(1769-1822), British statesman and Foreign Secretary. Born in Dublin, Castlereagh was elected to the Irish House of Commons in 1790 and the Westminster parliament in 1794. Like his political opponent, canning, he abandoned his connection with the whigs in response to the violence of the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789 and became a supporter of Pitt the Younger. As Secretary for ireland he handled the rebellion of 1798 and secured the passage of the Act of Union through the Irish parliament in 1800. Like Pitt and Canning, he resigned in 1801 over George Ill’s refusal to countenance Catholic emancipation (see Catholicism), but returned to office as secretary of state for war in 1802. He proved a vigorous and capable minister, but Canning’s criticisms led the pair to fight a duel in 1809 which relegated them both to the back benches. Castlereagh’s greatest achievements came as foreign secretary (1812-22), a post he occupied alongside that of Leader of the House. He successfully held together the coalition which defeated napoleon i (see also Treaties of chaumont), and at the Vienna congress was a key architect of the congress system designed to maintain peace in Europe. However, unlike metternich and other participants in the project of quadruple
ALLIANCE, he was against military intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states for the purpose of suppressing liberalism and nationalism. Nor would he have any truck with the holy ALLIANCE promoted by Tsar Alexander i. As Leader ofthe House, Castlereagh had some responsibility for British domestic policy and had to justify repressive legislation at a time of social unrest. Criticism over this, together with overwork and disillusionment at the functioning of the Congress System, led to a nervous breakdown, and in 1822 he committed suicide by cutting his throat.
Catalonia Region of north-eastern Spain. Its strong tradition of separatism (see also basques; galicia[2]) has been much reinforced by the preservation of Catalan as a distinctive language combining elements of Provenc;al with Castilian Spanish. During the nineteenth century Catalonia witnessed a literary and cultural Renaixenqa (“Renaissance”) closely associated with romanticism and LIBERALISM, while the decades around 1900 saw its intellectuals and artists making a notable contribution to a wider European modernism. By the turn of the century the region was also notable as a focal point of industrialization and of political radicalism. In 1932, under the new SECOND REPUBLIC, it succeeded in winning a modest measure of formal autonomy from Madrid. When the Spanish civil war broke out four years later, most of its inhabitants supported the Republican cause, and sustained the struggle against the Nationalists until early in 1939. Thereafter the victorious franco dictatorship endeavoured to erode Catalan identity, and particularly to weaken usage of the regional language. However, following the restoration of democracy in Spain, Catalonia achieved statutory endorsement as an “Autonomous Community” in 1979. The arrangements included recognition of Catalan as its official language, alongside Spanish, and the revised provisions of 2006 further enlarged the autonomy of this relatively prosperous region now containing a population of more than seven million. By then Barcelona, its chief city, had won an international reputation as a major cultural and touristic center rivalling Madrid.
