Rassegna storica del Risorgimento

Banche e ferrovie in Piemonte
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would have swelled to more than 210 kilometers and the cost would have reached nearly seventy-five million lire.53)
The Réunion Financière had promised to cover a third of the invest­ment in the Swiss concession and Rothschild himself had proposed the inclusion of the Piedmontese trunk to the Réunion, so the Cassa del Com­mercio could have anticipated- help Paris with that too54) The Lukmanier road had long attracted the interest of northern Italian capitalists and of the government in Turin. In the middle of the 1840s Charles Albert's govemment signed an accord with the concerned Swiss can tonai authorìties establishing the general guidelines for the railroad from Piedmont through the Lukmanier pass to the German border. A state engineer was dispatched from Turin to survey the route with Swiss and German counterparts and a provisionai agreement to build tlie line was even signed by a Turin-based banking syndicate. The project fell through as the railroad boom of the mid-1840s evaporated, however. In the boom period of the early 1850s new combinations attempted to marshal the necessary resources and negotiate new contracts, but again nothing reached fruition. In the Kingdom of Sardinia the debates in the Chamber of Deputies over the development of the realm's railroad network resulted in a resolution promising ten million lire to the company which successfully build the Lukmanier line. The city and division of Genoa subsequently pledged another six million lire each. Consequently, in 1856 the Cassa del Commercio could hope to see its exposure reduced to either roughly nineteen or thirty-four mhlion lire, depending on whether or not the Piedmontese trunk were added to the Ticino concession.s> The bank could also expect public interest in the line to be high throughout northern and centrai Italy, and not just in the Kingdom of Sardinia, so the placing of shares in the proposed venture should have been a relatively easy matter in the buoyant atmosphere of 1856.
The issue was never put to the test, however. The trunk from Bellin-zona to Chiasso, along the eastern side of Lake Maggiore, was considered vita! by the cantonal authorìties and the Cassa del Commercio had included it in its initial prospecfcus. Some members of the Réunion Financière had objected to its inclusion from the beginning and so the Réunion's early promise to take a third of the fìnancial burden had been accompanied by the request that the Cassa del Commercio drop the line from the proposal. Success in Bellinzona had been conditional upon retention of the road to Chiasso, however. Its place in the agreement between the Italian bank and the cantonal authorìties provided sufficient pretext for those in the Réunion who were unhappy with the Rothschild-Talabot program to engineer the Réunion's withdrawal of its pledge of support. Rothschild and Talabot resisted, urging their associates to live up to their agreement and accept
53) Howell, p. 294, bascd on figures in AP, 27:1285, 1308, and Cameron, France, 303.
54) Gille, Procès-verbaux , pp. 38-39, 42-52.
55) AP, 27:1254-1317, 28:1937, 35:728-730; and Guderzo, pp. 17-23.