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 Metternich, a previous Austrian chancellor, had reportedly dismissed on various occasions as a "[mere] geographical expression",[2] 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.