Catherine II (1729-96), Tsarina of Russia (1762-96), also known as “the Great.” Born Sophia Augusta Fredericka, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine emerged from her modest German origins when she was chosen by the Empress Elizabeth as bride for her nephew, Peter, the heir presumptive to Russia. Catherine moved there in 1744 and was married the following year. She successfully integrated herself into elite Russian society by adopting orthodox Christianity and altering her original name to the russified Catherine. She initially attempted to please her new husband, who succeeded to the throne as Peter III in January 1762, but he rejected her and also alienated powerful groups in society with his eccentric behavior and admiration of all things Prussian. When Peter spoke of setting Catherine aside in favor of his mistress, she orchestrated a coup the following June with the assistance of her lover, Grigori orlov, personally leading troops against her husband, who was forced to abdicate. She probably connived at his murder to protect her new position. Catherine’s accession marked the beginning of a fresh period of Russian territorial expansion, which had faltered with the death of Peter I (the Great) in 1725. By placing another former lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski, on the Polish throne in 1764 she established Russian domination over that territory. She subsequently orchestrated the three partitions of Poland, in 1772, 1793, and 1795, from which Russia was the major beneficiary. The second of these led to the acquisition of Polish Ukraine and its 3 million inhabitants, while the third wiped Poland entirely from the political map. Catherine similarly aimed to carve up the European territories of Turkey (see TURKEY AND europe). Although this was not achieved, russo-turkish wars eventuated in the acquisition of extensive gains in the Balkans, the Crimea, and beyond. Domestically, Catherine’s reign witnessed substantial reforms, especially in the early years. Central and provincial administration was reorganized; in 1786 a new system of elementary education was introduced; ecclesiastical property was confiscated and many monasteries dissolved; and in 1785 the nobility received rights similar to those pertaining in western Europe, part of a more general policy of “Westernization.” Catherine herself professed to be inspired by the ideals of the enlightenment. She claimed to have “ransacked” Montesquieu for the benefit of her empire; she told Voltaire that her motto was “Utility”; and she entertained Diderot and purchased his library. Yet it is doubtful if her attachment to the Enlightenment was more than superficial, for she undertook no reforms which might have threatened her autocracy. Thus the serfs (see serfdom) were placed yet more firmly under the control of their lords lest emancipation threaten the nobility’s support for the regime; opponents were imprisoned or exiled; the abolition of torture was continually postponed; and the many uprisings which brought together disaffected Cossacks, serfs, and religious dissidents were brutally suppressed. Like her nineteenth-century successors, Catherine was chiefly interested in improving the efficiency of her autocratic regime, not in diminishing her authority by liberalizing it.
Catholicism This term, derived from Greek katholikos (“universal”), is most regularly used to denote a distinctive “Roman” branch of Christianity that professes allegiance to traditions of teaching and practice enshrined in a papal authority unbroken since the epoch of St Peter. Worldwide, the Roman Catholic Church now claims more than 1 billion adherents, accounting for around half of all Christians; within Europe, it forms the largest Christian denomination, covering in excess of 250 million members (nominal or otherwise) and some 30 percent of overall population. A further 15 million Catholic believers belong to the Eastern Rite churches, sometimes referred to as Uniates, who remain in communion with Rome while retaining their own practices, language, and distinct canon law. Unlike members of the Roman clergy, Uniate priests may be married - a situation confirmed in the common law code accepted by their churches in 1991.
The outlines of the religious map of Catholic Europe have stayed remarkably constant over the last two centuries. Along the southern littoral, Portugal, Spain, and Italy persist as bastions for Catholicism; while Poland and Lithuania in the east, together with Ireland in the west, are also still relatively strong in piety. Belgium retains a significant level of commitment, and so too do some regions of southern Germany, with Bavaria as the most notable case. Catholic loyalties prevail also in Austria, and in certain other areas of former Habsburg rule such as Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia. By contrast, varieties of PROTESTANTISM retain the greater appeal in Scandinavia, northern Germany, parts of Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, while orthodox Christianity has remained the principal form of Christianity in most of eastern and southeastern Europe. The broadly stable patterns of religious allegiance as between countries have been generally reflected inside states as well. Thus in the French case Brittany and Normandy continue, even today, to show a relatively high degree of Catholic commitment just as they did in the late eighteenth century, whereas the Paris basin and the Massif Central have remained regions of relative dechris-tianization[1] such as they were even before 1789. Yet if the outline map of Catholic conformity has stayed remarkably constant, the actual levels of religious observance have everywhere fallen. This is a general trend that has been far from unique to Catholicism - and one that only Islam (see Muslims) and some evangelical Christian sects appear to have bucked. In the course of modern European history, the pattern of such decline has been neither linear nor geographically uniform. But, broadly speaking, it was men who were the more prone to fall away in the nineteenth century and women through much of the twentieth, with even graver loss of support among both genders then developing over the last fifty years or so. The causes are complex: traditional explanations center upon the processes of secularization and INDUSTRIALIZATION, though cultural changes have probably been of most significance since 1945.
