Part 3 (2/2)
In Italy itself a great clerical party is working silently but ceaselessly, under the mask of abstention from the elections, to recover its political power. The Sardinian Government could not withdraw from the duel at will; the Church in Piedmont was a political force constantly on the lookout for an opening to retake the position it had lost. Besides the moral power derived from the support of the peasants and of the old aristocracy, it wielded the material power of an organised body, which was numerous and wealthy in proportion to the numbers and wealth of the population. The annual income of the Church, including the religious houses, was nearly 700,000 a year. There were 23,000 ecclesiastics, or 1 monk to every 670 inhabitants, 1 nun to every 1695, 1 priest to every 214. In spite of the vast resources of the Church, the parish priest in 2540 villages received a stipend of less than 20 per year. Not only radicals but many moderate politicians were of opinion that the great number of convents of the contemplative orders formed an actual evil from the fact of their encouraging able-bodied idleness, and the withdrawal of so considerable a fraction of the population from the work and duties of citizens.h.i.+p. In the autumn of 1854, before the Crimean War was thought of, Rattazzi framed a bill by which the corporations that took no part in public instruction, preaching, or nursing the sick, were abolished.
Since the last crisis on the civil marriage bill, which wrecked D'Azeglio's ministry, Cavour, who all his life was not theoretically opposed to coming to an understanding with Rome, had made several advances to the Vatican, but with no effect: Rome refused any modification of the Concordat or any reduction of the privileges possessed by the clergy in the kingdom of Sardinia. On the failure of these negotiations, Victor Emmanuel despatched three high ecclesiastics on a private mission to the Pope to see if the quarrel could be made up. This mission, which might have seriously compromised the king, was not counselled by Cavour, who put a violent end to it when he authorised Rattazzi to bring in the bill for the suppression of religious houses. Victor Emmanuel was deeply mortified, and the Pope protested against this new ”horrible and incredible a.s.sault of the subalpine Government.” Just at the time that the measure was discussed in Parliament, the king lost his mother, his wife, his infant child, and his brother, a series of misfortunes in which the Church saw ”the finger of G.o.d.” As the two queens and the Duke of Genoa were devoted Catholics, their last hours were rendered miserable by the impending sacrilegious act. It is not to be wondered if the king was almost driven out of his mind.
After the lugubrious interruption of the royal funerals, the debate on the religious corporations was resumed with new vigour. Much the most effective speeches on either side were those delivered by the combatants of the two extremes, Brofferio and Count Solaro de la Margherita. Brofferio, who regarded all convents as a specific evil, had proposed their indiscriminate abolition in 1848, directly after the promulgation of the Statute. Cavour, he said, had then defended them. Was he therefore, mindful of their old warfare, to vote against this Bill in order to place difficulties in the way of the Ministry?
Far from it. If the Government were willing to abolish all the convents, so much the better; if 490, he would vote for that; if 245, he was ready to approve; if 100, yes; if 10, he would vote for 10; if one convent, he agreed; if one monk, his vote would be given for the abolition of one monk. He would not imitate those speakers who had attempted to conjure up a canonical or theological defence of the Bill. The Pope was probably a better theologian than he; but he denied that the Church had any prescriptive rights at all: all her privileges and property being held on sufferance of the State, which could withdraw its toleration when it chose. Ill.u.s.trious Italians, from Dante downwards, denounced the love of power and money of the Church as the bane of Italy. Had not Machiavelli said, ”If Italy has fallen a prey not only to powerful barbarians but to whatsoever attack, we Italians are indebted for it to the Church and to nothing else”?
Respect for the intentions of the pious founder was a good thing in its way (Brofferio had the sense to see that this was the strongest argument of the opposite party), yet, logically pursued, it would have obliged us to this day to preserve the temple of Delphi with a full chapter of priests. Some one might have got up and said, ”A very interesting result”; but Neo-h.e.l.lenism did not grow in the Sardinian Chamber of Deputies. Brofferio censured the exemption of the teaching and preaching orders--according to him, the most mischievous of all.
He blamed the Ministry for excusing the measure on financial grounds.
