'J'ATTENDS MON ASTRE'
1849-1850
The House of Savoy--A King who keeps his Word--Sufferings of the
Lombards--Charles Albert's Death.
Circumstances more gloomy than those under which Victor Emmanuel II.
ascended the throne of his ancestors it would be hard to imagine.
An army twice beaten, a bankrupt exchequer, a triumphant invader
waiting to dictate terms; this was but the beginning of the inventory
of the royal inheritance. The internal condition of the kingdom, even
apart from the financial ruin which had succeeded to the handsome
surplus of two years before, was full of embarrassments of the gravest
kind. There was a party representing the darkest-dyed clericalism and
reaction whose machinations had not been absent in the disaster of
Novara. Who was it that disseminated among the troops engaged in the
battle broadsides printed with the words: 'Soldiers, for whom do you
think you are fighting? The King is betrayed; at Turin they have
proclaimed the republic'? There were other broadsides in which Austria
was called the supporter of thrones and altars. The dreadful
indiscipline witnessed towards the end of, and after the conflict was
due more to the demoralising doctrines that had been introduced into
the army than to the insubordination of panic. There was another party
strengthened by the recent misfortunes and recruited by exiles from
all parts of Italy, which was democratic to the verge of republicanism
in Piedmont and over that verge at Genoa, where a revolution broke out
before the new King's reign was a week old. Constitutional government
stood between the fires of these two parties, both fanned by Austrian
bellows, the first openly, the second in secret.
Victor Emmanuel was not popular. The indifference to danger which he
had shown conspicuously during the war would have awakened enthusiasm
in most countries, but in Piedmont it was so thoroughly taken for
granted that the Princes of the House of Savoy did not know fear, that
it was looked on as an ordinary fact. The Austrian origin of the
Duchess of Savoy formed a peg on which to hang unfriendly theories. It
is impossible not to compassionate the poor young wife who now found
herself Queen of a people which hated her race, after having lived
since her marriage the most dreary of lives at the dismallest court in
Europe. At first, as a bride, she seemed to have a desire to break
through the frozen etiquette which surrounded her; it is told how she
once begged and prayed her husband to take her for a walk under the
Porticoes of Turin, which she had looked at only from the outside. The
young couple enjoyed their airing, but when it reached Charles
Albert's ears, he ordered his son to be immediately placed under
military arrest. The chilling formalism which invaded even the private
life of these royal personages, shutting the door to 'good
comradeship' even between husband and wife, may have had much to do
with driving Victor Emmanuel from the side of the Princess, whom,
nevertheless, he loved and venerated, to unworthy pleasures, the habit
of indulgence in which is far easier to contract than to cure.
[Illustration: VICTOR IMMANUEL]
The King's address at this time was not conciliatory, and, indeed, it
never lost a bluntness which later harmonised well enough with the
reputation he gained for soldierly integrity, but which then passed
for aristocratic haughtiness. His personal friends were said to belong
to the aristocratic or even the reactionary party. In the perplexities
which encompassed him, he could not reckon on the encouragement of any
consensus of good opinion or confidence. He was simply an unknown man,
against whom there was a good deal of prejudice.
Radetsky did not refuse to treat with Charles Albert, as has been
sometimes said, but the intolerably onerous terms first proposed by
him showed that he wished to force the abdication which Charles Albert
had always contemplated in the event of new reverses of fortune.
Radetsky was favourably disposed to the young Duke of Savoy, as far as
his personal feeling was concerned, a fact which was made out in
certain quarters to be almost a crime to be marked to the account of
Victor Emmanuel. The Field-Marshal did not forget that he was the
son-in-law of the Austrian Archduke Ranieri; it is probable, if not
proved, that he expected to find him pliable; but Radetsky, besides
being a politician of the purest blood-and-iron type, was an old
soldier with not a bad heart, and some of his sympathy is to be
ascribed to a veteran's natural admiration for a daring young officer.
On the 24th of March, Victor Emmanuel, with the manliness that was
born with him, decided to go and treat himself for the conditions of
the armistice. It was the first act of his reign, and it was an act of
abnegation; but of how much less humiliation than that performed by
his father twenty-eight years before, when almost on the same day, by
order of King Charles Felix, the Prince of Carignano betook himself to
the Austrian camp at Novara, to be greeted with the derisive shout of:
'Behold the King of Italy!' Little did Radetsky think that the words,
addressed then in scorn to the father, might to-day have been
addressed in truthful anticipation to the son.