As well as losing adherents, the Catholic Church has also seen its political power leaching away. By the close of the eighteenth century, the decline of Catholic Spain had already presaged a longer-term shift, which was then hastened by European conflict during the period 1792-1815
(see FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS; NAPOLEONIC
Wars). Protestant Britain and Orthodox Russia were the key beneficiaries of the peace agreed at the VIENNA CONGRESS of 1814-15. Although Catholic Austria played a key role, hindsight allows us to see how far this settlement also served to lay the basis for the further rise of Protestant Prussia. Moreover, as the nineteenth century developed, France (formerly the “eldest daughter of the Church”) could no longer be guaranteed to espouse Catholic political causes - a shift illustrated by the foreign policy of NAPOLEON III, even before the anticlericalism of the third republic made the rift deeper still. Catholic influence was further reduced as the balance of international power became recalibrated from time to time. For example, the Paris peace settlement of 1919 confirmed the great-power status of the USA and Japan, as well as Britain and France. in the aftermath of WORLD war ii the Soviet Union then came to rival the USA as a superpower, thus dominating most of central and eastern Europe in the name of atheistic communism. The collapse of that ideology, amid the European revolutions of 1989-91 in which Polish catholic resistance played a particularly vital role, was hailed by Pope john paul ii as “providential,” but it did not signal any full recovery of ecclesiastical influence over the secular world at large.
In Catholic, as in Protestant, countries the modern period of European development has witnessed profound changes of relationship between church and state. Until the late eighteenth century a closely symbiotic linkage prevailed. Governments generally favored a single religion, protected its exclusivity and doctrine, and privileged the civil rights of its professed adherents; conversely, whichever church was dominant then preached due submission to the temporal authority. In Catholic Europe such arrangements encouraged extensive ecclesiastical commitment to EDUCATION and other welfare activities, and even governments that were inclined towards clipping the wings of the clergy seldom questioned church dogma. The french revolution of 1789, and the campaign for dechristianization[2] in particular, attacked such a relationship. The revolutionaries attempted to eradicate catholicism and to substitute the deist Cult of the Supreme Being. It was left to napoleon i to pick up the pieces by means of the CONCORDAT of 1801 which effectively turned the Church into a department of state. Though the Church had to swallow hard over such developments, it came to regard concordats as the best means of preserving its own status in national and international contexts alike. Agreements of this sort offered some legal safeguards, and implicitly acknowledged a papal power to delegate authority over finance and ecclesiastical appointments. However, fears about loss of ecclesiastical autonomy appeared all the more justified in the light of the situation produced by Italian unification and GERMAN UNIFICATION (see also kulturkampf), and indeed of the condition of republican France from the 1870s onward and even, for a time, that of
Spain and Portugal as well. Here were governments bent on creating a sense of national belonging, on achieving some measure of social harmony amongst their diverse populations, and on creating an educated and productive workforce that could also bear arms. From the time of BISMARCK onward, states were also tending to take greater responsibility for their citizens through the development of a welfarism that further eroded the Church’s social role. In its approach to science (see positivism) as well as politics, the nineteenth-century church had already become widely perceived as an obstacle to “progress” even before pius ix issued his reactionary Syllabus of Errors in 1864. Amid these tensions, Catholicism was especially distrusted for its so-called ultra-montanism - the allegedly anti-patriotic tendency to appeal “beyond the mountains” not to national but to papal authority. Assertion of the latter had been most clearly crystallized in the decree of infallibility issued by the First Vatican council. This was proclaimed in 1870 even as the new Kingdom of Italy was about to strip the Pope of most of his remaining sovereign territory, leaving him to become a self-styled “prisoner” within the Vatican City (see micro-states[5]).
