Count Cavour Declares Rome Is To Be the Future Capital of Italy: March 29, 1861

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part II.

As he had done in central Italy, Cavour allowed the people of Naples and Sicily to decide whether they wanted to be annexed to Piedmont-Sardinia. Though Neapolitans and Sicilians had never shown any eagerness to join a united Italy, most of those who voted in the plebiscites said they favored annexation. Thus the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, along with the papal territories of Umbria and the Marches, were added to Piedmont-Sardinia.

King Vittorio Emanuele II, by Emilio Marsali

Pope Pius IX strongly protested against the “sacrilegious” theft of his lands, the richest in all the Papal States. But no one listened to his demands for justice, nor did they heed his warning that actions like Cavour’s would destroy all respect for authority, right, and justice. Such talk did not bother Cavour. If it had not been for Napoleon III, he would, without the slightest qualms of conscience, have ended the pope’s temporal rule forever.

Cavour’s final triumph came in March 1861, when representatives from not just Piedmont and Sardinia but also Lombardy, central Italy, Naples, and Sicily gathered in Turin and proclaimed Vittorio Emanuele II king of Italy. Since the days of Theodoric the Ostrogoth in the 6th century, Italy had been divided into various realms; now it was one nation, with one king and government and with one Liberal constitution. Only Venezia (under Austrian control) and Rome and the Patrimony of St. Peter remained outside the new kingdom.

Cavour

On March 29, 1861, Cavour declared that Rome was to be the future capital of Italy. Neither he nor his allies would rest until the pope’s city and every last place where Italian was spoken came under the sway of the House of Savoy. But while Cavour’s allies would live to see that day, Cavour would not. Worn out from his great labors, he died of malaria on June 6, 1861. It is said that, after receiving last rites, Cavour said, “Italy is made. All is safe.”

Napoleon III did not fare as well in the war as his “brother” monarch, Vittorio Emanuele, did. In undertaking his adventure “on behalf of Italy,” the emperor of France had lost the support of both French Liberals and French Catholics. He had also angered French factory owners by signing a treaty with Great Britain that reduced tariffs on imports. The factory owners did not want to have to compete with the greatest industrial power in Europe without any government protection for themselves. Napoleon’s declining popularity emboldened French Liberals to demand and win greater powers for the legislature. The ten years following the Italian war witnessed the end of Napoleon’s dictatorship over France.

But worse was to come for the emperor of France. By weakening Austria in the “Second Italian War of Independence,” Napoleon may have thought he was strengthening France. But if he thought this, he was deceived. The weakening of Austria did not strengthen France, but Austria’s chief rival in Germany—the Hohenzollern kingdom of Prussia. And in a few short years it would be Prussia, not Austria, that would struggle with Napoleon for the dominance of Europe and, in this struggle, humble the pride of the Bonapartes to the dust.