Cavour

Harry Hearder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317901396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Cavour was perhaps the key figure in the process of Italian unification. As prime minister of Piedmont, still reeling from military humiliation by Austria, he turned his backward and insignificant home state into the nucleus of the new Italy by his astute manipulation of the European great powers, becoming the united country's first prime minister in the year of his death, 1861. Harry Hearder's incisive study, setting Cavour and the Risorgimento in the full context of international European power-politics, reveals a ruthless, egocentric and far from balanced man - but a politician of genius.

Chapter 1

ORIGINS, BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, 1810–30

Cavour was born on 10 August 1810. His father was the Marquis Michele Antonio Benso di Cavour, an able and successful Piedmontese landowner. His mother, Adèle de Sellon, came from a French Huguenot family, who had been settled in Switzerland for several generations, and had subsequently become Catholics. Cavour’s godparents were French rulers of Napoleonic Italy. His godfather was Prince Camillo Borghese, governor general of the Transalpine departments of the French Empire, and his godmother was the Princess Paolina Bonaparte, sister of the great Emperor. He was thus christened Camillo. There is no record that it was ever considered naming him Napoleon.

The family name was thus Benso, and the Bensos had been an enterprising people. They claimed to have come to Italy with Frederick Barbarossa, but what could be known historically was that they had been bankers and merchants in the province of Chieri in the late middle ages. A Goffredo Benso was trading with Brazil as early as 1542. Later in that century the family moved to Turin to take posts in the court of the House of Savoy. Carlo Ottavio Benso, who died in 1724, was made Count of Santena, and built the castle which still stands in Santena today. Carlo Benso’s male line died out in 1753, but the line of the family from which Camillo Cavour was to come had already, in 1649, acquired the title of Marquis de Cavour for 20,000 lire. Cavour is a small town some thirty miles to the south-west of Turin.

The future of the family was by no means assured by the title of Cavour, but after many changes of fortune a Filippo di Cavour, in 1781, married Filippina, of the rich Savoyard family of the De Sales, of which St Francis de Sales had been a member. Filippo was Cavour’s paternal grandfather, and died only three years before Cavour’s birth. Filippina, Cavour’s paternal grandmother, lived until 1847, dying at the age of eighty-seven, too early to see her grandson become prime minister of Piedmont. With the wealth acquired by Fillipo’s fortunate marriage the Cavours purchased considerable lands and the palace in Turin where Cavour was to be born and to die. The street is called today, inevitably, Via Cavour, having had three previous names.

Cavour’s father, the Marquis Michele, was born in 1781, and was to live until 1850, sadly, like his own mother, dying before his son had achieved success. The family went through a bad spell after the Napoleonic invasion of 1796, losing a great deal of property. But they quickly accepted service under the French, and then for some years changed sides with a rapidity that would have done credit to the Vicar of Bray. They hastened to re-establish their loyalty to the restored legitimate Piedmontese regime when the Austro-Russian offensive under General Suvarov drove the French out of Italy in 1799. But after Napoleon’s victory at Marengo in 1800 the Marquis Michele secured a reconciliation with the French, and was given a post at court under the new rulers. He then built up another fortune by the purchase of Church land dispossessed by the French. In 1814 he was adroit enough to secure, once again, the favour of the restored House of Savoy.

Cavour’s father has often been contrasted unfavourably with his famous son, rather as Bismarck has been contrasted with the slow, thick-headed Junker who was his father. But the Marquis Michele’s dexterity at changing sides at least suggests that he was not slow-witted. The difference between Michele and Camillo was primarily one between generations. Michele believed that Piedmont should remain an agricultural country under a paternalistic absolutist monarch. Camillo, as we shall see, believed passionately in gradual social and economic change, industrialization, and a limited constitutional monarchy. Relations between father and son were often strained, though an early author on the youth of Cavour, Francesco Ruffini, claimed that the most important revelation of his book, which was a serious and well written work, was that Michele was adored by all his relatives, close and distant, and that he was an excellent paterfamilias. He was, according to Ruffini, only a little severe with strangers.¹

