Chapter Ten
The Wars of Italian Liberation, including the first war of 1848–49, the second of 1859–60, the third of 1866, and the campaign for Rome of 1870 (sometimes dubbed the ‘fourth war of Italian Liberation’) were waged by the moderate and monarchist Piedmontese party on the one hand, and the republicans and democrats of the Party of Action, on the other. While the Piedmontese party supplied the ‘blood and iron’, and perhaps more importantly the diplomatic expertise to win the wars, the Party of Action provided a broader degree of popular support, transforming the movement from a dynastic to a national one. Neither the moderates nor the republicans were truly popular, for both failed to appeal to the broad mass of workers and had little peasant support. Nonetheless they differed in their programmes, memberships and temperaments. The two camps also disagreed on the means of planning, waging and winning the wars, as well as having divergent visions of the final outcome. However, they needed each other to overcome Austria and her allies in the peninsula, and this assured some degree of cooperation.
The tone of the wars was set during the course of the First War of Italian Liberation (1848–49), when Carlo Alberto’s Piedmont chose as its slogan, ‘Italia farà da se’, predicting that the Italians would be able to liberate the peninsula without foreign assistance. In practice the secretive Piedmontese ruler and his suspicious ministers relied almost exclusively on the kingdom’s regular army to oust the Austrians. During the course of this conflict, the conservative Savoyard monarchy seemed more bent on Piedmontese expansion than Italian union, revealing a distrust of the other Italian states as well as the rural masses. Carlo Alberto’s campaign, marred by indecisiveness, incompetence and parochialism, and betraying dynastic more than national ambitions, led to the disasters of Custozza and Novara. The dreams of 1848 disintegrated in the dust of the restoration of 1849.
The mutual rivalry and suspicion of the Italian princes, coupled with the Piedmontese reluctance to invoke outside intervention or encourage internal upheaval by rousing the masses, meant that the little state of Piedmont had to confront the powerful Austrian empire alone. Its population of less than five million proved unequal to the task in the struggle against an empire having more than six times that number. Consequently, Piedmont, which waged war against Austria in 1848 and then in 1849, was twice defeated.
The period following the restoration of 1849 proved to be one of preparation for reopening the conflict and waging the Second War of Liberation, with the Piedmontese state acting as the motor for unification. In the decade from this restoration to the outbreak of this Second War in 1859, the moderates were aided by a number of factors. For one thing the European powers protected Piedmontese independence and territorial integrity, assuring the Savoyards the freedom of action to launch another attempt to dislodge the Habsburgs from the peninsula. Secondly, the overly cautious members of the Piedmontese party were superseded by a more daring leadership, personified by Count Camillo di Cavour. Cavour recognized that Italy could not achieve unification alone, and that outside assistance would be necessary to challenge Austria, which at that time possessed one of the strongest armies. Thus Cavour looked to London, and even more so to Paris, well aware that tiny Piedmont did not enjoy the international autonomy to act unilaterally. His national strategy called for the collaboration of the Second French Empire. Nonetheless, he concluded after the Congress of Paris of 1856 that some degree of national support was essential to legitimize Piedmontese ambitions, providing at once both a popular and Italian element to the Second War of Liberation.
Mazzini’s Party of Action likewise reconsidered its position in the decade from the Second Restoration to the outbreak of the Second War of Liberation, but the master himself, who had long championed the notion of unification, proved unwilling and unable to compromise his goals or reconsider his ideology. Mazzini refused to abandon his dream of religious regeneration and his nebulous philosophical doctrines, little understood or appreciated by the illiterate masses. Thus while the ‘soul of Italian unification’ pleaded for the involvement of the Italian people in the unification process, he did not know how to translate this goal into reality. Although the prophet had faith in popular initiative and enthusiasm, he consistently failed to rouse either. Mazzini proved incapable of offering the peasants a concrete programme of economic transformation and land reform that might have galvanized them into action.1 Furthermore, Mazzini even more than Garibaldi and the Party of Action, distrusted Napoleon and shunned French involvement in Italian affairs.
