injured. The culprits were quickly arrested. The leader was an Italian nationalist, [[Felice Orsini]], who was aided by a French surgeon [[Simon François Bernard]]. They believed that if Napoleon III were killed, a republican revolt would immediately follow in France and the new republican government would help all Italian states win independence from Austria and achieve national unification. Bernard was in London at the time. Since he was a political exile, the Government of the United Kingdom refused to extradite him, but Orsini was tried, convicted and executed on 13 March 1858. The bombing focused the attention of France and particularly of Napoleon III, on the issue of Italian nationalism.{{Sfn|Milza|2006|pp=407–412}}

Part of Italy, particularly the [[Kingdom of Sardinia (1720–1861)|Kingdom of Sardinia]], was independent, but central Italy was still ruled by the Pope (in this era, [[Pope Pius IX and Italy|Pope Pius IX]]), while [[Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia|Lombardy, Venice]] and much of the north was ruled by Austria. Other states were ''[[de jure]]'' independent (notably the [[Duchy of Parma]] and the [[Grand Duchy of Tuscany]]) but ''[[de facto]]'' fully under Austrian influence. Napoleon III had fought with the Italian patriots against the Austrians when he was young and his sympathy was with them, but the Empress, most of his government and the Catholic Church in France supported the Pope and the existing governments. The British Government was also hostile to the idea of promoting nationalism in Italy. Despite the opposition within his government and in his own palace, Napoleon III did all that he could to support the cause of Piedmont-Sardinia. The King of Piedmont-Sardinia, [[Victor Emmanuel II]], was invited to Paris in November 1855 and given the same royal treatment as Queen Victoria.

[[Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour|Count Cavour]], the Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, came to Paris with the King and employed an unusual emissary in his efforts to win the support of Napoleon III: his young cousin, [[Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione]] (1837–1899). As Cavour had hoped, she caught the Emperor's eye and became his mistress. Between 1855 and 1857, she used the opportunity to pass messages and to plead the Italian cause.{{Sfn|Milza|2006|pp=357–362}}

In July 1858, Napoleon arranged a secret visit by Count Cavour. In the [[Plombières Agreement]] they agreed to join forces and drive the Austrians from Italy. In exchange, Napoleon III asked for Savoy (the ancestral land of the King of Piedmont-Sardinia) and the then bilingual [[County of Nice]], which had been taken from France after Napoleon's fall in 1815 and returned to Piedmont-Sardinia. Cavour protested that Nice was Italian, but Napoleon responded that "these are secondary questions. There will be time later to discuss them."<ref>cited in {{Harvnb|Milza|2006|p=414}}.</ref>

Assured of the support of Napoleon III, Count Cavour began to prepare the [[Royal Sardinian Army]] for war against Austria. Napoleon III looked for diplomatic support. He approached [[Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby|Lord Derby]] (the [[Prime Minister of the United Kingdom]]) and his government; Britain was against the war, but agreed to remain neutral. Still facing strong opposition within his own government, Napoleon III offered to negotiate a diplomatic solution with the twenty-eight-year-old Emperor [[Franz Joseph I of Austria]] in the spring of 1858. The Austrians demanded the disarmament of Piedmont-Sardinia first and sent thirty thousand soldiers to reinforce their garrisons in Italy. Napoleon III responded on 26 January 1859 by signing a treaty of alliance with Piedmont-Sardinia. Napoleon promised to send two hundred thousand soldiers to help one hundred thousand soldiers from Piedmont-Sardinia to force the Austrians out of Northern Italy; in return, France would receive the County of Nice and Savoy provided that their populations would agree in a referendum.{{Sfn|Milza|2006|pp=415–420}}

It was the Emperor Franz Joseph, growing impatient, who finally unleashed the war. On 23 April 1859, he sent an ultimatum to the government of Piedmont-Sardinia demanding that they stop their military preparations and disband their army. On 26 April, Count Cavour rejected the demands, and on 27 April, the [[Imperial Austrian Army (1806–1867)|Austrian army]] invaded Piedmont.

====War in Italy – Magenta and Solferino (1859)====
[[File:Yvon Bataille de Solferino Compiegne.jpg|thumb|Napoleon III with the French forces at the [[Battle of Solferino]], which secured the Austrian withdrawal from Italy. He was horrified by the casualties and ended the war soon after the battle.]]
Napoleon III, though he had very little military experience, decided to lead the French army in Italy himself. Part of the French army crossed over the Alps, while the other part, with the Emperor, landed in [[Genoa]] on 18 May 1859. Fortunately for Napoleon and the Piedmontese, the commander of the Austrians, General [[Ferenc Gyulay]], was not very aggressive. His forces greatly outnumbered the Piedmontese army at [[Turin]], but he hesitated, allowing the French and Piedmontese to unite their forces.

Napoleon III wisely left the fighting to his professional generals. The first great battle of the war, on 4 June 1859, [[Battle of Magenta|was fought]] at the town of [[Magenta, Lombardy|Magenta]]. It was long and bloody, and the French center was exhausted and nearly broken, but the battle was finally won by a timely attack on the Austrian flank by the soldiers of General [[Patrice de MacMahon]]. The Austrians had seven thousand men killed and five thousand captured, while the French forces had four thousand men killed. The battle was largely remembered because, soon after it was fought, patriotic chemists in France gave the name of the battle to their newly discovered bright purple chemical dye; the dye and the colour took the name [[magenta]].{{Sfn|Milza|2006|p=425}}

The rest of the Austrian army was able to escape while Napoleon III and King Victor Emmanuel made a triumphal entry on 10 June into the city of [[Milan]], previously ruled by the Austrians. They were greeted by huge, jubilant crowds waving Italian and French flags.

