A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878 Part 50

[Alexander Cuza Hospodar of both Provinces.]

[Complete Union, 1862.]

[Charles of Hohenzollern, Hereditary Prince, 1866.]

Among the devotees of the Turk the English Ministers were the most impa.s.sioned, having indeed in the possession of India some excuse for their fervour on behalf of any imaginable obstacle that would keep the Russians out of Constantinople. The Emperor of the French had during the Conferences at Paris revived his project of incorporating the Danubian Princ.i.p.alities with Austria in return for the cession of Lombardy, but the Viennese Government had declined to enter into any such arrangement. Napoleon consequently entered upon a new Eastern policy. Appreciating the growing force of nationality in European affairs, and imagining that in the championship of the principle of nationality against the Treaties of 1815 he would sooner or later find means for the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of himself and France, he proposed that the Provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, while remaining in dependence upon the Sultan, should be united into a single State under a prince chosen by themselves. The English Ministry would not hear of this union. In their view the creation of a Roumanian Princ.i.p.ality under a chief not appointed by the Porte was simply the abstraction from the Sultan of six million persons who at present acknowledged his suzerainty, and whose tribute to Constantinople ought, according to Lord Clarendon, to be increased. [483] Austria, fearing the effect of a Roumanian national movement upon its own Roumanian subjects in Transylvania, joined in resistance to Napoleon's scheme, and the political organisation of the Princ.i.p.alities was in consequence reserved by the Conference of Paris for future settlement. Elections were held in the spring of 1857 under a decree from the Porte, with the result that Moldavia, as it seemed, p.r.o.nounced against union with the sister province.

But the complaint at once arose that the Porte had falsified the popular vote. France and Russia had now established relations of such amity that their amba.s.sadors jointly threatened to quit Constantinople if the elections were not annulled. A visit paid by the French Emperor to Queen Victoria, with the object of smoothing over the difficulties which had begun to threaten the Western alliance, resulted rather in increased misunderstandings between the two Governments as to the future of the Princ.i.p.alities than in any real agreement. The elections were annulled. New representative bodies met at Bucharest and Ja.s.sy, and p.r.o.nounced almost unanimously for union (October, 1857). In the spring of 1858 the Conference of Paris rea.s.sembled in order to frame a final settlement of the affairs of the Princ.i.p.alities. It determined that in each Province there should be a Hospodar elected for life, a separate judicature, and a separate legislative a.s.sembly, while a central Commission, formed by representatives of both Provinces, should lay before the a.s.semblies projects of law on matters of joint interest. In accordance with these provisions, a.s.semblies were elected in each Princ.i.p.ality at the beginning of 1859. Their first duty was to choose the two Hospodars, but in both Provinces a unanimous vote fell upon the same person, Prince Alexander Cuza. The efforts of England and Austria to prevent union were thus baffled by the Roumanian people itself, and after three years the elaborate arrangements made by the Conference were similarly swept away, and a single Ministry and a.s.sembly took the place of the dual Government. It now remained only to subst.i.tute a hereditary Prince for a Hospodar elected for life; and in 1866, on the expulsion of Alexander Cuza by his subjects, Prince Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a distant kinsman of the reigning Prussian sovereign, was recognised by all Europe as Hereditary Prince of Roumania.

The suzerainty of the Porte, now reduced to the bare right to receive a fixed tribute, was fated to last but for a few years longer.

[Continued discord in Turkish Empire.]

[Revision of the Treaty of Paris, 1871.]

Europe had not to wait for the establishment of Roumanian independence in order to judge of the foresight and the statesmanship of the authors of the Treaty of Paris. Scarcely a year pa.s.sed without the occurrence of some event that cast ridicule upon the fiction of a self-regenerated Turkey, and upon the profession of the Powers that the epoch of external interference in its affairs was at an end. The active misgovernment of the Turkish authorities themselves, their powerlessness or want of will to prevent flagrant outrage and wrong among those whom they professed to rule, continued after the Treaty of Paris to be exactly what they had been before it. In 1860 ma.s.sacres and civil war in Mount Lebanon led to the occupation of Syria by French troops. In 1861 Bosnia and Herzegovina took up arms. In 1863 Servia expelled its Turkish garrisons. Crete, rising in the following year, fought long for its independence, and seemed for a moment likely to be united with Greece under the auspices of the Powers, but it was finally abandoned to its Ottoman masters. At the end of fourteen years from the signature of the Peace of Paris, the downfall of the French Empire enabled Russia to declare that it would no longer recognise the provisions of the Treaty which excluded its war-ships and its a.r.s.enals from the Black Sea. It was for this, and for this almost alone, that England had gone through the Crimean War. But for the determination of Lord Palmerston to exclude Russia from the Black Sea, peace might have been made while the Allied armies were still at Varna. This exclusion was alleged to be necessary in the interests of Europe at large; that it was really enforced not in the interest of Europe but in the interest of England was made sufficiently clear by the action of Austria and Prussia, whose statesmen, in spite of the discourses so freely addressed to them from London, were at least as much alive to the interests of their respective countries as Lord Palmerston could be on their behalf. Nor had France in 1854 any interest in crippling the power of Russia, or in Eastern affairs generally, which could be remotely compared with those of the possessors of India. The personal needs of Napoleon III.

