After the disastrous experience of 1848–9, the kingdom of Sardinia became the ‘laboratory’ for the Italian Risorgimento. From 1849 to 1859, when Austria declared war on the kingdom, the movement for liberty and nationality regrouped and reorganized itself under the umbrella of the constitution, which, among the Italian states, only Piedmont had retained. The liberal ‘moderates’ led by Camillo Cavour gradually managed to strengthen the representative institutions and achieve bureaucratic modernization, while accepting responsibility for the ‘Italian’ struggle.Footnote 1 For this reason, nationalist historians used to call the 1850s ‘the decade of preparation’. The moderates occupied the political centre ground, and as the decade progressed, they appeared to speak not just for the majority of the Piedmontese citizens, but also for the majority of Italian patriots.
A neglected aspect of this well-known history is that this period witnessed an effort to lay the theoretical foundations of representative government in line with European ‘elite’ liberalism.Footnote 2 In reality, the 1850s saw a major shift in moderate political thought, as the new framework differed in a number of crucial respects from that of the 1840s. The latter, which had underpinned the struggle for reforms on the peninsula after the election in 1846 of Pope Pius IX, was an idiosyncratic intellectual phenomenon, very different from all the other variants of liberalism, whereas the former borrowed its main themes from French and British debate.Footnote 3 The evolution of moderatism in the 1850s has largely escaped the attention of historians, as will be detailed below. This article fills the gap, and by doing so identifies a set of themes and ideas of considerable importance for the ways in which the protagonists of the reforms in the kingdom, and the Risorgimento in Italy, understood their historical mission.
This article is divided into five sections. In section I the main features of liberalism in the 1840s are outlined, and the new context for the evolution of moderatism in the 1850s is highlighted. Section II deals with the economists' contribution to moderate culture. Section III identifies its core arguments. In section IV the moderate paradigm is related to the political issues that Piedmont was confronted with. Finally, section V briefly points to the special relevance that French political ideas and developments had in Piedmont.
I
‘Moderate opinion’ had begun to take shape in 1843, when the Piedmontese priest Vincenzo Gioberti published Del primato morale e civile degli italiani in Brussels. There followed other works that equally pleaded for the conversion of the established ruling houses to the cause of reform, and these too won instant acclaim – such as Delle speranze d'Italia (1844) and Sommario della storia d'Italia (1846) by the Piedmontese Count Cesare Balbo.Footnote 4 Both Gioberti and Balbo re-wrote the history of Italy in an attempt to combine the cultural traditions of the Italian elite – the memories of ancient Rome, the middle ages, and the Renaissance – with that of the masses, Catholicism.Footnote 5 In doing so, they constructed powerful myths that galvanized the forces of liberalism. Gioberti not only elaborated on the stirring vision of a reconciliation between the princes and the pope, but waxed eloquent on the Italians' religious and cultural pre-eminence as a guarantee of the certain regeneration of the peninsula. Balbo advocated inorientamento, namely that Austria could be persuaded to accept losses in Italy in return for a strengthening of its position in the Balkans, in the context of a Providence-inspired expansion of ‘Christian civilization’.Footnote 6 Massimo d'Azeglio, another Piedmontese aristocrat and a major figure of moderatism, poignantly depicted political and economic oppression in the Papal States in Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (1846), and in Proposta d'un programma per l'opinione nazionale italiana (1847) he made the impending emancipation of Italy the manifestation of a new, ‘evangelical’ political morality based on justice and compassion.Footnote 7
In other words, a timid advocacy of ‘negative’ liberties coexisted with emotional issues that could reawaken the ‘republican’ virtues required by the national struggle. Neither Gioberti nor Balbo called for constitutional monarchies, but only for the creation of consultative assemblies. Balbo in particular still adhered to a ‘medieval concept of liberty’ meaning that this could only be conceded by the king.Footnote 8 D'Azeglio's Proposta, which listed the moderates' requests to the Italian princes, makes no mention of constitutional arrangements as it focuses on administrative uniformity, economic liberalization, and reforms fostering the rule of law.Footnote 9
Before 1848, the moderates were scarcely equipped with a proper political theory. Liberal moderatism did not find expression in fully fledged treatises analysing free government, as abstract, theoretical political thought was rare and unsystematic.Footnote 10 There was a wealth of patriotic poems, novels, and histories, while economic journalism, inspired by the will to emulate the most developed countries, flourished – meaning that the moderates' claims were invariably linked to the peculiar circumstances of Italy, past and present. Furthermore, reliance on rhetorical traditions and geopolitical visions led to a view of the desired change that was not limited to liberty and independence. Besides the moral regeneration that was regarded as a precondition for political liberation, Balbo and Gioberti envisaged the restoration of Italian greatness. In short, moderatism was situated, unsystematic, and mixed with religious, historical, moral, and economic themes. It suited the Risorgimento as it took place in 1846–8, when, under the pressure of public opinion, governments conceded economic and political reforms, in a climate of patriotic enthusiasm. Eventually, the movement was defeated not only militarily but also politically. The princes and the pope reneged on their concessions as soon as Austria reimposed its hegemony by force of arms, while the patriotic camp split up. The moderates, already alarmed by the spectre of socialism materializing in Paris, began to fear the increasing influence of the democrats and were weakened by regional rivalries.
Nevertheless, Piedmontese liberalism continued to be characterized by a ‘moderate’ spirit during the 1850s, and not only because of the prominent roles played by Gioberti, Balbo, and d'Azeglio in the political and intellectual life of the kingdom. Their views on several questions changed, and in particular embraced the idea of constitutional monarchy, they too conforming to the new political trend. On 8 February 1848, in fact, King Charles Albert had announced that a constitution (or Statuto) would be granted. The French charters of 1814 and 1830 served as models for a document that made the king the head of the executive and provided for the creation of a two-chamber parliament. The upper chamber was composed of life peers appointed by the king, while the lower chamber was elected according to a narrow franchise resting on literacy and the ownership of property. The letter of the Statuto was unquestionably very moderate, although its spirit would be modified during Cavour's premiership as the king's ministers formed themselves into a responsible cabinet.Footnote 11 After Gioberti's ‘democratic’ premiership from December 1848 to February 1849, the liberal side ruled the kingdom uninterruptedly, first under the leadership of d'Azeglio (1849–52) and then of Cavour. Balbo too had a short spell as head of government.
