The Connection between Cavour and Calvinism

Abstract

In the perennial dilemma over the relationship between church and state, few eras were as crucial as the nineteenth century and the rise of nation-states. Italy with the Risorgimento in many ways paralleled similar struggles that were going on within the broader European context after the Spring of Nations of 1848. I argue that the Calvinist view of civil government, held by the Swiss Reformed tradition at the time of Alexandre Vinet, was foundational to the separatist position of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, during the time of the Italian Risorgimento. Through Cavour, Vinet’s separatism reverberated beyond Protestantism into the broader political Italian context of the day. While the relationship between church and state experienced many changes and even deterioration up to the time of the European revolutions, the contextual environment of the nineteenth century remains particularly significant in tracing a possible connection between Vinet’s principle of a “free church in a free state” and its Italian expression through the key political figure of Cavour.