made him, while he seemed to lead, the instrument of the British Government for enforcing British aims, and so gave to Palmerston the momentary shaping of a new and superficial concert of the Powers. Masters of Sebastopol, the Allies had experienced little difficulty in investing their own conclusions with the seeming authority of Europe at large; but to bring the representatives of Austria and Prussia to a Council-table, to hand them the pen to sign a Treaty dictated by France and England, was not to bind them to a policy which was not their own, or to make those things interests of Austria and Prussia which were not their interests before. Thus when in 1870 the French Empire fell, England stood alone as the Power concerned in maintaining the exclusion of Russia from the Euxine, and this exclusion it could enforce no longer. It was well that Palmerston had made the Treaty of Paris the act of Europe, but not for the reasons which Palmerston had imagined. The fiction had engendered no new relation in fact; it did not prolong for one hour the submission of Russia after it had ceased to be confronted in the West by a superior force; but it enabled Great Britain to retire without official humiliation from a position which it had conquered only through the help of an accidental Alliance, and which it was unable to maintain alone. The ghost of the Conference of 1856 was, as it were, conjured up in the changed world of 1871. The same forms which had once stamped with the seal of Europe the instrument of restraint upon Russia now as decorously executed its release. Britain accepted what Europe would not resist; and below the slopes where lay the countless dead of three nations Sebastopol rose from its ruins, and the ensign of Russia floated once more over its ships of war.

CHAPTER XXII.

Piedmont after 1849--Ministry of Azeglio--Cavour Prime Minister--Designs of Cavour--His Crimean Policy--Cavour at the Conference of Paris--Cavour and Napoleon III.--The Meeting at Plombieres--Preparations in Italy--Treaty of January, 1859--Attempts at Mediation--Austrian Ultimatum--Campaign of 1859--Magenta--Movement in Central Italy--Solferino--Napoleon and Prussia --Interview of Villafranca--Cavour resigns--Peace of Zurich--Central Italy after Villafranca--The Proposed Congress--"The Pope and the Congress"-- Cavour resumes office--Cavour and Napoleon--Union of the Duchies and the Romagna with Piedmont--Savoy and Nice added to France--Cavour on this cession--European opinion--Naples--Sicily--Garibaldi lands at Marsala-- Capture of Palermo--The Neapolitans evacuate Sicily--Cavour and the Party of Action--Cavour's Policy as to Naples--Garibaldi on the Mainland--Persano and Villamarina at Naples--Garibaldi at Naples--The Piedmontese Army enters Umbria and the Marches--Fall of Ancona--Garibaldi and Cavour--The Armies on the Volturno--Fall of Gaeta--Cavour's Policy with regard to Rome and Venice--Death of Cavour--The Free Church in the Free State.

[Piedmont after 1849.]