The Field-Marshal took good care, however, that nothing but respect
should be paid to his visitor, whom he received half-way, surrounded
by his superb staff, all mounted on fine horses and clad in splendid
accoutrements. As soon as the King saw him coming, he sprang from his
saddle, and Radetsky would have done the same had not he required,
owing to his great age, the aid of two officers to help him to the
ground. After he had laboriously dismounted, he made a military
salute, and then embraced Victor Emmanuel with the greatest
cordiality. The King was accompanied by very few officers, but the
presence of one of these was significant, namely, of the Lombard Count
Vimercati, whom he particularly pointed out to Radetsky.
While observing the most courteous forms, the Field-Marshal was not
long in coming to the point. The negotiations would be greatly
facilitated, nay, more, instead of beginning his reign with a large
slice of territory occupied by a foreign enemy for an indefinite
period, the King might open it with an actual enlargement of his
frontier, if he would only give the easy assurance of ruling on the
good old system, and of re-hoisting the blue banner of Piedmont
instead of the revolutionary tricolor. The moment was opportune;
Victor Emmanuel had not yet sworn to maintain the Constitution. But he
replied, without hesitation, that though he was ready, if needs be, to
accept the full penalties of defeat, he was determined to observe the
engagements entered into by his father towards the people over whom he
was called to reign.
One person had already received from his lips the same declaration,
with another of wider meaning. During the previous night, speaking to
the Lombard officer above mentioned, the King said: 'I shall preserve
intact the institutions given by my father; I shall uphold the
tricolor flag, symbol of Italian nationality, which is vanquished
to-day, but which one day will triumph. This triumph will be,
henceforth, the aim of all my efforts.' In 1874, on the twenty-fifth
anniversary of Novara, Count Vimercati wrote to the King of Italy from
Paris to remind him of the words he had then spoken.
When the King started for his capital, Radetsky offered to draw up his
troops as a guard of honour over the whole extent of occupied
territory between Novara and Turin. The offer was declined, and Victor
Emmanuel took a circuitous route to avoid observation. His journey was
marked throughout by a complete absence of state. Before he arrived, a
trusty hand consigned to him a note written in haste and in much
anguish by the Queen, in which she warned him to enter by night, as he
was likely to have a very bad reception. On the 27th of March he
reviewed the National Guard in the Piazza Castello on the occasion of
its taking the oath of allegiance. The ceremony was attended by Queen
Maria Adelaide in a carriage with her two little boys, the Princes
Umberto and Amedeo. There was no hostile demonstration, but there was
a most general and icy coldness.
That evening, the terms of the armistice were communicated to the
Chamber. As was natural, they evoked the wildest indignation, a part
of which fell undeservedly on the King. Twenty thousand Austrians were
to occupy the district between the Po, Sesia and Ticino and half the
citadel of Alessandria. The excitement rose to its height when it was
announced that the Sardinian Fleet must be recalled from Venetian
waters, depriving that struggling city of the last visible sign of
support from without. The Chamber sent a deputation to the King, who
succeeded in persuading its members that, hard though the terms were,
there was no avoiding their acceptance, and that the original
stipulations were harder still.
On the 29th, Victor Emmanuel took the oath to observe the Statute, to
exercise the royal authority only in virtue of the laws, to cause
justice to be fairly and fearlessly administered, and to conduct
himself in all things with the sole view to the interest, honour and
prosperity of the nation.
A trifling accident occurred which might have been far from trifling;
one of the ornaments of the ceiling of the Palazzo Madama, where the
Parliament assembled, fell close to the King. As it was of great
weight, it would have killed anyone on whom it had fallen. 'Never mind
that,' said the King in Piedmontese dialect to Colonel Menabrea, who
was near him, 'it will not be the last!'
The ministry which held office under the late King resigned; a new
one was formed, in which General Delaunay was President of the
Council, and Gioberti minister without a portfolio. The King was
advised to dissolve the Chamber, which had been elected as a war
parliament, and was ill-constituted to perform the work now required.