The Austrians had been driven from Lombardy, but the army of General Gyulay remained in the [[Veneto]]. His army had been reinforced and numbered 130,000 men, roughly the same as the French and Piedmontese, though the Austrians were superior in artillery. On 24 June, the [[Battle of Solferino|second and decisive battle]] was fought at [[Solferino]]. This battle was even longer and bloodier than Magenta. In confused and often ill-directed fighting, there were approximately forty thousand casualties, including 11,500 French. Napoleon III was horrified by the thousands of dead and wounded on the battlefield. He proposed an armistice to the Austrians, which was accepted on 8 July. A formal [[Treaty of Zürich|treaty]] ending the war was signed on 11 July 1859.{{Sfn|Milza|2006|pp=427–428}}<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hearder |first=Harry |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RVoSBAAAQBAJ&q=Armistice+of+Villafranca&pg=PA226 |title=Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento 1790–1870 |date=2014 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-3178-7206-1 |page=226}}</ref>

Count Cavour and the Piedmontese were bitterly disappointed by the abrupt end of the war. Lombardy had been freed, but Venetia (the Venice region) was still controlled by the Austrians, and the Pope was still the ruler of Rome and Central Italy. Cavour angrily resigned his post. Napoleon III returned to Paris on 17 July, and a huge parade and celebration were held on 14 August, in front of the [[Place Vendôme|Vendôme column]], the symbol of the glory of Napoleon I. Napoleon III celebrated the day by granting a general amnesty to the political prisoners and exiles he had chased from France.{{Sfn|Milza|2006|p=431}}

In Italy, even without the French army, the process of Italian unification launched by Cavour and Napoleon III took on a momentum of its own. There were uprisings in central Italy and the Papal States, and Italian patriots, led by Garibaldi, [[Expedition of the Thousand|invaded and took over]] [[Sicily]], which would lead to the collapse of the [[Kingdom of the Two Sicilies]]. Napoleon III wrote to the Pope and suggested that he "make the sacrifice of your provinces in revolt and confide them to Victor Emmanuel". The Pope, furious, declared in a public address that Napoleon III was a "liar and a cheat".{{Sfn|Séguin|1990|p=260}} Rome and the surrounding [[Latium]] region remained in Papal hands, and therefore did not immediately become the capital of the newly created Kingdom of Italy, and Venetia was still occupied by the Austrians, but the rest of Italy had come under the rule of Victor Emmanuel.

As Cavour had promised, Savoy and the County of Nice were annexed by France in 1860 after referendums, although it is disputed how fair they were. In Nice, 25,734 voted for union with France, just 260 against, but Italians still [[Italian irredentism in Nice|called for its return]] into the 20th century. On 18 February 1861, the first [[Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy|Italian parliament]] met in Turin, and on 23 March, Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed King of Italy. Count Cavour died a few weeks later, declaring that "Italy is made."{{Sfn|Milza|2006|pp=434–441}}

Napoleon's support for the Italian patriots and his confrontation with Pope Pius IX over who would govern Rome made him unpopular with fervent French Catholics, and even with Empress Eugénie, who was a fervent Catholic. To win over the French Catholics and his wife, he agreed to guarantee that Rome would remain under the Pope and independent from the rest of Italy and agreed to keep French troops there. The capital of Italy became Turin (in 1861) then [[Florence]] (in 1865), not Rome. However, in 1862, Garibaldi gathered an army to march on Rome, under the slogan, "Rome or death".{{Sfn|Briggs|Clavin|2003|page=97}} To avoid a confrontation between Garibaldi and the French soldiers, the Italian government [[Battle of Aspromonte|sent its own soldiers]] to face them, arrested Garibaldi and put him in prison. Napoleon III sought a diplomatic solution that would allow him to withdraw French troops from Rome while guaranteeing that the city would remain under Papal control. In the 1864 [[September Convention]] the Italian government guaranteed the independence of the rump Papal States and the French garrison in Rome was withdrawn.

However, Garibaldi made another attempt to capture Rome in November 1867, but was defeated by a hastily dispatched French force and Papal troops at the [[Battle of Mentana]] on 3 November 1867.

The garrison of eight thousand French troops remained in Rome until August 1870, when they were recalled at the start of the [[Franco-Prussian War]]. In September 1870, the [[Royal Italian Army]] finally [[Capture of Rome|captured Rome]] and made it the capital of Italy.{{Sfn|Girard|1986|pp=325–328}}

After the successful conclusion of the Italian campaign and the annexation of Savoy and Nice to the territory of France, the Continental foreign policy of Napoleon III entered a calmer period. Expeditions to distant corners of the world and the expansion of the Empire replaced major changes in the map of Europe. The Emperor's health declined; he gained weight, he began to dye his hair to cover the gray, he walked slowly because of [[gout]], and in 1864, at the military camp of [[Châlons-en-Champagne]], he suffered the first medical crisis from his [[gallstones]], the ailment that killed him nine years later. He was less engaged in governing and less attentive to detail, but still sought opportunities to increase French commerce and prestige globally.{{Sfn|Girard|1986|pp=309–310}}