In the gloomy years that followed 1849 the kingdom of Sardinia had stood out in bright relief as a State which, though crushed on the battle-field, had remained true to the cause of liberty while all around it the forces of reaction gained triumph after triumph. Its King had not the intellectual gifts of the maker of a great State, but he was one with whom those possessed of such gifts could work, and on whom they could depend. With certain grave private faults Victor Emmanuel had the public virtues of intense patriotism, of loyalty to his engagements and to his Ministers, of devotion to a single great aim. Little given to speculative thought, he saw what it most concerned him to see, that Piedmont by making itself the home of liberty could become the Master-State of Italy. His courage on the battlefield, splendid and animating as it was, distinguished him less than another kind of courage peculiarly his own. Ignorant and superst.i.tious, he had that rare and masculine quality of soul which in the anguish of bereavement and on the verge of the unseen world remains proof against the appeal and against the terrors of a voice speaking with more than human authority. Rome, not less than Austria, stood across the path that led to Italian freedom, and employed all its art, all its spiritual force, to turn Victor Emmanuel from the work that lay before him. There were moments in his life when a man of not more than common weakness might well have flinched from the line of conduct on which he had resolved in hours of strength and of insight; there were times when a less constant mind might well have wavered and cast a balance between opposing systems of policy. It was not through heroic greatness that Victor Emmanuel rendered his priceless services to Italy. He was a man not conspicuously cast in a different mould from many another plain, strong nature, but the qualities which he possessed were precisely those which Italy required. Fortune, circ.u.mstance, position favoured him and made his glorious work possible; but what other Italian prince of this century, though placed on the throne of Piedmont, and numbering Cavour among his subjects, would have played the part, the simple yet all momentous part, which Victor Emmanuel played so well? The love and the grat.i.tude of Italy have been lavished without stint on the memory of its first sovereign, who served his nation with qualities of so homely a type, and in whose life there was so much that needed pardon. The colder judgment of a later time will hardly contest the t.i.tle of Victor Emmanuel to be ranked among those few men without whom Italian union would not have been achieved for another generation.

[Ministry of Azeglio, 1849-52.]

[Cavour Prime Minister, 1852.]

On the conclusion of peace with Austria after the campaign of Novara, the Government and the Parliament of Turin addressed themselves to the work of emanc.i.p.ating the State from the system of ecclesiastical privilege and clerical ascendency which had continued in full vigour down to the last year of Charles Albert's reign. Since 1814 the Church had maintained, or had recovered, both in Piedmont and in the island of Sardinia, rights which had been long wrested from it in other European societies, and which were out of harmony with the Const.i.tution now taking root under Victor Emmanuel.

The clergy had still their own tribunals, and even in the case of criminal offences were not subject to the jurisdiction of the State. The Bishops possessed excessive powers and too large a share of the Church revenues; the parochial clergy lived in want; monasteries and convents abounded. It was not in any spirit of hostility towards the Church that Ma.s.simo d'Azeglio, whom the King called to office after Novara, commenced the work of reform by measures subjecting the clergy to the law-courts of the State, abolishing the right of sanctuary in monasteries, and limiting the power of corporations to acquire landed property. If the Papacy would have met Victor Emmanuel in a fair spirit his Government would gladly have avoided a dangerous and exasperating struggle; but all the forces and the pa.s.sions of Ultramontanism were brought to bear against the proposed reforms. The result was that the Minister, abandoned by a section of the Conservative party on whom he had relied, sought the alliance of men ready for a larger and bolder policy, and called to office the foremost of those from whom he had received an independent support in the Chamber, Count Cavour. Entering the Cabinet in 1850 as Minister of Commerce, Cavour rapidly became the master of all his colleagues. On his own responsibility he sought and won the support of the more moderate section of the Opposition, headed by Rattazzi; and after a brief withdrawal from office, caused by divisions within the Cabinet, he returned to power in October, 1852, as Prime Minister.

[Cavour.]

Cavour, though few men have gained greater fame as diplomatists, had not been trained in official life. The younger son of a n.o.ble family, he had entered the army in 1826, and served in the Engineers; but his sympathies with the liberal movement of 1830 brought him into extreme disfavour with his chiefs. He was described by Charles Albert, then Prince of Carignano, as the most dangerous man in the kingdom, and was transferred at the instance of his own father to the solitary Alpine fortress of Bard. Too vigorous a nature to submit to inaction, too buoyant and too sagacious to resort to conspiracy, he quitted the army, and soon afterwards undertook the management of one of the family estates, devoting himself to scientific agriculture on a large scale. He was a keen and successful man of business, but throughout the next twelve years, which he pa.s.sed in fruitful private industry, his mind dwelt ardently on public affairs. He was filled with a deep discontent at the state of society which he saw around him in Piedmont, and at the condition of Italy at large under foreign and clerical rule. Repeated visits to France and England made him familiar with the inst.i.tutions of freer lands, and gave definiteness to his political and social aims. [484] In 1847, when changes were following fast, he founded with some other Liberal n.o.bles the journal _Risorgimento_, devoted to the cause of national revival; and he was one of the first who called upon King Charles Albert to grant a Const.i.tution. During the stormy days of 1848 he was at once the vigorous advocate of war with Austria and the adversary of Republicans and Extremists who for their own theories seemed willing to plunge Italy into anarchy. Though unpopular with the mob, he was elected to the Chamber by Turin, and continued to represent the capital after the peace. Up to this time there had been little opportunity for the proof of his extraordinary powers, but the inborn sagacity of Victor Emmanuel had already discerned in him a man who could not remain in a subordinate position. "You will see him turn you all out of your places," the King remarked to his Ministers, as he gave his a.s.sent to Cavour's first appointment to a seat in the Cabinet.