The pontificate of leo xiii (1878-1903), which included the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, offered some limited concessions to secular modernity. However, his immediate successors proved reluctant to relinquish a more familiar conservative authoritarianism. Against that background, and with the Church’s fears further sharpened after 1917 by the triumph of the bolsheviks in Russia, we can better comprehend the allure of right-wing dictatorships for many Catholics in the first half of the twentieth century. The broadly pro-clerical and traditionalist regimes that emerged during the fascist era (see fascism) - for instance, in Italy, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the vichy regime in France - often claimed to be restoring moral certainties and to be promising a favored position for the Church. Though a number of concordats duly followed, these church-state agreements proved to be very unequal. The policy was especially ruinous in Germany where the 1933 concordat helped to legitimize Nazism and emasculated Catholic resistance to the hitler regime both before 1939 and during the wartime papacy of pius XII. Elsewhere (though this was imperfectly comprehended at the time) the Church was better placed in those surviving liberal democracies where it functioned as part of a pluralistic society. These included certain predominantly non-Catholic countries (such as Britain) where the penal legislation dating from the Reformation had been largely removed during the nineteenth century, for instance through the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) which granted full political and civil rights. In the aftermath of World War II a new era in church-state relations evolved. Across much of central and eastern Europe, Catholicism had to survive four decades ofpersecution conducted on a scale not seen since the French Revolution. Meanwhile, in the West, such bruising experience of cold war confrontation prompted the Church into some greater support for moderately progressive secular values, as embodied most notably in movements of so-called Christian democracy. Here, states that were now confident of holding the upper hand proved readier than before to opt for a neutral stance and an acceptance of religious pluralism; and anticlerical spats became rarer, even though issues such as gay rights, divorce, and abortion remained topics of contention.
It is misleading to write the history of Catholicism solely as one of political and intellectual reaction in the face of progress. To be sure, the church hierarchy tended to side with monarchism and even Fascism as supposed constraints upon social disruption, while also proving generally hostile to the emergence of religious modernism in the late nineteenth century. But priests and laity have embraced a wider range of values. For example, the liberal Catholicism developed by lam-MENAIS, Lacordaire, and Montalembert in the earlier nineteenth century exerted a long-lived influence in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. As well as urging the need for the Church to be free of involvement with the state, they encouraged the development of distinctly Catholic social policies to deal with issues of poverty and labor relations. Partly due to this, a Catholic Action movement emerged with particular clarity in the twentieth century, bringing larger numbers of the laity into the Church’s work. Moreover, the Vatican has taken the initiative on a number of occasions: for instance, through the major encyclicals of Leo XIII and pius XI on social issues, and the publication of Divino afflante Spiritu in 1943 as Pius Xll’s contribution towards revitalizing Catholic approaches to Biblical scholarship. However, no pope has had a greater influence on modern Catholicism than JOHN xxiii who was responsible for convening the Second Vatican Council of 1962-3. This marked a new spirit of openness, and inaugurated changes in ecclesiastical liturgy and governance as well as fresh approaches to social reform and ecumenism. In politics, as noted already, the pontificate of JOHN PAUL II (1978-2005) was particularly important in helping to inspire the movements that produced at the end of the 1980s the downfall of soviet communist hegemony over central and eastern Europe. In theological matters, however, the Vatican has generally shown since the later 1960s a greater cautiousness, seeking to reaffirm Catholicism’s traditional teachings even while facing continuing revisionist pressures especially on clerical celibacy, artificial contraception, and other issues pertaining to the practices of sexuality. Here, by 2010, the pontificate of Benedict XVI was becoming mired amid increasingly widespread allegations about priestly paedophilia, and indeed about longstanding concealments thereof on the part of European (and other) bishops.
As Christianity entered its third millennium, perhaps the most fundamental of the issues facing this “universal” church stemmed precisely from “globalization.” over the previous 200 years or so the demographics of Catholicism had changed dramatically. Due in part to the missionary zeal that had once accompanied centuries of colonial IMPERIALISM, what had previously appeared as a predominantly European faith was now much more notably the preserve of others in continents beyond. Though as yet the governing form of the Catholic Church was still “Roman,” the substance of its future development seemed bound to lie increasingly in non-European hands.
