The Piedmontese troops distinguished themselves in the field,
gaining the sympathies of the French and English; and at the
subsequent congress of Paris (1856), where Cavour himself was
Sardinian representative, the Italian question was discussed,
and the intolerable oppression of the Italian peoples by Austria
and the despots ventilated.
Austria at last began to see that a policy of coercion was useless and dangerous, and made tentative efforts at conciliation. Taxation was somewhat reduced, the censorship was made less severe, political amnesties were granted, humaner officials were appointed and the Congregations (a sort of shadowy consultative assembly) were revived. In 1856 the emperor and empress visited their Italian dominions, but were received with icy coldness; the following year, on the retirement of Radetzky at the age of ninety-three, the archduke Maximilian, an able, cultivated and kind-hearted man, was appointed viceroy. He made desperate efforts to conciliate the population, and succeeded with a few of the nobles, who were led to believe in the possibility of an Italian confederation, including Lombardy and Venetia which would be united to Austria by a personal union alone; but the immense majority of all classes rejected these advances, and came to regard union with Piedmont with increasing favour.[1]
Meanwhile Francis V. of Modena, restored to his duchy by
Austrian bayonets, continued to govern according to the traditions
of his house. Charles II. of Parma, after having been
reinstated by the Austrians, abdicated in favour of his
son Charles III. a drunken libertine and a cruel tyrant
Restored governments after 1849.
(May 1849); the latter was assassinated in 1854, and
a regency under his widow, Marie Louise, was instituted
during which the government became somewhat more
tolerable, although by no means free from political persecution;
in 1857 the Austrian troops evacuated the duchy. Leopold of
Tuscany suspended the constitution, and in 1852 formally
abolished it by order from Vienna; he also concluded a treaty of
semi-subjection with Austria and a Concordat with the pope for
granting fresh privileges to the Church. His government, however,
was not characterized by cruelty like those of his brother
despots, and Guerrazzi and the other Liberals of 1849, although
tried and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, were merely
exiled. Yet the opposition gained recruits among all the ablest
and most respectable Tuscans. In Rome, after the restoration of
the temporal power by the French troops, the pope paid no
attention to Louis Napoleon’s advice to maintain some form of
constitution, to grant a general amnesty, and to secularize the
administration. He promised, indeed, a consultative council of
state, and granted an amnesty from which no less than 25,000
persons were excluded; but on his return to Rome (12th April
1850), after he was quite certain that France had given up all
idea of imposing constitutional limitations on him, he re-established
his government on the old lines of priestly absolutism, and,
devoting himself to religious practices, left political affairs mostly
to the astute cardinal Antonelli, who repressed with great
severity the political agitation which still continued. At Naples
Persecution of Liberals
in Naples.
a trifling disturbance in September 1849, led to the
arrest of a large number of persons connected with the
Unità Italiana, a society somewhat similar to the
Carbonari. The prisoners included Silvio Spaventa,
Luigi Settembrini, Carlo Poerio and many other cultured and
worthy citizens. Many condemnations followed, and hundreds of
“politicals” were immured in hideous dungeons, a state of
things which provoked Gladstone’s famous letters to Lord
Aberdeen, in which Bourbon rule was branded for all time as
“the negation of God erected into a system of government.”
But oppressive, corrupt and inefficient as it was, the government
was not confronted by the uncompromising hostility of the
whole people; the ignorant priest-ridden masses were either
indifferent or of mildly Bourbon sympathies; the opposition was
constituted by the educated middle classes and a part of the
nobility. The revolutionary attempts of Bentivegna in Sicily
(1856) and of the Mazzinian Carlo Pisacane, who landed at
Sapri in Calabria with a few followers in 1857, failed from lack of
popular support, and the leaders were killed.
The decline of Mazzini’s influence was accompanied by the rise of a new movement in favour of Italian unity under Victor Emmanuel, inspired by the Milanese marquis Giorgio Pallavicini, who had spent 14 years in the Spielberg, and by Manin, living in exile in Paris, both of them New Unionist movement. ex-republicans who had become monarchists. The propaganda was organized by the Sicilian La Farina by means of the Società Nazionale. All who accepted the motto “Unity, Independence and Victor Emmanuel” were admitted into the society. Many of the republicans and Mazzinians joined it, but Mazzini himself regarded it with no sympathy. In the Austrian provinces and in the duchies it carried all before it, and gained many adherents in the Legations, Rome and Naples, although in the latter regions the autonomist feeling was still strong even among the Liberals. In Piedmont itself it was at first less successful; and Cavour, although he aspired ultimately to a united Italy with Rome as the capital,[2] openly professed no ambition beyond the expulsion of Austria and the formation of a North Italian kingdom. But he gave secret encouragement to the movement, and ended by practically directing its activity through La Farina. The king, too, was in close sympathy with the society’s aims, but for the present it was necessary to hide this attitude from the eyes of the Powers, whose sympathy Cavour could only hope to gain by professing hostility to everything that savoured of revolution. Both the king and his minister realized that Piedmont alone, even with the help of the National Society, could not expel Austria from Italy without foreign assistance. Piedmontese finances had been strained to breaking-point to organize an army obviously intended for other than merely defensive purposes. Cavour now set himself to the task of isolating Austria and securing an alliance for her expulsion. A British alliance would have been preferable, but the British government was too much concerned with the preservation of Napoleon III. and Italy. European peace. The emperor Napoleon, almost alone among Frenchmen, had genuine Italian sympathies. But were he to intervene in Italy, the intervention would not only have to be successful; it would have to bring tangible advantages to France. Hence his hesitations and vacillations, which Cavour steadily worked to overcome. Suddenly on the 14th of January 1858 Napoleon’s life was attempted by Felice Orsini (q.v.) a Mazzinian Romagnol, who believed that Napoleon was the chief obstacle to the success of the revolution in Italy. The attempt failed and its author was caught and executed, but while it appeared at first to destroy Napoleon’s Italian sympathies and led to a sharp interchange of notes between Paris and Turin, the emperor was really impressed by the attempt and by Orsini’s letter from prison exhorting him to intervene in Italy. He realized how deep the Italian feeling for independence must be, and that a refusal to act now might result in further attempts on his life, as indeed Orsini’s letter stated. Consequently negotiations with Cavour were resumed, and a meeting with him was arranged to take place at Plombières (20th and 21st of July 1858). There it was agreed that France should supply 200,000 men and Piedmont 100,000 for the expulsion of the Austrians from Italy, that Piedmont should be expanded into a kingdom of North Italy, that central Italy should form a separate kingdom, on the throne of which the emperor contemplated placing one of his own relatives, and Naples another, possibly under Lucien Murat; the pope, while retaining only the “Patrimony of St Peter” (the Roman province), would be president of the Italian confederation. In exchange for French assistance Piedmont would cede Savoy and perhaps Nice to France; and a marriage between Victor Emmanuel’s daughter Clothilde and Jerome Bonaparte, to which Napoleon attached great importance, although not made a definite condition, was also discussed. No written agreement, however, was signed.