[Plans of Cavour.]

[Cavour's Crimean policy.]

The Ministry of Azeglio had served Piedmont with honour from 1849 to 1852, but its leader scarcely possessed the daring and fertility of mind which the time required. Cavour threw into the work of government a pa.s.sion and intelligence which soon produced results visible to all Europe. His devotion to Italy was as deep, as all-absorbing, as that of Mazzini himself, though the methods and schemes of the two men were in such complete antagonism. Cavour's fixed purpose was to drive Austria out of Italy by defeat in the battle-field, and to establish, as the first step towards national union, a powerful kingdom of Northern Italy under Victor Emmanuel. In order that the military and naval forces of Piedmont might be raised to the highest possible strength and efficiency, he saw that the resources of the country must be largely developed; and with this object he negotiated commercial treaties with Foreign Powers, laid down railways, and suppressed the greater part of the monasteries, selling their lands to cultivators, and devoting the proceeds of sale not to State-purposes but to the payment of the working clergy. Industry advanced; the heavy pressure of taxation was patiently borne; the army and the fleet grew apace. But the cause of Piedmont was one with that of the Italian nation, and it became its Government to demonstrate this day by day with no faltering voice or hand. Protection and support were given to fugitives from Austrian and Papal tyranny; the Press was laid open to every tale of wrong; and when, after an unsuccessful attempt at insurrection in Milan in 1853, for which Mazzini and the Republican exiles were alone responsible, the Austrian Government sequestrated the property of its subjects who would not return from Piedmont, Cavour bade his amba.s.sador quit Vienna, and appealed to every Court in Europe. Nevertheless, Cavour did not believe that Italy, even by a simultaneous rising, could permanently expel the Austrian armies or conquer the Austrian fortresses. The experience of forty years pointed to the opposite conclusion; and while Mazzini in his exile still imagined that a people needed only to determine to be free in order to be free, Cavour schemed for an alliance which should range against the Austrian Emperor armed forces as numerous and as disciplined as his own. It was mainly with this object that Cavour plunged Sardinia into the Crimean War.

He was not without just causes of complaint against the Czar; but the motive with which he sent the Sardinian troops to Sebastopol was not that they might take vengeance on Russia, but that they might fight side by side with the soldiers of England and France. That the war might lead to complications still unforeseen was no doubt a possibility present to Cavour's mind, and in that case it was no small thing that Sardinia stood allied to the two Western Powers; but apart from these chances of the future, Sardinia would have done ill to stand idle when at any moment, as it seemed, Austria might pa.s.s from armed neutrality into active concert with England and France. Had Austria so drawn the sword against Russia whilst Piedmont stood inactive, the influence of the Western Powers must for some years to come have been ranged on the side of Austria in the maintenance of its Italian possessions, and Piedmont could at the best have looked only to St. Petersburg for sympathy or support. Cavour was not scrupulous in his choice of means when the liberation of Italy was the end in view, and the charge was made against him that in joining the coalition against Russia he lightly entered into a war in which Piedmont had no direct concern. But reason and history absolve, and far more than absolve, the Italian statesman. If the cause of European equilibrium, for which England and France took up arms, was a legitimate ground of war in the case of these two Powers, it was not less so in the case of their ally; while if the ulterior results rather than the motive of a war are held to const.i.tute its justification, Cavour stands out as the one politician in Europe whose aims in entering upon the Crimean War have been fulfilled, not mocked, by events. He joined in the struggle against Russia not in order to maintain the Ottoman Empire, but to gain an ally in liberating Italy. The Ottoman Empire has not been maintained; the independence of Italy has been established, and established by means of the alliance which Cavour gained.

His Crimean policy is one of those excessively rare instances of statesmanship where action has been determined not by the driving and half-understood necessities of the moment, but by a distinct and true perception of the future. He looked only in one direction, but in that direction he saw clearly. Other statesmen struck blindfold, or in their vision of a regenerated Turkey fought for an empire of mirage. It may with some reason be asked whether the order of Eastern Europe would now be different if our own English soldiers who fell at Balaclava had been allowed to die in their beds: every Italian whom Cavour sent to perish on the Tchernaya or in the cholera-stricken camp died as directly for the cause of Italian independence as if he had fallen on the slopes of Custozza or under the walls of Rome.

[Cavour at the Conference of Paris.]

