Cavour, Camillo Benso, conte di (count of)

▪ Piedmontese statesman

Introduction

born August 10, 1810, Turin, Piedmont, French Empire

died June 6, 1861, Turin, Italy

 Piedmontese statesman, a conservative whose exploitation of international rivalries and of revolutionary movements brought about the unification of Italy (Risorgimento) (1861) under the House of Savoy (Savoy, House of), with himself as the first prime minister of the new kingdom.

Family and early life

      The Cavours were an ancient family that had served the House of Savoy as soldiers and officials since the 16th century. Genevan by birth and Calvinist by religion, his mother brought into the Cavour family the influence of Geneva, a city open to all the political, religious, and social movements of the period. The French Revolution imperilled the fortunes of the Cavours because of their close ties with the ancien régime; but Cavour's father, Michele, reestablished the family in an eminent position in Napoleonic society. Camillo even had as godparents Prince Camillo Borghese—after whom he was named—and Pauline Bonaparte, the Prince's wife and Napoleon's favourite sister.

      At the age of 10 he was enrolled at the Military Academy of Turin. As the younger son who could not hope for the economic and social position that would fall to his elder brother, Camillo saw a brilliant career open up before him under the protection of the court of Charles Albert, prince of Savoy and Piedmont. In 1826 he obtained a commission as lieutenant in the corps of engineers.

      During his six years at the academy political ideas began to fascinate him; echoes of the constitutionalist Piedmontese revolution of 1821 reached the school, provoking in some of its members a flash of liberal and national spirit that was, however, immediately extinguished. Among his family, Camillo heard the great issues of the day being discussed: the internal politics of France under the restored Bourbons; the revolt against Turkish repression in Greece; the liberal Decembrist rising in Russia in 1825. He showed his sympathy, in his usual enthusiastic manner, with the liberals and with personalities such as Benjamin Franklin and Santorre di Santarosa, the famous ill-fated leader of the 1821 revolution in Piedmont, who was also a distant relative. A close friendship with a cadet three years his senior, Baron Severino Cassio, seems to have had a particular influence on his political views. Cassio, suspected of republicanism, imbued Camillo with patriotic ideas.

      The Cavour family, greatly disturbed by their son's association with a cadet holding compromising political views, ordered Camillo to terminate it—not without provoking his indignation and bitterness. This interference of the family was dictated by expediency, for in July 1824 the marchese Michele had obtained for Camillo the appointment as personal page to Charles Albert. His lack of enthusiasm for the court position and his open ridicule of the page-boy's uniform he was obliged to wear caused a scandal and confirmed the growing suspicions about the rebellious disposition of the young count Cavour. The insulted Charles Albert banished Camillo from court and—vainly—tried to persuade King Charles Felix to strip Camillo of his commission. The episode created an irreparable break between Camillo and the hereditary prince and for about 20 years made it impossible for Cavour to take any part in official political life.

Development of political ideals

      His military career began in the engineers. He was first stationed in Turin, then in various frontier posts, where fortifications were being constructed; yet, wherever he was, Cavour remained dissatisfied. In 1830 he was sent to Genoa, where he met Anna Giustiniani Schiaffino, an ardent advocate of ultrademocratic and republican ideas, whose salon was frequented by many members of the Carbonari, the secret revolutionary society whose guiding force then was Giuseppe Mazzini. Cavour's fervent radicalism was inspired by his love for Anna Schiaffino and by his renewed friendship with Severino Cassio, now a fellow officer in the engineers at Genoa.

      The French revolution of July 1830, which overthrew the last Bourbon, Charles X, and installed Louis-Philippe, “the citizen king,” also played a great part in strengthening Cavour's revolutionary ardour. Under the direction of Severino Cassio, he studied English in order to follow more easily the newspapers reporting political events in Europe. He was influenced by the liberal ideas of the French writers Benjamin Constant and François Guizot, and his adversaries remained those of his childhood: paternalistic absolutism; legitimist reactionaries representing the landed interests, the aristocracy, and the clergy; and the union of throne and altar. Of necessity this attitude pitted him consciously against the caste to which he belonged.

      The influence of the events in France on the temperamental Cavour once again aroused official suspicions, and this time he was subjected to police surveillance. As usual, his father's intervention helped to avert more serious consequences; in this case he was simply transferred to a remote mountain fort. It had become obvious, however, that he could no longer remain in the army, from which he resigned in 1831. His father found him a sort of occupation: he was appointed mayor of a village south of Turin and also became the administrator of extensive holdings in the vicinity belonging to his uncles.

      Although these modest occupations served to fill his time and to insulate him from his family, they aggravated his despondency over what appeared to be the end of his political ambitions. Social interests began to absorb him: the problems of poverty and of prisoner education became the subjects of his researches. In 1834 he wrote a memoir on poverty in Piedmont, which was published the following year in London in the Report from His Majesty's Commissioners for inquiring into the Administration and practical Operation of the Poor Laws. A second pamphlet on the history of the Poor Laws in England was edited and published by Cavour in 1835 at Turin.

