Camillo Cavour

As prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia in the 1850s, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour used diplomacy, war and an alliance with France to turn a small north-western kingdom into the core of a united Italy. He became the first prime minister of the Kingdom of Italy in March 1861 and died less than three months later, before Venice and Rome had joined the new state.

Cavour was born in Turin on 10 August 1810, when Piedmont was ruled by Napoleonic France, the younger son of a noble family; his godparents were Napoleon's sister Pauline and her husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, after whom he was named. He was sent to military academy at ten and served as an army engineer, but his liberal opinions, shaped by reading Jeremy Bentham and Benjamin Constant, made him suspect to the police, and he resigned in 1831. He then managed the family estates, experimenting with sugar beet and chemical fertilisers, and travelled in France and Britain, admiring the parliamentary debates in Paris and touring the industrial cities of England. He became convinced that economic progress, above all railways, must come before political change.

The revolutions of 1848 opened politics to him. He founded the newspaper Il Risorgimento and spoke for a constitution, which King Charles Albert granted. After Piedmont's defeat by Austria at Novara in 1849, Charles Albert abdicated in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel II. Cavour became minister of agriculture and commerce in 1850 and minister of finance in 1851, pushing through railway building that gave Piedmont about 800 kilometres of track by 1860, and laws limiting the church's control of land, schools and marriage. In November 1852, having allied the moderate right and left in what was called the Connubio, or marriage, he became prime minister.

Cavour believed in free trade and parliamentary government but distrusted republicans and revolutionaries. His methods were often high-handed: critics note that he relied on emergency powers, subsidised friendly newspapers and interfered in elections, and the state debt rose about sixfold. To win allies, he sent about 18,000 troops to the Crimean War in 1855, which earned Piedmont a seat at the Paris peace congress.

In July 1858 Cavour met Napoleon III secretly at Plombières, and the two agreed that France would back Piedmont in a war against Austria in return for Savoy and Nice. When Austria issued an ultimatum in April 1859, it appeared the aggressor. French and Piedmontese victories at Magenta and Solferino won Lombardy, but Napoleon made a separate peace at Villafranca in July, and Cavour resigned in fury. Recalled in January 1860, he gave Savoy and Nice to France in exchange for French acceptance of Piedmont's annexation of Tuscany and Emilia, approved by plebiscites.

In May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi, angry at the loss of his native Nice, landed in Sicily with a thousand volunteers, conquered the island and in September entered Naples. Cavour, fearing that Garibaldi would march on Rome and bring French intervention, sent the Piedmontese army through the Papal States regions of Umbria and the Marche to link up with the south. Garibaldi handed his conquests to Victor Emmanuel, and the two men remained bitter rivals.

The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 with Cavour as prime minister. He argued for Rome as the capital and for "a free church in a free state", with the pope giving up his temporal power. Worn out by overwork and insomnia, he fell ill, probably with malaria, was repeatedly bled, and died in Turin on 6 June 1861. He was buried at Santena. Venice joined Italy in 1866 and Rome in 1870, completing the unification of Italy he had begun.

Our 1815 map shows the divided Italian peninsula before unification, and the 1878 map shows the united Kingdom of Italy, five times the size of Cavour's Piedmont.