Either it was just or it was unjust. If just, it needed no excuse; if unjust, no excuse could justify it. There was, he said, no use in trying to make the Bill appear moderate in the hopes that it would be borne more patiently by the body against which it was aimed. The Court of Rome knew no more or less. War to the knife or refusal to kiss the Pope's toe: it was all one.
As the stoutest champion of the Bill was the Beranger of Piedmont, with his rough and ready eloquence, so its most formidable critic was the old apostle of thrones and altars, who would have taken Philip II.
as a model king, and Torquemada as an ideal statesman. His onslaught was far stronger than the strictures of less out-and-out reactionaries. It was easy, for instance, to accuse of weakness the amiable sentimentality of the Marquis Gustavo Cavour, who evoked Padre Cristoforo from Manzoni's _Promessi Sposi_ to plead for his fellow friars; but there was no destroying the force, so far as it went, of Count Solaro's question, Were they Catholics, or were they not? To endorse a policy not approved by the Church was to cease, _ipso facto_, to be a Catholic. The reasoning might not be true, but it was clear. Charles Albert's old minister drew a beautiful picture of the country in the good old times before the Statute. Then the people did not lack bread. Life and property and the good name of citizens were safeguarded. The finances were not exhausted; the taxes were not excessive; the revenue was not diminis.h.i.+ng; treaties were observed; Piedmont possessed that consideration of foreign courts which a wise government can always command, even without the prestige of force:--a picture drawn in a fine artistic free-hand, not slavishly subservient to fact; but as to the taxes, at least, its correctness was not to be gainsaid. Seen from this point of view, the progress of all modern States means retrogression, a paradox which has pa.s.sed now from the friends of the old order, few of whom have still the courage to sustain it, to the socialists, the sum of whose contentions it exactly formulates. Count Solaro enlarged on the dreadful evils that would result from the Bill were it to become law, not to the religious corporations, which a wiser generation and renewed endowments would restore to more than their pristine prosperity, but to the country which suffered the perpetration of a sin so enormous that words were powerless to describe it.
After the war dances of Brofferio and Solaro de la Margherita, Cavour made a temperate speech, in which he said that he agreed with Brofferio in placing moral expediency above a question of finance, but that if this were granted, the Government could not be indifferent, in the present state of the finances, to a saving of nearly a million francs a year (it being proposed to defray out of the confiscated ecclesiastical property a grant to that amount which the State paid to the poorer clergy). He defended the expropriation of a convent called Santa Croce to meet the need of a hospital for the military cholera patients. Pa.s.sing on to larger considerations, he recognised the great services rendered by religious orders in past times, when Europe was emerging from barbarism, and was still a prey to the violence and ignorance of feudal society. Had the religious communities not met a want, they would not have taken root. Civilisation, literature, agriculture, and above all the poor, neglected and oppressed by the secular power, owed them an immense debt. But coming down to the present day, Cavour argued that the original part played by monks and friars was now filled, and of necessity more efficaciously filled, by laymen. Their presence in superabundant numbers in the modern State was an anachronism. It was only needful to compare the countries where they abounded in number and in influence, as in Spain and the kingdom of Naples, with England, Prussia, or France, to see whether it was possible to allege that they tended to enlightenment and prosperity.
The Bill was pa.s.sed in the Chamber of Deputies on March 2, 1855, by 170 ayes against 36 noes; the majority, so much larger than the Government could usually command, showed that it rested on undoubted popular support. It was then sent up to the Senate, but while it was being discussed there, an incident occurred which nearly caused a political convulsion. The Archbishop of Novara and the Bishop of Mondovi wrote to the king promising that if the Bill were withdrawn, the Church in Piedmont would make up the sum of 92,841,230 frs., which the Government expected to gain by the suppressions. The king was delighted with the proposal, not perceiving the hopelessness of getting it approved by the Chamber of Deputies, which had already pa.s.sed the measure, and the impossibility of settling the matter ”out of court” without parliamentary sanction. He invited Cavour to accede, and on his refusal, he accepted the resignation of the Ministry.
Personally the king had always a certain sense of relief in parting with Cavour. He thought now that he could get on without him, but he was to be undeceived. While he was endeavouring to find some one to undertake the formation of a new cabinet, the country became agitated as it had not been since the stormy year of revolution. Angry crowds gathered in Piazza Castello, within a few yards of the royal palace.
”One of these days,” Victor Emmanuel said impatiently to his trusted valet, Cinzano, ”I'll make an end of these demonstrations,” to which the descendant of Gil Blas is reported to have replied as he looked out of window: ”And if they made an end of Us?” The whole population woke up to the fact that surrender on this point involved surrender along all the line. The king, however, to whom the compromise appeared in the light of peace with the dead and with the living, with the Superga and with the Vatican, was very unwilling to yield. At the same time no one could be found to form a ministry. In this dangerous crisis, Ma.s.simo d'Azeglio wrote a letter to his sovereign which is believed to have been what convinced him. Recalling the Spanish royal personage whom courtiers let burn to death sooner than deviate from the motto, _ne touchez pas la Reine_, D'Azeglio protested that if he was to risk his head, or totally to lose the king's favour, he would think himself the vilest of mankind if he did not write the words which he had not been permitted to speak. As an old and faithful servant, who had never thought but of his king's welfare and the good of the country, he conjured him with tears in his eyes, and kneeling at his feet, to go no further on the path he was entering. A monkish intrigue had succeeded in breaking up the work of his reign, agitating the country, shaking the const.i.tution and obscuring the royal name for good faith. There was not a moment to lose; similar intrigues had led the House of Bourbon and the House of Stuart to their destruction. Let the king take heed while there was time! It was long before Victor Emmanuel quite forgave his old friend, but the warning voice was not raised in vain.
Cavour was recalled. The Bill was presented again to the Senate with some slight modifications. One religious order was spared by Rattazzi, rather against the will of Cavour, who described it as ”absolutely useless,” because the king particularly wished to save it, the nuns having been favourites of his mother. To Cavour, Victor Emmanuel's resistance had seemed simply a fit of superst.i.tious folly; he did not sufficiently realise how distasteful the whole affair must be to a man like the king, who said to General Durando when he was starting for the Crimea, ”You are fortunate, General, in going to fight the Russians, while I stay here to fight monks and nuns.” In its amended form the Bill pa.s.sed on May 29. Cavour had triumphed completely, but he came out of the struggle physically and mentally exhausted; ”a struggle,” he wrote to his Geneva friends, ”carried on in Parliament, in the drawing-rooms, at the court as in the street, and rendered more painful by a crowd of distressing events.” As usual he sought refreshment in the fields of Leri, and when, after a brief rest, he returned to Turin, the furious pa.s.sions which had surged round this domestic duel were beginning to cool as the eyes of the nation became more and more fixed on the conflict in the East and its significance to Italy.
We can proceed now with the story of Cavour's work in the memorable year which opened so gloomily with a truce that appeared to leave _felix Austria_ mistress of the situation. Without firing a shot, that Power could consider herself the chief gainer by the war. Napoleon III., anxious for peace, welcomed her mediation, and in England, though peace was unpopular, and Austrian selfishness during the war had not been admired, Lord Palmerston was handicapped by the idea which just then occupied his mind, that Austria chiefly stood in the way of what, as an Englishman, he most feared in European politics, a Franco-Russian alliance. He divined the probability, almost the inevitability, of such an alliance at a date when most persons would have thought it an absurd fiction. Thus, in January 1856, both the French and English Governments were in a phase of opinion which promised nothing to Italian aspirations. The question was, Would it be possible for one capable brain to bend them to its purposes'? In the first instance, Cavour believed that it would not. He did not mean to represent his country at the Congress of Paris, nor did he hope that any good would come out of it for Italy. He wished, however, that Sardinia should figure, if not to her advantage, at any rate with dignity and decorum, and he turned, as he was wont to do when he wanted a ”perfect knight,” to the _rivale_, Ma.s.simo d'Azeglio. Both men had the little private joke of calling one another by this name in their familiar letters, which shows how free they were from any real jealousy. D'Azeglio was ready to accept what had the prospect of being a most thankless office, but on one condition--that the Sardinian plenipotentiary should be received on an equality with the representatives of the great Powers. Cavour knew that this condition had been explicitly refused; to please Austria, France and England declared that Sardinia would only be invited to share in those sittings of the Congress which affected her interests. Cavour did not let D'Azeglio know of the refusal; it was a case of the ”tortuous ways of Count Cavour,” of which the Prince Consort complained some years later. Cavour was scrupulous about the principles which he considered vital, but in dealing with men, and especially in dealing with his old colleague, he made more mental reservations than a severe moralist would allow. In the present instance the deception failed, for D'Azeglio, seized at the last moments with suspicions, insisted on seeing the diplomatic notes which had been exchanged relative to the Congress. In reading these, he discovered the true state of affairs, and in a violent fit of anger he refused to go. This incident was the sole cause of the departure of Cavour himself in the place of his indignant nominee. So are rough-hewn ends shaped.
