Victor Emmanuel I (
July 24, 1759 –
January 10, 1824) was the Duke of
Savoy, Piedmont, and
Aosta, and King of
Sardinia from
1802 to
1821.
He was the second son of King
Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia and
Maria Antonietta of Bourbon (1729-1785). His maternal grandparents were
Philip V of Spain and
Elizabeth Farnese.
Victor Emmanuel was known from birth as the Duke of Aosta. He succeeded his brother,
Charles Emmanuel IV, as King of Sardinia upon the latter's abdication in
1802.
In
1793 he took an active part in the struggle of the old powers against the
French Revolutionary forces in
Savoy, but, defeated, in
1799 he took refuge in
Sardinia, which was the only part of his domains not conquered by the French. During his exile at
Cagliari he constituted the
Carabinieri élite corps, still existing as one of the main branches of Italian Army.
He could return to
Turin only in
1814, his realm reconstituted by the
Congress of Vienna with the addition of the territories of the former
Republic of Genoa. The latter became the seat of the Sardinian Navy. Victor Emmanuel abolished all the freedoms granted by the Napoleonic Codices and restored a fiercely oppressive rule: he refused any concession of a
constitution, entrusted the instruction to the Church and reintroduced the persecutions against
Jews and
Waldensians.
After the death of his brother in
1819, he also became the
Jacobite pretender to the British thrones (as Victor I), although he, like his brother, did not make any public claims to this effect. When Victor Emmanuel died,
Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, the
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, wrote to his ministerial colleague
George Canning that there should be public mourning in Britain, as a significant number of Britons had regarded Victor Emmanuel as their rightful king.
After the outbreak of the liberal revolution in his lands in
1821, he
abdicated in favor of his brother,
Charles Felix. Victor Emmanuel died in the
Castle of Moncalieri. He is buried in the
Basilica of Superga. 
rss feed