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Updated: June 24, 2025
It was urgently necessary to form a new political combination which should reduce this party to impotence. Cavour's compact with Rattazzi was concluded in the first month of 1852, but at first it was kept a profound secret. It was divulged, as it were, accidentally in the course of a debate on a Bill which was intended to moderate the attacks of the press on foreign sovereigns.
Rattazzi formerly held ministerial office under him, and the long Tuscan crisis of 1859, looked at, as he looked at it, from the inside, gave him opportunities of judging the Iron Baron who opposed even his own will on more than one occasion in that great emergency.
Therefore, forestalling a vote of censure in the Chambers, where he had never yet had a real majority, Rattazzi resigned office with a parting homily in which he claimed to have saved the national institutions. The administration which followed contained the well-known names of Farini, Minghetti, Pasolini, Peruzzi, Delia Rovere, Menabrea.
Did Madame Rattazzi foresee that by September of the same year there would be a war, and that as one of its results Rome would so soon become the capital of that Italy which her husband had helped to build up?
His own old comrades were opposed to it, and it was notorious that Mazzini, to whom the counsels of despair were generally either rightly or wrongly attributed, had nothing to do with inspiring this attempt. In justice to Rattazzi, it must be allowed that, after the arrests at Sarnico, Garibaldi went into open opposition to the ministry, which he denounced as subservient to Napoleon.
Rattazzi, who still occupied the Speaker's chair, was willing to wait for the present for a seat in the Cabinet, especially when he heard that the king, who was at first very hostile to the Connubio, had quite expected him to take office.
A duel was going on between him and Rattazzi. He was accused, perhaps truly, of moving heaven and earth to upset the ministry, while Rattazzi's friends were spreading abroad every form of abuse and calumny to keep him out of office. When the Congress was announced, the popular demand for the appointment of Cavour as Sardinian plenipotentiary was too strong to be resisted.
Rattazzi was afterwards transferred to the Home Ministry, which he held till the Connubio broke up, more on personal than on political grounds, in 1858. Though Cavour's alliance with Rattazzi was not eternal, it lasted till it had served its purpose. By help of it he imposed his will on king and country until he was strong enough to impose it by force of his own commanding influence.
Some delay occurred in forming a new ministry. Count Arese was first called, but his position as a personal friend of the Emperor disqualified him for the task. Rattazzi succeeded better, but during the interregnum of eight or nine days Cavour was obliged to carry on the Government, and it thus devolved on him to communicate the official order to the Special Commissioners to abandon their posts.
Gioberti resigned because this policy was opposed by Rattazzi and other of his colleagues in the ministry. It would have been a difficult rôle to play; Sardinia, while endeavouring to checkmate the reaction, might have become its instrument. The failure of Gioberti's plan cannot be regretted, but his forecast of what would happen if it were not attempted proved to be correct.
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