Camillo Benso, count di Cavour

Camillo Benso, count di Cavour (born August 10, 1810, Turin, Piedmont, French Empire—died June 6, 1861, Turin, Italy) was a Piedmontese statesman, a conservative whose exploitation of international rivalries and of revolutionary movements brought about the unification of Italy (1861) under the House of Savoy, with himself as the first prime minister of the new kingdom.

Family and early life

The Cavours were an ancient family that had served the House of Savoy as soldiers and officials since the 16th century. Genevan by birth and Calvinist by religion, his mother brought into the Cavour family the influence of Geneva, a city open to all the political, religious, and social movements of the period. The French Revolution imperilled the fortunes of the Cavours because of their close ties with the ancien régime; but Cavour’s father, Michele, reestablished the family in an eminent position in Napoleonic society. Camillo even had as godparents Prince Camillo Borghese—after whom he was named—and Pauline Bonaparte, the Prince’s wife and Napoleon’s favourite sister.

At the age of 10 he was enrolled at the Military Academy of Turin. As the younger son who could not hope for the economic and social position that would fall to his elder brother, Camillo saw a brilliant career open up before him under the protection of the court of Charles Albert, prince of Savoy and Piedmont. In 1826 he obtained a commission as lieutenant in the corps of engineers.

During his six years at the academy political ideas began to fascinate him; echoes of the constitutionalist Piedmontese revolution of 1821 reached the school, provoking in some of its members a flash of liberal and national spirit that was, however, immediately extinguished. Among his family, Camillo heard the great issues of the day being discussed: the internal politics of France under the restored Bourbons; the revolt against Turkish repression in Greece; the liberal Decembrist rising in Russia in 1825. He showed his sympathy, in his usual enthusiastic manner, with the liberals and with personalities such as Benjamin Franklin and Santorre di Santarosa, the famous ill-fated leader of the 1821 revolution in Piedmont, who was also a distant relative. A close friendship with a cadet three years his senior, Baron Severino Cassio, seems to have had a particular influence on his political views. Cassio, suspected of republicanism, imbued Camillo with patriotic ideas.

The Cavour family, greatly disturbed by their son’s association with a cadet holding compromising political views, ordered Camillo to terminate it—not without provoking his indignation and bitterness. This interference of the family was dictated by expediency, for in July 1824 the marchese Michele had obtained for Camillo the appointment as personal page to Charles Albert. His lack of enthusiasm for the court position and his open ridicule of the page-boy’s uniform he was obliged to wear caused a scandal and confirmed the growing suspicions about the rebellious disposition of the young count Cavour. The insulted Charles Albert banished Camillo from court and—vainly—tried to persuade King Charles Felix to strip Camillo of his commission. The episode created an irreparable break between Camillo and the hereditary prince and for about 20 years made it impossible for Cavour to take any part in official political life.

Development of political ideals

His military career began in the engineers. He was first stationed in Turin, then in various frontier posts, where fortifications were being constructed; yet, wherever he was, Cavour remained dissatisfied. In 1830 he was sent to Genoa, where he met Anna Giustiniani Schiaffino, an ardent advocate of ultrademocratic and republican ideas, whose salon was frequented by many members of the Carbonari, the secret revolutionary society whose guiding force then was Giuseppe Mazzini. Cavour’s fervent radicalism was inspired by his love for Anna Schiaffino and by his renewed friendship with Severino Cassio, now a fellow officer in the engineers at Genoa.

The French revolution of July 1830, which overthrew the last Bourbon, Charles X, and installed Louis-Philippe, “the citizen king,” also played a great part in strengthening Cavour’s revolutionary ardour. Under the direction of Severino Cassio, he studied English in order to follow more easily the newspapers reporting political events in Europe. He was influenced by the liberal ideas of the French writers Benjamin Constant and François Guizot, and his adversaries remained those of his childhood: paternalistic absolutism; legitimist reactionaries representing the landed interests, the aristocracy, and the clergy; and the union of throne and altar. Of necessity this attitude pitted him consciously against the caste to which he belonged.

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The influence of the events in France on the temperamental Cavour once again aroused official suspicions, and this time he was subjected to police surveillance. As usual, his father’s intervention helped to avert more serious consequences; in this case he was simply transferred to a remote mountain fort. It had become obvious, however, that he could no longer remain in the army, from which he resigned in 1831. His father found him a sort of occupation: he was appointed mayor of a village south of Turin and also became the administrator of extensive holdings in the vicinity belonging to his uncles.

Although these modest occupations served to fill his time and to insulate him from his family, they aggravated his despondency over what appeared to be the end of his political ambitions. Social interests began to absorb him: the problems of poverty and of prisoner education became the subjects of his researches. In 1834 he wrote a memoir on poverty in Piedmont, which was published the following year in London in the Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for inquiring into the Administration and practical Operation of the Poor Laws. A second pamphlet on the history of the Poor Laws in England was edited and published by Cavour in 1835 at Turin.

During those years he was at last able to make his first long-awaited visit to Paris and London, thus widening his knowledge of Europe. He now came to know the two greatest and most advanced Western capitals—both ruled by constitutional and liberal regimes (however much they differed in character) and both attempting to effect the boldest economic and social changes. He took a feverishly active interest in the parliamentary life of England and France; he attended university lectures and visited factories, railways, ports, hospitals, schools, and prisons. The experience he acquired in the two Western capitals and in Geneva set him firmly on the path he had already instinctively chosen: always to follow the “golden mean.” He was repelled equally by the revolutionaries who wished to destroy society through terror in order to construct a better one without realizing that their methods would defile human dignity, and by the reactionaries, who, in blindly opposing all progress, eventually provoked revolutionary uprisings. Rejecting all extremes, he wanted above all to be a good European. Yet Cavour always remained a patriot. When his worth and his great ambition were acknowledged in France and one of his friends invited him to abandon the petty and wretched Piedmont of Charles Albert for a brilliant career in France, Cavour rejected the invitation.

In 1835, after his return from his travels, he began to engage in a fruitful series of enterprises that helped him to accumulate a considerable fortune. He also achieved a certain reputation with his writing. Even without directly facing the question of Italy’s future political structure, all his writings proclaimed social or economic principles that could in no way be reconciled with the prevailing conditions in Italy. Above all, the economic measures and the construction of railroads proposed by Cavour would have transformed the Italy of that period beyond recognition.