when his voice would be that of Piedmont, if not of Italy. He attached importance to personal relations, which helped him to keep in touch with European politics and politicians, and he was anxious to find out how the _Connubio_ was regarded by foreigners, among whom, till lately, Rattazzi had been looked upon as a revolutionary firebrand. But thinking men abroad understood the reasons which had dictated the coalition. In London Cavour met with a friendly reception from Lord Malmesbury, who was then Foreign Minister, and who assured him that the English Government would be glad to see him back in office. With characteristic presence of mind he framed his answer to provoke a more definite pronouncement. He could not, he said, return to office alone or abandon the party he had been at so much pains to create. “Naturally,” answered Lord Malmesbury, “you cannot return to power without your friends.” Reassured as to the sentiments of one great political party, Cavour approached the other in the person of Lord Palmerston, than whom he never had a firmer political friend or more sincere admirer. Lord Palmerston saw the larger meaning of the experiment of freedom in Piedmont, and he was one of the first to see it. If that experiment succeeded, the Italian tyrannies were doomed; how, he did not discern, but the fact was apparent to him. He heard, therefore, with much interest what Cavour had to tell him of the gradual taking root of constitutional government in the Sardinian kingdom, and he promised him the moral support, not of one party or another, but of England, “in pledge of which,” he added, “we have sent you our best diplomatist.” This allusion was to Mr. (afterwards Sir James) Hudson, whom Lord Palmerston had called back from the Brazils in the spring of the year, because by a singular intuition he guessed him to be the very man to help the Italian cause. It was intended to send him to Florence, but when he reached the Foreign Office, which Lord Palmerston had just vacated, he received instructions to go to Turin, a fortunate change of plan. No two men were ever better fitted to work together than Cavour and Sir James Hudson. Without ceasing to be particularly English and strictly loyal to the interests of his own country, the British Minister at Turin served Italy as few of her sons have been able to do. Beneath a rather cold exterior he concealed the warmest of hearts, and he had the power of attaching people to him, so that they never forgot him. It is greatly to be regretted that he left no record of the stirring years of his mission, which coincided with the rise and ascendency of Cavour.
Enchanted with the country, and “more _Anglomane_ than ever,” Cavour left England for Paris, where he laid himself out to conciliate political men of all shades, from Morny to Thiers, who advised him to be patient and not to lose heart: “If, after giving you vipers for breakfast, you have another dish served up for dinner, never mind”–such was the diet of politicians. What Cavour once called “his powerful intellectual organisation” made an immediate impression on the Prince President, as he was still styled. Louis Napoleon cultivated an impassible exterior, but at bottom his character was emotional, and, like all emotional persons, he was susceptible to the magnetism of a stronger brain and will. Cavour summoned Rattazzi to Paris to present him to the future Caesar. “Whether we like it or not,” he wrote at this time, “our destinies depend on France; we must be her partner in the great game which will be played sooner or later in Europe.” A few weeks later Napoleon declared at Bordeaux that “the empire was peace,” but like all intelligent onlookers Cavour received the statement with incredulity. Possibly the only person who believed in it was the speaker–for the moment; he may have thought that “bread and games” was a formula by which he could rule France, or rather Paris, but he was soon to find it insufficient.
Cavour sought out several of the Italian exiles who were leading a life of privation and obscurity in Paris, one of whom was Manin, the Dictator of Venice. With him Cavour expressed himself “very much satisfied, though his sentiments were rather too Venetian”: sentiments which Manin sacrificed–a last act of abnegation–when he finally gave his support to Italian unity under Victor Emmanuel, carrying with him two-thirds of the republican party, who could brave the charge of changed allegiance if so incorruptible a patriot led the way. Cavour also saw Gioberti, “always the same child of genius, who would have been a great man had he had common sense.” Gioberti, however, had made a great stride towards common sense, for instead of dreaming of liberating popes, he was now imagining a renovating statesman, and he had inscribed Cavour’s name under his new portrait. In a book published in Paris, Gioberti drew the Cavour of the future with a penetration and a sureness of touch which would make a reader, who did not know the date, suppose that the words were written ten years later. Men of great talent, he said, rarely threw aside the chance of becoming famous; rather did they snatch it with avidity; and what fame more splendid could now be won than that of the minister of the Italian prince who should re-make the country? He fixed his hopes on Cavour, because he alone understood that in human society civilisation is everything, all the rest, without it, nothing. “He knows that statutes, parliaments, newspapers, all the appurtenances of free governments, even if they are of use to individuals, are miserable shams to the commonalty if they fail to help forward social progress.” He was willing to forgive him the generous error of treating a province as if it were a nation, when he compared it with the pettiness of those who treated the nation as if it were a province. He invoked some great and solemn act of _Italianita_ on his part, which should pledge him irrevocably to the national cause. Cavour was too little influenced by others for it to be safe to say that this was one of the prophecies which tend to their own fulfilment; still it is worth noticing that he read the passage and was struck by it.
Cavour had scarcely returned to Piedmont when a ministerial crisis occurred through the rejection by the Senate of a far from stringent Bill for permitting civil marriage, which had passed in the Chamber of Deputies. The situation was further complicated by the state of mind into which the king had been driven by the remonstrances of his wife and mother, both near their end, and by the answer which he received from Rome in reply to a direct appeal to settle matters amicably, the Pope having said, in effect, that he was not going to help him to legalise concubinage in his dominions. D’Azeglio, harassed on all sides and ill through the reopening of his wound, resigned office, and advised the king to send for Cavour. “The other one, whom you know, is diabolically active, and fit in body and soul, and then, he enjoys it so much!” he wrote to a friend, with the pathetic wonder of the artist, romancist, and _grand seigneur_, who had never been able to make out what there was to enjoy in politics. Victor Emmanuel followed his advice, but he allowed Cavour to see that he hoped that the new ministry would make up the quarrel with Rome. Cavour knew that only one path could lead to peace–surrender. Though anxious for office he declined to take it on these terms, and he recommended the king to call Count Balbo to his counsels; but Balbo, persuaded that a ministry only supported by the Extreme Right could not stand even for a few weeks, in his turn suggested the recall of D’Azeglio. Here the saving good sense of the king interposed; little as he liked Cavour he recognised that he was the only man possible, and he charged him, without conditions, with the formation of a ministry. D’Azeglio had fallen on a point on which Cavour was for and not against him; his successor desired to show that there would be no violent change of policy, and he therefore reconstructed the Cabinet as it was before, except for the change of head. He reserved for himself the Presidency of the Council and the Ministry of Finance. Rattazzi, who still occupied the Speaker’s chair, was willing to wait for the present for a seat in the Cabinet, especially when he heard that the king, who was at first very hostile to the _Connubio_, had quite expected him to take office.
So the _gran ministero_, as it was called, entered upon its functions: great by reason of its chief, who infused his own life and vigour into what was before a weak administration. Cavour was a born man of business; he hated disorder in everything–except, indeed, dress, in which his carelessness was proverbial. He had not the common belief that, muddle them how you may, there will always be a providence which looks after the affairs of the State and prevents the collapse that would attend a private commercial enterprise conducted on the same system. He took in hand the financial renewal of Piedmont in the same spirit in which, when he had only just reached maturity, he volunteered to restore his father’s dilapidated fortune. It was for this that he chose the Ministry of Finance: Piedmont, as he saw, could never sustain a national and Italian policy abroad without having first set its own house in order. He started with two principles: taxation must be increased and the resources of the country must be so developed as to enable it to pay its way without sinking into hopeless stagnation. It was a disappointment to some to see Cavour devoting himself with more ardour to putting on new taxes than to producing any of those decorative schemes for hastening the millennium which are expected from a new and ambitious minister. But, though ambitious, he cared for the substance, power–not for the shadow, popularity.
If there had been no other reason for the compact with the moderate liberals, the necessity for fresh taxation would have been a sufficing one. The Extreme Right and Left proposed to meet the existing difficulties by cutting down expenditure, but, if sound in theory, in practice this policy would have reduced Piedmont to complete impotence. While a part of the Left Centre voted with the extremists, it was only by the greatest efforts that a grant of L100,000 was obtained for the fortifications of Casale, which had been declared by the war minister, La Marmora, to be absolutely necessary for the defence of the State. The radical deputy Brofferio said that States wanted no other defence than the breasts of their citizens. From the Chamber, as then constituted, there was little hope of obtaining the imposition of new burdens, in part designed to meet Sardinian liabilities, but in part also to render possible the reorganisation of the army, which was urgently required if the future was not to witness disasters worse than those already experienced. Prince Metternich had said that, even if Piedmont were so troublesome as to persist in her liberal infatuation, she would have to keep quiet, at a moderate computation, for twenty years–just the time which it took her king to unite Italy. The two campaigns of 1848-1849 and the war indemnity had cost about 300,000,000 frs. The annual expenditure was doubled. Added to this, the one source of wealth, agriculture, was almost ruined by the oidium disease which destroyed the vines, and by harvests so bad that the like had not been seen since the celebrated scarcity which followed the wars of Napoleon. As Cavour saved his father’s property not by burying the last talent in a safe place but by laying it out in bold improvements, so now he did not fear to spend largely and even lavishly, not only on the army, but also on public works. He completed the railway system and employed what Brofferio called “a portentous activity” in extending the roads, canals, and all the means of communication which could stimulate industry. It must be remembered that Piedmont was then lamentably backward; a long obscurantist _regime_, succeeded by war and havoc, had left her destitute of all the accessories of modern life. This was changed as if by the wand of the magician. In his first budget, Cavour put on new taxes to the amount of 14,000,000 frs., one being the so-called tax on patents, or on the exercise of trades and professions, which excited much adverse criticism. At the same time he reduced the salt tax and initiated several free-trade measures, to be ultimately crowned by the abolition of the corn laws. On the whole, however, his line of policy was not such as would recommend itself to the crowd, and in October 1853 a furious mob attacked the Palazzo Cavour, repeating the old cry that the minister was a monopolist who robbed the poor of their bread. Luckily the doors were barred, but next day Cavour was threatened as he walked along the streets. Just then the Ministry of Justice fell vacant, and it was offered to Rattazzi, who, to his credit be it said, did not hesitate to take office at a time when the head of the Government was the target of unscrupulous abuse, and it was even thought that his life was in danger. Rattazzi was afterwards transferred to the Home Ministry, which he held till the _Connubio_ broke up, more on personal than on political grounds, in 1858.
Though Cavour’s alliance with Rattazzi was not eternal, it lasted till it had served its purpose. By help of it he imposed his will on king and country until he was strong enough to impose it by force of his own commanding influence. He always considered the _Connubio_ one of the wisest acts of his political life. It is not uncommon to hear it still denounced in Italy as the origin of the political demoralisation, the mixing up of private and public interests, the lack of fixed principles; which later times have witnessed. If the fact were admitted, it would not show that Cavour could have governed in any other way. Had the country trusted him from the first it would have been different, but the country did not trust him. Even after the combination of the two Centres, whenever there was a general election it was doubtful if the Government would obtain a working majority. The accusation of corruption was frequently made against the Ministry in general and Rattazzi in particular, since it was he who presided over the electoral campaigns. Of corruption in the literal sense there was probably little, but constituencies were led to believe that it would be to their advantage to return the ministerial candidate. On one occasion Rattazzi tried to prove that such hints did not constitute “interference.” Cavour got up in the course of the same debate and not only acknowledged the “interference,” but said that without it constitutional government in Piedmont would collapse. His biographers have preferred to be silent on this subject, but he would have despised a reserve which conceals historical facts. The apathy of one section of the electors, the fads and jealousies of another, the feverish longing to pull down whomsoever was in power, inherited from a great revolutionary crisis, the indefatigable propaganda of clerical wire-pullers, all tended to the formation of parliaments so composed as to bring government to a standstill. The result of a protracted interruption might be the fall of the constitution itself, or it might be civil war. Cavour took the means open to him to prevent it, and, whether he was right or wrong, his career cannot be judged if the difficulties with which he had to cope are kept out of sight.