In January, just before the armistice, Cavour had sent the memorandum on what could be done by the Emperor for Italy, which Napoleon authorized him to write when he was in Paris. The first draft of the doc.u.ment was written by D'Azeglio, in whose literary style Cavour felt more faith than in his own; but this was not used. It was ”magnificent,” Cavour said, but ”too diffuse and long.” With the Emperor it was needful to put everything in the most concrete form, and to take a general view of all the hypotheses, except war with Austria, which, ”for the present,” did not enter into his ideas.
D'Azeglio was offended at the rejection of his work. He wrote complainingly, ”I may be called a fool about everything else, Amen; but about Italy, no!” The memorandum actually sent was short and moderate in tone, the chief point recommended being the evacuation of Bologna by the Austrians. It has been sometimes quoted in order to convict Cavour, at this period, of having held poor and narrow views of the future of Italy. But a man who is mounting a stair does not put his foot on the highest step first. At this stage in his political life most of Cavour's biographers pause to discuss the often-put question, Was he already aiming at Italian unity? Perhaps the best answer is, that really it does not matter. To be very anxious to prove the affirmative is to misunderstand the grounds on which we may call Cavour one of the greatest of statesmen. Those grounds are not what he hoped to do, but what he did. He was not a Prometheus chained to a rock, who hopes till hope creates the thing it contemplates.
Const.i.tutionally he was easily discouraged. In the abstract he rather exaggerated difficulties than minimised them; but in the face of any present obstacle an invincible confidence came over him in his power to surmount it. As he once wrote of himself--moderate in opinion, he was favourable, rather than not, to extreme and audacious means.
However long it may have been before the union of all parts of Italy seemed to Cavour a goal within the range of practical politics (that he always thought it a desirable goal there is not the smallest doubt), there was one, the Tiresias of the old order, who said boldly to the Prime Minister of Piedmont at this very juncture: You are steering straight to Italian unity. Solaro de la Margherita, who once declared that ”in speaking of kings all who had not sold their consciences were seized with religious terror,” saw what he would not see, more clearly than it was seen by those who would have died to make it true. Standing on the brink of the past, the old statesman warned back the future. In the debate on the loan for thirty million francs required to meet the excess in war expenditure (January 14), Count Solaro said: ”The object, Italian unity, is not hidden in the mysteries of the Cabinet; it glimmers out, clear as the light of day, from the concatenation of so many circ.u.mstances that I lift the veil of no arcanum in speaking of it; and even if I did, it would be my duty to lift it and warn all concerned of the unwisdom and impropriety of those aspirations.” Deny it who would, he continued, unity was what was aimed at--what was laboured for with indefatigable activity.
Italian unity! How could it sound to the other Italian princes? What was its real meaning for the Pope? The unity of Italy could only be achieved either by submitting the whole peninsula to the Roman Pontiff or by depriving him of the temporal power. And the speaker ended by prophesying, his only prophecy which failed, that this shocking event would not happen in the present century, whatever G.o.d might permit in the next.
An unwary minister would have taken up the ball and thrown it back.
Cavour's presence of mind prompted him to leave it where it lay. He did not say, ”No, we are not working for Italian unity; no, we do not wish to overthrow the Pope.” He answered that in speaking of the future of Italy it was impossible for a Piedmontese minister to entirely separate his desires, his sympathies, from what he considered his political duty: hence there was no more slippery ground than that on which, with consummate art, the Deputy Solaro de la Margherita had tried to draw him. But, he said, he would avail himself of the privilege generally conceded to the ministers of a const.i.tutional government when questions were still pending--to defer his reply till the case was closed (_a guerra finita_).
