Victor Emmanuel II

Victor Emmanuel II is the monarch around whom the novel’s account of Italian unification turns: Piedmont’s ruler becomes king of the new state after Garibaldi transfers southern Italy to him. He does not appear directly in the scenes, but his name marks both the political arrival of a new order and Don Fabrizio’s skepticism that Sicily will be changed by it.

Place in the Unification

The Risorgimento had gathered strength after the Napoleonic Wars and had already reached a crisis in 1848. By 1860, leadership of the unification movement had fallen mainly to Piedmont, the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel II, with Cavour as prime minister. The opening political background therefore places the king at the head of the state-building project, even as the action in Sicily unfolds amid the collapse of Bourbon authority.

In May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed for Sicily with a thousand volunteers, landed at Marsala, defeated Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, and occupied Palermo. After crossing to the mainland and entering Naples, he handed southern Italy over to Victor Emmanuel II. Plebiscites followed across the peninsula; the Papal States remained outside the new kingdom, protected by French troops. In 1862, Garibaldi’s attempt to march on Rome ended at Aspromonte, where Piedmontese troops routed his men and wounded him. These events establish Victor Emmanuel’s sovereignty as the outcome of a military and political consolidation, not simply a change of dynasty in Sicily.

A Distant Sovereign in Don Fabrizio’s Imagination

Victor Emmanuel II is present to Don Fabrizio chiefly as the possible successor to the Bourbon monarchy. After an audience with King Ferdinand, Don Fabrizio wonders whether the Piedmontese, represented by the so-called Galantuomo, will bring anything fundamentally different. He imagines that the dialect may become Torinese rather than Neapolitan while the underlying conditions remain much the same. The new king is thus viewed through a Sicilian nobleman’s suspicion of political change: the identity of the ruler may alter while the experience of rule does not.

Don Fabrizio’s doubts are not confined to dynastic comparison. As he considers the legitimacy of the Piedmontese advance, he recalls that earlier rulers’ claims to authority are also open to question, and compares political conquest with the succession of rulers in myth. His reasoning makes legitimacy appear less like an unchanging principle than a claim repeatedly secured through historical victory. The thought briefly unsettles his loyalty to the Bourbons, but he restores his composure by treating the present transfer of power as another episode in that long history.

The Limits of Political Change

The new monarch also becomes a measure of Sicily’s resistance to transformation. Looking out over Palermo on 13 May, Don Fabrizio sees the island’s sun as a force that keeps wills and activity in a state of immobility. He concludes, “It’ll take any number of Victor Emmanuels to change this magic potion for ever being poured for us.” The plural turns the king into more than an individual: even repeated changes of ruler, he suggests, may fail to overcome the conditions that shape Sicilian life.

That skepticism accompanies Don Fabrizio’s recognition that political turnover can coexist with social continuity. He interprets local Liberal hopes as a desire for opportunity and wealth rather than the destruction of the existing order. In his view, new men may take the old aristocrats’ places, while the governing habits and social arrangements persist. Victor Emmanuel’s accession consequently signifies real national change, but it does not persuade Don Fabrizio that the deeper structure of Sicily will change with it.

The New State and Don Fabrizio’s Refusal

The unified kingdom’s institutions reach the novel through a proposal that Don Fabrizio become a senator. Chevalley explains that the Turin government plans to nominate prominent Sicilians to the Senate, with the sovereign making the royal appointment. The offer represents an attempt to bring the island’s established figures into the new state’s public life and gives the monarch’s government a formal role in selecting its representatives.

Don Fabrizio declines. He describes himself as belonging to a generation caught between the old world and the new, compromised by its connection to the Bourbon regime and lacking the self-deception he considers necessary for political leadership. Instead, he recommends Don Calogero Sedàra, whose practical power and political usefulness, in his judgment, make him better suited to the new order. The recommendation anticipates Sedàra’s later entry into the Senate and underscores the transition’s characteristic exchange: old aristocratic authority yields space to newer power, while the institution of monarchy and the political machinery of the state continue under a different sovereign.