The Perfect Fusion was the 1847 act of the Savoyard king Charles Albert of Sardinia which abolished the administrative differences between the Mainland states and the island of Sardinia, in a fashion similar to the Acts of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. The once Iberian Kingdom of Sardinia had become a possession of the House of Savoy in 1720, and it had continued to be ruled as during the ages of the Spanish Empire. Although the Sardinian populace had been showing hostility against the new Piedmontese rulers since the failed insurrection in 1794, the island's separate status from the Mainland became a problem for the local notables from two major cities of Cagliari and Sassari when liberal reforms began to be put in force in Turin, and some of them started to see their own legal system as a handicap more than a privilege; a minority of other Sardinian notables, like Giovanni Battista Tuveri and Federico Fenu, were not in favour of the idea, fearing that further moves toward the centralisation of the Savoy-led Kingdom might have followed thereafter. King Charles Albert eventually solved the problem by transforming all his dominions into a single, centralized state. A new legal system entered into force in Sardinia, and the last viceroy, Claudio Gabriele de Launay, left Cagliari on 4 March 1848. The island was divided into three provinces ruled by their prefects, following the system already used in Piedmont since 1815. According to Pietro Martini, the ultimate goal of the unionist movement was "to transplant, without any reserves and obstacles, the culture and civilization of the Italian Mainland to Sardinia, and thereby form a single civil family under a Father better than a King, the great Charles Albert". Moreover, the fusion was supposed to spur commercial development in Sardinia and, by 1861, according to William S. Craig, increase the kingdom's importance; however, the island lost what little autonomy it had in the process and became an even more marginal part of the Kingdom, rasing the so-called "Sardinian Question": more specifically, Sardinians lost their former powers of taxation and autonomous representation in exchange for the Piedmontese parliament taking over legislative responsibility on the island, and some seats in the Congress. Most of the Sardinian unionists, including its leader Giovanni Siotto Pintor, would later regret it. The Fusion would not be able to improve the condition of the Sardinian notables, either: on the contrary, Sardinia's fusion into an Italian unitary state provoked, as a response, a marked increase in banditry and criminal activities against the central authorities.