General La Marmora had orders to quell the insurrection at Genoa, the
motive of which was not nominally a change of government, but the
continuance of the war at all costs. Its deeper cause lay in the old
irreconcilability of republican Genoa with her Piedmontese masters,
breaking out now afresh under the strain of patriotic disappointment.
Like the 15th of May at Naples, the Genoese revolution was a folly
which can hardly be otherwise described than as a crime; it happened,
however, that in Piedmont there was a King who had not the slightest
intention of turning it into an excuse for a royal hark-back. Austria
and France offered Victor Emmanuel their arms to put down the
revolution, but, declining the not exactly disinterested attention, he
made a wise choice in La Marmora, who accomplished the ungrateful
task with expedition and humanity. An amnesty was granted to all but a
very few participators in the revolt. On the brief black list when it
was submitted to the King was the name of the Marquis Lorenzo Pareto,
who at one time had held the Foreign Office under Charles Albert. As
Colonel of the Genoese National Guard, his responsibility in joining
the insurrection was judged to be particularly heavy; but the King
refused to confirm his exclusion from the amnesty. 'I would not have
it said,' he objected, 'that I was harsh to one of my father's old
ministers.'
The conception of Victor Emmanuel as a bluff, easy-going monarch is
mistaken. Very few princes have had a keener sense of the royal
dignity, or a more deeply-rooted family pride, or, when he thought fit
to resort to it, a more decisive method of preventing people from
taking liberties with him. But he knew that, in nearly all cases,
pardon is the best of a king's prerogatives.
An instance to the point happened when he came to the throne. Two
officers of the royal household had caused him annoyance while he was
Duke of Savoy by telling tales of his unconventionality to his
easily-scandalised father. To them, perhaps, he owed the condign
punishment he had undergone for the famous promenade under the
Porticoes. At anyrate, they had procured for the Duke many bad
quarters-of-an-hour, but the King, when he became King, chose to be
completely oblivious of their conduct, and they remained undisturbed
at their posts. To those who pointed to King Leopold of the Belgians,
or to any other foreign example of a loyal sovereign who understood
the needs of his people as a model for Victor Emmanuel to imitate, he
was in the habit of replying: 'I remember the history of my fathers,
and it is enough.'
'The Persians,' says the Greek historian, 'taught their children to
ride and to speak the truth.' In a land that had seen as much of
enthroned effeminacy and mendacity as Italy had seen, a prince fond of
manly exercise and observant of his word was more valuable than a
heaven-sent genius, and more welcome than a calendar saint. Piedmont
only could give such a prince to Italy. Its kings were not Spaniards
who, by way of improvement, became lazzaroni, nor were they Austrians
condemned by a fatal law to revert to their original type; they were
children of the ice and snow, the fellow-countrymen of their subjects.
All their traditions told of obstinacy and hardihood. They brought
their useful if scarcely amiable moral qualities from Maurienne in the
eleventh century. The second Count of Savoy, known as Amadeus with the
Tail, son of Humbert of the White Hands, founder of the House, went to
the Holy Roman Emperor with such a body of retainers that the guards
refused them entrance to the Council Chamber. 'Either I shall go in
with my Tail or not at all,' said Humbert, and with his Tail he went
in. This was the metal of the race. Even at the time when they were
vassals of the Empire, they expected to dictate rather than to obey.
They studiously married into all the great royal houses of Europe.
Though they persecuted their Vaudois subjects, who were only in 1848
rewarded by emancipation for centuries of unmerited sufferings and
splendid fidelity, yet the Princes of Savoy had from the first, from
the White-Handed Humbert himself, held their heads high in all
transactions with the Holy See, between which and them there was an
ever-returning antagonism. Not to the early part of the nineteenth
century, when the rebound from revolutionary chaos did not suffice to
denationalise the Kings of Sardinia, but sufficed to ally them with
reaction, ought we to turn if we would seize the true bearings of the
development of the Counts of Maurienne into Kings of Italy. At that
moment the mission of Piedmont, though not lost, was obscured. What
has rather to be contemplated is the historic tendency, viewed as a
whole, of both reigning house and people. No one has pointed out that
tendency more clearly than the anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled
_Le Testament politique du Chevalier Walpole_ (published at Amsterdam
in 1769), who was able to draw the horoscope of the House of Savoy
with a correctness which seems almost startling. He was not helped by
either sympathy or poetic imagination, but simply by political logic.
