The party of Young Italy, championed by Mazzini, was the first to detach itself, and to control the blindly working forces of the Carbonari movement by a settled plan of action. It was the programme of Young Italy to establish a republic by the aid of volunteers recruited from all parts of the peninsula. When Charles Albert came to the throne, Mazzini, as we have seen, addressed him a letter, as equal unto equal, calling upon the king to defy Austria and rely upon God and the people. Because Charles Albert (who, in spite of his fervent patriotism and genuine liberality of soul, was a man of mixed opinions, scrupulous in his sense of constitutional obligation, melancholy by temperament, and superstitiously religious) found himself unwilling or unable to take this step, the Mazzinisti denounced him as a traitor to 1821, and a retrogressive autocrat.
[1831-1846 A.D.]
In his exile at Geneva, Mazzini now organised an armed attempt on Savoy. He collected a few hundred refugees of all nations, and crossed the frontier in 1833. But this feeble attack produced no result beyond convincing Charles Albert that he could not trust the republicans. Subsequent attempts on the king’s life roused a new sense of loyalty in Piedmont, and defined a counter-body of opinion to Mazzini’s. The patriots of a more practical type, who may be called moderate liberals, began, in one form or another, to aim at achieving the independence of Italy constitutionally by the help of the Sardinian kingdom. What rank Sardinia would take in the new Italy remained an open question.
Count di Cavour
(1810-1861)
The publication of Vincenzo Gioberti’s treatise, Il Primato morale e civile degli Italiani, in 1843, considerably aided the growth of definite opinion. His utopia was a confederation of Italian powers, under the spiritual presidency of the papacy, and with the army of Piedmont for sword and shield. This book had an immense success. It made timid thinkers feel that they could join the liberals without sacrificing their religious or constitutional opinions. At the same date Cesare Balbo’s Speranze d’Italia exercised a somewhat similar influence, through its sound and unsubversive principles. In its pages Balbo made one shrewd guess, that the Eastern question would decide Italian independence.
Massimo d’Azeglio, who also was a Piedmontese; the poet Giusti, the baron Ricasoli, and the marchese Gino Capponi in Tuscany; together with Alessandro Manzoni at Milan, and many other writers scattered through the provinces of Italy, gave their weight to the formation of this moderate liberal party. These men united in condemning the extreme democracy of the Mazzinisti, and did not believe that Italy could be regenerated by merely manipulating the insurrectionary force of the revolution. On political and religious questions they were much divided in detail, suffering in this respect from the weakness inherent in liberalism. Yet we are already justified in regarding this party as a sufficient counterpoise to the republicans; and the man who was destined to give it coherence, and to win the great prize of Italian independence by consolidating and working out its principles in practice, was already there.
The count Camillo Benso di Cavour had been born in 1810, two years later than Mazzini. He had not yet entered upon his ministerial career, but was writing articles for the Risorgimento, which at Turin opposed the Mazzinistic journal Concordia, and was devoting himself to political and economical studies. It is impossible to speak of Mazzini and Cavour without remembering the third great regenerator of Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi. At this date he was in exile; but a few years later he returned, and began his career of popular deliverance in Lombardy.
Mazzini the prophet, Garibaldi the knight-errant, and Cavour the statesman, of Italian independence, were all natives of the kingdom of Sardinia. But their several positions in it were so different as to account in no small measure for the very divergent parts they played in the coming drama. Mazzini was a native of Genoa, which ill tolerated the enforced rule of Turin. Garibaldi came from Nice, and was a child of the people. Cavour was born in the midst of that stiff aristocratical society of old Piedmont which has been described so vividly by D’Azeglio in his Ricordi. The Piedmontese nobles had the virtues and the defects of English country squires in the last century. Loyal, truthful, brave, hard-headed, tough in resistance, obstinately prejudiced, they made excellent soldiers, and were devoted servants of the crown. Moreover, they hid beneath their stolid exterior greater political capacity than the more genial and brilliant inhabitants of southern and central Italy.