Whatever purpose Napoleon had in view, he was induced, at last, by the British Government to desist from prolonging a struggle which could only end in one way. The French fleet was withdrawn in January 1861, and Gaeta capitulated on February 13. King Francis began the sad life of exile, which closed a few years ago at Arco. The true Bourbon takes misfortune easily; the pleasures of a mock court are dear to him, his spirits never fail, nor does his appetite. But Francis II., the son of a Savoyard mother, never consoled himself for the loss of country and crown.
Cavour hoped that with the fall of Gaeta the state of the old Regno would rapidly improve, but another citadel remained to the reaction—Rome, whence the campaign against unity continued to be directed. A veritable terreur blanche, called by one side brigandage, by the other a holy war, possessed the hills from Vesuvius to the Sila forest. But though there were several foreign noblemen who took part in it, not one Neapolitan of respectability or standing joined the insurgents. The general elections showed in the south, as over the whole country, a large majority pledged to support Cavour. The first act of the new Chamber was to vote the assumption of the title of King of Italy by Victor Emmanuel. The king might have assumed the title a year before with more correctness than the Longobard kings of Italy or the First Consul, but he did well to wait till none could gainsay his right to it. Some faddists proposed to substitute "King of the Italians." Cavour replied that the title of King of Italy was the consecration of a great fact: the transformation of the country, whose very existence as a nation was denied, into the kingdom of Italy. It condensed into one word the history of the work achieved. On the proclamation of the new kingdom Cavour resigned office; Victor Emmanuel, who was never really at his ease with Cavour, thought of accepting in earnest what was done as a matter of form, but Ricasoli dissuaded him from the idea. The Cavour ministry therefore returned to office, with a few modifications.
The new Chamber represented all Italy, except Rome and Venice. From Villafranca to his death, Venice was never out of Cavour's mind. He kept in touch with the revolutionary forces in Hungary, and Kossuth believed to the last that, if Cavour had lived, he would have compassed the liberation of both Hungary and Venetia within the year 1862. He would have supported Lord John Russell's plan, which was that Italy should buy the Herzegovina and give it to Austria in exchange for Venetia, but, on the whole, he thought that the most likely solution was war, in which Prussia and Italy were ranged on the same side. He, almost alone, rated at its true value the latent military force of Prussia. He had a knack of calling Prussia "Germany," as he used to call Piedmont "Italy." He turned off the furious remonstrances which came like the burden of a song from Berlin, with the polite remark that the Prussian Government would be soon very glad to follow his example. When William I. ascended the throne, he ignored the rupture of diplomatic relations, and sent La Marmora to whisper into the ear of the new monarch words of artful flattery. He may have doubted if a Prussianised Germany would exactly come as a boon and a blessing to men. In 1848 he prophesied that Germanism would disturb the European equilibrium, and that the future German Empire would aim at becoming a naval power in order to combat and rival England on the seas. But he saw that the rise of Prussia meant the decline of Austria, and this was all that, as an Italian statesman, with Venetia still in chains, he was bound to consider.
CHAPTER XIII
ROME VOTED THE CAPITAL—CONCLUSION
The other unsolved question, that of Rome, was the most thorny, the most complicated, that ever a statesman had to grapple with. Though Cavour's death makes it impossible to say what measure of success would have attended his plans for resolving it, it must be always interesting to study his attitude in approaching the greatest crux in modern politics.
Cavour did not think of shirking this question because it was difficult. In fact, he had understood from the beginning that in it lay the essence of the whole problem. Chiefly for that reason he brought the occupations of the Papal States before the Congress of Paris. In 1856, as in 1861, he looked upon the Temporal Power as incompatible with the independence of Italy. It was already a fiction. "The Pope's domination as sovereign ceased from the day when it was proved that it could not exist save by a double foreign occupation." It had become a centre of corruption, which destroyed moral sense and rendered religious sentiment null. Without the Temporal Power, many of the wounds of the Church might be healed. It was useless to cite the old argument of the independence of the head of the Church; in face of a double occupation and the Swiss troops, it would be too bitter a mockery. When Cavour spoke in these terms, Italian Unity seemed far off. Now that it was accomplished, a new and potent motive arose for settling the Roman question once for all. In May 1861 Mr. Disraeli remarked to Count Vitzthum: "The sooner the inevitable war breaks out the better. The Italian card-house can never last. Without Rome there is no Italy. But that the French will evacuate the Eternal City is highly improbable. On this point the interests of the Conservative party coincide with those of Napoleon." There is no better judge of the drift of political affairs than an out-and-out opponent. So Prince Metternich always insisted that the Italians did not want reforms—they wanted national existence, unity. Mr. Disraeli probably had in mind a speech delivered in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, in which the Foreign Secretary recommended as "the best arrangement" the Pope's retention of Rome with a small surrounding territory. There is no doubt that a large part of the moderate party in Italy would have then endorsed this recommendation. They looked upon Roma capitale as what D'Azeglio called it—a classical fantasticality. What was the good of making an old man uncomfortable, upsetting the religious susceptibilities of Europe, forfeiting the complaisance of France, in order to pitch the tent of the nation in a malarious town which was only fit to be a museum? Those who only partly comprehended Cavour's character might have expected to find him favourable to these opinions, which had a certain specious appearance of practical good sense. But Cavour saw through the husk to the kernel; he saw that "without Rome there was no Italy."
Without Rome Italian Unity was still only a name. Rome was the symbol, as it was the safeguard of unity. Without it, Italy would remain a conglomeration of provinces, a union, not a unit—not the great nation which Cavour had laboured to create. Even as prime minister of little Piedmont, he had spurned a parochial policy. He had no notion of a humble, semi-neutralised Italy, which should have no voice in the world. Cavour lacked the sense of poetry, of art; he hated fads, and he did not believe in the perfectibility of the human species, but his prose was the prose of the ancient Roman; it was the prose of empire. United Italy must be a great power or nothing. Cavour was practical and prudent, as he is represented in the portrait commonly drawn of him, but there was a larger side to his character, which has been less often discerned. Nor is it to be conjectured that the direction Italy has taken, and the consequent outlay in armaments and ships, would have been blamed by him, though he would have blamed the uncontrolled waste of money in all departments, which is answerable for the present state of the finances. Nor, again, would Cavour have disapproved of colonial enterprises, but he would have taken care to have the meat, not the bones: Tunis, not Massowah. From the opening to the close of his career, the thought "I am an Italian citizen" governed all his acts. Those who accused him of provincialism, of regionalism, mistook the tastes of the private individual for the convictions of the statesman. He preferred the flats and fogs of Leri to the scenery of the Bay of Naples; but in politics he did not acquire the feelings of an Italian: he was born with them. It has been said that he aggrandised Piedmont; it would be truer to say that he sacrificed it. For years he drained its resources; he sent its soldiers to die in the Crimea; he exposed it again and again to the risk of invasion: he tore from it two of its fairest provinces. But there was one thing that he would not do; he would not dethrone Turin to begin a new "regionalism" elsewhere. At Rome alone the history of the Italian municipalities would become the history of the Italian nation.
Cavour deliberately departed from his usual rule of letting events shape themselves when he pledged himself and the monarchy to the policy of making Rome the capital. In October 1860 he said from his place in parliament that it was a grave thing for a minister to pronounce his opinion on the great questions of the future, but a statesman worthy of the name ought to have certain fixed points by which he steered his course. For twelve years their continual object had been national independence; henceforth it was "to make the Eternal City, on which rested twenty-five centuries of glory, the splendid capital of the Italian kingdom."
On March 25, 1861, Cavour seized a chance opportunity to repeat and emphasise his views. The question of Rome was, he said, the gravest ever placed before the parliament of a free people. It was not only of vital importance to Italy, but also to two hundred thousand Catholics in all parts of the globe; its solution ought to have not only a political influence, but also a moral and religious influence. In the previous year he had deemed it wise to speak with reserve, but now that this question was the principal subject of discussion in all civilised nations, reserve would not be prudence but pusillanimity. He proceeded to lay down as an irrefragable fact that Rome must become the capital of Italy. Only this could end the discords and differences of the various parts of the country. The position of the capital was not decided by reasons of climate or topography, or even of strategy. The choice of the capital was determined by great moral reasons, by the voice of national sentiment. Cavour rarely introduced his own personality even into his private letters, much less into his speeches; for the last ten years of his life he seemed a living policy, hardly a man. But in this speech there is a touch of personal pathos in the passage in which he said that, for himself, it would be a grievous day when he had to leave his native Turin with its straight, formal streets, for Rome and its splendid monuments, for which he was not artist enough to care. He called upon the future Italy, established firmly in the Eternal City, to remember the cradle of her liberties, which had made such great sacrifices for her, and was ready to make this one too!