Cavour helped unify Italy without ever really planning to
Count Camillo Cavour is remembered as a chief architect of a united Italy, yet his goal for most of his career was more modest: enlarge Piedmont by annexing Lombardy and Venetia. By his death in 1861 he had steered the small kingdom into controlling almost the entire peninsula, an area five times its original size.
He was an unlikely revolutionary, and indeed feared revolutionaries. Born in Turin on 10 August 1810 under Napoleonic rule, with Napoleon's sister Pauline as godmother, he entered military academy at ten and chafed at the discipline, once living on bread and water for three days after being caught with banned books. Travels through Paris and London fed his interest in parliamentary politics, and back home he experimented with sugar beets and was among the first Italian landowners to use chemical fertilisers. He believed economic progress, especially railways, had to come before political change.
The 1848 revolutions let him enter politics openly, though he was a poor public speaker and lost an early election. Returning to parliament, he rose to run agriculture, commerce and the navy, then forged a centre-left and centre-right alliance nicknamed the Connubio, or marriage, and became prime minister in 1852. The historian Denis Mack Smith judged him Italy's most successful parliamentarian but not a particularly democratic one: he ignored colleagues and meddled in elections.
His real talent was diplomacy. He sent Piedmontese troops into the Crimean War, hoping Britain and France would reward him. After Felice Orsini tried to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858, the French emperor warmed to the Italian cause, and at Plombières that July he and Cavour secretly agreed that France would help Piedmont fight Austria in exchange for Savoy and Nice. An Austrian ultimatum in April 1859 conveniently cast Vienna as the aggressor.
The war and Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand delivered most of Italy to the House of Savoy. Cavour became the first Prime Minister of a united Italy but died on 6 June 1861, only three months into the job, nine years before Rome was captured and unification completed.
Source: Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour
