The new Ministry formed at Turin, after Cavour’s resignation, had pursued its way timidly, fearing to rouse the suspicion and displeasure of the European Powers, but at this momentous and difficult juncture Cavour again accepted the premiership (January 20, 1860).  He immediately gave a bolder impetus to King Victor Emmanuel’s policy by sending a note to all the Powers, in which he asserted it to be now impossible for Sardinia to offer any resistance to the inevitable course of events.  Cavour imagined that since Napoleon III had obtained the imperial throne by a plebiscite, he would not deny the validity of such a claim in Italy, and forthwith submitted this idea to the Emperor, who was bound to approve of it.  But the French nation was discontented, imagining that the blood it had shed for Italy had profited nothing, and was, moreover, very averse to the formation of a powerful kingdom beyond the Alps.

Now it was that Cavour determined on a great sacrifice.  In the convention of Plombieres it had been agreed that, in the event of a kingdom of eleven million inhabitants being established from the Alps to the Adriatic, Sardinia would cede Savoy to France.  As, however, by the Treaty of Villafranca, Venetia had remained under the Austrian yoke, no more had been said about cession of territory, but by the annexation of Central Italy the number of Victor Emmanuel’s subjects was now augmented to eleven millions.  In order to induce Napoleon III to approve of such an annexation Cavour offered him Savoy, but the Emperor claimed Nice as well, and the Minister was obliged to accede to his demands.  On March 24, 1860, Savoy, the cradle of the reigning dynasty, and Nice, Garibaldi’s native Province, were ceded to France.  Garibaldi, deeply wounded in his tenderest feelings, violently abused Cavour in Parliament, but the Chamber, although it respected the hero’s emotion, ratified the treaty which was at this crisis a necessary concession.

At the same time Parma, Modena, Romagna, and Tuscany expressed by universal suffrage their cordial desire for union with Sardinia, and a few days later the fusion of these provinces with the dominions of the house of Savoy was an accomplished fact.  On April 2, 1860, at the opening of the new Parliament, Victor Emmanuel could thus sum up the results already obtained by the nationalist party:  “In a very short space of time an invasion repulsed, Lombardy liberated by valiant feats of arms, Central Italy freed by her people’s wonderful strength, and to-day, assembled around me here, the representatives of the rights and hopes of the nation.”

(1859) DARWIN PUBLISHES HIS ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Charles Robert Darwin