Sardinia, he said, was the best governed state in Europe. Instead of
yielding to the indolent apathy in which other reigning families were
sunk, its princes sought to improve its laws and develop its resources
according to the wants of the population and the exigences of the
climate. Finance, police, the administration of justice, military
discipline, presented the picture of order. From the nature of the
situation, a King of Sardinia must be ambitious, and to satisfy his
ambition he had only to bide his time. Placed between two great Powers
he could choose for his ally whichever would give him the most, and by
playing this mute _rôle_, it was impossible that he would not
hereafter be called upon to play one of the most important parts in
Europe. Italy was the oyster disputed by Austria and France; might it
not happen that the King of Sardinia, becoming judge and party, would
devour the oyster and leave the shells to the rival aspirants? It was
unlikely, added this far-seeing observer, that the Italian populations
should have got so innured to their chains as to prefer the harsh,
vexatious government of Austria to the happy lot which Sardinian
domination would secure to them, but even if they had become
demoralised to this extent, they could not resist the providential
advance of a temperate, robust and warlike nation like Piedmont, led
by a prince as enlightened as the King (Charles Emmanuel) who then
reigned over it.
The metaphor of the oyster recalls another, that of Italy being an
artichoke which the House of Savoy was to devour, a leaf at a time.
Whether or not a Duke of Savoy really invented this often-quoted
comparison, it is certain that power was what the rulers of Piedmont
cared for. They were no more a race of scholars and art patrons than
their people was a people of artists and poets. There is a story to
the effect that one Duke of Savoy could never make out what poetry
was, except that it was written in half lines, which caused a great
waste of paper. The only poet born in Piedmont found the country
unlivable. Recent research among the archives at Turin revealed facts
which were thought to be not creditable to certain princely persons,
and a gleaning was therefore made of documents to which the historical
student will no longer have access. The step was ill advised; what can
documents tell us on the subject that we do not know? Did anyone
suppose that the Savoy princes were commonly saints? Sainthood has
been the privilege of the women of the family, and they have kept it
mostly to themselves. But peccable and rough though the members of
this royal house may have been, very few of them were without the
governing faculty. 'C'est bien le souverain le plus fin que j'ai connu
en Europe,' said Thiers of Victor Emmanuel, whose acquaintance he made
in 1870, and in whom he found an able politician instead of the common
soldier he had expected. The remark might be extended back to all the
race. They understood the business of kings. A word not unlike the 'Tu
regere imperio populos, Romane, memento' of Virgil was breathed over
the cradle at Maurienne. If it did not send forth sons to rule the
world, its children were, at least, to be enthroned in the capital of
the Cæsars, and to make Italy one for the first time since Augustus.
From April to August 1849, the peace negotiations dragged on. The
pretensions of Austria were still exorbitant, and she resisted the
demand which Piedmont, weak and reduced though she was, did not fear
to make, that she should amnesty her Italian subjects who had taken
part in the revolution. Unequal to cope with the difficulties of the
situation, the Delaunay ministry fell, and Massimo d'Azeglio was
appointed President of the Council. This was a good augury for
Piedmont; D'Azeglio's patriotism had received a seal in the wound
which he carried away from the defence of Vicenza. Honour was safe in
his hands, whatever were the sacrifices to which he might be obliged
to consent.
Some pressure having been put on Austria by France and England, she
agreed in July to evacuate Alessandria, and to reduce the war
indemnity from 230,000,000 francs to 75,000,000, which Piedmont
undertook to pay, onerous though the charge was in her deplorable
financial condition. But the amnesty question was the last to be
settled, and in this Piedmont stood alone. France and her. The
Piedmontese special envoy at Milan, Count Pralormo, wrote to Prince
Schwarzenberg on the 2nd of July that his Government could not give up
this point. It was a conscientious duty so universally and strongly
felt, that they were readier to submit to the consequences, whatever
they might be, than to dishonour themselves by renouncing it. In other
words, they were ready to face a new war, abandoned to their fate by
all Europe, to undergo a new invasion, which meant the utter
destruction of their country, rather than leave their Lombard and
Venetian fellow-countrymen to the revenge of Austria. Count Pralormo
added that he was speaking not only in the name of the ministry, but
of the King and the whole nation. The risk was no imaginary one; there
were many in Austria who desired an excuse for crushing the life out
of the small state which was the eternal thorn in the side of that
great Empire. Few remember now the sufferings of Piedmont for Italy,
or the perils, only too real, which she braved again and again, not
from selfish motives--for the Piedmontese of the old, narrow school,
who said that their orderly little country had nothing to gain from
being merged in a state of 25,000,000 were by no means in error--but
from genuine Italian fellow-feeling for their less happy compatriots
beyond their confines.