In parallel with this evolution of practical politics, there developed a liberal culture that updated pre-1848 moderatism, but retained its conservative character. The task facing Piedmont in the 1850s was formidable. It consisted in consolidating constitutional government at home, and at the same time subverting the European balance of power, and arguably the pope's temporal power, without unleashing democracy or, worse still, socialism. Political thought focused on this twofold task. It remained situated and militant, yet its theoretical side was no longer ignored, and its subject matter was circumscribed, reflecting the creation of new chairs at the universities of Turin and Genoa, often filled by patriots fleeing Naples, Rome, or Palermo. Full-scale treatises were published, as systematic arguments seemed more powerful than emotional appeals – the works that had so effectively raised patriotic enthusiasm before 1848 were now of little use once the Risorgimento had become an affair of state, and the blend of liberalism with Catholicism proved impossible. It was in this context that, for instance, Domenico Carutti in Del governo libero (1852) and Balbo in Della monarchia rappresentativa (1857) analysed representative government in great depth. Commentaries of the constitution, such as Luigi Amedeo Melegari's Sunti delle lezioni di diritto costituzionale (1857) and Ludovico Casanova's Del diritto costituzionale (1859–60) marked the birth of constitutional law as an academic discipline in Italy. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini's Della nazionalità (1851) and Terenzio Mamiani's D'un nuovo diritto europeo (1859) covered the international implications of a future Italian revolution from a ‘scientific’ standpoint. The history of the relationship between church and state was examined at length in Pier Carlo Boggio's La chiesa e lo stato in Piemonte (1854). Even the shortcomings of Giuseppe Mazzini's strategy became the subject of a lengthy volume, Nicomede Bianchi's Vicende del mazzinianismo (1854). As the single social science of the times, political economy also transmitted a political message, as will be seen in section II.Footnote 12
The focus of this article is the foundations of political thought, meaning that some traditional topics of Risorgimento historiography will not be addressed here (e.g. the concept of nation, interpretations of the Statuto, state–church relationships, the anti-Mazzinian polemic, or views about the future reorganization of the peninsula). Rather, given that the most important Piedmontese political writers had certain themes and approaches in common, it is possible to draw from this a paradigm summing up the core of moderate thought, based on the work of five authors: Gioberti, Balbo, Mamiani, Carutti, and Carlo Boncompagni. Piedmontese moderatism will emerge as a conservative brand of nineteenth-century European liberalism, aiming to circumscribe the implications of constitutional government.
Generally speaking, historical analysis has neglected the 1850s compared with the 1840s. Yet the 1850s constituted the true ‘golden age of the Risorgimento’, in Guido De Ruggiero's opinion, for then ‘the boys of 1848 grew into men’.Footnote 13 Above all, the elite liberalism of the age has received little attention, with almost no literature on the thought of influential figures like Carutti and Boncompagni, who contributed significantly to the moderate paradigm, while Mamiani's theoretical writings of the 1850s have been largely neglected. As for Balbo and Gioberti, most historians have overlooked the themes addressed in this article.Footnote 14 The conservatism of the Piedmontese liberals has sometimes been pointed out, but in elusive terms. Most recently, their disparaging of individualist, middle-class values has been ascribed to a lasting Catholic inspiration – but if this may be true for the 1840s, the moderatism of the 1850s was a more composite puzzle.Footnote 15 As for Cavour's culture, according to his biographer Rosario Romeo, it was different from that of the moderates in his adherence to individualism and the other values underpinning modern economies.Footnote 16 The usual corollary is that Cavour managed to attract the moderates' support and therefore informed Piedmontese politics with his more ‘advanced’ brand of liberalism, especially in the field of ecclesiastical policy.Footnote 17 This view, true as it may be on the practical plane, needs qualification from the intellectual perspective for three reasons. First, Cavour was a keen reader of Jeremy Bentham but also, like the moderates, of François Guizot and the whig authors.Footnote 18 Second, Cavour's allegedly secular and individualistic liberalism was not set out in substantial writings in the 1850s and therefore its influence on political culture was presumably weak. Third, the moderate paradigm surfaces in topical literature at crucial junctures, as will be shown in section IV. Regarding ecclesiastical policy, the principle of separation between church and state advocated by Cavour was shared by most moderates.Footnote 19 Before outlining the paradigm, the next section examines the writings of economists.
II
Before 1848, political economy was the chosen idiom of modernity in Italy. Focusing on the material progress taking place in northern Europe, political economy proposed a model to imitate which had indirect political implications.Footnote 20 In the kingdom of Sardinia of the 1850s, however, it became a straightforward form of political discourse. The Italian economists who gathered in Piedmont after 1849 felt well equipped not only to defend private property and capitalism against socialist attacks but also to champion free government. They owed their inspiration to their French counterparts, who were at the forefront of the struggle against socialism. As the influential Frédéric Bastiat put it:
A science of political economy must be developed before a science of politics can be logically formulated. Essentially, political economy is the science of determining whether the interests of human beings are harmonious or antagonistic. This must be known before a science of politics can be formulated to determine the proper functions of government.Footnote 21
Cavour rephrased the point by contending that the French revolution of 1848 had demonstrated that the socio-economic issues were more momentous than the political ones. Hence the crucial function that political economy – ‘the most important’ of all moral sciences – was called to fulfil: to investigate the causes of ‘the relative conditions of the various classes of society’.Footnote 22
For reasons of space, full consideration will be given only to the Sicilian Francesco Ferrara, who wrote celebrated introductions to the economic works comprising the series ‘Biblioteca dell'economista’. Surprising as it may seem, the bulk of Ferrara's introductions are devoted to explaining the rationale of liberty, challenging socialism, analysing the progress of civilization, and assessing the demerits of the French compared with the merits of the English and Americans. A radical advocate of both free trade and laissez-faire, he was to elaborate a fully fledged philosophy of history around the dichotomy between liberty and despotism.Footnote 23 For Ferrara, liberty amounts to the unconstrained interaction of individuals with nature, whereas despotism is anything that limits liberty in this sense and shields individuals from the consequences of their choices. Infringements on liberty include tariffs, subsidies, incentives, state banking, public education, the need to have a degree to enter a profession, and copyrights.Footnote 24 Yet Ferrara's advocacy of laissez-faire economy was only the starting point of a vision of progress (incivilimento) encompassing the whole society, present as well as past.Footnote 25 In his view, the search for satisfaction of ever higher needs, together with the spur to action represented by the Malthusian principle, lay at the basis of all events in human history. Individual freedom and hence incivilimento, Ferrara wrote, have been regularly imperilled by the forces of ‘privilege’ and ‘monopoly’ – from feudal lords to absolute monarchs, from state-sponsored companies to socialists – perpetrating violent interference in the order of nature. Political economy is nothing but an argument in favour of liberty, or, more precisely, it is ‘the new formula that all over the world has been adopted in order to assess the struggle between the principle of emancipation and that of despotism’. Hence political economy is ‘the truest of all philosophies of history’.Footnote 26
In Ferrara's reconstructions, economists become a sort of apostles preaching the gospel of liberty to rulers and peoples who, more often than not, fail to listen. In recent decades, he remarked, the drama of the clash between liberty and privilege had been staged most clearly in France. It is Ferrara's favourite context, with heroes like Turgot, Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Dunoyer, or Bastiat challenging despots such as the Bourbon kings, the two Napoleons, the protectionist Adolphe Thiers, or Louis Blanc. Like many contemporaries, Ferrara was shocked by the February revolution, to the point that he attempted to expunge from political economy – as elaborated by David Ricardo in particular – all the theories that the socialists had exploited, notably the labour theory of value and the theory of differential rent.Footnote 27 Within Ferrara's framework, class struggles were not bound to worsen as socialists contended, since over time, the value of labour increases in relation to the value of capital.Footnote 28 He also put forward a theory of property built on two statements: everybody owns at least his/her body, and all present properties imply work done in the past – propositions meant to counter the socialist picture of property-less workers in opposition to fat-cat capitalists.Footnote 29 As already hinted at, for him socialism was the most extreme version of a general statist approach resulting from misguided economic theories – the difference between, say, Thiers and Blanc was only one of degree. The ultimate reason why the French state multiplied its functions was people's ‘cowardice’, namely their lack of self-reliance, energy, and self-respect; the French of all classes preferred to rely on the state because theirs was a country lacking ‘a sense of liberty’.Footnote 30 Granted that there was no grievance in the nation for which the French government did not make itself responsible, any failure to meet the demands produced discontent and possible revolution. The English and Americans, on the contrary, were suited to both a free government and a laissez-faire economy.Footnote 31 Ferrara's insistence on the role of national character was very much part of the ongoing political debate, as will be shown below.