Piedmont needed some years, not of rest, but of active and consecutive labour before it could enter the lists again as armed champion of Italian independence. The disastrous issue of the last conflicts had been attributed to every cause except that which was most accountable for it: a badly led and badly organised army. The “We are betrayed” theory was caught up alike by republicans and conservatives, who accused each other of ruining the country rather than give the victory to the rival faction. Whatever grain of truth there was in these taunts, the military inefficiency of the forces which Charles Albert led across the Ticino in March 1848 remained the main reason why Radetsky was able to get back Lombardy and Venetia for his master. This Cavour knew, and he was anxious not to precipitate matters till La Marmora, to whom he privately gave _carte blanche_, could say that his work was done. He began treating Austria with more consideration than she had received from Massimo d’Azeglio, who was a bad hand at dissembling. Count Buol was gratified, almost grateful. But these relatively harmonious relations did not last long. In February 1853 there was an abortive attempt at revolution in Milan, of which not one person in a thousand knew anything till it was suppressed. It was the premature and ill-advised explosion of a conspiracy by which Mazzini hoped to repeat the miracle of 1848: the ejection of a strong military power by a blast of popular fury. But miracles are not made to order, though Mazzini never came to believe it. As a reprisal for this disturbance, the Austrian Government, not content with executions and bastinadoes, decreed the sequestration of the lands of those Lombard emigrants who had become naturalised in Piedmont. Cavour charged Austria with a breach of international law and recalled the Sardinian minister from Vienna. It was risking war, but he knew that even for the weakest state there are some things worse than war. It was reversing the policy of prudence with which he had set out, but when prudence meant cowardice, Cavour always cast it to the winds. The outcry in all Europe against the sequestration decree deterred the Austrian Government from treating the Sardinian protest as a _casus belli_. Liberal public opinion everywhere approved of Cavour’s course, and in France and England increased confidence was felt in him by those in authority. Governments like to deal with a strong man who knows when not to fear.
Only such a man would have conceived the idea which was now taking concrete form in Cavour’s mind. This was the plan of an armed alliance with the Western Powers on the outbreak of the war, which as early as November 1853 well-informed persons looked upon as henceforth inevitable. Cavour would never have been a Chauvinist, but he was not by nature a believer in neutrality. He was constitutionally inclined to think that in all serious contingencies to act is safer than not to act. The world is divided between men of this mould and their opposites. La Marmora told him that the army, which had made incredible progress considering the state in which it was a short time before, could place in the field a force for which no country would have reason to blush. If not a great general, the Piedmontese Minister of War might fairly be called a first-class organiser. For the rest, Cavour believed that the ultimate school of any army is war. Above all, he believed that this was the hour for a great resolve or a _gran rifiuto_. If the House of Savoy stood still with folded arms it might retire into the ranks of small ruling families, which leave the rearrangement of maps to their betters. It was secretly reported to Cavour that Napoleon III. was beginning to drop enigmatical remarks about Italian affairs, and it was these reports that finally decided him to strain every nerve to make his audacious design a reality.
Russia had broken off diplomatic relations with Sardinia in 1848, and when Victor Emmanuel communicated the death of his father to the Powers, the only one which returned no response was the empire of the Czar. It would be absurd to adduce this lack of courtesy as an excuse for war; still it gave a slightly better complexion to an attack which the Russian Government was justified in calling “extraordinarily gratuitous.” Cavour had one person of great importance on his side, the king. In January 1854 he broached the subject with the tentative inquiry, “Does it not seem to your Majesty that we might find some way of taking part in the war of the Western Powers with Russia?” To which Victor Emmanuel answered simply, “If I cannot go myself I will send my brother.” But it is not too much to say that the whole country was against him. The old Savoyard party opposed the war tooth and nail, and from the “Little Piedmont” point of view it was perfectly right. The radicals, headed by Brofferio, denounced it as “economically reckless, militarily a folly, politically a crime.” Most of the Lombard emigration thought ill of it, and the heads of the army were lukewarm or contrary; this was not the war they wanted. The Tuscan romancist Guerrazzi wrote, with unpardonable levity, that republicans ought to rejoice because this was the final disillusion given to Italians by monarchy, limited or not. One republican, however, Manin, saw in the Italian tricolor displayed with the French and English flags in Paris the first ray of hope that had gladdened his eyes since he left Venice, and Poerio; when he heard of the alliance in his dungeon, “felt his chain grow lighter.” It seemed as if those who had suffered most for Italy had a clearness of vision denied to the rest.
What, if persisted in, would have been the most serious obstacle was the opposition of Rattazzi, but he was won over to assent, if not to approval, by Giuseppe Lanza, a new figure on the parliamentary scene, who had lately been elected Vice-President of the Chamber. Lanza (who was destined to be Prime Minister when the Italians went to Rome) was then only slightly acquainted with Cavour; from being independent, his favourable opinion carried more weight. With Rattazzi’s adhesion the majority of the Centres was secured. It was not an enthusiastic majority, but it quieted its forebodings by the argument which was beginning to take hold of people’s minds: that Cavour must be let do as he chose. Hardly any one liked him, but to see him stand there, absolutely unhesitating and sure, among the politicians of Buts and Ifs, began to generate the belief that he was a man of fate who must be allowed to go his way.
It is easy to be wise after the event, and it may seem strange now that the alliance with the Western Powers found so few, so very few cordial supporters. But Cavour himself called the risks which attended it “enormous.” The great question for Sardinia was what Austria would do. If she did nothing, the pros and cons were perhaps evenly balanced; if she joined Russia, the pros would be strengthened; if she joined the allies, the situation for Sardinia would be grave indeed. The republicans were already calling the war an alliance with Austria. Were the description verified, it was hard to see how the utmost genius or skill could draw aught but evil from so unnatural a union.
The first invitation to Sardinia to co-operate came separately from England, which had vetoed a monstrous proposal on the part of Austria to occupy Alessandria, in order, in any case, to prevent Piedmont from attacking her during the war. Lord Clarendon instructed Sir James Hudson to represent to Cavour that Austria’s fears would be set at rest if a portion of the Sardinian army were sent to the East. The chief English motive was really the conviction that numbers were urgently required if the war was to succeed, and also the desire to lessen the large numerical superiority of the French. In the first instance Cavour replied that although he had been all along in favour of participating in the war, his Cabinet was too much against the idea for him to take any immediate action. But the subject was revived. An alliance with Piedmont was popular in England, where the Government was in an Italian mood, having been made terribly angry by the King of Naples’ prohibition of the sale of mules for transport purposes in the East. In December 1854 Cavour was formally invited to send a corps which would enter the English service and receive its pay from the British Exchequer. He would rather have sent it on these terms than not at all, but the scheme met with such unqualified condemnation from La Marmora and General Dadormida, the Foreign Minister, that it was set aside as not becoming to the dignity of an independent nation. Meanwhile something had occurred which reinforced the arguments of those who were against sending troops at all. After hedging for a year, Austria signed a treaty couched in vague terms, but which appeared to debar her, at any rate, from taking sides with Russia–Italy’s most flattering prospect. Napoleon III. expected much more from it than this; he thought that Austria was too much compromised to avoid throwing in her cause with the allies. It must be said of Napoleon that among the men responsible for the Crimean War he alone aimed at an object which, from a political, let alone moral view, could justify it. He did not think that it would be enough to obtain a few restrictions, not worth the paper on which they were written, and the prospect of a new lease of life to Turkish despotism. He certainly had one paltry object of his own; he wished to gratify his subjects by military glory. He began to suspect the hollowness of the testimony of the plebiscite; the French people did not like him, and never would like him. A war would please the populace and the army; it would also make him look much more like a real Napoleon. But when he had decided to go to war, he hoped to do something worth doing. He thought (to use his own words) “that no peace would be satisfactory which did not resuscitate Poland.” There, and nowhere else, were the wings of the Russian eagle to be clipped. Moreover, the entire French nation, which cared so little for Italy, would have applauded the deliverance of Poland. On the Polish question the ultramontane would have embraced the socialist. France was never so united as in the sympathy which she then felt for Poland, except in that which she now feels for Russia. But Napoleon did not think that he could resuscitate Poland without Austrian assistance. At the close of 1854 he made sure of getting it.
Cavour clung to his project. Probably his penetrating mind guessed that Austria could not fight Russia, which had saved her from destruction in 1849. There now arose a demand for some guarantee which should give Piedmont, if she took part in the war, at least the certainty of a moral advantage. The king remarked to the French Ambassador that all this wrangling about conditions was folly “If we ally ourselves promptly and frankly, we shall gain a great deal more” Doubtless Cavour thought the same, but to satisfy the country it was necessary to demand, if nothing else, a promise from the Western Powers that they would put pressure on Austria to raise the sequestrations on the property of the Lombard exiles. But the Powers, which were courting Austria, refused to make any such promise, on which the Foreign Minister, General Dadormida, resigned, notwithstanding that the Lombard emigrants generously begged the Government not to think of them. Cavour offered the Foreign Office and the Presidency of the Council to D’Azeglio; under whom he would have consented to serve, but D’Azeglio declined to enter the Ministry, whilst engaging not to oppose its policy Cavour then took the Foreign Office himself, and at eight o’clock on the evening of the same day, January 10, 1855, the protocol of the offensive and defensive alliance of Sardinia with France and England was, at last, signed.
Wilting of the Crimean War in after days, Louis Kossuth observed that never did a statesman throw down a more hazardous and daring stake than Cavour when he insisted on clenching the alliance after he had found out that it must be done without any conditions or guarantees. Cicero’s _Partem fortuna sibi vindicat_ applies to diplomacy as well as to war, “but the stroke was very bold and very dangerous.”
CHAPTER VI
THE CRIMEAN WAR–STRUGGLE WITH THE CHURCH
The speeches made by Cavour in defence of the alliance before the two Houses of Parliament contain the clearest exposition of his political faith that he had yet given. They form a striking refutation of the theory, still held by many, especially in Italy, that he was lifted into the sphere of high political aims by a whirlwind none of his sowing. In these speeches he is less occupied with Piedmont, the kingdom of which he was Prime Minister, than an English statesman who required war supplies would be with Lancashire. “I shall be asked,” he said, “how can this treaty be of use to Italy?” The treaty would help Italy in the only way in which, in the actual conditions of Europe, she could be helped. The experience of the last years and of the past centuries had shown that plots and revolutions could not make Italy; “at least,” he added, “in my opinion it has shown it.” What, then, could make her? The raising of her credit. To raise Italy’s credit two things were needed: the proof that an Italian Government could combine order with liberty, and the proof that Italians could fight. He was certain that the laurels won by Sardinian soldiers in the East would do more for Italy than all that had been done by those who thought to effect her regeneration by rhetoric.
When Cavour spoke of himself in public, it was generally in a light tone, and half in jest. Thus in the debate on the treaty, he said that Brofferio and his friends could not be surprised at his welcoming the English alliance when they had once done nothing but tax him with Anglomania, and had given him the nickname of Milord Risorgimento. He could easily have aroused enthusiasm if, instead of this banter, he had spoken the words of passionate earnestness in which he alluded to his part in the transaction in a letter to Mme. de Circourt. He felt, he said, the tremendous responsibility which weighed on him, and the dangers which might arise from the course adopted, but duty and honour dictated it. Since it had pleased Providence that Piedmont, alone in Italy, should be free and independent, Piedmont was bound to make use of its freedom and independence to plead before Europe the cause of the unhappy peninsula. This perilous task the king and the country were resolved to persevere in to the end. Those French liberals and doctrinaires who were now weeping over the loss of liberty in France, after helping to stifle it in Italy, might consider his policy absurd and romantic; he exposed himself to their censures, sure that all generous hearts would sympathise with the attempt to call back to life a nation which for centuries had been shut up in a horrible tomb. If he failed, he reckoned on his friend reserving him a place among the “eminent vanquished” who gathered round her; in any case she would take the vent he had given to his feelings as the avowal _that all his life was consecrated to one sole work, the emancipation of his country_. This was not a boast uttered to bring down the plaudits of the Senate; it was a confession which escaped from Cavour in one of the rare moments when, even in private, he allowed himself to say what he felt. But it speaks to posterity with a voice which silences calumny.
After the point had been gained and the war embarked upon, the anxieties of the minister who was solely responsible for it did not decrease. The House of Savoy had survived Novara; one royal sacrifice served the purpose of an ancient immolation; it propitiated fate. But a Novara in the East would have been serious indeed. What Cavour feared, however, was not defeat–it was inaction, of which the moral effect would have been nearly as bad. What if the laurels he had spoken of were never won at all? The position of the Sardinian contingent on the first line was not secured without endless diplomacy; Napoleon wished to keep it out of sight as a reserve corps at Constantinople. When, with the aid of England, it was shipped for Balaclava, there still seemed a disposition to hold it back. Cavour wrote bitterly of the prospect of the Sardinian troops being sent by the allies to perish of disease in the trenches while they advanced at the pace of a yard a month. He described himself and his colleagues as waiting with cruel impatience for tidings of the first engagement: “Still no news from the army; it is distracting!” Meanwhile the “Reds” and the “Blacks” were happy. Cavour did not fear the first, except, perhaps, at Genoa; but he did fear the deeply-rooted forces of reaction, which were only too likely to regain the ascendant if things went wrong with the war.
