VIRGINIO PAOLO GASTALDI

Cavour e la strategia dell'unificazione (1850-1861) 

N. 151

Summary - Cavour did not have immediately among the salient points of his programme those of the political unification of the Italian peninsula. His objective was the modernization of the Savoyard society including the small kingdom of Sardinia into the trend of the economic-industrial development of the most advanced western European countries and to line it up among constitutional moderate and wealth-based regimes, in order to allow a cautious enlargement of the political class to the emerging bourgeoisie avoiding revolutionary dangers. On the other hand, the untiring Cavourian defense of the Albertine Statute was functional to the strategy of taking away the political leadership of the country from the authoritative fancies and from the personal initiatives of the King, for the purpose of entrusting it to the safe management of Parliament. The Italian national question, according to Cavour, fund thus the prior objective of the independence (with the dismissal from the peninsula of the direct and indirect influence of the Austrian Empire) and of the constitutionalism extended to all the Italian states to be re-organized on new bases in respect of the decisions of Congress of Wien. On the contrary, the unification was the result — not wanted but accepted — of the inclusion of the kingdom of Sardinia into the international policy of the great Powers and of the necessity of neutralizing the democratic forces (Garibaldinian activists and Mazzinian) in the constitutional moderate monarchic system.