Victor Emmanuel's Political Work

VICTOR EMMANUEL received the sceptre of Sardinia from the hands of Charles Albert, upon the lost battle-field of Novara, the 23d of March, 1849. On the 9th of January, 1878, he died in the Quirinal Palace at Rome, king of Italy.

His broken-hearted father consigned to him the shattered hopes of his country, and left him to make for her the best terms of peace he could with victorious Austria. Italy was, as Prince Metternich had truly said, “a mere geographical expression.” The several kingdoms, principalities, and duchies into which it was divided had, each in its several way, and more than half the time at cross purposes, made wild and fruitless efforts to achieve independence from the Austrian without and from despotism within. Mazzini had discovered the panacea of all the political miseries of Italy in a grand Italian republic, and the means of reaching this end in secret conspiracy. Gioberti had eloquently sketched the outlines of an Italian confederation, of which the Pope should be the head and the king of Sardinia the strong right arm. But princely treachery and domestic dissensions had cooperated with a foreign army in rudely awakening Naples, Milan, Florence, Palermo, Bologna, Rome, and Venice, one after another, from all such dreams of constitutional liberty. The chivalrous king of Sardinia, already defeated in one campaign, took up arms again, and received full on his shield the last fatal blow which closed the struggle of 1848 and 1849; and, abdicating in favor of his son, went into voluntary exile to die.

Victor Emmanuel reigned nearly nine and twenty years, first at Turin, then at Florence, finally at Rome; and, dying, has peacefully transmitted to his son the crown of a free and united Italy, settled in its constitutional government and recognized as one of the great powers of Europe, whose counsels are respectfully listened to and whose interests must be taken into consideration in any question of magnitude.

Such is the contrast between the beginning and the end of a single reign. The counsellors of the new king can tell him the whole story of this extraordinary revolution from their own personal memories: the young men who fought against Radetzky and Oudinot and Haynau are still holding command in the army or sitting in the Italian parliament.

Now, it is a not uncommon impression that this, if not the free gift of Providence to an almost passive Italy, was at least the work of her patriot statemen alone, the king contributing little more than his name to an epoch which other men have made so glorious. But whatever blessings Providence bestows upon nations, it is not usual to include among them that of an undeserved and unearned restoration to national life and liberty: and the work of restoring Italian nationality was not by any means so exclusively done by Piedmontese statesmen and soldiers as to account for the fact that greatness was laid upon the shoulders of their king rather than on those of any other ruler of Italy.

What, then, was Victor Emmanuel’s rôle in this magnificent drama of the risorgimento of Italy?

The question has interested the American press to no small degree: but the comments on the political character of the late king of Italy with which I have met have shown no appreciation of the true nature of those moral qualities for which he will hereafter be chiefly and most gratefully remembered. I venture, therefore, as one who has enjoyed some opportunities of informing himself on the subject, to supplement what has already been given to the public.

Victor Emmanuel inherited from his race, and still further acquired from the influences in the midst of which his early years were passed, what I will characterize as a bigoted and almost superstitious recognition of the spiritual claims and the spiritual power of the authorities of the Church of Rome. Leaving his moral life and his official and political life wholly apart, in what may be called his personal relations with ecclesiastical affairs he was almost a devotee in instincts, prejudices, habits, and convictions. And yet Italy, in building the proposed memorial to him in the Pantheon, will embody but the simple historic truth that she owes it to him, under Providence, that her national liberties and unity have been secured, not only in despite of the utmost resistance of the Vatican, but, as it will be proved, upon the ruins of that papal system with which he probably never doubted that the Catholic Church was identified. How is this fact to be explained? What is the key to this conquest of the king over the man ?

I answer in one word,—loyalty.

His courage, moral and physical, was worthy of the career he was called to run; and none who are not familiar with the perils, of which war was the least, through which he led his people to the goal of their political hopes can fully realize how sorely and how constantly this was put to the test.