Cattaneo, Carlo (1801-69), Italian political economist. His extensive writings, usually in his journals the Annali universali di statistica and II Politecnico, provided a moderate, gradualist critique of post-Napoleonic restoration Italy. His talents led to his recognition and employment by the British government on agrarian problems in India and Ireland. Besides his scholarship, he is principally remembered for his part in the early stages of the Milanese uprising of 1848 (see REVOLUTIONS OF 1848-9). After its failure he went into exile, only returning to Milan and reestablishing II Politecnico once the franco-aus-TRIAN WAR of 1859 had freed his native Lombardy from rule by the habsburg empire. However, as a federalist (see federalism [1]) rather than a nationalist, he remained deeply critical of Piedmontese expansionism and of the new Italian state ruled by the Savoy dynasty. (See also Italian unification;
RISORGIMENTO)
Caudillo Spanish term meaning “leader.” Having been originally applied to nineteenth-century South American revolutionaries using a populist and charismatic appeal to promote reforms, it is now associated particularly with franco who in 1936 declared himself “Caudillo of Spain, by the grace of God.” In this way, he nurtured a cult of hero-worship similar to that fostered in Italy by MUSSOLINI (as“Duce”) and in Germany by hitler (as “Fuhrer”).
Cavaignac, General Louis-Eugene (1802-57), French Minister of War. He became known to some as the “butcher of June,” due to his role in the JUNE DAYS of 1848 (see also revolutions of 1848-9). After serving with distinction in Algeria, Cavaignac was elected to the National Assembly and made minister of war in the provisional government of the second republic. When the workers of Paris rebelled in June 1848 he used a mixture of regular troops with elements from the NATIONAL GUARD and the Mobile Guard to crush the uprising. He subsequently became “head of the executive power” of the republic, but, although he maintained law and order, a series of maladroit fiscal and social policies eroded his administration’s popularity. He then ran for the presidency of the republic in December 1848, coming a poor second to Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (see NAPOLEON iii). He was briefly arrested and exiled to Picardy during the latter’s coup in December 1851. A staunch republican, albeit a conservative one, he continued thereafter to oppose Louis Napoleon.
Cavour, Camillo (1810-61), Piedmontese statesman, pivotal in Italian unification and the risor-GIMENTO. His background made him an improbable national hero, since his father had served the Napoleonic occupation of northern Italy and his mother hailed from Geneva. cavour spoke better French than he did Italian, and felt more comfortable in London or Paris than Turin. Trained as an engineer in the army of piedmont-SARDINIA, he resigned his military post in order to travel widely in Europe - especially to Britain and France, which he viewed as beacons of progress. His early views on Italian nationalism were vague, though he certainly regarded the republicanism of MAZZINI as unworkable and professed loyalties towards the Savoy dynasty of Piedmont. In June 1848 he was elected as a conservative to the parliament at Turin, where he supported charles Albert’s unsuccessful attempts to expel the Austrians from Lombardy (see revolutions of 1848-9; custozza; novara). Thereafter Cavour served as minister of trade and agriculture and then of finance. In these roles, he lowered tariffs, negotiated international trade agreements, and promoted railway-building so as to boost commerce and attract tourists from “the fogs” of northern Europe. In 1853 he became prime minister and, to the disgust of victor Emmanuel ii with whom he enjoyed a fractious personal relationship, established an important parliamentary power base on the center-left. It was the king, rather than his premier, who subsequently involved Piedmont in the Crimean war in the hope of recovering standing lost in 1848-9. However, though there were no immediate gains, cavour soon contributed his own skilful exploitation of the goodwill which this move had encouraged on the part of napoleon iii.