The family of Cavour’s mother, Adèle de Sellon, was cultured as well as rich. Adèle was one of three daughters. Michele di Cavour tried unsuccessfully to marry the eldest of the three, but had to settle for the second, Adèle, and they were married in 1805. Adèle had been well educated and had been taken on a long trip to Italy in 1790, seeing Rome and Naples, and staying in Florence from the end of 1792 to the summer of 1794. Like all her side of Cavour’s family, she developed a great affection for the customs and culture of Italy. Of the man she was to marry she noted in her diary, when the De Sellon family set out for their Swiss home from Italy: ‘“Cavourino” was our second brother. He is likeable, gay, obliging, lively. He is the young man with whom I am most at my ease’.² Evidently Cavour’s father, as a young man, was not unlike Cavour.

The considerable wealth of both of Cavour’s parents obviously contributed to his self-confidence, not to say arrogance. The noble, patrician background in Turin, with its deep roots, formed a happy mixture with the more cosmopolitan background of his mother’s many relatives in Geneva. Camillo’s brother, Gustavo, was four years older but was to live until 1864 – three years beyond Cavour’s death. The two boys grew up in close contact, always in a noisy and rowdy atmosphere. Gustavo was believed to be the philosophical genius of the family, while Camillo was characterized as a jolly extrovert, always seeking new ways of enjoying life. Their father was later to sum up the contrast between the two brothers by saying that Gustavo lived in the world of noumena and Camillo lived in the world of phaenomena.

Much was expected of the boys. Their mother was distressed when she could not teach Camillo the alphabet at the age of four, and when he hated book studies at the age of five. But he had great intellectual curiosity. The tutors their parents hired for the two boys praised Gustavo, but complained that Camillo lay in bed until midday, then got up, did well at his lesson, but was not very obedient. He grumbled and cried at having to study. ‘He has been very naughty all day’, commented the tutor. To which Camillo replied, with a precocious sense of humour, ‘I cannot stand studying. What do you want me to do? It is not my fault’.³

Camillo as a boy was clearly high-spirited, awkward, often impossible, but also likeable and entertaining. (His brother was to have a life punctuated by tragedy. He married, but his wife died when she was young. He had three children, two boys and one girl. Of the two boys, who might have kept the Cavour line going, one remained a batchelor, and the other was killed in 1848 in the First War of Italian Independence, at the battle of Goito.) Their mother was a devoutly religious woman. Gustavo acquired her pious convictions and habits of life, which Camillo never adopted. Gustavo was not entirely a recluse, however. He was to take a seat in the Piedmontese parliament, where he was concerned only to defend the Church against the assaults of the secular state, especially assaults launched by his brother. But although their opinions and their whole attitude to life were in such sharp contrast, the two brothers retained an affection for each other.

The Benso family had for long had ties not only with the royal government and the landed nobility, but also with the Piedmontese army. Usually the eldest sons of Piedmontese noble families were trained for the army, but as Gustavo was a quiet, studious, introverted boy, whose health was believed to be poor, it was decided that the robust Camillo should have a military career. His aunt, the formidable Vittoria de Clermont-Tonnerre said he was ‘born and created to be a military man’. Her judgement was not good. So, on 30 April 1820, at the age of ten, Camillo was sent to be a boarder at the Royal Military Academy in Turin. The institution was run on strictly military lines, and the teachers were army officers or N.C.O.s, sometimes rather rugged and brutal soldiers. It was a grinding curriculum of academic study, military exercises and religious practices, with no official vacations. Attendance at chapel was required twice a day. Like many spirited youths, Cavour was turned against formal Christianity by regular religious services. A savage discipline was imposed, with punishments consisting of prolonged military exercises, or long periods spent on the knees.⁴

At school Cavour was thus inevitably a rebel, receiving severe punishments for disobedience and for possessing forbidden literature. He was most successful in mathematics and mechanics. To anyone familiar with English public schools it may come as a surprise to learn that mechanics was taught in such an institution, but the traditional classical subjects were also, of course, taught. Cavour, who was never very competent in literary subjects, and who always spoke better than he wrote, did poorly in Italian language and literature. On the positive side, it must be said that the school seems to have been strong in the teaching of the sciences, both pure and applied. Several leaders of the risorgimento were, after all, educated there, though whether they were forward-looking as a result of their education or as a backlash against it, is open to argument.

The little Cavour’s first letters home suggest that he was homesick and that he missed his ‘dear mama’ and his ‘dear brother’, thus implying that his home life, if tempestuous, had been a happy one. By 1821, when he reached his eleventh birthday, he was doing very well academically – better than his contemporaries – but was getting into trouble for offences against the discipline of the place, a discipline which he was intelligent enough to regard as mindless. Nevertheless, when the revolution of 1821 broke out in Piedmont, and some students of the Royal Academy got into trouble with the authorities, Camillo remained immune. In February 1822, however, he was found ‘guilty of grave disobedience’, and condemned to bread and water for three days, and in August of that year he and a friend were found guilty of ‘having kept books without permission of his superiors’, but apparently the books in question were simply two novels from his father’s house.

That he was already eager to secure recognition in the world is indicated by a desire to be first in the class, a desire which led him to request to be moved into a lower class, where he knew he could shine. His tutor, as gently as possible, explained that it would be better for him to remain where he was, but to work harder. The letters of the young Cavour from school thus show him to have been proud, conceited, always ready to contradict his superiors and above all, disobedient and rebellious. They were characteristics which were to be of considerable service to Piedmont and Italy in the years ahead.

On 9 July 1824 Prince Carlo Alberto, the future king of Piedmont, nominated Camillo one of his pages. He had not yet reached his fourteenth birthday, and the Cavour family were delighted. A valuable pension and a brilliant career seemed to be opened to Camillo. But the young man did not share his parents’ enthusiasm. ‘You must realize, my dear papa’, he wrote, ‘that I have no wish to be a page, But since it will please you, I resign myself to it patiently’. What particularly irritated him was the quaint red livery that he had to wear, a livery which seemed to him that of a humble domestic, and the court rituals he found equally degrading.

Meanwhile at school he continued to do well in maths, which was evidently taught thoroughly because it was needed by officers in the artillery and engineering branches of the army. For Cavour the importance of mathematics lay in its role as a training of the mind. He still did less well in literary subjects, and later regretted that he had not been taught to write elegantly or fluently, although some of his parliamentary speeches and letters suggest that he exaggerated the deficiency. In physical and military exercises he was not brilliant, mainly, it seems, because he disliked taking orders, and was lazy. He preferred to study the social sciences and history, which he had to do on his own.

In 1825–26 Camillo experienced a sharp crisis with his family. He became a close friend of another, slightly older, boy – Severino Cassio, who was something of a revolutionary and an Italian nationalist. The family insisted that Camillo should break off the friendship, which he did, but only with great bitterness and distress, and, as it proved, only temporarily. He subsequently renewed relations with Severino, asking his forgiveness for having broken with him so suddenly. His relationship with his father, on the other hand, changed, as Camillo acquired maturity and psychological autonomy. However, the Marquis Michele, having threatened to send his rebellious son ‘to die of hunger in America’, was subsequently to be very generous to him. It is interesting to speculate what Camillo would have made of America: that he would have died of hunger seems unlikely.

There is some evidence that it was at this time – in his sixteenth year – that Cavour began to read newspapers and historical and political works, though such readings had no immediate influence. At the Academy his private war against the authorities continued. On 15 March 1826 he was excluded from horse-riding exercises for having been ‘extremely negligent’, and on the next day he was placed under arrest for having openly and defiantly disobeyed a superior. He was under arrest for two weeks, and on 19 April arrested again for replying arrogantly to a superior. But if they were trying to break him, they did not succeed. The Academy set forbidding final exams, which lasted for five months from March to August, 1826. Cavour’s results were impressive. He secured maximum grades in all subjects, which related mostly to the application of engineering to military needs, but included differential calculus, civil architecture, history and even elocuzione, by which was meant literature. His name was at the top of the list of exam results, and for promotion purposes second only to a certain Marquise Scati, who, unlike Cavour, had remained a respectful page of Carlo Alberto. Cavour’s disrespect and openly proclaimed contempt for the ‘lackey’s uniform’ of the page led to his dismissal by Carlo Alberto.

