Piedmont’s leaders sabotaged volunteer support and rejected mass mobilization options

Evidence

The Piedmontese government could forcibly enrol soldiers within its own territory in proportion to its population, just as Austria could in its territory and in proportion to an enormously larger population. An all-out war on these terms would always have been disastrous for Piedmont after a certain time. Given the principle that “Italy goes it alone”, it was necessary either to accept immediately a confederation with the other Italian States, or to propose territorial unity on such a radically popular basis that the masses would have been induced to rise up against the other governments, and would have constituted volunteer armies who would have hastened to the support of the Piedmontese. But precisely here lay the problem. The right-wing tendencies in Piedmont either did not want auxiliaries, thinking that they could defeat the Austrians with the regular Piedmontese forces alone (and it is incomprehensible how they could have had such presumption), or else would have liked to have been helped for nothing (and here too it is incomprehensible how serious politicians could have asked such an absurdity). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 501

Categorization

• XREF: The forced-choice framing (confederation vs. radical popular basis) prefigures Gramsci’s base-superstructure and passive-revolution concerns that recur across the Notebooks. — connects to: Mazzini-inspired insurrection failed because aristocrats withheld support