      During those years he was at last able to make his first long-awaited visit to Paris and London, thus widening his knowledge of Europe. He now came to know the two greatest and most advanced Western capitals—both ruled by constitutional and liberal regimes (however much they differed in character) and both attempting to effect the boldest economic and social changes. He took a feverishly active interest in the parliamentary life of England and France; he attended university lectures and visited factories, railways, ports, hospitals, schools, and prisons. The experience he acquired in the two Western capitals and in Geneva set him firmly on the path he had already instinctively chosen: always to follow the “golden mean.” He was repelled equally by the revolutionaries who wished to destroy society through terror in order to construct a better one without realizing that their methods would defile human dignity, and by the reactionaries, who, in blindly opposing all progress, eventually provoked revolutionary uprisings. Rejecting all extremes, he wanted above all to be a good European. Yet Cavour always remained a patriot. When his worth and his great ambition were acknowledged in France and one of his friends invited him to abandon the petty and wretched Piedmont of Charles Albert for a brilliant career in France, Cavour rejected the invitation.

      In 1835, after his return from his travels, he began to engage in a fruitful series of enterprises that helped him to accumulate a considerable fortune. He also achieved a certain reputation with his writing. Even without directly facing the question of Italy's future political structure, all his writings proclaimed social or economic principles that could in no way be reconciled with the prevailing conditions in Italy. Above all, the economic measures and the construction of railroads proposed by Cavour would have transformed the Italy of that period beyond recognition.

Statesman

      Gradually, as the year 1848 drew near and the first gusts of the great revolutionary storm of that year could be felt, Cavour's interest in politics began once more to dominate all others. This is shown by the chronological sequence of his writings. His transition to politics was completed when King Charles Albert decided to embark on measures of reform and to concede a certain amount of freedom to the press. Cavour took advantage of this to found the newspaper Il Risorgimento, which soon became the champion of increasingly drastic reforms. After taking a leading part in persuading Charles Albert to grant a liberal constitution, Cavour used Il Risorgimento to propagate the idea of an immediate war with Austria (which still ruled Lombardy and Venetia) as a historical necessity. Once elected a member of Parliament in June 1848, however, he assumed an intermediate position between the conservatives and the revolutionaries, thus calling forth the enmity of both left and right.

      The war against Austria was undertaken, but developments went against the Piedmontese. This prompted Cavour to offer his services as a volunteer until, on being elected a deputy in the third Legislature (July 1848), he began to fight for the approval of a peace treaty with Austria, although the extremists of the left wanted to continue a war that was, in effect, already lost. The intelligence and expertise he displayed in the debates on financial and military questions gained him a prominent place among the deputies of the majority that supported the right-wing government of Massimo d'Azeglio. In October 1850, he was offered the post of minister of agriculture and soon became the most active and influential member of the Cabinet. Through a series of treaties with France, Belgium, and England, Cavour attempted to bring about the greatest possible amount of free trade. He also sought to form a network of economic interests with the great powers to pave the way for a political alliance against Austria. His appointment as minister of finance in 1850 was evidence of his growing ambitions.

      Cavour now sought to create an alliance between the centre right and the centre left that would form a new majority with greater ability to move toward a policy of secularization and modernization in Piedmont. The alliance, called the connubio (“marriage”), brought about the resignation of d'Azeglio (Azeglio, Massimo Taparelli, Marquess d'), whose parliamentary standing had been completely destroyed. After vain attempts to restore an effective d'Azeglio ministry, Victor Emmanuel II, who had succeeded his father Charles Albert in 1849, resigned himself to entrusting the formation of a government to Cavour, who from that time (Nov. 4, 1852) until his death was his country's acknowledged political leader.

      The European drama into which Cavour was drawn against his will began in 1854 with the Crimean War (1853–56), which saw France and England allied against Russia in order to defend the integrity of the Turkish territory threatened by Russia's determination to open the Dardanelles for passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Victor Emmanuel immediately pledged his help to the French and English representatives. Cavour, whose ministers voted against the Crimean venture, was on the point of being dismissed by the King if he rejected the alliance or of being forced to resign by his colleagues if he accepted it. Accepting the alliance with customary boldness and self-confidence, he averted dismissal by the King and embarked upon war. The turning point of the war came with the Anglo-French-Sardinian victory that persuaded Austria to cast aside its neutrality and, by means of an ultimatum, force Russia to make peace.

      With some difficulty, Cavour secured the participation of the small power of Piedmont in the peace negotiations at the Congress of Paris (Paris, Treaty of) (1856), at which the greatest European powers were represented. By supporting Napoleon III's (Napoleon III) undeclared yet obvious intention to intervene militarily in Italy in the near future and by taking advantage of the general animosity toward Austria, which had joined the allies in the Crimean War only when victory over Russia was assured, Cavour succeeded in proposing the discussion of the Italian problem on the grounds that it was one that threatened European peace. In his view, peace was threatened by Austrian encroachment, papal misgovernment in central Italy, and the autocratic rule of the Spanish Bourbons in southern Italy. Thus, for the first time, the Italian question was presented for diplomatic consideration in a manner favouring the liberation of the peninsula. The difficulty was to persuade the two great powers, France and England, to persevere in their support of an anti-Austrian policy on the part of Piedmont.

      In Paris, Cavour had occasion to meet and appraise the stature of Europe's most capable diplomats and to examine the reasons behind the policies of the great powers. He knew full well that it was illusory to hope for the disinterested assistance of Europe in the Italian cause; nevertheless, with his tireless energy and unlimited capacity to take advantage of the most adverse situations, he finally succeeded in winning Napoleon III over to his side. His trump card was the proposition to reestablish France as the leading power on the Continent by an expedition into Italy that would replace Austrian domination of the peninsula with French rule.

      At a secret meeting at Plombières in July 1858, Napoleon III and Cavour agreed to provoke a European war against Austria in the following year. At the first suspicions of a secret agreement, the European powers—especially England—began a campaign to prevent the French and Piedmontese from carrying out their intentions, a campaign so intense that Cavour saw himself being dragged toward the brink of personal and national catastrophe. He was saved by an incredible blunder on the part of Austria, which sent an ultimatum threatening war unless Piedmont disarmed at once. The Franco-Piedmontese alliance accordingly came into force, and this time Austria's superior military power was counterbalanced by the French contribution. Franco-Piedmontese victories followed one after another until Napoleon signed an armistice with Emperor Francis Joseph I at Villafranca in July 1859.

      The war had unleashed revolutionary movements in Tuscany, in the duchies of Modena and Parma, and in the papal states between the Po and the Apennines, from Bologna to Cattolica; the ducal rulers had been expelled, as had the papal legates. The armistice seemed to call everything into question, except for Victor Emmanuel's acquisition of Lombardy, which was a minimal gain compared with Cavour's dreams of liberating Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic. At Villafranca, Cavour vented his rage and frustration on the King and resigned his office.

      Contrary to his usual perception, he realized only later the advantages to be derived from the armistice. The revolutionary landslide in Italy could no longer be checked, nor could the French emperor withdraw from his position as protector of Italian self-determination. After being returned to power by the reluctant king in January 1860, Cavour worked for the annexation of the central duchies that had formerly belonged to the ancient rulers of Piedmont; he was able to do this only by ceding Savoy and Nice to France.

Unification of Italy

      The surrender of Nice to France vastly sharpened the conflict between Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi (Garibaldi, Giuseppe), for Nice was the popular hero's birthplace. The surrender of Piedmont's Alpine bulwark could be compensated for only by territorial expansion into central Italy (at the pope's expense) and into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But Cavour, by now the black sheep of European diplomacy for having disturbed its tranquillity too often, was not in a position to take the initiative, even though England now favoured his policy.

      It was Garibaldi who resolved the stalemate caused by Cavour's enforced inactivity. Sailing with his famous Thousand to Sicily, he destroyed Bourbon rule there and in the south. The daring diplomacy of Piedmont and Cavour seemed momentarily to be eclipsed by the military exploits of the red-shirted hero, but more important, there now appeared the first outlines of rivalry between a moderate, monarchist Italy and a revolutionary, republican Italy. The danger of a rupture was averted by the good sense and magnanimity of Garibaldi and by a diplomatic stratagem of Cavour. Cavour, taking up his stance before Europe as the defender of law and order against revolutionary excesses, and before Napoleon as the defender of the last strip of papal territory against attack by Garibaldi, sent an army under Victor Emmanuel across Marche and Umbria in order to check the “hero of the two worlds” and to weld the two Italies into one united kingdom.

      There still remained the problem of establishing a capital. Cavour felt that only Rome could be the capital of the new state; but that meant he had to face the most complex problem of his life—that of the position to be assigned to the pope, the head of Catholicism, once Rome had become the capital of Italy. Cavour wholeheartedly accepted the concept of the separation of church and state; in his negotiations with the papacy he became a passionate supporter of the idea. He maintained that the liberty of the church was to be the fulcrum of the renewal of the world, even though this involved the renunciation of its temporal power and the surrender of Rome to the Italian nation. An entirely spiritual church and papacy, he asserted, would revive mankind. Pius IX's answer to these proposals was negative. But while Cavour was still vigorously promoting his formula of “a free church in a free state,” he fell seriously ill and died, after having formed a nation in 10 years of impassioned and restless activity.

Umberto Marcelli Ed.

Additional Reading

Paul Matter, Cavour et l'unité italienne . . . , 3 vol. (1922–27); Arthur J.B. Whyte, The Early Life and Letters of Cavour, 1810–1848 (1925, reprinted 1970), and The Political Life and Letters of Cavour, 1848–1861 (1930, reprinted 1975), are documented works available in English. W. Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Times of Cavour, 2 vol. (1911, reissued 1971), contains a full bibliography. Heinrich von Treitschke, Cavour (1870, reissued 1939), depicts Cavour as an exponent of Realpolitik. Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, 3rd ed., vol. 1– (1977– ), is a standard work on Cavour. Denis Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the Risorgimento (1971), is a revisionist work on Cavour and the Risorgimento.

* * *