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Updated: June 24, 2025
Rattazzi thought Cavour an ambitious and aggressive publicist rather than a patriot statesman, and Cavour knew Rattazzi to be the minister who led the country to Novara. But he appreciated his value as a parliamentary ally; he had the qualities in which Cavour himself was most deficient. He was a perfect master of Italian; his manners were popular and insinuating.
That soreness did, in fact, still exist; but when in January the Rattazzi ministry fell, the King saw that it was his duty to recall Cavour to his counsels, and he at once charged him to form a cabinet. That Cavour accepted the task is the highest proof of his abnegation as a statesman.
At Turin there was an ignoble cabal, supported not so much, perhaps, by Rattazzi himself as by followers, the design of which was to prevent Cavour from returning to power. Abroad, the Empress Eugénie, who looked on Cavour as the Pope's worst foe, did what she could to further the scheme, and its promoters counted much on the soreness left in Victor Emmanuel's mind by the scene after Villafranca.
After painting the situation with all the irony and scorn of which he was master, he gave his note of warning: 'If needs be, I will become a conspirator, I will become a revolutionist, but this treaty shall never be executed; a thousand times no never! The routine business of the Prime Minister still fell to Cavour, as Rattazzi, who succeeded him, had not yet formed his cabinet.
After letting Garibaldi make what arrangements and issue what manifestoes he chose for six weeks, Rattazzi suddenly had him arrested at Sinalunga on the 23rd of September. The only consequence was fatal delay; not knowing what to do with their prisoner, the Government shipped him to Caprera.
The accusation of corruption was frequently made against the Ministry in general and Rattazzi in particular, since it was he who presided over the electoral campaigns. Of corruption in the literal sense there was probably little, but constituencies were led to believe that it would be to their advantage to return the ministerial candidate.
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.
On one occasion Rattazzi tried to prove that such hints did not constitute "interference." Cavour got up in the course of the same debate and not only acknowledged the "interference," but said that without it constitutional government in Piedmont would collapse. His biographers have preferred to be silent on this subject, but he would have despised a reserve which conceals historical facts.
Ricasoli was rigid, frigid, a frequenter of the straightest possible roads; Rattazzi, supple, accommodating, with an incorrigible partiality for umbrageous by-ways.
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