Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour

Biography

Camillo Benso di Cavour was born in Turin in 1810, under Napoleonic rule, the younger son of a noble Piedmontese family. Sent to the Turin Military Academy at ten, he served in the engineers of the Sardinian army but resigned his commission in 1831, disliking both military life and the reactionary court. He then ran the family estate at Grinzane, where he was mayor until 1848, experimented with modern farming, promoted railways and founded the Piedmontese Agricultural Society, and travelled widely in France and Britain.

After founding the newspaper Il Risorgimento, he entered the Piedmontese Chamber of Deputies in 1848. He joined Massimo d'Azeglio's cabinet in 1850 as minister of agriculture and commerce and became finance minister in 1851, launching a large railway programme. His alliance with Urbano Rattazzi, the Connubio, brought down d'Azeglio, and Cavour became prime minister of Sardinia in November 1852.

As premier he pursued free trade, curbed the Church's power and modernised the state, while managing parliament with heavy-handed methods. He took Piedmont into the Crimean War, winning it a seat at the Congress of Paris, and in 1858 secretly agreed with Napoleon III at Plombières on a joint war against Austria in return for Savoy and Nice. After the 1859 war he left office, having quarrelled with the king over the Armistice of Villafranca, but returned in January 1860, ceded Savoy and Nice to France in exchange for annexing central Italy, and steered Garibaldi's conquest of the south into Piedmont's hands.

When the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 he became its first prime minister, but he fell ill, probably with malaria, and died in Turin on 6 June 1861, weakened by repeated bleeding.