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PIEDMONT AND FRENCH INTERVENTION.

PIEDMONT is, undoubtedly, of all the Italian states, the most warlike, and the one upon which the hopes of the patriots in other states have been now for some time past concentrated. It has been justly designated as the "sword of Italy." Had Piedmont been true to its mission-the liberation and redemption of Italy-and had it proceeded to work out that mission with the aid of Italy; had Piedmont, unconquered, whilst all the rest of the peninsula was enslaved, reared herself up for the combat as the rallying-point of extinguished nationalities, instead of associating to themselves the Gallic host, and reviving thereby the memory of the times of Francis I., and Charles V., of Charles Emmanuel I., of Victor Amadeus I. and II., and, indeed, of almost every monarch since the reconstruction of Piedmont (1559 to 1580), the sympathies, if not of the rulers, at all events of the people, and of all the civilised portions of the world would have been with her and with her cause.

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Unfortunately, Piedmont, which its distinguished historian Gallenga speaks of as a state of God's own making," and as "the barrier which Providence reared up for the defence of Italy," has, although an Alpine and trans-Alpine state, more Swiss than French, and more Italian than either, always been willingly or unwillingly involved in the vortex of French politics. The battle-field of nations, she has stood, like Lombardy, alternately befriended and then devastated, but still always victimised by friends and foes alike. The only great peculiarity-the charm lent to her up to the present time-the glory of her crown and unstained escutcheon, till the Napoleon alliance-was her independence amid trials, her freedom when surrounded by other people, all writhing in the chains of old and new despotisms, or of a bygone feudal and moukish barbarism. If the lessons of history are of any avail at the present crisis, it will be found that it has always been so, and it is therefore probable that it will also long be so-the prostration of the feeble, however aspiring, to the strong. All around that circle of mountains which embrace the head waters of the Po, ever since the time when the House of Savoy first put forth their claims to the proud appellation of guardians of the Alps, they have striven to add all the resources of art to the great fortifications which nature had reared up for their defence. Every valley, except where the rock and glacier scarcely allow a path for the chamois and its hunter, has been barred by fortresses-battle-fields above the clouds, which have been repeatedly bathed by the best blood both of the French and Piedmontese, and which the latter have never failed to rue when forced by the former, or opened to their domineering hosts. Times go by, people change, but the physical circumstances of the soil remain the same; the congregations of people, till the introduction of railways, scarcely ever varied, and the battle-fields of nations, whether on the Rhine, the Meuse, the Danube, or the Po, have always been repeated so near the same spots as to have been almost within the sound of the booming guns.

*

Hall.

History of Piedmont. By Antonio Gallenga. Three Vols. Chapman and

The northern invasions, which laid desolate all the provinces of the Roman Empire, to the almost utter extinction of ancient civilisation, did not fail in the end to reach the sub-Alpine and Ligurian lands, but it was in the same lands, not above thirty Piedmontese miles from Marengo, at Pollentia, on the left bank of the Tanaro, that Alaric met with a first check, and was driven thence to Verona and out of the country. When a new race, or rather a confederacy of races-that of the Franks-first overran Italy (536-553), they exercised cruelties "for which their wicked race won so sinister a reputation even amongst barbarians." "They had turned indiscriminately against friends and foes; they had inflicted such dire calamities on the land, that they themselves perished almost to a man of the distress, the famine, and plague which their own blind rage had created."*

It was especially during the senseless, aimless expeditions that followed upon the first budding of the Frank power, and which were renewed year after year, that the Franks, whose ephemeral successes were invariably attended by terrific reverses, gave rise to that ominous saying, so often applied since to their descendants, that "the land of Italy was fated to be the tomb of their nation." (Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, canto xxxiii.) In 665 the Lombards, under one of their iron-crowned kings, Grimoald, destroyed an army of Clotaire II., near Asti, in the same ill-fated valley of the Tanaro, in which are also the plains of San Julian, better known as Marengo.

When a new race of rulers snatched the sceptre from the hands of the worn-out Merovingians, their rulers, all in succession-Charles Martel, his son Pepin, and his grandson Charlemagne-meditated, and the last achieved, the conquest of Italy. The Church afforded a pretext. "The Carlovingian princes were all distinguished by that loose expedient piety which, since the conversion of Clovis, had won the Frankish nation the proud name of 'Eldest Daughter of the Church,' and covered that multitude of sins by which both its people and its rulers so far exceeded all the tribes of mankind."

