Word: solferino
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...invitation from Italy was nearly a year old, but with his customary talent for the dramatic, President Charles de Gaulle of France had waited for just the right occasion to stage his first state visit abroad. On June 24, 100 years ago, Emperor Napoleon III defeated the Austrians at Solferino alongside Sardinia's little Victor Emmanuel II, who two years later became the first king of a united Italy. Off went the imperial message to Paris-"Great battle, great victory!"-though it had been such a blood bath that a Swiss traveler, Henri Dunant, shocked by the lack...
...cheering streets of Milan. The French Tricolor fluttered from windows; there were Arches of Triumph made out of flowers, and at least one made out of cake. At Magenta, De Gaulle inspected the 4th Regiment of the plumed Italian Bersaglieri, whose predecessors fought there a century ago. Near Solferino, he and President Gronchi lunched at a villa where Napeleon III and Victor Emmanuel gloated over a victory banquet that had been set for the Emperor of Austria, who never got around...
...retirement that followed were in some ways the most educational in De Gaulle's life. After abandoning active efforts at a political comeback in 1953, he continued to drive into Paris from Colombey once a week to hold court in his Spartan Left Bank office on the Rue de Solferino. And because he remained for many Frenchmen a kind of father figure, men of every political current called to confide in him. Without ever soliciting information, De Gaulle became perhaps the best-informed man in France on the inner workings and gaping inadequacies of the Fourth Republic...
...Orsini went to the guillotine in March 1858. crying "Viva l'Italia! Viva la Francia!" To show his love of Italy, Louis Napoleon would have liked to pardon him; instead, thirteen months later, he led an army of 200,000 over the Alps and defeated the Austrians at Solferino and Magenta. It was the beginning of the end of foreign rule in Italy. The new Kingdom of Italy, established seven years later, would have to decide whether Felice Orsini was a hero or an inept killer, or both. As to his bomb-throwing predilections, he might have answered with...