At last, when the armistice concluded on the morrow of Novara had been
prolonged for five months, the treaty of peace was signed. Prince
Schwarzenberg offered to further reduce the indemnity, 75,000,000 to
71,000,000, but D'Azeglio having agreed to the former figure,
preferred to abide by his agreement. He thought, probably, that he
would thus gain some concession as to the amnesty, and, in fact,
Austria finally consented to pardon all but a small number of the
persons compromised in the late events. D'Azeglio still stood out, but
finding that there was no shadow of a chance of obtaining more than
this, he reluctantly accepted it. The great mass, the hundred thousand
and more fugitives who had left their homes in Lombardy and Venetia,
were, at any rate, promised a safe return. The city of Venice, as yet
undominated, though on the brink of her fall, was totally excluded.
The list of those whose banishment from Lombardy was confirmed,
comprises the noblest names in the province; with the exception of a
few who were excluded from the amnesty on the score that, before the
revolution, they were Austrian functionaries, nearly every unpardoned
Lombard was noble: Casati, Arese, Borromeo, Litta, Greppi,
Pallavicini, and the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso of Milan, the two
Camozzis of Bergamo, and G. Martinengo Cesaresco of Brescia.
It must not be imagined that this amnesty ushered in a reign of
oblivion and mildness. It seemed, rather, that Austria, afraid of the
moral consequences of the return of so many unloving subjects,
redoubled her severity. The day following the promulgation of the
amnesty was the 18th of August, the Emperor of Austria's birthday. In
the morning, placards dissuading the citizens from taking part in the
official rejoicings were to be seen on the walls of Milan. The persons
who put these up were not caught, but in the course of the day a
crowd, consisting of all classes, made what the official report called
'a scandalous and anti-politic demonstration,' raising revolutionary
cries, and even saying uncomplimentary things of His Majesty, and
worse still, of the Austrian soldiers. During this 'shameful scene,'
of which the above is the Austrian and hence the most highly-coloured
description, the military arrested at hazard some of the crowd, who,
by a 'superior order,' were condemned to the following pains and
penalties:--
1. Angelo Negroni, of Padua, aged thirty, proprietor, forty
strokes;
2. Carlo Bossi, watchmaker, aged twenty-two, forty strokes;
3. Paolo Lodi, of Monza, student, aged twenty-one, thirty strokes;
4. Giovanni Mazzuchetti, Milanese, barrister, aged twenty-four,
thirty strokes;
5. Bonnetti, Milanese, lithographer, aged thirty-one, fifty
strokes;
6. Moretti, Milanese, domestic servant, aged twenty-six, fifty
strokes;
7. Cesana, artist, aged thirty-two, forty strokes;
8. Scotti, shopkeeper, of Monza, fifty strokes;
9. Vigorelli, Milanese, proprietor, fifty strokes;
10. Garavaglia, of Novara, aged thirty-nine, thirty strokes;
11. Giuseppe Tandea, Milanese, aged forty, twenty-five strokes;
12. Rossi, Milanese, student, thirty strokes;
13. Carabelli, workman, forty strokes;
14. Giuseppe Berlusconi, fifty strokes;
15. Ferrandi, bookseller, thirty strokes;
16. Ernestina Galli, of Cremona, operatic singer, aged twenty,
forty strokes;
17. Maria Conti, of Florence, operatic singer, aged eighteen,
thirty strokes.
There were other sentences of imprisonment in irons and on bread and
water, but the roll of the bastinado, extracted from the official
_Gazzetta di Milano_ may be left to speak for all the rest, and to
tell, with a laconicism more eloquent than the finest rhetoric, what
the Austrian yoke in Italy really meant.
A few days after, the military commandant sent the Milanese
Municipality a bill for thirty-nine florins, the cost of rods broken
or worn-out, and of ice used to prevent gangrene, in the punishment
administered to the persons arrested on the 18th of August. Sixty
strokes with the Austrian stick were generally enough to prove fatal.
