Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (77 page)

In Chambéry itself, the majority of pro-French votes was declared to be only 99.39 per cent. ‘There were no winners and losers today’, an imperial proclamation commented. ‘In the midst of such imposing unanimity, the old hatreds have disappeared.’
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Within a week, Garibaldi sailed with his ‘Thousand’ from Genoa, heading for the conquest of Sicily, and Savoy faded from the forefront of Europe’s attention.

Ratification of the plebiscite was scheduled for 29 May in the subalpine parliament in Turin, and for early June in the French Senate. The session in Turin proved tumultuous. Only three of the eighteen Savoyard deputies bothered to attend, and Cavour was shouted down. But he had little to fear. The results were safely ratified. French troops held a grand parade in Chambéry in front of the Fontaine des Éléphants.

Two matters remained: the transfer of powers, and the division of the armed forces. The former was staged in the castle at Chambéry on 14 June 1860. The French emperor’s representative, Senator Laity, arrived to take possession of the territory from the Sardinian commissioner, M. Bianchi. The two men drove to the castle in one carriage. The documents of transfer were signed in the antechamber of the Grand Salon. M. Bianchi then left by the back door, as Senator Laity proceeded to announce that annexation was complete. The archbishop made a short speech: ‘For eight centuries,’ he said, ‘the clergy of Savoy always maintained a sense of loyalty and of perfect submission to the royal family to whom Providence had assigned our destiny… Subject now to a new sovereign, we shall grant him the same respect, obedience and loyalty.’ The senator responded gracefully. At 12.15 p.m. the French flag was raised, and cannon roared out a salute.
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At the time of the plebiscite, 6,350 Savoyards were serving in the Sardinian army; 6,033 had voted ‘
Oui
’ and 282 ‘
Non
’. The officers were now given a free choice either of staying in the Sardinian service, or of resigning their commissions. Most of them stayed. But the ‘Brigade de Savoie’ was disbanded:

When Victor Emmanuel presided [in Turin] over the last parade of the Brigade of Savoy, before sending the soldiers home over the Alps, which had now become a state frontier, it is said that the troops and the sovereign were both deeply moved… The ancient alliance between the Savoyard soldiers and the House of Savoy was coming to an end amid the ritual and fanfares of a military review; and eight centuries of history were reaching their term. One of the oldest and most stable monarchies in Europe was dying… There was much… to impress every man of honour, even the most passionate democrat.
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When it was all over, the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Eugénie paid their first official visit to Savoy between 27 August and 5 September. The celebrations were extravagant. The streets were hung with bunting and with loyal placards. Parades, receptions, balls, banquets, concerts and theatre visits followed in dizzy succession, and the emperor graciously ate a meal of
chamois aux épinards
. The empress graciously waved to every shout of the crowd. A memorable gas-lit tableau was erected on the station platform at Chambéry showing an imperial eagle, with a wing-span of 30 feet, clutching in its talons a board bearing the figure 141,893 – supposedly the total tally of votes cast for France.
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No one knew what the results of the plebiscite might have been if all options had been offered. Britain and Switzerland protested in vain. France and ‘Sardinia’ insisted that they had fulfilled their obligations, and that the result had been lawfully ratified; a Free Trade Zone was in place along France’s new border with Switzerland. The king and Count Cavour had more pressing matters to worry about. The
fait
was
accompli
. Yet the divorce between Savoy and Piedmont can only be seen as a historic rupture. It ended a union that had been in place since 1416, and it rode roughshod over a number of democratic choices. It also separated the ruling house from its ancestral land, cutting them adrift like a boat without moorings, a flimsy vessel tossed like a bottle onto the stormy seas of Italian politics.