At last the long-desired, almost despaired-of news arrived. On August 16 the Piedmontese fought an engagement on the Tchernaia; it was not a great battle, but it was a success, and the men showed courage and steadiness. It was hailed at Turin as a veritable godsend. The king, jaded and worn out by the trials which this year had brought him, rejoiced as sovereign and soldier at the prowess of his young troops. The public underwent a general conversion to the war policy; every one thought in secret he had always approved of it. The little flash of glory called attention to the other merits of the Piedmontese soldier besides those he displayed in the field. These merits were truly great. The troops bore with the utmost patience the terrible scourge of the cholera, which cost them 1200 lives. Their English allies were never tired of admiring the good organisation and neatness of their camp, which was laid out in huts that kept off the burning sun better than tents, intersected with paths and gardens. The little army was fortified by the feeling that after all it was serving no alien cause but its own. “Never mind,” said a soldier, as they were struggling in the slough of the trenches, “of this mud Italy will be made.” They all shared the hope which the king expressed in a letter to La Marmora, “Next year we shall have war where we had it before.”
Victor Emmanuel’s visit to the courts of Paris and London was not without political significance. Cavour first intended that only D’Azeglio should accompany him; he always put the Marquis forward when he wished the country to appear highly respectable and anti-revolutionary; at the last moment he decided to go himself as well. In Paris the king was dismayed at observing that Napoleon, in presence of Austria’s inaction, was bent on making peace. Cavour had also counted on the continuance of the war, but he found encouragement in the fact that when he left, the Emperor told him to write confidentially to Walewski what, in his opinion, he could do for Piedmont and Italy. In England the king was most cordially received, and, if he was rather embarrassed when a portion of the English religious world hailed him as a kind of new Luther, he could not help being struck by the real friendliness shown to him by all classes. Cavour made a strongly favourable impression on Prince Albert, and the Queen expressed so much sympathy with his aims that he called her “the best friend of Piedmont in England.” He carried away a curious souvenir of his visit to Windsor. When Victor Emmanuel was made Knight of the Garter, the Queen wished that he should know the meaning of the oath he took; whereupon Lord Palmerston at once wrote down a translation of the words into Italian, and handed it to the king. When Cavour heard of this, he asked the king to give him the paper to preserve in the Sardinian archives.
The preliminaries of the peace were signed in February 1856. It was a great blow to Victor Emmanuel, who had felt confident that if the war lasted long enough for Russia to be placed in real danger, Austria would he obliged to go to her assistance. The heavy bill for war expenditure, largely exceeding the estimate, damped people’s spirits, buoyed up for an instant by victory, and they asked once more, what was the good of it all? Time was to answer the question; but before showing how an issue, which even Cavour viewed with disappointment, proved, nevertheless, fruitful of more good than the most sanguine advocate of the war had ventured to hope for, a short account must be given of the home politics of Piedmont in the year 1855.
“Battles long ago” never wholly lose their interest. The mere words, “There was once a battle fought here” make the traveller stop and think, even if he does not know by what men of what race it was fought. But the parliamentary struggles of one generation seem passing stale and unprofitable to the next. Yet the history of nations depends as much on their civil as on their warlike contests. In Piedmont the strife always turned on the same point: whether the State or the Church should predominate. Free institutions do not settle the question; it is most manifestly rife to-day in a free country, Canada. In Italy itself a great clerical party is working silently but ceaselessly, under the mask of abstention from the elections, to recover its political power. The Sardinian Government could not withdraw from the duel at will; the Church in Piedmont was a political force constantly on the lookout for an opening to retake the position it had lost. Besides the moral power derived from the support of the peasants and of the old aristocracy, it wielded the material power of an organised body, which was numerous and wealthy in proportion to the numbers and wealth of the population. The annual income of the Church, including the religious houses, was nearly L700,000 a year. There were 23,000 ecclesiastics, or 1 monk to every 670 inhabitants, 1 nun to every 1695, 1 priest to every 214. In spite of the vast resources of the Church, the parish priest in 2540 villages received a stipend of less than L20 per year. Not only radicals but many moderate politicians were of opinion that the great number of convents of the contemplative orders formed an actual evil from the fact of their encouraging able-bodied idleness, and the withdrawal of so considerable a fraction of the population from the work and duties of citizenship. In the autumn of 1854, before the Crimean War was thought of, Rattazzi framed a bill by which the corporations that took no part in public instruction, preaching, or nursing the sick, were abolished. Since the last crisis on the civil marriage bill, which wrecked D’Azeglio’s ministry, Cavour, who all his life was not theoretically opposed to coming to an understanding with Rome, had made several advances to the Vatican, but with no effect: Rome refused any modification of the Concordat or any reduction of the privileges possessed by the clergy in the kingdom of Sardinia. On the failure of these negotiations, Victor Emmanuel despatched three high ecclesiastics on a private mission to the Pope to see if the quarrel could be made up. This mission, which might have seriously compromised the king, was not counselled by Cavour, who put a violent end to it when he authorised Rattazzi to bring in the bill for the suppression of religious houses. Victor Emmanuel was deeply mortified, and the Pope protested against this new “horrible and incredible assault of the subalpine Government.” Just at the time that the measure was discussed in Parliament, the king lost his mother, his wife, his infant child, and his brother, a series of misfortunes in which the Church saw “the finger of God.” As the two queens and the Duke of Genoa were devoted Catholics, their last hours were rendered miserable by the impending sacrilegious act. It is not to be wondered if the king was almost driven out of his mind.
After the lugubrious interruption of the royal funerals, the debate on the religious corporations was resumed with new vigour. Much the most effective speeches on either side were those delivered by the combatants of the two extremes, Brofferio and Count Solaro de la Margherita. Brofferio, who regarded all convents as a specific evil, had proposed their indiscriminate abolition in 1848, directly after the promulgation of the Statute. Cavour, he said, had then defended them. Was he therefore, mindful of their old warfare, to vote against this Bill in order to place difficulties in the way of the Ministry? Far from it. If the Government were willing to abolish all the convents, so much the better; if 490, he would vote for that; if 245, he was ready to approve; if 100, yes; if 10, he would vote for 10; if one convent, he agreed; if one monk, his vote would be given for the abolition of one monk. He would not imitate those speakers who had attempted to conjure up a canonical or theological defence of the Bill. The Pope was probably a better theologian than he; but he denied that the Church had any prescriptive rights at all: all her privileges and property being held on sufferance of the State, which could withdraw its toleration when it chose. Illustrious Italians, from Dante downwards, denounced the love of power and money of the Church as the bane of Italy. Had not Machiavelli said, “If Italy has fallen a prey not only to powerful barbarians but to whatsoever attack, we Italians are indebted for it to the Church and to nothing else”? Respect for the intentions of the pious founder was a good thing in its way (Brofferio had the sense to see that this was the strongest argument of the opposite party), yet, logically pursued, it would have obliged us to this day to preserve the temple of Delphi with a full chapter of priests. Some one might have got up and said, “A very interesting result”; but Neo-Hellenism did not grow in the Sardinian Chamber of Deputies. Brofferio censured the exemption of the teaching and preaching orders–according to him, the most mischievous of all. He blamed the Ministry for excusing the measure on financial grounds. Either it was just or it was unjust. If just, it needed no excuse; if unjust, no excuse could justify it. There was, he said, no use in trying to make the Bill appear moderate in the hopes that it would be borne more patiently by the body against which it was aimed. The Court of Rome knew no more or less. War to the knife or refusal to kiss the Pope’s toe: it was all one.
As the stoutest champion of the Bill was the Beranger of Piedmont, with his rough and ready eloquence, so its most formidable critic was the old apostle of thrones and altars, who would have taken Philip II. as a model king, and Torquemada as an ideal statesman. His onslaught was far stronger than the strictures of less out-and-out reactionaries. It was easy, for instance, to accuse of weakness the amiable sentimentality of the Marquis Gustavo Cavour, who evoked Padre Cristoforo from Manzoni’s _Promessi Sposi_ to plead for his fellow friars; but there was no destroying the force, so far as it went, of Count Solaro’s question, Were they Catholics, or were they not? To endorse a policy not approved by the Church was to cease, _ipso facto_, to be a Catholic. The reasoning might not be true, but it was clear. Charles Albert’s old minister drew a beautiful picture of the country in the good old times before the Statute. Then the people did not lack bread. Life and property and the good name of citizens were safeguarded. The finances were not exhausted; the taxes were not excessive; the revenue was not diminishing; treaties were observed; Piedmont possessed that consideration of foreign courts which a wise government can always command, even without the prestige of force:–a picture drawn in a fine artistic free-hand, not slavishly subservient to fact; but as to the taxes, at least, its correctness was not to be gainsaid. Seen from this point of view, the progress of all modern States means retrogression, a paradox which has passed now from the friends of the old order, few of whom have still the courage to sustain it, to the socialists, the sum of whose contentions it exactly formulates. Count Solaro enlarged on the dreadful evils that would result from the Bill were it to become law, not to the religious corporations, which a wiser generation and renewed endowments would restore to more than their pristine prosperity, but to the country which suffered the perpetration of a sin so enormous that words were powerless to describe it.
After the war dances of Brofferio and Solaro de la Margherita, Cavour made a temperate speech, in which he said that he agreed with Brofferio in placing moral expediency above a question of finance, but that if this were granted, the Government could not be indifferent, in the present state of the finances, to a saving of nearly a million francs a year (it being proposed to defray out of the confiscated ecclesiastical property a grant to that amount which the State paid to the poorer clergy). He defended the expropriation of a convent called Santa Croce to meet the need of a hospital for the military cholera patients. Passing on to larger considerations, he recognised the great services rendered by religious orders in past times, when Europe was emerging from barbarism, and was still a prey to the violence and ignorance of feudal society. Had the religious communities not met a want, they would not have taken root. Civilisation, literature, agriculture, and above all the poor, neglected and oppressed by the secular power, owed them an immense debt. But coming down to the present day, Cavour argued that the original part played by monks and friars was now filled, and of necessity more efficaciously filled, by laymen. Their presence in superabundant numbers in the modern State was an anachronism. It was only needful to compare the countries where they abounded in number and in influence, as in Spain and the kingdom of Naples, with England, Prussia, or France, to see whether it was possible to allege that they tended to enlightenment and prosperity.
The Bill was passed in the Chamber of Deputies on March 2, 1855, by 170 ayes against 36 noes; the majority, so much larger than the Government could usually command, showed that it rested on undoubted popular support. It was then sent up to the Senate, but while it was being discussed there, an incident occurred which nearly caused a political convulsion. The Archbishop of Novara and the Bishop of Mondovi wrote to the king promising that if the Bill were withdrawn, the Church in Piedmont would make up the sum of 92,841,230 frs., which the Government expected to gain by the suppressions. The king was delighted with the proposal, not perceiving the hopelessness of getting it approved by the Chamber of Deputies, which had already passed the measure, and the impossibility of settling the matter “out of court” without parliamentary sanction. He invited Cavour to accede, and on his refusal, he accepted the resignation of the Ministry. Personally the king had always a certain sense of relief in parting with Cavour. He thought now that he could get on without him, but he was to be undeceived. While he was endeavouring to find some one to undertake the formation of a new cabinet, the country became agitated as it had not been since the stormy year of revolution. Angry crowds gathered in Piazza Castello, within a few yards of the royal palace. “One of these days,” Victor Emmanuel said impatiently to his trusted valet, Cinzano, “I’ll make an end of these demonstrations,” to which the descendant of Gil Blas is reported to have replied as he looked out of window: “And if they made an end of Us?” The whole population woke up to the fact that surrender on this point involved surrender along all the line. The king, however, to whom the compromise appeared in the light of peace with the dead and with the living, with the Superga and with the Vatican, was very unwilling to yield. At the same time no one could be found to form a ministry. In this dangerous crisis, Massimo d’Azeglio wrote a letter to his sovereign which is believed to have been what convinced him. Recalling the Spanish royal personage whom courtiers let burn to death sooner than deviate from the motto, _ne touchez pas la Reine_, D’Azeglio protested that if he was to risk his head, or totally to lose the king’s favour, he would think himself the vilest of mankind if he did not write the words which he had not been permitted to speak. As an old and faithful servant, who had never thought but of his king’s welfare and the good of the country, he conjured him with tears in his eyes, and kneeling at his feet, to go no further on the path he was entering. A monkish intrigue had succeeded in breaking up the work of his reign, agitating the country, shaking the constitution and obscuring the royal name for good faith. There was not a moment to lose; similar intrigues had led the House of Bourbon and the House of Stuart to their destruction. Let the king take heed while there was time! It was long before Victor Emmanuel quite forgave his old friend, but the warning voice was not raised in vain.
