VICTOR EMMANUEL II, King of Italy. - Born in Turin on 14 March 1820, died in Rome on 9 Jan. 1878. The firstborn of Charles Albert of Savoy-Carignano, later king of Sardinia, and of Maria Theresa of Habsburg-Lorraine, he spent his early childhood in Florence, at the home of his paternal grandfather, and then moved to Turin, where King Charles Felix wished the boy, presumptive heir to the crown, to receive a careful education, especially from the religious and political point of view.
But V. E. - whom his father, as soon as he ascended the throne (1831), named duke of Savoy - derived no great profit from his studies, because his exuberant character inclined him rather to physical exercise and to military life. Although nourished by a sincere and profound faith, he soon yielded to the overmastering sensuality of his nature, whence the grave failings of his private life. Married, from 12 Apr. 1842, to the archduchess Maria Adelaide of Habsburg-Lorraine (d. in 1855), who bore him six children (Clotilde, Humbert, Amadeus, Oddone, Maria Pia and Charles Albert), in 1869, in danger of death, he regularized by morganatic marriage his long-standing relationship with Rosa Vercellana, created countess of Mirafiori. Kept, in accordance with Savoyard traditions, aloof from politics during his father's lifetime, he occupied himself with passion with the military commands entrusted to him and in 1848 conducted himself valorously at the head of his troops, especially on the day of Goito. It is a calumny that he had provoked by his inaction the defeat of Novara in March 1849 in order to assume the crown more promptly. Having become king through the abdication of Charles Albert (23 March 1849), the next day he met at Vignale with the victorious marshal Radetzky and concluded with him an armistice on severe but not dishonorable terms, nobly refusing to abrogate the Statute granted by his father. V. E. was thus the only European sovereign to keep in force the Constitutions granted in 1848.
Too well known are the vicissitudes of his thirty-year reign: firmly resolved to secure the independence of Italy and to unify it under his own scepter, he knew how to direct to this end both the legal and the revolutionary forces and to insert the problem of Italian liberty into the framework of international politics, thanks above all to the diplomatic skill of Cavour, so that his name remains indissolubly linked to the so-called "decade of preparation" (1849-59), to the Crimean expedition of 1855, to the second war of independence, won with the assistance of Napoleon III (1859), to the annexations of the Duchies, the Legations and the Mezzogiorno (1859-60), to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (1861), to the campaign of 1866 which led - despite Custoza and Lissa - to the liberation of Venetia, as well as to the capture of Rome in 1870. A constitutional sovereign, he often arrogated to himself the right to conduct a personal policy: so it may be said of the skillful clause inserted in the approval of the preliminaries of Villafranca, such as to leave undecided the future arrangement of central Italy; of the relations maintained directly with Garibaldi during the expedition of the Thousand and of the agreements secretly stipulated with Mazzini in 1864 for the purpose of stirring up revolts against Austria in Galicia and in the Danubian Principalities. A valiant soldier rather than a skillful commander, he fought personally at Palestro, had a principal part in the victory of S. Martino, but his action of command proved entirely ineffective at Custoza. After 1870 he did not hesitate, for the good of the country, to sacrifice his feelings and to go to Vienna and to Berlin to seal the new policy of friendship with the central empires, as also to accept the coming to power of the Left (1876), although his sympathies were rather with the defeated party.
Of particular interest here are the part he had in the ecclesiastical policy of his reign and his personal attitude toward the Pope: subjects to which the correspondences published by Fr. Pirri have brought fundamental testimonies. Despite the weaknesses of his private conduct, V. E. was always sincerely religious, so that the measures of his government injurious to the rights of the Church and of the Pontificate constantly proved painful to his Catholic conscience and to the filial devotion he always nourished for Pius IX. He was reluctant to sanction in 1850 the law that abolished the ecclesiastical forum in the Sardinian States and was induced to do so only with difficulty, after a bitter crisis of conscience, having bound himself by his duties as constitutional king. Two years later, as the d'Azeglio ministry persisted in laicist legislation, V. E., encouraged in this by the direct intervention of Pius IX, refused the royal signature to the introduction of civil marriage, although it had been approved by Parliament, thus provoking the resignation of the cabinet: he then entrusted the task to Cavour, after having vainly sought to bring to life a Balbo-Revel government, more respectful of the rights of the Church. Particularly acute became his inner drama in 1855, when it was a question of promulgating a new law aimed at the suppression of certain religious corporations, also because the grave bereavements that struck him in that period and his own dangerous illness appeared to many a divine chastisement for the offense done to religion: but the King, deeming the measure opportune this time, signed it, only obtaining that the Sacramentine Sisters be excluded from it, for whom the Queen his mother had nourished a special predilection. Subsequently, however, it does not appear that he opposed the legislation, all the more subversive for the Church, of the Kingdom of Italy.
