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.

As old juridical and institutional barriers disappeared in the course of the nineteenth century, the degree to which the aristocracy survived as an identifiably separate group at the upper reaches of Piedmontese society depended on more than recasting and reproducing traditional values, customs, and practices. It also entailed a restructuring of relations with other wealthy and influential non-noble elements who emerged to challenge the primacy of the old titled families within a new and greatly expanded ruling class. In this arena, aristocratic survival involved a mixture of flexibility and rigidity. From the stand point of the law, nobles had become only one among the various strata of the bourgeois world by the second half of the century. Moreover, changing political and economic realities in Piedmont and on the Italian peninsula necessitated an unprecedented level of cooperation and collaboration between nobles and non-nobles in virtually all areas of public life, especially after 1848. Rubbing elbows on elective municipal councils or on the boards of voluntary associations, however, did not automatically lead to more intimate connections in private life. On the contrary, the persistence of relatively closed social networks at least in Piedmont served to reinforce a caste consciousness and isolation that delayed genuine integration of old and new elites.

A remarkably consistent image of Piedmont's titled nobility emerges from contemporary accounts of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an image which suggests they were respected, but seldom loved. Observers invariably commented on the arrogance, bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and self-satisfaction of the second estate. In the 1760s, for instance, Giuseppe Baretti noted an “excessive pride of birth” among Piedmontese aristocrats, the majority of whom “disdain any familiarity” with persons of less exalted lineage. On those rare occasions when they agreed to speak to outsiders, Baretti claimed that “their kindness is such a bizarre mixture of courtesy and haughtiness that it is impossible for a man of substance not to be offended.” Nearly a century later, Vincenzo Gioberti observed in the 1840s how “the concept of their own superiority is inborn in the Piedmontese aristocrats; they make you feel it although they are courteous; they dominate while they bow; they show that they are your masters while professing themselves your servants.” In the 1860s, one of the nobility's most distinguished figures, Massimo d'Azeglio, provided a striking confirmation of these outsiders' impressions:

The success of the nobility in perpetuating their leadership and influence in public life in the second half of the nineteenth century depended to no small extent on their ability to also remain a part of the wealthy upper class within Piedmontese society. Much as elsewhere in Europe, inclusion in the hereditary nobility of Piedmont had traditionally implied wealth, if only because an aristocratic way of life presupposed a certain level of affluence. As a high court official expressed it in the 1840s, a respectable aristocrat needed “a patrimony sufficient to sustain with splendor the decorum of the noble title.”

Such wealth, however, became even more essential in an era when nobles no longer enjoyed corporative privileges. To begin with, a sizeable unearned income made possible the extensive leisure time that titled ladies and gentlemen required in order to occupy honorary offices and take part in the activities of voluntary political, religious, philanthropic, cultural, and recreational associations and clubs. More concretely, wealth was a prerequisite for old aristocratic families who wished to play the roles that gave them the greatest prestige and influence in the decades after 1848, namely those as organizational founders, patrons, and financiers.

This chapter will examine the issue of aristocratic wealth by addressing the following questions: How rich were Piedmontese nobles? What was the range of wealth-holding within the nobility?

As the preceding chapters have argued, the Piedmontese aristocracy proved to be more successful than their titled counterparts elsewhere on the Italian peninsula at maintaining a combination of landed wealth, social exclusivity, cultural traditions, and political influence in the second half of the nineteenth century. The same cannot be said for the following century. The extraordinary growth of industry in Piedmont, the rapid advance of mass politics, recurrent problems in the agricultural sector, demographic weakness, two wars, and ultimately the fall of the monarchy combined to transform irrevocably the identity, status and, material circumstances of the nobility in Piedmont by the middle of the twentieth century.

Old-line aristocratic families responded to these challenges in a variety of ways. Some conformed to popular stereotypes by squandering the remains of the ancestral patrimony on gambling, mistresses, and the high life or by retreating to their decaying country houses and palaces where they led a proud, but increasingly impoverished existence before simply dying off. For others, preeminence was followed not so much by decadence and disappearance as by adaption and survival. In fact, a number of titled families became active participants in a process of adjustment to the difficult circumstances that confronted them particularly after 1914. As a result, they remained an affluent and prominent component of Piedmontese high society in the decades that followed.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Piedmontese aristocrats and their blue-blooded counterparts elsewhere on the Italian peninsula confronted a world in which many of the old social boundaries and barriers had been dismantled or blurred. With the disappearance of the absolute monarchy and the abolition of the last remnants of feudalism, nobles ceased to be members of a legally distinct order possessing any exclusive rights and prerogatives. Old-line families still had a legal right to sport their titles as symbols of their antiquity and to pass them from generation to generation, but these titles no longer afforded special privileges or significant economic advantages. Henceforth the prestige and influence of the nobility would have to rest chiefly on their status as a social elite.

The loss of privileges unavoidably raised, however, fundamental questions about what it now meant to be a noble and about the extent to which individual nobles still constituted a coherent group, separate from other elements of Piedmont's propertied classes. Once titles ceased to carry with them tangible and exclusive benefits, they also ceased to provide even the appearance of unity to an “estate” that, in fact, had always encompassed sizeable variations in wealth, origins, and family lineage.

This study examines the evolution of aristocratic identities and roles in an ostensibly post-aristocratic society, namely that of Italy from the middle of the nineteenth century to the decade following World War I. As such, it aspires to contribute not only to our understanding of traditional elites, but also to the ongoing scholarly discussion of the social contours and characteristics of the Italian bourgeoisie at its upper reaches. The changing relations between old aristocratic and new bourgeois elites has long been viewed as one of the central themes in the larger processes of modernization in Europe. Indeed, historians have used this relationship to explain England's extraordinary political stability (and more recently its industrial decline), Germany's authoritarian path to modernity, the failure of liberal polity in Italy, and the crisis of the late Czarist regime in Russia.

Most scholars would agree that at some time between the early nineteenth century and the end of World War II the aristocracies and upper middle classes of Europe became so intertwined and intermarried that they no longer functioned as separate groups and effectively merged into a single upper class. There has been considerably less agreement, however, on the pace, mechanisms, terms, and consequences of this fusion of aristocracy and bourgeoisie.