Summary: We ended the last podcast by looking at an excerpt from Christopher Duggan’s The Force of Destiny, where Duggan argued that ‘the real problem [for the Austrians and the Restoration governments of Italy] lay with the educated classes’. In this podcast we’ll certainly see that this was true, that educated, graduates of Italian universities, young men qualified in law, in medicine, working in the armies of the Italian states or in their governments, found that they were pushed aside in the restoration. However, as we’ll see as the course goes on, until 1848, and perhaps until after that date, these middle class trouble makers didn’t have the power or the will to loosen Austria’s grip on the Italian Peninsula. Transcript