CHAPTER VII
THE CONGRESS OF PARIS
With the foreboding that this would be the last act of his political life, Cavour started on the mission which he had almost no choice but to a.s.sume, in spite of his extreme repugnance for the _role_ of diplomatist. A few days after his arrival in Paris he was informed that the Emperor, in concert with England, conceded the point as to placing the representative of Sardinia on the same footing as the others. Though it does not seem to have struck Cavour, the sudden change of intention was evidently an involuntary tribute to himself: how could such a man be treated as an inferior? Only the form was won; the substance remained in doubt. Lord Clarendon hinted to the Piedmontese plenipotentiary that he had ”too much tact” to mix in discussions which did not concern him. But Cavour was not discouraged.
With his usual quick rebound he was soon thoroughly braced up to the work before him. As he began to see his way, he was rather spurred on than disconcerted by the chorus of dismal predictions which the Congress and his own part in it evoked at home. Almost every notable man in Piedmont contributed his quota of melancholy vaticination, in which the note, ”I told you so!” was already audible. Who could plead Italy's cause in a congress in which Austria had a voice? Was there ever such midsummer madness? ”But we knew how it would be from the first.”
Cavour had said that he hated playing at diplomacy; but some of his smaller, as well as larger gifts, marked him out as a successful diplomatist. He was watchful for little advantages. All who could help the cause were enlisted in its service. Thus he made a convert of a fair Countess, to whose charms Napoleon III was supposed not to be insensible. Paris was full of notabilities whom he sought to turn into useful allies. In a letter to the Marquis Emanuel d'Azeglio (the Sardinian Minister in London) he tells how he even ”made up” to Lady Holland's dog with such success that he got it to put its large paws on his new coat! When the Marchioness of Ely arrived to be present on the part of the Queen at the birth of the Prince Imperial, Cavour, knowing her to be the Queen's intimate correspondent, lost no time in paying his court to her; but in this instance an acquaintance begun from political motives ripened into real friends.h.i.+p on both sides. A point which is worth observing is that, as minister, no one ever made less use of what may he called the influence of society than Cavour.
He never tried to make himself agreeable at Turin, least of all to the king. For a long time he was considered haughty by those who did not know him, and arbitrary by those who did. But abroad he underwent a change which probably came about from his revealing not less but more of his natural self. ”He has that petulance,” Ma.s.simo d'Azeglio said, ”which is exactly what they like in Paris.” Abroad he could give this quality freer play than in Italy, where vivacity offends in a serious man. He charmed even those who did not share his opinions. At a dinner given by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris to all the members of the Congress, he sat next to the Abbe Darboy, one day to succeed to the see and meet a martyr's death in the Commune. The Abbe never forgot his neighbour of that evening, and in 1870, at Rome during the Oec.u.menical Council, when some one mentioned Cavour's name, he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, ”Ah, that was a man in a thousand!
He had not the slightest sentiment of hate in his heart.”
In the two months which Cavour spent in Paris he perceived very clearly that Walewski and the other French ministers would have to be reckoned more as opponents than friends in the future development of affairs. He found, however, two men who could be trusted to continue his work by incessantly pus.h.i.+ng Napoleon III. in an Italian direction; one was Prince Napoleon, the other, Dr. Conneau, a person entirely in the Imperial confidence. Henceforth Dr. Conneau was the secret, and for a long time quite unsuspected, intermediary between Cavour and the Emperor. The idea of establis.h.i.+ng this channel of communication first occurred to Count Arese, whose own influence at the Tuileries, though exercised with prudent reserve, was of no slight importance. This Milanese n.o.bleman personified, as it were all the proud hatred of the Lombard aristocracy for an alien yoke. The truest and most disinterested friend of Queen Hortense, Arese remained faithfully attached to her son in good and evil fortune. He would never turn the friends.h.i.+p to account for himself. When Napoleon offered to ask as a personal favour for the removal of the sequestration on his family property, he answered that he preferred to take his chance with the rest. He won the lasting regard of the Empress, though she knew that he influenced Napoleon in a sense contrary to her own political sympathies. The visits of this high-minded gentleman and devoted friend were as welcome at a court crowded with self-seekers and charlatans as they were to be later in the solitude of Chislehurst.
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