Ferdinand, 1840-1844
It is hard to imagine a youngster as busy as Prince Ferdinand in the early 1840s. Divided between his roles as a member of his father’s Council, Commander of the Artillery, and his studies (after meeting Charles Babbage in Turin in 1840, he made a failed attempt to make the Analytical engine to work), the legend says that the Prince only slept with his wife Maria Adelaide (and, given the fact that the couple was soon blessed with a son, Umberto, born in 1841, and a daughter, Vittoria, in 1843, even in that occasion he was hardly given any rest). Although their match had political reasons (Charles Albert was trying to get closer to Austria, going as far as to sign a defensive pact with the Emperor, and urged his son to marry one of his cousins for this very reason, although Ferdinand would have preferred to choose a foreign bride) the couple got on well together. Ferdinand famously did not take any mistress, which not prevented Maria Adelaide from occasionally complaining. She wrote in her diary: “If only I could be jealous of a pretty face, a white bosom. Another woman, I could easily outcompete; but a whole kingdom? Or, should I say, an entire Peninsula…” She went as far as to issue a formal complaint to Charles Albert, who famously responded: “Are we really talking about this? If there is a problem, it’s Ferdinand's friendship with that damned Jacobin!” The “Jacobin” in question was no-one less than Cavour, whose open mockery of his page’s suit in his youth had gained him the eternal hatred of Charles Albert. The King forbade a return to Court of Camillo, and thought of formally forbidding Ferdinand to see a “preposterous fellow who has no love for our Kingdom.” The answer of the young Prince was: “Your Majesty loves his Kingdom with the affection of father; Camillo loves it with the passion of a lover.” Begrudgingly, Charles Albert relented, although more than Ferdinand’s quip he might have been influenced by the report “On the role of the railways in the development of the British Empire”, written by Ferdinand with the extensive help of Camillo. The report convinced Charles Albert to finally give answers to the many voices in the kingdom advocating for the construction of railways since 1826. Priority was given to the line Turin-Genoa, to connect the main port of the Kingdom with the capital. The line was to pass through Alessandria, from which a further line to Novara was started. Ferdinand also pointed out the necessity of the national production of steam engines, not to depend only on imports. The active support of the crown led in 1845 to the creation of the company Ansaldo, whose first factory, the Sampierdarena, was operative in 1847. Meanwhile, the first line of the Sardinian Railways (the Turin-Moncalieri) was inaugurated in 1844, on the occasion of the marriage of Maria Cristina of Savoy to Henri of Orleans, second youngest son of Louis-Philippe of France. This marked a shift in international politics for the Kingdom of Sardinia. This new pro-French direction was dictated by the tensions with Austria following the first works of the railway Alessandria-Novara, which was meant to get to the lake port of Arona, creating a commercial route that would damage the existing one through the Austrian Adriatic ports.
However, this is not to say that there was no love involved; on the contrary, the young couple fell in love almost at first glance. The two met in 1844 after Ferdinand, who had heard that Henri was in Naples to meet (and potentially marry) Maria Carolina of Naples, invited Henri (whose acquaintance he had made during his Grand Tour) to Turin “to tell the tale of his heroic military feats against the Algerians”. Having a great love for his sister, he feared that Maria Carolina would suffer in a marriage with one cousin or another- and that she was likely to make his husband suffer, too. In fact, Maria Cristina was nothing like the average, pious Savoy princess. She was smart and somewhat of a rebel, to the despair of her mother, who once wrote to her father “I have no idea from where did this child come from. She is nothing like any of us, and she seems to be born to spurn me! She should thank God she was born pretty.” At the age of eighteen, Maria Cristina was a ripe, sensual, wild beauty, described by many as a “Princess of Lombards, or maybe the Franks, or the Herulians”. Henri, previously set on the delicate, angelical Maria Carolina of Naples, was immediately charmed by the Savoy princess. The two fell in love when Henri promptly extinguished the fire Maria Cristina had accidentally set on her dress to hide a cigarette. Showing no embarrassment at all, Carolina laughed and reportedly said “I hope Your Highness is as good at turning fires on”, at which the Prince blushed and uttered a few words in what "sounded more like Ostrogoth than French", as Maria Cristina wrote in her diary. It is Henri's diary, however, that tells us what was really thinking: "I will marry her, and only her. I am a soldier, and she shines with the beauty and the danger of the most glorious of battles." The marriage was soon agreed, with Ferdinand actively taking part in the negotiations, although the hardest of the job was to convince his mother that it was best for all (Charles Albert was thorn between the political opportunity of the match and the embarrassment for his daughter's behavior, and in the end, had Maria Cristina solemnly swear in front of a notary that she would never ever smoke again. She complied-for a while. ).
The full account of the War in Algeria (Ferdinand was not of the sort that lets an occasion of learning something; he became famous for the sentence “There is no such thing as a useless knowledge” that he said to his wife after she said that his beloved math was, by all means, useless) made a great impression on the young prince, who resented a lot the lack of any chance to test the reforms he, his father and Menabrea had been implementing. However, after thinking on the subject, he concluded that this way, the skills of the Sardinian Army would be a surprise to their enemies as well. And he added, “Let us hope that they will be more surprised than us.”