The issue of Italian unification was now under increasingly urgent discussion, within the National Society (a small but influential group whose members now generally accepted the key role of the Piedmontese monarchy) as well as by Mazzinian nationalists. Cavour himself retained doubts about union with what he viewed as the uncivilized south (see mezzogiorno), and favored instead an enlarged northern state strongly centralized under Piedmontese control. He also believed that international diplomacy was essential and, following the orsini plot, began negotiations with the French emperor. These resulted in the PLOMBIERES AGREEMENT of July 1858, a cynical piece of REALPOLITIK in which Cavour betrayed his limited nationalist credentials by agreeing to cede Nice and Savoy. The ensuing franco-austrian war of 1859 did not go to plan, as Napoleon proved an unreliable ally and the villafranca treaty yielded to Piedmont only Lombardy, not Venetia. Though Cavour promptly resigned, he then returned to office in January 1860 and oversaw plebiscites in central Italy which massively endorsed annexation to Piedmont. At that stage Nice and Savoy were handed to the French, helping to provoke garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in May. Though Cavour had not dared to obstruct this venture, he neither strongly expected nor unambiguously encouraged the success that it rapidly registered. He was now forced to throw caution to the wind, moving Piedmontese forces southward so as to stymie Garibaldi’s progress towards Rome, which lay under French protection and whose capture might imperil everything so far gained (see also papal states). Cavour thus recovered the initiative, ensuring Piedmontese dominance over the new kingdom of italy proclaimed in March 1861. As first prime minister of this creation, which despite the lack of Venetia and the papal states was still much larger and less manageable than he had envisaged, Cavour recognized many of the problems ahead. His sudden death in June 1861, probably induced by nervous strain, meant that they were left largely for others to confront.
Gorbachev’s reformist appeals to the Eastern bloc met only with contempt from Ceau§escu, who failed to anticipate the popular rising and military revolt that led to his swift overthrow and summary execution amidst the European revolutions OF 1989-91.
Center Party (Germany) (see zentrum)
Central Powers Term denoting the military alliance, initially comprising the german empire and the habsburg empire, which confronted the Allies in WORLD WAR I. Geographically located in central Europe, Germany and Austria-Hungary were linked through the dual alliance of 1879 and the TRIPLE ALLIANCE of 1882. The latter pact also included italy, which nonetheless remained neutral in 1914 and then entered the war on the Allied side in May 1915. The Central Powers were joined in late October 1914 by Turkey, and by Bulgaria a year later. They could also lay claim to the sympathies of those nationalities keen to slough off Russian rule, notably Finns, Ukranians, and Lithuanians. in late 1918, the decisions ofBulgar-ia, the Ottoman Empire, and Austria-Hungary to sue for armistice, left the German regime with little choice but to do the same.
Ceaufescu, Nikolae (1918-89), First Secretary of the Communist Party of Romania (1965-89), and State President (1974-89). Having advanced under the patronage of gheorghiu-dej, he became the latter’s deputy in 1957 and then succeeded him as party leader in 1965. Throughout the brezhnev era, Ceau§escu continued his former chief s policy of stressing Romania's sovereign independence from the soviet union. Though he never attempted to secede from the Warsaw pact or coMECON, his nationalistic distancing from the Kremlin won him much sympathy in the West (and even an honorary knighthood from the UK). Domestically, however, he was using his secur-itate police to develop state terror (see terrorism), coupled with a cult of personality and private luxury. policies of enforced population growth (e. g. a ban on contraception) and of rapid industrialization did little to benefit general living standards. Instead, the products of any economic improvement went largely to line the pockets of the leader, his formidable wife Elena, and their main party associates. in the later 1980s
Champ de Mars massacre The killing by the NATIONAL guard in 1791 of around fifty unarmed demonstrators (though some authorities put the number as high as 200) during the french revolution OF 1789. Following the unsuccessful attempt of LOUIS XVI to flee France in June 1791, calls for his removal multiplied, even though conservative opinion within the National Assembly rallied to his defense and he was reinstated as monarch. On July 17, some six thousand people flocked to the Champ de Mars, a large field on the outskirts of Paris, to sign a petition drafted by the radical cordeliers club which declared the Assembly's actions contrary to the popular will. A confrontation between the demonstrators and the National Guard was provoked when two men, who had hidden under the table on which the petition was placed in order to get a view of the ladies' ankles, were discovered and summarily hanged. In response, the Guard, led by lafayette and the mayor of paris, Bailly, marched to disperse the crowd. Displaying the red flag, which indicated the imposition of martial law, the
Guard nevertheless opened fire without warning. The massacre marked a further breach in the relations between the popular movement and the Revolution’s middle-class leadership.