[Change of Austrian policy, 1856.]

At the Conference of Paris in 1856 the Sardinian Premier took his place in right of alliance by the side of the representatives of the great Powers; and when the main business of the Conference was concluded, Count Buol, the Austrian Minister, was forced to listen to a vigorous denunciation by Cavour of the misgovernment that reigned in Central and Southern Italy, of the Austrian occupation which rendered this possible. Though the French were still in Rome, their presence might by courtesy be described as a measure of precaution rendered necessary by the intrusion of the Austrians farther north; and both the French and English plenipotentiaries at the Conference supported Cavour in his invective. Cavour returned to Italy without any territorial reward for the services that Piedmont had rendered to the Allies; but his object was attained. He had exhibited Austria isolated and discredited before Europe; he had given to his country a voice that it had never before had in the Councils of the Powers; he had produced a deep conviction throughout Italy that Piedmont not only could and would act with vigour against the national enemy, but that in its action it would have the help of allies. From this time the Republican and Mazzinian societies lost ground before the growing confidence in the House of Savoy, in its Minister and its army. [485] The strongest evidence of the effect of Cavour's Crimean policy and of his presence at the Conference of Paris was seen in the action of the Austrian Government itself. From 1849 to 1856 its rule in Northern Italy had been one not so much of severity as of brutal violence. Now all was changed. The Emperor came to Milan to proclaim a general amnesty and to win the affection of his subjects. The sequestrated estates were restored to their owners. Radetzky, in his ninety-second year, was at length allowed to pa.s.s into retirement; the government of the sword was declared at an end; Maximilian, the gentlest and most winning of the Hapsburgs, was sent with his young bride to charm away the sad memories of the evil time. But it was too late. The recognition shown by the Lombards of the Emperor's own personal friendliness indicated no reconciliation with Austria; and while Francis Joseph was still in Milan, King Victor Emmanuel, in the presence of a Lombard deputation, laid the first stone of the monument erected by subscriptions from all Italy in memory of those who had fallen in the campaigns of 1848 and 1849, the statue of a foot-soldier waving his sword towards the Austrian frontier. The Sardinian Press redoubled its attacks on Austria and its Italian va.s.sals. The Government of Vienna sought satisfaction; Cavour sharply refused it; and diplomatic relations between the two Courts, which had been resumed since the Conference of Paris, were again broken off.

[Cavour and Napoleon III.]

[Meeting at Plombieres, July, 1858.]

Of the two Western Powers, Cavour would have preferred an alliance with Great Britain, which had no objects of its own to seek in Italy; but when he found that the Government of London would not a.s.sist him by arms against Austria, he drew closer to the Emperor Napoleon, and supported him throughout his controversy with England and Austria on the settlement of the Danubian Princ.i.p.alities. Napoleon, there is no doubt, felt a real interest in Italy. His own early political theories formed on a study of the Napoleonic Empire, his youthful alliance with the Carbonari, point to a sympathy with the Italian national cause which was genuine if not profound, and which was not altogether lost in 1849, though France then acted as the enemy of Roman independence. If Napoleon intended to remould the Continental order and the Treaties of 1815 in the interests of France and of the principle of nationality, he could make no better beginning than by driving Austria from Northern Italy. It was not even necessary for him to devise an original policy. Early in 1848, when it seemed probable that Piedmont would be increased by Lombardy and part of Venetia, Lamartine had laid it down that France ought in that case to be compensated by Savoy, in order to secure its frontiers against so powerful a neighbour as the new Italian State. To this idea Napoleon returned. Savoy had been incorporated with France from 1792 to 1814; its people were more French than Italian; its annexation would not directly injure the interests of any great Power.

Of the three directions in which France might stretch towards its old limits of the Alps and the Rhine, the direction of Savoy was by far the least dangerous. Belgium could not be touched without certain loss of the English alliance, with which Napoleon could not yet dispense; an attack upon the Rhenish Provinces would probably be met by all the German Powers together; in Savoy alone was there the chance of gaining territory without raising a European coalition against France. No sooner had the organisation of the Danubian Princ.i.p.alities been completed by the Conference which met in the spring of 1858 than Napoleon began to develop his Italian plans. An attempt of a very terrible character which was made upon his life by Orsini, a Roman exile, though at the moment it threatened to embroil Sardinia with France, probably stimulated him to action. In the summer of 1858 he invited Cavour to meet him at Plombieres. The negotiations which there pa.s.sed were not made known by the Emperor to his Ministers; they were communicated by Cavour to two persons only besides Victor Emmanuel. It seems that no written engagement was drawn up; it was verbally agreed that if Piedmont could, without making a revolutionary war, and without exposing Napoleon to the charge of aggression, incite Austria to hostilities, France would act as its ally. Austria was then to be expelled from Venetia as well as from Lombardy. Victor Emmanuel was to become sovereign of North-Italy, with the Roman Legations and Marches; the remainder of the Papal territory, except Rome itself and the adjacent district, was to be added to Tuscany, so const.i.tuting a new kingdom of Central Italy. The two kingdoms, together with Naples and Rome, were to form an Italian Confederation under the presidency of the Pope. France was to receive Savoy and possibly Nice. A marriage between the King's young daughter Clotilde and the Emperor's cousin Prince Jerome Napoleon was discussed, if not actually settled. [486]