Two comments are in order. First, the Piedmontese intelligentsia, although deeply influenced by French writers, were in the main Anglophile. In Italy before 1846–8, judgements concerning the political and economic condition of Britain had tended to be critical (in accord with French opinion), but the repeal of the Corn Laws converted many writers, economic as well as political: Richard Cobden's triumphal tour of the peninsula in 1847 revealed that Italian opinion at large was warmly embracing both free trade and Anglophilia.Footnote 32 By 1851, Britain's rejection of both protectionism and other evidence of ‘a vested-interest state’ definitely brought about a change in the nation's image.Footnote 33 Appreciation on the part of the Piedmontese liberals was further strengthened by the interpretation of the Crimean war as ‘a fight for justice against brute aggression’ prevalent in British opinion, an approach which foreshadowed a similar attitude towards a future patriotic war in the peninsula.Footnote 34 The second comment concerns the relationship between Cavour's economic policies of the 1850s and Ferrara's stance. Although a believer in free trade and laissez-faire as general rules, and granted the impressive degree of liberalization of the kingdom's economy that he achieved, as a policy-maker Cavour could not come anywhere near Ferrara's extreme recommendations. Inevitably, therefore, the latter soon became a stern critic of Cavour, especially in relation to banking policy. However, by emphasizing the idea of economic liberty (which had been a chief demand of the patriotic movement in the 1840s), Ferrara and the other Piedmontese economists substantiated Cavour's view that free trade was ‘the highest and most concrete expression of the liberals’ progressive policies’.Footnote 35
A view of the course of history similar to Ferrara's was put forward by the Neapolitan Antonio Scialoja and the Genoese Gerolamo Boccardo. In particular, Scialoja sketched a history of the twin processes of the emancipation of work and the formation of the middle classes, processes clashing with the opposing forces of political privilege. The ‘mission’ of the middle classes is to promote work and economic freedom, he argued, making possible both an ‘orderly liberty’ and the ‘harmony of interests’. But in France, the progress of civilization came to a halt during the July monarchy, when the ruling middle class pursued policies of economic privilege (or ‘monopoly’) that made the few richer at the expense of the many. A struggle between the government and the wealthy, on the one hand, and the poor, on the other, began. Yet since the middle class had betrayed its origin in work, the French became accustomed to relying on the state, to the effect that the socialist experiment of 1848 merely extended state protection to the workers – like Ferrara, Scialoja regarded socialism as protectionism for the masses. Both Scialoja and Boccardo extolled Britain and the Anglo-Saxon character in contrast with France and the French, and argued that Britain had benefited from the teachings of political economy, as demonstrated by the repeal of the Corn Laws. In Scialoja's view, political economy effectively influenced the attitudes of the middle class in Piedmont too.Footnote 36 In addition, Scialoja and Boccardo, like Ferrara, strove to purify political economy by refuting head-on the theories that authors like Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Blanc had borrowed from the classical economists.Footnote 37
Cavour shared these views on France and Britain as well as considering political economy as a chief bulwark against socialism. He devoted the main part of a series of articles in Il Risorgimento to Thomas Robert Malthus's principle of population, agreeing with Ferrara, Boccardo, and Scialoja that Malthus was basically right. But in Piedmont (and elsewhere since the 1830s) the bleak implications of the principle were expunged as they contradicted the image of a conflict-free incivilimento. Cavour explained that the population was not bound to exceed the amount of food available at any given moment thanks to both the foreseeable improvement of agricultural techniques and the rise in the amount of capital invested in agriculture; furthermore, the effectiveness of Malthus's ‘preventive checks’ increased with income, and data confirmed that the birth rate declined as the standard of living rose. The principle of population was therefore to be understood as a mere tendency, and one effectively countered.Footnote 38 Boccardo drew the conclusion that Malthus's lesson was a moral one, focusing on the need for the working classes to be thrifty and far-sighted since ‘the chief causes of pauperism lie in the poor themselves’.Footnote 39 Ferrara re-formulated Malthusianism in ‘progressive and humanitarian’ terms by depicting population pressure as a welcome stimulus to effort.Footnote 40
The texts just discussed strengthened moderate culture in one crucial respect. In the face of military defeat and the rise of socialism, this Bastiat-style political economy guaranteed that the progress of ‘orderly liberty’ was ineluctable, in spite of temporary hindrances. Evoking the authority of science, economists demonstrated that liberty was the precious outcome of historical development; that poverty was to be ascribed to the forces opposing economic freedom, and eventually to the Malthusian principle; that socialists were wrong; and that Britain, rather than France, was the proper source of inspiration. Granted that progress was certain, the moderates' decision to regroup after 1849 was the right one. Whereas Mazzini's followers were as impatient as ever, moderate liberals waited for more propitious times, which surely lay ahead. As for socialism, Piedmont's ruling classes were certainly frightened by its spread in neighbouring France, but they knew well that it was not a pressing danger in their state. It was nevertheless necessary to challenge socialism on the intellectual plane, since its appearance denied the image of the status quo as the culmination of a beneficent course of history.
