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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Napoleon had long been an admirer of Italy and wanted to see it unified, although that might create a rival power. He plotted with Cavour of the Italian kingdom of Piedmont to expel Austria and set up an Italian confederation of four new states headed by the pope. Events in 1859 ran out of his control. Austria was quickly defeated, but instead of four new states a popular uprising united all of Italy under Piedmont. The pope held onto Rome only because Napoleon sent troops to protect him. His reward was the County of Nice (which included the city of Nice and the rugged Alpine territory to its north and east) and the Duchy of Savoy. He angered Catholics when the pope lost most of his domains. Napoleon then reversed himself and angered both the anticlerical liberals at home and his erstwhile Italian allies when he protected the pope in Rome.The British grew annoyed at Napoleon's humanitarian intervention in Syria in 1860–1861. Napoleon lowered the tariffs, which helped in the long run but in the short run angered owners of large estates and the textile and iron industrialists, while leading worried workers to organize. Matters grew worse in the 1860s as Napoleon nearly blundered into war with the United States in 1862, while his takeover of Mexico in 1861–1867 was a total disaster. The puppet emperor he put on the Mexican throne was overthrown and executed. Finally in the end he went to war with the Germans in 1870 when it was too late to stop German unification. Napoleon had alienated everyone; after failing to obtain an alliance with Austria and Italy, France had no allies and was bitterly divided at home. It was disastrously defeated on the battlefield, losing Alsace and Lorraine. Historian A. J. P. Taylor was blunt: "he ruined France as a great power".Foreign warsIn 1854, the Second Empire joined the Crimean War, which saw France and Britain opposed to the Russian Empire, which was decisively defeated at Sevastopol in 1854–55 and at Inkerman in 1854. In 1856, France joined the Second Opium War on the British
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