The Kingdom of Italy did not materialize until the year following the transfer of Nice and Savoy. Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, and subsequently to Naples, proved a decisive catalyst, and for several weeks in the late summer of 1860, the prospect loomed that the ‘Sardinian’ monarchists would be sidelined. However, neither Cavour nor Napoleon III was prepared to contemplate failure. On 11 September, the Sardinian army marched south to take control of all the Papal States and to keep Garibaldi’s republicans out of Rome. The race was on. ‘If we do not reach the Volturno before Garibaldi reaches La Cattolica,’ Cavour said, ‘the monarchy is lost, and Italy will remain in the prison-house of the revolution.’
⁵³

Garibaldi lost the race. Marching up from the south, he never reached Rome and had to settle for a triumphal entry into Naples in the company of Vittorio Emanuele II. Then, having been refused the Neapolitan viceroyalty for life, he retired in pique. The king of Sardinia was left in command of the whole country. The last major obstacle had fallen. The House of Savoy was indeed entering its third kingdom.

Arrangements were finalized in the winter of 1860/61. An all-Italian parliament was summoned to Turin and voted decisively for the creation of a national Kingdom of Italy, of which Vittorio Emanuele was to be the first monarch. The proclamation was made in February 1861 and the coronation staged on 17 March. Count Cavour officially became Italian prime minister, but he was also mortally exhausted, and died of a stroke within months. His last words, as reported, were ‘Italy is made. All is safe.’
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Napoleon III was aghast at the news. ‘The driver has fallen from the box,’ he remarked, ‘we must see if the horses will bolt.’
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After four years, the kingdom’s capital was moved from Turin to Florence. In 1866, following the Austro-Prussian War, Venice was incorporated into Italy. Finally in 1870, Rome fell; and the Papal States were abolished. The pope lost all temporal power. Vittorio Emanuele took up residence in the former papal palace on the Quirinale. When he died in 1878, victorious and revered, the foundation stone of the
Vittoriano
was laid in his honour.

During the next sixty-eight years three monarchs reigned in Italy: Vittorio Emanuele II’s son Umberto I (r. 1878–1900), Vittorio Emanuele III (r. 1900–46) and Umberto II (r. 1946). None of their reigns was terminated by natural causes. Umberto I, who had fought at Solferino, had been christened with the name of the dynasty’s founder, and changed his regnal number from IV to I. By contemporary standards, he was not the most oppressive of monarchs, and was dubbed
Il Buono
. Nonetheless he did little to calm a wave of violent bread riots that broke out in the late 1890s, and he made himself unpopular by rewarding the general, Bava-Beccaria, who had violently suppressed rioters in Milan. Like his maternal Habsburg relatives, he became the target for nihilist assassins. In July 1900, at Monza, he was shot dead.

The House of Savoy entered the twentieth century, therefore, visibly chastened. In conservative eyes, the assassination of 1900 simply added to the continuing humiliation of a Catholic nation evident in the fate of a ‘captive papacy’. Monarchs relying solely on Divine Right were evidently unsafe. In any event, the elaborate bronze and marble complex of seventeen sculptures of princes of the House of Savoy from Umberto Biancamano on, executed in 1903 by Canale and displayed in the Valentino Garden in Turin, was to be the last of its kind. The First World War was a time of intense ordeals for Italy as for many countries, and it proved fatal for several ancient monarchies. If the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs could be toppled, the
Casa Savoia
had to watch its step.

Fortunately, the new king, Vittorio Emanuele III, had sworn loyalty to the constitution without demur, and was widely judged to be a man of ‘energy and a lofty sense of duty’.
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Italian Fascism was not his creation, and his policy of trying to tame it rather than confront it cannot be attributed to cowardice. It all happened by a process of creep and fudge. Nonetheless, as the true nature of Europe’s first Fascist regime was revealed in the 1920s, the monarchy undoubtedly complied with some of its excesses. And in one important symbolic respect, by accepting a panoply of phoney titles, it lent its name to the regime’s aggressions. Vittorio Emanuele III did not object when offered the crown of the ‘emperor of Abyssinia’ or the ‘king of Albania’. One of his relatives basked in the title of ‘Zvitomir II, king of Croatia’.