The empire of Charlemagne was not, however, of very long duration; built up at a period in which the ruling nation of the Franks was hurrying to its dissolution, it could hardly hold together for two generations. Together with its other provinces, South-eastern Gaul and North Italy -Burgundy and Lombardy-it passed into the hands now of one, now of another of his sons and grandsons, till, at the deposition and death of the last emperor of his race-Charles the Fat, in 888-these countries had already fallen, or were ready to fall, into the hands of powerful princes, connected or not with the imperial family, who erected them into separate kingdoms-a separation which, in an ill-conditioned and ill-fated country like Italy, only led to civil wars, far more fatal to the cause of humanity than even the barbaric incursions.

Savoy-whose modern name, Sapaudia, or Sabaudia, first appears in history in the fourth century+-first became a separate state at the breaking up of the empire of Charlemagne. Its government, however, being Burgundian, its direction was mainly in France, having alternately

* Procop., De Bello Gothico, II. 25; Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptor., I. 295.

† Ammianus Marcellinus, XV. 11.

Geneva, Lyons, and Vienne for its capital. Both Frank and Lombard, however, alike eschewed the high mountains, and in those early times the renowned vales of Susa and Aosta were, like the whole of the Valais, but wilderness and unreclaimed forest. Although the famed chiuse, or écluses (fortifications erected at the entrance of valleys), existed in the Val di Susa as far back as the time of Charlemagne, and the famous abbey of the Novalaise was founded at the foot of Mount Cenis, in 726, by a Frankish lord driven to Susa by the Saracen incursions, still there is no doubt but that, in these early times, the whole valley was little better than rock and swamp.* **

Under Charlemagne and his descendants, the Alps became again the true limits between Frankish and Italian lands. The valleys of Susa and Aosta were restored to the latter kingdom, though Susa continued to be a dependency of the diocese of Maurienne, as it had been since Gontran, King of Burgundy, erected that diocese at St. Jean de Maurienne in 575. Aosta, also, as a bishopric, was united to the metropolitan see of Vienne, though it originally depended on Milan; and it seems that, politically also, it had fallen under the sway of the last king of Burgundy in 1015. It is well to know, however, that even in the dark ages, during the successive phases of the long night of barbarism that followed upon the breaking up of the Carlovingian empire, Savoy and Piedmont met with a comparatively mild fate, and were not illtreated by their Burgundian and Lombard rulers, both alike people of Vandalic race, and amongst the most humane of the so-called barbaric nations.

It appears to have been owing to this happy condition that the feudal lords of Piedmont-the marquises of Ivrea, Vercelli, and Novara—attained such power as to enter the list for the Lombard and Roman crown. It was from these contests, and the deeds of the lords and prelates of the ninth and tenth century, that that old and frequently reiterated charge of faithlessness and fickleness arose against the Italians, and which has ever since remained attached to them. "The fame of these," says Gallenga, "as well as of all other Italian sovereigns or pretenders of that epoch, lies deep under the weight of heinous charges, from which, owing to the darkness involving all contemporary records, it would be vain for modern criticism to attempt to rescue it. It was by the fault of these princes, it is said, that the Italians won an evil name, which clung to them in after ages, designating them as a restless, faithless race, ever ready to set up one of their rulers against another, ever busy in plots and rebellions, leading to nothing but a change of masters and the aggravation of their own servitude, ever prone to call in the interference of foreigners in the unnatural quarrels between the children of the same land."

This

The House of Savoy, at its first rise, strengthened itself by intermarriages with the royal families of France, but such alliances history shows to have been invariably followed by evil to the weaker power. state of things continued after the annexation of Piedmont to Savoy. Charles VII. interfered on behalf of the imperious Anne of Lusignan, Louis XI. on that of Yolande of France. Charles VIII., again, advanced to the conquest of Piedmont, nominally in the interests of Blanche of * Durandi, Antico Piemonte Traspadano, p. 84.

Montferrat. Under Louis XII. Piedmont was ravaged by the opposing armies of the French and Spaniards. Under Francis I. it was the French against Spain and Austria. And even after the ascendancy of Charles V. was established, the wars between the French and the Imperialists were still continued; and under their successors, Henry II. of France, and Philip II. of Spain, unfortunate Piedmont and Lombardy were still the battle-field for empire.

No part of Italy was more barbarously ill used during these prolonged wars between France and Austria than Piedmont. If the lessons of history were of the least value these could not be disregarded, but they are ever overlooked, and the same desolating tragedies re-enacted at the slightest pretence. Alas! for the garden of Piedmont. There was a moment, it is said, when Charles V. contemplated the idea of securing Lombardy against French incursions, by converting the whole tract between the Alps and the Po into a marshy wilderness! All the scourges of Heaven-famine, pestilence, locusts, earthquakes-combined with the ravages of war to desolate this unfortunate country. "Woe !" exclaims Gallenga "to the Italian who can read the history of his country without the most poignant sorrow!" And he adds, curiously enough for an Italian, "It is with but scanty hope of consolation that we would fain seek in Piedmont an exception to this all-sweeping law of decay." But, strange to say, it was at this very crisis-when Italy as a nation had reached its end-that Emmanuel Philibert, Prince of Savoy, conquered at St. Quentin, and the nationality of Piedmont rose in the ascendant. Had Philibert fallen, he might have cried, "Finis Sabaudia!" France and Spain, or Austria, would have bordered upon one another at the Alps, and the intermediate state would never have been missed!

