To the old king of Naples were given his dominions in their former extent;[25] and on the 8th of December, 1816, he declared himself, by the title of Ferdinand I, the founder of a new dynasty, whose realm, embracing both the mainland provinces and the island, was named the united kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The petty San Marino was formally recognised as the last surviving representative of the Italian republics; and a French peer, who possessed Monaco, an imperial fief on the coast near Nice, had influence enough to preserve for his lands the nominal rank of an independent state.
In styling himself merely king of Lombardy and Venice, the emperor Francis assumed a title which expressed the real amount of his power much less properly than it would have been denoted by that more ambitious name which Napoleon had given to a monarchy embracing but a few more Italian provinces. Without any further condition Austria was mistress of the half of Italy. Naples alone was left to dispute with the pope about his claims of feudal homage, which were finally compromised in 1818, for an annual payment of 12,000 crowns to Rome. The dangers, however, which encompassed the restored sovereigns were made the pretence for conferring on the Austrians a temporary right of interference far more active than any ancient privilege. They were allowed to garrison Piacenza during the reign of Marie Louise, and Ferrara and Comacchio permanently; while the king of Naples accepted as a favour, and agreed to subsidise largely, a German army which was to protect him from his own subjects during a fixed term of years.[d]
MARRIOTT ON THE RESTORATION
Looking no longer to the past but to the future, the most interesting feature of the Restoration still remains to be noticed. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the dukes of Savoy had acquired Piedmont, and thus succeeded in straddling the Alps. Their geographical position, as the prince de Ligne had cynically said, did not permit them to behave like honest men. Consequently by rather tortuous, but in the main successful, diplomacy they managed in the eighteenth century to add the royal crown of Sardinia to the ducal crowns of Piedmont and Savoy; and never was a European war concluded, however remote the principal combatants might be, but the house of Savoy was able to acquire several of the towns of Lombardy, stripping it, as the saying goes, like an artichoke, leaf by leaf. Their position was still further strengthened in 1815 by the acquisition of the annihilated republic of Genoa.
Such was the Italy of 1815, little if at all better than Metternich’s “geographical expression.”[26] But for all that the Italy of 1815 was not the Italy of the ante-Napoleonic days. Strive as they might, the diplomatists of Vienna could not set back the hands of time, nor erase from the minds of the Italian people the newly awakened recollection of their ancient fame; they could not stifle, strive as they might, their newly conceived but none the less passionate longing for the realisation of their national identity. A more accurate or more eloquent expression of this feeling could hardly be found than in the letter addressed, thirty years afterwards, by Mazzini nominally to Sir James Graham, really to the English people:
“There are over there (in Lombardy) from four to five millions of human creatures gifted with an immortal soul, with powerful faculties, with ardent and generous passions; with aspirations towards free agency, towards the ideal which their fathers had a glimpse of, which nature and tradition point out to them; towards a national union with other millions of brother souls in order to attain it; from four to five millions of men desiring only to advance under the eye of God, their only master, towards the accomplishment of a social task which they have in common with sixteen or seventeen millions of other men, speaking the same language, treading the same earth, cradled in their infancy in the same maternal songs, strengthened in their youth by the same sun, inspired by the same memories, the same sources of literary genius. Country, liberty, brotherhood, all are wrested from them; their faculties are mutilated, curbed, chained, within a narrow circle traced for them by men who are strangers to their tendencies, to their wants, to their wishes; their tradition is broken under the cane of an Austrian corporal; their immortal soul feudatory to the stupid caprices of a man seated on a throne at Vienna, to the caprices of the Tyrolese agents; and you go on indifferent, coolly inquiring if these men be subject to this or that tariff, if the bread that they eat costs them a halfpenny more or less! That tariff, whatever it is, is too high; it is not they who have had the ordering of it; that bread, dear or not, is moistened with tears, for it is the bread of slaves.”[e]
ERRORS OF THE MONARCHY
[1815-1816 A.D.]
The condition of Italy, in 1815, was one in which old things struggled with new. Her soldiers, after having served with credit under Napoleon, were either hastily disbanded, or called upon to transfer their allegiance to powers against which they had often been arrayed. The transition from war to peace is apt to bear hardly upon men whose services are no longer required, and whose career is brought to a close. Where feelings of good-will and mutual confidence exist, such hardships are felt, but do not rankle. From the restored governments of Italy the veterans of Napoleon’s armies obtained little sympathy. Their case was not generously or wisely considered, and their feelings, as well as claims, were disregarded. Distinction, whether military or civil, obtained under the French Empire, was viewed with narrow-minded aversion. At a crisis when the greatest delicacy was required, the generous confidence and noble forbearance which win the allegiance of the heart were wanting; and the prejudices of retrogradist counsellors were allowed to prevail. At Milan, disgust was excited by the presence of a German army, and by the employment of foreign officials. At Turin, and still more at Naples, royalist factions were allowed to monopolise and abuse the powers of the state.
Thus peace, which had been hailed with so much joy, was robbed of its sweetness; the exactions of the French were forgotten, and the impartiality of their administration began to be regretted. Then it was that the Carbonari became dangerous, not only by their alliance with the resuscitated embers of Jacobinism—smothered, but not extinguished, by Bonaparte—but by the strength which they derived from a general feeling of disappointment.[f]