Their hopes centred in the young Carignano, whose agreeable manners had endeared him to all, and who had many friends among the Liberals and Carbonari. Early in 1820 a revolutionary movement was set on foot, and vague plans of combined risings all over Italy and a war with Austria were talked of. Charles Albert no doubt was aware of this, but he never actually became a Carbonaro, and was surprised and startled when after the outbreak of the Neapolitan revolution of 1820 some of the leading conspirators in the Piedmontese army, including Count Santorre di Santarosa and Count San Marzano, informed him that a military rising was ready and that they counted on his help (2nd March 1821). He induced them to delay the outbreak and informed the king, requesting him, however, not to punish anyone. On the 10th the garrison of Alessandria mutinied, and two days later Turin was in the hands of the insurgents, the people demanding the Spanish constitution. The king at once abdicated and appointed Charles Albert regent. The latter, pressed by the revolutionists and abandoned by his ministers, granted the constitution and sent to inform Charles Felix, who was now king, of the occurrence. Charles Felix, who was then at Modena, repudiated the regent’s acts, accepted Austrian military assistance, with which the rising was easily quelled, and exiled Charles Albert to Florence. The young prince found himself the most unpopular man in Italy, for while the Liberals looked on him as a traitor, to the king and the Conservatives he was a dangerous revolutionist. At the Congress of Verona (1822) the Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich, tried to induce Charles Felix to set aside Charles Albert’s rights of succession. But the king was piqued by Austria’s interference, and as both the grand-duke of Tuscany and the duke of Wellington supported him, Charles Albert’s claims were respected. France having decided to intervene in the Spanish revolution on the side of autocracy, Charles Albert asked permission to join the duc d’Angoulême’s expedition. The king granted it and the young prince set out for Spain, where he fought with such gallantry at the storming of the Trocadero (1st of September 1823) that the French soldiers proclaimed him the “first Grenadier of France.” But it was not until he had signed a secret undertaking binding himself, as soon as he ascended the throne, to place himself under the tutelage of a council composed of the higher clergy and the knights of the Annunziata, and to maintain the existing forms of the monarchy (D. Berti, Cesare Alfieri, xi. 77, Rome, 1871), that he was allowed to return to Turin and forgiven.
On the death of Charles Felix (27th of April 1831) Charles Albert succeeded; he inherited a kingdom without an army, with an empty treasury, a chaotic administration and medieval laws. His first task was to set his house in order; he reorganized the finances, created the army, and started Piedmont on a path which if not liberalism was at least progress. “He was,” wrote his reactionary minister, Count della Margherita, “hostile to Austria from the depths of his soul and full of illusions as to the possibility of freeing Italy from dependence on her.... As for the revolutionaries, he detested them but feared them, and was convinced that sooner or later he would be their victim.” In 1833 a conspiracy of the Giovane Italia Society, organized by Mazzini, was discovered, and a number of its members punished with ruthless severity. On the election in 1846 of Pius IX., who appeared to be a Liberal and an Italian patriot, the eyes of all Italy were turned on him as the heaven-born leader who was to rescue the country from the foreigner. This to some extent reconciled the king to the Liberal movement, for it accorded with his religious views. “I confess,” he wrote to the marquis of Villamarina, in 1847, “that a war of national independence which should have for its object the defence of the pope would be the greatest happiness that could befall me.” On the 30th of October he issued a decree granting wide reforms, and when risings broke out in other parts of Italy early in 1848 and further liberties were demanded, he was at last induced to grant the constitution (8th February).
