Although this alarmed Metternich, what really filled him with dread was what he would call ‘la prétention italienne’. He had always brushed aside any idea that the Italians might be allowed their own state, on the grounds that they were incapable. ‘No country is less fit than Italy to be given over to government by its people,’ he would write as late as 1833, ‘as the Italians lack the first precondition for the existence of such a government; they have neither the character, nor the gravity nor the conduct necessary for it; in a word, they are not a people.’ He and Francis would, over the next
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