Women were flogged half-naked, together with the men, and in the
presence of the Austrian officers, who came to see the spectacle.
When the treaty of peace with Austria was signed, there arose a new
difficulty; the Sardinian Chamber of Deputies refused to approve it.
Some of the deputies asked why they should be called upon either to
accept or reject it, on which they were reminded of the 75,000,000
francs indemnity, funds for the discharge of which could not be
legally raised without a parliamentary vote. The reluctance to share
in an odious though necessary responsibility made these novices in
representative government anxious to throw away the greatest, if not
the sole guarantee of constitutional freedom. Brofferio, by far the
ablest man of the extreme radical party, who had opposed all peace
proposals as long as Rome and Venice still resisted, now advised his
friends to bow before the inevitable. But they did not comply, and the
ministers had no other alternative than to resort to a fresh appeal to
the country.
The crisis was serious, because no amount of loyalty on the part of
the head of the state can save liberty when the representatives of a
nation, taking the bit between their teeth, set themselves
deliberately to work to make government impossible. People are too
fond of talking of liberty as if it were something locked up in a box
which remains safe as long as the guardian of the box does not steal
it or sell it. Liberty is in the charge of all and at the mercy of
all. There were not wanting persons who blamed the new dissolution as
unconstitutional, and who called the proclamation of Moncalieri which
announced it an act of despotism and of improper interference with the
independence of the electors. It is hardly too much to say that it was
this royal proclamation that saved Piedmont. The King appealed to
Italy and to Europe for judgment on the conduct of the late Chamber.
Having signed, he said, a 'not ruinous' treaty with Austria, which the
honour of the country and the sanctity of his word required to be
faithfully executed, the majority sought to make that execution
legally impracticable. He continued: 'I have promised to save the
nation from the tyranny of parties, whatever be the name, scope and
position of the men who constitute them. These promises I fulfil by
dissolving a Chamber which had become impossible, and by convoking the
immediate assemblage of another parliament; but if the electors of the
country deny me their help, not on me will fall henceforth the
responsibility of the future; and if disorders follow, let them
complain, not of me, but of themselves. Never, up till now, has the
House of Savoy had recourse in vain to the faithfulness, wisdom and
honour of its peoples. I have therefore the right to trust in them on
the present occasion, and to hold for certain that, united together,
we shall save the constitution and the country from the dangers by
which they are menaced.'
The Proclamation produced a great effect, and the parliament which met
on the 20th of December contained a working majority of men who were
not only patriotic, but who were also endowed with common sense. When
the ratification of the peace came on for discussion, there was,
indeed, one deputy who spoke in favour of immediate war, which, in a
fortnight, was to effect the liberation, not only of Lombardy and
Venetia, but also of Hungary, a speech worth recalling, as it shows
how far madness will go. The debate concluded with a vote authorising
the King's government to fully carry out the treaty of peace which was
concluded at Milan on the 6th of August 1849, the ayes being 137
against 17 noes. Piedmont had learnt the bitter but useful lesson,
that if you play and lose, you must pay the cost.
He who had played and lost his crown had already paid the last fee to
fortune. Charles Albert was now a denizen of the Superga--of all
kings' burial places, the most inspiring in its history, the most
sublime in its situation. Here Victor Amadeus, as he looked down on
the great French army which, for three months, had besieged his
capital, vowed to erect a temple if it should please the Lord of Hosts
to grant him and his people deliverance from the hands of the enemy.
Five days later the French were in flight. All the Alps, from Mon Viso
to the Simplon, all Piedmont, and beyond Piedmont, Italy to the
Apennines, can be scanned from the church which fulfilled the royal
vow.
To the Superga the body of Charles Albert was brought from the place
of exile. Before the coffin, his sword was carried; after it, they led
the war-horse he had ridden in all the battles. After the war-horse
followed a great multitude. He had said truly that it was an opportune
time for him to die. The pathos of his end rekindled the affections of
the people for the dynasty.
As in the Mosque of dead Sultans in Stamboul, so in the Mausoleum of
the Superga, each sovereign occupied the post of honour only till the
next one came to join him. But the post of honour remains, and will
remain, to Charles Albert. His son lies elsewhere.