AZEGLIO TAPARELLI, MASSIMO d'. – Lithograph by Chardon. Rome, Museum of the Risorgimento.
This is not enough for him: from the “patriotic” paintings, such as La disfida di Barletta and La battaglia di Legnano, there arises in him the desire to devote himself to some other work for the benefit of the homeland and in order “to electrify the character” of the Italians. And from the richly coloured canvases and the “stilted” prose of Sagra di s. Michele disegnata e descritta (Turin 1829), after various attempts at poems and drama had failed, he moves impetuously, under the evident influence of Manzoni (whose daughter Giulia he had married in ’31) and of the Milanese milieu, to Ettore Fieramocca o la disfida di Barletta (1833), a novel rich in compelling patriotism, which immediately brought its author to prominence and won the volume, appreciated even by Mazzini, genuine acclaim. In the same spirit there followed Niccolò de' Lopi, ovvero i Palleschi e i Piagnoni (1841), broader in scope and carried out with more extensive research but less successful, and La Lega Lombarda, interrupted in ’45 at chapter 8 and published posthumously in 1871. Just as painting had done before, literature now appeared insufficient to him: in the man who had urged his cousin Balbo to outline Speranze d'Italia, the desire for more direct action had arisen.
Uncommitted to sects or movements, he undertook a political journey through the Marches, Romagna, and Tuscany, completing it by opposing ideas of uprisings and conspiracies, calling for concord and discipline, and advocating, despite the distrust of many, the name of Carlo Alberto (September 1845), with whom, on 12 October, he would have a dramatic, decisive conversation in Turin. From the journey and the anticipated failure of the Rimini uprising there arose one of the best-known pamphlets of the Risorgimento, Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (March 1846), in which, faithful to his conception—as he would say six years later—“that the lightning rod of revolutions should be appropriate, serious reforms and good, liberal laws,” he at once disapproved revolutionary claims and certain deficiencies of the government and, convinced that the premise of the national question could not be found outside certain ethical principles equal “for the great as for the small, for the strong as for the weak, for rulers as for the ruled,” urged the Italians to abandon conspiracies in order to unite in open conspiracy. This writing had a great resonance; its fundamental theme, one of d'A.’s basic ideas, would recur frequently in his works and speeches, as in that of 12 February 1851: “I believe that there are not two different codes of morality, one for rulers and another for the ruled; I do not believe that raison d’état 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 motive of its own faith. The subsequent Proposta di un programma per l'opinione nazionale (1847), the “magna charta” of Italian reformism, still founded on the concepts of civic education, reaffirmed his ideas, to which the Austrian occupation of Ferrara gave a more decisive national imprint. The bloody Milanese incidents of the following January prompted him to write a fervent indictment, I lutti di Lombardia (1848), which identified Austria as the enemy and sounded the reveille for the war, in which he took part with Durando’s papal troops. Wounded at Vicenza on 10 June, he entered the polemic against the democrats and republicans, whom he accused of being solely responsible for the defeat. And in Timori e speranze (1848) he reaffirmed another of his fundamental ideas: “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 institutions and constitutions as perfect as one wishes; everything will be useless: the result will be nothing but disorder and anarchy.”
Averse to power, only after Novara and the accession of Vittorio Emanuele II did he accept, out of a sense of patriotic duty, the ministry (7 May 1849–November 1852). It was a difficult undertaking to govern Piedmont after the defeat and amid the ferment of passions. Once again his programme was: order within the law, “neither absolutism nor a republic, and much less anarchy.” With this conception he negotiated the difficult peace with Austria (August 1849), resisting its demands with dignified firmness and securing honourable conditions; he concluded useful agreements with France and England, maintained the Statute, welcomed exiles from every part of Italy, and initiated reforms.
In the face of 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 conveyed by the “Proclamation of Moncalieri,” which he had the king sign (20 November 1849). In relations with Rome (the Siccardi Laws, 1850), d'A., driven by the concern to modernise the legislation and settle accounts with the past in accordance with prevailing ideas, inevitably infringed the rights of the Church and attacked the authority of the papacy, irreparably stoking that religious conflict which, above all through incomprehension, was to divide Italy so painfully and for so long into two opposing camps. The support he received from Cavour in the parliamentary struggle secured Cavour’s entry into the ministry, but prepared d'A.’s downfall. By nature indolent and too little flexible and astute, he would be overwhelmed, after the crisis of the connubio (21 May 1852), by the dynamic, audacious, unscrupulous man whom he jokingly called “the impious rival.”
Excluded forever from active politics, he returned calmly to private life and art; yet from time to time he was entrusted with some mission and was always ready to support his successor through direct interventions with the sovereign, speeches, and writings (as in the cases of the law on civil marriage, the appropriation of ecclesiastical property, and the expedition to the Crimea), or by accompanying the king and Cavour to Paris and London (November 1855). By then, however, the man who could claim political consistency from Gli ultimi casi through his most recent public actions appeared outdated, and his legalism and moralism—which would lead him to refuse to represent Piedmont at the Congress of Paris (1856)—confined him to his Cannero in an oppositional posture, while, amid his paintings and devoted friends, he began to recall in Bozzetti della vita italiana (1858) part of his colorfully adventurous life. From that retreat he would emerge, on the eve of the war of 1859, to go to Paris and London and assist Cavour’s policy. Yet he would never allow himself to be completely convinced by it, distrustful as he was of what appeared to him to be an unscrupulousness in its means.
For a short time commissioner of the government in 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 II. The same sentiment prompted him to rise up (Il misfatto di Parma, Oct. 1859) against the assassination of Auriti, a crime that appeared to him to be “high treason against Italy,” whose reputation, honor, and independence he feared had been compromised; and it made him wish for a regular trial of Garibaldi after Aspromonte. Though he continued to be loved and esteemed, the support of the more active and doctrinaire liberals was gradually abandoning him, especially in view of his hardening stance on some of the issues then most fiercely debated. In La politique et le droit chrétien (Dec. 1859), he advocated Rome as a free city, the first step toward his rejecting Rome as capital (Questioni urgenti, 1861) and advocating as the definitive solution to the Roman question the provisional one established by the Convention of September. The letter Agli elettori (1865) was another sign of his going against the current, of his placing civic education before immediate action. To this end he also devoted his Miei ricordi (1863–65), because “Italy’s first need is that Italians endowed with different and strong characters should be formed.” His death (1866) interrupted the work by which he had wished to contribute to making Italians after Italy.