His political ability was, in the estimate, it is said, of so good a judge as Thiers, of a far higher order than the world has given him credit for. Victor Emmanuel hated the parade of kingcraft: but it would be difficult to explain his singleness of purpose, the unswerving policy which never lost sight of its great aims or of the principles in accordance with which they were alone to be obtained, through frequent revolutions of party and changes of ministry, save on the theory that the king, having been once thoroughly imbued with the grand purposes and principles of Count Cavour, represented that statesman in every cabinet, radical or moderate, from the death of Cavour to his own.

Especially was it a distinguishing characteristic of Victor Emmanuel that he was able to draw around him, and to attach to himself and almost to each other, in the closest practical alliance and cooperation, a band of such unlike as well as great patriots as those who were granted to Italy in the supreme period upon which her future turned. D’Azeglio, Balbo, Cavour, Mamiani, Corsini, Ricasoli, Garibaldi, Ratazzi, La Marmora, Cialdini, Sclopis,—what would not Italy have lost if the king had alienated from him any one of these? The king who could combine such men, by their loyalty to him and to Italy, for the accomplishment of the work which was given to him and to them to do, possessed rare qualities as a ruler, of which the world has perhaps lost sight in the blaze of the genius and civic virtues of the patriots and heroes and statesmen by whom he has been surrounded and in the midst of whom he will be remembered in history.

These qualities Victor Emmanuel possessed in a very remarkable degree; but if history is to single out one of his moral characteristics as preeminent, — one quality as that which secured the independence and the unity of his country and which made him king of Italy, —lie will be remembered as Victor Emmanuel the Loyal.

In the midst of the political convulsions of 1848, all the rulers in Italy — the Pope, the kings of Naples and of Sardinia, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany (the petty dukes of Parma and of Modena were driven from their dominions, which were united with Sardinia) — granted constitutions to their respective peoples, and as soon as the crisis was past and they had the reins of authority well in hand again, they all revoked them, and either imprisoned or exiled the patriots who had been identified with them — all, with the sole exception of the king of Sardinia.

Charles Albert was not at all the man who would have been selected as the champion of his country’s liberties. Yet Cavour was able to persuade him not only to give a constitution to Sardinia, but to take up arms in its defense, as I have recounted, once and again. And when that constitution was but a year and six weeks old, and before his people could be said to have any practical experience of its advantages to them, doubly defeated, he gave up his task in despair, called for the prince, then twenty-nine years of age, and educated under anything but liberal and constitutional influences, and with the crown gave him the solemn charge to devote his life to the unity and national liberties of Italy. It is related that the young king gave his promise to his father, and then drawing his sword, brandished it towards the Austrian camp, and pledged his honor as a soldier and his good faith as a prince of the loyal house of Savoy to be true to that promise. The next day he took the oath as king to uphold the constitution which his father had so lately granted: he soon after named as prime minister Massimo d’Azeglio, that Bayard of unsullied honor and truthfulness; and to that promise, and to that oath before his people, Victor Emmanuel was true from 1849 to 1878.

It is easy to perceive the nature, but it would be very difficult for Americans to realize the intensity, of the struggle between what he himself was and that which his royal duty now bound him to be; nor is it easy, without that realization, to appreciate the grandeur of the moral self - conquests which must have gone before every important advance in Italian liberty and toward Italian nationality. Nor is it to be wondered at that there were crises in that advance when all seemed on the verge of being lost; when the strain which that loyalty put upon his personal affections and habits of bigoted deference to the authorities of the church seemed for a while to be more than they could bear without a violent reaction.

Two or three anecdotes, which I have every reason to believe authentic, will illustrate this royal loyalty and the nature of its repeated victories in issues such as these. If they are not literally true they certainly are morally so, and they are much more than ben trovate.

When, after Novara, the Austrian government peremptorily demanded of the young monarch that he should revoke the Sardinian constitution, he replied that an insuperable obstacle lay in the way of his compliance with this demand, one which he himself had no power to remove, “the word of a king.”

