Cavour the new leader

Camillo Paul Filippo Giulio Benso, Conte di Cavour, of Isola Bella and leri, known more simply as Cavour (born August 10, 1810 – Turin, June 6, 1861), was an Italian politician, hero of the Risorgimento in his role as head of Government of the Kingdom of Sardinia and later the first President of the Council of the Kingdom of Italy.
 He is  considered, with Giuseppe Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele II and Giuseppe Mazzini, as opne of the  main architects of the unification of Italy.making the Italian peninsula a United political organisation and independent national basis with Rome capital from 20 September 1870

cavour

 A result of this  process was the end of the old States and a  Savoy monarchy took the seat of all power, with Vittorio Emanuele II first King of Italy.
The changes that ensued  influenced also  the socio-economic situation of Italy . While still at the end of the 18th century, the force which was economically and socially dominant was the aristocracy allied with the Church, and the restricted groups of modern bourgeoisie, which  had  consolidated during the 18th century. The Risorgimento can therefore be regarded as a "bourgeois revolutions" like most of the others includung the British civil war in the Americas called the American War of Independence.

Piedmont Dragoons GPG54mm

Never was there a mind which cherished fewer illusions than that of Cavour.

GPG

 He believed that the pursuit of the unattainable was still more a political crime than a political blunder. He was, in this, what is now called an opportunist, and he was also an opportunist in believing that though in politics you can choose your aim, you can very rarely choose your means.
 He held (and this was the reason that he was so profoundly hated by men of very different parties) that to accomplish great changes you have to make sacrifices, not only of the higher sort, but, in a certain sense, also of the lower.
As he thought that the Austrians could not be expelled from Italy for good and all without foreign help, he contemplated from the first securing that foreign help, though no one would have been more glad than he to do without it.
 He thought that Italian freedom could not be won without a closer alliance with the democratic party than politicians like D'Azeglio, who had the fear of the ermine, of tarnishing its whiteness, would have ever brought themselves to acquiesce in, and he therefore immediately took steps to establish that alliance.
 Cavour had no faith in the creation of ideally perfect states, such as the Monarchy of Dante or the Republic of Mazzini, but he did think that a living land was better than a dead one, that the struggle of an awakening power, the rush of a new nation, was infinitely to be pAn aristocrat by birth and the inheritor of considerable wealth, Cavour was singularly free from prejudices; his favourite study was political economy, and in quiet times he would probably have given all his energies to the interests of commerce and agriculture.

Volunteer Corps

 He was an advocate of free trade. Cavour understood English politics better than they have ever been understood by a foreign statesman; his article on Ireland, written in 1843, may still be read with profit.
 Before parliamentary life existed in Piedmont, he took the only way open of influencing public opinion by founding a newspaper, the Risorgimento, in which he continued to write for several years.
 In the Chamber of Deputies he soon made his power felt—power is the word, for he was no orator in the ordinary sense; his speeches read well, as hard hitting and logical expositions, but they were not well delivered.
 Cavour never spoke Italian with true grace and ease though he selected it for his speeches, and not French, which was also allowed and which he spoke admirably.
His presence, too, did not lend itself to oratory; short and thickset, and careless in his dress, he formed a contrast to the romantic figure of D'Azeglio. Yet his prosaic face, when animated, gave an impressive sense of that attribute which seemed to emanate from the whole man: power.referred to the desolation of dreamy sleeps, sweet silences, and everlasting memories that spelt regrets.