Nevertheless, throughout the war years, the monarchy acted as a force for stability and continuity. Many of Italy’s elite regiments, like the
Cavalleggeri Savoia
or the
Granatieri di Savoia
– named after the House not the Duchy of Savoy – prided themselves on traditions going back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century. ‘
Avanti Savoia
’ remained the standard battle cry of Italian troops, and high-quality equipment such as the Savoia Marchetti SM 79 bomber benefited from the royal brand. In August 1942, while fighting the Red Army on the River Don at Izbushensky, 600 dragoons of the Prince of Aosta Celere Division achieved a signal victory against overwhelming odds. As they trotted, cantered and then galloped into ‘the last major cavalry charge of European history’, they whirled their sabres and roared out their cries of ‘
Carica!
’ (‘Charge!’) and ‘
Savoia!
’

Whether or not the dynasty could be forgiven was the issue posed by the referendum of 1946. For the first time in Italy’s history, women were permitted to participate in the voting. The opinion of a leading British historian betrays no regrets about the people’s choice: ‘Like the [English] in 1688 and the French in 1789, the Italians had thus carried out their own constitutional revolution… The oldest surviving dynasty in Europe had run its course. After eighty-five years, during which it presided over national unification and enjoyed many triumphs as well as failures, the end came in tragedy and anticlimax’.
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But once again the wording of the referendum may be pertinent. At the time it was first discussed, Vittorio Emanuele III had already ceded his official duties to his son; and it would have been perfectly possible for the referendum to have posed the question whether or not the king should officially abdicate. In that case, the nation could have passed its verdict on one man’s record, while leaving the monarchy intact. Yet the referendum’s authors, heavily influenced by ex-Partisans and Communists, were determined that the vote should be aimed directly at the institution of monarchy. As a result, the king’s conduct and the suitability of his son were overshadowed by weightier considerations. The question posed was ‘republic’ or ‘king’. The House of Savoy was presented as being out of its depth in an age of populist politics and democratic manipulation. Just as it had discarded the Duchy of Savoy through a plebiscite, it now lost the Kingdom of Italy through a referendum. The long story, which began nearly ten centuries before with one Umberto, ended with another. And the vision of Mazzini and Garibaldi finally triumphed over that of Cavour.

III

In the view of monarchical purists no throne ever falls vacant. There is always an heir apparent, always a successor, always a claimant (even if some see the claim as that of a false pretender). ‘The king is dead’, they say. ‘Long live the king!’

Ex-King Umberto II, therefore, was not really an ex-king in the eyes of his most fervent subjects and followers. He was simply an unfortunate monarch in temporary exile – exactly as his great-great-grandfather Carlo Alberto had been, or his maternal grandfather, King Nikola of Montenegro (see
Chapter 12
). After leaving Italy, and arranging his father’s funeral in 1947, he and his family settled in Switzerland. The royal couple’s marriage, however, had never been happy; and exile permitted them to separate. The ex-queen, Marie-José, who was a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha by birth, stayed in Geneva with her children, and later moved to Mexico. Umberto took up residence in the Villa Italia at Cascais in Portugal, whence, as ‘Europe’s Grandfather’, he could sally forth to royal weddings or jubilees at the invitation of the dwindling company of reigning monarchs. According to gossip, he was bisexual – a personal trait which might explain the Vatican’s strange silence during the referendum of 1946. He died in 1983 and was laid to rest at Hautecombe, where Marie-José would join him twenty years later.
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His last act, irksome to many of his relatives, was to bequeath the Shroud of Turin in his will to the Roman Catholic Church.

Umberto’s death led automatically to the elevation of his only son and heir to Italy’s virtual throne. Vittorio Emanuele IV, prince of Naples (b. 1937), had shot and killed a man in Corsica and had spent a dozen years proving his innocence in the French courts. (He had fired a rifle in anger at night-time intruders on his yacht, and hit a sleeping tourist on an adjacent boat.) He was also pressing the Italian government to lift the ban on his return to Italy, entering a plea to the European Court of Human Rights. His wish was finally granted in 2002 on condition that he formally renounce all claims. This done, he proceeded to sue the Republic both for compensation, and for restitution, among other things, of the Quirinale Palace. In 2006 he was briefly imprisoned on charges of benefiting from the profits of prostitution at his casino at Campione on Lake Como.
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