When the news of the Milanese revolt against the Austrians reached Turin (19th of March) public opinion demanded that the Piedmontese should succour their struggling brothers; and after some hesitation the king declared war. But much time had been wasted and many precious opportunities lost. With an army of 60,000 Piedmontese troops and 30,000 men from other parts of Italy the king took the field, and after defeating the Austrians at Pastrengo on the 30th of April, and at Goito on the 30th of May, where he was himself slightly wounded, more time was wasted in useless operations. Radetzky, the Austrian general, having received reinforcements, drove the centre of the extended Italian line back across the Mincio (23rd of July), and in the two days’ fighting at Custozza (24th and 25th of July) the Piedmontese were beaten, forced to retreat, and to ask for an armistice. On re-entering Milan Charles Albert was badly received and reviled as a traitor by the Republicans, and although he declared himself ready to die defending the city the municipality treated with Radetzky for a capitulation; the mob, urged on by the demagogues, made a savage demonstration against him at the Palazzo Greppi, whence he escaped in the night with difficulty and returned to Piedmont with his defeated army. The French Republic offered to intervene in the spring of 1848, but Charles Albert did not desire foreign aid, the more so as in this case it would have had to be paid for by the cession of Nice and Savoy. The revolutionary movement throughout Italy was breaking down, but Charles Albert felt that while he possessed an army he could not abandon the Lombards and Venetians, and determined to stake all on a last chance. On the 12th of March 1849 he denounced the armistice and took the field again with an army of 80,000 men, but gave the chief command to the Polish general Chrzanowski. General Ramorino commanding the Lombard division proved unable to prevent the Austrians from crossing the Ticino (20th of April), and Chrzanowski was completely out-generalled and defeated at La Bicocca near Novara on the 23rd. The Piedmontese fought with great bravery, and the unhappy king sought death in vain. After the battle he asked terms of Radetzky, who demanded the occupation by Austria of a large part of Piedmont and the heir to the throne as a hostage. Thereupon, feeling himself to be the obstacle to better conditions, Charles Albert abdicated in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel. That same night he departed alone and made his way to Oporto, where he retired into a monastery and died on the 28th of July 1849.
Charles Albert was not a man of first-rate ability; he was of a hopelessly vacillating character. Devout and mystical to an almost morbid degree, hating revolution and distrusting Liberalism, he was a confirmed pessimist, yet he had many noble qualities: he was brave to the verge of foolhardiness, devoted to his country, and ready to risk his crown to free Italy from the foreigner. To him the people of Italy owe a great debt, for if he failed in his object he at least materialized the idea of the Risorgimento in a practical shape, and the charges which the Republicans and demagogues brought against him were monstrously unjust.
Bibliography.—Besides the general works on modern Italy, see the Marquis Costa de Beauregard’s interesting volumes La Jeunesse du roi Charles Albert (Paris, 1899) and Novare et Oporto (1890), based on the king’s letters and the journal of Sylvain Costa, his faithful equerry, though the author’s views are those of an old-fashioned Savoyard who dislikes the idea of Italian unity; Ernesto Masi’s Il Segreto del Re Carlo Alberto (Bologna, 1891) is a very illuminating essay; Domenico Perrero, Gli Ultimi Reali di Savoia (Turin, 1889); L. Cappelletti, Storia di Carlo Alberto (Rome, 1891); Nicomede Bianchi, Storia della diplomazia europea in Italia (8 vols., Turin, 1865, &c.), a most important work of a general character, and the same author’s Scritti e lettere di Carlo Alberto (Rome, 1879) and his Storia della monarchia piemontese (Turin, 1877); Count S. della Margherita, Memorandum storico-politico (Turin, 1851).
CHARLES AUGUSTUS [Karl August] (1757-1828), grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, son of Constantine, duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and Anna Amalia of Brunswick, was born on the 3rd of September 1757. His father died when he was only nine months old, and the boy was brought up under the regency and supervision of his mother, a woman of enlightened but masterful temperament. His governor was Count Eustach von Görz, a German nobleman of the old strait-laced school; but a more humane element was introduced into his training when, in 1771, Wieland was appointed his tutor. In 1774 the poet Karl Ludwig von Knebel came to Weimar as tutor to the young Prince Constantine; and in the same year the two princes set out, with Count Görz and Knebel, for Paris. At Frankfort, Knebel introduced Karl August to the young Goethe: the beginning of a momentous friendship. In 1775 Karl August returned to Weimar, and the same year came of age and married Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt.
