When, on the evening of the same day, the Emperor of Austria signed the preliminaries of peace, he said to Prince Napoleon, who took the document to Verona for his signature: 'I pray God that if you are ever a sovereign He may spare you the hour of grief I have just passed.' Yet the defeat of Solferino and the loss of Lombardy were the first steps in the transformation of Radetsky's pupil from a despot, who hourly feared revolution in every land under his sceptre, to a wise and constitutional monarch ruling over a contented Empire. To some individuals and to some states, misfortune is fortune.
Napoleon III. and Cavour--The Cession of Savoy and Nice--Annexations in Central Italy.
Napoleon's hurried journey to Turin on his way back to France was almost a flight. Everywhere his reception was cold in the extreme. He was surprised, he said, at the ingratitude of the Italians. It was still possible to ask for gratitude, as the services rendered had not been paid for; no one spoke yet of the barter of Savoy and Nice. But Napoleon, when he said these words to the Governor of Milan, forgot how the Lombards, in June 1848, absolutely refused to take their freedom at the cost of resigning Venice to Austria. And if Venice was dear to them and to Italy then, how much dearer had she not become since the heroic struggle in which she was the last to yield. The bones of Manin cried aloud for Venetian liberty from his grave of exile.
Venice was the one absorbing thought of the moment; yet there were clauses in the brief preliminaries of peace more fraught with insidious danger than the abandonment of Venice. If the rest of Italy became one and free, it needed no prophet to tell that not the might of twenty Austrias could keep Venetia permanently outside the fold. But if Italy was to remain divided and enslaved, then, indeed, the indignant question went up to heaven, To what end had so much blood been shed?
When he resolved to cut short the war, Napoleon still had it in his power to go down to history as the supreme benefactor of Italy. He chose instead to become her worst and by far her most dangerous enemy. The preliminaries of peace opened with the words: 'The Emperor of Austria and the Emperor of the French will favour the creation of an Italian Confederation under the honorary presidency of the Holy Father.' Further, it was stated that the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Duke of Modena would return to their states. Though Napoleon proposed at first to add, 'without foreign armed intervention,' he waived the point (Rome was in his mind) and no such guarantee was inserted. Here, then, was the federative programme which all the personal influence and ingenuity of the French Emperor, all the arts of French diplomacy, were concentrated on maintaining, and which was only defeated by the true patriotism and strong good sense of the Italian populations, and of the men who led them through this, the most critical period in their history.