VITTORIO EMANUELE II, KING OF ITALY. — Born in Turin on 14 March 1820, died in Rome on 9 January 1878. Eldest son of Charles Albert of Savoy-Carignano, later King of Sardinia, and of Maria Theresa of Habsburg-Lorraine, he spent his early childhood in Florence with his paternal grandfather, and then moved to Turin, where King Charles Felix arranged for the boy, the presumptive heir to the throne, to receive a thorough education, particularly in religious and political matters.
Yet V.E. — whom his father, upon ascending the throne (1831), named Duke of Savoy — derived little benefit from his studies, as his exuberant character inclined him rather toward physical exercise and military life. Though nourished by a sincere and profound faith, he soon yielded to the overpowering sensuality of his nature, which led to grave shortcomings in his private life. Married on 12 April 1842 to Archduchess Maria Adelaide of Habsburg-Lorraine (d. 1855), who bore him six children (Clotilde, Humbert, Amadeus, Oddone, Maria Pia, and Charles Albert), in 1869, when death seemed near, he regularized his long-standing quadrilateral relationship with Rosa Vercellana by a morganatic marriage, creating her Countess of Mirafiori. Kept, in accordance with Savoyard tradition, apart from politics during his father’s lifetime, he devoted himself passionately to the military commands entrusted to him and in 1848 distinguished himself at the head of his troops, especially on the day of Goito. It is slander to claim that his inaction provoked the defeat at Novara in March 1849 or that he sought the crown more eagerly. Upon becoming king through the abdication of Charles Albert (23 March 1849), the following day he met with the victorious Marshal Radetzky at Vignale and concluded an armistice on severe but not dishonorable terms, nobly refusing to revoke the Statute granted by his father. Thus V.E. was the only European sovereign to maintain in force the constitutions granted in 1848.
The events of his thirty-year reign are too well known: firmly resolved to secure Italy’s independence and unify it under his own scepter, he directed both legal and revolutionary forces toward this end and placed the question of Italian liberty within the framework of international politics, thanks chiefly to the diplomatic skill of Cavour, so that his name remains indissolubly linked to the so-called “decade of preparation” (1849–59), the Crimean expedition of 1855, the Second War of Independence won with the aid of Napoleon III (1859), the annexations of the duchies, the Legations, and the Mezzogiorno (1859–60), the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (1861), the campaign of 1866 that, despite Custoza and Lissa, led to the liberation of Venetia, and the capture of Rome in 1870. As a constitutional monarch, he often arrogated to himself the right to pursue a personal policy: such was the case with the clever clause inserted in the approval of the preliminaries of Villafranca, which left the future arrangement of central Italy unsettled; with the direct relations he maintained with Garibaldi during the Expedition of the Thousand; and with the secret agreements concluded with Mazzini in 1864 to foment revolts against Austria in Galicia and the Danubian Principalities. A valiant soldier rather than a skilled commander, he fought in person at Palestro, played a leading role in the victory at San Martino, but his command proved entirely ineffective at Custoza. After 1870 he did not hesitate, for the good of the country, to sacrifice his personal feelings by traveling to Vienna and Berlin to seal the new policy of friendship with the Central Empires, and by accepting the rise to power of the Left (1876), though his sympathies lay rather with the defeated party.
Of particular interest here is his role in the ecclesiastical policy of his reign and his personal attitude toward the Pope: subjects on which the correspondence published by Fr. Pirri has provided fundamental testimony. Despite the weaknesses of his private conduct, V.E. was always sincerely religious, so that the measures of his government that infringed upon the rights of the Church and the Pontificate were constantly painful to his conscience as a Catholic and to the filial devotion he always bore for Pius IX. He refused in 1850 to sanction the law abolishing ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Sardinian States and only did so with difficulty after a severe crisis of conscience, bound as he was by his duties as a constitutional king. Two years later, as the d’Azeglio ministry persisted in its laicist legislation, V.E., encouraged by the direct intervention of Pius IX, refused his royal assent to the introduction of civil marriage, though approved by Parliament, thereby provoking the resignation of the cabinet; he then entrusted the task to Cavour, after unsuccessfully attempting to form a Balbo-Revel government more respectful of Church rights. The inner drama became especially acute in 1855, when it came to promulgating a new law aimed at suppressing certain religious orders, particularly since the grave bereavements that struck him in that period and his own dangerous illness appeared to many a divine punishment for the offense done to religion; yet the King, deeming the measure opportune on this occasion, signed it, only securing the exclusion of the Sacramentine Sisters, for whom his mother the Queen had felt special affection. Subsequently, however, there is no evidence that he opposed the legislation of the Kingdom of Italy, which was far more destructive to the Church.
The events of the autumn of 1859 confronted HIM with the necessity of respecting the territorial integrity of the Papal States. Harshly torn between the demand for Italian unification and respect for the Pope, after energetically preventing Garibaldi from crossing into the Marches, HE turned directly to Pius IX (the Stellardi mission) in the hope that the Pope might be induced to grant HIM, in the form of a vicar, the government of the provinces of central Italy. This was the first in a series of attempts made by the King—often unbeknownst to his ministers—to achieve Italian unity with the Pope’s consent. The secret correspondence between Pius IX and HIM, besides documenting the persistent cordiality of personal relations between the Pontiff and the Sovereign, would seem to attest to the King’s sincere concern not to offend the immutable principles of religion. Some historians, however, have suggested that HE may have exceeded in commitments and promises to allay the Pope’s anxieties, though resolved to shelter himself later behind the convenient excuse of his constitutional duties; and this suspicion of duplicity indeed sometimes surfaces in the letters of Pius IX. In any case, these secret contacts continued even after the occupation of the Marches and Umbria (1860), as seen in the most confidential missions of Vegezzi and Tonello in 1865 and 1866, and in the confidential commission entrusted by the King to Lord Clarendon in December 1867, immediately after the Garibaldi attempt at Mentana, which HE had sought to prevent or at least to contain through the energetic action of General Menabrea, whom HE had called to government by an audacious extra-parliamentary solution to the ongoing ministerial crisis. Even on the eve of September 20, HE hoped to induce Pius IX to a peaceful renunciation of Rome; and while General Ponza di San Martino carried to the Pope the royal letter,
VITTORIO EMANUELE
its escape constituted a veritable national mourning. His remains repose in the Pantheon in Rome, in a monument cast in bronze from cannons seized from the enemy.