[Cavour in view of the French Alliance.]

From this moment Cavour laboured night and day for war. His position was an exceedingly difficult one. Not only had he to reckon with the irresolution of Napoleon, and his avowed unwillingness to take up arms unless with the appearance of some good cause; but even supposing the goal of war reached, and Austria defeated, how little was there in common between Cavour's aims for Italy and the traditional policy of France! The first Napoleon had given Venice to Austria at Campo Formio; even if the new Napoleon should fulfil his promise and liberate all Northern Italy, his policy in regard to the centre and south of the Peninsula would probably be antagonistic to any effective union or to any further extension of the influence of the House of Savoy. Cavour had therefore to set in readiness for action national forces of such strength that Napoleon, even if he desired to draw back, should find it difficult to do so, and that the shaping of the future of the Italian people should be governed not by the schemes which the Emperor might devise at Paris, but by the claims and the aspirations of Italy itself. It was necessary for him not only to encourage and subsidise the National Society--a secret a.s.sociation whose branches in the other Italian States were preparing to a.s.sist Piedmont in the coming war, and to unite Italy under the House of Savoy--but to enter into communication with some of the Republican or revolutionary party who had hitherto been at enmity with all Crowns alike. He summoned Garibaldi in secrecy to Turin, and there convinced him that the war about to be waged by Victor Emmanuel was one in which he ought to take a prominent part. As the foremost defender of the Roman Republic and a revolutionary hero, Garibaldi was obnoxious to the French Emperor. Cavour had to conceal from Napoleon the fact that Garibaldi would take the field at the head of a free-corps by the side of the Allied armies; he had similarly to conceal from Garibaldi that one result of the war would be the cession of Nice, his own birthplace, to France. Thus plunged in intrigue, driving his Savoyards to the camp and raising from them the last farthing in taxation, in order that after victory they might be surrendered to a Foreign Power; goading Austria to some act of pa.s.sion; inciting, yet checking and controlling, the Italian revolutionary elements; bargaining away the daughter of his sovereign to one of the most odious of mankind, Cavour staked all on the one great end of his being, the establishment of Italian independence. Words like those which burst from Danton in the storms of the Convention--"Perish my name, my reputation, so that France be free"--were the calm and habitual expression of Cavour's thought when none but an intimate friend was by to hear. [487] Such tasks as Cavour's are not to be achieved without means which, to a man n.o.ble in view as Cavour really was, it would have been more agreeable to leave unemployed. Those alone are ent.i.tled to p.r.o.nounce judgment upon him who have made a nation, and made it with purer hands. It was well for English statesmen and philanthropists, inheritors of a world-wide empire, to enforce the ethics of peace and to plead for a gentlemanlike frankness and self-restraint in the conduct of international relations. English women had not been flogged by Austrian soldiers in the market-place; the treaties of 1815 had not consecrated a foreign rule over half our race. To Cavour the greatest crime would have been to leave anything undone which might minister to Italy's liberation. [488]

[Treaty of January, 1859.]

[Attempts at mediation.]

[Austrian ultimatum, April 23.]

Napoleon seems to have considered that he would be ready to begin war in the spring of 1859. At the reception at the Tuileries on the 1st of January he addressed the Austrian amba.s.sador in words that pointed to an approaching conflict; a few weeks later a marriage-contract was signed between Prince Napoleon and Clotilde, daughter of Victor Emmanuel, and part of the agreement made at Plombieres was embodied in a formal Treaty.

