Prime Minister of Sardinia, Chief Architect of Italian Unification’s Diplomacy
Count Cavour (1810–1861) was Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the most important political planner of Italian unification. He drove the economic modernization of Sardinia, drew in Napoleon III’s France against Austria through deft diplomacy, won northern Italian regions such as Lombardy by war, and cleverly used a relationship of both cooperation and check with Garibaldi to integrate northern and southern Italy into a new Italian kingdom under the Sardinian crown. He is acknowledged as the chief architect of the "diplomatic path" of Italian unification, complementing the "military path" that Garibaldi represented, and together they brought about the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 — but he died of illness just three months after unification, never seeing the completed map.
Cavour well knew that Sardinia alone could not defeat mighty Austria, and so secretly allied with the French emperor Napoleon III, even ceding Nice and Savoy in exchange for French military help against Austria — the resulting 1859 war won Lombardy, a crucial diplomatic-and-military combination in the process of unification.
Garibaldi’s victory in the "Expedition of the Thousand" once alarmed Cavour, who feared Garibaldi might set up an independent republic and even considered stopping his northward march by force. In the end the two reached an understanding: Garibaldi chose to give his conquests to the Sardinian crown, and Cavour completed the political integration of north and south — their cooperation and rivalry together defining the final shape of Italian unity.
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