[32] [According to Bulle[d] Cavour had higher plans for Clotilde’s marriage, but yielded for diplomacy’s sake.]
[33] [The losses were considerable on both sides; on the French side there were 246 officers and 3,463 men dead or wounded; and 735 missing. The Austrians had 281 officers, 3,432 men dead or wounded, and 4,000 missing. But the result of the battle was to open Milan to the French.—Delord.[e]]
[34] [“La Farina and his National Society opened up a way—the helper was the government but the help came from a private person so the government was not involved. The proof of this is to be found in the letter of La Farina to Count Cavour written from Bristo Arsizio and dated April 24th, 1860, in which Farina told the minister that the cases (of arms) which were expected from Modena had not reached Genoa or the station at Piacenza and deplored this delay, the reason of which he did not know. The cases arrived the same day at Genoa and news of them was telegraphed. Letter book No. 595 to La Farina by the vice-governor.”—Bertolini.[c]]
[35] [The hero of Italy, like the heroine of France, risen from among the people to place the king at the head of an emancipated nation, after having succeeded beyond all probability in the first part of his undertaking, failed in the second, wounded and made prisoner as was Joan of Arc. Conducted to the fort of Varignano, in the Gulf of Spezia, Garibaldi was the object of a universal sympathy. Men disapproved of his perilous expedition; but what he had attempted was, at bottom, what all the world desired. An amnesty was granted by the king.—Henneguy.[f]]
CHAPTER XXI. THE COMPLETION OF ITALIAN UNITY
Italy in 1814 was scarcely aroused to a national consciousness; in 1849 that consciousness was a dominant fact. Out of Carbonari plottings to mitigate the tyranny of local despots, out of the failures of 1820, ’21 and ’31, out of Mazzini’s Young Italy, and the preachings of Gioberti, had developed a strong and abiding desire not only for liberty, not only for independence, but also for unity, without which these could not endure. The idea of Nationality had sprung up in Italian hearts. The race which had given Christendom a religion, which had expressed itself in literature and in art and in science, and which had once led the world in commerce and industry, this race had at length set itself to win what it had hitherto lacked,—political freedom. Italy was to be no longer a geographical expression, but a nation.—Thayer.[b]
[1867-1878 A.D.]