Cavour was recalled. The Bill was presented again to the Senate with some slight modifications. One religious order was spared by Rattazzi, rather against the will of Cavour, who described it as “absolutely useless,” because the king particularly wished to save it, the nuns having been favourites of his mother. To Cavour, Victor Emmanuel’s resistance had seemed simply a fit of superstitious folly; he did not sufficiently realise how distasteful the whole affair must be to a man like the king, who said to General Durando when he was starting for the Crimea, “You are fortunate, General, in going to fight the Russians, while I stay here to fight monks and nuns.” In its amended form the Bill passed on May 29. Cavour had triumphed completely, but he came out of the struggle physically and mentally exhausted; “a struggle,” he wrote to his Geneva friends, “carried on in Parliament, in the drawing-rooms, at the court as in the street, and rendered more painful by a crowd of distressing events.” As usual he sought refreshment in the fields of Leri, and when, after a brief rest, he returned to Turin, the furious passions which had surged round this domestic duel were beginning to cool as the eyes of the nation became more and more fixed on the conflict in the East and its significance to Italy.
We can proceed now with the story of Cavour’s work in the memorable year which opened so gloomily with a truce that appeared to leave _felix Austria_ mistress of the situation. Without firing a shot, that Power could consider herself the chief gainer by the war. Napoleon III., anxious for peace, welcomed her mediation, and in England, though peace was unpopular, and Austrian selfishness during the war had not been admired, Lord Palmerston was handicapped by the idea which just then occupied his mind, that Austria chiefly stood in the way of what, as an Englishman, he most feared in European politics, a Franco-Russian alliance. He divined the probability, almost the inevitability, of such an alliance at a date when most persons would have thought it an absurd fiction. Thus, in January 1856, both the French and English Governments were in a phase of opinion which promised nothing to Italian aspirations. The question was, Would it be possible for one capable brain to bend them to its purposes’? In the first instance, Cavour believed that it would not. He did not mean to represent his country at the Congress of Paris, nor did he hope that any good would come out of it for Italy. He wished, however, that Sardinia should figure, if not to her advantage, at any rate with dignity and decorum, and he turned, as he was wont to do when he wanted a “perfect knight,” to the _rivale_, Massimo d’Azeglio. Both men had the little private joke of calling one another by this name in their familiar letters, which shows how free they were from any real jealousy. D’Azeglio was ready to accept what had the prospect of being a most thankless office, but on one condition–that the Sardinian plenipotentiary should be received on an equality with the representatives of the great Powers. Cavour knew that this condition had been explicitly refused; to please Austria, France and England declared that Sardinia would only be invited to share in those sittings of the Congress which affected her interests. Cavour did not let D’Azeglio know of the refusal; it was a case of the “tortuous ways of Count Cavour,” of which the Prince Consort complained some years later. Cavour was scrupulous about the principles which he considered vital, but in dealing with men, and especially in dealing with his old colleague, he made more mental reservations than a severe moralist would allow. In the present instance the deception failed, for D’Azeglio, seized at the last moments with suspicions, insisted on seeing the diplomatic notes which had been exchanged relative to the Congress. In reading these, he discovered the true state of affairs, and in a violent fit of anger he refused to go. This incident was the sole cause of the departure of Cavour himself in the place of his indignant nominee. So are rough-hewn ends shaped.
In January, just before the armistice, Cavour had sent the memorandum on what could be done by the Emperor for Italy, which Napoleon authorized him to write when he was in Paris. The first draft of the document was written by D’Azeglio, in whose literary style Cavour felt more faith than in his own; but this was not used. It was “magnificent,” Cavour said, but “too diffuse and long.” With the Emperor it was needful to put everything in the most concrete form, and to take a general view of all the hypotheses, except war with Austria, which, “for the present,” did not enter into his ideas. D’Azeglio was offended at the rejection of his work. He wrote complainingly, “I may be called a fool about everything else, Amen; but about Italy, no!” The memorandum actually sent was short and moderate in tone, the chief point recommended being the evacuation of Bologna by the Austrians. It has been sometimes quoted in order to convict Cavour, at this period, of having held poor and narrow views of the future of Italy. But a man who is mounting a stair does not put his foot on the highest step first. At this stage in his political life most of Cavour’s biographers pause to discuss the often-put question, Was he already aiming at Italian unity? Perhaps the best answer is, that really it does not matter. To be very anxious to prove the affirmative is to misunderstand the grounds on which we may call Cavour one of the greatest of statesmen. Those grounds are not what he hoped to do, but what he did. He was not a Prometheus chained to a rock, who hopes till hope creates the thing it contemplates. Constitutionally he was easily discouraged. In the abstract he rather exaggerated difficulties than minimised them; but in the face of any present obstacle an invincible confidence came over him in his power to surmount it. As he once wrote of himself–moderate in opinion, he was favourable, rather than not, to extreme and audacious means. However long it may have been before the union of all parts of Italy seemed to Cavour a goal within the range of practical politics (that he always thought it a desirable goal there is not the smallest doubt), there was one, the Tiresias of the old order, who said boldly to the Prime Minister of Piedmont at this very juncture: You are steering straight to Italian unity. Solaro de la Margherita, who once declared that “in speaking of kings all who had not sold their consciences were seized with religious terror,” saw what he would not see, more clearly than it was seen by those who would have died to make it true. Standing on the brink of the past, the old statesman warned back the future. In the debate on the loan for thirty million francs required to meet the excess in war expenditure (January 14), Count Solaro said: “The object, Italian unity, is not hidden in the mysteries of the Cabinet; it glimmers out, clear as the light of day, from the concatenation of so many circumstances that I lift the veil of no arcanum in speaking of it; and even if I did, it would be my duty to lift it and warn all concerned of the unwisdom and impropriety of those aspirations.” Deny it who would, he continued, unity was what was aimed at–what was laboured for with indefatigable activity. Italian unity! How could it sound to the other Italian princes? What was its real meaning for the Pope? The unity of Italy could only be achieved either by submitting the whole peninsula to the Roman Pontiff or by depriving him of the temporal power. And the speaker ended by prophesying, his only prophecy which failed, that this shocking event would not happen in the present century, whatever God might permit in the next.
An unwary minister would have taken up the ball and thrown it back. Cavour’s presence of mind prompted him to leave it where it lay. He did not say, “No, we are not working for Italian unity; no, we do not wish to overthrow the Pope.” He answered that in speaking of the future of Italy it was impossible for a Piedmontese minister to entirely separate his desires, his sympathies, from what he considered his political duty: hence there was no more slippery ground than that on which, with consummate art, the Deputy Solaro de la Margherita had tried to draw him. But, he said, he would avail himself of the privilege generally conceded to the ministers of a constitutional government when questions were still pending–to defer his reply till the case was closed (_a guerra finita_).
CHAPTER VII
THE CONGRESS OF PARIS
With the foreboding that this would be the last act of his political life, Cavour started on the mission which he had almost no choice but to assume, in spite of his extreme repugnance for the _role_ of diplomatist. A few days after his arrival in Paris he was informed that the Emperor, in concert with England, conceded the point as to placing the representative of Sardinia on the same footing as the others. Though it does not seem to have struck Cavour, the sudden change of intention was evidently an involuntary tribute to himself: how could such a man be treated as an inferior? Only the form was won; the substance remained in doubt. Lord Clarendon hinted to the Piedmontese plenipotentiary that he had “too much tact” to mix in discussions which did not concern him. But Cavour was not discouraged. With his usual quick rebound he was soon thoroughly braced up to the work before him. As he began to see his way, he was rather spurred on than disconcerted by the chorus of dismal predictions which the Congress and his own part in it evoked at home. Almost every notable man in Piedmont contributed his quota of melancholy vaticination, in which the note, “I told you so!” was already audible. Who could plead Italy’s cause in a congress in which Austria had a voice? Was there ever such midsummer madness? “But we knew how it would be from the first.”
Cavour had said that he hated playing at diplomacy; but some of his smaller, as well as larger gifts, marked him out as a successful diplomatist. He was watchful for little advantages. All who could help the cause were enlisted in its service. Thus he made a convert of a fair Countess, to whose charms Napoleon III was supposed not to be insensible. Paris was full of notabilities whom he sought to turn into useful allies. In a letter to the Marquis Emanuel d’Azeglio (the Sardinian Minister in London) he tells how he even “made up” to Lady Holland’s dog with such success that he got it to put its large paws on his new coat! When the Marchioness of Ely arrived to be present on the part of the Queen at the birth of the Prince Imperial, Cavour, knowing her to be the Queen’s intimate correspondent, lost no time in paying his court to her; but in this instance an acquaintance begun from political motives ripened into real friendship on both sides. A point which is worth observing is that, as minister, no one ever made less use of what may he called the influence of society than Cavour. He never tried to make himself agreeable at Turin, least of all to the king. For a long time he was considered haughty by those who did not know him, and arbitrary by those who did. But abroad he underwent a change which probably came about from his revealing not less but more of his natural self. “He has that petulance,” Massimo d’Azeglio said, “which is exactly what they like in Paris.” Abroad he could give this quality freer play than in Italy, where vivacity offends in a serious man. He charmed even those who did not share his opinions. At a dinner given by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris to all the members of the Congress, he sat next to the Abbe Darboy, one day to succeed to the see and meet a martyr’s death in the Commune. The Abbe never forgot his neighbour of that evening, and in 1870, at Rome during the Oecumenical Council, when some one mentioned Cavour’s name, he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, “Ah, that was a man in a thousand! He had not the slightest sentiment of hate in his heart.”
In the two months which Cavour spent in Paris he perceived very clearly that Walewski and the other French ministers would have to be reckoned more as opponents than friends in the future development of affairs. He found, however, two men who could be trusted to continue his work by incessantly pushing Napoleon III. in an Italian direction; one was Prince Napoleon, the other, Dr. Conneau, a person entirely in the Imperial confidence. Henceforth Dr. Conneau was the secret, and for a long time quite unsuspected, intermediary between Cavour and the Emperor. The idea of establishing this channel of communication first occurred to Count Arese, whose own influence at the Tuileries, though exercised with prudent reserve, was of no slight importance. This Milanese nobleman personified, as it were all the proud hatred of the Lombard aristocracy for an alien yoke. The truest and most disinterested friend of Queen Hortense, Arese remained faithfully attached to her son in good and evil fortune. He would never turn the friendship to account for himself. When Napoleon offered to ask as a personal favour for the removal of the sequestration on his family property, he answered that he preferred to take his chance with the rest. He won the lasting regard of the Empress, though she knew that he influenced Napoleon in a sense contrary to her own political sympathies. The visits of this high-minded gentleman and devoted friend were as welcome at a court crowded with self-seekers and charlatans as they were to be later in the solitude of Chislehurst. Arese was in Paris during the Congress, having been chosen by the king, at Cavour’s urgent request, to carry his congratulations to the Emperor on the birth of the Prince Imperial.
At the earlier sittings of the Congress, Cavour kept in the background; his instinct as a man of the world, and that mixture of astuteness and simplicity which he shared with many of his countrymen (even those of no education), guided him in filling a difficult and, in some respects, an embarrassing position. He spoke, when he did speak, in as brief terms as could serve to express his opinion. But this modest attitude only threw into relief his inalienable superiority. He cast about the shadow of future greatness. The representative of the second-rate Power, who sat there only by favour, was to make so much more history than any of his colleagues! Curiously enough the only one of the plenipotentiaries who had a prior acquaintance with Cavour was the Austrian, Count Buol, who was formerly ambassador at Turin. In old days, before 1848, he had played whist with him. “I know M. de Cavour,” he said; “I am afraid he will give us _de fil a retordre_.” Cavour carefully avoided, however, unnecessary friction. Loyal to both the allies, he managed to steer between their not always consonant aims while preserving his own independence, by taking what seemed, on the whole, the most liberal side in debated questions. With Count Buol he maintained courteous if formal relations, and he soon made a thorough conquest of Count Orloff, who did not begin by being prepossessed in favour of the minister who alone had caused the Sardinian attack on Russia, but who ended on far better terms with him than with his Austrian colleague, of whom he said to Cavour in a voice meant to be heard, “Count Buol talks exactly as if Austria had taken Sebastopol!”
