But Louis XIV., convinced of his insincerity, caused six thousand of his soldiers to be disarmed, on which he allied himself with Austria, and war recommenced with France. During the three campaigns, 1703, 1704, 1705, he lost all his possessions save Turin, which was besieged by the French. Succoured by the famous Prince Eugene, who arrived with the imperial army, the French were utterly defeated, and Victor regained all his lost territory. By the peace of Utrecht he gained the island of Sicily, abandoned by Philippe; and then for the first time the duke of Savoy assumed the title of king. But the Sicilians preferred the Spanish rule. Alberoni reconquered it, then the emperor, and Victor by the treaty of London received the island of Sardinia in exchange. Victor Amadeus reformed the internal administration of his states, published a code of laws, and disgraced the Jesuits. In 1730 he abdicated in favour of his son, Charles Emmanuel, retiring with his second wife, the famous countess of Saint Sebastian, to the castle of Savoy. This ambitious creature incited him to reclaim the reins of power; his son arrested him, and he died at Moncalier in 1732.—[M.]
VICTOR AMADEUS III. ascended the throne in 1773, in his forty-seventh year, and immediately set himself to reorganize the army. He erected the fortress of Saint Victor at Tortona, completed the citadel of Alexandria, built the observatory, founded the Royal Academy of Science, the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and commenced the harbour of Nice. But the French revolution overtook him in the midst of his peaceful reforms; revolutionary agents inundated Savoy, and revolts in Chambery were suppressed by violent means. A French army lined the frontiers of Nice and of Savoy. The Piedmontese army, though numerous and strong, was badly organized, and so incompetent were the generals, that to the Austrian Devins and to Calli, who had obtained the rank of general in the Austrian service, was intrusted the supreme command. Moreover, the state was encumbered by £4,000,000 sterling of debt, and the king, instead of striving to strengthen himself in the affections of his people, whom he had governed well hitherto, issued a series of edicts for their disarmament and the suppression of their liberties, which entirely alienated them. In 1792 a French army invaded Savoy, while General Anselme seized on Nice. In November, 1792, Savoy was annexed to France as the department of Mont Blanc, and, in December of the same year, Nice as the department of the Maritime Alps. The inhabitants of the island of Sardinia, summoned to surrender, fell upon the French fleet, cut to pieces the soldiers who succeeded in landing, and compelled the invaders to retire to Toulon. Victor III. then appealed to the princes of Italy to form a national league against France, but they replied with a counter project of "unarmed neutrality," on which he entered into an offensive and defensive treaty with the allies, engaging to bring fifty thousand men into the field, for which England was to pay £200,000 per annum. Austria, profiting by the distress of her ancient ally, forced him by the treaty of Valenciennes to restore the Novarese and other districts which had been detached from the duchy of Milan. In his first open fight Massena utterly defeated him, and before the end of May, 1794, the French were in possession of all the passes of the Maritime Alps. By the acceptation of the armistice of Cherasco, Victor was compelled to yield to Bonaparte the fortresses of Cena, Cuneo, and Tortona; and at the peace of Paris, Alessandria and Valenza. Thus he signed the downfall of his dynasty, but dying of apoplexy in October, 1796, he did not realize the extent of the misfortune which he had bequeathed to his heirs.—[M.]
