1848 (24 page)

For Jelačić, the challenge was how to extend his authority over Serbian insurgents and then harness their energies for his purposes. Some of the Serbian border regiments certainly rallied to the ban, but others preferred to back the Glavni Odbor. Meanwhile, the Hungarian war minister, Hrabovszky, armed with formal military authority, was urging the borderers back to obedience. Consequently, the Serbian section of the Military Frontier was torn between three centres of power. The waters were muddied further when the Croatian Sabor opened in Zagreb on 5 June and, in deference to the Illyrian ideal, voted to invite a delegation from Voivodina. It was a move that could only provoke the Hungarians, which was precisely why Jelačić himself encouraged such behaviour. At the opening of the parliament, he took his oath from none other than Metropolitan Rajačić. As a Croat, Jelačić then took Catholic Mass, but he also held a service of thanksgiving in Zagreb's Orthodox church. All this publicly underlined his support for the idea that the Serbs and Croats were a ‘single-blooded nation of two faiths'.
⁸³

Both sides - Magyar and south Slav - now dashed to gain the imperial blessing for their conflicting claims. When the Sabor sent a deputation to Emperor Ferdinand, they arrived at Innsbruck to find that Batthyány had beaten them to it. On 10 June an imperial decree deposed Jelačić, confirmed Hrabovszky's powers, and gave Latour a slap on the wrist, reminding the Austrian war minister that control of the Military Frontier fell to Budapest, not Vienna. None the less, through the summer, Latour continued to send money quite openly to the Military Frontier's treasury. He may have had good reasons to do so, since the Hungarians were understandably reluctant to provide the Croats with money and supplies, while Austrians needed the Croats not necessarily against Hungary, but as reliable recruits for the war in Italy.
⁸⁴
In any case, the dismissal of Jelačić did nothing to curb the resistance of the southern Slavs: Jelačić, determined to prove his loyalty to the Habsburgs, had begun to concentrate his forces on the Drava and, already aroused by Magyar pressure, the Sabor closed ranks in support of the ban. The Magyars now faced the very real possibility of a full-blown invasion from Croatia.
⁸⁵
Yet the imperial government was still unwilling to countenance such a drastic means of restoring Habsburg authority because it was already fighting in northern Italy.

The early days of the Italian revolutions were dark for the Austrians, but exhilarating for Italian liberals. By April the Austrians had been pushed back to the four fortresses of the Quadrilateral in the north, while further south Pope Pius IX still seemed to be fulfilling his early liberal promise and offering his leadership to a rejuvenating Italy. Having proposed a customs union in November 1847, Pius now suggested some form of defensive league for the Italian states, to which Tuscany and Naples immediately subscribed. Meanwhile, there was a widespread popular movement across Italy to join the war against Austria, putting Pius under intense pressure to commit to the anti-Austrian conflict. The moderate liberal Pellegrino Rossi, who shared Vincenzo Gioberti's vision of an Italian confederation under the Pope, but no supporter of the war, declared that ‘the national sentiment and the enthusiasm for war are a sword, a weapon, a powerful force; either Pius IX will grasp it firmly in his hand, or the hostile factions will take it and turn it against him and against the Papacy'.
⁸⁶
Alexander Herzen, in Rome with his family at the time, was even blunter: Pius, he remarked, ‘must either withdraw from rising events or ingloriously hit the ground and be crushed or be dragged along against his will'.
⁸⁷
In fact, privately Pius viewed the early defeats of the Austrians as providential, but the papacy had a moral and religious obligation not to go to war unless in self-defence. So he hedged his bets, hoping that Austria would be thoroughly defeated before he had to commit any papal troops into action against what was, after all, a Catholic monarchy.
⁸⁸
The Pope's dilemma explains the ambiguity of his orders to the Piedmontese general Giacomo Durando, whom he had invited to command his soldiers. These men - seven thousand in all - were marched to the northern frontier of the Papal States, from where they were to offer the Piedmontese invasion under King Charles Albert their support - but to what extent and how were left deliberately unclear.