However, the economists' eulogy of the middle class, utilitarian foundations, and cult of liberty was not shared by the bulk of moderate writers. The former's individualistic, laissez-faire approach did contribute to moderate ideology but the variant of liberalism the moderates endorsed was different. A treatise by the philosopher Vito D'Ondes Reggio – a Sicilian teaching at the University of Genoa – was criticized by Gustavo Cavour on account of its utilitarian spirit, and this is significant because, like Ferrara, D'Ondes Reggio combined a natural law framework with an emphasis on needs as the foundation of society, which owed much to Bentham, John Locke, and Antonio Genovesi. Eighteenth-century ‘materialism’ was anathema to the prevailing spiritual culture, whether of Catholic or ‘eclectic’ origin.Footnote 41
III
Political thought in the kingdom of Sardinia lacked theoretical originality. The circumstances of the Risorgimento struggle, however, gave it a peculiar character. Two writers stand out: Balbo and Gioberti. The influence of the former, who died in 1853, was substantial in the 1850s, as his books were re-published (by the Florentine publishing house Le Monnier) and some new writings appeared posthumously. Prominent among these was Della monarchia rappresentativa in Italia, a treatise which, besides re-formulating all the crucial themes of the Risorgimento, focused on the relationship between representative institutions and ‘public spirit’, as Alexis de Tocqueville had done.
As the head of government, Gioberti aimed to implement ‘democratic politics’, focusing on the material and spiritual well-being of the people.Footnote 42 But the ascendancy of left-wing liberalism did not last, and eventually Gioberti left for voluntary exile in Paris. His Del rinnovamento civile d'Italia was published in Turin a few months before Louis Napoleon's coup. The book as a whole was unpalatable to the moderates. Gioberti, for instance, asserted the unavoidable advent of ‘democracy’ and hence recommended the involvement of the masses in the national struggle, and he favoured, although in principle only, a republican rather than a monarchical form of government. However, other views of Gioberti's were very much in tune with the emerging moderate consensus, as will be detailed below. Rinnovamento was avidly read in Piedmont, and two editions sold out in a few months, and even the king himself appreciated the book, in spite of the critical remarks about his predecessor Charles Albert.Footnote 43Rinnovamento was the work of a man of unusual standing and prestige: as the author of the Primato Gioberti enjoyed the status of a hero, while his philosophical works (1838–43) had earned him universal recognition. Thus the moderates criticized Gioberti's interpretation of specific episodes of 1848–9, but maintained silence on the republican and democratic aspects of his position.Footnote 44 Furthermore, in Rinnovamento Gioberti came to recommend precisely the course of action that Cavour would carry out. Granted a ‘Piedmontese hegemony’ over the national movement, an alliance with France would set in motion a process of gradual unification of the peninsula. Gioberti died in October 1852.
The moderate paradigm consisted of five theses recurring in the writings of Gioberti, Balbo, Carutti, Mamiani, and Boncompagni, albeit to different degrees: (1) natural (and/or divine) laws are both the ultimate source of right and wrong in politics (as in morality) and the guarantee of gradual progress; (2) the brightest citizens should rule; (3) ‘democracy’, that is popular sovereignty and universal suffrage, is inherently wrong; (4) citizens' attitudes play an important role in politics; and (5) moderatism was imbued with Burkeanism, meaning that it endorsed a realistic, prudent approach to politics, that much was made of Italian (and often only Piedmontese) history and traditions, and that mere constitutional machinery was to be disdained. In tune with French liberalism after 1814, the overall goal shaping Piedmontese moderatism was, in François-René de Chateaubriand's words, ‘to eradicate (extirper) the Revolution’ from political thinking.Footnote 45 This amounted to elaborating arguments justifying elite government and countering democracy, namely demands for immediate political equality. How to justify limited suffrage was clearly a theme of immediate practical concern, especially in view of the adoption of universal male suffrage in France since 1848.
The first three theses are interwoven, as Carutti's Dei princìpii del governo libero clearly shows.Footnote 46 His starting point is the existence of a ‘natural’ and ‘divine’ law asserting the conformity of political liberty and civil rights (property being one of them) with ‘supreme justice’. Not only should positive laws rest on the natural law, but sovereignty itself belongs to it. Hence the task of government is to interpret and administer ‘supreme justice’, irrespective of any political or social power.Footnote 47 All human beings know the dictates of natural law by virtue of ‘reason’ bestowed by God, but some with greater clarity than others. In practice, Carutti recommends, echoing Guizot, that the masses had to be excluded from political power on the grounds of their limited intelligence and knowledge: ‘capacity (capacità) is the condition for sovereignty’. The proper ruling class consists of the educated and the clever, whom Carutti and other Piedmontese writers call the ottimati.Footnote 48 As government by the greatest number, ‘democracy’ puts ignorance in charge. Furthermore, people at large are often victims of demagogues who flatter them by preaching equality and end up seizing the wealth of the rich. ‘Communism’ is an inescapable consequence of the principle of political equality. Suffrage should be restricted according to sex, age, property, and education.Footnote 49
Similar correlations between a postulated natural order and rule by the few who understand its laws figure neatly in Mamiani, Boncompagni, and Casanova. According to Mamiani, the ottimati should rule because they are the interpreters of the moral law, to which they are exclusively responsible, pace the electors. And he added that at present the ottimati could not grant complete liberty to the people because of their manifest ignorance and unbridled passions, but sooner or later they would do so since the people understand the moral law with ever greater clarity – in due course universal suffrage, for example, was bound to be conceded.Footnote 50 The aim of government is to guarantee natural, that is civil, rights, Boncompagni argued. Public opinion is the ultimate ruler, yet in a democracy it cannot but be ‘vulgar’ as most people lack both knowledge and independence. To make opinion ‘enlightened’, namely informed by ‘reason’, suffrage should be limited to those who, because of their position in society, are supposed to understand political matters.Footnote 51 According to Boncompagni the principles of law, morality, and religion were self-evident to men who were not befuddled by ‘ignorance or passions’.Footnote 52 This belief was symptomatic of the moderates' approach: by positing their views as the plain interpretation of natural laws or objective reason, they ruled out all other possible positions as the outcome of sinister motives, as will be corroborated below. (Significantly, the content of the natural laws which the moderates so often invoked was never specified). In ascribing sovereignty to natural law, the jurist Casanova argued that democracy was tyrannical since the masses neither knew the ‘natural order’ nor were they independent. Hence a restricted suffrage was necessary to ‘allocate power in accordance with the corresponding capacity’, to be understood as ‘the faculty of acting in accordance with reason’.Footnote 53
