Cesare Balbo

Balbo, Cesare 

Born Nov. 27,1789, in Turin; died there, June 3,1853. Count; Italian statesman, historian, and writer.

Like V. Gioberti and M. d’Azeglio, Balbo was an ideologist of the moderate liberal currents in the Italian national liberation and unification movement. In his work The Hopes of Italy (1844), Balbo rejected revolutionary methods of struggle and argued for the unification of Italy “from above” by means of the creation of a federation of Italian rulers headed by the monarch of the Savoy dynasty. Balbo saw the exploitation of contradictions among the great powers as the only way to liberate Italian territories from the Austrian yoke. He believed that Austria would voluntarily renounce the regions of Lombardy and Venetia if the Western powers supported Austrian claims in the Balkans. Between March and July 1848, Balbo was the head of the first constitutional cabinet in Piedmont.