Napoleon undertook to support Sardinia in a war that might arise from any aggressive act on the part of Austria, and, if victorious, to add both Lombardy and Venetia to Victor Emmanuel's dominions. France was in return to receive Savoy, the disposal of Nice being reserved till the restoration of peace. [489] Even before the Treaty was signed Victor Emmanuel had thrown down the challenge to Austria, declaring at the opening of the Parliament of Turin that he could not be insensible to the cry of suffering that rose from Italy. In all but technical form the imminence of war had been announced, when, under the influence of diplomatists and Ministers about him, and of a financial panic that followed his address to the Austrian amba.s.sador, the irresolute mind of Napoleon shrank from its purpose, and months more of suspense were imposed upon Italy and Europe, to be terminated at last not by any effort of Napoleon's will but by the rash and impolitic action of Austria itself. At the instance of the Court of Vienna the British Government had consented to take steps towards mediation. Lord Cowley, Amba.s.sador at Paris, was sent to Vienna with proposals which, it was believed, might form the basis for an amicable settlement of Italian affairs. He asked that the Papal States should be evacuated by both Austrian and French troops; that Austria should abandon the Treaties which gave it a virtual Protectorate over Modena and Parma; and that it should consent to the introduction of reforms in all the Italian Governments. Negotiations towards this end had made some progress when they were interrupted by a proposal sent from St. Petersburg, at the instance of Napoleon, that Italian affairs should be submitted to a European Congress. Austria was willing under certain conditions to take part in a Congress, but it required, as a preliminary measure, that Sardinia should disarm. Napoleon had now learnt that Garibaldi was to fight at the head of the volunteers for Victor Emmanuel. His doubts as to the wisdom of his own policy seem to have increased hour by hour; from Britain, whose friendship he still considered indispensable to him, he received the most urgent appeals against war; it was necessary that Cavour himself should visit Paris in order to prevent the Emperor from acquiescing in Austria's demand. In Cavour's presence Napoleon seems to have lost some of his fears, or to have been made to feel that it was not safe to provoke his confidant of Plombieres; [490] but Cavour had not long left Paris when a proposal was made from London, that in lieu of the separate disarmament of Sardinia the Powers should agree to a general disarmament, the details to be settled by a European Commission. This proposal received Napoleon's a.s.sent. He telegraphed to Cavour desiring him to join in the agreement.

Cavour could scarcely disobey, yet at one stroke it seemed that all his hopes when on the very verge of fulfilment were dashed to the ground, all his boundless efforts for the liberation of Italy through war with Austria lost and thrown away. For some hours he appeared shattered by the blow.

Strung to the extreme point of human endurance by labour scarcely remitted by day or night for weeks together, his strong but sanguine nature gave way, and for a while the few friends who saw him feared that he would take his own life. But the crisis pa.s.sed: Cavour accepted, as inevitable, the condition of general disarmament; and his vigorous mind had already begun to work upon new plans for the future, when the report of a decision made at Vienna, which was soon confirmed by the arrival of an Austrian ultimatum, threw him into joy as intense as his previous despair. Ignoring the British proposal for a general disarmament, already accepted at Turin, the Austrian Cabinet demanded, without qualifications and under threat of war within three days, that Sardinia should separately disarm. It was believed at Vienna that Napoleon was merely seeking to gain time; that a conflict was inevitable; and that Austria now stood better prepared for immediate action than its enemies. Right or wrong in its judgment of Napoleon's real intentions, the Austrian Government had undeniably taken upon itself the part of the aggressor. Cavour had only to point to his own acceptance of the plan of a general disarmament, and to throw upon his enemy the responsibility for a disturbance of European peace. His reply was taken as the signal for hostilities, and on the 29th of April Austrian troops crossed the Ticino. A declaration of war from Paris followed without delay. [491]

[Campaign of 1859.]

[Battle of Magenta, June 4.]

For months past Austria had been pouring its troops into Northern Italy. It had chosen its own time for the commencement of war; a feeble enemy stood before it, its more powerful adversary could not reach the field without crossing the Alps or the mountain-range above Genoa. Everything pointed to a vigorous offensive on the part of the Austrian generals, and in Piedmont itself it was believed that Turin must fall before French troops could a.s.sist in its defence. From Turin as a centre the Austrians could then strike with ease, and with superior numbers, against the detachments of the French army as they descended the mountains at any points in the semicircle from Genoa to Mont Cenis. There has seldom been a case where the necessity and the advantages of a particular line of strategy have been so obvious; yet after crossing the Ticino the Austrians, above a hundred thousand strong, stood as if spell-bound under their incompetent chief, Giulay.