Cavour, beholden to the propertied classes on the one hand, and dependent upon the goodwill of the courts of Europe, who feared revolution and communism, on the other, had neither the inclination nor the leeway to involve the peasants, preferring to let ‘sleeping dogs lie’. Determined to preserve social stability as much as to achieve unification, the aristocratic Cavour relied first and foremost on the regular army, diplomacy and the bureaucracy to fulfil his ambitions. Popular movements, carefully controlled and guided, might supplement but not replace his strict reliance on the organs of state. On the war issue, he continued Carlo Alberto’s cautious policy. The rural masses were not encouraged to take part in the campaign of 1848–49, and in that fateful year, the countryside often sided with General Radetzky against the Piedmontese. Later, too, the peasants failed to rise, and during the ensuing campaigns often stripped and robbed the fallen soldiers on both sides, in every battlefield.2
In the competition between the Piedmontese Party and the Party of Action, led respectively by Cavour and Mazzini, most of the advantages rested with the Machiavellian minister rather than the idealistic philosopher. Cavour, recognizing that a measure of broad support was required in the reorganization of the peninsula, under the auspices of the Piedmontese state, knew how to win adherents for his war of position. He proved able to drag the greater part of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy into his national bloc, while neutralizing the ultraconservative and Catholic forces. Mazzini, championing a popular war, could not rouse the masses. Small wonder that substantial numbers from the left abandoned his cause and reorganized under the banner of the National Society, founded in 1857, committing themselves to cooperation with Cavour and the Piedmontese. The fact that an increasing contingent from the Party of Action joined Cavour’s coalition affected not only the future of Mazzinianism, but the nature of the state which emerged from unification.
Among the first republicans to question the dogmas of Mazzini was the wealthy Lombard aristocrat, the Marchese Giorgio Pallavicino Trivulzio, who had transferred to Turin. Implicated in the revolutionary upheaval of 1821, and a ‘martyr’ of the Spielberg, his nationalist credentials and reputation were impeccable. Early in 1849, he hinted that republicanism might have to be sacrificed for independence. Since Piedmont preserved the Albertine Constitution of 1848, and had soldiers and cannon, he proclaimed himself ‘Piedmontese’. He explained to Massimo D’Azeglio that there were two wings in the republican camp, one led by Mazzini and the second by Manin. Trivulzio predicted that the latter would support the Piedmontese monarchy if it committed itself to the holy goal of independence.3 The prediction materialized following the formation of the National Society in 1857.
The failure of Mazzinianism and Cavour’s Alliance with the National Society substantiated Vittorio Emanuele’s observation that they had the Party of Action in their pocket.4 It meant that the left had to await the initiative of the moderates, and that the wars which made Italy would not involve the broad masses. Thus it is not surprising that Italian casualties in the various conflicts for Italian Liberation were light. It is estimated that some 3,000 perished in the first (1848–49) and second wars (1859–60). Only fourteen were killed in battle during the Crimean War of 1855, while another thousand perished on land and sea during the third war.5 The Garibaldini suffered more than 600 deaths at Mentana (1867), while the Italian Regulars had only twenty-four deaths during the campaign of September 1870.6
Thus it is estimated that the total casualties of the regular and volunteer forces between 1848 and 1870 were about 6,000 dead and some 20,000 wounded.7 In fact more died in the post-unification pacification, branded ‘brigandage’ by the national government, than perished in all the Wars of Liberation. This led Piero Marconi first, and Italian imperialists later, to denounce the Risorgimento as a small story, not sufficiently irrigated by blood.8
While the Piedmontese picked up the Italian standard from the dust of Novara by the diplomacy of Cavour and the army of Vittorio Emanuele, playing a major role in provoking and waging the Second War of Liberation of 1859–60, they did not do it alone. In addition to French military assistance, and eventual British diplomatic support, they also secured internal allies. From 1857 to 1862 the Italian National Society published a newspaper, first a weekly and then a daily, with a national circulation, which popularized the national goal while prodding the Piedmontese to action. The society drafted volunteers into the campaign against Austria in 1859, its committees orchestrated the revolutions in the towns of central Italy when the Papal and Austrian forces withdrew, and it played a key role in the plebiscites which sanctioned Piedmontese action. In 1860 the society was implicated both in Garibaldi’s invasion of the Kingdom of Naples and Cavour’s incursion into the Papal States, thus ensuring that the kingdom of 1861 would be national rather than northern.9
The burden of funding the wars of liberation fell primarily upon the Piedmontese kingdom, and the Italian kingdom which succeeded in 1861. It proved heavy. Calculations reveal that the war of 1848–49 cost some 200 million lire, with an additional 50 million spent for the Crimean War of 1855. The Second War of Liberation cost nearly 400 million lire with 89 million going for the Piedmontese campaign, another 60 million to cover the expenses of their French ally, 100 million lire to provide for that portion of the Lombard debt assumed by the French, and another 145 million to cover the remaining Lombardo-Venetian debt. The total expenditures for the Third War of Liberation have been estimated as high as 800 million lire.10
The onerous cost of waging the Wars of Liberation affected first Piedmont’s and then Italy’s social, political, military, diplomatic and fiscal policies. Thus, during the course of the First War of Liberation, paper money became more common throughout the peninsula, and above all in Piedmont, where the government virtually ‘forced’ the population to accept its treasury notes as legal tender. The drain of the second War of Liberation (1859), followed by the high cost of waging the third war (1866), brought the deficit to a peak of 740 million lire after the war for Venice. To cope with this grave financial situation, and the spectre of ruin, the Italian government in May 1866 decreed the inconvertibility of banknotes, introducing the ‘corso forzoso’.11
The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, in placing her diplomatic and military efforts at the service of Italian unification, incurred grave financial burdens which compromised the process of modernization which Cavour had begun in the 1850s. The diplomatic pretensions of the new Italian kingdom, and the need to create a modern infrastructure of roads, bridges and railroads, to ‘stitch the peninsula together’ only aggravated the problem.12 To be sure, there were compensations for Piedmont which sacrificed itself to absorb Italy. By setting the tone and directing the Wars of Liberation, the moderate Piedmontese party imposed its stamp on the society and state which resulted. Despite the fact that the Party of Action was more nationalist in attitude and outlook, and its leaders such as Mazzini and Garibaldi shared international reputations, their influence on the unitary state proved marginal in comparison to that of Cavour and his allies.