With regard to Cavour’s real business, the fate of Italy, he was obliged to proceed with a restraint which few men would have had the self-control to observe. This was what had been predicted; how, in fact, putting aside Austria, could an Italian patriot speak freely of nationality, of alien dominion, of the rights of peoples, in an assembly of old diplomatists, conservative by the nature of their profession and religiously in awe of treaties by the responsibility of their office? It was only just before the signature of peace that Cavour cautiously launched his bolt in the shape of a note on the situation of affairs in Italy, addressed to the English and French plenipotentiaries. It was conceived on the same lines as the letter to Walewski: the Austrian occupation of the Roman Legations was again made a sort of test question, to which particular weight was attached. One reason why Cavour dwelt so much on this point was that the occupation could be assailed on legal grounds, leaving nationality alone. As, moreover, it was admitted that the Papal Government would fall in Romagna were the Austrians withdrawn, the principle of the destruction of the temporal power of the Pope would be granted from the moment that their departure was declared expedient. While D’Azeglio thought that the separation of Romagna from the States of the Church would be “positively mischievous,” Cavour looked upon it in the light of the first step to far greater changes. Many other schemes were floating in his brain for which he worked feverishly in private, though he did not venture to support them officially. The object nearest his heart was the union or rather reunion of Parma and Modena with Piedmont, to which those duchies had annexed themselves spontaneously in 1848. In order to get rid of the Duke of Modena and Duchess of Parma with the consent of Europe, Cavour was desperately anxious to find them–other situations. Every throne that was or could be made vacant was reviewed in turn; Greece, Wallachia, and Moldavia, anywhere out of Italy would do; the Duchess, not a very youthful widow, was to marry this or that prince to obligingly facilitate matters:–abortive projects, which seem absurd now, but Cavour was willing to try everything to gain anything. In weaving these plans Cavour employed the energy of which Prince Napoleon complained that he did not show enough in the Congress, though to have shown more would have led to a rebuff, or, perhaps, to enforced retirement. Still there was one point which, in the Congress, as out of it, he never treated with moderation: this was the sequestration of Lombard estates. When Count Buol spoke of an amnesty including _nearly_ all cases, he replied that he would not renew diplomatic relations with Vienna while one exception remained. In an audience with the Emperor, after Walewski had ingeniously tried to excuse Austria for exercising her “rights” over her ex-subjects, Cavour burst out with the declaration that if he had 150,000 men at his disposal he would make it a _casus belli_ with Austria that very day.
Peace was signed on March 30. A supplementary sitting was held on April 8, when the President, Count Walewski, by express order of the Emperor, and to the astonishment of all present, proposed for discussion the French and Austrian occupations of the Roman States and the conduct of the king of Naples (his own favourite monarch) as likely to provoke grave complications and to compromise the peace of Europe. This was a victory for Cavour, as it was the direct result of his “note,” but he was afraid that the discussion of the Roman question would be kept within the narrowest limits in consequence of its affecting France as well as Austria. Walewski wished so to limit it; he was embarrassed by the analogy of the French in Rome, and by the fear of saying something unflattering of the Pope. But Napoleon would not have risked the discussion at all had he shared his minister’s sensitiveness. The truth was, that he was always looking out for an excuse which would serve with the clerical party in France for recalling his troops from Rome. He was thinking then of withdrawing them so as to oblige Austria to withdraw her forces from the Legations. It does not appear that Cavour guessed this. In his own speech he glided over the presence of the French, in Rome as lightly as he could, merely saying that his Government “desired” the complete evacuation of the Roman States; but his reserve was not imitated by Lord Clarendon, nor could Napoleon have expected that it would be. When some one asked Lord Palmerston for a definition of the difference between “occupation” and “business,” he answered on the spur of the moment–“There is a French occupation of Rome, but they have no business there;” and this witticism correctly represented English opinion on the subject. It was natural, therefore, that the British plenipotentiary should make no distinction between the French in Rome and the Austrians at Bologna: he denounced both occupations as equally to be condemned and equally calculated to disturb the balance of power, but at the root of the matter was the abominable misgovernment, which made it impossible to leave the Pope to his subjects without fear of revolution. The papal administration was the opprobrium of Europe. As to the king of Naples, if he did not soon mend his ways and listen to the advice of the Powers, it would become their duty to enforce it by arguments of a kind which he could not refuse to obey. An extraordinary sensation was created by the speech of which this is a bald summary; it might have been spoken, Cavour said, “by an Italian radical,” and the vehemence with which it was delivered doubled its effect. Lord Clarendon, who, at the beginning of the Congress, was nervous as to what Cavour might do, had been worked up to such a pitch of indignation by the private conversations of his outwardly discreet colleague that he himself threw diplomatic reserve to the winds. Walewski, dreadfully uncomfortable about the Pope, tried to bring the discussion back within politer bounds; Buol was stiffly indignant; Orloff, indifferent about the Pope, was on tenter-hooks as to Russia’s friend, the king of Naples; the Prussian plenipotentiary said that he had no instructions; the Grand Vizier was the only person who remained quite calm. Cavour’s concluding speech was dignified and prudent; his real comment on the proceedings was the remark which he made to every one after the sitting was over: “You see there is only one solution–the cannon!”
On April 11 he called on Lord Clarendon with the intention of driving home this inference. Two things, he said, resulted from what had passed: firstly, that Austria was resolved to make no concession; secondly, that Italy had nothing to expect from diplomacy. This being so, the position of Sardinia became extremely difficult: either she must make it up with the Pope and with Austria, or she must prepare, with prudence, for war with Austria. In the first alternative he should retire, to make place for the retrogrades; in the second he wished to be sure that his views were not in opposition to those of “our best ally,” England. Lord Clarendon “furiously caressed his chin,” but he seemed by no means surprised “You are perfectly right,” he said, “only it must not be talked about.” Cavour then said that war did not alarm him, and, when once begun, they were determined that it should be to the knife (using the English phrase); he added that, however short a time it lasted, England would be obliged to help them. Lord Clarendon, taking his hand from his chin, replied, “Certainly, with all our hearts.”
When, after Cavour’s death, the text of this conversation was printed, Lord Clarendon denied in the House of Lords having ever encouraged Piedmont to go to war with Austria. Nevertheless, it is impossible that Cavour, who wrote his account of the interview directly after it occurred, could have been mistaken about the words which may well have escaped from the memory of the speaker in an interval of six years. With regard to the sense, the sequel proved that Lord Clarendon did not attach the official value to what he said which, for a moment, Cavour hoped to find in it. Lord Clarendon’s speech before the Congress gives evidence of a state of mind wrought to the utmost excitement by the tale of Italy’s sufferings, and it is not surprising if, speaking as a private individual, he used still stronger expressions of sympathy. Nor is it surprising that Cavour attributed more weight to these expressions than they merited. Up till now, he had never counted on more than moral support from England; he admitted to himself that the English alliance, which he would have infinitely preferred to any other, was a dream. But the thought now flashed on him that it might become a reality. He decided to pay a short visit to England, which was useful, because it dispelled illusions, always dangerous in politics. In the damp air of the Thames, Lord Clarendon seemed no longer the same enthusiast, and Lord Palmerston pleaded the excuse of a domestic affliction for seeing very little of Cavour. The Queen was kind as ever, but the momentary hope conceived in Paris vanished. One after-consequence of this visit was Lord Lyndhurst’s motion, which nearly caused an estrangement between the British and Sardinian Governments. Cavour had taken too literally the assurance that on the subject of Italy there was no division of parties. The warmly Italian speech of the veteran conservative statesman which had been inspired by him was not meant to embarrass the ministry, but that was its effect, and it was natural that they should feel some resentment. Fortunately the cloud soon passed away, and if Cavour imagined to gain anything from flirtations with the Tory party he was undeceived by the violently pro-Austrian speech delivered by Mr. Disraeli in July. The sincere goodwill of individuals such as Lord Lyndhurst and Lord Stanhope (who invented the phrase “Italy for the Italians,” so often repeated later) did not represent the then prevailing sentiment of the party as a whole.
Cavour returned to Turin without bringing, as Massimo d’Azeglio expressed it, “even the smallest duchy in his pocket”; yet satisfied with his work, for he rightly judged that, though there was no material gain, the moral victory was complete. The recalcitration of Austria, which had reached the point of threatening war if Parma were joined to Piedmont, contained the germs of her dissolution as an Italian power. The temporal power of the Pope had been called in question for the first time, not in the lodge of a secret society, but in the council chamber of Europe. Beaten on the lower plane, Cavour had won on the higher; checked as a Piedmontese, he was triumphant as an Italian. In spite of the approval voted by both Houses of Parliament, some shade of disappointment existed in Piedmont, but throughout Italy there was exultation. The Tuscan patriots sent the statesman a bust of himself, with the happily chosen inscription: “Colui che la difese a viso aperto.”[1]
[Footnote 1: “He who defended her with open face” (Dante).]
The position of Piedmont after the Congress of Paris was one to which it would be difficult to find a parallel. States are commonly at peace or at war; if at peace, even where there are smouldering enmities, an appearance is kept up of mutual toleration. But in Piedmont the king, government, and people were already morally at war with Austria. When Cavour said in the Chamber that the two months during which he sat side by side with the Austrian plenipotentiaries had left in his mind no personal animus against them, as he was glad to admit their generally courteous conduct, but the most intimate conviction that any understanding between the two countries was unattainable, he was certainly aware of the grave significance of his words. Great solutions were not the work of the pen, and diplomacy was powerless to change the fate of peoples: these were the conclusions which he brought away from Congress. Every one knew that they meant war. Except for the order for marching, the truce imposed by Novara was broken. Those who had been edified by Cavour’s cautious language in Paris stood aghast. It was well enough that Piedmont should protest in a calm, academic way, but protest was now abandoned for defiance. The change was the more unwelcome, because both in France and England the pendulum of the clock was swinging towards Austria. Napoleon disliked to commit himself to any policy, and after seeming to adopt one side he invariably swayed to the other. There was not the same intentional inconsistency in England, but the fact that Austria was undergoing a detachment from Russia improved her relations with England. Lord Palmerston suspected Cavour of being too friendly with Russia. In addition to this, there was a real fear in England lest Piedmont should pay dearly for what was considered its rashness. The British Government put the question to Cavour, whether it would not be better to disarm the opposition of Austria by depriving her of every plausible reason for combating the policy of Piedmont? He replied that only Count Solaro de la Margherita and his friends could live on amicable terms with the oppressors of Italy; England was at liberty to renew her old alliance with Austria if she chose, but upon that ground he could not follow her; Lord Palmerston might end where Lord Castlereagh began, but they would remain faithful to their principles whatever happened.
