On the 8th of April the Constitutionalist troops which marched towards Novara, sanguine that the loyal regiments there quartered would end by joining them, were met by an armed resistance, in which the newly-arrived Austrians assisted.  Their defeat was complete, and it was the signal of the downfall of the revolution.  The leaders retired from Turin to Alessandria, and thence to Genoa, that had risen last and was last to submit.  Thus most of them escaped by sea, which was fortunate, as Charles Felix had the will to establish a White Terror, and was only prevented by the circumstance that nearly all the proposed victims were outside his kingdom.  Capital sentences were sent after them by the folio:  there was hardly a noble family which had not one of its members condemned to death.  When his brother, Victor Emmanuel, recommended mercy, he told him that he was entirely ready to give him back the crown, but that, while he reigned, he should reign after his own ideas.  He seems to have had thoughts of hanging the Prince of Carignano, and for a long time he seriously meant to devise the kingdom to his son, the infant Prince Victor.  Thus a new set of obstacles arose between Charles Albert and the throne.

Of the personal friends of that ill-starred Prince all escaped.  One of them, the noble-minded Count Santorre di Santa Rosa, died fighting for liberty in Greece.  In the miseries of exile and poverty he had never lost faith in his country, but fearlessly maintained that ’the emancipation of Italy was an event of the nineteenth century.’  To another, Giacinta di Collegno, it was reserved to receive the dying breath of Charles Albert, when as an exiled and crownless king he found rest, at last, at Oporto.

There were deeper reasons than any which appear on the surface for the failure of the revolutionary movements of this period.  North and south, though the populations exhibited a childish delight at the overthrow of the old, despotic form of government, their effervescence ended as rapidly as it began.  They did not really understand what was going on.  ’By-the-bye, what is this same constitution they are making such a noise about?’ asked a lazzarone who had been shouting ‘Viva la Costituzione’ all the day.  Within a few weeks of the breakdown at Novara, Count Confalonieri wrote wisely to Gino Capponi that revolutions are not made by high intelligences, but by the masses which are moved by enthusiasm, and for a possibility of success, the word Constitution, the least magical of words, should have been replaced by the more comprehensible and stirring call:  ’War to the stranger.’  But this, instead of sounding from every housetop, was purposely stifled at Naples, and kept a mysterious secret in Piedmont.

CHAPTER III

PRISON AND SCAFFOLD

1821-1831

Political Trials in Venetia and Lombardy—­Risings in the South and
Centre—­Ciro Menotti.