1848 (40 page)

In Tuscany the reaction to Custozza was maybe even more dramatic than it was in Venice. Cosimo Ridolfi's government, a coalition of conservatives and moderates, had long been castigated by the centre-left liberal opposition under Bettino Ricasoli for its lukewarm support for the war. Ridolfi's cabinet resigned when the news of the battle provoked rioting: Florence jostled with the unemployed, with deserters, with demoralised soldiers and volunteers still keen to fight, while radical political clubs shrilly demanded a Mazzinian war of the people. Eventually, the moderate liberal Gino Capponi stepped up to take the poisoned chalice and became prime minister. He promised to continue Tuscany's war effort if the armistice between Austria and Piedmont were to collapse. The real drama occurred in Livorno, which was always prickly about Florentine pre-eminence and where the dockers, in particular, were stricken by unemployment in the economic downturn. The Livornese democrats were roused by Father Gavazzi, the fire-breathing friar and preacher of holy war, who, ignoring a ban imposed by the government, had stepped ashore in the port. When he was arrested, Livorno rose up on 23 August: the crowd tore up the railway lines and occupied the arsenal. With the port threatening to become virtually an independent city-state, Capponi, in desperation, sent the popular radical Francesco Guerrazzi to try to calm Livornese spirits. Guerrazzi had himself been arrested in January for leading an insurrection in the city, but now he was afraid of the prospect of social upheaval. He had to exercise all his moral authority - and some physical force - to prevent the radicals from proclaiming a republic. But despite his work in restoring some semblance of order, Capponi disliked him and replaced him with a democrat and fervent advocate of a
costituente
, Professor Giuseppe Montanelli, who had been lionised as a hero for his valour at the battle of Curtatone. Yet even he struggled to master the situation in the city. Ultimately, the only way for the Grand Duke to prevent more violence was to yield to the democrats and appoint a radical ministry. In October he chose Montanelli, who refused to serve without Guerrazzi, so the two radicials assumed power together.
¹⁵³

In Rome, Prime Minister Mamiani had tried ease the Pope into the role of constitutional monarch, but it was a part which Pius IX filled only with difficulty. Mamiani swallowed his own radical liberalism after the newly elected parliament opened on 5 June, expressing support for the Italian national cause, but insisting that it must take the form of an Italian league, with the Pope acting as peacemaker. For this, he was blasted by the radical minority in parliament, led by the Prince of Canino, a member of the Bonaparte clan, and Doctor Pietro Sterbini. Outside parliament, Ciceruacchio could raise the working-class quarter of Trastevere and the teeming, impoverished districts immediately surrounding it. When the Austrians counter-attacked in northern Italy in July and spilled over into the Papal States, briefly reoccupying Ferrara on 14 July, the radicals mobilised the Roman crowd through the clubs, or
circoli
, which followed Canino's lead in demanding that the government declare both a state of emergency and war. Mamiani refused to budge, but when the crowd invaded the lower house of parliament, howling for arms to defend the city, it was clear that the government could do little to control the democrats. Custozza was the political
coup de grâce
and Mamiani resigned on 3 August. The Pope wanted to appoint the gifted and shrewd Pellegrino Rossi, but there was too much popular opposition to that, because Rossi was a very moderate breed of liberal, so for now Pius had to make do with a six-week caretaker ministry. Meanwhile, to stem the flow of determined Italian volunteers from making their way to help defend Venice, Austrian troops tried to occupy Bologna. The white-coated forces reached the gates of the city on 8 August, but the citizens put up a determined resistance: the urban poor, students, shopkeepers, artisans and bourgeois stood their ground under bombardment by field-guns and managed to cut off a company that had penetrated the town's defences. Within three hours, the Austrians withdrew, leaving behind a city feverish with revolution and patriotic fervour.
¹⁵⁴