Patriotic enthusiasm in Rome was kept on the boil by a popular radical leader, the wholesale merchant Angelo Brunetti, better known by his moniker Ciceruacchio, and by the tall, dark and fiery figure of Father Alessandro Gavazzi. A Barnabite monk, the latter had been criss-crossing the country like a medieval mendicant friar, electrifying his audiences with his rallying cry: ‘
Fuori i barbari!
' (‘Out with the barbarians!'). When the news of Milan's Five Glorious Days arrived in Rome, Gavazzi and Ciceruacchio presided over a ceremony in the Colosseum, in a scene described by Herzen: ‘the setting sun came through the arches in bright strips. The innumerable crowd filled the centre; on the arches, on the walls, in the half-ruined loges people crowded - people sat, stood, or lay everywhere. In one of the prominent loges was Pater Gavazzi, tired, pouring sweat, but ready to speak again.' Gavazzi, who offered his services as chaplain to the Roman legion that was now being formed, declared that the Christian cross and the Italian tricolour stood side by side in this struggle: it was a holy war. Below one of the arches bedecked with the Italian and Lombard flags, young men signed up to join the legion. ‘It grew dark in the courtyard, and torches burned near this strange
recruits' levy
; the people remained in semi-darkness, the wind shook the flags, and frightened birds, unaccustomed to such visitors, circled overhead, and all this was embraced by the gigantic frame of the Colosseum.' Two days later Herzen saw the first volunteer detachments setting out and, revolutionary though he was, wondered how many of these fresh-faced young men would not return: ‘War is a savage, disgusting proof of human folly, generalized brigandage, justified murder, the apotheosis of violence - and mankind still has to fight before there is a possibility of peace!'
⁸⁹

The Roman volunteers, nicknamed
crociati
(crusaders) left Rome on 25-6 March: comprising ten thousand raw recruits and civic guards under the republican Colonel Andrea Ferrari, they boosted the papacy's contribution to the war to seventeen thousand men.
⁹⁰
In Tuscany moderates like Baron Bettino Ricasoli joined the Florentine democrats in criticising Grand Duke Leopold's premier, the Marchese Ridolfi, for his lukewarm attitude towards the war. At a great public meeting in Florence on 26 March, watched by Leopold himself, Ricasoli whipped up popular passions for the ‘crusade' and Leopold had to cool tempers by agreeing to send a force of some 7,770 men to join the Piedmontese campaign in Lombardy.
⁹¹
Southern Italy made a contribution, too: even the fractious Sicilians, who wanted independence from Naples before they wanted to be any part of a unified Italy, sent a symbolic force of a hundred men northwards.
⁹²
In Naples the patriotic Princess Cristina di Belgiojoso, herself from Lombardy, hired a steamer to carry her back to northern Italy, but found her lodgings besieged by Neapolitans clamouring to go with her to join the fighting. On 29 March, with the princess bearing the Italian tricolour, her ship steamed out of port, passing through waters crammed with smaller craft saluting her and the 184 volunteers bound for the war.
⁹³
They were to be joined by a much larger, regular Neapolitan force under the command of the Napoleonic veteran and former revolutionary exile General Guglielmo Pepe. Now sixty-eight years old, Pepe wore a cocked hat topped with a towering white feather and at his side clanked an enormous sabre that was a relic of his younger days.
⁹⁴
Amnestied by King Ferdinand of Naples, he returned from exile on the day of Belgiojoso's departure and was initially invited to form a government by the monarch, keen to quiet liberal demands by appointing one of their own. Pepe, however, made demands that were far too radical for the King's taste, including the immediate departure of the army for Lombardy.

