The Piedmontese Machiavelli
Sarah Bradford
Cavour Denis Mack Smith (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.95)
Om glance at the cover portrait of this biography tells you more than words ever could about its subject, Count Camille de Cavour, Prime Minister of Piedmont and architect of Italian reunification. A self-satisfied figure with small, cunning eyes, large fleshy nose and rat-trap mouth, stars, sashes and chains of office decorating his breast, a hand tucked into his waistcoat to conceal the swelling belly of which he was always painfully conscious, Cavour is the personification of a pezzo grosso. Nor. is the pencil drawing on the back cover of Cavour aged 25 any more reassuring. Under the dark Byronic curls the eyes stare smugly out with angry disdain, the mouth at once contemptuous and stubborn. This is the man of whom no European states- man of his time had a good word to say, who Disraeli (who was in a position to know) called 'utterly unscrupulous' and whom Napoleon 111 (no mean practitioner himself of the art of deception) dubbed 'the Piedmontese Machiavelli'.
Not surprisingly, Machiavelli's The Prince was Cavour's favourite reading. He cheated, betrayed and deceived everyone with whom he had to deal. Lord Cowley, the English ambassador in Paris, com- mented that Italian liberty did not seem uppermost in his mind but rather hatred of Austria, personal ambition and a thirst for Piedmontese aggrandisement. Indeed, Cavour regarded as his principal enemies not the Austrians, nor the Pope, nor the Neapolitan Bourbons, nor any of the other ostensible obstacles to Italian liberty but those twin standard-bearers of the Risor- gimento, Mazzini and Garibaldi.
Cavour saw them as dangerous radicals to be thwarted at all costs, even, as far as Mazzini was concerned, going to the length of sending to London for a daguerrotype portrait by which the police could recog- nise him should he attempt to return to his native Genoa and offering considerable
bribes to his associates to betray him. His treatment of Garibaldi over Naples and Sicily was even shabbier. Having first attempted to prevent and then to sabotage Garibaldi's expedition, he then plotted to usurp his successes. Much of his time between August and November 1860 was devoted to outmanoeuvring the hero of the Thousand by means which included send- ing two farcical police agents to Naples who on arrival were discovered to be also in the pay of Napoleon III, King Francesco of Naples and probably of the Pope. He even contemplated igniting an European war to recapture the initiative from the Italian 'revolutionaries' and attempted to incite an abortive revolt in Naples before Garibaldi got there. When all else failed, he invaded the Papal States. Warning the army that was to proceed to Naples to expect resistance from what he termed 'the Garibaldian hordes', he wrote that if necessary Garibaldi's forces might have to be 'exterminated to the last man' (a phrase which was understandably subsequently deleted from the published text of the letter). Of course, Cavour won in the end, and Garibaldi was shipped back to his 'farm' on the barren island of Caprera with an annual pension and a steam yacht.
Cavour was a supreme example of self- less devotion to self-interest. Like Peel, his liberalism stemmed from a conviction that reform was the only sensible alternative to revolution and that the removal of popular grievances constituted the safest defence of the interests of himself and of his class. But he would never have been moved, as Peel was, by the sad statistics of poverty and famine or by the impassioned rhetoric of a Cobden or a Bright. He consistently ignored the homicidal conditions of the prison at Alessandria, and Piedmont was lucky in that respect to escape the much publicised comminations of Gladstone on the prisons of Bourbon Naples.
He was greedy for food, money and power. As a young man he dreamed, literally, of becoming Prime Minister of Piedmont, gambled at the tables and on speculative enterprises. When power final- ly came in 1852, he cherished it, expanded it, guarded it jealously, eliminating his rivals so that he became at one time not only Prime Minister but also Foreign Minister, Minister of Finance and of the Interior. He worked relentlessly to drag priest-ridden Piedmont into the modern era, combating the stranglehold of the Church, dissolving the monasteries and earning himself excommunication from the Pope. He read economics and history, despising literature (and poetry in particu- lar) as responsible for the decadence of Italy. He was, above all, a pragmatist, seeking always 'le juste milieu', as he put it in French which, significantly, was his first language.
He had, apparently, no private life, beyond visits to a mistress who had once been the favourite of his sovereign, Victor Emmanuel II, and who at his death capital- ised on their relationship by selling his intimate letters to her. Perhaps he de- served no better. He suffered, he once said, from 'lassitude of the heart', shy even of giving his affection to a pet because its death might prove upsetting and giving as his reason for not marrying that 'a wife left on her own by a busy husband would expose him to gossip, scandal and hence ridicule . .
He was not, therefore, a very nice man but, fortunately for Italy, a very able one. Singlehandedly he made the inaptly named Kingdom of Sardinia a force, however small, in European politics. Although he often overreached himself in his intrigues earning himself universal distrust (Baron de Talleyrand said after an hour's con- versation with him that his `genuis for intrigue was of quite heroic proportions'), he nonetheless achieved his objectives. It was he, quite as much as his ally Napoleon III, who was responsible for the Italian War of 1859 which he had long planned and which ultimately yielded Piedmont such rich returns.
He was, as his biographer puts it, 'a• great fighter but not a great builder'. When he died in 1860 having literally worked himself to death at the age of 50, he left an Italy which was more than a geographical expression but less than a country, divided by regional jealousies,, with a rickety and corrupt parliamentary structure governed by men, many of whom were as greedy and as power-hungry as he was, but without his political genius and intellect.
Denis Mack Smith has written some justly celebrated books on Italian subjects, but this biography is not one of them. What, one wonders, was his brief? The lack of illustrations and the monotonous but informative chapter headings such as 'Prime Minister 1852-5', 'Economics Policy 1852-8', 'Foreign Policy 1856-7' etc. lead one to suspect that it must have read something like an examination question: 'Give a brief account of the career of Count Cavour and his contribution to the unification of Italy . . .'. Within that con- text, it succeeds.
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