AZEGLIO, MASSIMO TAPARELLI d'. - Politician and man of letters, b. in Turin on 24 Oct. 1798, fourth-born son of Cesare and of Cristina Morozzo di Bianzè, d. 15 Jan. 1866. A man of brilliant and independent character, he received a careful and strict family education and soon felt most keenly the contrast between the closed, traditionalist environment of the Restoration and the new spirit and new ideals of the century. The decision to go to Rome to devote himself to painting and to prepare to live by his own work tore him from the closed Piedmontese environment and helped him to become Italian. In the Roman period, in fact, the Italian and the new man matured in d'A., making him averse to conspiracies and uprisings and keeping him far, unlike his brother Roberto, from the Piedmontese revolution of '21. But he did not escape the fascination of the national idea, and he soon thought of Italy in terms of moderate liberalism.
Painting, which nevertheless won him praise and remuneration, was not enough for him: from the "patriotic" paintings, such as La disfida di Barletta and La battaglia di Legnano, there arose in him the desire to devote himself to some other work for the advantage of the fatherland and to "electrify the characters" of the Italians. And from the canvases rich in colour and from the "stilted" prose of the Sagra di s. Michele disegnata e descritta (Turin 1829), after various attempts at poems and plays had failed, he passed impetuously, under the evident influence of Manzoni (whose daughter Giulia he had married in '31) and of the Milanese environment, to Ettore Fieramocca o la disfida di Barletta (1833), a novel rich in an enthralling patriotism, which immediately placed the author in the front rank and won the volume, which pleased Mazzini too, genuine acclaim. There followed, in the same spirit, Niccolò de' Lopi, ovvero i Palleschi e i Piagnoni (1841), more extensive and conducted with more careful research, but less successful, and La Lega Lombarda, interrupted in '45 at chap. 8 and published posthumously in 1871. As painting had already done, literature now appeared to him insufficient: in him, who had urged his cousin Balbo to outline the Speranze d'Italia, the desire for more direct action had arisen.
Uncompromised with sects or movements, he engaged in a political journey through the Marches, Romagna and Tuscany, and carried it out while fighting ideas of uprisings and conspiracies, invoking concord and discipline and championing, even amid the mistrust of many, the name of Charles Albert (Sept. 1845), with whom, on 12 Oct., he was to have a dramatic, decisive conversation in Turin. From the journey and from the anticipated failure of the Rimini uprising was born one of the best-known pamphlets of the Risorgimento, Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (March 1846), in which, faithful to his concept, as he would say six years later, "that the lightning-rod of revolutions is timely, serious reforms and good and liberal laws", he disapproves at once of revolutionary pretensions and of certain shortcomings of the government and, convinced that the premise of the national question cannot be found outside certain ethical principles equal "for the great as for the small, for the strong as for the weak, for the rulers as for the ruled", exhorts the Italians to give up conspiracies in order to agree upon open conspiracy. Great was the resonance of this writing, whose fundamental theme, one of d'A.'s basic ideas, would return frequently in his works and his speeches, such as that of 12 Febr. 1851: "I believe that there are not two different codes of morality, one for rulers, the other for the ruled; I do not believe that reason of State is a dispensation from common morality".
D'A. suddenly became one of the most influential leaders of liberal and patriotic opinion, which believed it had found in Pius IX the sign and the motive of its faith. The subsequent Proposta di un programma per l'opinione nazionale (1847), "magna charta" of Italian reformism, founded always on the concepts of civil education, reaffirmed his ideas, to which the Austrian occupation of Ferrara gave a more decided national imprint. The bloody Milanese incidents of the following Jan. dictated to him an ardent indictment, I lutti di Lombardia (1848), which points to Austria as the enemy and sounds the reveille of war, in which he took part with Durando's papal troops. Wounded on 10 June at Vicenza, he entered the polemic against democrats and republicans, whom he accused as the sole persons responsible for the defeat. And in Timori e speranze (1848) he reaffirmed another of his fundamental concepts: "the most important political education of every people is that which teaches respect for the law. Without this respect one may change the form of government, find new orders, constitutions as perfect as one likes, everything will be useless: one will succeed only in disorder and anarchy".
Averse to power, only after Novara and the advent of Victor Emmanuel II did he accept, out of a sense of patriotic duty, the ministry (7 May 1849-Nov. 1852). An arduous undertaking to govern Piedmont after the defeat and amid the ferment of passions. Once more his programme was: order within the law, "neither absolutism, nor republic, and much less anarchy". And with this concept he negotiated the difficult peace with Austria (Aug. 1849), resisting with dignified firmness its demands and obtaining honourable conditions; he concluded useful agreements with France and England, maintained the Statute, welcomed exiles from every part of Italy, and began reforms.
Faced with the Chamber, which did not wish to accept the peace, painful but inevitable, he did not hesitate to resort to dissolution, and the country understood the warning that sprang from the "Proclama di Moncalieri" which he had the king sign (20 Nov. 1849). In relations with Rome (Siccardi Laws, 1850) d'A., driven by the concern to modernize legislation and to settle the past according to current ideas, came fatally to injure the rights of the Church and to encroach upon the authority of the papacy, irremediably inflaming that religious conflict which, above all through misunderstanding, was so long painfully to divide Italy into two opposing camps. The support he received in the parliamentary struggle from Cavour won the latter entry into the ministry, but prepared the fall of d'A., who, lazy by nature and too little pliable and shrewd, would be overshadowed, after the crisis of the connubio (21 May 1852), by the man he jokingly called "the impious rival", dynamic, bold, unscrupulous.
Excluded forever from active politics, he returned serenely to private life and to art; but he was from time to time entrusted with some mission and was always ready to support his successor with direct interventions with the sovereign, with speeches, with writings (as for the law on civil marriage, for the confiscation of ecclesiastical property and for the expedition to the Crimea), or by accompanying the king and Cavour to Paris and London (Nov. 1855). But by now the man who could claim a political consistency from Gli ultimi casi to the most recent manifestations appeared outmoded, and his legalism and his moralism, which would make him refuse to represent Piedmont at the Congress of Paris (1856), confined him to his Cannero in an attitude of opposition, while, among his paintings and devoted friends, he began to recall in the Bozzetti della vita italiana (1858) part of his picturesquely adventurous life. From that retirement he would emerge, on the eve of the war of 1859, to go to Paris and London to assist Cavour's policy there. By which, however, he would never allow himself to be completely convinced, distrustful as he was of what appeared to him an unscrupulousness of means.
For a short time commissioner of the government at Bologna (1859) and governor of Milan (1860), his restless puritanism made him suspicious even of the expedition of the Thousand, for fear that Mazzini might profit from it. A similar feeling made him rise up (Il misfatto di Parma, Oct. 1859) against the assassination of Auriti, a crime that appeared to him "high treason against Italy," whose reputation, honor and independence he feared were being compromised, and which made him desire a regular trial for Garibaldi after Aspromonte. Though still loved and esteemed, the approval of the most active and doctrinaire liberals was abandoning him, especially in the face of his stiffening on some of the most burning questions of the time. In La politique et le droit chrétien (Dec. 1859) he wished for Rome as a free city, a first step toward making him deny Rome as capital (Questioni urgenti, 1861) and toward making him advocate as the definitive solution to the Roman question the provisional one of the September Convention. The letter Agli elettori (1865) was another sign of his going against the current, of his placing civil education before immediate action. And to this end he also devoted the Miei ricordi (1863-65), because "Italy's first need is that Italians be formed, endowed with other and strong characters." Death (1866) interrupted the work with which he would have wished to contribute to making, after Italy, the Italians.