Count Camillo de Cavour: Of the seven states of Italy, only Sardinia-Piedmont was ruled by an Italian princely house. When the revolutionary uprisings of 1831 and 1848 failed to unite Italy, the responsibility to establish a unified Italy fell upon this Italian state. King Victor Emmanuel II was its ruler and Cavour was the Chief Minister. Cavour led the movement to unite the separate states of nineteenth-century Italy. He engineered a careful diplomatic alliance with France, which helped Sardinia-Piedmont defeat the Austrian forces in 1859, and thereby free the northern part of Italy from the Austrian Habsburgs.
