2 - The long goodbye: aristocrats in politics and public life: 1848–1914

Summary

The Revolution of 1848 fundamentally transformed the political and legal framework within which Piedmont's titled nobility had long exercised leadership and exerted power. The triumph of constitutional government and full civil equality that year not only ended the aristocracy's virtual monopoly of high state office in the Kingdom of Sardinia; it also eliminated their last remaining institutional privileges. Indeed, the nobility ceased to exist as a separate corporative body in the new parliamentary order that emerged from the Statute. Officially, only individual noble families remained and they now represented at best just one component of a much larger and heterogeneous ruling class, defined more by wealth and education than birth and privilege. Such changes unavoidably entailed a significant reduction in the direct political power wielded by the old nobility in the decades after 1848.

The loss of their formal institutional status in the state, however, did not mark the end of aristocratic involvement in politics. On the contrary, Piedmont's titled families managed to keep some of their old roles while carving out new ones for themselves that together still assured them an influential place in public life both locally and at the national level in the second half of the nineteenth century.