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Charles Albert (October 2, 1798-July 28, 1849) was the Duke of Savoy, Piedmont, Aosta and King of Sardinia from 1831 to 1849. He succeded to Charles Felix but his name is also bound with the first Italian statute and the first war of independence (1848 - 1849). He abdicated after a defeat suffered from the Austrian army at the Battle of Novara.
Born in Turin in 1798, to the son of the Prince of Carignano, Carlo Emanuele, and Albertina Maria Cristina of Saxony. He was educated in the intellectually liberal but Francophil atmosphere of Geneva, then Paris during the First French Empire. At the fall of Napoleon he returned to Turin. He married Maria Teresa of Tuscany in 1817 and displayed some sympathies with liberals. In 1821, as regent for the kingdom in the absence of the new king, Carlo Felice, he conceded a constitution that was disavowed by the king, who sent him to join the French ultra-monarchist forces in Spain to suppress the liberal revolution there and restore Ferdinand VII. He distinguished himself at the Battle of Trocadero in 1823, which annihilated hopes of a constitutional monarchy for Spain.
Carlo Alberto succeeded Carlo Felice to the throne of Sardinia in 1831. Although an Italian patriot opposed to Austrian hegemony in Northern Italy, he put down the Mazzini conspiracy. He introduced a series of reforms that abolished domestic customs barriers within the kingdom, promulgated a law code (the Albertine Code) along Napoleonic lines and supported the arts and sciences.
In the year of revolutions of 1848 he agreed to a constitutional regime that remained in place for the century that the Kingdom of Italy lasted. The same year he declared war on absolutist Austria. However, he was defeated at Novara in 1849 and, rather than redraw the Statute, abdicated in favour of his son, Vittorio Emanuele.
He then left for exile in Oporto, Portugal, where he died the same year.
For all hereditary titles, check Vittorio Amedeo III.
With Maria Teresa of Tuscany he had children including:
- Vittorio Emanuele II
- Ferdinand Marie Albert (1822-1855), Duke of Genoa who had 2 children:
- Margaret of Savoy (1851-1926), married Umberto I
- Tomasso (1854-1931), Duke of Genoa, who had children including:
- Philiberto, Duke of Pistoia
- Adalberto, Duke of Bergamo
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