Two causes tended to prolong a coldness that was new in the intercourse between England and Piedmont. One was the frontier question of Bolgrad, in which, however, Cavour finally acted as mediator, his suggestion being accepted both by the English and the Russian Governments. The other was the _Cagliari_ affair: the _Cagliari_, a Sardinian merchant ship, which carried the ill-fated expedition of Pisacane to Sapri, was captured by the Neapolitan Government, and the crew, two of whom were English, were taken in chains to Salerno. At first the English Foreign Office seemed inclined to back up an energetic demand for restitution, but afterwards it deprecated strong measures, and left Sardinia somewhat in the lurch. Circumstances combined, therefore, to render Cavour isolated, but he understood that this was a reason to advance, not to retreat. Had Sardinia seemed to bend to the peaceable advice of her friends abroad, her ascendency in Italy would have been gone for ever. Cavour drilled the army, and drew nearer to those great popular forces that were destined to make Italy, which could be freed, but never regenerated, by the sword. Piedmontese statesmen had always looked askance at these forces; Cavour was becoming fully alive to the vast motive power they would place in the hands of the man who could command them, and whom they could not command. He was free from the caste prejudices which caused many even good patriots of that date to hold the masses in horror. If he had prejudices they were against the men of his own order. Once, in summing up the results of an unsatisfactory general election, he wrote: “A dozen marquises, two dozen counts, without reckoning barons and cavalieri–it was enough to drive one mad!” When he had to do with men born of the people, he instinctively treated them on a perfect equality, not a common trait, if the truth were told. In August 1856 an event took place which had far-reaching consequences: the first interview between Cavour and Garibaldi. Cavour was one of Garibaldi’s earliest admirers; he applauded his exploits at Montevideo and at Rome, when the old Piedmontese party tried to belittle him and obliged Charles Albert to decline his services. In one way the hero was a man after the minister’s own heart: he was absolutely practical; he might be obstinate or rash, but he was no doctrinaire. Cavour never changed his opinion of people, and even after the General became his enemy he still admired and esteemed him. In 1856 he received him with flattering courtesy, the first recognition he had met with from any person in authority in his own state, from which, after 1849, he had been, not exactly banished, but invited to depart. During the same autumn Cavour began to see much of Giuseppe La Farina, a Sicilian exile, who was intimately connected with the new party, which, despairing alike of the existing governments and of the republic, took for its watchword, “Italy under Victor Emmanuel.” In the first instance, La Farina was commissioned to ask Cavour to explain his views. His answer was perfectly frank. He had faith, he said, in the ultimate union of Italy in one state, with Rome for its capital; but he was not sufficiently acquainted with the other provinces to know whether the country was ripe for so great a transformation. He was minister of the king of Sardinia, and he could not and ought not to do anything which would compromise the dynasty. If the Italians were really ready for unity, he had the hope that the opportunity of getting it would not be very long delayed; meanwhile, as not one of his political friends believed in its possibility, the cause would only be injured were it known that he had direct dealings with the men who were working for it. He was willing to receive La Farina whenever he liked, but on the understanding that he came in the morning before it was light, and that, if Parliament or diplomacy got wind of their relations, he should reply that he knew nothing about him. The interviews took place almost daily for four years, without any one knowing of them. Some hours before dawn La Farina ascended the narrow secret staircase which led directly to Cavour’s bedroom, and he was gone when the city awakened. In spite of the almost melodramatic complexion of these secret meetings, it must not be supposed, as some have supposed, that Cavour pulled the wires of all the conspiracies in Italy. His visitor kept him informed of the progress made, the propaganda carried on, but he rarely interfered. He still thought that his own business was to make Piedmont an object-lesson in constitutional monarchy, and to get the Austrians out of Italy. That done, the country, left to itself, must decide whether it would unite or not.
After the Congress of Paris, Cavour took the Foreign Office in addition to the Ministry of Finance. He could not trust either of these departments to other hands; and the country approved, for the conviction gained ground that, whether he was mad or not, only he could extricate it from the situation into which he had drawn it. When one senator called him a dictator, he retorted that, if Parliament refused him its support, he should go away, which was not the habit of dictators. But the mere threat of resignation brought the most recalcitrant to reason. Thus he continued to obtain large sums to carry out the works he deemed necessary, one of the greatest of which was the transfer of the arsenal from Genoa to Spezia–a step which angered the Genoese on one side, and on the other the old conservatives, who asked what had little Piedmont to do with big fleets? “But the fact was,” Count Solaro said with a sneer, “the Prime Minister had all Italy in view, and was preparing for the future kingdom.” Cavour also forced Parliament to vote the supplies required for undertaking the boring of Mont Cenis, which most of the deputies expected would be a total failure. In proposing this vote he declared that they must advance or perish. He was delighted with a phrase with which Lord Palmerston concluded a congratulatory letter sent to the Sardinian legation in London, and written in elegant Italian: “Henceforth no one will talk of the works of the ancient Romans.” This little episode wiped out the last traces of misunderstanding between the two statesmen, who became again what fate had meant them to be, friends and fellow-workers. Cavour’s budgets had the inherent defect that they continued to show increased expenditure and a deficit, but no minister who had lacked the power and the courage to brave criticism by a financial policy which would have been certainly indefensible if Piedmont alone was concerned, could have done what he did. Meanwhile, on the whole, the economic state of the country improved in spite of heavy taxation: the exports and imports increased; there were signs of industrial activity; agriculture revived. Cavour was often bitterly blamed for favouring and sparing the landowning class, though whether he did this because he had estates at Leri, as his detractors alleged, or because agriculture must always be the most vital of all Italian interests, need not be discussed now. Improved education stimulated enterprise. That there was room for improvement may be supposed, when it is known that in 1848 the number of persons who could not read was three to one to the number of those who could.
The most severe phase in the financial difficulties was past when, at the beginning of 1858, Cavour consigned the exchequer to Lanza, assuming himself the Ministry of the Interior, which was vacant through the resignation of Rattazzi. The breach between the two men, who were never in entire intellectual harmony, had been growing inevitable for some months. It was final; Cavour resolved never again to have Rattazzi for a colleague. The elections of the autumn before, which Cavour thought that Rattazzi had mismanaged, lessened his confidence in him; but the actual cause of their rupture was briefly this. Cavour wished to put an end to the king’s relations with the Countess Mirafiori, whom he married by the rite of the Church during his serious illness near Pisa in 1868–an interference in the private affairs of the sovereign which, though inspired by regard for the decorum of the Crown, must be admitted to have been unwise, as (amongst other reasons) it was certain not to attain its object. In this matter Cavour thought that Rattazzi ought to have stood by him, instead of which he took the part of the deeply offended king, who went so far as to say that only his position and his duty to the country prevented him from challenging his prime minister then and there.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PACT OF PLOMBIERES
Time seems long to those who wait. The thrill of expectancy that passed through Italy after the Congress of Paris was succeeded by the nervous tension that seizes people whose ears are strained to catch some sound which never comes. Especially in Lombardy there was a feeling of great depression: no one trusted now in revolution, which the watchfulness of the Austrians made as impossible as their careless belief in their own invulnerability had made it possible in 1848. The years went by, and help from without appeared farther off than ever. Meanwhile every interest suffered, and life was rendered wellnigh intolerable by the ceaseless antagonism between government and governed. This was the state of things when the Archduke Maximilian came to Milan full of genuine love for the Emperor’s Italian subjects and of determination to right their wrongs. “I much admire M. de Cavour,” he said to a Prussian diplomatist, “but when it is a question of a policy of progress, I am not going to let him outdo me.” On his side Cavour remarked, “That Archduke is persevering, and will not be discouraged, but I am persevering too, and will not let myself be discouraged.” Nevertheless, if there was one thing that Cavour had always feared, it was Austrian conciliation. The gift of a milder rule would change the aspect of the whole question before Europe, and only those ignorant of human nature could suppose that it would entirely fail in its effect with a population which was beginning to be hopeless. Cavour viewed the experiment not without anxiety, but he guessed that the good intentions of Maximilian would be frustrated by the Viennese Government. The forecast was verified, but meanwhile the simple fact that an Austrian archduke had set his heart on winning the affections of the Lombards and Venetians was taken everywhere as a sign favourable to peace.
Then happened the unforeseen event which marks with almost unfailing regularity the turning points in history. On January 14, 1858, Felice Orsini tried to assassinate Napoleon III and failed. His failure was strange. The bomb thrown under the carriage which conveyed the Emperor and Empress to the opera did not explode. An accomplice was arrested with another in his hand, which he had not time to throw. Many of the passers-by received fatal or serious injuries. Of the previous attempts on Napoleon’s life none was prepared with such seeming certainty of success. If others were planned with equal deliberation, could the result be doubted? Napoleon was probably putting this question to himself when he appeared in his box, with an impassible face, while the conspirators on the stage sang the chorus of the oaths in _Guillaume Tell_. Not a cheer greeted the sovereigns, though what had occurred in the street was immediately known. When the first report reached Turin, Cavour exclaimed, “If only this is not the work of Italians!” On receiving the particulars with the name of Orsini, he remembered that this Romagnol revolutionist had written to him nine months before, offering his services to whatever Italian Government, “not the Papacy,” would place its army at the disposal of the national independence, and urging the Sardinian ministers to take a daring course, in which they would have all Italy with them. Cavour did not answer the letter, “because it was noble and energetic, and he thought it unbecoming in him to pay Orsini compliments.” If he had summoned Orsini to Piedmont, the attempt in the Rue le Peletier would never have taken place.
No one in Europe was more dismayed by the news than Cavour, who expected a harvest of embarrassments for Sardinia, and, worst of all, the permanent ill-will of Napoleon. The first expectation was speedily realised: floods of official and unofficial invective were poured upon the two countries, which were held responsible for nurturing the plot. In England the counter-blast upset Lord Palmerston’s Government, and in Piedmont the dynasty itself might have been endangered had not Victor Emmanuel’s sense of personal dignity preserved him from bending to the rod of imperial displeasure. Cavour was ready even to forestall the cry for precautionary measures; the air was full of wild rumours, and he thought that Victor Emmanuel’s days and his own were threatened, a baseless suspicion, for the most reckless conspirators in those times accounted regicide madness in a free country. But he believed it, and for this reason, as well as from his entirely sincere abhorrence of political crime, he was quite in earnest in his resolve to go as far as the Statute would let him to keep plotters out of Piedmont. Napoleon, however, affected to consider the action of the Sardinian Government weak and dilatory, an opinion which he expressed with vehemence to General Delia Rocca, who was sent by the king to congratulate him on his escape. He hinted that, if his complaints were not attended to, he should seek an alliance with Austria. All the pride of the Savoy blood rose in the veins of Victor Emmanuel: “Tell the Emperor,” he wrote to Delia Rocca, “in the terms you think best, that this is not the way to treat a faithful ally; that I have never tolerated violence from any one; that I follow the path of honour, for which I have to answer to God and to my people; that we have carried our head high for 850 years, and that no one will make me bow it; and that, notwithstanding, I desire to be nothing but his friend.” Cavour instructed Delia Rocca to “commit the indiscretion” of reading the letter to the Emperor word for word. At the same time he wrote to the Sardinian Minister in Paris “that the king was ready for the last extremity to save the honour and independence of the country, and we with him.” But extremities were not needful. Napoleon was always impressed by the true ring of that ancient royalty which was the one thing which he could not purchase. He wrote a conciliatory letter to Victor Emmanuel: “It was only between good friends that questions could be treated with frankness. Let the king do what he could, and not be uneasy.” The French Foreign Office went on scolding through the Legation at Turin, till Cavour said, with a smile, to Prince de Latour d’Auvergne, “But it is finished; yesterday the king had a letter from the Emperor which ends the whole affair.”
A little while after, Cavour received a private communication from Paris containing Orsini’s last letter, and inviting him to publish it in the _Official Gazette_. It was only then that it began to dawn on him what had been the real effect of the attempt, and of Orsini’s trial, on the mind of the Emperor. Cavour had none of the fellow-feeling with conspirators that lurked in Napoleon’s brain, and the idea seemed to him absurd that a man should be strongly moved by the pleading of his would-be assassin. Among the royal families of Europe, Orsini’s influence was at once understood, but it was thought to have its source in fear. It was remarked how, when the sentence of death was passed, the condemned man, turning to his counsel, whispered the words of Tasso–
Risorgero, nemico ognor piu crudo,
Cenere anco sepolto e spirto ignudo.
“The Italian dagger,” wrote the Prince Regent of Prussia, “has become a fixed idea with Napoleon.” Yet it was not only, and perhaps not chiefly, the fear of being assassinated that inclined Napoleon to listen to Orsini’s dying prayer, “Free my country, and the blessings of twenty-five million Italians will go with you!” His own part in the revolutionary movement of 1831 has been shown to have been no boyish freak but serious work, into which he entered with the sole enthusiasm of his life. “I feel for the first time that I live!” he wrote when on the march towards Rome. The Romagna was the hotbed of the Carbonari; all his friends belonged to the Society, and it must always be held probable that he belonged to it also. At any rate the memory of those days lent dramatic force to the last appeal of the man who was more willing to go to the scaffold than he was to send him there.
