Accession of Victor Emmanuel as king of Sardinia.
It remained for Austria to reëstablish her prestige in Italy and in the German Confederation. In March, 1849, Charles Albert renewed the war which had been discontinued after the defeat at Custozza. The campaign lasted but five days and closed with his crushing and definitive defeat at Novara (March 23), which put an end to the hopes of Italian liberty for the time being. Charles Albert abdicated in favor of his son, Victor Emmanuel, who was destined before many years to become king of Italy.
Austria reëstablishes the former conditions in Italy, except in Piedmont.
After bringing the king of Sardinia to terms, Austria pushed southward, reëstablishing the old order as she went. The ephemeral Italian republics were unable to offer any effectual resistance. The former rulers were restored in Rome, Tuscany, and Venice, and the constitutions were swept away from one end of the peninsula to the other, except in Piedmont, the most important part of the king of Sardinia's realms. There Victor Emmanuel not only maintained the representative government introduced by his father, but, by summoning to his councils d'Azeglio and others known throughout Italy for their liberal sentiments, he prepared to lead Italy once more against her foreign oppressors.
Question of the extent of the proposed union.
Impossibility of a German state which should include both Austria and Prussia.
267. In Germany, as elsewhere, Austria profited by the dissensions among her opponents. On May 18, 1848, the National Assembly, consisting of nearly six hundred representatives of the German people, had met at Frankfurt. It immediately began the consideration of a new constitution that should satisfy the popular longings for a great free German state, to be governed by and for the people. But what were to be the confines of this new German state? The confederation of 1815 did not include all the German inhabitants of Prussia, and did include the heterogeneous western possessions of Austria,—Bohemia and Moravia, for example, where a great part of the people were Slavs. There was no hesitation in deciding that all the Prussian territories should be admitted to the new union. As it appeared impossible to exclude Austria altogether, the Assembly agreed to include those parts of her territory which had belonged to the confederation formed in 1815. This decision rendered the task of founding a real German state practically impossible; for the new union was to include two great European powers who might at any moment become rivals, since Prussia would hardly consent to be led forever by Austria. So heterogeneous a union could only continue to be, as it had been, a loose confederation of practically independent princes.
The Assembly at Frankfurt gives Austria time to recover.