As for Gioberti, his advocacy of democracy was diluted by the leadership attributed to those who had intellectual power (ingegno). Democracy amounts to ‘the predominance of the people’, but the people consists of the plebs (plebe) and the educated; the latter, as both writers and politicians, should interpret the Italian masses’ ‘confused instincts’ and lead them to the achievement of nationality and liberty.Footnote 54 Sovereignty belongs to ‘the nation’ but not straightforwardly to the greatest number, for, like the French Doctrinaires, Gioberti avers that ‘reason’ is the supreme ruler and therefore the ‘general will’ must be subordinated to the ‘absolute and eternal’ values of morality and justice.Footnote 55 In other words the people – gradually refined by the dynamics of commercial society – are sovereign only insofar as their decisions are informed by ingegno.Footnote 56 Gioberti was in favour of universal suffrage, but he wanted to amend it so that intellectual capacity could emerge.Footnote 57
Clearly enough, the Doctrinaires were a major influence on the Piedmontese moderates. In regarding reason as the single principle legitimizing power, and la capacité politique as the ability to follow its precepts, the Doctrinaires had argued that the supériorités in this sense should rule.Footnote 58 Furthermore, for Guizot reason was a manifestation of ‘the divine law’.Footnote 59 Needless to say, the Doctrinaires’ rationalism concedes little to the intrinsic rights of the individual, whose liberty is limited to ‘obeying’ the dictates of reason.Footnote 60 Apart from the sway of the Doctrinaires in particular, it has been recently maintained that over the nineteenth century both British and continental liberals relied on the ‘discourse of capacity’. It was a crucial argument for it allowed them to counter the claims made by the two opposite ‘discourses’ of divine right and universal political rights.Footnote 61 It is worth adding that the Piedmontese ottimati were not synonymous with the hereditary aristocracy but, as a discussion between d'Azeglio and Luigi Carlo Farini in 1847 had made clear, with a natural one.Footnote 62
Balbo was influenced more by the Burkean tradition than by the Doctrinaires. Thus the first three theses of the paradigm took the shape of, respectively: (1) a philosophy of history focusing on the progressive destiny of Christian nations, a destiny then requiring the setting up of representative monarchies; (2) the view that a natural aristocracy (or notabilità) characterized by wealth and learning had to play a crucial role in politics; and (3) a denial that sovereignty belonged to the nation – if it did, political turmoil would be the rule. Regarding sovereignty, Balbo struggled to give a liberal twist to two views usually supporting absolute power: that all authority ultimately comes from God, and that all authority is intended for the good of all subjects.Footnote 63
Denouncing democracy took various forms besides that of the rule of the ignorant. Two criticisms are particularly interesting. Carutti, Balbo, and Mamiani found little to commend in the liberty of the ancients, siding with the moderns in the famous contrast put forward by Benjamin Constant. They pointed out that the ancients’ popular government had been regularly associated with both political instability – often erupting into civil wars – and an inadequate concern with national independence. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, states had to be bigger than cities to attain ‘civil greatness’, and consequently popular participation should give way, in Mamiani's words, to the provision of more effective ‘security, order, discipline, and authority’, in the context of a ‘perfect legal equality’. In the ancient republics, popular participation was made possible by slavery, according to Carutti, while Balbo stressed that their governments had been aristocratic rather than democratic.Footnote 64 Basically, the moderates aimed to challenge the well-established association of ancient democracies with lofty ideals and heroic deeds. As will be shown below, they were suspicious of ‘positive’ liberties as far as the masses were concerned.
A second argument against popular government was that it led to utter chaos – and hence was bound to turn into tyranny – because ‘passions’ predominated. Whereas ‘reason’ was associated with a government of the elite, ‘passions’ characterized democracy. ‘Passions’ stemmed from the dominance of low instincts over reason; as Balbo put it, ‘a good passion is impossible in the political realm’ since the very term referred to extreme views and behaviour.Footnote 65 Democracy as the ‘empire of the instinctual over the intelligible’ evoked images of the Terror of 1793–4, which Carutti brought up to date: the ‘revolutionary spirit’ informing Mazzini's sect created ‘angels of evil’ smelling blood, leading a ‘furious throng’ (or even a ‘horde of cannibals’!) in the streets, and eventually triggering an ‘infernal storm’.Footnote 66 Here, rather than Tocqueville's ‘passion for equality’, two works by Germaine de Staël come to mind. In De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (1796), she maintained that politics amounted to the management of the citizens' passions; government was equated with ‘reason’, exerting restraint on the ‘passions’ of the ‘nation’. Since all passions led to an imbalance between desires and the capacity to meet them, the more effective the government's checking action, the purer political liberty could be.Footnote 67 In Considérations sur la Révolution française (1818), Staël recounted graphic scenes of Jacobin violence that may have inspired Carutti.Footnote 68 A few years later, Guizot explained how the various ‘passions’ inherited from the Revolution could be put to good use; but in 1849, he regarded democracy and the guerre sociale it brought about as the outcome of ‘bad passions and bad principles’.Footnote 69
As mentioned above, Balbo's Della monarchia rappresentativa elaborates on the view that the institutions of free government need certain civic virtues to thrive. The Piedmontese moderates were convinced of this, in accordance not only with a series of major writers going from Montesquieu to Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill but also with an Italian tradition of thought beginning with Vincenzo Cuoco's reaction to the revolutionary triennium 1796–9.Footnote 70 In addition, an explanation of the French turmoil of 1848–51 in terms of the population's want of civic attitudes was then widespread in Britain – as Walter Bagehot's Letters exemplifies – as well as in Piedmont (see section II above).Footnote 71 In Balbo's view, the revolutions of 1848–9 had revealed a deficiency in Italians' ‘political education’ due to the fact that, unlike the English, Italians could not gradually develop, over the course of centuries, the virtues required by representative government. Italians lacked a practical mind – they were ‘poets’ – and shared with the French that most serious of political flaws, an inclination to extremism, namely an eagerness for revolutions that was incompatible with the spirit of liberty. This was ultimately based on reverence for the law, as not only the English, but also the Americans demonstrated.Footnote 72 In practice, in 1848–9 Italians' excessive enthusiasm and childish conceit (superbia) entailed unachievable propositions such as republican governments or national unity. The ‘republican dream’ – meaning a concern with liberty when independence, the necessary stepping stone to liberty, was still to come – was the main cause of failure.Footnote 73 That the debacle of 1848–9 had depended on the Italians' insufficient understanding of the duties required by liberty had been first argued by d'Azeglio.Footnote 74 Ironically perhaps, in 1846–8 it had been a staple of moderate argument that Italians were demonstrating their political and moral maturity, namely an ability to marry the advocacy of reform with a respect for authority.