Charles I of Austria (see under habsburg empire)
CharlesX (1757-1836), King of France (1824-30) and Count of Artois. A younger brother of louis XVI, Charles was amongst the first members of the royal family to flee after the outbreak of the french REVOLUTION OF 1789, and then remained in exile promoting the counter-revolution. He became king following the death of his older brother, louis XVIII. It was said that he had forgotten little and learned nothing from the revolution, and he appeared bent upon restoring as much of the old regime as possible. Nobles were given compensation - the milliard - for lands lost, and this was funded by a reduction in the interest rate offered to government bond-holders. public, and particularly bourgeois, opinion was further affronted by curbs on press freedom and by measures designed to increase clerical influence, including a sacrilege law which made burglary of ecclesiastical premises a capital offence. However, even the ostentatiously pious Charles did not dare to restore to the church the lands that had been confiscated during the revolution. In 1829 he chose a cabinet of ultras headed by the reactionary polignac. When the ministry was defeated in elections the following year, Charles responded by dissolving the Chamber and ordering a new poll. He also introduced censorship and dramatically reduced the size of the electorate. These measures, which were certainly illegal under the constitutional charter of 1814, went too far. Although Charles tried to back down, his actions precipitated a bloodless coup and he was obliged to abdicate on August 2, 1830 (see REVOLUTIONS OF 1830-2). Though he hoped that the dynasty would continue in the person of his grandson, he was succeeded by the Orleanist, Louis Philippe. (See also july monarchy; legitimism; orleanism)
Charles Albert (1798-1849), King of piedmont-SARDINIA (1831-49). Chiefly known as a modernizer, he had in 1821 briefly served as regent to his cousin, CHARLES FELIX. Though swiftly banished for the concessions that he had offered to advocates of change, Charles Albert then succeeded to the throne in his own right ten years later. His reign began with moderate policies of financial, administrative, and military reform. During the 1840s, however, he also became increasingly responsive to more radical ideas of liberalism and nationalism. Early in the revolutions of 1848-9 he granted a constitution - which was one of the few political reforms to survive those upheavals and indicated Piedmont-Sardinia as the most likely state to promote some measure of Italian unification. Though Charles Albert’s intentions remain obscure, it looks as if he was chiefly interested in acquiring Lombardy, and he supported the Milanese revolt in March 1848. His army was quickly defeated by the Austrians at custozza (July 24) and shortly afterwards he signed an armistice. Criticized by radicals at home and by the Milanese, he renewed the fight in March 1849 only to be beaten again, at novara. He abdicated in favor of his son victor emmanuel ii and went into exile in Portugal where he died shortly afterwards.
Charles Felix (1765-1831), Duke of Savoy and King of PIEDMONT-SARDINIA (1821-31). He came to the throne following the abdication of his brother, Victor Emmanuel I, who faced an uprising from revolutionaries demanding constitutional reform. While waiting for the arrival of Charles Felix from Modena, his cousin, Charles ALBERT, was appointed regent. The latter mollified the rebels by granting a liberal constitution. However, this was swiftly annulled by Charles Felix, who exiled the regent and suppressed the uprising with Austrian assistance (see novara, battles of). Though married in 1807, Charles Felix had no children, and on his death the throne passed to Charles Albert.
World History