In southern Italy the nascent liberal order in the Kingdom of Naples had been slowly strangled in its cradle since King Ferdinand had reasserted royal authority with cannon, musket-ball and bayonet on 15 May. Yet, for as long as the Piedmontese continued to challenge Austria in the north, the Neapolitan reactionaries did not feel strong enough to tighten the screws: no Italian government would dare to betray constitutionalism as long as there was the possibility that the liberal cause would triumph by force of arms. Moreover, Sicily was still fighting for its independence and much of the countryside on the mainland was in open revolt, with an uprising in the Abruzzo and a major insurrection in Calabria. Times were not yet propitious for Ferdinand to destroy all that he had promised his subjects in January: there was therefore no full-blooded censorship; and fresh elections, which were held on 15 June (albeit on an even narrower franchise than before), returned a parliament with a strong liberal showing. The old order none the less began to reassert itself in significant ways: the Jesuits were let back into the kingdom; the old royal police reappeared on the streets; and there was a ban on public meetings. The political currents were slowly beginning to run back in Ferdinand's favour, while the radicals failed to channel the peasant uprisings towards political objectives. A force of six hundred Sicilians sent to support the Calabrian uprising fractiously refused to have much to do with the peasants. The insurrection was brought to heel by the end of July, when the eight thousand troops sent by the King made their presence felt. In any case many of the insurgents were more than happy to turn their scythes back to their original use, for the harvest had to be brought in. Even parliament, though the lower house was still dominated by the liberals, had little in the way of teeth. The upper house was full of conservative peers and the King's prime minister Bozzelli pointedly and repeatedly failed to show up to parliamentary debates.

With word of Custozza, the King knew that the time to reassert his authority in full was fast approaching. His main concern was to bring Sicily under control. The liberal leadership of the rebellious island had been on the cusp of accepting a restoration of the constitution of 1812 early in March, when news of the February revolution in Paris arrived. The Sicilian parliament, which first met on 25 March, then raised the stakes by demanding a constitution whereby the island would be virtually independent, its only link with Naples being its shared royal dynasty, the Bourbons. When the Neapolitan government rebutted Sicilian pretensions, on 13 April the parliament at Palermo - mainly lawyers, intellectuals and liberal nobles - decreed the monarchy deposed: ‘Sicily does not demand new institutions,' it haughtily declared, ‘but the restoration of rights which have been hers for centuries.'
¹⁵⁵
Sicily was, for a few months, truly an independent state: it did not even adopt the Italian tricolour as its flag, but the three-legged symbol of the island. Such separatism allowed the snubbed Neapolitans to accuse the Sicilians of waging a ‘civil war' against a united Italy. Though there was a radical, republican minority, including Francesco Crispi, most Sicilian revolutionaries were constitutional monarchists, and the parliament voted for the respected liberal veteran Ruggiero Settimo to act as president until a new royal dynasty could be elected.

Beyond the rarefied confines of the Sicilian legislature, the island was slipping into anarchy. What police remained were being murdered by the
squadre
, who now not only controlled large areas of the countryside but enjoyed influence within Palermo itself. With the collapse of Bourbon power, they had seized control of their own villages and marched ‘their' people into the capital, enjoying the awe and fear that they inspired among the Palermitans. The government created a National Guard to defend the property and lives of Sicilian citizens, who were liable to be kidnapped or threatened until they parted with their money. In April this militia, drawn from the propertied elites, came to blows with the
squadre
, one of whose groups was led by the trouser-wearing, pistol-wielding Testa Di Lana, a formidable woman who had graduated from herding goats to killing policemen.

In all the chaos the government could do little to raise an army strong enough to defend Sicily against any Neapolitan counter-attack. By September, the island could depend upon perhaps six thousand troops, including two regular battalions, with the rest made up of poorly trained National Guards, in addition to the hardened street-brawlers of the great cities and the unpredictable but undoubtedly violent
squadre
. They were no match for the Neapolitan regular army. In August Ferdinand mustered a ten-thousand-strong expeditionary force on the Calabrian coast, across the Straits of Messina. Seeking to free his hands of all political interference during his reconquest of Sicily, he also prorogued the Neapolitan parliament. The police set the
lazzaroni
on to the radical artisans who tried to defend the legislature on 5 September. The National Guard was severely reduced and liberal officials and judges were dismissed or harassed. By this time, the campaign to retake Sicily had already begun: the expeditionary force came to the rescue of the royal garrison in Messina's citadel, the one bridgehead that the Neapolitans had clung on to since the start of the revolution. After a relentless bombardment from the guns of the fortress between 1 and 6 September, the troops advanced, confronted only with the city's rough-and-ready civic guards and the urban crowd. The royal forces grimly set about retaking Messina street by burning street. When the fighting was over, some two-thirds of the city lay in smouldering ruins. Ferdinand was henceforth known to Sicilians by a new epithet:
Bomba
. A six-month armistice brokered by the appalled British and French on 11 September led to a lull in the fighting, but the Neapolitan reconquest of Sicily had begun with a royal vengeance.
¹⁵⁶