The liberal historian Adolfo Omodeo in a series of works applauded the contribution of the patriotic minority which forged Italy at great cost. Likewise the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce’s Storia d’ltalia provided a positive evaluation of the efforts and edifice created by the liberal directing class in the Risorgimento era. Not all shared this vision, however. In his Rivoluzione liberale, Piero Gobetti branded the Risorgimento a ‘failed revolution’, conducted by men who proved unwilling and unable to involve the Italian masses in the project, thereby failing to create a modern state structure. The latter assessment influenced Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts on the Risorgimento.
The debate on the manner in which Italy was transformed from a ‘geographical expression’ into a ‘political entity’ began early. ‘Italy is made, now we must make the Italians’ observed Massimo D’Azeglio. Mazzini and Pio Nono feared that the Italians would be made in the Piedmontese image. The ‘soul of Italian unification’ who died alone and dissatisfied with the state forged by the Piedmontese, proved almost as critical of the unitary kingdom as did Pio Nono, the ‘Cross’ of Liberals and Nationalists alike. Following the proclamation of unification, Mazzini complained that the Italians had been led astray, accepting material in place of moral unity. He warned that any system not inspired by God would perforce have to resort to blind and brutal force.13 Pio Nono, for once, found himself in total agreement with Mazzini, denouncing the ‘so-called’ Risorgimento as a moral, civil and religious oppression.14 God alone, he insisted, could provide true guidance and consolation.15 Indeed, the Pontiff suspected that he, Garibaldi and Mazzini were the only men who got nothing out of the Risorgimento.16
In his December 1870 speech from the throne, Vittorio Emanuele proclaimed that since Italy was ‘free and united’ the task was now to make her ‘great and happy’. The post-Risorgimento had begun, and some found the prose of consolidation considerably less exciting than the poetry of liberation. The new state, divided into fifty-nine provinces in 1861 and sixty-nine after the acquisition of Venice and Rome, possessed a population of approximately twenty-seven million; thus it ranked as the sixth greatest European power after Russia, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain. Nonetheless, the patriotic poet Carducci derided this little Italy as ‘Italietta’, while others despaired that Trent and Trieste had not been included. Thus irredentism emerged as an important movement, eventually propelling Italian entry into the First World War, which some have dubbed Italy’s fifth and final War of Liberation.
Notes
1. Antonio Gramsci, Sul Risorgimento, ed. Elsa Fubini (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967), pp. 108–14.
2. Denis Mack Smith, Italy: a Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 39.
3. Raymond Grew, A Sterner Plan for Italian Unity: the Italian National Society in the Risorgimento (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 9–11.
4. Gramsci, p. 120.
5. Mack Smith, Italy, p. 79; Mack Smith, Cavour (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 83.
6. Costantino Bulle, Storia del Secondo Impero e del Regno d’ltalia (Milan: Società Editrice Libraria, 1911), pp. 719, 1023.
7. Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 1870–1925 (London: Methuen and Co., 1967), p. 3.
8. Gramsci, p. 49.
9. Grew, pp. ix-xii.
10. Shepard B. Clough, The Economic History of Modern Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 34, 42; Mack Smith, Italy, p. 85.
11. Clough, pp. 22, 53.
12. Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, The Liberation of Italy 1815–1870 (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), p. 403.
13. Frank J. Coppa, ‘The Religious Basis of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Political Thought’, Journal of Church and State, XII (Spring, 1970), 253.
14. Antonio Monti, Pio IX nel Risorgimento Italiano con documenti inediti (Bari: Laterza, 1928), p. 171.
15. Pius IX to Louis Napoleon, 5 July 1871, Archivio Segreto del Vaticano, Archivio Particolare Pio IX, Sovrani, Francia, no. 96.
16. Glorney Bolton, Roman Century: A Portrait of Rome as Capital of Italy, 1870–1970 (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), p. 63.