Meanwhile French detachments crossed Mont Cenis; others, more numerous, landed with the Emperor at Genoa, and established communications with the Piedmontese, whose headquarters were at Alessandria. Giulay now believed that the Allies would strike upon his communications in the direction of Parma. The march of Bonaparte upon Piacenza in 1796, as well as the campaign of Marengo, might well inspire this fear; but the real intention of Napoleon III. was to outflank the Austrians from the north and so to gain Milan. Garibaldi was already operating at the extreme left of the Sardinian line in the neighbourhood of Como. While the Piedmontese maintained their positions in the front, the French from Genoa marched northwards behind them, crossed the Po, and reached Vercelli before the Austrians discovered their manoeuvre. Giulay, still lingering between the Sesia and the Ticino, now called up part of his forces northwards, but not in time to prevent the Piedmontese from crossing the Sesia and defeating the troops opposed to them at Palestro (May 30). While the Austrians were occupied at this point, the French crossed the river farther north, and moved eastwards on the Ticino. Giulay was thus outflanked and compelled to fall back. The Allies followed him, and on the 4th of June attacked the Austrian army in its positions about Magenta on the road to Milan. The a.s.sault of Macmahon from the north gave the Allies victory after a hard-fought day. It was impossible for the Austrians to defend Milan; they retired upon the Adda and subsequently upon the Mincio, abandoning all Lombardy to the invaders, and calling up their troops from Bologna and the other occupied towns in the Papal States, in order that they might take part in the defence of the Venetian frontier and the fortresses that guarded it.

[Movement in Central Italy.]

The victory of the Allies was at once felt throughout Central Italy. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had already fled from his dominions, and the Dictatorship for the period of the war had been offered by a Provisional Government to Victor Emmanuel, who, while refusing this, had allowed his envoy, Boncampagni, to a.s.sume temporary powers at Florence as his representative. The Duke of Modena and the d.u.c.h.ess of Parma now quitted their territories. In the Romagna the disappearance of the Austrians resulted in the immediate overthrow of Papal authority. Everywhere the demand was for union with Piedmont. The calamities of the last ten years had taught their lesson to the Italian people. There was now nothing of the disorder, the extravagance, the childishness of 1848. The populations who had then been so divided, so suspicious, so easy a prey to demagogues, were now watchful, self-controlled, and anxious for the guidance of the only real national Government. As at Florence, so in the Duchies and in the Romagna, it was desired that Victor Emmanuel should a.s.sume the Dictatorship. The King adhered to the policy which he had adopted towards Tuscany, avoiding any engagement that might compromise him with Europe or his ally, but appointing Commissioners to enrol troops for the common war against Austria and to conduct the necessary work of administration in those districts. Farini, the historian of the Roman States, was sent to Modena; Azeglio, the ex-Minister, to Bologna. Each of these officers entered on his task in a spirit worthy of the time; each understood how much might be won for Italy by boldness, how much endangered or lost by untimely scruples. [492]

[Battle of Solferino, June 24.]

In his proclamations at the opening of the war Napoleon had declared that Italy must be freed up to the sh.o.r.e of the Adriatic. His address to the Italian people on entering Milan with Victor Emmanuel after the victory of Magenta breathed the same spirit. As yet, however, Lombardy alone had been won. The advance of the allied armies was accordingly resumed after an interval of some days, and on the 23rd of June they approached the positions held by the Austrians a little to the west of the Mincio. Francis Joseph had come from Vienna to take command of the army. His presence a.s.sisted the enemy, inasmuch as he had no plan of his own, and wavered from day to day between the antagonistic plans of the generals at headquarters.

Some wished to make the Mincio the line of defence, others to hold the Chiese some miles farther west. The consequence was that the army marched backwards and forwards across the s.p.a.ce between the two rivers according as one or another general gained for the moment the Emperor's confidence. It was while the Austrians were thus engaged that the allied armies came into contact with them about Solferino. On neither side was it known that the whole force of the enemy was close at hand. The battle of Solferino, one of the bloodiest of recent times, was fought almost by accident. About a hundred and fifty thousand men were present under Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; the Austrians had a slight superiority in force. On the north, where Benedek with the Austrian right was attacked by the Piedmontese at San Martino, it seemed as if the task imposed on the Italian troops was beyond their power. Victor Emmanuel, fighting with the same courage as at Novara, saw the positions in front of his troops alternately won and lost.

But the success of the French at Solferino in the centre decided the day, and the Austrians withdrew at last from their whole line with a loss in killed and wounded of fourteen thousand men. On the part of the Allies the slaughter was scarcely less.

[Napoleon and Prussia.]

[Interview of Villafranca, July 11.]

[Peace of Villafranca.]