What Prussia Had to Teach

Our Italian genius is going to take on its own new and original form of expression here. The endearing habits formed in exile, the attachments of the heart felt by the generation that is in its prime today for those who were its teachers in youth, the conceptions formed in a series of progressive stages by the nation during the last fifty years, Guelphism, Liberal Catholicism, the collaboration of Italy and the papacy in politics, the alliance of the Latin races, all these will be preserved as touching souvenirs and as proofs of our good faith and our good will in each of the situations through which we have passed—but let us break the hold they have on our ideas and our actions in the present. Germany, following in the steps of England and America, has gained such a lead on the rest of the world that we shall have to hurry our pace and pursue reality, leaving behind affections, dreams, and the sentimental ideal, and grasp hold vigorously of the only things that are solid and secure: positive science, productivity, and the force that comes from both of them. It pleases me to repeat to you these things that you yourself have been saying for a long time now, because here in Rome I sense a spirit and a setting which, although not endowed with any incontrovertible moral or intellectual superiority, ought to sustain, so it seems to me, a more serious and elevated standard for our political and social action than what we had in Florence, and a less exclusive one than what we found in Turin. This effect of sober enthusiasm, of ardor tempered with reflection, of confidence without boastfulness, of the honest desire to do much and do it well, all of which I observe here, are felt by everyone, all the Italians from the other parts of the country have felt it too. Let us endeavor to make sure that it is not an illusion.... Happy the one who shall find himself at the vital points in the magnificent dawn that is commencing for Italy.

With these hopes for the future, the secretary general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alberto Blanc, then on a mission to Rome, finished a long letter of 12 October 1870 to Marco Minghetti, who at that moment was in Vienna. Rome was now part of Italy and Prussia was supreme in Europe, and the two great events of the dramatic September of 1870, a month that would not be forgotten "until the distant revolution," were thus closely linked by Blanc: in both it was possible to glimpse the commencement of a novus ordo, and above all a radiant dawn for Italy, the "third Italy" that now had to stride resolutely toward the future, relying on the heritage and the genius of Rome and the powerful friendship of Germany, free of the trammels of the past.

And in fact Blanc seemed already to be working out a new subjective attitude, one entirely suited to the new political course he was propounding. A Savoyard raised under the direct political guidance of Cavour and bound permanently to the men of the Right, cabinet chief to La Marmora and general secretary to Visconti Venosta, Blanc was overall a man who might well, as a result of this background and this professional experience, have continued to embrace as true and real the values of La Marmora, Lanza, or Visconti Venosta. Instead he chose to call them souvenirs émouvants. Blanc said a firm farewell to the attaches du coeur, to the tradition of the past, in order to set himself new goals, and goals with a moral dimension, not merely those of political success. Sentimental ideals were banished, and he welcomed the only things that were now "solid and secure": science, productivity, force—for the concept of Realpolitik, though not the term, was by this time widespread, in the sense that the only forces to be taken into account were the tangible and observable ones, using the empirical sensory apparatus and mathematical calculation to do so. There was an overriding sense that the meaning of life ought basically to be looked for in the economic realm, and in the further development of civilization through mechanical and industrial technology, and hence that the dominant moral and cultural concerns of the men of the period from 1820 to 1850 ought to recede into the background. It was on this basis that Blanc, in another letter to Minghetti, insisted that the influence of economic factors was increasing almost daily in international politics, so that it was imperative to permit the fundamental laws of economics to bring about their effects, unhindered by the deleterious "inclinations to sentimentality or to classicism that still have a grip on so many distinguished intellects among us," and that his injunction to "grasp hold vigorously of the only things that are solid and secure" was truly the expression of a new way of facing the problems of political life. It was not the case, certainly, that before this time a sense of the concrete, of the politically possible, of the driving forces, had been absent; on the contrary, it would be utterly ridiculous to speak of, or even to suppose, such an absence, if one recalls that Cavour had already come and gone. But the fact is that only now, in 1870, were the driving forces so nakedly and openly defined as technology, productivity, material capacity: politics as pure, quantitatively definable force. To repeat, concepts and ideas of a Prussian cast were already in the air, and the realité endorsed by the general secretary at the foreign ministry was being assimilated to the Reelle to which the Sergeant King had once brutally recalled the attention of his son Frederick, then still a dreamy youth. There was an affinity between Blanc's choses solides and the realité which Frederick II, when he became king of Prussia, had...