 

In 1847 the German writer A. von Haxthausen graphically warned his readers of the possible calamity to come:

 

Though a conservative who was writing (with some sympathy) about Russia, Haxthausen expressed the deep-rooted fears of a much wider spectrum of European opinion about the dangers posed by the ‘social question' of poverty and the painful economic transition of the nineteenth century. The liberals shared his fear that, after the political triumphs of the first months of 1848, radicals would seek to exploit the widespread distress and kill the new liberal order at the very moment of its birth, by pushing for a second, social revolution.

The moderates were right to be worried. The poverty of the urban workers was one of the most important factors in the ultimate collapse of the liberal regimes of 1848. The workers' demands were not always revolutionary, but they were social. In no country were they anywhere near a majority of the population, but because they were urban based, they could directly threaten the central institutions of the new order. Liberals, content with the constitutional liberties and governments in the making, were reluctant to concede to the workers much more than certain civil and political rights, along with some public works projects to ease the immediate economic misery. In the long run, they hoped, economic recovery and the new freedom to associate and to pursue any trade would take the sting out of labour militancy. But in 1848-9 there was little sign of economic recovery (undoubtedly the political uncertainties of those years contributed to this problem) and the measures promoted by liberal regimes to combat poverty were mere palliatives, sticking plasters barely covering the deep wounds of social despair. So even when workers' own demands were moderate, or rooted in social distress rather than political militancy, radicals were frequently able to exploit their grievances and channel them towards political goals. At the same time, it was all too easy for conservatives to point to the fearsome power of working-class demonstrations, the June days in Paris, the August uprising in Vienna or the September insurrection in Frankfurt, to claim that the workers were intent on destroying social order, or even civilisation itself. Most liberals and middle-class people were now sufficiently shocked to agree and consequently were willing to sacrifice some of their hard-won political freedoms if that would ensure a return to social order. In these circumstances, with liberals falling in line with the forces of authority and the workers becoming increasingly associated with radicals, the politics of the 1848 revolutions were fatally polarised. Yet more dangerous still to the liberal order were those social divisions that more or less coincided with ethnic differences. This lethal cocktail was particularly potent among the peasantry of Central and Eastern Europe - and it was the rural population that in 1848 lent its considerable support to the counter-revolution.

I
n June 1848 a young Prussian nobleman had an audience with Frederick William IV in the King's palatial refuge at Sans Souci. The thirty-three-year-old Junker advised the monarch that the struggle against the revolution was simply a ‘war . . . of self-defence' for the conservative order, but ‘I could not induce the King to share my conviction that his doubts as to his power were without foundation' and to resist the ‘usurpations' of the Prussian parliament.
¹
The nobleman was Otto von Bismarck, who as yet had little influence with the King, but who would famously rise to become one of Germany's greatest, albeit one of its more Machiavellian, statesmen. In fact, Bismarck had also despaired over the collapse of absolutism: ‘The past is buried . . . no human power is able to bring it back to life, now that the Crown itself has cast earth on the coffin.'
²
Yet the Junker soon rediscovered his mettle. He had already come to the notice of court conservatives before the revolution. In the United Diet in 1847 his speeches distinguished him as an earnest supporter of the King, and Leopold von Gerlach - one of the reactionaries who had Frederick William's ear - took note. The King was not inclined to listen to Bismarck in the summer of 1848, but by the autumn the situation had been transformed and Frederick William was ready to strike back against the revolutionaries.