He struck the first heavy blows at the power of Rome when he sanctioned the laws introduced by Count Sicardi as a member of the D’Azeglio cabinet, by which ecclesiastical courts were abolished and the clergy deprived of their immunity from the civil law. This step was followed up by others in the same direction, aimed, one and all, at the emancipation of the state and of society from priestly influence and tyranny; until the death, in close succession, of the king’s mother, only brother, wife, and child gave the priests an opportunity of pointing out to him that these were divine judgments on his course. When, therefore, shortly after, Count Cavour, who was now prime minister, brought before parliament a bill for the suppression of certain monastic orders, the clerical advisers of the king found him less able to resist them. For a time he yielded to their warnings and desired that the bill should be withdrawn. Cavour and his cabinet, of course, at once resigned. The church party was triumphant. But while they were engaged in the formation of a new ministry, which should secure the fruits of this victory, D’Azeglio hurried to the king. Twice he was refused, and then he boldly, frankly wrote to him, pointing out the fatal nature of the step which he was taking against the liberties of his country and the principles of that constitutional government which he had pledged himself to defend.

Victor Emmanuel showed himself worthy of such an adviser. He recalled Cavour and reinstated the late cabinet. The bill was again presented to parliament, was passed, and received the royal approval; and the subsequent extension of those laws of Sardinia over province after province, and finally even over Rome itself, has transformed Italy.

This was in 1855. Some fifteen years afterwards, when the king was supposed to be dying at San Rossore, and, in the absence of his own confessor, sent for a neighboring priest, there appeared to be another opportunity for the church. The priest, acting under instructions, demanded, as the condition of absolution and the viaticum, a profession of repentance of all his official acts against the church and a solemn promise, in case of his recovery, to revoke and undo all such laws and acts. The king replied in substance, “ Father, if you will talk to me, as to a dying man, of my sins, I am ready to hear you; but if you insist upon talking politics, I must refer you to my ministers, who are in the next room.”

When, in 1870, it was proposed to him to abdicate, in order to escape the necessity of sanctioning the occupation of Rome against his duty to the Pope, he refused thus to evade the responsibilities of his crown, and gave the order from which, as a man, he shrunk almost with horror, but which he saw to be his duty as a king. “ History,” said an American at the time, “tells us of many men who have given their lives for their country; this is the first who has been willing for his country to jeopardize his soul.”

Such was the royal loyalty of Victor Emmanuel. This loyalty was a family virtue. It has often been illustrated in the history of his house; and it was nobly illustrated in the close of the brief reign of Amadeus, Duke of Aosta and brother of the present king. This prince was called to the throne of Spain, as a constitutional king, toward the close of 1870; but when he had reigned little more than two years he was advised by his ministers that it was impossible to maintain his government without revoking a constitution, for which Spain had proved herself unfit. Amadeus would not violate his royal oath; and he therefore promptly renounced the crown which he could not retain but at the expense of his good faith.

Of this loyal race comes the new king of Italy. The interests which have already been secured during his father’s reign, will rest safely in his hands; but there are some issues in the period of contemporaneous history into which Italy is now about to enter for which Humbert will probably be even better fitted than Victor Emmanuel could have been.

The late king was the firm friend of France. Such were his grateful memories of the campaign of 1859 that he would gladly have gone to the assistance of Napoleon in 1870. King Humbert, on the contrary, is known to be far more cordially in sympathy with Germany. Moreover, the late king found it very difficult, as we have seen, to bear his part in the successive steps by which Italian independence was redeemed from indirect priestly rule, and by which the temporal interests of Italy were taken out of the hands of the papacy. Could it be expected that any prince of the house of Savoy, educated before 1849, would sustain his government with equal firmness when the issue should involve the very existence of the papacy itself? And yet, upon the death of the present Pope, such will probably be the issue which those who control the policy of the church will force upon the king and kingdom of Italy. The son of Victor Emmanuel will be able to meet such an issue far more promptly and with a more untrammeled spirit than could ever have been expected of Victor Emmanuel himself. His work, that which in the providence of God was assigned to him, has been well and nobly done.

The reign of Victor Emmanuel, first king of Italy, is one of the most glorious chapters in the history of a marvelous century. And among those who have made that reign the record of the restoration of a great people to nationality, the king himself, whatever may have been the faults of his personal character, was fearless, generous and true, and, as a king, not unworthy to be the standardbearer and hero of an epic which history shall never weary of nor the world forget, Italia Liberata.

Wm. Chauncy Langdon.