Karl Marx

Sardinia

From the English.

["The People's Paper", No. 211, May 17, 1856]

The history of the House of Savoy can be divided into three periods—the first, in which it rises and expands, while occupying an ambiguous position between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, between the Italian republics and the German Empire; the second, in which it thrives by changing sides in the wars between France and Austria; and the final stage, in which it strives to turn the world-wide struggle between revolution and counter-revolution to its own advantage, just as it previously exploited the antagonism of peoples and dynasties. In all three periods, ambiguity is the constant axis around which its policy revolves, and the results, insignificant in scale and double-edged in character, appear as the natural fruit of that policy.

At the end of the first period, simultaneously with the formation of the great European monarchies, we witness the House of Savoy developing into a small monarchy. At the end of the second period, the Congress of Vienna saw fit to cede the Genoese Republic to it, while Austria swallowed Venice and Lombardy and the Holy Alliance gagged all second-rate powers, whatever their confession. In the course of the third period, finally, Piedmont is permitted to appear at the Congress of Paris; it draws up a memorandum against Austria and Naples, tenders wise counsels to the Pope, lets an Orlov pat it on the shoulder, is encouraged in its constitutional aspirations by the coup d’état, and is prodded in its dreams of a dominant position in Italy by the same Palmerston who so successfully betrayed Piedmont in 1848 and 1849.

It is a quite absurd notion on the part of the Sardinian representatives that constitutionalism—whose agony they can at present observe with their own eyes in Great Britain, and whose bankruptcy the revolutions of 1848–49 made echo across the European continent, proving that it is equally powerless against the bayonets of crowns and the barricades of the people—that this constitutionalism is now about to celebrate not only its restitutio in integrum <full restoration> on the Piedmontese stage, but even to become an overwhelming power. Such a thought could only be produced by the great men of a small state. For any impartial observer it is an indisputable fact that, alongside France as the great monarchy, Piedmont must remain a small monarchy; that in the face of imperial despotism in France, Piedmont exists at best only on sufferance; and that with the formation of a genuine republic in France, the Piedmontese monarchy will vanish and dissolve into an Italian republic. In particular, the very conditions upon which the existence of the Sardinian monarchy depends prevent it from attaining its ambitious aims. It can play the role of liberator of Italy only at a time when revolution is absent in Europe and counter-revolution in France holds unrestricted power. Under such conditions it can conceive of taking the lead in Italy as the sole Italian state with progressive tendencies, with native rulers and a national army. But these very conditions expose it to the two-sided pressure of imperial France on the one side and imperial Austria on the other. In the event of serious frictions between these neighbouring empires, the Sardinian monarchy would become the satellite of the one and the battlefield of both. In the event of an entente cordiale between them, it would have to content itself with an asthmatic existence, with a mere reprieve. To lean on the revolutionary party in Italy would be the sheerest suicide for the House of Savoy—indeed, the events of 1848–49 destroyed the last illusions about its revolutionary mission. The hopes of the House of Savoy are thus bound up with the status quo in Europe; but the status quo in Europe denies it expansion on the Apennine peninsula and assigns it the modest role of an Italian Belgium.

In attempting to resume the game of 1847 at the Congress of Paris, the Piedmontese plenipotentiaries could therefore present only a very pitiful sight. Every move they made on the chessboard of diplomacy signified
check
to themselves.

While vigorously protesting against the Austrian occupation of central Italy, they were forced to touch only very cautiously upon the French occupation of Rome; while murmuring against the theocracy of the Pope, they had to bow down before the hypocritical grimaces of the first-born son of the Church <Napoleon III>. To Clarendon, who had shown such tender mercy to Ireland in 1848, they had to appeal to give the King of Naples <Ferdinand II> some lessons in humanity, and the gaoler of Cayenne, Lambessa, and Belle-Île they had to implore to open the gates of the prisons of Milan, Naples, and Rome. While passing themselves off as champions of freedom in Italy, they slavishly submitted to Walewski’s attack on the freedom of the press in Belgium and stressed explicitly that

“it is difficult to maintain good relations between two nations when one of them has newspapers with exaggerated doctrinaire views that wage war against neighbouring governments.”

Relying on their foolish clinging to Bonapartist doctrines, Austria immediately approached Piedmont’s plenipotentiaries with the imperious demand to put an end to the war waged by the Piedmontese press against Austria and to punish those responsible.