VICTOR EMMANUEL I. (May, 1814), second son of Victor Amadeus, succeeded to the title on the abdication of Charles Emmanuel IV., his eldest brother, in 1802; but of all his hereditary dominions only the island of Sardinia remained to him as a refuge—Napoleon by victories and by perfidy having absorbed all his continental dominions. By the treaty of Paris, signed on the 30th May, 1814, the house of Savoy was restored to all its ancient possessions, and the treaty of Vienna among other iniquities annexed thereunto the republic of Genoa. Welcomed with boundless enthusiasm by his people, on the day following his return to his capital Victor issued an edict whereby all the laws of 1770 were reinforced, and the state replunged in its antique barbarism. Taking an old almanac of that year, all the officials who were still alive were reinstated; if dead, their sons. All the French laws were abolished; aristocratic privileges revived; monks, priests, and Jesuits alone found in the kingdom of Piedmont an earthly paradise. To such a state of things the people could not be reconciled. The nobles and many of the superior officers of the army conspired with Charles Albert, prince of Carignano. They demanded a constitution; the proud old king resigned, and named his brother, Charles Felix, king instead, Charles Albert being regent during that brother's absence. To the demand for a constitution was added the cry of "war to Austria." From the balcony of the palace the young regent proclaimed the constitution. Charles Felix, however, thundered anathemas from Modena. Charles Albert fled, and in Spain atoned for his liberal aberrations by fighting as a simple soldier at Trocadero against the patriots of Spain, who were combating for that same constitution which he had promulgated from Turin. With Charles Felix the main line of the house of Savoy died out. Forgiving him for his youthful follies, he named as his successor Charles Albert, a lineal descendant in the sixth generation of Thomas Carignano, second son of Charles Emmanuel I.—[M.]
* VICTOR EMMANUEL II. ascended the throne of Piedmont on the abdication of his father, Charles Albert, March 23, 1849, after the disastrous three days' campaign of Novara. His first act was to sign an armistice with Radetzky, by which he consented to the invasion of his lands as far as Sesia, and to the partial occupation of the citadel of Alessandria by an Austrian garrison. England and France, however, obtained the evacuation of Piedmontese territory by the Austrians, and the king and his counsellors had leisure to recompose the internal affairs of the kingdom, sadly disorganized by the disastrous war with Austria. His first acts—the ferocious bombardment of Genoa, and his twice dissolving parliament—induced many to believe that he was following the steps of the king of Naples, the pope, and the duke of Tuscany, and that his intention was to reign by terror supported by foreign intervention. But a short time sufficed to prove that he was bent on the preservation and consolidation of the constitutional franchises granted by his father in the commencement of 1848, and this good faith is the chief crown of glory of the king, especially when we contrast his conduct with the traditions of his ancestors, or with the example of his fellow Italian sovereigns. Viewed as a king of Piedmont, his reign leaves nothing to desire. In the relations with the rest of Italy, the traditional policy of his house is visible. "To descend with the valley of the Po;" to regard Italy as an "artichoke, to be swallowed leaf by leaf," and even this by means of barters and foreign alliances—these are the maxims transmitted from father to son during thirty-eight generations. Hence, when a series of outbreaks and revolutions in Lombardy, Genoa, Naples, and Sicily during the first ten years of his reign, warned the king that he must either enter into the spirit of the age, second the Italians in their aspirations after one Italy, or run the risk of losing his own crown, he sought by participation in the Crimean war to strengthen the position of Piedmont in Europe; then, in 1859, gladly accepted the French alliance against Austria, handing over to France the province of Nice and the faithful Savoy—the cradle of his race—in exchange for the plains of Lombardy, minus the fortress of Mantua and Peschiera. At the commencement of the war he had asked and obtained dictatorial powers from his people—who were willing to make any sacrifice for the welfare of Italy. The marriage between the Princess Clotilde and Prince Napoleon was regarded as a political event of no small importance. The partisans of the house of Savoy believed that Rome would be abandoned; the opposition saw only a future pledge of foreign usurpation in Italy; but the enthusiasm for the king rose to its height when, on the field of San Martino he led his troops in person, exposing himself in the foremost ranks, fighting as heartily as the meanest of his soldiers. That hardly won victory, in which one in every five of the Piedmontese soldiers lay dead upon the field, was justly considered as having washed out the stain of Novara from the Piedmontese banner. The promise of the ally, that Italy should be free from the Alps to the Adriatic, was firmly believed, when the disastrous peace of Villa Franca dashed the hopes of the Venetians to the ground, and caused the Italians to remember how in that abandonment of the brave Venetians, the son followed closely in his father's steps. On the refusal of the states of central Italy to receive Prince Napoleon for their sovereign, he accepted the annexation of Tuscany and the "legations," forbade Garibaldi to cross the Rubicon and assail the papal troops, and did all in his power to hinder his taking part in the Sicilian revolution. When the island of Sicily was free he forbade the passage of the revolution to the continent; but when Garibaldi
