1848 (8 page)

The first violent confrontation of 1848 arose in Milan in the form of perhaps the first concerted anti-smoking campaign in modern history. The young nobles of Milan, gathering in the Jockey Club, long chafing at the scant opportunities for advancement in the German-speaking regime and encouraged by the liberal-sounding noises coming from the Vatican, wanted to hit the Austrians where it would hurt most: the treasury purse. Since Austria's Italian provinces were among its most lucrative sources of taxation, the Italian notables, inspired by the example of the Boston Tea Party of 1773, organised a boycott of tobacco, the tax on which gave the Viennese treasury a significant portion of its revenue. The nobles also knew that taxation was a source of resentment among Lombardy's humbler citizens, so they had little difficulty in winning popular support. On New Year's Day, the Milanese gave up smoking. In response, the Austrian garrison, encouraged by their officers, took up smoking with gusto, ostentatiously waving their cigars in the faces of the citizens. Relations between the Italians and the Austrians had been tense since at least the previous autumn, so tempers - no doubt frayed by nicotine withdrawal - almost inevitably snapped. On 3 January, a Milanese, offended by an Austrian soldier puffing exaggeratedly at a cigar, knocked it out of his mouth. A scuffle ensued and some citizens were beaten up by soldiers. A larger crowd of civilians then gathered and retaliated by attacking the troops. The garrison came out in strength, putting down the ‘tobacco riot' by killing six and wounding fifty civilians.
²
The commander of the Austrian forces in Italy, Marshal Joseph Radetzky, warned Metternich that he needed reinforcements to contain any further outbreaks, but he was ignored. In fact, the Milanese nobles did not want to provoke revolution. Rather, the tobacco boycott was intended to be a means of continuing the
lotta legale
and of securing peaceful reform. More prosaically, one Milanese nobleman explained to Metternich that what the Lombard elites really desired was more access to the higher state positions usually reserved for Austrians. In neighbouring Venetia, Daniele Manin and Nicolò Tommaseo pursued the
lotta legale
by petitioning the Central Congregation of the Austrian provinces for political reform, but the Austrian authorities threw both men in prison on 18 January.

The tobacco riots and the arrests of two popular Venetian leaders created
causes célèbres
that helped to broaden the basis of support for the liberal campaign. Meanwhile, the Austrian government was convinced of its strength against the hot air spouted by Venetian and Milanese liberals. On 16 January, the steely octagenarian Radetzky assured his men that Italian liberalism (‘fanaticism and the insane mania for innovations') would be smashed on their courage, ‘like fragile surf against hard rock'.
³
The entrenched positions of both sides ensured that northern Italy was in ‘a state of undeclared war'.
⁴
The explosion, when it came, would yield considerably more than the limited reforms originally demanded by the liberal leadership.

The battle lines had hardened in the north partly in response to developments in the south, where the year's first full-blown revolution took place, in Sicily. The fiercely independent islanders had long been convinced that their ‘tyrannical' government, the autocratic Bourbon monarchy in Naples, was wilfully ignoring their interests. This impression was reinforced by the state's feeble response to the desperate poverty that became entrenched in a dreadful winter. On 12 January, a crowd in Palermo ‘celebrated' the Neapolitan King Ferdinand II's birthday by building barricades high across the streets and unfurling the Italian tricolour, crying, ‘Long live Italy, the Sicilian Constitution and Pius IX!' They were soon joined by shady people with less lofty motives. Peasant bandits from the impoverished countryside and the
squadre
, an early form of mafia who lived by running protection rackets against hapless villagers, slipped into the city. They bristled with a grisly array of home-made weapons, hooks and blades of all kinds, and proceeded to terrorise the Neapolitan garrison in the street fighting. The government forces bombarded Palermo from the grim Bourbon fortress of Castellamare, while gunners scattered their lethal charges of grapeshot into the crowd in front of the royal palace and cathedral before they were overwhelmed by the insurgents. The police headquarters was invaded and its records incinerated. Some thirty-six people were killed before the army withdrew from the city. Within days, the Sicilian countryside was literally in flames as peasants joined the revolution, torching the tax records and land registers in village halls. Eventually, the only royal troops left on the island were those besieged in the citadel of Messina. A General Committee assumed the powers of a provisional government in Palermo under the liberal nobleman Ruggero Settimo, Prince of Fitalìa, who was a veteran of the British-inspired parliament of 1812 and the revolution of 1820. The General Committee included both moderate liberals and more radical democrats, but for now both were willing to work together to protect lives and property from the rampaging peasantry and the urban poor. They also faced the hardest task of all: that of imposing legal rule over those areas controlled by the
squadre
. The revolutionary leadership called for elections to the Sicilian parliament, which had not been allowed to meet since the union of Sicily with Naples in 1816.
⁵