But there was an exception to Balbo's problematic portrayal of the Italian character. He believed that the Piedmontese – that is, the inhabitants of the region – were ready for liberty, as demonstrated by their (relatively) calm behaviour in 1846–9. Crude as they were, the Piedmontese were not deceived by the intrigues of republicans, and were loyal to the house of Savoy. This was why Piedmont ‘is almost the Switzerland of monarchy’. Clearly enough, the virtue Balbo most appreciated in the masses was obedience. As for the Piedmontese aristocracy, in 1832 he had enthused about its military prowess, loyalty, and stubbornness.Footnote 75
The house of Savoy attracted the greatest amount of praise from the moderates. The 1850s witnessed the early works of the so-called sabaudisti: historians who depicted the dynasty as having pursued an anti-Austrian, pro-Italian mission since the sixteenth century.Footnote 76 The more the international order was challenged by Cavour's foreign policy, the more these historians stressed its continuity with the past conduct of the house of Savoy. In the hands of the sabaudisti – Ercole Ricotti, Luigi Chiala, Bianchi, and Carutti – history became a powerful instrument of political legitimization, benefiting from the willingness of the government to open state archives when an historical enterprise promised to pay off.Footnote 77 For instance, in the crucial year 1859 Bianchi published some papers by the ultra-conservative Joseph de Maistre in order to show the similarity between his views and Cavour's policy.Footnote 78 The glorification of Charles Albert – depicted as a patriotic and brave, albeit unfortunate, warrior – had already begun, contributing to the legend around the dynasty.
Piedmontese Burkeanism consisted chiefly in a concern with continuity and prudence, but there was no lack of denunciations of ‘paper constitutions’ either.Footnote 79 Historians pointed to the stati generali of the middle ages as the peculiar parliamentary experience testifying to the antiquity of liberty in the kingdom. Echoing Staël, Guizot, and Augustin Thierry, Federico Sclopis claimed that in Piedmont too despotism was modern and liberty was ancient.Footnote 80 Balbo's Della monarchia rappresentativa abounds with statements, reminiscent of whig authors, on the value of unwritten constitutions ‘grown step by step, the product of the times and the national spirit, and embedded in laws and mores’, in contrast with constitutions suddenly ‘invented’ by a king or an assembly.Footnote 81 Carutti argued that the constitution of a state should not be drafted in the abstract, but should correspond to the people's degree of ‘culture, entrepreneurship, and intelligence’.Footnote 82 He invoked a ‘law of continuity’ allegedly put forward by Montesquieu and Edmund Burke in order to demonstrate that a republic should not be introduced in a country used to monarchical rule. In Carutti's view, Britain's example showed that reforms required both moderation and respect for national history and traditions – Italians were well suited to this mix of conservative and progressive politics, as contemporary Piedmont, after ancient Rome and Venice, demonstrated.Footnote 83 As for the transition from absolutism to liberty, it was ideally carried out by a wise and prudent king, freely acknowledging the existing ‘social needs’, peacefully expressed by the people (If this sentence was meant as a reference to Charles Albert's octroi of 1848, it was very far from reality.).Footnote 84 Religious teachings are necessary to instil deference to social hierarchies among the masses, Carutti continued; even well-devised institutions fail if the citizens do not comply with ‘moral and religious duties’.Footnote 85
Boncompagni too combined rationalism, Guizot-style, with Burkean arguments. If reason were the single criterion for political participation, he argued, an ‘absolute equality’ would ensue since all men are endowed with reason. But considering that people regard with unquestioned reverence those who are on the upper rungs of the social ladder, the hereditary aristocracy has a special role to play.Footnote 86 Needless to say, political developments must be gradual. Any attempt to accelerate the process of reform is misplaced, he contended, for the ideas and attitudes prevailing in a given country determine the performance of its institutions. Both the democrats and the advocates of absolute rule regularly carry out hasty and a priori reforms as they disregard the power of opinion – the slow but certain evolution of ideas.Footnote 87 Possibly inspired by Guizot, Boncompagni argued that any principle decayed unless it was restrained by a contrary one; it followed that liberty should combine with authority, and, accordingly, that both philosophy – identified with liberty – and religion – identified with authority – were necessary to the polity.Footnote 88
It emerges that the foundations of the paradigm were laid between 1848 and 1853, when major writings by Boncompagni, Carutti, Gioberti, and Mamiani appeared. In those years, the preservation of representative government could hardly be taken for granted, as most glaringly indicated by the ‘proclamation of Moncalieri’ of November 1849, in which the king threatened the abrogation of the constitution if the coming election did not return a majority willing to approve the peace treaty with Austria. But the Piedmontese representative system was strengthened by the connubio, the parliamentary alliance between Cavour's centre-right and Urbano Rattazzi's centre-left, formed at the end of 1852. As a result, the conservatives found themselves increasingly isolated.Footnote 89 From then on, moderatism became much more confident and assertive, and the ‘Italian’ policy of Cavour's governments grew, whereas Mazzini's plots failed and the extremes of right and left weakened. Curiously perhaps, the moderates were silent on Louis Napoleon's regime, whose ‘democracy without liberty’ was harshly denounced in Britain.Footnote 90 Apart from obvious tactical reasons, the moderates were probably ambivalent about a government that had done away with revolution but rested on seven million votes.
IV
Unsurprisingly in such a small country, there was a considerable osmosis between political theory and practice. Except for Casanova, all the authors considered so far were involved in politics at the very highest levels of government. In the contributions of a theoretical nature considered above, Piedmontese and Italian matters were regularly referred to; conversely, the arguments making up the paradigm often surfaced in texts discussing topical issues, such as official documents or pamphlets. This section reviews the issues – relative to both domestic reforms and Italian policy – that most clearly reveal a connection with the paradigm.
