3791 THE REVIVAL OF THE PLEBISCITE IN ITALY 8 1 



asking the consent of the many peoples conquered and 

 forced under the French domination of the new empire. 

 The French Revolution had not, as some of the advocates of 

 the plebiscite as the expression of national self-determina- 

 tion are wont to assert,- implanted the plebiscite as an in- 

 stitution in European international life and relations. To 

 M. Talleyrand, the French representative at the Congress 

 of Vienna, Emperor Alexander I of Russia said : " You 

 speak to me all the time of principles, your public law is 

 nothing to me ; I know not what it is. What importance do 

 you think I attach to your parchments and treaties ? "^ It 

 was more than half a century later that the plebiscite again 

 made its appearance in the international life of Europe. 



While the doctrine of national self-determination had 

 ceased to operate with the advent of the French Empire the 

 principle of popular sovereignty, though resented and op- 

 posed by governments and rulers, made steady headway in 

 western European national life. 



It was in the Italian states that the struggle for recog- 

 nition of the principle of popular sovereignty found its first 

 successful conclusion. Here, analogous to the French Revo- 

 lution, was a movement which originated in a revolt against 

 oppressive government and a demand for constitutional 

 refonn, into which, in the course of the struggle, were in- 

 jected questions of the relations to each other of the states 

 involved. This extension and broadening of the revolu- 

 tionary movement in the Italian states was aimed at nothing 

 less than the abolition of Austrian rule in the two northern 

 provinces of Lombardy and Venetia and the overthrow of 

 the reactionary princes settled upon them by the Congress 

 of Vienna and the Holy Alliance. First as the means to 

 this end and finally as the goal itself, union with Piedmont 

 (or Sardinia) under Charles Albert, the first of all the 



* " C'fst (U- la Kt'volution fran(;aisc que date la conception sulijec- 

 tive tie la nationalite, fondec sur le consentcment " (David, p. 17). 

 See also WambaiiKli, I), i. 



" Koiiard dc Card, p. 39. 

 6 