If this view is correct, it follows that when Napoleon talked about an Austrian alliance to enforce his demand for restrictive measures in Piedmont, it was a groundless threat, such as he was always in the habit of using. A month after Orsini’s execution, the project of an alliance between France and Sardinia, and of the marriage of the king’s daughter with Prince Napoleon, reached Cavour in a mysterious manner, and it is still unknown if it was sent with the Emperor’s knowledge, or by some one who had secretly ascertained what he was thinking about. Cavour showed the draft to the king, but he did not place much credence in it. Nevertheless, to keep Napoleon’s attention fixed on Italy, he caused him to be informally assured that if the worst came to the worst, Sardinia would go to war with Austria by herself; the situation was already so strained that almost anything would be preferable to its prolongation. Cavour had just induced the Chamber to sanction a new loan for forty million francs, which suggested that, if others were apt to use empty threats, he was not. In June Dr. Conneau, who was travelling “for his amusement,” stopped at Turin, where he saw both the king and Cavour. Under the seal of absolute secrecy it was arranged that Napoleon and Cavour should meet “by accident” at Plombieres. Next month the minister left Turin to breathe the fresh air of the mountains. He was not in high spirits. To La Marmora, the only man besides the king who knew the true motive of his journey, he wrote, “Pray heaven that I do not commit some stupidity; in spite of my usual self-reliance, I am not without grave uneasiness.” He succeeded in travelling so privately that he was nearly arrested on arriving at Plombieres because he had not a passport: a mysterious Italian coming from no one knew where–no doubt a new Orsini! But one of the Emperor’s suite recognised him, and made things straight. He passed nearly the whole of two days closeted with Napoleon, the decisive interview lasting from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M., after which the Emperor took him out alone, in a carriage driven by himself. During this drive the subject of the Princess Clotilde’s marriage was broached. Towards the end of the visit, Napoleon said to him, “Walewski has just telegraphed to me that you are here!” The French ministers were, as usual, kept in the dark. It flattered Napoleon’s _amour propre_ to take into secret partnership a man whose place in history he divined. “There are only three men in Europe,” he remarked to his guest; “we two, and then a third, whom I will not name.” Who was the third? Bismarck was still occupied in sending home advice that was not taken from the Prussian Embassy at St Petersburg. The saying brings to mind another, attributed to the aged Prince Metternich, “There is only one diplomatist in Europe, but unfortunately he is against us; it is M. de Cavour.”
In a long letter to the king, Cavour gave a detailed but probably not a complete account of the interviews at Plombieres. It is said that among his papers, which Ricasoli, his successor in the premiership, gave to his heirs, but which they ultimately restored to the State, there is only one sealed packet–that which relates to this visit. He went by no means certain that the Emperor meant to do anything at all; he came away with great hopes, but still without certainty, for his trust in his partner was limited. He never felt sure whether Napoleon was not indulging on a large scale in the sport of building castles in the air, to which all semi-romantic temperaments are addicted. Still the basis of what bore every appearance of a definite understanding had been established. A rising in Massa and Carrara was to serve as the pretext of war. The object of the war was the expulsion of the Austrians from Italy, to be followed by the formation of a kingdom of Upper Italy, which should include the valley of the Po, the Legations, and the Marches of Ancona. Savoy was to be ceded to France. The fate of Nice was left undecided. To all of these propositions the king had authorised Cavour to agree. The hand of the Princess Clotilde was only to be conceded if it was made a condition of the alliance, which was not the case. Cavour believed, however, that everything depended on gratifying the Emperor’s wish, and he strongly urged the king to yield a point which seemed to him of no great importance. Since most princesses made unhappy marriages, what did it matter if Prince Napoleon was a promising bridegroom or not? Victor Emmanuel was persuaded by the “reason of State”; but the sacrifice of his daughter cost him more than Cavour could ever conceive.
Napoleon told his visitor that he felt sure of the benevolent attitude of Russia, and of the neutrality of England and Prussia, but he had no illusions as to the difficulty of the task. The Austrians would be hard to crush, and unless thoroughly crushed they would not relax their hold on Italy. Peace must be imposed at Vienna. To this end at least 200,000 Frenchmen and 100,000 Italians would be necessary. Cavour has been criticised for acquiescing in the crippled programme of a kingdom of Upper Italy. What was he to do? Victor Amadeus II, in his instructions to the Marquis del Borgo, his minister at the Congress of Utrecht, laid down the rule: “Aller au solide et au present et parler ensuite des chimeres agreables.” This was the only rule which Victor Emmanuel’s minister could observe with any profit to his country at Plombieres. As he wrote himself, “In politics one can only do one thing at a time, and the only thing we have to think of is how to get the Austrians out of Italy.”
The period from the meeting with the Emperor of the French to the outbreak of the war was, in the opinion of the present writer, the greatest period in Cavour’s life. Patience, temper, forethought, resource, resolution–every quality of a great statesman he exhibited in turn, and above all the supreme gift of making no mistakes. He did not trust in chance or in fate; he trusted entirely in himself. He showed extraordinary ability in compelling the most various and opposing elements to combine in the service of his ends. In spite of Napoleon’s promises and of the current of personal sentiment which lay beneath them, he soon foresaw that the unwillingness of France and the constitutional vacillation of the Emperor would render them barren of results, unless Austria attacked–an eventuality which was considered impossible on all sides. Mazzini, who was generally not only clear-sighted, but also furnished with secret information, the origin of which is even now a mystery, asserted positively that “even if provoked Austria would not attack.” The same belief prevailed in the inner circle of diplomacy. When Mr. Odo Russell called on Cavour in December 1858, he remarked that Austria had only to play a waiting game to wear out the financial resources of Piedmont, while, on the other hand, Piedmont would forfeit the sympathies of Europe if it precipitated matters by a declaration of war. The only solution would be if the declaration of war came from Austria; but she would never commit so enormous a blunder. “But I shall force her to declare war against us,” Cavour tranquilly replied, and when the incredulous Englishman inquired at what time he expected to bring about this consummation, he answered, “About the first week in May.” Mr. Odo Russell wrote down the date in his notebook, and boundless was his surprise when Austria actually declared war a few days in advance of the time prescribed. This is statesmancraft!
Cavour had always said that an English alliance would be the only one without drawbacks. Among these drawbacks he doubtless placed the melancholy necessity of ceding Piedmontese territory; but that was not all. There was a peril which would have appeared to him yet more fatal than the lopping off of a limb, because it threatened the vital organs of national life: the risk of an all-powerful French influence extending over Italy. To ward off this danger it was of the greatest moment that Italians should join in their own liberation–that not only the Government and the army but patriots of every condition should rally round the country’s flag. Though Cavour has been often said to have lacked imagination, it needed the imaginative faculty to discern what would be the true value of the free corps which he decided to constitute under the name of the Hunters of the Alps. With a promise of 200,000 Frenchmen in his pocket, he was yet ready to confront difficulties which he afterwards called “immense,” in order to place in the field a few thousand volunteers of whom the heads of the army declared that they would only prove an embarrassment. Cavour listened to no one. He sent for Garibaldi, then at Caprera, and having made sure of his enthusiastic co-operation, he carried out his project without asking the assent of Parliament and without flinching before the most violent opposition, internal and external. Had not Cavour felt so conscious of his strength he would have been afraid of offending Napoleon by “arming the revolution”; but he knew that the best way to deal with men of the Emperor’s stamp is to show that you do not fear them. Garibaldi, who never did anything by halves, placed himself and his influence absolutely at Cavour’s disposal. “You can tell our friend that he is omnipotent,” he wrote to La Farina. He begged the Government to assume despotic power till the issue was decided. Garibaldi did not love the man of the _coup d’etat_; but he knew too much about war to miscalculate either the value or the need of the French alliance. Only a small section of the republicans still stood aloof. Cavour had Italy with him. All felt what Massimo d’Azeglio expressed with generous expansion, “To-day it is no longer a question of discussing your policy, but of making it succeed.” Cavour had torn open the letter with impatience, recognising the handwriting. When he finished reading it his eyes were full of tears. No one was more whole-hearted in his support of the minister who exacted of him two most bitter sacrifices than the king. “The difficulty,” Cavour said, “is to hold him back, not to spur him on.” The public, imperfectly informed of what was happening or going to happen, remained calm, for, at last, its faith in the helmsman was complete. An amusing story is told of those times. The Countess von Stackelberg, wife of the Russian minister at Turin, was buying something at a shop under the Porticoes, when the shopman suddenly left her and rushed to the door. On coming back he said with excuses, “I saw Count Cavour passing, and wishing to know how our affairs are going on, I wanted to see how he looked. He looks in good spirits, so everything is going right.”
A misunderstanding arose between France and Austria on a question connected with Servia; it was in outward allusion to this that Napoleon said to the Austrian Ambassador at the reception of the Corps Diplomatique on New Year’s Day, 1859, “Je regrette que les relations entre nous soient si mauvaises; dites cependant a Votre Souverain que mes sentiments pour lui ne sont pas changes.” Whether there was a deliberate intention to convey another meaning is a matter of conjecture; at all events the whole of Europe gave the words an Italian sense, and Cavour, though taken by surprise, was not slow to turn them to account. In writing the speech from the throne for the opening of Parliament, he introduced a paragraph alluding to clouds in the horizon, and eventualities “which they awaited in the firm resolve to fulfil the mission assigned to them by Providence.” The other ministers would not share the responsibility of language so charged with electricity. Cavour then did one of those simple things which yet, by some mystery of the human brain, require a man of genius to do them–he sent a draft of the speech to Napoleon and asked him what he thought of it! The Emperor answered that, in fact, the disputed paragraph appeared too strong, and he sent a proposed alteration which made it much stronger! The new version ran: “Our policy rests on justice, the love of freedom, our country, humanity: sentiments which find an echo among all civilised nations. If Piedmont, small in territory, yet counts for something in the councils of Europe, it is because it is great by reason of the ideas it represents and the sympathies it inspires. This position doubtless creates for us many dangers; nevertheless, while respecting treaties, we cannot remain insensible to the cries of grief that reach us from so many parts of Italy.” Cavour had the French words turned into good Italian by a literary friend (for he always misdoubted his own grammar); one or two expressions were changed; “humanity” was left out. Did it savour too much of Mazzini? Victor Emmanuel himself much improved the closing sentence by substituting “cry” for “cries.” This was the singularly hybrid manner in which the royal speech of January 10, 1859, arrived at its final form. Much, at this critical juncture, depended on its effect, and nothing is so impossible to foretell as the effect of words spoken before a public assembly. Cavour stood beside the throne watching the impression which each phrase created; when he saw that success was complete, beyond every expectation, he was deeply moved. The ministers of the Italian princedoms could hardly keep their virtuous indignation within bounds. Sir James Hudson called the speech “a rocket falling on the treaties of 1815”; the Russian Minister, waxing poetic, compared it with the shining dawn of a fine spring day. The “grido di dolore,” rapturously applauded in the Chamber, rang like a clarion through Italy. And no one suspected whence this ingenious piece of rhetoric emanated!
The French alliance still rested on nothing more substantial than a secret unwritten engagement which Napoleon could repudiate at will. Cavour, who would have made an excellent lawyer, strove his utmost to obtain some more solid bond, for which the marriage-visit of Prince Napoleon offered a favourable opportunity. The connection with one of the oldest royal houses in Europe so flattered the Emperor’s vanity that he authorised the bridegroom and General Niel, who accompanied him, to sign a treaty in black and white, binding France to come to the assistance of Piedmont, if that State were the object of an act of aggression on the part of Austria. Possibly, like other people, he thought that no such act of aggression would be made, and that he remained free to escape from the contract if he chose. A military convention was signed at the same time, one of the clauses of which Cavour was fully determined to have cancelled; it stipulated that volunteer corps were to be excluded. He signed the convention, but fought out the point afterwards and gained it, in spite of Napoleon’s strenuous resistance. These transactions were intended to be kept absolutely secret, and the French ministers do not seem to have known of them, but somehow the European Courts, and Mazzini, got wind of a treaty having been signed. Different rumours went about: the Prince Consort was informed that Savoy was to go for Lombardy, and Nice for Venetia; others said that Nice was to be the price of the Duchies and Legations. There was a persistent impression that the island of Sardinia was mentioned, which would not merit record but for the general correctness of the other guesses. There is no reference, however, to Sardinia, in the version of the treaty which has since been published, and Cavour indignantly repudiated the idea of ceding this Italian island to France, when the charge of having entertained it was flung at him a year later. Some doubt may linger in the mind as to whether there was not a scheme for giving the Pope Sardinia in return for part or all his territory.
