Everything was done to make Orsini a hero in the eyes of the French public, and to excite sympathy in his cause. Jules Favre by his eloquent defence in which he pleaded not for the life, but for the honour of his client, and still more Orsini's own letter to the Emperor, produced a powerful impression; there was a dramatic interest in the man who, disdaining to crave clemency for himself, tried a last supreme effort in the service of the country he had loved too well. 'Deliver my fatherland, and the blessings of twenty-five million citizens will be with you.' So concluded the letter in which Orsini [Pg.216] told Napoleon, that till Italy was free there would be no peace for Europe—nor for him. It was whispered that the Emperor had a secret interview with the condemned man at the Mazas prison; at any rate, when Orsini mounted the scaffold, he was borne up, not only by his invincible courage, but by the strongest hope, if not the certainty that his last prayer would have only a short time to wait for fulfilment.
Though persons who were able to read the signs of the times no longer doubted that Napoleon had resolved to solve the Italian question by force of arms, it suited his purpose to occupy the public mind for the moment with the furious agitation against England and Piedmont as 'dens of assassins,' which led to the fall of the Palmerston administration on the Conspiracy Bill, and seemed to almost place in jeopardy the throne of Victor Emmanuel. Napoleon sent the King of Sardinia demands so sweeping in language so threatening, that the old Savoy blood was fired, and Victor Emmanuel returned the answer: 'Tell the Emperor in whatever terms you think best that this is not the way to treat a faithful ally; that I have never tolerated violence from anyone; that I follow the path of unstained honour, and for that honour I am only answerable to God and to my people. That we have carried our head high for 850 years, and no one will make me lower it; and that, nevertheless, I desire nothing better than to remain his friend.' This reply was benevolently received; Cavour passed through the Chambers a bill which, though not corresponding to the extravagant pretensions of the French Government, gave reasonable security against the concoction of plots of a criminal nature; Napoleon expressed himself satisfied, and three months after, despatched Dr Conneau to Turin, to mention, quite by the way, to the Piedmontese minister, that [Pg.217] he would be glad to have a conversation with him on Italian affairs. This was the preliminary of the interview of Plombières.
Plombières is a watering-place in the Vosges, which became famous on the 20th of July 1858, the day on which Napoleon III. and Cavour entered into the compact that laid down the conditions of the Italian war. The Emperor was to bring 200,000 men into Italy, and the King of Sardinia undertook to furnish 100,000. The Austrians were to be expelled from Italy. The kingdom of Upper Italy would embrace the Legations and the Marches then under the Pope. Savoy would be ceded to France. The marriage of the Emperor's cousin with the Princess Clotilde was not made a condition of the war, and only in case it had been made a condition, was Cavour empowered to agree to it. He, therefore, left it uncertain; but he came away from Plombières convinced that nearly everything depended upon its happening. Napoleon was beyond measure anxious for a marriage which would ally him with one of the oldest reigning families in Europe. It would be a fatal mistake, Cavour thought, to join the Emperor, and at the same time, to offend him in a way which he would never forget. Directly after the interview, he wrote a long letter to the King to persuade him to yield the point. After all, where would the Princess find a more promising match? Was it easy to provide husbands for princesses? Were not they generally extremely unhappy in marriage? What had happened to the King's four aunts, all charming princesses, who had married the Duke of Modena, the Duke of Lucca, the Emperor Ferdinand of Austria, and the King of Naples? Had they been happy? Prince Napoleon could not be so very bad, as he was known to have hurried to Cannes to pay a last visit to a woman whom he had loved, a great actress, then upon her [Pg.218] deathbed. This reminiscence was a singular one to evoke under the circumstances, but Cavour was not an Englishman, and he was not impressed by the propriety of drawing a veil over facts which everyone knew.
The King's instinct told him that his young daughter, pious and simple and destitute even of that seasoning of vanity which is so good and necessary a thing in a woman, but proud at heart like all her race, would derive no compensation from the outward brilliancy of the Imperial Court for the absence of domestic joy which would be her wedded lot unless a surprising change came over the bridegroom. When, however, he was persuaded of the importance, or rather, of the essential character of the concession, he said to Cavour: 'I am making a great sacrifice, but I yield to your arguments. Still my consent is subordinate to the freely given consent of my daughter.' The matter was referred to the Princess, who answered: 'It is the wish of my father; therefore this marriage will be useful to my family and my country, and I accept.' An answer worthy of one who, twelve years later, when the members of the Imperial House were flying, remained quietly in Paris, saying: 'Savoy and fear are not acquainted.'
The marriage was celebrated at Turin in January. The King made a present to Cavour, as a souvenir of the event, of a ring representing two heartseases. In thanking him, the minister said: 'Your Majesty knows that I shall never marry.' 'I know,' replied the King; 'your bride is the country.'
Though warlike rumours circulated off and on, the secret of the understanding arrived at in the Plombières interview was well preserved, and the words spoken by Napoleon to the Austrian Ambassador at the New Year's Day reception fell on Europe with the effect of a [Pg.219] bombshell. Turning to Baron Hubner, he said: 'Je regrette que les relations entre nous soient si mauvaises; dîtes cependant à votre souverain que mes sentiments pour lui ne sont pas changés.'
Even Cavour was startled. Probably till that moment he had never felt sure that Napoleon would not after all throw the Italian cause to the winds. The Emperor's invariable method in dealing with men was to mystify them. He was pleased to pose as a faithful ally, but human intellect was insufficient to fathom what he meant. On this system, skilfully pursued, was reared the whole fabric of Louis Napoleon's reputation for being a profound politician. Bearing the fact in mind, we can easily see why that reputation crumbled away almost entirely when the present became the past. There are few cases in which there is more disagreement between the judgment of contemporaries and that of immediate posterity than the case of the French Emperor.
The least surprised, and, among Italians, the most dissatisfied at the New Year's Day pronouncement was Mazzini, who when he read it in the Times next morning felt that the Napoleonic war closed the heroic period of Italian Liberation. To men like Mazzini failure is apt to seem more heroic than success, and the war of 1859 did close the period of failure. The justification for calling in foreign arms could only be in necessity, and Mazzini denied the necessity. Charles Albert denied it in 1848 with no less confident a voice. Then, indeed, there did appear a chance of Italy making herself, but was there the slightest prospect, eleven years later, of that chance being repeated? Each student of history may answer for himself. What is plain is, that France and Sardinia together were to find it an exceedingly hard task even to drive the Austrians out of Lombardy.
[ [Pg.220] The unconquerable dislike of men of principle, like Mazzini, to joining hands with the author of the coup d'état was perfectly explicable. There were doubtless some sincere Bulgarian patriots who disliked joining hands with the Autocrat of all the Russias. The gift of freedom from a despot means a long list of evils. Mazzini grasped the maleficent influence which Napoleon III. would be in a position to exercise over the young state; he knew, moreover, when only two or three other persons in Europe knew it, that the bargain of Plombières was on the principle of give-and-take. How Mazzini was for many years better informed than any cabinet in Europe, remains a secret. 'I know positively,' he wrote on the 4th of January 1859, 'that the idea of the war is only to hand over a zone of Lombardy to Piedmont, and the cession of Savoy and Nice to France: the peace, upon the offer of which they count, would abandon the whole of Venetia to Austria.' A month before this he had disclosed what was certainly true, namely, that Napoleon wanted to place a Murat on the throne of Naples, and to substitute Prince Napoleon for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The point that is doubtful in the above revelation is the statement that the Emperor never meant to emancipate Venetia. The probabilities are against this. He may, however, have questioned all along whether his troops, with those of the King of Sardinia, would display a superiority over the Austrian forces sufficiently incontestable for him to risk taking them into the mouse-trap of the Quadrilateral. In this one thing Napoleon was amply justified—in having no sort of desire to take a beaten army back to Paris.
Mazzini, with the more extreme members of the Party of Action (including Crispi), issued a protest against the Napoleonic war, with [Pg.221] the advice to have nothing to do with it or its authors. But Italy thought otherwise, and Garibaldi, the man who of all others most nearly represented the heart of Italy, rejoiced and was glad. He did not believe a word about the proposed cession of Savoy and Nice; no one did, except Mazzini and his few disciples. What he saw was, that a great step towards independence was about to be taken. In 1856, he not only adhered to Manin's call to all Italians to rally round the house of Savoy, but went further than Manin in accepting unconditionally what he called the 'Savoy Dictatorship,' to which he left full liberty of choice in the matter of ways and means. He did justice then to Cavour's patriotism: it was only after the sacrifice of Nice that a feeling of bitter antagonism grew up in him for the man who he thought had deceived Italy and himself. In December 1858, on a summons from Cavour, he left Caprera (the island which he had bought with a little inheritance falling to him on the death of his brother) and proceeded to Turin, where he was informed of a plan for a rising in Massa and Carrara, which was originally intended to be the signal of the war. The plan was given up, but in March 1859, Garibaldi was told by Victor Emmanuel in person of the imminence of war, and was invited to take part in it as commander of an auxiliary corps of volunteers which took the name of 'Cacciatori delle Alpi.' In this way, all his own followers, not only those in arms, but the great mass of the people which was obedient to his lead, became enrolled in the service of the Sardinian monarchy; a fact of capital importance in the future development of affairs. Without it, the Italian kingdom could not have been formed. And this fact was due to Cavour, who had to fight the arrayed strength of the old, narrow, military caste at Turin, which [Pg.222] had succeeded in getting Garibaldi's sword refused in 1848, and wished for nothing in the world more than to get it refused in 1859. Near the end of his life, Cavour said in the Chamber that the difficulties he encountered in inducing the Sardinian War Office to sanction the appointment were all but insurmountable. Unfortunately, the jealousy of the heads of the regular army for the revolutionary captain never ceased. As for Cavour, even when he opposed Garibaldi politically, he always strove to have the highest personal honour paid to the man of whom he once wrote 'that he had rendered Italy the greatest service it was possible to render her.'