Even before his sixteenth birthday, however, the young rebel had been made a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. When Prince Carlo Alberto asked his king, Carlo Felice, to strip Cavour of his newly acquired commission, the king was at first inclined to do so, but the commander of the engineers intervened: if Cavour were to go, the commander would resign also. So Cavour remained in the army, but the Cavour family abandoned any idea that he might have a career at court, and Cavour, for his part, kept his distance from Carlo Alberto, so soon to be king of Piedmont. Cavour did not take up his commission immediately, because of some undefined illness, from which he had evidently recovered early in 1827. In theory, he was not entirely averse to his new job in the army. When his pacifist uncle, Jean-Jacques de Sellon (of whom more in a moment), attacked armies in general, Cavour argued that the engineers might be a deterrent to warfare, and quoted Carnot, who had said that other military arms were destructive, but ‘strong places’ (presumably constructed by the engineers) were purely defensive.

When Cavour was at home in Turin the house was always full of relatives. Gustavo must have found it considerably more difficult than Camillo to live with this extended family of the nobility. Two of their mother’s sisters, together with their husbands, came to live in the Palazzo Cavour. One of them – Vittoria de Clermont-Tonnerre – was married to a French peer and was a strongly reactionary influence on the young Cavour. Another relative on his mother’s side was her brother, Count Jean-Jacques de Sellon, who was an influence in a strikingly progressive sense, whether directly, when he was living in the family house in Turin, or by correspondence. While Cavour’s father’s family were loyal monarchists, his mother’s family tended towards republicanism and free-thinking, Adèle herself being the exception. Cavour had grown up in an atmosphere of continual debate, though evidently civilized and cultured debate. Arguments often went on until daybreak. Of all the large family Cavour seems at first to have preferred the company of his uncle, the Count de Sellon, although his own political opinions were always appreciably less advanced than De Sellon’s convictions, which in their day seemed utopian.

De Sellon was proud to be called a ‘philanthropist’, and considered philanthropy ‘the chivalry of modern times’. He had lived in his youth for four years in Italy, staying for long periods in Rome, Naples and Florence, so that this Swiss intellectual who was a first influence on Cavour actually knew Italy better than Cavour was ever to know it. It was in Florence that De Sellon found his spiritual home, partly because it was in Florence that capital punishment had been abolished by the good Grand Duke Piero Leopoldo in the eighteenth century, and the abolition of the barbarism of capital punishment was perhaps the main driving force of De Sellon’s life. Another important motivation was pacifism on the international scene, and De Sellon founded in Geneva, as early as 1830, a society for establishing world peace. (If he could have lived until 1867 De Sellon would have witnessed another congress in Geneva for world peace, a congress attended by Garibaldi.) If the death sentence were ever to be abolished there would inevitably be more people confined to prison, and this thought led De Sellon to a study of the penitentiary system, an interest which would also be one of Cavour’s. Even if Cavour was never to share the visionary ideas of De Sellon, he had, at least, been exposed to them.⁵

On 15 October 1828 Cavour was sent to Ventimiglia in connection with the building of fortifications. On 25 February 1829 he was moved to a different garrison at Exilles, and in May 1829 to the fortress of Lesseillon, near Modane. In these remote spots on the Alpine borders he was immensely bored. He always needed stimulating company, which he was not likely to find in the Piedmontese army. With the other young officers he could play and gamble at cards, but for intellectual satisfaction he was left to read in solitude. A rather strange publication has reproduced all Cavour’s jottings – notes certainly never intended for publication. They include a variety of writings, from mathematical calculations to the po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• CHAPTER 1 Origins, Boyhood and Youth, 1810–30
• CHAPTER 2 Lover, Farmer and Speculator, 1830–48
• CHAPTER 3 Cavour’s Economic and Political Philosophy
• CHAPTER 4 Power and the First Taste of European Politics, 1848–56
• CHAPTER 5 The Alliance with France, 1856–59
• CHAPTER 6 The War of 1859: Its Preparations and Consequences
• CHAPTER 7 Cavour and Garibaldi in the Final Struggle to Unite Italy, 1860–61
• CHAPTER 8 Cavour and the Historians
• CHAPTER 9 Sequel and Conclusion
• Chronology
• Bibliographical Note
• Map
• Index