One of the first acts of the young grand-duke was to summon Goethe to Weimar, and in 1776 he was made a member of the privy council. “People of discernment,” he said, “congratulate me on possessing this man. His intellect, his genius is known. It makes no difference if the world is offended because I have made Dr Goethe a member of my most important collegium without his having passed through the stages of minor official professor and councillor of state.” To the undiscerning, the beneficial effect of this appointment was not at once apparent. With Goethe the “storm and stress” spirit descended upon Weimar, and the stiff traditions of the little court dissolved in a riot of youthful exuberance. The duke was a deep drinker, but also a good sportsman; and the revels of the court were alternated with break-neck rides across country, ending in nights spent round the camp fire under the stars. Karl August, however, had more serious tastes. He was interested in literature, in art, in science; critics, unsuspected of flattery, praised his judgment in painting; biologists found in him an expert in anatomy. Nor did he neglect the government of his little state. His reforms were the outcome of something more than the spirit of the “enlightened despots” of the 18th century; for from the first he had realized that the powers of the prince to play “earthly providence” were strictly limited. His aim, then, was to educate his people to work out their own political and social salvation, the object of education being in his view, as he explained later to the dismay of Metternich and his school, to help men to “independence of judgment.” To this end Herder was summoned to Weimar to reform the educational system; and it is little wonder that, under a patron so enlightened, the university of Jena attained the zenith of its fame, and Weimar became the intellectual centre of Germany.
Meanwhile, in the affairs of Germany and of Europe the character of Karl August gave him an influence out of all proportion to his position as a sovereign prince. He had early faced the problem presented by the decay of the Empire, and began to work for the unity of Germany. The plans of the emperor Joseph II., which threatened to absorb a great part of Germany into the heterogeneous Habsburg monarchy, threw him into the arms of Prussia, and he was the prime mover in the establishment of the league of princes (Furstenbund) in 1785, by which, under the leadership of Frederick the Great, Joseph’s intrigues were frustrated. He was, however, under no illusion as to the power of Austria, and he wisely refused the offer of the Hungarian crown, made to him in 1787 by Prussia at the instance of the Magyar malcontents, with the dry remark that he had no desire to be another “Winter King.” In 1788 Karl August took service in the Prussian army as major-general in active command of a regiment. As such he was present, with Goethe, at the cannonade of Valmy in 1792, and in 1794 at the siege of Mainz and the battles of Pirmasenz (September 14) and Kaiserslautern (October 28-30). After this, dissatisfied with the attitude of the powers, he resigned; but rejoined on the accession of his friend King Frederick William III. to the Prussian throne. The disastrous campaign of Jena (1806) followed; on the 14th of October, the day after the battle, Weimar was sacked; and Karl August, to prevent the confiscation of his territories, was forced to join the Confederation of the Rhine. From this time till after the Moscow campaign of 1812 his contingent fought under the French flag in all Napoleon’s wars. In 1813, however, he joined the Grand Alliance, and at the beginning of 1814 took the command of a corps of 30,000 men operating in the Netherlands.
At the congress of Vienna Karl August was present in person, and protested vainly against the narrow policy of the powers in confining their debates to the “rights of the princes” to the exclusion of the “rights of the people.” His services in the war of liberation were rewarded with an extension of territory and the title of grand-duke; but his liberal attitude had already made him suspect, and his subsequent action brought him still further into antagonism to the reactionary powers. He was the first of the German princes to grant a liberal constitution to his state under Article XIII. of the Act of Confederation (May 5, 1816); and his concession of full liberty to the press made Weimar for a while the focus of journalistic agitation against the existing order. Metternich dubbed him contemptuously “der grosse Bursche” for his patronage of the “revolutionary” Burschenschaften; and the celebrated “festival” held at the Wartburg by his permission in 1818, though in effect the mildest of political demonstrations, brought down upon him the wrath of the great powers. Karl August, against his better judgment, was compelled to yield to the remonstrances of Prussia, Austria and Russia; the liberty of the press was again restricted in the grand-duchy, but, thanks to the good understanding between the grand-duke and his people, the régime of the Carlsbad Decrees pressed less heavily upon Weimar than upon other German states.