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Updated: June 28, 2025
Cavour's Successors Aspromonte The September Convention Garibaldi's Visit to England. There were two possible successors to Cavour, the Tuscan, Bettino Ricasoli, and Urban Rattazzi, a Piedmontese barrister. The first belonged to the right, the second to the left centre in the Parliamentary combinations. Cavour had no very close personal relations with either, but he knew their characters.
Cavour's words, soon after Villafranca, "It is England's turn now," were not belied. With Lord John at the Foreign Office, England rose to the occasion. Napoleon III. wished to make a cat's-paw of this country, and was sanguine enough to believe that Her Majesty's Government would take the proposed Italian Confederation under its wing. Lord Palmerston, Mr.
Roma capitale could never again be put aside as the dream of revolutionists and poets. This was the last great political act of Cavour's life. Though he did not think that his life would be a long one, he thought that he should have time to finish his work himself.
One passage in Cavour's early life was revealed a few years ago, and, whether or not it was right to reveal it, the portrait would be now incomplete which did not touch upon it.
It is evident that one thing he could not do. Whatever was in his thoughts, unless he was prepared to retire into private life then and there, he could not proclaim from the house-tops that he espoused the artichoke theory attributed to Victor Amadeus. There were only too many old diplomatists as it was, who sought to cripple Cavour's resources by reviving that story.
Whether Cavour's life-work was to succeed or fail depended henceforth largely on England. "Now it is England's turn," he said frequently to his relations in Switzerland, where he went to recover his health and spirits. Soon all traces of depression disappeared.
When the case became evidently desperate, the family sent for a monk, named Fra Giacomo, who had promised Cavour during the cholera epidemic of 1854 that the refusal of the sacraments to Santa Rosa should not be repeated in his own extremity. An excited crowd gathered round the palace. One workman said: "If the priests refuse, a word and we will finish them all." But Fra Giacomo kept his promise. "I know the Count," he said (for many years he had dispensed his private charities); "a clasp of the hand will be sufficient." On the evening of the same day, June 5, the king ascended the secret staircase leading to Cavour's bedroom, which had been so often mounted before dawn by too compromising visitors. Cavour exclaimed on seeing him: "O Maest
With Nassau Senior he began a long friendship, and Edward Romilly, the librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, whom he had met at Geneva, introduced him to a rich landed proprietor of the name of Davenport, who was to prove the most useful of all his English acquaintances, as he liberally placed his house in Cheshire at Cavour's disposal to give him an opportunity of studying English agriculture.
Cavour sought out several of the Italian exiles who were leading a life of privation and obscurity in Paris, one of whom was Manin, the Dictator of Venice. With him Cavour expressed himself "very much satisfied, though his sentiments were rather too Venetian": sentiments which Manin sacrificed a last act of abnegation when he finally gave his support to Italian unity under Victor Emmanuel, carrying with him two-thirds of the republican party, who could brave the charge of changed allegiance if so incorruptible a patriot led the way. Cavour also saw Gioberti, "always the same child of genius, who would have been a great man had he had common sense." Gioberti, however, had made a great stride towards common sense, for instead of dreaming of liberating popes, he was now imagining a renovating statesman, and he had inscribed Cavour's name under his new portrait. In a book published in Paris, Gioberti drew the Cavour of the future with a penetration and a sureness of touch which would make a reader, who did not know the date, suppose that the words were written ten years later. Men of great talent, he said, rarely threw aside the chance of becoming famous; rather did they snatch it with avidity; and what fame more splendid could now be won than that of the minister of the Italian prince who should re-make the country? He fixed his hopes on Cavour, because he alone understood that in human society civilisation is everything, all the rest, without it, nothing. "He knows that statutes, parliaments, newspapers, all the appurtenances of free governments, even if they are of use to individuals, are miserable shams to the commonalty if they fail to help forward social progress." He was willing to forgive him the generous error of treating a province as if it were a nation, when he compared it with the pettiness of those who treated the nation as if it were a province. He invoked some great and solemn act of Italianit
Cavour himself drew a miserable picture of his country: science and intelligence were reputed "infernal things by those who are obliging enough to govern us"; a triumphant bigotry trembled alike at railways and Rosmini; Cavour's aunt, the Duchess de Clermont Tonnerre, only got permission to receive the Journal des Débats after long negotiations between the French minister at Turin and the Sardinian government.
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