The Republicans under Mazzini ceased to be a main stream of movement when the Young Italy was defeated by Austrian and Italian conservatism. The Federalists betrayed the movement and it was the wrong horse to be backed. Only Piedmont posed the needed economic basis and military force to fight Austrian rule in Italy. The three great task of achieving unity, explosion of Austrian from Italy and gaining liberty had to be sacrificed to achieve national unity under Piedmont. As Rascaoli says "Piedmont today is all of Italy." Cavour when he came to power, carried out vigourous economic reform and industrial development since he knew that a strong economic basis was the prerequisite for national struggle. Moreover, he knew that diplomacy was important by exploiting the revolution of 1848 when the Holy Alliance was on the reign of collapse, Italian unification was to be achieved by foreign war with friendly foreign relationships. "Italy could not make herself, she could only be made by exploiting the differences between the powers", as A. J. P. Taylor comments, and France was the potential ally when Napoleon III was a member of the Carbonari and he was eager for national prestige and to break the 1815 settlement. As Cavour once said, "We must be the partner of France in the great game that sooner or later must be played in Europe.".
Moreover, the war was to be achieved from above not below, by the monarchy, not the masses. Mazzini and the Carbonari still served the Italian cause, but their role now was only subsidiary. Mazzini was continue to be preacher of Italian nationality and it needed "Mazzini to endow the revolutionary movement with a spiritual quality", as J. Dnz says, and as Lipson observed "Mazzini broadened the political horizon of the Italians and create vigourous public opinion in favour of nation unity." While the Carbonari was now served little, but the "political immigration was the political hard school in which the political philosophy of Italian unification was gradually evolved.