When news of the Sicilian revolution reached Naples by steamship, the populace took to the streets. Meanwhile, King Ferdinand had embarked some five thousand troops on steamers bound for Sicily to crush the uprising. He thus denuded the mainland of forces just as the revolution took hold there. Swelling the crowd in Naples were the notorious
lazzaroni -
the poverty-stricken slum masses whom Herzen, who would arrive in the city in February, described as having ‘wild features . . . the servile manners of the Neapolitan mob . . . a hybrid of all the slaves, the lower stratum of everything defeated, the remnant of ten nationalities, intermingled and degenerate'.
⁶
Normally, government-sponsored charity kept them in a state of uneasy quiescence, but the disastrous economic crisis had bit exceptionally hard and, in a pattern that would be repeated elsewhere in the coming months, the government proved unable to help the people out of the depths of their distress. The
lazzaroni
therefore turned against the authorities and, meanwhile, the peasants of the Cilento rose up against their landlords. This, and the rumour that some ten thousand of them were marching on the city, provoked the uncomprehending fear of townspeople for the scythe-bearing rural mob. It was enough to push the Neapolitan nobility and bourgeoisie into demanding some political changes in order to meet the crisis. The panic infected the court itself and, learning that his own troops were at best reluctant to fight, Ferdinand sprang the liberal leader Carlo Poerio from prison. This at last gave the liberals a figure around whom they could rally. On 27 January they organised a 25,000-strong demonstration on the great piazza in front of the royal palace. When cavalry trotted out to disperse them, the crowd surged around the horsemen and persuaded them to stand down; their commander even offered to take a petition to King Ferdinand.
⁷
Afraid of losing his entire kingdom, Ferdinand promised a constitution, which was published on 10 February. It was based heavily on the French Charter of 1814, so it was a long way from enfranchising the masses. The Sicilians, who demanded the restoration of the constitution of 1812 and political autonomy with merely a dynastic link to Naples, remained implacable. Some Neapolitan liberals, however, hoped that Naples was at last joining an inexorable current rolling towards Italian unification. The onetime republican but now moderate liberal Luigi Settembrini returned to the city from exile in Malta on 7 February to find the port efflorescent with the Italian tricolour.
⁸

The collapse of the absolute monarchy in the south reverberated up the mountainous spine of Italy. In the Papal States, public pressure on Pius IX, who now wanted to slow the pace of reform, became more intense. When he tried to placate the Roman masses by declaring a day of prayer for peace in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, he merely provoked a night-time demonstration that filled the Corso on 3 February. The avenue blazed with torches as the people of Rome cheered, ‘
Viva Pio Nono
', but now added, ‘
e la costituzione e la libertà
'. The civic guard - formed in the summer of 1847 as a concession to liberal demands - defiantly tore off the white-and-yellow papal cockades and pinned tricolours to their hats instead. A few days later, rumours that the Austrians were preparing to restore order in Italy by sending their army southwards brought out another massive protest, which filled the Piazza del Popolo. The demonstrators called on the Pope to raise an army to defend the frontiers. According to the alarmed Belgian ambassador, there were also cries of ‘Death to the cardinals! Death to the priests!' With little means of coercion at his disposal, the chastened Pope promised to summon a new government in which laymen as well as ecclesiastics would serve as ministers. Yet, the Belgian diplomat concluded on 12 February, ‘the party of movement, now master of the field, will not check itself in the middle of such favourable progress, and its last word . . . is a
constitution
'.
⁹