Once again Cavour repeated his demand for yet more money, and this time it was received not, as heretofore, with reluctant submission, but with acclamation. At last people saw what the minister was driving at; only the few who would have disowned the name of Italian voted with the minority. The fifty million francs were quickly subscribed, chiefly in small sums, in Piedmont itself, a triumphant answer to the Paris house of Rothschild, which had declined to render its help. Cavour’s speeches on the new loan were, in reality, addressed to Europe, and no one was more skilful in this kind of oratory than he. Without apparent elaboration, each phrase was studied to produce the effect desired. The policy of Piedmont, he said, had never altered since the king received his inheritance on the field of Novara. It was never provocative or revolutionary, but it was national and Italian. Austria was displayed as the peace-breaker, and, as she was pouring troops into Italy and massing them near the Piedmontese frontier, it was easy to exhibit her in that light. After having made Austria look very guilty, Cavour proceeded to lay himself out to conciliate England, whose policy was, at that moment, everything that he wished it not to be; but he was determined not to quarrel. The Earl of Malmesbury kept him informed of the “real state of Italy,” of which he was supposed to be profoundly ignorant. The Lombards no longer desired to be united to Piedmont, and a war of liberation would be the signal of the reawakening of all the old jealousies, while republicans, dreamers, pretenders, seekers of revenge, power, riches, would tear up Italy between them. In the House of Lords, Lord Derby declared that the Austrian was the best of good governments, and only sought to improve its Italian provinces. Cavour concealed the irritation which he strongly felt. Lord Derby’s speech, he said, did not sound so bad in the original as in the translation, and, after all, England’s apparent change of front came from a great virtue, patriotism. She suppressed her natural sympathies, because she believed that patriotic reasons required her to back up Austria. He repeated to the Chamber what he had often said in private, that the English alliance was the one which he had always valued above all others. It was a remarkable thing to say at a moment when he hoped so much more from France than from England. But precisely because he hoped to obtain material assistance from France, he was more than ever anxious to remain on good terms with England. He finely resisted the temptation of saying, “We can do without you.” After having got the French into Italy, the next thing to do would be to get them out of it, and he foresaw that England would be useful then. Moreover, angry as he was in his heart, he did not doubt that the “suppressed sympathies” would break out again and prove irresistible. They were even breaking out already, for the arrival of the Neapolitan prisoners caused one of those powerful waves of feeling which, in England, always end by influencing the Government.
Meanwhile, Lord Derby’s ministry made Herculean efforts to ward off war, in which, by force of traditions that govern all English parties, they had the opposition entirely with them. They begged Austria to evacuate the Papal Legations, and to leave off interfering with the States of Central Italy. They even asked Cavour to help them, by formulating his views on the best means of peaceably improving the condition of Italy. Cavour answered that at the root of the matter lay the hatred of a foreign yoke. The Austrians in Italy formed, not a government, but a military occupation. They were not established but encamped. Every house, from the humblest home to the most sumptuous palace, was closed against them. In the theatres, public places, streets, there was an absolute separation between them and the people of the country. Things got constantly worse, not better. The Austrian rulers in Italy once offered their subjects some compensation for the loss of nationality in a policy which defended them from the encroachments of the court of Rome, but the wise principles introduced by Maria Theresa and Joseph II. had been cast to the winds. Unless Austria completely reversed her policy, and became the promoter of constitutional government throughout Italy, nothing could save her; the problem would be solved by war or revolution.
It ought to have been apparent that, as far as Piedmont was concerned, the control of the situation had passed out of the hands of the Government. The youth of Lombardy was streaming into the country to enlist either in the army or in the corps of “Hunters of the Alps,” which was now formed. Cavour looked on this patriotic invasion with delight; “They may throw me into the Po,” he said, “but I will not stop it.” Had he wished, he could not have stopped the current of popular excitement at the point it had reached. It was the knowledge of this, joined to the threatened destruction of all his hopes, that well-nigh overpowered him when–at the eleventh hour–in spite of engagements and treaties, Napoleon seemed to have suddenly decided not to go to war. Prince Bismarck once declared that he had never found it possible to tell in advance whether his plans would succeed; he could navigate among political events, but he could not direct them. Since the meeting at Plombieres, Cavour had undertaken to direct events, the most perilous game at which a statesman can play. For a moment he thought that he had failed.
CHAPTER IX
THE WAR OF 1859–VILLAFRANCA
On the whole it can be safely assumed that Napoleon’s hark back was real, and was not a move “pour mieux sauter.” He was not pleased at the cool reception given in Italy to a pamphlet known to have been inspired by him, in which the old scheme was revived of a federation of Italian States under the presidency of the Pope. The Empress was against war–it was said “for fear of a reverse.” Perhaps she thought already what she said when flying from Paris in 1870: “En France il ne faut pas etre malheureux.” But more than this fear, anxiety for the head of the Church made her anti-Italian, and, with her, the whole clerical party. Nor was this the limit of the opposition which the proposed war of liberation encountered. Though France did not know of the secret treaty, she knew enough to understand by this time where she was being led, and with singular unanimity she protested. When such different persons as Guizot; Lamartine, and Proudhon pronounced against a free Italy,–when no one except the Paris workman showed the slightest enthusiasm for the war,–it is hardly surprising if Napoleon, seized with alarm for his dynasty, was glad of any plausible excuse for a retreat. Such an excuse was forthcoming in the Russian proposal of a Congress, which was warmly seconded by England. Austria accepted the proposal subject to two conditions: the previous disarmament of Piedmont, and its exclusion from the Congress. The bearing of the French Ministry became almost insulting; the Emperor, said Walewski, was not going to rush into a war to favour Sardinia’s ambition; everything would be peaceably settled by the Congress, in which Piedmont had not the smallest right to take part. None of the usual private hints came from the Tuileries to counteract the effect of these words.
Cavour was plunged in blank despair. He wrote to Napoleon that they would be driven to some desperate act, which was answered by a call to Paris; but his interviews with the Emperor only increased his fears. He threatened the king’s abdication and his own retirement. He would go to America and publish all his correspondence with Napoleon. He alone was responsible for the course his country had taken, the pledges it had given, the engagements already performed (by which he meant the consent wrenched from the king to the Princess Clotilde’s marriage). The responsibility would be crushing if he became guilty before God and man of the disasters which menaced his king and his country.
The English Government now proposed that all the Italian States should be admitted to the Congress, and that Austria as well as Piedmont should he invited to disarm. On April 17 Cavour sent a note agreeing to this plan. It was a tremendous risk; but it was the only way to prevent Piedmont from being deserted and left to its fate. If Austria also consented, all was lost: there would be peace. Could the gods be trusted to make her mad? Cavour’s nervous organisation was strained at a tension that nearly snapped the cord. It is believed that he was on the brink of suicide. On April 19 he shut himself up in his room and gave orders that no one should be admitted. On being told of this, his faithful friend, Castelli, who was one of the few persons not afraid of him, rushed to the Palazzo Cavour, where his worst fears were confirmed by the old major-domo, who said, “The Count is alone in his room; he has burnt many papers; he told us to let no one pass; but for heaven’s sake, go in and see him at whatever cost.” When he went in, Castelli saw a litter of torn-up papers; others were burning on the hearth. He said that he knew no one was to pass and that was why he had come. Cavour stared at him in silence. Then he went on, “Must I believe that Count Cavour will desert the camp on the eve of battle; that he will abandon us all?” And, unhinged by excitement and by his great affection for the man, he burst into tears. Cavour walked round the room looking like one distraught. Then he stopped opposite to Castelli and embraced him, saying, “Be tranquil; we will face it all together,” Castelli went out to reassure those who had brought him the alarming news. Neither he nor Cavour afterwards alluded to this strange scene.
At the very moment that Cavour thought he had lost the game, he had won it. On the same day, April 19, Count Buol,–somewhat, it is said, against his better judgment, but yielding to the Emperor, who again yielded to the military party,–sent off a contemptuous rejoinder to the English proposals. Ignoring all suggestions, the Austrian Minister said that _they would themselves call upon Piedmont to disarm_. Here, then, was the famous _acte d’agression_. Napoleon could not escape now.
The fact that this happened simultaneously with Sardinia’s submission to the will of Europe was a wonderful piece of luck, which, as Massimo d’Azeglio said, could happen only once in a century. When the Austrian Government took the irrevocable step, it did not know yet that the whole onus of breaking the peace would fall upon it. Nor, it must be remembered, did it know the test of the treaty between France and Sardinia, and in view of the French Emperor’s recent conduct it may well have become convinced that no treaty at all existed. Hence it is probable that Austria flattered herself that she would only have to deal with weak Sardinia.
The Chamber of Deputies was convoked on April 23 to confer plenary powers on the king. Many deputies were so overcome that they wept. Just as the President of the Chamber announced the vote, a scrap of paper was handed to Cavour, on which were written the words in pencil: “They are here; I have seen them.” It was from a person whom he had instructed to inform him instantly when the bearers of the Austrian Ultimatum arrived. They were come; angels of light could not have been more welcome! Cavour went hastily out, while the House broke into deafening cries of “Long live the king!” He said to the friend who brought the message, “I am leaving the last sitting of the last Piedmontese Chamber.” The next would represent the kingdom of Italy.
The Sardinian army to be placed on a peace-footing, the volunteers to be dismissed, an answer of “Yes” or “No” required within three days–these were the terms of the Ultimatum. If the answer were not fully satisfactory His Majesty would resort to force. Cavour replied that Piedmont had given its adhesion to the proposals made by England with the approval of France, Prussia and Russia, and had nothing more to say. No one who saw the statesman’s radiant face would have guessed that less than a week before he had passed through so frightful a mental crisis. He took leave of Baron von Kellersberg with graceful courtesy, and then, turning to those present, he said, “We have made history; now let us go to dinner.”
The French Ambassador at Vienna notified to Count Buol that his sovereign would consider the crossing of the frontier by the Austrian troops equivalent to a declaration of war.
Lord Malmesbury was so favourably impressed by Sardinia’s docility and so furious with the Austrian _coup de tete_ that he became in those days quite ardently Italian, which he assured Massimo d’Azeglio was his natural state of mind; and such it may have been, since cabinet ministers are constantly employed in upholding, especially in foreign affairs, what they most dislike. He hoped to stop the runaway Austrian steed by proposing mediation in lieu of a Congress; but the result was only to delay the outbreak of the war for a week, much to the disadvantage of the Austrians, as it gave the French time to arrive and the Piedmontese to flood the country by means of the canals of irrigation, thus preventing a dash at Turin, probably the best chance for Austria. Baron von Kellersberg and his companion, during their brief visit, had done nothing but pity “this fine town so soon to be given over to the horrors of war.” Their solicitude proved superfluous.
For the present the statesman’s task was ended. He had procured for his country a favourable opportunity for entering upon an inevitable struggle. When Napoleon said to Cavour on landing at Genoa, “Your plans are being realised,” he was unconsciously forestalling the verdict of posterity. The reason that he was standing there was because Cavour had so willed it. In spite of the Emperor’s fits of Italian sympathy and the various circumstances which impelled him towards helping Italy, he would not have taken the final resolution had not some one saved him the trouble by taking it for him. As a French student of history has lately said, in 1859, as in 1849, there was a Hamlet in the case; but Paris, not Turin, was his abode. Napoleon needed and perhaps desired to be precipitated. Look at it how we may, it must be allowed that he was doing a very grave thing: he was embarking on a war of no palpable necessity against the sentiment, as the Empress wrote to Count Arese, of his own country. A stronger man than he might have hesitated.
The natural discernment of the Italian masses enlightened them as to the magnitude of Cavour’s part in the play, even in the hour when the interest seemed transferred to the battlefield, and when an emperor and a king moved among them as liberators. At Milan, after the victory of Magenta had opened its gates, the most permanent enthusiasm gathered round the short, stout, undistinguished figure in plain clothes and spectacles–the one decidedly prosaic appearance in the pomp of war and the glitter of royal state. Victor Emmanuel said good-humouredly that when driving with his great subject, he felt just like the tenor who leads the prima donna forward to receive applause.
Success followed success, and this to the popular imagination is the all-and-all of war. Milan was freed, though the battle of Magenta was not unlike a drawn one; Lombardy was won, though the fight for the heights of Solferino could hardly have resulted as it did if the Austrians had not blundered into keeping a large part of their forces inactive. Would the same fortune be with the allies to the end? Cavour does not appear to have asked the question. He watched the war with no misgivings. It was to him a supreme satisfaction that the Sardinian army, which he had worked so hard to prepare, did Italy credit. He took a personal pride in the romantic exploits of the volunteers, though for political reasons he carefully concealed that he had been the first to think of placing them in the field. He made an indefatigable minister of war (having taken the office when La Marmora went to the front). The work was heavy; the problem of finding even bread enough for the allied armies was not a simple one. On one