A first point to note is the correspondence between the claim to be the interpreters of la raison and the natural order, on the one hand, and the view that moderatism was the only legitimate political position, on the other. In January 1849, when Gioberti was prime minister, d'Azeglio contrasted the governments representing ‘sects’ or ‘parts’, either democratic or aristocratic, with those composed of honest and intelligent men who rule in the interest of all, in accordance with the constitution – the ottimati, one is tempted to say. As the product of a sect imbued with ‘greed and secret ambitions’, Gioberti's government epitomized the ‘despotism of minorities’.Footnote 91 Ironically, in Rinnovamento Gioberti himself warned against parties as they were of necessity ‘quarrelsome’, ‘intolerant’, ‘extreme’, and ‘self-concerned’. Carutti welcomed the parliamentary ‘parts’ but deprecated ‘circles’, namely the permanent groups acting as alternative parliaments. Balbo, who was more Anglophile than all the others, recommended two parliamentary parties only; both should represent ‘moderate’ views, whereas the ‘extreme’ parties should not only be excluded from parliament but repressed by force.Footnote 92
Besides being the fruit of rationalism, this suspicion of parties rested on two grounds. First, the moderates' accounts of the events of 1848–9 ascribed the patriots’ failure to internecine quarrels.Footnote 93 Second, some of the moderates' sources of inspiration, and in particular several French writers, had also denounced parties. Staël's De l'influence des passions depicted the Jacobin Terror as the eruption of ‘esprit de parti’, which was an ideological frenzy, an uncompromising resolve to impose one's own idea; but, she added, party spirit ne tient point à la nature de son objet, it is unrelated to any idea in particular as it can be a vehicle of all. In fact, both aristocrats and Jacobins were subject to it. The clash of contrasting, but equally extreme, party visions resulted in a loss of contact with reality, hence the growth of an abstract fervour.Footnote 94 (Bianchi, among others, remarked that Mazzini's plots resulted from the irresponsible vanity of a man who had lost contact with reality).Footnote 95 Victor Cousin viewed ‘exclusive doctrines’ in philosophy as the counterparts of parties in politics, and, accordingly, eclecticism as the synthesis of partial philosophies corresponded to adherence to the constitution as the true general interest.Footnote 96 As for Guizot, he insisted on the necessary harmony between government – the embodiment of reason – and society, a view that ruled out parties alternating in government unless society changed radically.Footnote 97 In Italy, a dictum by the poet Ugo Foscolo (1815) was often quoted by moderates: ‘in order to remake Italy we have to unmake the sects’. These have ‘secret interests’ to foster, Foscolo contended, whereas ‘parties’ act in accordance with the general interests of the polity.Footnote 98 Yet the distinction failed to gain acceptance. In 1837, the influential Catholic philosopher Antonio Rosmini spoke of parties as ‘worms that devour the fabric of society’ for they pursued their own interests and ignored what was morally right.Footnote 99 Before 1848, by presenting themselves as the only force energized by the moral power of public opinion, the moderates came to identify their platform with the general interest.Footnote 100
The target of the moderates' polemic was greater than Mazzini's groups, as d'Azeglio's denunciation of Gioberti's government clearly indicates. Everybody who was either on the right or the left of the moderate camp, both in Piedmont and Italy, was portrayed as a ‘sectarian’ and hence a revolutionary.Footnote 101 The point was crucial since the Piedmontese government depicted its struggle against Austria as conservative in nature, a struggle for order against chaos. It was regularly maintained – in memorandums, pamphlets, or in the press – that Piedmont merely aimed to strengthen the European balance of power, put at risk by Austria's expansionism but more generally by the permanent mayhem Austrian dominance caused on the peninsula. First, republican radicalism was roused by foreign rule; second, the administration of Lombardy-Venetia showed a cavalier attitude to property rights, as exemplified by the confiscation of the assets of the exiles in 1853; and third, Austria was the protector of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, whose government's barbarous repression of the liberal movement made the moderates define it as ‘the apostle of disorder’ and ‘the demagogical entity par excellence’.Footnote 102 In short, Austria behaved like a sect, for it fuelled extremism and fought the demand for liberty stemming from the course of civilization itself.
In contrast, a ‘Piedmontese hegemony’ over the Italian movement was a guarantee of both monarchical order and compliance with Balbo's ‘Christian civilization’. A few examples of the moderates' arguments will suffice. In an open letter to William Gladstone, Farini reminded him of the fact that ‘the constitutional monarchy of Savoy is the single conservative force on the peninsula’, considering that absolute governments fuelled the revolutionarism of republicans.Footnote 103 Boncompagni was at pains to depict the patriotic struggle in Italy as a ‘conservative’ kind of revolution – like the English one of 1688 – aiming to restore rather than to innovate, with both the reforms of the eighteenth century and the liberties brought by Napoleon as the achievements in need of restoration.Footnote 104 Some critics regard our foreign policy as ‘revolutionary’, Chiala argued in 1858, but they should not, because ‘the house of Savoy has been heading for Milan and Lombardy for four centuries’.Footnote 105 And in 1859, when ‘wonderful events’ were happening on the peninsula, Mamiani judged that the coming into being of the Italian nation implemented the ‘rational order’ prescribed by the moral law.Footnote 106 In short, the moderates reconstructed the discourse on the Risorgimento in such a way that diverging positions were excluded on principle. There was no scope for other viewpoints as the moderates were, at the same time, revolutionary and conservative, while, on the philosophical plane, their mission was in accordance with reason and nature.