The events of the autumn of 1859 placed V. E. before the necessity of encroaching upon the territorial integrity of the Papal State. Bitterly torn between the demand of Italian unification and respect for the Pontiff, after having energetically prevented an incursion by Garibaldi into the Marches, he turned directly to Pius IX (Stellardi mission) in the hope that the Pope might be induced to grant him spontaneously, in the form of a vicariate, the government of the provinces of central Italy. This was the first of a series of attempts pursued by the King - often without the knowledge of his ministers - to realize the unity of Italy with papal consent. The secret correspondence between Pius IX and V. E., besides documenting the persistent cordiality of the personal relations between the Pontiff and the Sovereign, would seem to testify to a sincere anxiety on the King's part "not to do offense to the immutable principles of Religion." Some historians, however, have believed they could observe that V. E. would have abounded in commitments and promises to calm the Pope's apprehensions, though resolved to entrench himself later behind the facile excuse of his constitutional duties: and such a suspicion of duplicity does indeed surface at times in the letters of Pius IX. In any case, such secret contacts were repeated also after the occupation of the Marches and of Umbria (1860), whence the highly confidential Vegezzi and Tonello missions of 1865 and 1866 and the confidential task entrusted by the King for the Pope to Lord Clarendon in Dec. 1867, on the morrow of the Garibaldian attempt at Mentana, which V. E. had sought to prevent or at least to circumscribe through the energetic action of Gen. Menabrea, whom he called to the government with a bold extra-parliamentary solution of the ministerial crisis then in progress. Still on the eve of 20 Sept., V. E. hoped to be able to induce Pius IX to a peaceful renunciation of Rome; and while Gen. Ponza di S. Martino was carrying to the Pope the royal letter with the invitation to the Pontiff not to obstruct the votes of Italy, another messenger delivered a second, confidential one to him, in which the King, after having once again set forth the political reasons that obliged him to the armed conquest of Rome, implored the Pope to see to it that the inevitable shedding of blood be limited to the utmost. Nor did V. E. set foot in the city without sending another letter to the Pope to express to him the anguish that such an attack on the pontifical prerogatives cost him. Although Card. Antonelli had to prevent the bearer of it, Marquis Spinola, from being able to confer with the Pontiff, just as in 1871 he opposed, on instructions received, that Gen. Bertolè-Viale might express to Pius IX V. E.'s good wishes for his papal jubilee, both times the Pontiff had his paternal gratitude conveyed to the King for the twofold filial gesture. With A. Monti it must be added that «all of V. E.'s relations with the Holy See after 1870... are veiled by the great, intimate sorrow of the King, forced to embitter the Pontiff, silencing (for reasons of State) the impulses of his heart and of his sincere soul as a Catholic sovereign». To this vision of V. E.'s spiritual problem, however, that of other historians contrasts, such as, for example, Jemolo, who, while giving V. E. credit for his constant «desire for pacification», believes he can exclude any «crisis of anguish» and rather places the accent on the «very strong and very harsh» words that he sometimes used with Pius IX in defense of the prerogatives of the State. For his part the Pope did not deny the sovereign very clear proofs of benevolence: he abstained from naming him expressly in the encyclical Respicientes of Nov. 1, 1870 against the despoilers of the temporal domain, and when he learned he was at the point of death he absolved him from every canonical censure, granting that he receive the last Sacraments, and comforted him with his apostolic blessing.
Extremely popular for the generosity of his spirit, his frankly democratic manners, his inexhaustible beneficence, V. E. had the fine title of Father of the Fatherland, and his early death constituted a true national mourning. His remains rest in the Pantheon of Rome, in a monument cast in the bronze of the cannons torn from the enemy.
Bibliography
Renzo U. Montini