Builders of United Italy

by Rupert Sargent Holland

CAVOUR

[CAVOUR, THE STATESMAN]

Cavour planned united Italy; his career is a shining example of what may be done by a man with one definite purpose to which he adheres without digression. Just as Disraeli seems from his early manhood to have aimed at becoming Prime Minister of England so Cavour appears to have aimed at the union of Italy under the leadership of Piedmont. There were a thousand and one points at which he could have turned aside, a dozen times when a brilliant temporary success was held before him, but he preferred to sacrifice no atom of energy or influence which might in time help in his fundamental purpose. He preferred obscurity to the danger of being too well known, and the coldness of contemporaries to the burden of relations with them which might tend to shackle his own independence. He read his time and countrymen with extraordinary accuracy, and foresaw that what was left of the old régime was tottering and that to attempt to bolster it up was absurd. He preferred to let the old conventions of a departed feudalism go their way in peace while he prepared himself for the day when the new statecraft should be recognized.

The Piedmont of 1810, the year of Cavour’s birth, was singularly mediæval. The militant strength and daring of the small states of the Middle Ages had departed, but the point of view remained. The aristocracy was narrow, bigoted, and overbearing, they were intolerant of the new discoveries of science and the useful arts, they devoted themselves exclusively to the trivial entertainments of the Eighteenth Century. Napoleon spread above them like a storm cloud; they wrapped themselves as well as they could in their ancestral cloaks and waited, confident that the gale could not last long. The majority of them could not believe that the French Revolution was more than an accident, but there were a few, and those almost entirely men and women who had lived abroad, who saw further. One of these latter was Cavour’s grandmother, the Marquise Philippine di Cavour, from whom he seems to have inherited his breadth of view.

The family of Benso belonged to the old nobility of Piedmont, and in time came into possession of the fief of Santena and the fastness of Cavour in the province of Pignerolo. A member of the family who became distinguished for military services was made Marquis of Cavour by Charles Emmanuel III., and the eldest son of Marquis Benso di Cavour married Philippine, daughter of the Marquis de Sales, a girl brought up in a château on the Lake of Annecy. The Marquise Philippine immediately became the controlling factor in the Cavour household; she strove to lighten the heavy somberness of her husband’s family in Turin, and at the trying time of the French occupation sold much of the family plate and furnishings, and finally certain priceless religious relics, in order to provide for her son, a boy of sixteen, when he was ordered to join General Berthier’s corps of the French army. Later she was commanded to become one of the household of the Princess Camillo Borghese, sister of Napoleon, and wife of his governor of Piedmont, who, better known as Pauline Bonaparte, figures as one of the most beautiful as well as one of the liveliest women of that age. The Marquise Philippine acquitted herself so well and so graciously that the Princess became one of her staunchest friends, and with the Prince acted as sponsor at the christening of the Marquise’s second grandchild, Camille di Cavour. The Marquise’s son, Michele Benso, had married Adèle, daughter of the Count de Sellon of Geneva, and had two sons, Gustave and Camille. Michele Benso had profited greatly by his mother’s tact, but he was still the unbending reactionary in nature. So was his eldest son Gustave. It was the younger boy who received the adaptable genius of the Marquise Philippine, and who seems to have been best able to appreciate her. On one occasion he said to her, “Marina” (a Piedmontese term for grandmother), “we get on capitally, you and I; you were always a little bit of a Jacobin.” When, as the boy grew older, his family and friends reproached him with being a fanatical liberal, he turned to the Marquise, confident that she understood him. Cavour had few confidants during his whole life, few friends from whom he drew inspiration, but his grandmother had so trained him in the light of her own self-reliant spirit that he rarely seems to have felt the need of any outside aid.

The feudal system had scant respect for younger sons. Gustave was carefully educated for his proud position, Camille was largely left to grow up by chance. He was sent to the Military Academy at Turin, and became a page at the court of Charles Albert. With both the social and military life about him he found himself out of temper, his views were too liberal for the narrowness he met on every hand, he was hoping for events which most of his companions could only have regarded at that time as tragedies. His restlessness was noted, and he was sent to the lonely Alpine fortress of Bard. There the soul-wearying inertia of the military life of a small state grew to typify to him the condition of his land. At the age of twenty-one, he wrote to the Count de Sellon, “The Italians need regeneration; their morale, which was completely corrupted under the ignoble dominion of Spaniards and Austrians, regained a little energy under the French régime, and the ardent youth of the country sighs for a nationality, but to break entirely with the past, to be born anew to a better state, great efforts are necessary and sacrifices of all kinds must remould the Italian character. An Italian war would be a sure pledge that we were going to become again a nation, that we were rising from the mud in which we have been trampled for so many centuries.”

Such ideas found no sympathy at the court of Piedmont, and Cavour, confident that the army could offer him no opportunity to use his talents, resigned his commission, and induced his father to buy him a small estate at Leri. There, in the middle of the rice-fields of Piedmont, Cavour settled down to the life of a farmer, experimenting with new steam machinery, canal irrigation, artificial fertilizers, studying books on government and agriculture, seeing something of his country neighbors, waiting for the gradual breakdown of the old régime. His family were quite content to let him vegetate on his far-off estate, he had no position in the family household in Turin, his father and brother were busy with details of court life, and after the death of his grandmother his combined family regarded him as lacking in normal balance. Without becoming actually melancholy the youth was continually dejected, he saw no place waiting to be filled by him, he wished that he had been born into another nation, and sighed, “Ah! if I were an Englishman, by this time I should be something, and my name would not be wholly unknown!” Yet, indifferent as he seemed to comradeship, he had at this time one strong friend, a woman of high birth, “L’Inconnue,” as he called her in his journal. She summoned him to her at Turin, and he obeyed her call; she was unhappy and ardently patriotic, with the visions of Mazzini, he admired her and was filled with remorse at the thought of a love so constant and disinterested. They corresponded for over a year, and then Cavour’s ardor faded. He had never been in love with her, but she had loved him devotedly. A few years later she died, and left him a last letter ending, “the woman who loved you is dead.... No one ever loved you as she did, no one! For, O Camille, you never fathomed the extent of her love.” She had at least succeeded in drawing him out of his lonely despair; platonic as his regard for her seems to have been, it was the nearest approach to love that entered his life.