The dichotomy between the ‘factions’ and a ‘nation’ identified with moderatism was put to use in 1859. An analysis of the proceedings of the assemblies of Tuscany, Romagna, and the Duchies – all with provisional rulers of moderate leanings – reveals a successful attempt to exclude dissent and therefore political discussion on the grounds of the alleged emergence of a single ‘party of the nation’.Footnote 107 The moderates – following the guidelines spread by the Società nazionale, Cavour's agent of revolution in northern and central Italy – claimed that they were ruling in the name of ‘public opinion’ since parties had lost their raison d'être once the war of independence had begun. This argument gained credibility from the democrats’ failure to put forward an alternative game plan in those crucial months. As the official newspaper of the Romagne put it, ‘here there are no longer republicans and supporters of the constitution, moderates and enthusiasts, half-hearted liberals and extremists, as here there are either Italians who love Italy or its enemies’.Footnote 108 The key terms of political discourse in 1859 were ‘concord’ and ‘order’: the moderates congratulated themselves first on the unanimity with which affairs were settled, and annexation to the kingdom of Sardinia was demanded, and, second, on the fact that no breakdown of law and order occurred despite the regime changes. The peaceful transitions were regarded as definitive evidence that Italians were now ready (maturi) for liberty. On various occasions Farini, then ‘dictator’ of the Romagne, argued that the prevalence of concord and order testified to Italians' new political attitudes, developed by experiencing adversity and reflecting on the example of Piedmont. The days of discord, revenge, and misplaced ardour were gone as the provisional governments had managed to change the mores of the Italian peoples in a few months. At last, they were displaying ‘discipline’.Footnote 109 As a logical consequence, the enemies of concord became indistinguishable from the enemies of Italy, as for instance Giuseppe La Farina, the leader of the Società nazionale, made clear in voicing his anger at the democrats and federalists Carlo Cattaneo and Giuseppe Ferrari: they sowed ‘discord’ and were therefore ‘traitors’ to the patria.Footnote 110
To return to Piedmont, politics was informed by a cautious approach to reform, inspired by the British experience. Chiala commented at length on the connubio in terms of Cavour's Peel-like flexibility meant to ‘preserve and progress’ at the same time (Burke had spoken of ‘a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve’). Regardless of any tactical alliance, Cavour never renounced his firm commitment to prudent progress, Chiala argued.Footnote 111 Robert Peel was a model for the moderates also because he had been ‘the minister of the whole nation, not of a part of it’Footnote 112 – it was no coincidence that in 1856 Guizot published a laudatory study of him.Footnote 113 The institutions of Piedmont should certainly be reformed in accordance with the principle of liberty, Domenico Berti averred, but its application should take circumstances into account, and more often than not this entails that the government should be content with achieving the possible rather than the optimum. In the case of university reform, considering that a deficiency in the spirit of association rules out the creation of private universities, a system of higher learning managed by the state is required.Footnote 114
After 1848, Piedmont found itself set on a collision course with the Catholic church. Nevertheless, it was stressed that the separation between church and state pursued in the kingdom was in accordance with religious orthodoxy properly understood.Footnote 115 Not only did the moderates declare themselves to be fervent Catholics, but Catholicism continued to be viewed as essential to public morality. Boncompagni regarded Catholicism as a pillar of the throne for its traditional task of recommending obedience. Bianchi, Carutti, and Farini argued that the masses were willing to fight for liberty and independence only if Catholicism taught them the virtues of sacrifice and duty – individuals guided by self-interest only would merely follow anybody promising to fill their stomachs.Footnote 116 Catholicism, that is, was deemed essential to the shaping of Italians' attitudes at a time of turmoil. Significantly, Farini attacked Mazzini's ‘religion of humanity’ because, by making each man in some way divine, it justified popular sovereignty and hence all passions; eventually these reduced to ‘envy’, bringing about a never-ending cycle of seditions and revolutions since ‘nobody will ever manage to satisfy human desires once these are not checked by religion, morals, and duty’. The liberals, Farini continued, should not pose as irreligious rationalists and should either be, or purport to be, good Catholics – otherwise a crucial connection with the masses would be lost.Footnote 117 On a different plane, Mancini and others stressed the bearing of Catholicism on the making of the principles of equality, liberty, and nationality.Footnote 118 And when the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March 1861, ministers and members of parliament claimed that the protection of God over the house of Savoy had been a crucial factor in the process of national unification. History is not a casual series of events, it was argued, but ‘the work of Providence, which clearly manifests itself in the general government of the world’.Footnote 119 Thus, to the moderates, Catholicism and civilization could not but be partners since their alliance was necessary to achieve moral and political stability. Yet the kind of Catholicism they endorsed was not that of Pius IX. To borrow a sentence referring to French liberals after 1815, the moderates aimed to establish ‘a “juste milieu” of faith’ between eighteenth-century materialism and ultramontanism.Footnote 120
V
From the publication of Gioberti's Primato up to 1848, Italian moderatism was sui generis. It built on the Catholic tradition as well as the glorious past of the peninsula, and refrained from demanding constitutional rule. But in the 1850s, moderatism became a variant of European elite liberalism. In the kingdom of Sardinia, the decade witnessed the making of a political culture which, taking the Statuto as a point of reference, was more theoretical in approach and circumscribed in content than before. This culture conceded very little to democracy and advocated a gouvernement des meilleurs. The lessons of history together with the virtues of realism and prudence were stressed – an approach that made much of widespread doubts about Italians' readiness for free government. Political economy provided the arguments needed to oppose socialism and reaffirm the certainty of gradual progress.
The political instability of France in the nineteenth century, according to Pierre Rosanvallon, resulted from the simultaneous occurrence of both a liberal and a democratic revolution in 1789. In England, these revolutions occurred separately.Footnote 121 In Piedmont (and Italy) too, a liberal phase, coinciding with the Risorgimento, preceded the democratic one. In particular, as the 1850s progressed, the Piedmontese moderates did not have to deal with a real political challenge from the democratic movement, which lacked unity and direction.Footnote 122 Nevertheless, the danger it posed was constantly emphasized. Was democracy perhaps ‘inscribed in the social order’, as Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard and Tocqueville perceived it to be in France?Footnote 123 It is safe to answer in the negative, as Piedmontese society was not egalitarian, respect for the authority of the aristocracy and the local notables was high, and the sway of religious precepts among the masses substantial.Footnote 124 The point is that, although the spectre of democracy took indigenous guises – the memory of 1848–9, a decreasingly belligerent parliamentary opposition, and the Mazzinians' quixotic attempts at insurrection – its cultural relevance in Piedmont was a reflection of its topicality in France, at least to some degree. The Piedmontese were over-sensitive to French developments. Stressing the democratic threat was clearly a strategy meant to rally the moderates, but at the same time what happened in France, where liberals were confronted with a strong democratic discourse of rights, was perceived by the Piedmontese as the proper context for their reflections.Footnote 125 There was the feeling that, almost out of necessity, political developments in France would soon cross the Alps, either in the form of armies or ideas. (France's ‘universalist’ mission in the name of abstract ideas – its proselytizing spirit that is – had been a commonplace view in Europe since the late eighteenth century.)
The Piedmontese moderates did believe that the course of European civilization was in tune with their demands. Italian patriotism and liberty, that is, were regarded as stemming from the forces which had been shaping European history since 1789. Arguably the origin of their liberalism is to be found in an awareness of the inevitability of liberty after the turmoil of 1789–1814, an awareness which, in turn, resulted from an extreme sensitivity to foreign events. As a buffer state between France and Austria, the kingdom of Sardinia had struggled for survival for centuries; annexed to France by Napoleon in 1799, it was reconstituted in 1814, and since then the younger generation acknowledged the unstoppable strength of the ideas set in motion by the French Revolution.Footnote 126 Thus Cavour welcomed the constitution granted by Charles Albert as a document in which ‘all the great principles proclaimed by the French nation in 1789’ were frankly endorsed.Footnote 127 Rejecting them was not an option; both the natural laws and the rule of reason so often called into play in the 1850s were nothing but the philosophical representation of this perception. As Mancini put it: in this century setting up a free government is an ‘inescapable necessity’.Footnote 128 ‘Living in tune with modern civilization’ was therefore the moderates' guiding principle, entailing political and economic progress along the lines of the French and British example. The corollary was that the struggle of the Risorgimento did not stem from ‘revolutionary passions’ but from ‘the principles of civilization universally agreed on’.Footnote 129