Ferdinand managed to force Pepe to resign, but he could not withstand the popular pressure to go to war against Austria. On 7 April he formally joined the conflict, now asking Pepe to command his forty-thousand-strong army. Pepe accepted, but found his efforts to organise his forces hampered at every turn: the foot-dragging King, he claimed later, ‘was determined to do all he could to ensure that the army remained numerically weak, lacking in everything, and incapable, in all, of lending powerful support to the Italian cause'. Ferdinand was certainly reluctant to commit troops to a war that, for one, would primarily help to aggrandise his great rival, Charles Albert, while also diverting Neapolitan energies from the more urgent task of destroying Sicilian separatism. These troops none the less sailed three weeks later, disembarking at Ancona for the march northwards.
⁹⁵
Having accomplished this task, the Neapolitan squadron, consisting of seven frigates, five of steam and two of sail, and two brigs, then set course for Venice to help raise the Austrian naval blockade. The vessels dropped anchor in the lagoon on 16 May, to a rapturous welcome.
⁹⁶
Yet on land progress was less promising. On 3 May, the day he joined his troops, the exasperated Pepe received an order from the King's new war minister telling him that when he reached the south bank of the River Po, which marked the northern frontier of the Papal States, he was to wait for further orders. Pepe exploded with rage: what sort of general, he asked, could possibly sit on one side of a river while, on the other, the Piedmontese and Venetians were sacrificing themselves for Italy's honour? Worse was to come, for when Pepe's troops reached the Po, they numbered only fourteen thousand, not the full forty thousand he had expected.
⁹⁷

Yet papal and Neapolitan hesitancy was not as immediately alarming for Italian patriots as the ambiguous intentions of King Charles Albert of Piedmont himself. Publicly, the King peppered his words with the tantalising spice of Italian unity. His declaration of war on Austria on 23 March proclaimed his ‘feelings of Italian brotherhood' and that his troops were ‘to carry the Cross of Savoy [his dynastic emblem] imposed on the tricolour flag of Italy'.
⁹⁸
The monarch's decision for war, however, was not driven by the lofty aim of Italian unification. Rather, Charles Albert's energies were sustained by a muddier soup of domestic political pressures and his own dynastic ambition.

At home, there was a real danger of a republican backlash in Piedmont if the King failed to assume the leadership of the anti-Austrian struggle. The stirring news of Milan's Five Glorious Days had galvanised the democratic movement in Turin and Genoa: followers of Giuseppe Mazzini, protesting against the limitations of the constitution of 4 March, were mustering in the great port city, and across Piedmont anti-clerical crowds attacked Jesuit houses. The prime minister, the cautious moderate Cesare Balbo, warned the King that not to act would almost certainly drive public opinion away from the monarchy and into the arms of the republicans. Moreover, without a Piedmontese military presence, there was a real danger that neighbouring Lombardy and Venetia would become hives of republicanism under Cattaneo and Manin. With revolutions sweeping along the duchies of Parma and Modena too, Charles Albert was persuaded that an invasion of Lombardy would stem what he saw as an alarming tide of republicanism. After all, it had been moderates like Milan's mayor, Casati, who had pleaded for Piedmontese intervention not only to defeat the Austrians but to prevent the republicans from assuming power.

The King also had personal ambitions: to expand his state by annexing Lombardy and Venetia, creating a northern Italian kingdom under his dynasty. His battle cry, ‘
Italia farà da sé
' (‘Italy will do it herself'), was not just an empty nationalist slogan: it was a warning to Italian republicans not to appeal for French intervention, which would certainly weaken his own cause. A war of dynastic expansion would curtail and then choke the incipient nationalist movement. Yet, for now, Charles Albert was buoyed by outspoken and enthusiastic public support for his intervention. On 23 March even the shrewd political fox, the moderate Piedmontese liberal Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, got carried away in his newspaper,
Il Risorgimento
:

 

Unsurprisingly, Italian republicans approached the King with suspicion bordering on open hostility. Mazzini, who was hastening to Italy via France and Switzerland from his exile in London, wrote to an English friend on 28 March, ‘my countrymen in Lombardy have done wonders; but, as soon as they have nearly conquered, Ch. Albert goes in and will gather the fruits grown up through Italian blood. I do not know what I will do.'
¹⁰⁰

The republican dilemma was that the Piedmontese had the military strength to finish off the job of expelling the Austrians, but accepting such aid meant bowing to Charles Albert's monarchist ambitions. The Milanese revolutionaries had all agreed to put off the political debate between monarchists and republicans
a causa vinta
, and Mazzini, despite his private misgivings, agreed. While passing through Paris on 31 March, he issued a proclamation to the Lombards in the name of the Italian National Association (itself an organisation aimed at unifying the different strands of exile opinion):