It would be a month (14 March) before the Romans received that from the Pope, but further north Leopold of Tuscany saved his grand-ducal throne by granting a constitution on 11 February, while King Charles Albert of Piedmont had promised one three days before and produced the definitive document on 4 March. This was a seismic shift in Italian politics, for the country's most powerful monarchy, the Savoyard dynasty, had abandoned its age-old absolutist tradition. This would carry heavy weight in the future development of Italy. The proclamation prompted a flamboyant reaction from the people of Turin: patriotic women took to wearing black riding habits, with the skirts lifted up to reveal red-white-and-green petticoats. Church bells pealed so exuberantly that the peasants in the surrounding countryside took up arms in the belief that the ringing was a warning of an Austrian invasion.
¹⁰
The Dukes of Modena and Parma stood firm for now, but only because they were under the immediate protection of Austrian troops, while Lombardy and Venetia simmered resentfully. It would take wider European events to make those two provinces boil over and, when they did, Italian nationalists were gifted the long-awaited opportunity to fight for Italian unity.

The first of these ground-breaking European events was the revolution in Paris, where the republicans and the dynastic opposition were campaigning for political reform. Their way was blocked inside parliament by an intransigent government, but they kept up the pressure outside by pursuing the banquet campaign. One such gathering provided the unexpected flashpoint for the revolution in France, and thereby sparked the explosions that would erupt across Europe. The banquet was to be held in the 12th Arrondissement in Paris - which then covered the area around the Panthéon and included one of the heartlands of Parisian republicanism, with radical traditions reaching back to the days of the 1789 revolution. The choice of location left the moderates fretting that the banquet might provide an occasion for a more strident, popular demonstration. The leader of the dynastic opposition, Odilon Barrot, who did not lack physical courage, but who was politically cautious, therefore had the banquet moved to the well-heeled Champs-Elysées, scheduling it for 22 February, which prompted the republicans to call for a protest march that day. The moderates reacted by cancelling the event altogether. They achieved this at a hastily arranged meeting of all opposition deputies and journalists in Barrot's home in the evening of 21 February. Even Armand Marrast, editor of the republican
National
, agreed. They were all scrambling back from a collision with the authorities and from the radical forces that such violence might unleash. But it was too late: Marrast's own paper had advertised the order of march for the demonstration and the radical republicans insisted that it must go ahead. At a crisis meeting of republicans of the left-wing
Réforme
tendency, held that same night, the radicals agreed that the protest would take place as planned, but it would disperse at the first show of strength by the authorities: even they were eager to avoid an uncontrollable, unpredictable clash with the government. No one envisaged a revolution.
¹¹

Paris arose the next morning to a grey sky heavy with rain. Gusts of wind drove a miserable drizzle down its streets, but by nine o'clock plenty of demonstrators - unemployed workers, women and children - had gathered on the Place de la Madeleine, the starting point for the march. The authorities had called out the National Guard, but the crowd was steeled by the arrival of some seven hundred students who crossed the River Seine singing ‘The Marseillaise'. According to the left-wing writer and activist Marie d'Agoult, this electrified the atmosphere.
¹²
Emboldened and reinforced, the crowd now surged across the Place de la Concorde towards the Chamber of Deputies to demand reform, only to be pushed back without bloodshed by National Guards and dragoons. In the battle that then heaved back and forth on the Place de la Concorde that afternoon, it was, however, the Municipal Guard which bore the brunt of the people's frustration: