Plombières Agreement

The Plombières Agreement (Italian: Accordi di Plombières, French: Entrevue de Plombières) of 1858 was a secret verbal agreement concluded at Plombières-les-Bains between the chief minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, Count Cavour, and the French Emperor, Napoleon III. Some older English language sources refer to it as the Treaty of Plombières, but most avoid identifying it as a "treaty".

For evidential reasons there have been disputes on the details of what was agreed, but as events unfolded over the next couple of years it was apparent that the agreement had opened the way for the , concluded on 28 January 1859, and for the subsequent war that became an important step along the path to Italian unification within fewer than ten years.

The Plombières Agreement was an agreement concerning a future war in which France and Piedmont would ally themselves against Austria in order to remove and exclude Austrian authority and influence from the Italian peninsula. In its place Italy, which a previous Austrian chancellor had reportedly dismissed on various occasions as a "[mere] geographical expression", would be divided into two spheres of influence to be dominated respectively by Piedmont and France. As events turned out the war was triggered as agreed at Plombières, but its geo-political aftermath was not precisely the one that had been envisaged.

The Emperor Napoleon was keen to settle the "Italian question" and to correct the humiliations of the 1815 Vienna Congress. He had long ago formed the view that this required a war against Austria. War with Austria could bring France military success, delivering glory to France and humiliation to Austria. Actively supporting Italian nationalist aspirations would place France firmly on the side of what was then seen as progressive liberalism, and confirm the nation's special revolutionary credentials. For France, however, Italian independence (from Austria) and Italian political unification were two very different things. Political unification would have been contrary to French interests because it would have risked reducing French influence on the Italian peninsula.

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