PROGRAMMA
I. Negli indiani della religione, di cui è moderatore e committente il Pontefice di Roma.
II. Negli indiani della civiltà, di cui è ancora una legalità nel Vittorio Emanuele nel regno italico.
Napoli, 3 settembre 1868.
If the halting reform initiatives of the Italian princes interest us as an extreme effort by the regional States to adapt to the needs of the times, the heartfelt and spontaneous manifestations of political will and conscience among the various Italian populations interest us far more. A defect in organization, experience, and a sense of unity mars the entire effort that culminates in the "federal war." Pius IX himself, while distrusting the "Italian fever" for what it contained that was exclusive, mundanely absolute, and religiously contingent, comes to make the Italian cause his own even after the famous Allocution of April 29, 1848, which disappointed the proponents of the Neo-Guelf "crusade": in the letter sent through Corboli-Bussi to the Emperor of Austria, he still consecrates the principle of nationality, outside of any resort to violence, appealing to the sovereign's piety so that he might renounce his Italian possessions.
The extreme point of the revolution of 1848 is reached in Italy with the establishment of democratic, republican governments based on the principle of popular sovereignty, from which is also deduced the necessity of a national Constituent Assembly and partial constituent assemblies elected by universal suffrage: but this establishment of democracies occurs only in Florence, Venice, and Rome, and only in Rome are all, or nearly all, the ideological consequences of the theoretically elaborated principles deduced. On the other hand, doctrinal premises are not sufficient to qualify a regime: the Roman Republic interests us above all for certain social transformations, studied by Demarco, and for certain practical motivations in the face of the Catholic convictions of the vast majority.
After the catastrophe of '48, major and better patriots engaged in an examination of conscience that sometimes assumes a particular value for the historian: consider Cattaneo's Archivio triennale, Gioberti's Rinnovamento, Tommaseo's writings, etc. But in such writings the "ideals of '48" still often appear normative: a sort of political "prophetism" still persists, especially in Mazzini and Gioberti. The times are truly ripe for hegemony, or for the dictatorship that the latter entrusts to the Piedmontese State, but not for revealing in the historical process that "omnipotence of ideas" which is his worldly faith; nor does the Mazzinian people-messiah arise. It is the hour, instead, of Cavour's brilliant possibilism, supported moreover by a liberal ethic: he utilizes the scattered elements of an Italian program of action: Savoyard dynastic politics, Napoleon III's idées napoléoniennes, the heritage of Albertism among moderates in various regions, the crisis of particularism—now noticeable even in the Bourbon Mezzogiorno, at least among the educated, who not infrequently find themselves, as exiles, sharing the Piedmontese constitutional experience. But to be fully Italian, Cavour's program must necessarily, willingly or unwillingly, accept a confrontation with intransigent national prophetisms: and thus the encounter takes place between royal war and people's war—where a small minority represents the future "people"—in 1860. An encounter well responding to the traditions of the R., somewhat like the proclamation of Rome as a capital in fieri, which is Cavour's last Risorgimento gesture.