But Napoleon came, another shape of evil. While the king was preparing to defend the passes of the mountains, the young French general turned the line of defence by the sea, and poured his army into Piedmont. A succession of rapid battles carried him to the walls of Turin; and the astonished king, in 1796, signed a treaty which left his dominions at the mercy of Republicanism.
On the death of the king in this year of troubles, his son, Charles Emanuel IV., succeeded him. But he was now a vassal of France; he saw his country dismembered, his armies ruined, and his people groaning under the cruel insults and intolerable exactions which have always characterised French conquest. Unable to endure this torture, he retired to Sardinia, and from Sardinia finally went to Rome, and there abdicated in favour of his brother, Victor Emanuel.
The new monarch, whose states were undergoing from year to year all the capricious and agonising vicissitudes of Italian revolution, at length shared in the general European triumph over Napoleon, and at the peace of 1814 returned to his dominions, augmented, by the treaty of Vienna, by the important addition of Genoa.
But his return was scarcely hailed with triumph by his subjects, when the example of Spain was followed in an insurrection demanding a new constitution. The king, wearied of political disturbance, and being without offspring, now determined to follow the example of his predecessor, and gave up the crown to his brother, Charles Felix, appointing, as provisional regent, Prince Charles Albert of Savoy Carignano, a descendant of Victor Amadeus I.
After a reign of ten years, undistinguished by either vices or virtues, but employed in the harmless occupations of making roads and building schools, the king died in 1831, and was succeeded by the Prince of Carignano.
Charles Albert has now been seventeen years upon the throne; yet, to this hour, his character, his policy, and his purposes, are the problems of Italy. His whole course strongly resembles those biographies of studied mystery and sleepless ambition—those serpent obliquities and serpent trails—which marked the career of the mediæval princes of Italy; but which demanded not only a keen head, but a bold resolve,—Castruccio, with a Machiavel, for the twin image of the perfection of an Italian king.
The object of universal outcry for his original abandonment of "Young Italy,"—an abandonment which may find its natural excuse in the discovery that Young Italy was digging up the foundations of the throne, on whose first step his foot was already placed, and to which within a few years he actually ascended;—from that period he has fixed the eyes of all Italy upon his movements, as those of the only possible antagonist who can shake the power of Austria. He has at least the externals of a power to which Italy can show no rival: 50,000 of the best troops south of the Alps, which a blast of the trumpet from Turin can raise to 100,000; a country which is almost a continued fortress, and a position which, being in the command of the passes of Italy, can meet invasion with the singular probability of making his mountains the grave of the invader, or open Italy to the march of an auxiliary force, which would at once turn the scale. His government has exhibited that cool calculation of popular impulse and royal rights, by which, without a total prohibition of change, he has contrived to keep the whole power of government in his hands. Long watched by Austria, he had never given it an opportunity of direct offence; and if he has at length declared war, his whole past conduct justifies the belief, that he has either been driven to the conflict by some imperious necessity, or that he has assured himself, on deliberate grounds, of the triumph of his enterprise.
He has now taken the first step, and he has taken it with a daring which must either make him the master of Italy, or make him a beggar and an exile. By rushing into war with Austria, he has begun the game in which he must gain all or lose all. Yet we doubt that, for final success, far as he has gone, he has gone far enough. On the day when he unfurled the standard against Austria, he should have proclaimed Italian independence. We look upon the aggression on Austria as a violation of alliance which must bring evil. But that violation being once resolved on, the scabbard should have been thrown away, and the determination published to the world, that the foreign soldier should no longer tread the Italian soil. This declaration would have had the boldness which adds enthusiasm to interest. It would have had the clearness which suffers no equivocation; and it would have had the comprehensiveness which would include every man of Italian birth, and not a few in other countries, to whom unlicensed boldness is the first of virtues.
The private habits of this prince are said to be singularly adapted to the leader of a national war. His frame is hardy, his manner of living is abstemious, and his few recreations are manly and active. He has already seen war, and commanded a column of the French army in the campaign of 1823, which broke up the Spanish liberals, and reinstated the king upon the throne. But, with all those daring qualities, he never forgets that the Italian is by nature a superstitious being; that he is, at best, a compound of the mime and the monk—with the monk three-fourths predominating; and that no man can hope to be master of the national mind who does not take his share in the priestly slavery of the people. This accounts for the extraordinary reverence which from time to time he displays in the ceremonials of the church, for his sufferance of the monkish thousands which blacken the soil of his dominions, and for his tolerance of the Jesuits, whom he, as well as probably every other sovereign of Europe, dreads, and whom every other sovereign of Europe seems, by common consent, to be fixed on expelling from his dominions.
What the ulterior views of the King may be, of course, it would require a prophet to tell. Whether the crown of Lombardy is among the dreams of his ambition, whether the Italian hatred of Austria stimulates his councils, or whether the mere Italian passion for freedom urges him to stake his own diadem on the chances of the field for the liberation of the peninsula, are questions which can be answered only by the event; but he has at last advanced,—has menaced the Austrian possession of Italy; has pressed upon the Austrian army in its retreat; has reduced it to the defensive; and has brought the great question of Austrian dominion to the simple arbitration of the sword.