Emmanuel Philibert, the conqueror of the French and the reconstructor of Piedmont, could not, however, emancipate himself from the trammels of the French court. Henry II. attached the warrior to him by providing him with a wife in the person of his sister, Margaret of Valois.

"No words," says Gallenga, 66 can describe the meanness and arrogance by which the French aggravated this prolonged usurpation of their neighbour's territories. They clung to Piedmont, urging their own convenience as an unanswerable right. Birago unblushingly said to Emmanuel Philibert that his royal master must needs' have a footing south of the Alps, and the duke was at the greatest pains to assure the king that he could always tread upon himself (luy passer sur le ventre) whenever he had a mind to enter Italy." Yet was France at that time a prey to the factions of Catholics and Huguenots, and had Emmanuel retorted upon her the policy of usurpation, which had become traditional with respect to Piedmont, he could have put himself at the head of one of these factions, and have more than repaid the indignities he had had to endure at the hands of the predatory French. Emmanuel, however, albeit impressed with the feeling that his mission was the restoration of his own state and not the subjugation of his neighbour's, was also fully aware of the importance of his position as the "bulwark of Italy," and felt that on his existence hung the fate of such states in the peninsula as still aspired to independence. "I know full well," he said, in a moment of cordial expansion, "that these foreigners are all bent on the utter destruction of Italy, and I may be first immo

lated; but my fall can be indifferent to no Italian state."* Pity that the kings of Piedmont have not always held by the same policy. They have never left the passes of the Alps open but that they have rued it.

The presence of the French at Saluzzo, south of the Alps, and the roll of the French drums at Carmagnola, had embittered the last days of Emmanuel Philibert. Charles Emmanuel I., his successor, was of a more ambitious and warlike spirit than his predecessor. He at once attacked the French, invaded Saluzzo, and took Carmagnola Ceutallo and Castel Delfino. He even struck a medal, in which he represented a centaur trampling a royal crown under his hoofs, with the motto, "Opportunè!" Henry IV., not many years later, having humbled Savoy, retorted the taunt by another medal, in which the centaur was seen crushed under the club of Hercules, and the no less pithy inscription was "Opportuniùs!"t Charles Emmanuel, although backed by Spain, was indeed soon forced to bow before the superior power of France.

Victor Amadeus I. continued the unequal contest with various success. The regency of Christina of France, that followed upon the death of Victor Amadeus, was disturbed mainly by internal dissensions; Piedmont was too French to be worth invading. Mazzarin had given up Turin, with his niece Olympia Mancini, to Eugène Maurice, and Louis XIV. declared, with the arrogance to which the world was at that time accustomed, that "he would not suffer a cannon to be fired in Italy, except at his own bidding." Charles Emmanuel II. was obliged to content himself with doing the biddings of France, embellishing Turin and constructing the Pass of Les Echelles between Pont-Beauvoisin and Chambéry.

Victor Amadeus II. was equally under the thraldom of Louis XIV., who held Casale, exacted subsidies from Piedmont, and exterminated the Protestants. Victor ventured to rebel, and was punished in consequence by the loss of the greater part of his dominions, which fell into the power of his arrogant enemy.

The two treaties-of Utrecht and London-which constituted Piedmont into a monarchy have still a most important bearing upon actual events. By these treaties, Lombardy passed from the hands of the feeble and distant Austro-Spanish monarchs into those of the adjoining rulers of the puissant German empire. All Italy was prostrated. Piedmont alone stood still upright, and the new King of Sardinia, his back now securely resting against the Alps, faced his old hereditary enemy of the House of Hapsburg.

The reign of Charles Emmanuel III. embraces a period of three-andforty years (1730—1773). That of his son and successor, Victor Amadeus III., further extends to the year 1796; its latter end coincides with the great events of the French revolution. The wars for the succession of Poland (1733--1735), and for the Austrian succession (1740 -1748), afforded full scope for the activity of Charles Emmanuel III. at the outset of his career, but from 1748 to 1792 there was both for Piedmont and Italy a profound, uninterrupted peace, by far the longest the country had ever enjoyed. It was to France that Europe was indebted for the cessation of so long a period of peace, tranquillity, and progress, and the advent of rebellion, war, devastation, and destruction. * Boldù, Relazione, Albieri, III. 464.

† Costa de Beauregard, Maison de Savoie, II. 11.