At the very moment when they purport to set the international politics of peoples against the international politics of states, they congratulate themselves, on the other hand, on the treaty that renews those bonds of friendship which have existed for centuries between the House of Savoy and the house of Romanov. Goaded to make a display of their eloquence before the plenipotentiaries of old Europe, they must submit to being treated contemptuously by Austria as a second-rate power incapable of having a say in the discussion of first-rate questions. While they enjoy the overwhelming satisfaction of being allowed to draw up a memorandum, Austria is permitted to station its troops along the entire Sardinian frontier, from the Po to the summits of the Apennines, to occupy Parma, to fortify Piacenza in defiance of the Treaty of Vienna, and to deploy its forces along the coast of the Adriatic, from Ferrara and Bologna as far as Ancona. Seven days after these complaints were laid before the congress, on 15 April, a special treaty was signed between France and England on the one side and Austria on the other, which clearly demonstrated the harm the memorandum had done to Austria.

Such, then, was the position at the Congress of Paris of the worthy representatives of that Victor Emmanuel, who, after the abdication of his father and the defeat at the battle of Novara, had embraced Radetzky, the most implacable enemy of Charles Albert, before the eyes of an army enraged to the highest pitch. Piedmont must now—if it is not deliberately blind—realise that it is being tricked with peace just as it was tricked with war. Bonaparte can make use of it to muddy the waters of Italy, with the intention of fishing crowns out of the mud. Russia can pat little Sardinia on the shoulder with the aim of alarming Austria in the south in order to weaken it in the north. Palmerston can, for reasons best known to himself, repeat the comedy of 1847 without even taking the trouble to play the old tune to a new melody. In all this, Piedmont is nothing but a tool of foreign powers. With reference to the speeches in the British Parliament, Signor Brofferio declared before the Sardinian Chamber of Deputies, of which he is a member, that those speeches “had never been Delphic, but always only Trophonian oracles.” He is mistaken here only in so far as he confuses echo with oracle.

The Piedmontese intermezzo is in and of itself of no interest whatsoever, except that of seeing how the House of Savoy, in its hereditary policy of tacking and in its repeated attempts to make the Italian question the prop of its own dynastic intrigues, has once again come to grief. Yet there is a more important point of view, which the English and French press deliberately overlook, but to which the Sardinian plenipotentiaries make special

reference in their notorious memorandum. Austria’s hostile attitude, justified by the policy of the Sardinian plenipotentiaries in Paris, “compels Sardinia to remain armed and to take measures that place an extraordinary burden upon its finances, already disordered by the events of 1848 and 1849 and by the war in which it took part.” As if that were not enough.

“The unrest among the people,” according to the Sardinian memorandum, “seemed recently to have abated. The Italians, seeing one of their national princes allied with the great Western powers … cherished the hope that no peace would be signed before their sufferings were alleviated. This hope made them calm and resigned; but if they learn of the negative results of the Congress of Paris, if they hear that Austria, despite the courtesies and the benevolent mediation of England and France, has even refused a discussion of the question …, then without any doubt the exasperation that slumbers at present will reawaken more furious than ever.
Convinced that they have nothing more to hope for from diplomacy, the Italians, with southern vehemence, will again throw themselves into the arms of the subversive and revolutionary party
<emphases according to the “N.-Y. D. T.”> and will once more transform Italy into a focus of conspiracies and turmoil, which may be stifled by redoubled severity but, at the slightest disturbance in Europe, will be kindled into fresh outbreaks of the utmost violence. The awakening of revolutionary passions in all the countries surrounding Piedmont, from causes liable to arouse sympathy among the people, exposes the Sardinian government to exceedingly grave perils.”

So it is. During the war the rich bourgeoisie of Lombardy had, so to speak, held its breath in the vain hope of securing national emancipation and bourgeois liberty at the conclusion of peace through diplomatic actions and under the auspices of the House of Savoy, without the need to wade through the Red Sea of revolution and without having to grant to the peasantry and the proletariat those concessions which, after the experiences of 1848/49, the bourgeoisie knew had become inseparable from every popular movement. But now their Epicurean hopes are gone. The sole tangible result of the war – at least the only one that attracts the attention of the Italians – is the material and political advantages Austria has pocketed: a further consolidation of that hated power which has been secured with the aid of the so-called independent Italian state. Once again the Piedmontese constitutionalists had the game in their hands; once again they have lost it; and once again they stand convicted of failure in their loudly proclaimed mission as Italy’s leading force. Their own army will call them to account. The bourgeoisie is once more compelled to lean on the popular masses and to equate national liberation with social regeneration. The Piedmontese nightmare is shaken off, the diplomatic spell is broken, and the volcanic heart of revolutionary Italy begins to beat again.